Aria closed her eyes and listened to the harp, whose fairy-like plucking stood out against the melody of the classical orchestra. She imagined the musician’s hands and fingers stroking across the strings. Her body knew every note of the song. Then again, everybody’s did. The song was “Silent Night.” The speakers in the mall had been playing an endless rotation of Christmas songs for a month now.
She had come to the mall to use the public restroom and dig through the dumpsters behind the stores, which promised to be full because it was Christmas Eve. She found herself sitting in the common area of the mall, between the rows of kiosks, watching children pose for pictures on Santa’s lap.
Aria felt ambivalent about Christmas. For her, and so many of the other people in her position, there were two sides to the story of Christmas in their lives. In one way, Aria could feel what might have been. She could see herself as a child in a different kind of home. It was as if she were looking through a window onto that life she never had. The glass was partially frosted. Inside she could see her younger self with her mother, Lucy, looking healthy, with a responsible and gentle man who took care of them by her side. She could see a younger sister or brother there too. The family dog was wearing a Christmas sweater. They were reading The Night Before Christmas on the couch in front of a giant Christmas tree. Every ornament on the tree was glamorized by the creamy glow of the Christmas lights. She had memorized every one of them. She had felt the nostalgia of taking each ornament out of its wrapping with this imaginary family each year. She could taste the thickness of hot cocoa against the roof of her mouth.
Every smell associated with Christmas contained a story of its own, a thousand years of festivity. Aria loved those smells. She loved the idea that the notes of each Christmas carol had the potential to restore those positive memories and those feelings of love and belonging to full bloom. She loved the look on the children’s faces, overwhelmed with the magic of presents appearing in their stockings. She loved the way that people seemed to be stricken with a sudden sense of kindness during Christmas. Instead of fighting their way through the crowd, people were smiling and making way for each other. They were wishing each other a happy holiday. Aria imagined she would love the tradition of Christmas if that tradition had been anything good.
But the other side of the story of Christmas in Aria’s life was the reality: that Christmas wasn’t good. It was watching her mother draw a Christmas tree on a paper with crayons because it was all she could afford to do. It was the time of the year that Lucy was most aware she couldn’t give her daughter the life she wanted to give her. It was watching her mother struggle to buy or steal her one toy each year. It was playing with that toy by herself, watching Lucy drown away that feeling of shortcoming with a needle. It was the fuckedup way the foster parents or staff at the group homes tried to make them enjoy a holiday designed specifically to celebrate the very thing that all of them had lost.
Aria knew that the man who was pretending to be Santa most likely had the stain of alcohol on his breath. She knew that the shops were just looking to Christmas for one more way to tease the money out of people’s purses. She knew she had no home to go home to. And because of all this, Aria wished that Christmas didn’t exist. The interminable build-up to Christmas was like never-ending foreplay leading up to an experience that she could never have. The outward hatred she showed for Christmas was her way of hiding the painful fact that, like everyone, she wanted to love Christmas, but couldn’t because of the reality of her unlucky life.
It had been nearly five months since Aria had come to Los Angeles. Though she had found a sort of base camp in the car lot and with the people who lived there, it had been a breadth of hardship. In that time, Aria had learned the true value of a dollar. She had learned how to disappear into the tapestry of the city. She had learned so much the hard way, like where not to walk at night and where not to walk during the day. Her life had been a surfeit of near misses. Finding programs for people in her position that posed too much of a risk for her to try to join.
Taylor hadn’t had it much better. He had taken a handful of temp jobs and lived off of the dollars he made until he had none left, but it was never enough to rent a place. He had attended a few publicly advertised cattle calls for actors, but had never gotten a part. He had slept with more than a few men, but it never amounted to anything more than a booty call. Some days he went out on behalf of both of them with a cardboard sign to solicit charity. It made Aria feel guilty when he did it, but she was still 17. She couldn’t take the risk of getting caught.
Luke and Palin, forever nomadic, had been off to a dozen festivals. Occasionally he brought back a gutter punk or two that he had met there. They would park themselves at the car lot for a day or two before leaving on the boxcar of some train, headed to whatever places anarchists go. Though her almost patriotic devotion was to Luke, Palin had grown close to Aria. Scratches now scuffed up the side of the broken-down Land Cruiser from Palin trying to coerce her to come out and play.
Aria’s hair had grown longer. She had bitten her nails down as far as she could chew them. As far as food went, some days she was luckier than others. The unpredictability of sustenance made it difficult for her to concentrate sometimes. She welcomed the mental fogginess because it made her stop thinking about her life. Her gums were sore. With the lifeblood stripped from her immune system, it seemed like she had fallen sick at least seven times in the past months. She was so skinny that people might have been expected to guess the truth about her situation. But because her youth would not give her body the permission to decay, people simply assumed that she was anorexic.
