The Macramé for Dummies book is crammed
between three sets of referral paperwork and a note from transcription.
Wilson stares at it half a beat before he opens the cover and a note drops
out. It reads HAPPY JEW CHRISTMAS in House's distinctively disastrous
handwriting.
Wilson says, "God," under his breath, rolling his eyes and tossing it to a
corner of his desk, where it gets immediately covered up by the three
referrals and two medical journals.
The second day of Hanukkah, Wilson gets woken up by a phone call from his mother reminding him it's the second day of Hanukkah, which he finds out an hour and a half later anyway when he gets to his office and finds a paper punch-out menorah taped to his office door with two candle flames colored in.
Wilson scrubs at his face with his free hand and rips it off, to the delighted titters of a few nurses looking on in the hallway.
He's busy vowing revenge when he notices the My Little Pony portable stable on his desk. Underneath it, on a sheet of official Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital letterhead, House has left a note saying:
For my little princess, kiss kiss House.
"What did you do—steal it from one of the kids in the clinic?" Wilson demands later.
House rolls his eyes hugely, blatantly stealing Wilson's French fries. "Geez, no. Like anybody at the clinic is cool enough to have a portable My Little Pony stable." He winks at Wilson and says, "I bought it at a garage sale a couple of months ago. I've been saving it special for you."
After work the third day, the DHL man knocks on Wilson's door and makes him sign for an enormous box, which turns out to contain three other smaller, nested boxes, each of which is filled with multicolored Styrofoam peanuts. Wrapped in pale-purple paper and festooned with bright yellow, curled ribbon in the last box is a pale green sweater with a unicorn knit into the chest with sparkly yellow yarn. It's the ugliest thing Wilson has ever seen.
"Oh my God," Julie says, recoiling in horror. "I thought House liked you."
The trouble with being friends with a deranged genius is that House has a deadly combination of intimate knowledge of Wilson's vulnerabilities as well as a completely twisted sense of humor, which is how Wilson ends up blearily dragging himself into the department head meeting clutching a WORLD'S BEST WIFE mug and not noticing it until Johnson from Radiology says:
"There's—uh, some ribbon. On your mug. And a tag."
When Wilson finally looks down at the cup and registers what it says, he groans and flips the tag over to read House's handwriting looping out, "4 more days of Jew-love still to go!"
"I hate Hanukkah," Wilson says to himself darkly and wraps his palms around the burning ceramic to cover up the words.
That night, he digs out the Macramé for Dummies book.
Wilson's effigy of House is enormously popular, and the foot-traffic in that section of the hallway is brisk. Nurses and doctors and the occasional patient all stop to slap the little braided doll and its little Krazy-glued cane into a wall with a sense of vicious satisfaction.
He's on alert all day, waiting for the fifth monstrosity to land somewhere inappropriate and very publicly during work hours and nearly drives himself insane trying to anticipate House's insanity, which Wilson knows he should know is impossible.
But House is remarkably well-behaved and absent all day, and when Wilson gets into his car at the end of the day, he's gained a new faith in voodoo that lasts until he turns on the radio—which has been, in his absence, set to tape instead, and starts blaring Bananarama loudly enough to shatter glass.
After a lot of cursing and closer inspection, Wilson finds a cassette box in his glove compartment with a little Star of David drawn on it in silver paint pen. The track listing features such winners as Adam Ant and Billy Idol and a little red heart in between the initials GH and JW that reeks of suicidal impulse.
"I'll kill him," Wilson tells Julie that night as she fusses over dinner plans.
"Sure, sure," she says, distracted. "Does your grandmother still hate me?"
"God, yes," he says. "Put her next to your uncle. She doesn't know he's related to you."
The sixth day, Wilson leaves the menorah on his door, suffering a moment of Zen enlightenment as he realizes the only thing he's dreading more than his present today is the Hanukkah dinner he and Julie are hosting. The last time they'd done Seder, he and House ended up in a closet with all the remaining bottles of Manischewitz, claiming they were helping the children look for the matzo.
