BEFORE
Mary hummed carols as she draped strands of tinsel on her desktop tree. She rubbed a pine needle between her fingers and breathed deep. What a transporting smell—so forest-rich, so secret. She imagined herself in a sleigh with Ron under a snuggly blanket, whooshing through snow-laden trees, the smell of horses’ oaty breaths clouding the air, the heavy, hollow clunking of bells, flurries drifting down all around them.
Maybe she and Ron could find a place that offered sleigh rides.
Right. In Manhattan.
She looked out the window. She was on the eighteenth floor of Ron’s New York offices, and she was watching people in nearby buildings sitting at their desks in other eighteenth-floor windows. It was a week before Christmas. No snow was in the forecast. The dusky sky was laden with clouds. It was supposed to rain later tonight.
Oh well, she thought. Ron wouldn’t have gone for it anyway. He was afraid of horses.
“Twelve hmm-hmms leaping, eleven somethings um-ing,” she sang.
She’d put the tree in a concrete urn that took up most of her desk. A wooden snowman stood next to it, staring at her with black eyes and a wavery smile as if he were watching over her. She stepped back. Her desk looked tacky and cluttered and jolly, and there was absolutely no room left to work. Oh well. She wasn’t a desk kind of person anyway. Most of the time, she ended up working sitting cross-legged on the floor on her orange shag rug that Ron called “the yak-hair mat” with piles all around her, crookedly writing her articles on a sketch pad. Ron didn’t know she did that, though. It was her little secret. He’d told her that he liked her to compose on a computer, told her that her thoughts “lined up better that way.” Well, they were her thoughts—let them get out of line if they wanted to.
She looked around her office. Strands of garlands and twinkle lights swooped and wove everywhere. It was like a Christmas spider had gone crazy.
“Face it, Mary. You have decorating issues,” she said to herself. Which was ironic, she knew. She wrote for Ron’s five home magazines. Her life was décor. Ron told her she was a “guru of tasteful,” that she could do tasteful in her sleep. But, it was weird, in the past year or so, when it came to her own work space and her own home, Mary was a decorating mess.
She’d started to overdo everything. Not one inspirational sign on her wall, but six of them. Not two throw pillows on her couch, but a lumpy mountain range of them. She used to pride herself on the simplicity of her life, but now it was as if she couldn’t get enough belongings surrounding her. She kept buying more and more cute trinkets. Her home and office were turning into higgledy-piggledy muddles. Her therapist, Zelda, said that Mary was looking to “fill a kind of hole inside,” that she was “trying in vain to make home homier.”
Mary didn’t like that “in vain” part. But she knew that Zelda was right on some level. What Mary was doing was compulsive and unhealthy.
At least she hadn’t turned into a hoarder—but she watched that show sometimes as a cautionary tale. And she wasn’t a collector. Thank goodness she hadn’t taken up amassing frog statuettes or hundreds of different salt and pepper shakers. But sometimes she opened the door to her office or her condo in Brooklyn and thought, Where am I in all of this stuff?
Now she looked around her office and thought, I’ve gone overboard with Christmas too.
She said aloud, “Don’t beat yourself up. You’re doing okay. You still manage to get things done. A lot done.” That was true. She’d just completed another assignment. Somehow, out of her personal chaos, a totally together article about somebody else’s beautiful house always emerged. How she managed to pull it off, she didn’t know. Some days she felt like a total fraud.
She sighed. Twinkle lights blinked on and off around her. A garland above her head proclaimed, BELIEVE! Old-fashioned statues of Santa heads lined her shelf, and a pair of angel wings hung on the wall next to a picture of her daughter and granddaughter—CC looking like an imp with her ragged cap of brown hair and big blue eyes and Larkin looking like a miniature longer-haired version of her mother, with her serious expression and black glasses. She tried not to look at their faces. That way was sadness. She hadn’t seen them in months.