No matter how many times she managed to find a place to wash them, her clothes seemed to be eternally soused by the fumes of sports cars that passed her by. Aria had never cared about fashion. But she found herself missing the feeling of wearing something just because it looked good. It was asking for trouble to be on the streets and wear something for any reason other than that it was practical.
With no phone or calendar, and LA having no real seasons to demonstrate the passing of time, the days blurred into one another. If society was a rat race, most of its members were stuck in the wheel. The people on the street believed themselves to be free from that rat cage, but the stasis in which they lived was just another kind of rat cage. Their marginal existence was the wheel of surviving day to day. Never getting ahead, every day starting over at zero. Aria had the feeling that if she got off the street and came back to these same places, she would see the same people doing the same things in one year, five years, 20 years … assuming that they hadn’t died first. If you weren’t insane before living out here, the living here would make you insane. It would kill you, but not quickly and not painlessly. It would wear you down at the edges before scooping out your core.
Last-minute shoppers swarmed through the corridors of the mall: frenzied people quickly bouncing from store to store with bags in their hands. The buttery smell of toasted almonds, coated in cinnamon sugar, was laced through the air. Aria wove her way through the crowd to get outside the building behind the food court. She waited until no one was passing by and grabbed the first thing that her hands could reach out of the dumpster. It was a styrofoam takeaway box with a divvy of partially eaten lo mein noodles. Instead of standing there, she took them to a corner of the bustling parking lot and ate them with her hands. Whoever had finished the first portion of the noodles had drowned them in soy and sriracha hot sauce. It made her mouth and stomach burn, but she ate them anyway before heading back to the car lot.
Luke woke them up in the morning by knocking his elbow against the glass. In his hands, he was precariously holding two paper cups full of instant hot cocoa. He had taken the packets and cups from a bank office three days before with Christmas morning in mind. Like almost everyone else, Luke had nowhere to go this Christmas. But in typical fashion, he had taken it upon himself to prevent them all from sinking into sorrow.
Taylor opened the door and took the cups from him. “Merry Christmas. It’s cocoa,” Luke announced. “I’ll be back in a second.”
Taylor handed one of the cups to Aria. It was so hot that the film of wax on the outside of the cup began to come loose on her hands. They watched Luke go back into his tent and carry little cups to every person in the car lot, except for Ciarra, Aston and Mike, who had been gone for two days to visit a relative somewhere in Hemet, California. When he got around to Anthony’s tarp, Anthony refused to respond. He was not asleep; he simply didn’t move. He stayed where he was, lying on his stomach, staring off into a chasm of depression that only he could see. Luke placed the cup of cocoa in front of his face, where it stood the least chance of being knocked over but where he would be forced to see it.
Luke came back to the Land Cruiser with his own cup of cocoa and Palin in tow. They both got into the back seat with Aria, forcing her to slide over to one side. “Mmmm, a subtle note of cherry, maybe some oak and definitely some chocolate undertones,” he said, jokingly sipping his cocoa as if impersonating a wine sommelier.
They laughed out loud. The joke was all the more funny because the cocoa he had managed to make them on his little camping stove was anything but gourmet. The saccharin sweetness of synthetic chocolate was enough to give them all a headache. But it lifted their spirits anyway. “So, what the fuck should we do today?” Taylor asked them with a tone that denoted defeat.
“Ah, dude, today’s the best day to go downtown. People give out mad loot, man,” Luke responded.
“What do you mean?” Taylor asked.
“It’s Christmas, the only day people actually give a shit,” Luke responded with a pandering smile.
As it turned out, Luke was right. He, Taylor, Aria and Palin sat under the façade of a building on a street close to the three biggest missions in the city. Aria was glad that being in California meant there would be no snow for Christmas this year. It wasn’t that she hated snow; quite the opposite. But it didn’t feel quite like Christmas without snow, and so the holiday didn’t hurt as much as it might have otherwise. Christmas lights didn’t look or feel the same without the backdrop of powdery white.
The streets were crowded with people like themselves, looking to take advantage of the habitual alms that they could expect to receive on Christmas Day. In a slow and virtuous swarm, families and couples passed by in their brand new Range Rovers, Ford Fusions, Porsches, Teslas and Toyota Priuses. Every so often, one of the cars would stop and open the trunk to gather an allotment of whatever they had decided to hand out to the homeless that year. They would walk the items over to whichever recipients they had singled out and hand them down to them with righteous smiles on their faces.
