Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos

Author:Marisa de los Santos [de los Santos, Marisa]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Plume
Published: 2006-11-27T16:00:00+00:00

15

Cornelia

They went to the light show after all, Teo and Clare did. They’d shopped for a while and talked for a while—Clare especially had talked—and over slices of pizza, Clare had suddenly said, “Do you know about the brass eagle? The big brass eagle between the shoe department and the jewelry department?” And Teo thought about this and then, in his uncanny Teo way, asked, “At Lord & Taylor?” Even though I’m pretty sure he’d never been there, since Teo doesn’t live in Philadelphia; is a less-than-exuberant shopper; and claims to be allergic to large department stores—literally, not metaphorically, allergic. I’ve heard him say this more than once or, rather, mumble it apologetically, usually while declining an invitation to enter just such a department store. The standard mumble includes incoherent references to ventilation and cleaning fluid, which oddly enough people seem willing to accept, possibly on the grounds that he is a physician or maybe just because they are disarmed by his general disarmingness. Although, I have to say that Teo doesn’t exploit his ability to disarm nearly as often as most people would.

Anyway, despite his well-guarded ignorance regarding department stores, Teo asked, “At Lord & Taylor?” And Clare said, “Yes. Just to the side of the eagle, that’s the best place to sit. If you’re closer, it hurts your neck, and if you’re farther back, you get stepped on by people shopping for hats and scarves.” So they went. They sat on the marble floor, just to the right of the brass eagle to watch a light show that’s been going on, in some form or another, since something like 1955. You’d think kids these days, with their easy access to Pixar animation, Imax, and video games that break clean through their computer screens and scramble around their rooms, would fail to be transfixed by organ music and nutcrackers and sugarplum fairies in lights raising one leg, then the other in their stiff little dance. You’d think so, but you’d be wrong. They’re transfixed.

“Was she transfixed?” I asked Teo.

We were sitting on what would be Teo’s bed for the second night in a row but what was at that moment still my couch. Clare was asleep in my room.

And he said, “Yeah, that’s the perfect word for what she was.”

That struck me as such unequivocally good news, and hearing it caused me to feel relief and hope, which in turn caused me to ramble excitedly and at some length about the wonderful resilience of children, until I noticed that Teo’s expression bespoke not relief and hope, but worry and puzzlement.

“What?” I said.

“I hadn’t thought about it that way,” he said.

“What way did you think about it?” I asked, nervously.

“Do you know that Clare’s been to that light show every year since she was born? When she asked to go today, I just thought, she’s eleven, it’s Christmas Eve, her mother is God knows where, and she wants to go to the show they’ve seen together every year since she was born.

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