Dear Santa,

So, first I wanted to say that I am still confused about the time when I was a kid and you brought Stanley Bean some presents, and we even saw a news report telling us that you were in the area. You’ll recall that on Christmas Eve of that year my brother and I spent our time caroling at a nursing home, and because I figured you’d want me to be extra damn awesome, I even let that one really scary woman who reminded me of a Skeksies touch my face. I was frightened, Santa, but I knew I needed to act right.

The thing about Stanley Bean is that he never ever brushed his teeth. He was a pretty rotten kid, and he got in trouble at school all the time. So, it was confusing to me when, come Christmas morning, despite the fact that I was so fucking well behaved that I regularly got three M&Ms for good behavior while my classmates got two, you didn’t give me a damn thing. Maybe the M&Ms were my year long gift, like playing annuity in the lottery, but had I been presented with the option I would have chosen a Mr. Microphone and some brand name cereal.

I’m grown up and aware that Stanley had a difficult home life, which caused him to act out at school to try to get attention. I don’t begrudge him the Christmas presents he got. However, I do feel like you owe me a few.

I would like very much, Santa, to be in amazing shape by March. I got some free personal training recently, and it occurs to me that I would benefit greatly from having the face of a trainer in front of my, begging to be punch, in order to motivate me to keep my shit together and do 20 reps instead of- well, instead of no reps at all.

And it’s not just for me, Santa. I want this for you, too. I want you to not have to make your elves knit me larger sweaters, and I want you to stop all of your fretting over my health. Plus, if you do this, I will totally send you pictures of me in a bathing suit. I’ll send them in an envelope that says “Heating Bill” so Mrs. Clause doesn’t get nosy.

What do you say? Help me get in shape? Wouldn’t it make you so happy to see me happy?

Holiday Best,

Nikol

She was tidy. I’ll give her that. If anything was important to my mother, it was semblance of tidy, neat and proper. It made little sense to me, because I had gone for so long without being bathed that I once had a splinter in my bottom for several weeks (from the see-saw) that I could no longer sit down, it hurt so bad. It hadn’t been noticed because no adult had asked me to bathed or bathed me. Her cleanliness always came in sprees, and always with blame laid on everyone around her. But my mother wanted people to know that we were important because she kept things clean.

That’s why she decided that all of the carnies needed a bath. And that was why she covered the seats of Honda’s camper with plastic bags. She was taking us all to the lake and we were going to “skinny dip” ourselves clean. A skinny dip made me think of Lick’Em Sticks. Those sticks were vanilla flavored, and any time I got the honor of buying them I’d suck the sticks and let my baby brother eat the colored sugar packets.

I was expecting something wonderful and vanilla the day that we went skinny dipping in the lake with the carnies. My mother had worked so hard to keep everything clean that I expected she was in a good phase right then. Even when Danny had begged to stop to pee, she had told him to hold it in and he had listened. This was serious. Obviously. Danny never listened, always just doing what he wanted. This time, though, he held it. We both knew that if she was doing right, it was time to be proper.

The lake itself stunk like cabbage. I dipped a toe in and was laughed at for being “dainty”. At age five I still thought that being laughed at was all wrong. The only people who had laughed at me were the ones who snuck into my room late at night. Sometimes they laughed at my brother, then hit him.The shame of laughter was the same as the shame of pain. So I wanted to stop anything bad that may come and I swam in that cabbage stinking lake.

I had heard about people getting worms. Getting was still my word for acquiring. But I had heard that some people got worms from lakes, so I was suspicious of the people around me, as if they had come to this spot to acquire the worms. Instead we acquired their dinner.

It happened like so: Mom and Honda, they were swimming. Mom and Honda, they were kissing. They were close. They were naked. I was naked. She was far way. Mom and Honda had their eyes closed. Everyone was screaming and Mom was screaming and Honda had his tongue in her mouth. Mom and. Mom. Mom looked like she was hurt and I tried to go help her. Someone grabbed my arm. Someone else made a joke. Everyone laughed, but I was afraid. She said, “She can’t see nothing” And then my mom was mad. And then someone screamed and held something in the air.

