Work Text:
There's a costume.
The job advertisement said the department store needed someone to wrap gifts, not to wrap gifts in costume.
And yet there is a costume.
They can't afford to pay her more than $5.15 an hour, but they can afford a costume.
Carol almost walks the moment her new boss reveals the green tunic and peppermint-striped tights and red cap, but her self-discipline—she has some, really, or maybe it's desperation, she's got loads of that—intervenes and reminds her that she needs to pay the rent.
She tells herself it's only for three weeks. She's endured worse for longer.
Once she's finished adjusting her expectations, she asks, just so she knows exactly how bad it's going to be, whether she is still on the gift-wrapping duty that she thought she was being hired for.
Of course, says Rob—oh, and of course she also has to help out their Santa.
Of course. And what does that entail?
Nothing much, only wrangling the kids while they're in line to see Santa, asking the parents if their spawn have peed before they get to Santa, and taking pictures of them in Santa's lap on request. There isn't a problem, is there?
No. Obviously not. 'Tis the season, ha ha.
(Yeah. Ha ha. Ho ho ho, even.)
(Fuck.)
🎄
It's after Carol's too-short lunch break on her fourth shift when a woman at the back of the line catches her attention and waves her over.
She smiles and approaches. "Picture with Santa?" she asks perkily. It's pointless; the tight lips and scandalized glances at Santa have already told her what this conversation is going to be about.
"Who is that woman?"
"What do you mean?" Carol asks, pretending not to know what the issue is, giving this woman a graceful out. "That's Santa."
Yes, the Santa she works with is a woman. She doesn't even try to hide it, and the kids generally don't notice and never care. (Carol noticed right away, at the same time she noticed those shining blue eyes.)
The parents are a different story. Some of them get huffy but won't say anything, some of them complain to her, and some of them get outright hostile. Her first day Carol had to call security on a man who didn't want to expose his nephews to women's liberation and other unAmerican, anti-Christmas horrors.
"That's not Santa," the woman hisses at Carol. She's not soft enough, because the little boy in front of her hears that there's a fake Santa and starts to cry.
Carol's smile becomes even more fixed. "It is Santa," she says, mostly for the benefit of the crying kid. "Right from the North Pole on an authentic work visa. Just," she grits her teeth, "like me."
The woman whose kid is now crying turns around and glares—not at the sexist customer who's fucking up everything, but at Carol. She drags her son out of the store, and he wails the entire way.
"See?" the first woman says, like wrecking that boy's day has proved some sort of point. "Santa has to be a man."
Carol notices that she's holding the hand of a little girl, who is surely going to take the wrong message away from all this, and decides to strike a blow for feminism. "This is the 90s," Carol declares, probably too loudly. "Women can be whatever they want to be. So can Santa."
What this woman wants to be is a nuisance. She says, for the benefit of everyone, that Santa isn't a woman and drags her kid off. Which would be fine, except her kid starts to cry, too, which sets off a chain reaction as every other kid in line becomes convinced that they, too, will not get to see Santa.
The afternoon, already dismal, is ruined.
Later on, after her shift is over, Carol is in the break room looking for pens to steal when she's interrupted.
"Whatcha doing?" Santa asks.
Carol thinks fast. "Uh, where are the coffee filters?"
"If I had to guess? Not in the cabinet labeled stationery."
There's really nothing Carol can say to that, and so she's just gawking as Santa sheds the beard and hat. When she's done shaking out her long brown hair, she looks directly at Carol, who forgets all about stealing pens and being caught stealing pens.
"That was quite the feminist manifesto earlier," Santa says. Her tone and expression indicate that she's laughing at Carol, and Carol… doesn't mind a single bit. She might later, once she gets her mind unstuck, but for now it's a fucking privilege to be laughed at. "Do you think it took?"
Carol hears the question, but it doesn't register as something that requires her attention.
"What's your name? I presume it's not just my little helper."
"Carol," she says. Somehow she can speak.
"Carol? As in A Christmas—"
"Don't," she says.
