The Fallback Plan (11 page)

“Tell me what you’re self-conscious about,” he said, “so I’ll know not to mention it.”

“My legs,” I said. “I hate my legs.”

Jack looked at them closely.

“Your legs are my favorite part of you,” he said. “They’re perfect.”

“No, they’re not.”

“Yes, they are.” He ran one hand from my knee to the waist of my jeans.

I started to relax a little. Jack got up to take off his t-shirt. I stared at the freckles on his shoulders, the soft gold of his skin, the muscular slope of his back as he moved across the room, to put on some music. His chest was hairless, like a high school athlete’s. I felt like I was fulfilling my adolescent fantasy of making out with a member of the varsity water polo team, and at the same time I felt like I was auditioning for the role of serious girlfriend. I was auditioning in the nude. We wouldn’t be young forever, a fact I was both grateful for and terrified of. Someday, Jack would lose all his muscle definition and his skin would sag and his hairline would recede but, unlike Jocelyn, I would still cherish him.

But why?
a voice in my head said.
What do you love about him that isn’t physical?

I told the voice to shut up. “Stay” by Lisa Loeb came on and Jack came back to bed.

“Why do you have this song?” I said.

“You don’t like it?”

“Girls like this song. Girls listen to this song when they’re drunk and lonely.”

“Lisa Loeb has a sweet body,” he said.

I couldn’t argue with that. Before I could say anything else potentially embarrassing, Jack kissed me, softly on the mouth, and then down my neck. I closed my eyes and put one arm around his neck and touched his face with my other hand.
This song must have been the make-out soundtrack
of 1994
, I thought. I felt something that was almost pleasure. I was waiting for the moment when my brain would go totally quiet, for that temporary respite that drugs or sex offered. We rolled to the other side of the bed, and I straddled his legs while he got a condom out of the drawer of his bedside table.

“Creep” by Radiohead came on and then Jack said something that I didn’t hear.

“What?” I said.

“Do something sexy,” he said.

“What do you mean? Like what?” I stared at him.

“I can’t
tell
you,” he said.

“Well, if you don’t tell me, I don’t know what you want.”

“What do
you
want?”

“I already told you,” I said. That glimmer of pleasure was fading out of sight. “Turn off the lights.”

“Your
self-consciousness
is a real
turnoff
,” he said, but when I didn’t laugh, he got up to switch the lights off, and I was glad when he didn’t say anything else after that. I felt my brain detaching from my body, with the voice in my head telling my body to enjoy itself, and my body accusing the voice of making a big mistake. There was little to enjoy. At one point, when I took Jack’s hand in my own out of frustration, to guide it where I wanted it to be, he pulled back and broke our kiss. “Not yet,” he said.

“Not yet what,” I said. “Oh, are you trying to
tease
me?”

“Yeah.” I could tell this was a skill he prided himself upon.

I had twenty minutes for my audition, but I never figured out what the sexy thing Jack wanted me to do was, and he remained on his back with his eyes closed, until finally he just flipped me over and finished without making a sound. When he rolled off of me, I got up to look for my underwear.

“Can I ask you something? Don’t take this the wrong way.”

“What?”

“Do you find sex to be frustrating?”

I gritted my teeth. There was my underwear: inside-out on the floor next to some nunchucks. “No,” I said. “I really like it.”

“What are you looking for,” he said.

My
self-respect
. “Nothing,” I said. I pulled the underwear on.

“I need to pee,” he said.

While he was in the bathroom, I maneuvered around the baskets of still unwashed laundry, and let myself out.

• • •

Bad news: I didn’t realize how drunk I really was until I started driving. Without lane markings, I would have drifted and gotten lost and crashed into the bushes that hid the low-income apartments off Roosevelt Road. That’s where the recent immigrants and refugees lived, and the kids my age who made minimum wage delivering sandwiches. At least they didn’t have to live with their parents.

