32. Oliver

THIRTY-TWO

Oliver

On the last day of school before the holiday vacation, I hear a tiny knock on my office door. “Come in,” I yell.

Max and Dorothy walk through the door holding a massive piece of paper between them.

“Hi, Max. Hi, Dorothy,” I say, pleasantly surprised to see them, and to see them together. “What brings you in here today?”

Max is bouncing up and down. “We made you a holiday card!”

The two of them carry the card over to me. I take it from their hands. It must be at least two feet tall. On the front, thirty tiny hands dipped in green paint form the shape of a Christmas tree. The fingers of all the hands point downwards, like branches and leaves. A star made from red glitter glue rests on the top.

I open the card. In an eight-year-old’s best handwriting, it says: Happy Holidays, Principal Flores! We love you! Love, Class 302.

My eyes sting. “Wow, friends. This is really beautiful. I love it so much. Happy holidays to you, too.” I stand up to put it in a place of honor among the awards on my table. “Did you guys do this yourself?”

“Ms. Baker helped us,” Dorothy says.

“Ms. Baker made us do it,” Max says at the same time.

“Well, tell Ms. Baker I said ‘thank you.’”

“We will!” they tell me.

“Are either of you doing anything fun over the break?”

“Just hanging out with my mom,” Max tells me. “But my dad is getting out of jail on New Year’s Eve! Then I can hang out with him, too!”

Dorothy and I look at him for a moment. I make a mental note to inform both Georgia and Lina.

“How about you, Dorothy?” I say quickly.

She looks back at me, looking a little sad and a little afraid. “We’re going to my grandma’s in Pennsylvania,” she says, and that’s all she gives me.

“I hope both of you have a wonderful holiday,” I tell them, and each of them comes over to give me a hug. “Thank you again for the card. And make sure you thank the rest of your class and Ms. Baker for me.”

I lean back in my chair after they leave and stare at the card for a while. Particularly at the message. Especially where it says “we love you”.

Georgia agrees to come to the Flores Noche Buena. I borrow my friend Brian’s car, in exchange for moving it for Alternate Side Parking days, while he is away on vacation. I lock up my apartment, whistling the tune of All I Want for Christmas is You, holding bags of presents in my arms. I’m picking Georgia up at her place first, and we’ll drive east from there. I run into a PS 2 family with a second grader and a fifth grader on the way out.

“Merry Christmas Eve, Principal Flores!” they tell me.

I laugh. “Merry Christmas Eve, guys.”

I make the drive over to Georgia’s and park in front of a hydrant. I shoot her a text, “here”. She answers “k”, and I wait.

Nine minutes later, she’s still not downstairs. At the ten-minute mark exactly, I decide to use my key to her apartment and make sure she’s okay. I put the car’s hazard lights on and run up the stairs to her place.

Now, I’ve seen her apartment messy before, but this… this is something else. This is sheer pandemonium. There is shit everywhere .

There is evidence of cooking splattered all over the kitchen—eggshells, opened bags of sugar, opened cans of sweetened condensed milk. Piles of sugar and drippings on the counter.

The living room has bits of tissue paper and crumpled up wrapping paper and bags and ribbons. Scotch tape and scissors lay in dangerous places on the floor, just waiting for an unsuspecting bare foot to step on it.

Georgia stands somewhere in the middle, looking beautiful and wild and a lot a bit frantic, in a velvet wrap-around dress that accentuates her curves. Her eyes are wet and swollen and rimmed red.

“Georgia…” I approach her slowly, as if I would a wild animal. “Baby, are you okay?”

Her mouth trembles slightly, and then she bursts into tears.

“Hey…” I pick up my pace and wrap her slender body in my arms. “Shhh…” I whisper into her ear, smoothing her hair down. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

“I just…” she sobs into my chest. “I just wanted to make it like it used to be,” she tells me nonsensically. “I wanted to cook so mething, so I looked up the recipe for a Filipino dessert, but the flan collapsed, and then I tried again, and then that one collapsed, and then I got frustrated and threw everything away.”

“There’s going to be plenty of food, Georgia?—”

“And then I wanted to get the best White Elephant present ever, and then I wanted to wrap it really nicely, but I couldn’t get the edges of the wrapping paper straight, and it looked like one of my students wrapped it, so then I tried a bag, but then I didn’t have enough tissue paper…”

“Georgia, I’m sure it’s fine?—”

“It’s not fine ,” she yells, shoving me away. She glares at me with tears streaming down her face. My heart breaks. “This means a lot to you, and your family is amazing, and I just wanted my first Christmas without my family and with your family to be perfect, but I’m fucking losing it here, Oliver. This is not the time to patronize me.”

I step forward and wrap her in my arms again, relieved when she lets me. “I’m sorry, Georgia, I didn’t mean to be patronizing,” I tell her, letting her sob quietly for a moment. “Okay. I’m here for you. I know this is tough for you.”

“It is tough for me.”

“I know, baby, I know.” I resume smoothing her hair down until she calms down and her breath evens out. “What can I do to help you?”

She’s silent for a long time.

“Just… just give me the space to be me, today,” she sniffs. “I’m going to be weird. I’m worried your family will think I’m insane. But… I just need you to let me work through this on my own. But don’t… don’t apologize for me. Just let me be. ”

“Okay,” I assure her. “I can do that.”