"You know, Carol," she says, and Carol needs to hear her name in that mouth again and again, "I don't get the sense that you're exactly brimming with festive spirit."
"I'm doing this so I don't start the new year by getting evicted," Carol says. She means it as something of a challenge: yeah, I don't have steady employment and I'm broke as shit. What are you going to do about it, call me a loser?
But Santa doesn't take the bait, she only nods and makes a comment about the unfavorable job market. "I was hired to be an elf, too," she says when Carol doesn't respond. "But a tragic candy cane accident struck, and so I filled in for the big guy."
Carol can't tell if she's shitting her. "You're saying you were a mall Santa understudy."
"I'm saying that when the first Santa tripped over one of those giant candy canes and started screaming about his ACL in front of twenty kids, Rob got desperate. The first thing out of his mouth was 'fuck,' and the second was 'hey, Helen, you're jolly, put the beard on.' I did, and now I don't have to wear what you're wearing."
Now Carol is sure that she (Helen, there's a name to go with her, and isn't it just the only sound Carol wants to make again, ever) is shitting her.
Helen must sense her skepticism, because she raises her right hand. "Honest to God."
"Are you? Jolly, I mean."
"Mm, enough to make up for being partnered with the crabbiest elf imaginable."
Carol flushes. She's tried, really tried, but she has always been terrible at concealing her true feelings.
"Do you want to grab a drink after this? I know a place we can afford."
There is nothing Carol wants more. "I'm busy," she says.
"Bullshit," Helen says.
Carol doesn't have a comeback for that, so she's maneuvered into saying yes, and another sentence further maneuvers her into giving Helen a ride. This seems like a good idea until they're in the parking lot next to her gray 1984 Corolla, which suddenly seems inadequate, almost embarrassing.
But Helen doesn't appear to notice that it's beneath her. She settles into the passenger seat like she belongs, and immediately asks, "Mind if I smoke?"
Carol wouldn't mind if this woman lit her on fire, let alone a cigarette. She says to go ahead.
"Thanks," Helen says. "I've been dying all shift."
"Why don't you take smoke breaks?" She always thought those were one of the perks of smoking. That and, apparently, looking hotter than hell while you did it.
"It was impressed on me that no mother wants to explain why Santa smells like daddy did before he left for milk." She tries to crank down the window before Carol can stop her, and the handle comes off in her hand. "Shit. I'm sorry."
Carol almost stumbles over her own tongue in her haste to tell her that it doesn't matter, that it was already broken, not to worry about it. What she actually says is: "Can you watch it?"
"Is it my fault your car is falling apart?"
"It was intact before you touched it."
"You know cars aren't supposed to fall apart on first contact, right? I don't want to die because you don't know a lemon when you see one."
"It's not a lemon," Carol says, more defensively than the state of her car warrants. "You're a lemon."
"Hear that squealing noise? That means your serpentine belt is cracked all to hell. You need a new one."
And whatever one of those was probably cost as much as she was going to make over the next three weeks. "Any other insights?" she asks sarcastically.
"Only one—your tags are expired," Helen says.
Carol already knew that.
By the end of their evening, she also knows that Helen is in graduate school, that she has siblings and nieces and parents who wouldn't prefer her dead, and that she has to work as a mall Santa so she can afford the gas money to drive back home for Christmas and New Year's.
Helen also does not mention a boyfriend. Carol notices herself noticing that, and she might despise herself for the little spark of hope she feels.
🎄
"Ma'am, I don't work at the store you bought these from," Carol says. It is irrational and futile to act as though this fact will get through to the angry woman in front of her, but the programming that at least some people can be reasoned with sometimes is still running despite years of on-again, off-again retail work.
The problem is ostensibly a box of legos, though Carol thinks the underlying cause of the woman's distress is her inability to interface with reality.
"But these are Aquasharks. My grandson wants Aquanauts. Can't you exchange them?"
This is the fifth time the woman has asked. Carol manages a polite noise and keeps something like a smile fixed on her face. "I would, but we don't sell legos."
