Rebel without a clue
Stealing Christmas
By Patricia Evangelista
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 23:23:00 12/27/2008
Filed Under: People, Festive Events (including Carnivals)
IT began with a ringing phone, and a voice demanding to be let through the front door. Of course, when your best friend is the reigning queen of the obsessive-compulsive, you do not immediately open the door. You pick up the broom and rush through the room for the 14th time. You pick up all random paraphernalia that are not where they are supposed to be—including rolls of sticky tape, remote controls, film directors who drop by hoping for apple pie—and toss them where they will appear least noticeable. You stuff what’s left into the broom closet, shove stray sheets of paper into desk drawers, and pull the curtains to hide the mess you left outside on the balcony. Then you open your front door, smile at the complaining creature in the long dress with the long hair, and stare at the bags she has clutched in her arms. There are more outside the door: what appeared to be half the contents of her parents’ pantry, carefully packed sets of plastic spoons and forks and plates and cups—the very word in classy dinnerware—and what appeared to be her very own rice cooker.
Nicole has been a friend for the last five or so years, a scholar in sociology who has heard me swearing eternal love to various members of the male population, including several who are unaware of my existence, has provided theoretical frameworks for my various and impulsive changes in opinion, and whose lifelong goal appears to be the collection of various paper products (preferably in A4 size) and who went into what can only be called a spasm of joy when she reported her fiancé is buying her a notebook wire binder for Christmas. The past two years has been punctuated by bi-monthly postcards from Amsterdam or Paris or London, or wherever in the world she is studying with her trusty laser-jet printer. Our gathering that night was a result of two weeks of planning on her part, including various e-mails dragging back friends who have scattered across the globe to “dinner at Pat’s.” My letters from her consisted of enumerated outlines of my various responsibilities that included “ask your mom for food.”
When she walked into my apartment two hours early, she shook her head mournfully at the fact I used a pen instead of a printer to label my boxes of tapes, began picking up stray hangers that I missed, and raised holy hell when I had the gall to put the pasta on the computer table—“they belong on the food table.” Then she stripped off her sandals, informed my father—who had been shanghaied into bringing in dinner—that his daughter was a mess, and proceeded to clamber up and down the loft stairs carting up books and the random throw pillow. That she said nothing about the fact that the dusty floor was making both our bare feet the approximate color of graveyard dirt is a testament to our friendship.
When you live in a one-room apartment and share space with several hundred fat romance novels, inviting four people to walk through the front door is already a challenge to the laws of physics. An attempt to add any more warm bodies would turn the place into a den of iniquity—unintentional or otherwise. Last Monday, 12 people and a David—we are never certain if he counts as one or two—stuffed themselves into my thirty-six square meters. As I owned a grand total of two distinctly uncomfortable chairs, four girls and one boy squeezed into my single bed, one boy perched on the ice box until it leaked a lake of vodka-flavored tepid water, and the rest sprawled on the floor, hung on the stair railings, and complained about the sputtering air conditioning. This is Christmas.
I can’t remember anymore what happened, only that there were shrieks when crotch-less panties were unwrapped, whoops of delight from the esteemed gentlemen who opened boxes of action figures (“Look, it’s Voltron!”) and a long involved debate on whether homosexual marriage should be legalized. Nobody got drunk, the chicken turned out beef, and old scandals were dragged out of the laundry and re-hung until they sparkled. Cameras flashed. Eyes were rolled at jokes. And Nicole, for whom this was the last unmarried Christmas, sat in her corner of the bed and happily discussed the state of her wedding invitations—and the color ink.
I sit on the same bed now as I write this. I have just discovered there is a half-eaten cake in a box on my bedside table, and as there is nothing left in my refrigerator except for two Yakult bottles and mayonnaise, I offer thanks to the kind soul who left the box, I am pleased to report that six days of isolation under a pile of newspapers, last week’s jeans, aromatherapy candles and torn gift-wrapping does not damage icing-covered mango tortes. Next week, David will be in Singapore and Mike in Japan, the others will be losing weight in law school or gaining weight in med school, Nicole will be reorganizing her list of wedding demands, and I will still be sitting here, still writing, still pretending to be grown-up, and still hoping that nothing will change until the next time they knock on my door.
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Email: pat.evangelista@gmail.com
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