When he reaches into his printer tray to retrieve his still-warm patient print-outs only to find black lettering unreadable against garish, iridescent pink and purple Lisa Frank stationary, Wilson puts his head down on his desk in defeat.
"Here," House says on the seventh day, holding his fist out proudly like a toddler with a present.
Wilson finds the simile disturbingly appropriate and gingerly cups his hands, bracing himself for a rat or a tarantula or a slug or God knows what else House fished off of a body in the morgue.
Instead, there's only the barely-there swish of thread over his palm, and Wilson peers down into his opened hands to see half one half of a cheaply-made, pink plastic heart pendant dangling from a braided necklace. The surface of the heart reads:
BEST
FOR
Wilson stares up helplessly for a moment, baffled, until House tugs open his collar, proudly showing Wilson that he's already wearing the other half, which apparently reads:
FRIENDS
EVER
"I know," House says magnanimously at Wilson's horrified silence. "No need to thank me."
"What did I ever do to deserve this?" Wilson mutters, mostly at himself, closing his fist around the damn necklace and feeling the toothy ridges that separate the words out digging into his palm.
"The better question is really 'who,'" House informs him snottily. "Anyway—it's Hanukkah, your people have persevered—again. Lighten up."
Wilson leans back in his chair, staring at his ceiling philosophically as he says:
"Knowing you should earn me year-round Purim."
Wilson knows enough to know that House's pronounced flair for drama makes the eighth day of Hanukkah the most dangerous, and he barely manages to keep himself from creeping around the hospital with his back to the wall—for all he knows, House has painted a fresh strip of green down the middle and he'll be walking around with a teal ass for the rest of the day.
But aside from an updated menorah on his office door, nothing comes, and Wilson settles in at his desk at four-thirty to wait for imminent doom—it comes at four thirty-five.
"There's something wrong with my car," House says matter-of-factly, poking his head into Wilson's office.
Wilson narrows his eyes. "There is nothing wrong with your car. The mob gave you that car."
"And you think they give punk doctors top of the line?" House scoffs, eyes huge. "They probably fished the thing out of Hudson and got it re-detailed before giving it to me." He jerks his head, motioning out of the door to beckon Wilson out of his chair. "Come on."
He's not going to quit until I suffer this indignity, anyway, Wilson thinks to himself, which is why he follows House down the hallway, into the elevator, and wanders with him through the parking decks until he reaches—House's Jetta.
"You said it was the mob car," Wilson argues.
"No, you said it was the mob car and I didn't disagree," House points out. "Go on in. There's something wrong with the backseat and I can't be expected to crawl in there myself," he adds, tapping the bottom of his cane against the ridge of his sneakers.
"This is disturbingly similar to the story you told me about how you managed to lose your virginity," Wilson prevaricates.
House glares. "Get in the car!"
Twenty minutes later, Wilson is helplessly locked in next to two packed overnight bags and staring forlornly at rush hour traffic as they fly down the highway. Of course, Wilson thinks sadly to himself, of course. It wouldn't be Hanukkah unless there was a felony kidnapping.
Eventually, though, when they reach the golf resort a few hours later, Wilson forgives House, but that only lasts long enough for House to discover the joys of what he dubs golf cart cripple polo, which gets them kicked off the green for the rest of the weekend.
"Yeah, happy Hannukah," Wilson says, laughing.
"Better than forty years in the desert," House says.
Much later that night, between the first and second bottles of Jack Daniels, Wilson remembers the Hanukkah dinner Julie's hosting by herself right now and wonders drunkenly and with only the lightest frosting of dread and guilt what he's going to say to her when he gets back. He figures the fact that she hasn't called him means she's either unsurprised or doesn't notice, which makes him feel better about pouring another Jack and Coke for himself.
"These guys are so stuffy," House complains, legs kicked up on the coffee table in their private cabin. "Everybody else has to make things handicap accessible—I don't see why my golf innovations are so brutally rebuffed."
Outside their window, Wilson can hear golfers gossiping about the jackass going forty near the eighth hole and he has to stifle a hysterical giggle.
"You're so misunderstood," Wilson agrees sincerely.
"And that's why you have the necklace," House says with supreme satisfaction.