"Don't you have any in the back?"
"No, ma'am," Carol says. "We don't sell legos."
"I bought them here," the lady says.
"You bought them in another store," Carol says. "That store is in the same mall, but it is not this store. We do not have legos. There are no legos in the back." Again she pulls her lips back from her teeth in an effort at conciliation. "Pinky promise," she adds sweetly.
"Can't you check?"
"No, ma'am. I have to stay here in case Santa needs me."
At the moment Santa is twiddling her thumbs, there being no children to ask her for Barbies or Aquawhateverthefucks, and probably—definitely—eavesdropping.
"But—"
"I can't exchange anything, but I can wrap your present," Carol says, and picks up her scissors. "Which paper can I get for you?"
"He likes trains."
"We have three kinds," Carol says with the patience of eighty martyrs. "White and green stripes, green with Santa heads, and red."
"But I want it wrapped in trains. Don't you have a kind with trains?"
Finally Carol snaps. "Do you want me to wrap this or not?"
The woman's eyes widen. "I want to speak to your manager."
This is the first time all conversation she's actually acknowledged anything Carol has said. It was the tone that reached her, Carol thinks, not her words. A tone that was slightly less than utterly submissive, a tone that implied something like equality.
"All the managers are in a meeting that's going to last at least twenty more minutes," Carol lies. The truth is that Rob has told her never to bother him. We must practice de-escalation at the lowest possible level are the words he used, but Carol knows what he meant.
"Can't you interrupt them? I am a paying customer."
"Wrong," Carol says. "You haven't paid for jack."
"I bought this," the woman says in a raised voice.
"From anoth—"
"I'm a manager," Helen says, appearing (still in costume) at the woman's side from nowhere. "Can I help resolve your issue, ma'am?"
"Oh, I hope so. She's being rude and not helping me."
"That's not what I like to hear," Helen says. "It's not right for one of my elves to be naughty."
Carol gives her the most withering glare she can summon, customer's presence be damned.
Helen ignores her. "May I?" she says, taking the box from the woman. "Ah. I see the problem. This isn't from our toy department, but you can find the store you did get this from if you go through that door and to the left. All you have to do is look for a sign that says FAO Schwarz and tell them you want an exchange."
"Thank you," the woman says. "That's so clear. I don't know why that was so hard for her."
Carol seethes.
"You're welcome. But—you know, this set has some unique pieces. You can't get them with the Aquanauts, and they're pretty neat. I bet your grandson would like them."
"I'm just afraid he'll be scared of it," she says.
Carol would ask her why she picked it out to begin with if it was so scary. Helen argues for the aesthetic superiority of the Aquasharks over the Aquanauts, and says that—How old is her grandson? Six? Such a fun age, isn't it?—six year old boys think sharks are cool.
As she continues to talk, it dawns on Carol that Helen doesn't know anything about the product, she's just talking it up to save the people at the toy store from having to deal with this woman trying to do an exchange. She succeeds, and she also succeeds in persuading her that trains aren't any good on wrapping paper.
When she winds down, the customer is in a good mood. "I'm glad to know that customer service isn't dead," she says. Then she points at Carol, something that Carol learned was rude when she was five. "You need to do something about her."
"Don't worry," Helen says. "We maintain the highest standards of discipline here at the North Pole."
The woman gives Carol a truly nasty smile. Carol manages not to say anything, barely, and wraps the legos in the shiny red paper that Helen has talked her into accepting.
Helen turns on her after the customer is finally gone. "Do you try to get fired, or does it just happen to you a lot?"
"How did you do that?" Carol asks. She ignores the question, which Helen doubtless knows the answer to.
"I'm full of Christmas cheer and holiday jollity," Helen responds. "You should try smiling some time."
Carol's lips thin. "Fuck you," she says.
🎄
The JCPenney at the other end of the mall hires their own Santa, and Rob is incensed. He directs Helen and Carol to scope out the competition, take all their ideas, and shut the other North Pole down if they see an opportunity.