“Okay.” She steps away. I watch her collect herself, watch her shove something down and then re-energize, looking more like the confident Georgia I know. I’m not sure I’m a fan of her coping mechanisms, but it’s not my place. “Okay. Let me just fix my makeup, and then let’s go.”

“No problem.”

She disappears into the bathroom, and I take a moment to shoot off a text to my immediate family members. Then I become a tornado of cleaning, throwing dishes and cooking utensils in her dishwasher and wiping down counters. I make organized piles of wrapping paper and tissue and put them on her coffee table, picking up the scissors and scotch tape. I grab her White Elephant gift.

I notice a photo on the mantle of her living room. It’s a selfie, of a younger Georgia, with who I assume to be her mother and father. They are all wearing identical grins.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” Georgia asks from behind me.

I smile, turning around and gathering her into my arms. “You really take after them.” I kiss the top of my forehead.

She gives me a small smile at that. “My mom was obsessed with wrapping presents. She would always make sure her gift wrap was on point.”

I hold up her White Elephant gift, a colorful explosion of red and green and gold and glitter and ribbon, so at odds with the neatly wrapped, monochromatic silver present I have in the trunk of the car. “I think she’d be proud of you, then.”

On the drive over, Georgia is fidgety and subdued. I hate it.

“Ask me a question. Make me tell you a story,” I command.

She smiles then, thinking. “Am I the first girl you’re bringing home to meet your family?”

Christ. Talk about unhealthy coping mechanisms . But upon further thought, I decide I can be honest with her. “Actually… yes. You are. ”

“Really? Why?”

“I don’t…” I let out a breath. “I’ve never really had any serious relationships. Only casual things.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“What are you, my therapist, now?” I smile over at her.

She laughs. “You said to make you tell me a story.”

“Well… I think they’ve never really worked out because of my career. I have a grueling schedule, as you know. You do too. Early mornings and late nights. All without the impressive salary to make up for it.”

She nods. “Not to mention the sheer fucking exhaustion when you finally get home.”

“Right. No mental, physical, or emotional capacity to do much of anything.”

“Except fucking.”

I bark a laugh. “Except fucking.” I reach over the console to take her hand. “It is really nice though, Georgia, besides all the fucking, to have someone to come home to that I can just… be with. Whether it’s companionable silence or funny comments or watching trashy television… I don’t know. It’s nice to come home and not be the one who has all the answers. You just…you get it.”

She squeezes my hand. “I get it.”

We drive up to my Tita’s house, beautiful in the way some suburban houses can be. The wraparound porch has a meticulously decorated Christmas tree in the corner, glowing with an array of ornaments. Lights wrap around the white columns; the porch railings adorned with garlands of pine and holly and red ribbon. Christmas lights drench both floors—strings of multicolored bulbs outline the roof and windows, while icicle lights dangle from the eaves .

“What are those?” Georgia asks, pointing to the star-shaped lanterns hanging in the windows, all flashing multicolored lights. “They’re beautiful.”

“Those are parols . They’re traditional Filipino ornaments for Christmas. They’re usually made with lapiz—a type of shell.”

“Cool.”

No one comes running out of the house to attack Georgia this time, thankfully. It seems as if my family read my text. Together we walk up the driveway, our warm breaths puffing in the cold air.

It’s still really, really loud, with the sound of laughter and yelling and singing audible from the driveway. I turn to Georgia, who is unnaturally quiet. “Do you want to have some sort of signal? If it gets to be too much? We can leave whenever you want, or take a break.”

“No, I don’t want to do that to you on Christmas Eve with your family?—”

“Georgia, believe me when I say this—I am the only person on this planet who truly understands what it feels like to be overwhelmed by the Flores’s. Remember why I am the way I am?” I say, gesturing towards myself. “It’s okay to take breaks. I’ve been taking breaks from them for thirty-eight years.”

“But I don’t need breaks from them. I love them, Oliver, they’re great… It’s just today…”

“So let’s just take breaks today, then. How about you just squeeze right here—” pointing to the inside of my bicep, “when you want to step away?”

Georgia remains silent, just looking at me.

I note the brilliant blue of her eyes under the moon, her perfect mouth, her wild hair stuffed under a beanie. I feel a pang in my heart, in that moment, for how beautiful she is. How perfectly flawed. How lucky I am, what a gift it is, on this Noche Buena, to be able to love her. Because that’s what this is , I think. This chaotic hurricane of woman has swept into my life, leaving destruction in her wake. Fun, spontaneity. I never realized how much it was missing.

She seems to read something in my face, and hers softens. We simultaneously take a step forward. I cup a hand under her jaw, wind the other through her hair, and tilt her head up for a kiss. Her lips are cold but perfect, her tongue meeting mine stroke for stroke. And through this kiss—in my softness and with gentleness—I try to convey my feelings.

We break apart naturally, and I kiss her top lip, then bottom lip, giving her the little nip I know she loves.

Her face is ethereal. Then she squeezes the inside of my bicep. Five times. Hard. “I’m giving you the signal, Oliver. Can we go take a break? A sex break? In your car?” she grins. There you are.

“Let’s go in for a few hours, and maybe I’ll let you give me road head on the drive back.”

“Deal.”