I will be alone forever
, I thought to myself, and this thought was like a single pathetic rock that precipitated an avalanche of heavier, even more pathetic rocks.
I am the littlest panda in the world
, I thought.
I am Mary Lennox if she never found the key to the secret garden and it made Colin die. I am Maria from
The Sound of Music
if the Nazis stormed the abbey and the Von Trapps had to spend their last days in a concentration camp with Anne Frank and Sophie from
Sophie’s Choice
and the guy Adrien Brody played in
The Pianist.

I knew the only thing I could do to keep myself from ending my life was sing a show tune. At the next stoplight, I rummaged through the CDs in the console and found the
West Side Story
soundtrack and put on the quintet song, the one in which everyone sings about how they’re going to either kill or have sex with one another when the moon rises. I could sing the words to every part until the voices started to echo and layer and split, and then I just stuck to Maria, the dumb optimist, Natalie Wood with a Puerto Rican accent, doomed Juliet.

When I was still acting and had to cry in a scene and for whatever reason couldn’t, I’d think of Maria singing to Tony’s dying body in the end, at the playground.

How many bullets are left, Chino?

Sylvia Cannon, the professor from New York, told us that as a child actress, when Natalie Wood couldn’t cry on camera, her mother would pull the wings off butterflies, and make her watch.

Part of me felt responsible for May’s fall at the pool, and the other part of me was steeped in self-loathing and confusion after the night at Jack’s, so before I left for Amy’s the next morning I put on my most outrageous sunglasses and popped an Ativan.
If only Amy wasn’t there
, I thought,
if only I was paying closer attention, if only May was solely mine to protect. If only I had known the sexy thing I was supposed to do
. I just wanted to be alone with May. She had become the only person I didn’t dislike talking to.

I told Amy that me and May, little black-eyed May, were going for a walk. We had never left the property before without Amy coming with us.

She looked mildly hurt. “Why can’t you just play in the yard? You can refill the kiddie pool,” she said. It had been in the nineties for days, and their yard had dried into a fire hazard. The offer was tempting, but I didn’t bite.

“I thought May would like to play on the swings at the park,” I said, and at the word “swings,” May’s eyes grew wide. Or one of them did. The one that could open.

“Put me in the baby swing!” she yelled.

“What about me? Can I go in the baby swing?”

“No!”

“Why? Because I’m not a baby? Are you a baby?”

“Will you two stop and just listen to me for one minute?” Amy said, fiercely, and both May and I fell silent. I was suddenly a child, too, being scolded for unintentional misbehavior. “I have too much work to do for this. I can’t come with you. You’ll have to take her without me.”

Amy wiped the sweat off her upper lip, went to the closet and returned with a leash. May didn’t flinch.

“We don’t call it a
leash,”
Amy whispered to me as she fastened the straps, “we call it a
costume.”
It was a brown furry backpack made to look like a dog, and I was supposed to hold on to the tail while she wandered.

“Don’t let go.”

“Can I tell you something?” May said.

“What?”

“I’m a puppy,” she explained, holding her arms out like,
What can you do?

“Let’s go, then, pup.”

“Don’t be long. It’s supposed to rain,” Amy called after us.

May was much easier to walk than a dog; she couldn’t run very fast and when she stopped to look at something, she didn’t want to stray very far. We watched a battalion of ants march home. We took turns blowing the white heads off every dandelion we came across. May asked if I had a
cup in my pocket so she could collect cicada shells, but I reminded her that there were about 2.6 million of them in her own driveway.

“Can I tell you something?”

“What?”

“Do you have a bag?”

“No. I don’t have a cup or a bag.”

At the end of the block, there was a playground at the elementary school. It took us twenty minutes to walk the hundred yards there.

“When is it going to be Halloween?”

“Not for a long time.”

“Did you know that polar bears have black skin?”

“Is that what you’re going to be for Halloween?”

“Pretend that from now on I really am a puppy.” May barked.

We were the only ones at the park, except for two eleven-year-old boys who circled the perimeter on their skateboards and tried to push each other off whenever I happened to look at them. I let May out of her harness so I could put her in one of the baby swings, the ones shaped like upside-down helmets with leg holes. She shouldn’t have even been able to fit, but she was skinny for her age.