"Um, are you saying that you want us to commit sabotage or vandalism?" Carol asks, and for the first time she thinks she might enjoy this job. "What if we get arrested?"
"I've told you to take the message to Garcia," he says, and slams his office door in their faces.
Carol looks at Helen. "Who the fuck is Garcia?"
"I think he means that we're on our own," Helen says.
Whatever. Carol will take any excuse not to wear the elf costume, and corporate espionage sounds like it could be fun.
Helen gets distracted by a bookstore near the JCPenney.
"We shouldn't," Carol says automatically, and just as automatically she lets Helen take her by the elbow and guide her into the store.
"If we stand by the window, we can see all the customers going into JCPenney," rationalizes Helen. "That counts as intelligence gathering."
They don't stay by the window. Helen meanders to the back for the classics, and Carol drifts after her, partly because she doesn't want to expose her love for fantasy, partly because she's just following Helen by this point.
Helen lights on a copy of Inferno by Dante Alighieri. "Damn," she says after looking at the cover.
"Well, yeah," Carol says.
"Translated by Ciardi," Helen says. "I've been looking for a copy by Dorothy L. Sayers. Did you know she turned to theological work after the Lord Peter books?"
Carol does not want to hear about hell or theology. The right thing to do would be to shrug and pick up another book and say something intelligent and insightful and impressive about it, but what she does is say that she doesn't believe in that shit.
It must come out a little too sharp, because Helen looks at her, just looks, for longer than feels comfortable. "Neither do I," she says at last. "I only care about it because it's one of the greatest epic poems ever written."
"Yeah, real great of him to just shit on everyone who pissed him off."
"There's recurrences of three across the whole poem," Helen says. "So you do see his enemies in hell, yes, but you see members from those same families in Purgatory and—and you don't care, do you."
"No," Carol says.
"All right." Helen puts the book back on the shelf. "Your turn to pick one and my turn to tell you how bad it is."
"I didn't know we were playing a game," Carol says.
"We are now. Go."
She goes from A to S and she picks up The Taming of the Shrew.
"Come on," Helen says. "You actually have to like the damn thing before I shoot it down. Those are the rules of the game."
"I do like it," Carol says. "It's in my top ten of his."
"You're kidding me."
"Eight, probably."
"And you were getting on my case for looking at something that has a bad message. You know there's no way to read it positively and respect the text. Petruchio is an asshole and there's no way around it."
Carol had had this argument with a professor in college. She'd gotten a D on the paper and was still mad about it.
"That doesn't matter," she says. "Everyone in the play is a raging asshole. Remember the framing device? They're screwing with a drunk for shits and giggles. Petruchio is mean, Kate is mean, and after he 'tames' her they are mean to other people at the same time. He leads the joke, she follows. It's about them, I don't know, learning to play together."
"It doesn't end with her joking. Famously."
"I think that speech is actually about how she just found someone she can respect for the first time in her life." She shrugs. "Your turn to like a rotten book."
Helen checks her watch. "I'd go with Crime and Punishment, but we should probably leave."
She would have chosen well; Carol does hate that book, and also all Russian literature. "What happened to intelligence gathering?"
"I've had a sudden conversion experience and no longer wish to commit time theft. Do you want to buy your terrible play?"
Carol actually wouldn't mind buying it—she sold the copy she'd used for college years ago—but she can't afford it. "Nah," she says.
The JCPenney North Pole display is front and center when they walk into the store, and they can instantly see why Rob feels like he's being out-competed; this is flat-out better than what he's put on in every possible way. They have simulated snow, piles of glittery white felt, draped over everything. They have nine wire reindeer and a metal sleigh. They have two dozen beautifully wrapped packages beneath a Christmas tree covered with tinsel and giant blinking C9 lights. They have a designated photographer, multiple elves to usher everyone forward, and a fully separate gift wrapping station. There are also more kids, and fewer of them are sobbing.
