A Christmas Carol, Recycled

(Some strong language) Cornelia’s roommate had just gotten back from Trader Joe’s. Cornelia could hear the wheeze of the refrigerator door opening and closing, punctuated by cheerful slams of cupboard doors in an uneven rhythm, accompanied by the staccato and rustle of emptied paper bags being snapped through the air and then carefully folded and tossed into their place in the stack of paper bags under the sink.

Cornelia’s roommate Sally was always careful to insist on paper bags at checkout and insisted again on preserving them for next time under the sink and never once remembered to take them with her to the store.

Cornelia’s bedroom door opened into the kitchen. The post-shopping racket had broken her Zen so she rolled carefully off her yoga mat and peeked her head out of her door. “Need any help?” she asked, hoping for a no, hoping for an invitation to stay in her room with the door closed. 

“Oh, you’re there! Ka-mear, ka-mear, ka-mear,” rang out Sally, stringing the syllables of Come Here together in a trill of excitement. Sally was always excited about something. It was like living with a puppy. 

Cornelia opened the door and stepped into the threshold. How far did she need to move to demonstrate a socially appropriate interest?

“Look at these Advent Calendars. They’re so cute this year! I know how you feel about ethically sourced chocolate, but come on, these are adorable and I got them just in time to start the 24 days. It’s time to Get In the Spirit!” rattled on Sally, rushing up to Sally in her bedroom doorway with the cardboard and plastic advent calendar, waving the indisputable evidence of cuteness in front of Cornelia’s face with one hand and beckoning Cornelia into the kitchen with the other. 

Cornelia didn’t understand how anyone’s speech could exit their mouths with visible capital letters and exclamation points but she felt like she could see them when Sally talked, the energy of her enthusiasm transmuting into a visible speech bubble above her head like in a cartoon. 

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” thought Cornelia. “Like I’m supposed to get all happy as fuck about a countdown to her goddamn consumerist armageddon by gorging on refined sugar and child labor? And she had to get two of them, double the plastic? Why did she have to get me involved?” 

She mentally doubled back on her usual response to this kind of invitation to a guilty pleasure. “Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you, I’m doing a cleanse for all of December. I want to start the New Year completely free of toxins.” 

“Oh,” replied Sally, stepping back towards the sink and lowering the profurred calendar to the counter. “I get it. That’s awesome, I wish I had the discipline to do that. I know these calendars are silly, of course. It’s just my Mom used to always get ‘em.” She deflated for just a moment, remembering all the other silliness that she would not be describing to her roommate for fear of all the ways in which her family’s holiday traditions had precipitated climate change. She would not be getting a real tree for this apartment, that’s for sure. 

But then Sally’s face brightened with the arrival of a new thought: she’d share the calendar with the little girl next door. She’s Latina and her mother is a single mom. Cornelia would approve of that, thought Sally, opening her mouth to share her intent but not getting the words out before Cornelia cut off her escape.

“Well, thanks anyway. It’s the thought, right?” replied Cornelia, her response serving as a pat on Sally's head before she retreated into her room and closed the door on everything happening in the kitchen at that moment.  

After completing her yoga routine, Cornelia skipped a shower to save water and dressed for her evening shift at the homeless shelter on University. It was run by a church, but it was biking distance to the apartment so she’d overlooked the association when she’d volunteered. She came once a week to make spaghetti and garlic bread for about 100 regulars plus whoever else wandered in every Wednesday night looking for a meal. 

As she walked in and headed towards the kitchen, she surveyed the room, noticing what looked like a family group she hadn’t seen before, a mother with two kids. She noticed as she passed that the children’s skin didn’t match their mother’s. She stopped to say hello. 

“Hi kids,” she said, her tone pitching upwards, unconsciously imitating Sally. “I’m Cornelia. Do you like spaghetti?” 

“Yeah, everybody like spaghetti,” replied the older child truthfully, leaning his body back from her, looking at her from under his eyelashes, distrustful that Cornelia would signal them out with such an obvious question. 

The boy’s suspicion disarmed Cornelia. She realized she’d made some kind of mistake but didn’t understand what it was. Unlike with Sally, she felt like she couldn’t drop the exchange until the awkwardness was healed. “Umm, hey, do you know we’re organizing a Toys of Hope toy run here this year? I’m kind of doing it for the pastor, well, it was pretty much my idea. And this year we’re not going to accept any presents from Target or Walmart or any kind of big-box,” she rushed on, turning her head to the mother now. “We’re making sure that the kids get all ethically sourced and upcycled presents so your family won’t be contributing to landfill!” 

