Oh.

I went to the foreign documentaries section. And yes, next to a lm cal ed 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 lms about mass murder? If so, I like you already. If not, why

not? Do you also despise les lms de Woody Al en? If you want your red Moleskine notebook back, I suggest you leave instructions in the lm 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 bet er than to mention Christmas movies. Clearly, no invitation was too smal 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 wel 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 bat ling 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 di erence 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 knel of a Salvation Army bel 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.

I walked inside Macy’s and faced the pathetic spectacle of a department store ful of shoppers, none of whom were shopping for themselves.

Without the instant grati cation of a self-aimed purchase, everyone walked around in the tactical stupor of the nancial y obligated. At this late

date in the season, al the fal backs were being used. Dad was get ing a tie, Mom was get ing a scarf, and the kids were get ing sweaters, whether

they liked it or not. I had done al of my shopping online from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. on the morning of December 3; the gifts now sat at their respective

houses, to be opened in the new year. My mother had left me gifts to open in her house, while my father had slipped me a hundred-dol ar bil and

told me to go to town with it. In fact, his exact words were, “Don’t spend it al on booze and women”—the implication being, of course, that I

should spend at least some of it on booze and women. Had there been a way to get a gift certi cate for booze and women, I was sure he would

have made his secretary run out and get me one over her lunch break.

The salespeople were so shel -shocked that a question like “Where do I nd the warm woolen mit ens with reindeer on them?” didn’t seem the

least bit strange. Eventual y, I found myself in Outer Garments, wondering what, short of an earplug, would count as an Inner Garment.

I had always felt that mit ens were a few steps back on the evolutionary scale—why, I wondered, would we want to make ourselves into a less

agile version of a lobster? But my disdain for mit ens took on a new depth when looking at Macy’s (Macy’s’s?) holiday o erings. There were

mit ens shaped like gingerbread men and mit ens decorated in tinsel. One pair of mit ens simulated the thumb of a hitchhiker; the destination was,

apparently, the North Pole. In front of my very eyes, a middle-aged woman took a pair o the rack and placed them in the pile she’d grown in her

arms.

“Real y?” I found myself saying aloud.

“Excuse me?” she said, irritated.

“Aesthetic and utilitarian considerations aside,” I said, “those mit ens don’t particularly make sense. Why would you want to hitchhike to the

North Pole? Isn’t the whole gimmick of Christmas that there’s home delivery? You get up there, al you’re going to nd is a bunch of exhausted,

grumpy elves. Assuming, of course, that you accept the mythical presence of a workshop up there, when we al know there isn’t even a pole at the

North Pole, and if global warming continues, there won’t be any ice, either.”

“Why don’t you just fuck o ?” the woman replied. Then she took her mit ens and got out of there.

This was the miracle of the season, the way it put the fuck o so loud in our hearts. You could snap at strangers, or snap at the people closest to

you. It could be a fuck o for a slight reason—You took my parking space or You questioned my choice of mit ens or I spent sixteen hours tracking

down the golf club you wanted and you gave me a McDonald’s gift certi cate in return. Or it could bring out the fuck o that’d been lying in wait

for years. You always insist on cut ing the turkey even though I’m the one who spent hours cooking it or I can’t spend one more holiday pretending

to be in love with you or You want me to inherit your love for booze and women, in that order, but you’re more of a role anti-model than a father.

This was why I shouldn’t have been al owed in Macy’s. Because when you turn a short span of time into a “season,” you create an echo chamber

for al of its associations. Once you step in, it’s hard to escape.

I started shaking hands with al the reindeer mit ens, certain that Lily had hidden something inside one of them. Sure enough, the fth shake

brought a crumple. I pul ed out the slip of paper.

6. I left something under the pillow for you.

Next stop: bedding. Personal y, I preferred the word bedding when it was a verb, not a noun. Can you show me the bedding section? could not

compare to Are you bedding me? Seriously, are we going to bed each other? In truth, I knew these sentences worked bet er in my head than

anywhere else—So a never real y understood what I was saying, although I usual y chalked that up to her not being a native speaker. I even

encouraged her to throw some obscure Spanish wordplay my way, but she never knew what I was talking about when I talked about that, either.

She was pret y, though. Like a ower. I missed that.

She was pret y, though. Like a ower. I missed that.

When I got to the bedding section, I wondered if Lily appreciated how many beds there were for me to probe. They could house a whole

orphanage in here, with a few extra beds for the nuns to fool around in. (Pul my wimple! PULL MY WIMPLE!) The only way I was going to be

able to do this was to divide the oor into quadrants and move clockwise from north.

The rst bed was a paisley print with four pil ows propped up on it. I immediately launched my hand underneath them, looking for the next

note.

“Sir? Can I help you?”

I turned and saw a bed salesman, his look half amused and half alarmed. He looked a lot like Barney Rubble, only with the remnants of a spray

tan that would have been unavailable in the prehistoric age. I sympathized. Not because of the spray tan—I’d never do shit like that—but because I

gured being a bed salesman was a job of biblical y bad paradox. I mean, here he was, forced to stand for eight or nine hours a day, and the whole