"Well," Carol says at last, "I can see why they're doing better than us."
"Do you want to tell him the secret is to hire more than two people?" Helen asks.
"Nah," Carol says. "We can just say it's a bigger props budget."
"Do you really think that more props will help us after what happened with the candy cane?"
Carol is forced to concede the point. "We're not actually going to mess things up, are we?" she asks, just to be sure. She hasn't figured out the bounds of Helen's sense of humor yet.
"I think not," Helen says, and Carol thinks she hears a note of regret. "I've seen enough kids cry today."
"Yeah, what's with that? I don't remember seeing so many tears at one of these things when I was little."
"Couldn't say, never went."
Rob is hopping mad when they get back to their own store. "Where were you? Do you have any idea how many people were here looking for you? One woman actually started to cry because she'd promised her boys that they'd get to see Santa, and here you people are, out of costume with your thumbs up your ass."
He storms off without waiting for them to remind him that he had dispatched them on a mission.
"Tell the next ten of them that you're not real," Carol advises Helen.
🎄
The night before Christmas Eve, Helen says she knows a bar that's hosting a trivia quiz and insists they go. She doesn't have to insist very hard; by this point there's very little Carol won't do if Helen asks, and sometimes she'll even do it without finding something to complain about first.
They don't win (there are too many sports questions, and both of them are useless there), but Carol can hold her own in music and movies, and it turns out that Helen knows a lot about geography. One day, she says, she'll have enough money to travel.
Thinking of the future dissipates the excitement brought on by the game, and Carol feels gloom settle in.
"What's wrong?" Helen asks. "Sore we lost?"
"I don't know what I'm going to do after this job ends," she says. Which is true, but not why she's unhappy at that moment. After tomorrow at noon, she isn't going to see Helen anymore.
"Well, it's Christmas," Helen says. "What are you doing for that?"
"Nothing," Carol says, which sounds better than her actual plan, which is to unplug her phone on the off chance that her mother might call, drink until she passes out, wake up, and drink until she passes out again.
Helen stirs the ice in her glass with her straw. It's a casual gesture, and her voice is still more casual when she asks Carol if she wants to come home with her for Christmas.
"No," Carol says without a second thought. "Christmas isn't… I don't… It's not my thing."
"It's lucky my family doesn't celebrate Christmas, then," Helen says. She's still looking down into her glass.
No? Oh, right. "And I don't know anything about Hanukkah. I'd just get in the way."
Helen looks up at that. "Hanukkah's over," she says, almost gently, like she's being kind to an extremely ignorant child. "We'll still get together on Christmas just because it's a day off and I'll be in town. And, yes, we will get Chinese takeout. Don't laugh and you'll be fine."
A bunch of people who love each other getting together and eating on a designated holiday sounds dangerously like a celebration to Carol, but what does she know about anything approaching normalcy?
Just enough to know it's not for her.
"I can't," Carol says. "Sorry. I really would ruin everything. Thanks, though."
Helen's face takes on a carefully neutral expression. Carol knows she's hurt her feelings, and she'd give anything to be another kind of person.
"I have to ask," she says, very mildly, after a few awkward seconds, "how you think you could possibly fuck up sitting around and eating lo mein."
Helen really doesn't know Carol if she can't think of six different ways to answer that question on her own.
Carol considers trying to explain how she managed to ruin (her mother's word) every Christmas between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three, when she stopped going, usually by drinking, picking fights, or picking fights while drinking. She also considers lying and saying that, actually, she does have plans, only they're private and she doesn't want to talk about them. Instead, she blurts: "I'm gay."
Helen's eyebrows shoot up.
Carol looks down so she won't see the surprise curdle into betrayal or disgust. "I'm sorry. I should have told you earlier. Just… don't want to give anyone the wrong impression."
"Carol," Helen says after a few long seconds. "Look at me."
Carol does, very reluctantly, and in Helen's face she doesn't see shock or confusion or strained civility, and there's certainly no revulsion. There's only laughter.