“Six somebodies doing something, five golden rings…” she sang quietly. One golden ring would be enough, she thought. Well, it was finally going to happen. She and Ron were getting married. They’d been semi-engaged for four years. Or at least that’s what Mary called it. Although he hadn’t given her an engagement ring. Well, who needed an engagement ring these days? She wasn’t a diamond lover anyway. They had a plan this time. Not like the other three times when Ron had postponed their wedding. This time it was real. They were getting married January third. Justice of the peace at ten a.m., then brunch with a few friends at a new restaurant that had just opened in a converted brownstone. Mary had a reservation for the private dining room. She’d decided on the menu (a medley of all different kinds of crepes, from quinoa lemon curd to ham, asparagus, and Swiss—so fun) and the flowers (bunches of miniature daisies), and although Ron wanted to use someone from his staff to be the photographer, she’d gone ahead and booked a young guy who was just starting out instead. He’d shot his share of indie bands and skateboarders, but never a wedding. Yet he was so sweet, so vulnerable when she interviewed him, and his photos, especially the portraits, had such sensitivity she couldn’t resist hiring him. It was only candid shots she wanted anyway. She’d put a deposit down on it all. There was no going back now.
After the wedding, she was moving in with Ron. She’d already sold her condo. The closing was in three weeks. Then they were going to buy their own house together. She’d have a chance to start over then. Make a homey home. So there, Zelda!
She was looking forward to that. So forward. She felt a hopeful blippy rise in her chest every time she thought of it. It was going to be perfect—two home-décor addicts uniting! She could almost see their kitchen—a walk-in pantry so big you could do a little dance in it, an island with storage for every shaped pot and pan, a farm sink with a faucet as big as a swan’s neck. She was so lost in her thoughts that she flinched when her phone dinged with a text from Ron.
C u in my office?
She brushed her glittery hands off on her pants and hurried down the hall. She was excited to hear what Ron was going to say. She’d emailed him earlier with an idea about starting a monthly DIY feature in one of his magazines where she showed how to redo a living room for under five hundred dollars. Snap! She knew it would be a hit. Lately she’d been longing to use her decorating skills again, besides just writing about décor.
“What did you think of my idea?” she asked him the minute she walked in the door. That was Mary. She found it hard to contain herself. It was a constant struggle around Ron because he’d become such a model of restraint. Everything was a thoughtful “maybe” or a “perhaps” these days. Never a “YES!” anymore. Mary could throttle him sometimes.
He said, “I have another project I want you on.”
He was so elegant. His pants draped beautifully as he stood up from behind his desk. Why didn’t he ever wrinkle? He looked British somehow with that aristocratic nose, those long fingers. Like a Ralph Lauren model. When Mary met him, he was always in ripped jeans and a pair of paint-splattered sneakers. Now he was rich. Imagine! And Mary had helped him get there.
She could see the perfect posture of his body reflected in the sheen on his desk, the one made out of that exotic wood from a tree that was endangered in the rain forest, only one stand of them left in the whole world, but Ron had managed to get some of it anyway when they moved into these new offices, had it made into this huge “statement” of a desk. It made Mary sad to look at it. So she looked at him instead—gorgeous, brilliant, successful him.
He said, “I’m starting a new magazine.”
Ron was always starting new home magazines these days. He knew people couldn’t get enough of home—buying, restoring, expanding, renovating—and he was making a killing off it. Ron was aware that the home craze had to do with people’s longing to change their lives but their being unable or unwilling to do that—too much emotional work! So they knocked down a wall in their foyer instead or installed some French doors in their bedroom or changed out their laminate countertops for granite, and they managed to feel okay about themselves again. At least for a moment. Home reno was the new drug, and he was pushing it hard. His business was juggernauting, higher, higher, higher. Mary was typing her heart out just to keep up.
He said, “It’ll be called Home Tweet Home. Just photos with captions. And we’d keep it down to the Twitter two-hundred-and-eighty-character limit. People’s attention spans are so short. It’s such a great concept. And you’re perfect to write the captions!”
Copyright © 2022 by Sandy Gingras