That’s how I came to know about turtles.

This was a snapping turtle, I was told. Could bite my toe clean off.

On the way home, my brother Danny peed in a puddle on the floor of Honda’s camper. We went back to where we had set up and I stayed a while with the carousel horses, looking at their teeth and wondering if they could bite my toes clean off. At one point my mother stepped out, calling the others to join them for dinner. I was hungry, but I felt old right then. Too old to go chewing at a thing that might find me under the water and be interested in my toes.

It didn’t matter, though. When Danny went running to the camper door to eat some of that snapping turtle (they all came out saying it was like sausage) they just smacked him in the face so he came crying to me, anyway.

That’s when I told him what I told him about the clouds.

When I was a little girl my mother shacked up with a dude who managed a carnival. I remember that his name was John Honda, but he went simply by his last name, causing me great confusion because he didn’t ride a motorcycle at all. Honda had himself a camper and it was bursting with sacks full of penny toys. Keeping my eyes on those toys I decided it wasn’t in my favor to make any arguments toward him changing his name to John Winnabego.

The summer after I turned 5, when my brother Danny was almost 4, we hit the road with Honda and my mother to become carnie kids. My brother was to run the goldfish bowl booth with mom, but they decided that I was old enough to run my own game. While Danny seemed fairly thrilled to be the caretaker of all of those fish, I worked my stomach into knots over the thought of such responsibility.

Age Five

My game, The Toss Until You Win (you can’t lose, only a dollar, step right up) was constructed in under a day out of some raw 2x4s we’d found along the highway. Honda, shirtless with a tool belt and a beer, explained the intricate genius of the game, with the crappiest toys on the easiest pegs to circle with the plastic rings. People would toss rings until they won. They’d pay a dollar. We’d make a fortune. All I had to do was get them to play. I hated everything about it.

Days would start in Honda’s camper, my brother and I pouring Sugar Smacks and Frosted Flakes from individual boxes straight into our mouths, further coating our unbrushed teeth. If we’d just hit the town, there was set up. If we’d already set up, it was straight to work. We always left a town at night, so we never needed to worry about breaking a site down when the sun was up.

Days at the carnival were boring and blurry, deep fried and stinking of WD40. My Toss Until You Win booth didn’t make the fortune that Honda had predicted, and he was always on my case to lure more paying customers in. I’m the kind of woman who feels bad about summoning a waiter at a restaurant. I was the kind of child who felt terrible about summoning seemingly nice people to waste their money on a game I knew was all a scam. Plus, I was pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, yet there I was all day long in new small towns across the midwest trying to get strangers to talk to me. Backwards shit.

My most memorable customers were a man and his son. I was standing, quietly, watching people walk past and hoping they thought I was just a statue. When this man saw me he stopped too fast and his son ran into him. I wanted to laugh, but I knew it would be rude. Plus I was pretty sure he thought I was a statue and that was why he was starting, so I held very still. They approached, and once he asked me about my game I figured the statue gig was up, and ran through my rehearsed lines.

If I rocked this look now, I'd be queen of the hipsters

As an adult, I think about that moment a lot, trying to place myself into the role of that father. My child and I are out for a night of fun, and a little girl no bigger than my son stands in a booth that all of a sudden seems bigger than the whole world and in her lispy five year old should be playing fairy princess right now voice, she recites “Toss Until You Win. You can’t lose. Only a dollar, and You can’t lose.” And maybe I’m reading that situation wrong, and maybe that man felt nothing. But I choose to believe and hope that he was one of the good fathers and that seeing me made him feel more protective of his son. I hope that each time I said, “You can’t lose” it was like a gypsy blessing to both of them, and I guess I hope that because at least then I wouldn’t feel like such a jerk for taking their money.