"We've been dating for two weeks."
Oh.
Oh.
🎄
Okay, so Helen likes her well enough, for now, maybe, but it doesn't follow that her family will, and even if they do—fat chance, really—it doesn't follow that they'll welcome the intrusion on their holiday, and even if they are fine with it, it doesn't follow that they'll think eating lunch together every day for a couple weeks is enough of a relationship to warrant an introduction.
And what is Helen planning on introducing her as? Pathetic ex-coworker who had nowhere else to go would be true, but not how Carol wants to be presented to anyone Helen knows. Girlfriend? Presumptuous and absurd. She doesn't even know if Helen's out to her family, let alone if she'd want to so officially link herself to someone like Carol.
Friend?
Yes, she could handle that. It's a nice compromise between what is true and what she wants to be true.
"Minion," Santa calls. "We require a photograph."
Carol manages to walk rather than stomp over to where Helen is, and she snaps the photo with her Polaroid camera. The aunt doesn't like how it turns out, so Carol reshoots it—for free, which Rob wouldn't like, but Rob's in his office, sleeping, and this is their last shift, so what he doesn't know isn't going to hurt Carol.
"Minion? I'm going to kill you," Carol says once the family has left.
Helen only smiles.
"With something lingering," Carol adds.
Helen waves her homicidal intentions off. "You look so tense you're giving me a stomachache."
"I'm not tense. You're tense."
"One mom used you as an example as to why her kid shouldn't bite her nails. Keep it up and everyone in the vicinity is going to get a panic attack via contagion."
Carol scours her inner depths for the perfect comeback. "Shut up," she says.
"Whatever you're doing in your head, stop it."
"Nothing's going on in my head," lies Carol. "Except for my counting down the minutes until I can take this outfit off forever. It's two hundred twenty-six, by the way."
"Well, watching 'nothing' is driving me nuts. Fix it."
"Get used to it or get me a drink."
Two hundred twenty-seven minutes and half a dozen kindergartner meltdowns later, Carol is in the break room peeling off her elf outfit. She balls the whole thing up and leaves it on one of the tables for Rob to take care of.
"You're going to want to take I-25 North," Helen says as she neatly folds her costume.
"I thought we were going together?" Carol asks, and the vice around her chest constricts further.
"We are. You're driving my car."
"You're trusting me to do that? Really?"
"I want to sleep," Helen says. "And I think you're less likely to jump out if you're driving."
"If you're asleep, you won't notice if I turn the car around and drive us to Mexico instead."
"I'd like that, too, but we don't have our passports."
Carol takes the point in silence and follows Helen out to her car. She's gotten in the driver's seat, adjusted the mirrors, and set off for the highway before Helen speaks again.
"My parents aren't going to impale you on a meathook and eat parts of you in front of your eyes, you know."
"Great," Carol grumbles, "something else to worry about."
"They'll love you. Just be yourself."
Carol can't help but be herself, and that's the problem. It's always the problem. Sooner or later, Helen will figure that out.
Better for it to be sooner.
"We're not too far from my apartment. I can still get out and you can just go by yourself like you originally planned."
Helen doesn't open her eyes. "I thought I won this argument already," she says.
"I'm not arguing," Carol argues. "I'm just giving you a chance to back out. I'll be fine if I'm alone tomorrow."
"I'm sure you would be. However, I would not get what I want."
"Which is."
"I want you to meet my family, and I want to get to know you outside of a job you hate, and I want you to tell me what you do with all those office supplies you think nobody knows you stole, and I want to kiss you on New Year's Eve, and I want you to be part of my life, and I can't get any of that if you're moldering in some studio. You understand?"
Carol doesn't, and she considers putting her foot down and pulling off at the next exit for Helen's own good.
"Everything I've seen from you makes me think that you want the same things."
"Yes," Carol concedes, but there's a world of difference between her wanting those things from Helen and Helen wanting those things from her. "But—"
"For fuck's sake, Carol. Shut up and drive."
Carol shuts up and drives.
