Elizabeth Schoettle

New Work by Elizabeth Schoettle

Companion Story by Elizabeth Schoettel

It started with the gingerbread house. The Carlyle Hotel every year at Christmas has a giant gingerbread house on the table in the center room that replaces the large fountain full of gold chocolate coins I like to steal when Edward isn’t looking.                    

“Oh, well certainly this is the end of the house,” the maître d’ said upon greeting us, “you should have seen it when we first put it out, a shame you weren’t here in the beginning. It was quite brilliant in the beginning, but now, well because of people taking from it, it’s gone all to bits.”

Apparently the eaters there, after and before dinner, while walking by just rip things from the gingerbread house: all the little butter cookies and the enchantingly colored jelly candies, the icing candy canes, and silver-foiled Hershey’s kisses, but me, I wasn’t interested in all that. I wanted the plastic reindeer. Eight miniature reindeer with tan backs and bushy tails coated in powdered sugar stood stuck in the snow of the house. And I wanted the deer. I told Edward how I wanted a deer but he said to forget it, I should just take a piece of candy instead, no one takes a deer from the house.

“Honey I’ve been coming here for years and the idea of the gingerbread house isn’t to take the toys it’s to take the candy, the toys are there for display only.” But I disagreed and so I made a subtle suggestion to Charles, the maitre d’, while Edward checked the coats.

“I love those little deer, they are so cute, the little deer on the gingerbread house?”

“Oh,” he said, leaning in, “well if you love the deer then you must love the cute little elves?”

Ah, but elves, good god, I didn’t see any elves, I mean elves, what was he talking about elves. I didn’t see one elf on that gingerbread house and if you know anything about me you’ll know I’m a huge elf fan. I’m like an elf. I jingle. I wear green and pink and red and I’m always making things. I’m sure my past life was spent as a Santa’s elf. I feel year round like a helper. I love it. I’m always happy even when I’m workhorse sad.

“Oh, elves, well I didn’t see the elf,” I informed the maitre d’ excitedly.

“Oh, good heavens yes,” he exclaimed, “we have four of them, they are the favorites of every customer, all the customers envy the Carlyle elves, it’s tradition you know our elves. They are in back of the house by the gumdrops.”

I wasn’t going to eat much. I told Edward after we were seated and looking at menus how I was on a diet and he looked at my size-two body and just said oh. I think he enjoys my eating disorder as much as I do. I told him I couldn’t stand I’d not been working out due to “the illness” and if I don’t work out then I don’t want to eat.

“I mean what’s the point of eating if you can’t work out,” I told him, “what’s the point of anything.”

He agreed. “Honey, I know, if I don’t work out I’ll hardly eat a thing either.”

We really do have a ton in common, Edward and I. Quite frankly I’d probably live longer if Edward liked fat women. There are few men to whom I could confess that all I had the whole day was a can of light tuna fish with half the salt, sweet peas doused in ketchup, one mushroom and a diet coke.

“You don’t think that’s strange Edward?” I asked. “You don’t think that’s a problem?”

“No honey,” he said picking a crumb off my sleeve, “it’s you, it makes sense, really there can be nothing strange about someone who inhabits the word strange.”

Jesus. I’m losing my mind like blades off a spinning fan. I tell people all the time how I’m losing it but they don’t seem to hear. They have those pretty pinwheels from stale parties stuck in their ears. It’s people. It’s everything. All anyone talks about these days, and maybe that’s all they’ve always talked about, is the weather and the movies and the things on TV, Nicky Hilton and her famous slut sister, the rich girls on MTV, Iraq, what the stars are wearing, how Halle Berry has diabetes and SO WHAT, WHO FUCKING CARES IF HALLE BERRY HAS DIABETES, STANLEY HAS IT TOO AND DOES ANYONE CARE ABOUT HIM. God, I just can’t stand it. I can’t stand that just because you are a star and you have a disease or you are a star in a car accident that suddenly it’s all talked about and everyone says awe and wants to be your friend. It’s pathetic. Does anyone care that I had the flu and nearly died from a headache and hacking up my burned green lungs last week? No. 

“Honey, look how well-spaced it is here. You don’t find many restaurants in New York where you can put your elbows up.”

“I know, it really is well-spaced.”

That’s one of Edward’s positive attributes. He sits away from me at dinner now. In the beginning he didn’t understand. He sat close until I told him. Space Edward. Space. I’m like a pea in my own pod and the idea of someone breaking open that pod and latching on is one of utter disgust.  I hate people touching me, holding my hand and patting me on the back while I have food in my mouth. I’m not a baby. I have to concentrate.

 “The Odeon is like that too honey, they have very well-spaced tables, and so is Orsay. We love Orsay...that’s on our top three, wouldn’t you say honey? Honey what other places have we been to like that? Can you think?”

            God Edward

“God Edward, that’s tough, let’s see, there’s, I don’t know, all the other well-spaced places I can think of are very expensive ones we haven’t been to.”

