The Fallback Plan

by Leigh Stein

  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.

  WELTSCHMERZ

  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.

  I hardly remember anything that happened before I was eight or nine: a carousel ride near a one-room school-house, cutting my lip on the sidewalk, my old Strawberry Shortcake lunch box with my name on the inside in black permanent marker. My mom had let me write my first name and she had written my last. The letters in “Esther” overlapped and twisted like morning glory vines beside a “KOHLER” in all caps, in the clean hand of a biologist, the name of my species.

  I’ve heard that only children remember less than children with siblings do, because we have no one with whom to corroborate our memories. I’ve had to appropriate my parents’ memories of my childhood, their stories, true or not, because sometimes when I see old photos of myself I don’t quite believe that’s who I was. What appear to be the happiest years of my life in photo albums are the years most missing in my memory. That girl could be anyone. She could be the girl that came with the picture frame. She could be anyone’s daughter running along the beach.

  Remember this, I wanted to tell May, as I watched her short fingers twist clover stems. Now she was an only child, too. Try to stay this age forever, but if you can’t, at least remember everything.

  I lay on my back and closed my eyes against the sun and moved my arms through the grass like wings, imagining the blades were feathers. May joined me. “Whooooo,” she whispered.

  “Does that feel good?”

  “Whooooo,” she said again.

  “Whooooo,” I said.

  I looked over, and her eyes were still closed.

  “Whooooo is the sound of the snow,” she said.

  • • •

  On the other side of her dream, the Littlest Panda finds herself standing on snowy ground beneath the warm glow of a gas-lit lamppost. She is surrounded by tall pines. In the near distance, she can see a solitary building, some sort of house, with a balcony. There are two lawn chairs on the balcony, but she does not see a use for them, as it’s so cold, and the seats are blanketed with snow.

  The young panda is beginning to realize how alone she is in this unfamiliar wood. She knows that sometimes her brother will agree to play-hide-and-seek but instead of looking for her, he’ll make himself a sandwich, practice playing his mbira, and later claim that he forgot she was hiding.

  Maybe there are better brothers inside the house with the balcony, she thinks to herself.

  “Hello?” she calls out, bravely. The sound of her voice frightens a chipmunk, who scampers deeper into a thick patch of trees.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she whispers, wishing it would return so she wouldn’t be so alone, but it’s gone.

  The Littlest Panda walks closer to the house. Her Mary Janes crunch through the snow with each tentative step. “Is anybody in there?” Forget her stupid brother, she thinks, with his stupid African percussive instrument. Forget her stupid parents who sent her to live with her stupid uncle in the stupid countryside. This is where she will live from now on. In this place, she may do whatever she likes, and no one will ever know that she’s done it.

  And then suddenly, the most beautiful faun she’s ever seen appears on the balcony and announces to the still wood that the little panda has arrived. But before the little panda can ask where, exactly, that is, he throws some keys in the air and she holds out her hands to catch them before they get lost in the deep snow.

  • • •

  My mom let me borrow the Saturn so that after I left the Browns’ I could go to a doctor’s appointment. I knew I was depressed, but my hope was that maybe there was a brain tumor at the root of all this, something that would show up on a map of my cerebrum, something excisable. And then I came across the word Weltschmerz.

  It w
as one of the incorrectly spelled National Spelling Bee Championship words, mentioned in an old Tribune article about the Bee. Little Emily Ehrlich from Providence put a “t” before the final “z.” Her parents probably fired her German tutor. I cut the definition from the paper and pinned it to my bulletin board. Weltschmerz is defined as “mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state; a mood of sentimental sadness.” I doubted the U.S. government recognized sentimental sadness as a form of disability, but at least I knew my diagnosis.

  I decided to go to the doctor’s appointment anyway. Maybe I could get a note that I could submit to the disability benefits office.

  In the car, my cell phone rang. It was Pickle.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “It’s me,” he said.

  “I know it’s you.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I’m driving,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  I passed the park district. All the little summer campers were returning to the rec center from the playground, each child tied to the next with a rope. In their yellow t-shirts they looked like a baby duck chain gang.

  “I know what I’m gonna do now!” Pickle said, picking up a previous conversation we had never begun.

  “I’m gonna be a fireman!”

  “You don’t mean a man who puts out fires, do you?”

  “Yeah!”

  Pickle, with his baseball hats, his pierced ear, his Chuck Taylors, his Chinese dragon tattoo, his ’98 Honda civic with the bumper sticker that said, NEVER DO ANYTHING YOU WOULDN’T WANT TO EXPLAIN TO THE PARAMEDICS.

  “Pick, that’s been your dream since you were six! Are they going to let you wear your red plastic fireman’s hat?”

  “I’m serious!”

  “I didn’t say you weren’t serious!”

  “Whatever. Maybe I’ll invite you to my graduation from Fire Academy. Maybe I won’t.”

  “Are you mad at me?” I said, but he had already hung up.

  I ran a yellow light and got on 355 South. I didn’t have an I-PASS, but I didn’t want to stop and pay the toll, so I drove through the I-PASS lane and fiddled with my parents’ garage door opener, making a confused facial expression for the highway cameras, so they would think I had a malfunctioning device. When I turned on the radio I caught the last few bars of my favorite song and then for the next five minutes the station played commercials. After what had happened during the last semester of school, I should have still been in therapy, but once I graduated, I started skipping appointments. It was a long drive back up to the north shore, and when I’d told Dr. Libman I thought I was getting better, she’d looked at me with steel-colored eyes, frozen by Botox, and told me she didn’t think I was qualified to make that decision.