The Fallback Plan (6 page)

So I slowed my pace, paused to linger, pretended to look for something in the deep recesses of my handbag. There was nowhere I needed to be. No one was waiting for me to arrive anywhere safely.
Come get me
, I thought.
Kidnap me. I want to be Patty Hearst. I want Stockholm Syndrome and a media fortune
.

Finally, the truck slowed to a crawl alongside me.

A teenage boy I didn’t recognize was behind the wheel.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I said. “What are you doing?”

He leaned out the window, conspiratorially. “They
pay
me to do this,” he said. His voice was nasally, and yet deeper than I thought it would be. He was probably stoned.

“Pretty sweet,” I agreed.

“What’s your name?”

“Es … telle.”

“Do you live around here?”

“My cousin does. I’m just visiting from New Jersey.”

“Estelle from New Jersey.”

He seemed to appreciate the lengths I’d gone to in order to lie about myself. Either that or he believed me. I didn’t ask his name or where he lived. If he told me, I
would have realized I’d gone to school with one of his older siblings, and felt overcome by feelings of jealousy and disappointment. By this point, I knew no one was going to jump from the back of the truck and put a potato sack over my head. I continued to stand there because there was something I wanted, something sweeter than abduction: ice cream.

“Can I give you a ride to your cousin’s or something?”

“I like walking.”

“I don’t have anything else to do.”

And I believed him. I stared into his enormous, harmless pupils. “Okay,” I said, “but only if I can have an ice cream.”

The boy gave me a Choco Taco, and I let him drop me off three houses down from my own. He watched me walk all the way to the front porch of the Grazianos’ house, from which I waved. The boy made his hand into a gun and shot it at me, which I took as the international sign of ice cream truck driver affection, and then drove off into the evening, presumably in search of paying customers to answer his siren call.

My phone buzzed on the walk to my real house. It was Jack:
What r u doing tonite?

And I had to stop in the middle of our front yard, I was so astonished by this unexpected love note. What did it mean? Did it mean Jocelyn had been in a car accident? Did he need me to come to the hospital and hold his
hand while he waited to hear whether or not she’d make it through the night?

Do you like tire swings
, I wrote back.

Yea!! Do u have booze?

I gave him my address. Then I ran inside, straight to my new bedroom, where I put on “Always Be My Baby,” and tried to find something to wear that would look especially good in a tire swing. Like a skirt. Or something. What was the temperature? Hadn’t I just been outside? Maybe if I got cold, he would put his arm around me, and maybe that would transform the swing into a spaceship, and we could go live on another planet together.

To mentally prepare for my life on this new planet, I went through all the reasons I was irresistible. One, I was an actress, like Jocelyn. Two, a German foreign exchange student had once told me at a party, in his native tongue, that I had beautiful eyes. Three, I knew how to drive a car, should our planet have gravity.

My parents were watching TV, but every time I passed them on my way to and from the bathroom (to put on eyeliner and take it off and put it on again), a commercial was playing, so I had no idea what show was on. Maybe they were watching a commercial clips show, but I didn’t see any D-list celebrity experts.

“Are you guys going to bed soon? What are you watching?”

“As You Like It,”
my dad said.

“As I like what?”

“The play? By Shakespeare?”

“Oh,” I said, embarrassed. My face felt like I had stuck it in a campfire. I put my hands to my cheeks, pulling the skin so I looked like a plague victim.

“Aren’t you guys glad I went to school on scholarship? So you didn’t have to pay for what a failure I’ve become?”

“Esther,” my mom said, looking at me above the reading glasses she wore when she crocheted. I had said “failure” to make them laugh, so they would reassure me that I wasn’t one, but they both just stared at my plague face. I could tell my mom was trying to decide if she should be concerned or not. I had to get out of there.

“ ‘All the world’s a stage,’ she muttered to herself, exiting quickly,” I muttered.

