Such a Pretty Girl by T. Greenwood

Author:T. Greenwood [Greenwood, T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

New York City

Christmas, 1976

We were supposed to go to Vermont for Christmas. Liliana would drive; we’d leave on Christmas Eve and then return to the city before New Year’s. Serafina had called and said she would make the buttery sugar cookies I loved, the ones with the hard candies melted in the center like stained glass. She said that there was a lot of snow on the ground already, and another storm would bring enough to go sliding. (This is what we called sledding in Vermont.) I thought of the dented aluminum saucer I had, and how much I loved sliding at night: the crunch of fresh snow as we traipsed up the hill to the barn, the hush of it, and snowflakes like moving constellations above us.

Liliana had already picked up the van from the garage in New Jersey. Guillermo had told her where to go to get it tuned up. Now it was in a spot on the pier, a makeshift lot where Westbeth residents with cars paid to park them.

Gilly and I had stayed up late for two nights in a row, talking about all the things we wanted to do when we were back at Lost River.

“Do you think Santa will find us there?” Angelica asked.

I was starting to have my suspicions about Santa, but giving them voice made me feel sort of hollow and sad, and so I nodded and assured her that he would.

“Just make sure to bring your stocking to hang,” I said. Angelica had curled up in my lap and hugged me.

Christmas was on a Saturday this year, so we’d gotten out of school a whole week before. We had put up a fake Christmas tree in the apartment, decorated with god’s eyes we made from sticks and yarn. Liliana and my mother had threaded cranberries and popcorn to make garlands, and Angelica made an angel out of a paper-towel roll and tissues in her first-grade class.

Gilly had been excited to show me all his favorite New York holiday traditions. We’d watched the skaters at Rockefeller Plaza, of course, and then stayed to see the enormous tree illuminated. But he also brought me to see the origami tree at the Natural History Museum, decorated with hundreds of paper insects and intricately folded animals. When we got home that day, Liliana found a stack of origami paper she used for her art classes, and we spent hours learning how to turn the delicate pieces of paper into cranes and frogs and dragons. But best of all were the tickets Guillermo got from a friend, who was a light designer for the New York City Ballet, to see The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center. I had been completely and utterly mesmerized. It took every ounce of my strength not to plead with my mother to please let me take ballet lessons. After watching the performance, there was nothing else I wanted more. If I made enough money doing modeling, I thought, maybe I could pay for lessons myself.

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