By the end of the speech, even Cornelia had become aware of how much her voice sounded like Sally’s so she stopped talking.

The mother smiled politely back and nodded her head while rubbing her hand slowly, reassuringly across the top of her son's back. “Yes, I heard about that. The pastor is actually my brother-in-law. We’re here tonight to visit and the kids really do like spaghetti, so....” She left the rest of the sentence unsaid: we’re not homeless.

“Oh, okay, well, I guess I better get to making it then!” Cornelia said, her tone risen to blindingly bright as she backed towards the kitchen, regretting the entire conversation, regretting the very impulse to talk to anyone at all, ever, but determining to make up for her divergence from the path with the best spaghetti she’d ever made for homeless people.  

Cornelia returned home from the shelter around 8pm, late for dinner at a homeless shelter, but not for a family with a working mother. The little girl from next door was sitting on the stairwell landing shared by her family and Cornelia and Sally. The door to her family’s apartment was half open, bachata music and cooking smells spilling into the hallway. The little girl often played in the hallway. Cornelia didn’t know why she didn’t play in her own apartment. 

Tonight the girl had a doll in her hand; on the floor next to her were a plastic teapot and cup, out-of-scale to the doll but still toy-sized, and the Trader Joe’s Advent Calendar. It looked like she’d already eaten through Day 14. “That must have been Sally. See, the stupid thing won’t even make it a day and I bet I end up having to move it into the recycling,” thought Cornelia.

The little girl looked up into her face, searching her expression for an opening. Sometimes the other one, the smiling one, would stop and pretend to have a cup of tea with her. This one also smiled sometimes, but hers was a grown-up smile, a smile that gave the girl permission to play, not one that asked for an invitation to play with her. 

But this time, the second woman hesitated. She was looking at the doll in the girl’s hand. The doll was a Barbie-style doll, but not the real thing. This one came from the .99 store and was Barbie-shaped with Malibu Barbie-inspired coloring, the impossibly large eyes impossibly blue and the shining nylon hair a shade of yellow never seen on a real human head, even in Scandinavia or any of the other places in the world this little girl didn't know about yet. The doll couldn’t be posed as flexibly as a real Barbie and it had come in only a bathing suit with no shoes so you could see the nubs at the end of her legs, more of a reference to feet than an actual representation. 

“Wouldn’t you prefer a doll that looks like you?” asked Cornelia, not unkindly, her tone edging towards curiosity.

“What do you mean? My aunt gave me this doll,” said the little girl, confused by the question but recognizing an opportunity for attention. “Her name is Yahaira, like my cousin,” she added. “My aunt says Yahaira is the most beautiful one in the family. And she likes to have tea at parties. Do you want some tea? We could have some.” 

Cornelia hesitated, her mind for some reason flashing back onto the face of the mother she’d talked to in the homeless shelter, the white mother of black children who wasn’t homeless after all but who’d sounded supportive of Toys of Hope.  

She sat down on the top step, next to the girl, who pushed the plastic cup towards her and poured an invisible stream of tea into the cup from the plastic teapot decorated with an image of the snowman from Frozen. The girl looked at Cornelia thoughtfully for a second and then popped out the Day 15 chocolate from the Advent Calendar, placing it on the dirty carpet next to the plastic tea cup as an additional offering. The chocolate looked like a square with an earthworm on top but it was probably supposed to be shaped like a candy cane. 

Cornelia looked at the girl and doll and the plastic teapot and the earthworm. She hesitatingly picked up the cup, not confident of her understanding of the ritual but knowing she couldn’t turn back now without hurting something. She picked up the earthworm/candy cane and placed it on her tongue, where it started to melt. 

“Are you going to get a Christmas tree for your apartment?” asked the little girl.

“No. I don't believe in killing trees for a holiday. They’re too important to the ozone layer. But someday, when I die, I want my body to be cremated and buried in a forest so the trees can grow better," explained Cordelia. She paused, looking into the little girl’s face to check if she’d maybe want to ask about the word ozone. "It'll be like a whole Christmas forest," Cornelia added. She'd never thought about it that way before.

“Oh, that’s interesting,” said the little girl with a beautiful cousin named Yahaira, chirping happily as she poured Cordelia another toy-sized cup of invisible tea.