In my bedroom, I changed back into the shorts I’d just been wearing and covered my skin in insect repellent. Then I went to wait in the yard for my Orlando, with a half bottle of Seagrams I’d found in the cupboard with our seasonal party ware.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d sat in the swing in our backyard. Not since high school. It hung parallel to the earth, and was wide enough for two or three people. As children, Summer and I had spent entire afternoons spinning in circles, first clockwise, then counter, knees together, eyes closed, screaming with vertigo, threatening to throw up on each other.

Ten or fifteen minutes passed, and then Jack swaggered through the dark tree shade. The moon bloomed above us. I was hidden by branches, and liked watching him in the act of looking for me, the false bravado of his footsteps. He was everything I was not supposed to want. Unreliable, disreputable, violent. If he wanted to, he could have killed me with his bare hands, but that, too, thrilled me. I never knew what he’d do next, and I’ve always liked the terror of not knowing how the play will end.

“Esther?” he whispered, still wandering through the dark.

I was remembering more of it now: how Rosalind dresses in pants and passes as a man. How she meets Orlando in the Forest of Arden and lets him practice his wooing of her. I waited until Jack said my name once more, and then I skimmed my feet across the grass like dragonflies over water.

“It’s like
The Lorax
in here and shit,” he said, pushing branches aside to sit across from me on the swing.

I laughed, and then savored the opportunity to stare at his face. The way the moonlight made its way down the boughs of the tree and cast one side in shadow. The gentle bow of his mouth. I imagined us posed on the cover of a paperback romance novel—his hands on my waist, my head thrown back in chestnut-haired ecstasy.

“Thank you for coming over,” I said.

“Are you wearing perfume?”

“Citronella.”

“Cinderella?”

“Citronella, like the candles?”

“You smell like a barbecue.”

“What a prince,” I said, and leaned in to shove him backward off the swing, but his feet were planted so firmly on the ground that instead I fell forward, my chin crashing into his shoulder with a sound that I felt in the bones of my face.

I would have preferred to stay there, my chin to his shoulder, until one of us died, but Jack put his hands on the tops of my arms, as if steadying a very drunk or mentally retarded person, and gently pushed me back to my side of the tire.

“What was that, are you okay?”

I forced a laugh. “Totally fine,” I lied. My chin hurt so bad I thought I might start to cry; I quickly took a sip of gin, trying to obliterate the pain before it spread.

“I’ve never seen anyone fall over like that,” he said. He took the bottle when I was finished. “You’re cuter when you don’t move around so much.”

My arms remembered where Jack’s hands had been. I wondered why he had come over, and when we would get to the next part, the next scene in our paperback romance.
Why do you always miss everything
, I thought.
Why can’t you ever be happy in the moment, instead of looking backward or forward?

“Guess what?” Jack said.

“What?”

“I won a motorcycle.”

“You won a motorcycle?”

“I was a finalist. I just have to go somewhere and wait for them to call my number.”

That wasn’t the same as winning, of course, but I wasn’t about to tell him so, because I had just fallen over, and also because there was a teenage girl inside of me who was sure he was trying to impress me with his luck.

We spun in a circle, staring at the juncture of our knees. The leafy branches trembled.

“Where do you have to go?”

“When?”

“To get the motorcycle?”

“The Excelsior.”

“Is that a part of Medieval Times?”

“No, it’s a strip club,” he said. “It’s on the south side. Do you want to come? Jocelyn won’t.”

“When? Tonight?”

“We should probably leave in a few minutes.”

I imagined driving to the city with him, watching the lights of the skyline appear like a new constellation on the eastern horizon. I imagined topless women. Topless women doing cocaine in the dressing room. Topless women doing cocaine in the dressing room with Jack while I was in the bathroom. Topless women doing cocaine in the dressing room with Jack while I was in the bathroom and then
having sex with him for free because they would find him so dangerously attractive and because they would want revenge on their asshole boyfriends. Then, like some kind of pervert, I imagined May. I imagined her baby dinosaur face. I didn’t see how I could go to a strip club one minute, and Sesame Street the next.

“Won’t Pickle go with you?”

“He’s working tonight. And anyway, you’re more fun. And less retarded.”