“Well, that’s the whole point honey, the places where you can move are the most expensive. Everyone wants space.”

I ordered a salad and I had them add onions and mushrooms, tomatoes that they charged five dollars extra for, I also ordered an artichoke emphasizing absolutely no dressing whatsoever so I wouldn’t have to exhaust the little guy who runs out after the server with the big pot, really just wishing I was ten at home on my old farm eating mayonnaise in summer.  When I was done ordering Edward asked if I was eating enough, and I said I was. Then he asked for a seventy-dollar lobster with clams on the half-shell to start. Edward eats rich. I wanted to eat like that too but instead I chose an empty artichoke. I then excused myself to the ladies room.

I love using the ladies room when it’s empty and I feel pretty. The only not pretty thing about the ladies room is how ugly I feel knowing I’ve never tipped the attendant. She always sits on the same powder puff stool; she reminds me of all the things I’m trying to get away from. Namely that I have to care for people all day too. The bathroom walls are her bars the same way the restaurant walls are mine. (I’m a waitress.) And thank you all the same, I don’t need the souvenir. Sometimes she’s putting out hand towels and nice paper things with the Carlyle emblem on them. Other times she’s refilling the soaps, but mostly she’s staring at the wall. I know exactly what she’s thinking.  Every second she sits is one second closer to out, and how good out is going to feel.

She doesn’t wear a watch. Maybe she doesn’t feel well, her throat hurts (like mine) and she just wants to take her medicine, get in the shower, close her eyes and pull up the covers. Or maybe it’s her baby. “Hurry up clock tick my baby is sick, wash your hands and please leave a tip.”

Sometimes she hums. Occasionally she dusts things that don’t need dusting.

She looks so bored.

It makes the bathroom heavy. If she wasn’t there, I’d feel so good, so free, I’d be able to spread out my pleats, sneak a shot and breathe.  I need to feel comfortable when I pull up my skirt, unroll my tights and sit down on the seat. Maybe that’s why I don’t tip. I resent this lady for getting paid to stand outside my bathroom stall listening to the most intimate sound I can think of. Raw and stinking truth. She should at least smile. When I serve people, I do it with a smile. (Watching people eat is just as raw and stinking.)

It’s pristine and white, a country club insane asylum. And that warden dressed like a doily knows when you’re finished. As soon as you turn the lock on that door, it swings open, only with her hand on the metal, not yours.

I look very forward to this time, where I can be alone, stare down at the white checkerboard tiles with my elbows on my knees and feel the hot urine bleed from my body. For one moment get away from Edward and forget. Those twenty seconds I wait for all week, the simple pleasure of sitting alone on a white toilet seat in a restaurant bathroom while a man who thinks I’m urinating waits for me at a table. Tonight, however, I came prepared to tip. I had one dirty little bill tucked inside the pocket of my wool skirt. So, after I dried my hands, fixed myself a bit in the mirror, I simply swung around and pulled from within that pocket the dollar bill. I didn’t fold it a million times though the way people like Edward do to make the person think they’re getting more. “You have a pretty skirt,” she said as I handed her the dollar. “Thank you.” I brushed my hand over the skirt and pushed open the door.

Through the large foyer with the hanging chandelier I walked like a model, tall, the taste of licorice on my lips from the shot I swigged in the stall on the sound of the flush—I brought a stash of sambuca I stole from the restaurant I work in with me tonight. I love it so I thought why not, and it’s Christmas. I was now feeling good. The room seemed to move round and round like a lazy Susan, my pelvis sticking out just half an inch past the thinness of my waist. And even though I’m not a model at all it felt nice to get watched and to act like one if only for a moment.  There’s a lot to be said for getting a feeling in your bones if only for a moment.

I felt like an elf as I tiptoed up to that gingerbread house, quickly bending down to peruse the candy and the sugar, imagining myself in the house, small and sitting Indian style, sweets piled high around me, stuck in the powder of all that thick white sugar. A soft overhead light lit the table but inside the house was dark, I felt dark. I envied those helpers, so free and so fat and so, so away. I stooped before the big graham cracker cookie door with its raisin doorknocker, broke off a piece of house, licked the sweet then, into the dark sugar-whipped world barricaded in icing thick as blizzard snow I went. Squeezing through first my hands, then my arms head and neck, until that gingerbread door closed tight around my waist, I was able to see—everything. The bedrooms and the bathrooms, the living room and the dining room, two foyers and three pantries, everything everywhere glittery edible fun fun fun. The high syrupy scent of ginger, long crystal banisters made from lemon sticks and cherry sticks shimmied under the candy corn candelabras. And would you believe (COTTON CANDY COBWEBS OH MY GOD!)

