Unfortunately, now that Langston has a boyfriend again, he has forgotten all about me. He has to be with Benny all the time. To Langston, our parents and Grandpa being gone for Christmas is a gift, and not the outrage it is to me. I protested to Langston about him basically granting Benny a permanent state of residence in our house over the holidays. I reminded him that if Mom and Dad were going to be away at Christmas, and Grandpa would be at his winter apartment in Florida, then it was Langston’s responsibility to keep me company. I was there for him in his time of need, after all.
But Langston repeated, “Lily, you just don’t understand. What you need is someone to keep you occupied. You need a boyfriend.”
Well sure, who doesn’t need a boyfriend? But realistically, those exotic creatures are hard to come by. At least a quality one. I go to an all-girls school, and meaning no disrespect to my sapphic sisters, but I have no interest in finding a romantic companion there. The rare boy creatures I do meet who aren’t either related to me or who aren’t gay are usually too attached to their Xboxes to notice me, or their idea of how a teenage girl should look and act comes directly from the pages of Maxim magazine or from the tarty look of a video game character.
There’s also the problem of Grandpa. Many years ago, he owned a neighborhood family grocery store on Avenue A in the East Village. He sold the business but kept the corner block building, where he had raised his family. My family lives in that building now, along with Grandpa in the fourth-floor “penthouse” apartment, as he calls the converted space that was once an attic studio. There’s a sushi restaurant on the ground floor where the grocery store once was. Grandpa has presided over the neighborhood as it went from low-income haven for immigrant families to yuppie enclave. Everybody knows him. Every morning he joins his buddies at the local Italian bakery, where these huge, burly guys drink espresso from dainty little cups. The scene is very Sopranos meets Rent. It means that because everyone looks affectionately upon Grandpa, they’re all looking out for Grandpa’s pet—me, the baby of the family, the youngest of his ten grandchildren. The few local boys so far who’ve expressed an interest in me have all been quickly “persuaded” that I’m too young to date, according to Langston. It’s like I wear an invisible cloak of unavailability to cute boys when I walk around the neighborhood. It’s a problem.
So Langston decided to make it his project to (1) give me a project to keep me occupied so he could have Benny all to himself over Christmas and (2) move that project to west of First Avenue, away from Grandpa’s protection shield. Langston took the latest red Moleskine notebook that Grandpa bought me and, together with Benny, mapped out a series of clues to find a companion just right for me. Or so they said. But the clues could not have been further removed from who I am. I mean, French pianism? Sounds possibly naughty. The Joy of Gay Sex? I’m blushing even thinking about that. Definitely naughty. Fat Hoochie Prom Queen? Please. I’d include hoochie as a most un-goodwill type of curse word. You’d never hear me utter the word, much less read a book with that word in its title.
I thought the notebook was seriously Langston’s stupidest idea ever until Langston mentioned where he was going to leave it—at the Strand, the bookstore where our parents used to take us on Sundays and let us roam the aisles like it was our personal playground. Furthermore, he’d placed it next to my personal anthem book, Franny and Zooey. “If there’s a perfect guy for you anywhere,” Langston said, “he’ll be found hunting for old Salinger editions. We’ll start there.”
If it had been a regular Christmas season, where my folks were around and our normal traditions carried on, I never would have agreed to Langston’s red notebook idea. But there was something so empty about the prospect of a Christmas Day without opening presents and other, less important forms of merrymaking. Truthfully, I’m not exactly a popularity magnet at school, so it wasn’t like I had alternate choices of companionship over the holidays. I needed something to look forward to.
But I never thought anyone—much less a prospect from that highly coveted but extremely elusive Teenage Boy Who Actually Reads and Hangs Out at the Strand species—would actually find the notebook and respond to its dares. And just as I never thought my newly formed Christmas caroling society would abandon me after only two nights of street caroling to take up Irish drinking songs at a pub on Avenue B, I never thought someone would actually figure out Langston’s cryptic clues and return the favor.
Yet there it was on my phone, a text from my cousin Mark confirming such a person might exist.
Mark: Lily, you have a taker at the Strand. He left you something in return. I left it there for you in a brown envelope.
I couldn’t believe it. I texted back: WHAT DID HE LOOK LIKE?!?!?
Mark answered: Snarly. Hipster wannabe.
I tried to imagine myself befriending a snarly hipster wannabe boy, and I couldn’t see it. I am a nice girl. A quiet girl (except for the caroling). I get good grades. I am the captain of my school’s soccer team. I love my family. I don’t know anything about what’s supposed to be “cool” in the downtown scene. I’m pretty boring and nerdy, actually, and not in the ironic hipster way. It’s like if you picture Harriet the Spy, eleven-year-old tomboy wunderkind spy, and then picture her a few years later, with boobs she hides under a school oxford uniform shirt that she wears even on non-school days, along with her brother’s discarded jeans, and add to her ensemble some animal pendant necklaces for jewelry, worn-out Chucks on her feet, and black-rimmed nerd glasses, then you’ve pictured me. Lily of the Field, Grandpa calls me sometimes, because everyone thinks I am so sweet and delicate.
Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to venture to the darker side of the lily-white spectrum. Maybe.
I sprinted over to the Strand to retrieve whatever the mysterious notebook taker had left behind for me. Mark was gone, but he’d scrawled a message on the envelope he’d left behind for me: Seriously, Lily. Dude snarls a lot.