I let the compliment dangle there for a minute, like a sparkly dreamcatcher. It didn’t register immediately that I was his third choice.

“I wish I could,” I finally said, “but I have to babysit in the morning. It’s only my second day.”

“That’s bogus,” Jack said, but didn’t beg me. If he’d have begged, I might have changed my mind.

We both climbed out of the tire. He didn’t hold my arms this time.

“I think I need an ice pack for my face.”

Jack smiled in the crooked way of those up to no good. “You’re pretty adorable for a Jew,” he said, before walking back to his car, leaving me to stand there alone in the moonlight, wondering if I should have followed, until I heard the engine start, and fade away down the street.

The littlest panda puts on a cloche hat and climbs inside the armoire in which she found it. She can hear her brother running in the hallway, opening every door. She knows she has found the best hiding place and does a little dance. Then she touches the hat in the darkness, imagining how beautiful she must look.
If only there were a mirror!
she thinks. She knows where there is one, and is tempted to leave the armoire, but she also knows that if she leaves her brother will find her.

Little does she know that her brother has given up the game. He doesn’t want to play anymore; he wants to go downstairs and make a veggie burger, and then maybe go for a row around the misty lake with his two older siblings. The four panda children are staying with their uncle, and he is never home. He leaves them notes on the table in the foyer, written in a language that they don’t understand. They often wonder if the notes explain why they are pandas and he is not.

Whenever the pandas feel hungry, they go to the kitchen and the refrigerator is mysteriously restocked with groceries from Whole Foods.

Still in the armoire, the young panda doesn’t hear her
brother’s footsteps anymore. She holds her breath. She closes her eyes. She feels something delicate and cold on her cheek, something both foreign and familiar.
Where could it have come from?
she wonders. She spins around inside the closet, looking for the exit, but gets caught in the trains of dozens of
haute couture
gowns and before she knows it, all the walls have vanished, the gowns have turned into furs, the furs into trees with snow-laden boughs, and then she feels the flush of winter on her face as though she has just entered the most wonderful dream.

“This would all happen before the opening credits,” I told May.

“What’s a armoire?” May tilted her head to the side.

“A closet.”

“Can I tell you something?”

“Sure, what?”

“Why was it snowing in that closet?”

“I’ll tell you when you’re older,” I said, and pulled on one of her pigtails to bring her head back. She laughed.

We were in the backyard, weaving crowns from white clover. We had made one for every girl we knew, and then we made bracelets and necklaces and rings. Once I’d realized that to be a good babysitter I only had to be willing to behave like a four-year-old, but with a keener eye for potential dangers, I liked my new job very much.

This was the first time May and I were alone together. Every five minutes she became nervous, and asked if we
could go back inside to give the clover jewelry to her mom, but I knew Amy was busy doing something in the attic because I caught sight of her face every now and then, keeping an eye on us from the diamond-shaped window near the peak of the roof. I didn’t let May know that her mom was watching us.

“Should we walk to the park?” I said.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Should we make juice Popsicles and eat them while we draw on the sidewalk with chalk?”

“No,” May said. “Can I eat this?” She held up a single bunch of clover. I wasn’t sure if you were supposed to eat clover, but I remembered eating it when I was little, and didn’t horses like it?

“Yeah, sure, go for it.” I watched her chew. “Do you want to hijack a plane and fill it with Swedish Fish like a big piñata and fly over countries where they don’t have clean drinking water and make little boys and girls happy?”

“No,” May said. “It’s too hot.”

“What if you were an Eskimo, though?” I said. “Think about that for a quick sec. Do you think Eskimos would complain about it being too hot?”

May thought about it. “No,” she decided. “The Eskimos prob’ly go inside their closets when it’s hot.”

I couldn’t argue with the logic of that.

“Let’s make snow angels in the grass,” I said, and she blinked at me, watched to see what I’d do so she could decide whether or not to copy.

I wondered if May remembered the previous winter, if she associated the loss of her sister with snow, icicle waterfalls flowing from gutters, the feeling of damp boots when you’ve stayed out for too long. And if she did remember, I wondered how long it would be before she forgot.