DECEMBER 23, 2000

I work as a copy typist at an advertising agency on Michigan Avenue, Chicago’s “Magnificent Mile.” It’s as dark and frozen as Finland out there, but warm and bright in the office. I fix some typos on a 30-second radio spot for Metra, print it out on creamy letterhead, deliver a stack of U-matic video tapes to Belinda’s vacant desk in Traffic, and then, finally, it’s time to clock out and brave the flurries and horn-honks, the slush and salt and slow-braking buses. I’m wearing impractical shoes for winter, shiny red Chinese Laundry loafers. Last week, one of the account execs came in wearing the same shoes and when she looked down and saw mine, she groaned in defeat and rolled her eyes. I guess because I’m a secretary and having the same shoes as me is embarrassing.

I never seem to get too cold or wet, and I don’t realize it’s because I’m still a kid, still a hardy, unfussy furnace. I have my dad’s old camel coat and a hat with cat ears that I must have bought at one of the punk stores on Belmont. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve and I still haven’t bought presents for my family, so tonight I’m slushing over to Marshall Field’s (just Field’s, to Chicagoans.) Field’s has fourteen floors, mosaic ceilings by Tiffany, its own candy factory, and a 45-foot Christmas tree in the Walnut Room, where the very young and the very old eat breakfast below its boughs. The eighth floor is the Cozy Cloud Cottage, where a very professional Santa dandles tots (what a word, dandles) as a singular and precious Polaroid is taken.

But the holiday windows are the best part; they attract polite and oddly reverent crowds to the store all month, breath fogging the glass as they watch dolls twirl in a motor-driven frenzy, angels trumpeting up and down, a bear scrolling back and forth on the world’s slowest unicycle. I know I’ve arrived when I see the crowds, and the huge clock on the corner of State and Washington. It’s been there since the 1800s and will still be there, surely, when the store goes dark forever. A scenario that’s hard to imagine tonight, in 2000, when the place is mobbed and the trees are aglow and if you buy a T-shirt, they’ll nestle it in tissue paper and place it in a green gift box and finish it with a gold elastic ribbon.

There’s a counter for everything: Isotoner gloves, Timex watches, Clinique, where the salesladies wear white lab coats and seem like they might actually be doctors. When I’m done shopping, I’m burdened with bags and I feel very grown-up, like I’m the shopper now instead of the child with a list. I’m actually in a liminal space between magic-maker and magic-taker; I have very little responsibility beyond my entry-level job and my two cats, but I’m old enough that I’m expected to bring gifts and I like doing it. I like finding the perfect pair of Dearfoams slippers for my mom, I like the way the cashier tapes the receipt inside the lid of the box, I even like the lines because the lines mean it’s Christmas, and people are talking to each other, and everything will always be the same, year after year, forever.

After I leave, I get on the L at Washington and ride uptown to Lakeview. I get off and eat dinner at my favorite Indian restaurant, where the owner refers to me as “The Minister of Finance” because I always pay for my boyfriends. There’s a whole buffet and it’s like six dollars or something and the mango lassi is fantastic. After I’ve cleared a couple of plates, I get back on the L and ride about fifteen more minutes to my neighborhood.The snow is really coming down now and the sky is so clear and cold, and I feel like I’m in a diorama of my own life. The walk from the station to my apartment is long, but I never seem to get too cold or wet, I assume I will always be this resilient, that the boiler inside me will never fail.