May was timid at first, and didn’t want me to push her too high, but once she felt safe she began to pump her legs furiously, and her little fists turned white from holding on to the swing chains so tightly.

“Is this fun?”

“Swing with me!”

“Okay, but you have to keep kicking real hard,” I said.

The humidity was unbearable. My tank top clung to my back, even the bridge of my nose was damp where my sunglasses rested, but at least when I started to swing there was a slight breeze.
At least you don’t work in a Chinese brick factory
, I told myself. The sky was turning from gray to green, but I figured we had a little more time before it stormed.

I swung higher and higher. High enough to see the tops of the trees in the park, their leafy branches dead still in the heat. I saw the flat black roof of the school. I watched the skateboarders ride away, and marveled at the bizarre contrast between their skinny arms and wide-legged jeans, as if they were summoning their bodies to grow.

May wasn’t watching the boys. She was staring at her leash, sprawled on the ground, keeping an eye on it.

“Do you want to go down the slide?” I finally said, after a few more minutes of swinging.

“No.”

“Do you want to go on the monkey bars?”

“No, I said!”

“I think it’s going to rain, May,” I said. “I think we’d better go.” I stopped kicking and let myself return to Earth.

The sky was now a deep muddy green. A wall of
clouds hid the sun. Tornado sky, but it wasn’t the season. I thought of how shocked Tierney had been when I told her that children in Illinois have to practice tornado drills every year. (She was from New Jersey.) How we’d line up in the hallways, away from the windows, and curl up into little balls, with our heads closest to the walls while a siren wailed. How when it stopped, we could go back to our classrooms.

I hoisted May out of her swing and asked her if she wanted to race me home.

“Do I have to wear my costume?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll carry it.” I figured I could put May right back into it before we got close enough for Amy to see us coming home.

“Are you gonna let me win?”

“Never.”

“Ready, set, go!” she said, and we were off.

There was one street to cross, and when we got there May came to a dead stop and held out her hand for me to hold, but as soon as we got to the other side she let go, and resumed the race. Thunder rumbled in the east. I felt a couple of raindrops on my arm. I kept up with May—sometimes doing a lame, slow-motion version of the Running Man so I wouldn’t get very far—but a few yards from their driveway I pretended to get a cramp and doubled over.

May was close to the house, but the next time she
checked over her shoulder she saw that I was stranded behind. She stopped running and stared at me, her brow knit with indecision. I realized she wouldn’t want to win if I was hurt. I waved her on and jogged behind.

She tagged the front porch. And then she tagged it again to make sure I had seen her win.

“Are you okay!” she called back to me.

“I’m okay!”

“Okay, come on!”

I realized I had forgotten about the leash, but I made it to the porch mere seconds before the clouds broke and just hoped Amy wouldn’t notice. Once we were inside, I checked to make sure all the windows were closed. May followed behind me, whimpering at every thunderclap. She put her thumb in her mouth.

As I checked the last window, I saw Emily, one of May’s dolls, facedown in the front yard next to a pinwheel, but I didn’t mention it because I knew I would have to be the one to go out in the storm.

Before I could offer to read May a book, to distract her from the noisy weather, the lights in the living room went out and I heard the whole house shut down. The only sound now was the incessant rain against the windows and porch screen.

May yelped.

“I want my mom,” she said, and her chin trembled.

I had to quickly distract her from the impending
tantrum. I collapsed onto the couch and pulled her onto my lap. “Hey, May! Guess what we are!” I said.

“I don’t know.”

“Guess!”

“No,” she said, still pouting. “Tell me.”

“We’re pioneers on the Oregon Trail! We’ll light lanterns and camp out in our Conestoga wagon until the rain lets up and then we can go hunt some bison. Bison. Yum.” I rubbed her belly, and she tried not to smile.

“We don’t have any ladders, Esther.”
Lanterns
.

“We’ll light candles, then,” I said. There were thick pillar candles along the windowsills and tea lights in shallow blue glass bowls at the edges of the bookshelves. “Do you know where the matches are?”