There were juju fruit doorknobs and stairs coated with white chocolate, smaller border tiles with dark, and lamp shades folded together in rows of vanilla wafers like little accordions. I saw rickety elfin chairs built of chocolate-covered pretzel sticks, spongy beds of soft carrot cake and hot apple pie crust, blankets spun with multi-colored taffies fresh from the oven. Peanut brittle glazed the floors, and the bathtubs overflowed with tapioca. There was Brownie soap, radiators made from Hershey bars, and the wallpaper lay heavy in lickable flowers tasting like strawberry fields (along with all the other things I was too hungry and too excited to list).

Then and there (while bending and perusing) I caught sight, of the elf. And let me just say: Behold the elf. Indeed, the man was right, there in the back of the house by the gumdrop stepping stones, four elves sat, lay rather, in red and green with little legs crossed over little knees in relaxed fashions, impish joking fool grins painted on tiny faces, pointed caps and stockinged feet. And so, growing a beanstalk smile, I attempted to rip one from its sugarcoated ground.

“Come on. What’s the matter with you elf. Let’s go,” I whispered with immense aggravation. As I found that ripping an elf from the ground of the Carlyle Hotel gingerbread house was not an easy feat, not easy at all. In fact—you should have seen. The elves were glued deliberately and cruelly to the bottom of that house. And for the life of me try as I, “Come on elf…Up. Get…” might, I could not square an elf away. My attempts soon became dangerous, the house began to rock. I could hardly control or stop myself. I backed one leg at a time out of the door, repositioned myself on the table, and stepped down—“Oh,” I slowly gathered my pleats, smoothed my sweater and peered my head over the gingerbread chimney.  Dear god, looks from all directions. Waiters and busboys and even the other diners were beginning to shoot off suspicion—along with many other unwritten rules at the Carlyle—you can’t stop. You are either sitting or you are moving. The minute you stop it looks like you either work there or you are hanging out. I’m not a tourist and I wouldn’t exactly call it hanging out but I stop all the time. There are mirrors everywhere. They are on the sides next to the tables and they are in the walls around the tables and they are in the halls, the lobby. I look in all of them. I can’t help myself. Sometimes I look like a movie star in a Carlyle mirror and every mirror makes me look different than the other. I have to find the one I look my best in. It’s like going to the funhouse at the circus. One minute I’m very pretty and thinking everyone else in the room thinks I’m pretty too, but then when I look around to see if anyone notices, I see very clearly. They don’t. And why should they? I’m not a model. I’m not really a movie star. I’m a chubby Mr. Jeremy Fisher frog.

When I returned Edward asked me if I’d fallen in the toilet and I said no, that I was trying to break off an elf and that it was impossible.

“Honey, I told you, don’t do that, it’s meant for display, take a cookie instead, you don’t need an elf.”

But again, I disagreed. In fact, I disagreed so much that when the waiter passed I called him over, and with a cheek full of bread, raising my hand like a polite fifth grader, said, “Excuse me, but I have a question.”

He bent over, the napkin swinging on his arm, and in a low and devious tone, two hands clasped desperately together I said, “You see I was just over by the house, you know,” I gestured, “the gingerbread house... and you were right, the elves were there...and so I was hoping, well sir I don’t really need the candy, but, I think I might need a steak knife, do you think you might—”

The waiter held up a finger of genuine concern and excused himself. I looked at Edward. Poor Edward. His face was now down by his knees and his cough was bad near raging. For over three weeks now he’s had this cough that he “pretends” not to have. He says it’s impossible to transfer but that’s bullshit.  And if there is anything you shouldn’t do it’s give a blowjob to a man with a cough. I tell Edward all the time but he doesn’t care. (If cancer were contagious he’d still say blow me.)

“Honey,” Edward coughed (god) and leaned into me, “I just can’t tell you how big your breasts look tonight in that sweater. Maybe if you show the waiter your breasts he’ll carve you off an elf... Oh honey, it’s so exciting, I bet all these men in here think I’m your father. Do you know how horny that makes me?”

 “Really Edward. That is exciting.”

“Honey, do you think if I wasn’t around you’d be giving blowjobs for money to other men, you know if you did say work in a situation like this where rich men were coming in all the time and asking for things.” And of course I had to be honest.

“Yes,” I said dipping bread in my wine glass. “Yes Edward if you were not around, and I’d never met you I’m sure one way or another I’d have figured it out, a lot’s changed,” I ate the bread, “within the last few centuries but not that and quite frankly,” my mouth was overflowing with bread, I pushed more in, “I don’t see so much wrong with it.” Because really I don’t. I’d actually prefer plain Johns instead of some man who considers me his girlfriend. I hate having emotional ties with the person I’m getting paid to blow. It’s complicated.

Elizabeth Schoettle was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. She studied at Gettysburg College for two years before transferring to Hunter College, where she earned a BA in Film Production. She currently lives in New York City, where she works as a full-time artist and writer. Her alter ego is a paper doll–like character known as PhoebeNewYork, and she is also the subject of a docu-series exploring her life as an artist. Her work has been published in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, The Louisville Review, Mania Magazine, Lit Magazine, with recent work appearing in Porchlight Literary.