Christmas

Posted to Work on 14 October 2007.

Sometimes, when I was seventeen, I almost wanted to cry as we hacked the nubs off the branch tips of the Scotch pine trees growing on the B— Christmas Tree Farm. I liked the raw physical nature of the work, but Heidi, Mr. B—’s beautiful, if tomboyish daughter, had a big crush on my cousin Brian, who got me the job there. Brian wanted to “just be friends” with her. It seemed like every girl I would ever love would bypass me for him, but Heidi and I did go on a date once. When I brought her home, she invited me inside. When I sat on the couch with her in her parents’ ancient farmhouse, she stood to draw the shades, “Otherwise everybody drivin’ by can see what you’re doin’.” That turned out to be tongue-kissing, with my right hand firmly between her thighs, fondling her over her Levis. Doesn’t that mean something, I wanted to scream as I hacked away in the noonday summer heat.

I wore a long-sleeved “blue dog” of a shirt every day, because I was afraid of wrinkling prematurely, but the mildly poisonous Scotch pine needles relentlessly left a spattering of tiny, itchy red dots where they punctured my skin.

We went to the McDonald’s Drive-Thru one day with a few of the other workers, when one boy, half-Vietnamese and half-Caucasian, stormed inside, his act well-rehearsed. He asked for a manager. “That bitch in the Drive-Thru says she won’t serve me just because I’m Mexican!,” the boy railed.

The manager, I’m told, rolled his eyes and pointed to the door. “Leave,” he said.

The boy burst into laughter. We laughed all the way back to work.

“I don’t want you to feel intimidated or inferior to the people we work with,” Brian told me in private, rubbing my shoulder. “Most of them are just here to earn a little extra money before they head off to med school.”

All I could think of though, as I picked the fragrant sharp green needles out of my underpants later, was that maybe the pretend-Mexican boy got to touch Heidi the way I did, and their childish liaison was a secret, too. She treated us with equal indifference, after all.

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