Aria felt uncomfortable in her own skin. The entire display made her lose even more faith in humanity. It was her poverty that forced her to consent to being there, where her pride could not. This was a poison called philanthropy. The reality was that people did not care. Every other day of the year, these same people would yell at them to stop loitering in front of their buildings or to go get a job. Every other day of the year, these same people would pass them by, dousing them in the ordure of their car fumes. But today, with the Christmas spirit upon them, suddenly they all acted like they cared. Aria would have been glad for this sudden shift, were it not for the smug looks on their faces. Contrary to popular opinion, it was not Christ-like at all. She could see that this giving was not really giving. It was taking. It was a transaction. People like herself accepted whatever they were handing out, and in exchange, they could revel in a sense of their own moral goodness. It was a display of self-gratification. People love nothing more than seeing themselves as good, even if it is by definition entirely self-centered.
By the end of the day, Aria had begrudgingly accrued an orange, four water bottles, mouthwash, shaving cream and a razor, four pairs of new socks, a pack of sanitary wipes, a bottle of hand sanitizer, two toothbrushes with toothpaste, a packet of gum, chapstick, five hand warmers, a packet of mixed nuts, four granola bars, a comb, a packet of cheese and crackers, $10 and some beef jerky which she couldn’t eat. When neither Luke nor Taylor was close enough to see, she fed the jerky to Palin, who inhaled it. Palin seemed overwhelmed with the excitement of the unforeseen change of atmosphere and the energy between people in the air. Each time a person had approached them, she submissively flattened her ears and crawled toward them, anxiously wagging her tail. Only one person leaned down to pet her. The rest simply assumed that because she was in the company of a vagrant, she must be carrying some kind of disease.
Having caught wind of a turkey dinner that was apparently offered every year to the homeless and hungry at the United Methodist Church, Taylor and Luke decided to follow a fellow drifter there. Aria declined to join them. Instead, she walked the long distance back to the car lot alone. When she arrived, she could see that Anthony had not moved from his original position. The cup of cocoa that Luke had placed beside him had been spilled. Aria assumed it had been knocked over intentionally. Aside from Anthony, there was no one else at the lot. They had probably all gone out to take advantage of the many opportunities that existed as a result of this sudden Christmas caring.
Aria sat in the mute atmosphere of the back seat of the Land Cruiser. Here, away from the self-gratification of the people and the diminishment she felt because of it, she was glad for her little pile of charity items, where she hadn’t felt glad before. She spread them all out on the seat of the car. She was conscious that the way she felt, looking at them, was similar to the way she’d felt on the few occasions when one of her foster parents had taken her trick-or-treating. She felt replete. At least for a little while, she wouldn’t have to go desperately searching to meet an immediate need.
Stripping down to her bra and underwear, Aria used a few of the hand wipes to give herself a kind of provisional sponge bath. She pulled the comb unforgivingly through the length of her hair. She was grateful for the comb most of all. Since her brush had gone missing when her backpack was stolen on one of her first days in the city, she had been using her own hands to untangle her hair every morning. Leaning her legs out the opposite side of the car from where Anthony’s camp was situated, she used one of the bottles of water, the razor and the men’s shaving cream to shave her legs for the first time in ages. She didn’t know why she did it. Perhaps it was stupid. There was no reason to shave her legs in the life she was currently living. In fact, doing so might make her more uncomfortable once the hair started to grow back in. But she was sick of feeling decrepit.
Because it was Christmas, she allowed herself to separate the orange and the packet of cheese and crackers from the rest of the stash, which she stuffed deep into the main compartment of her backpack. The sweet-sour taste of the orange segments was tainted by the bitter pith that still glazed her hand from when she’d peeled off the rind. She spread the cheese on one of the crackers with the little red stick that was provided in the packet. It tasted chemical, but it felt luxurious to eat. When she had finished, she threw the orange rind and the little tangle of hair that had come loose in her comb over the fence of the car lot.
Waiting for Taylor and Luke to return, Aria found herself loosely watching over Anthony’s little denigrated arbor. The blue tarp over his head was contorting with the lift and release of the wind. Aria imagined that he must have actually had good Christmases once. It made her sad to imagine them. She could see him younger, wearing a ridiculous Christmas sweater and sitting down at a long table with so many family members that he would have to shout to be heard over the chorus of voices. Of course, she didn’t know if what she imagined was anything like his actual Christmases. But she could conjure up no other explanation for his catatonic state.
For most people, Christmas was a time of celebration. It was a time for gifts and family and feasts. But for people like herself and Anthony, whose ostracization had led them straight into the back alleys of life, Christmas was anything but that. Watching him, Aria began wishing that if people were actually capable of caring about the people in society who were damaged or down and out of luck, they would act every day like they did on Christmas Day. Then again, if they did, she doubted whether anyone would be living on the streets in the first place.