I ripped open the package, and … what?!?! Snarl had left me a copy of The Godfather, along with a delivery menu for Two Boots Pizza. The menu had dirty footprints embedded on it, indicating perhaps it had been on the floor at the Strand. To go along with the unsanitary theme, the book wasn’t even a new copy of The Godfather, but a tattered used copy that smelled like cigarette smoke and had pages that were crinkled and a binding that was at death’s door.
I called Langston to decipher this nonsense. No answer. Now that our parents had messaged us that they’d arrived in Fiji paradise safely, Benny was probably officially moved in, the door to Langston’s room locked, his phone off.
I had no choice but to go grab a slice and ponder the red notebook alone. What else could I do? When in doubt, ingest carbs.
I went to the Two Boots location on the delivery menu, on Avenue A just above Houston. I asked the person at the counter, “Do you know a snarly boy who likes The Godfather?”
“I wish I did,” the counter person said. “Plain or pepperoni?”
“Calzone, please,” I said. Two Boots makes weird Cajun-flavored pizzas. Not for me and my sensitive digestive system.
I sat at a corner booth and flipped through the book Snarl had left for me but could find no viable clues. Well, I thought, I guess this game is over as soon as it’s started. I was too Lily white to figure it out.
But then the menu that had been tucked inside the book dropped to the ground, and out of it peeked a Post-it note I hadn’t noticed before. I picked up the Post-it note. It was definitely a boy’s scrawl: moody, foreign, and barely legible.
Here’s the scary part. I could decipher this message. It contained a poem by Marie Howe, a personal favorite of my mother’s. Mom is an English professor specializing in twentieth-century American lit, and she regularly tortured Langston and me with poetry passages instead of bedtime stories when we were kids. My brother and I are frighteningly well-versed in modern American poetry.
The note was a passage from my mother’s favorite of Marie Howe’s poems, too, and it was a poem I had always liked because it contained a passage about the poet seeing herself in the window glass of a corner video store, which never failed to strike me as funny, imagining some mad poet wandering the streets and spying herself in a video store window reflected next to, perhaps, posters of Jackie Chan or Sandra Bullock or someone super-famous and probably not at all poet-y. I liked Moody Boy even more when I saw that he’d underlined my favorite part of the poem:
I am living. I remember you.
I had no idea how Marie Howe and Two Boots Pizza and The Godfather could possibly be connected. I tried calling Langston again. Still no answer.
I read and re-read the passage. I am living. I remember you. I don’t really get poetry, but I had to give the poetess credit: nice.
Two people sat in the booth next to me, setting down some rental videos on their table. That’s when I realized the connection: say the window of the corner video store. This particular Two Boots location also had a video store attached to it.
I dashed over to the video section like it was the bathroom after I’d accidentally ingested some Louisiana hot sauce on top of my calzone. I immediately went to where The Godfather was. The movie wasn’t there. I asked the clerk where I’d find it. “Checked out,” she said.
I returned to the G section anyway and found, mis-shelved, The Godfather III. I opened up the case and—yes!—another Post-it note, in Snarl’s scrawl:
Nobody ever checks out Godfather III. Especially when it’s misfiled. Do you want another clue? If so, find Clueless. Also misfiled, where sorrow meets pity.
I returned to the clerk’s counter. “Where does sorrow meet pity?” I asked, fully expecting an existential answer.
The clerk didn’t look up from the comic book she was reading under the counter. “Foreign documentaries.”
Oh.
I went to the foreign documentaries section. And yes, next to a film called The Sorrow and the Pity was a copy of Clueless! Inside the case for Clueless was another note:
I didn’t expect you to make it this far. Are you also a fan of depressing French films about mass murder? If so, I like you already. If not, why not? Do you also despise les films de Woody Allen? If you want your red Moleskine notebook back, I suggest you leave instructions in the film of your choice with Amanda at the front desk. Please, no Christmas movies.
I returned to the front desk. “Are you Amanda?” I asked the clerk girl.
She looked up, raising an eyebrow. “I am.”
“May I leave something for someone with you?” I asked. I almost added, Wink wink, but I couldn’t bring myself to be that obvious.
“You may,” she said.
“Do you have a copy of Miracle on 34th Street?” I asked her.
three
–Dash–
December 22nd
“Is this a joke?” I asked Amanda. And the way she looked at me, I knew that I was the joke.
Oh, the impertinence! I should have known better than to mention Christmas movies. Clearly, no invitation was too small for Lily’s sarcasm. And the note:
5. Look for the warm woolen mittens with the reindeer on them, please.
Could there be any doubt what my next destination was supposed to be?
Macy’s.
Two days before Christmas Eve.
She might as well have gift-wrapped my face and pumped the carbon dioxide in. Or hung me on a noose of credit card receipts. A department store two days before Christmas Eve is like a city in a state of siege—wild-eyed consumers battling in the aisles over who gets the last sea horse snow globe to give to their respective great-aunt Marys.
I couldn’t.
I wouldn’t.
I had to.
I tried to distract myself by debating the difference between wool and woolen, then expanding it to include wood vs. wooden and gold vs. golden. But this distraction only lasted the time it took to walk the stairs from the subway, since when I emerged on Herald Square, I was nearly capsized by the throngs and their shopping bags. The knell of a Salvation Army bell ringer added to the grimness, and I had no doubt that if I didn’t escape soon, a children’s choir would pop up and carol me to death.