The Fallback Plan

by Leigh Stein

  “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.

  BABY PANDA AT

  THE PLAYGROUND

  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?”

&n
bsp; “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?”

  She shook her head. Of course she didn’t know where the matches were. By the dim greenish light still coming through the windows, May followed me to the kitchen. The trees in the backyard flailed in the wind like dancers, and young boughs had already snapped and fallen to the grass. Where was Amy? Why hadn’t she come downstairs? She had been so reluctant to let us go, but then she must have forgotten us, or decided to let us fend for ourselves in the dark.

  I found a long-stemmed lighter, the kind used to light birthday candles on cakes for octogenarians, and we returned to the other room. After I moved the candles away from the books I told May what we would do.

  “We’re going to make dedications,” I said. “Every time we light a candle, something good will happen to whoever or whatever we say the candle is for. Do you understand?”

  “Understand what?”

  “Okay, watch,” I said, and lit the first one. “This one is for cats who don’t have a home to live in.”

  “And mine’s gonna be for poor people.”

  “And this one is for global warming.”

  “And this one, my one, is for Emma McElroy because she has warts on her hands that are gross but she is still my friend because she knows how to swim without floaties.”

  “This one is for May because she is friends with Emma McElroy.”

  The candles smelled like vanilla and white lilacs. We made dedications to Dora the Explorer, the president of the United States, squirrels, Cambodian orphans, bugs you find in the house that you kill even though you should get a plastic cup and put them back outside, and broken toys, which we both decided should go to heaven when they broke. The room pulsed with light like a cathedral. When we had lit all the candles we could find, May asked for a story.

  • • •

  The Littlest Panda now has the keys to the house where the beautiful faun lives. She lets herself inside and finds a long corridor, lit on both sides by beautiful, ornate wall sconces. Because there’s only candlelight, she can only see a few feet in front of her at a time, and she must walk carefully, through the darkness, just as she did when inside the armoire.

  Then she hears a music box. It is playing “Silent Night.” I must be walking in the right direction, the young panda thinks to herself, because the song is getting louder and louder.

  When she finally finds a door along the corridor, she hesitates only slightly before turning the handle, knowing that the room will either be full of everything she’s ever dreamed of or a horrible, horrible trap.

  Luckily, the door opens into a cozy living room. There is a fire blazing in the fireplace, a plate of cookies on the table, and a kind-looking faun, who is sitting in a velvet armchair beside a frosted window. He is smoking a pipe. She doesn’t like the smell of pipe smoke, but is too polite to say so.

  “Would you like some Turkish coffee?” is the first thing the faun says.

  “I don’t know, sir,” the little panda says. “I’ve never tried it.”

  He pours her a cup and she politely takes a tiny sip. It tastes awful.

  “Like it?” he asks.

  She nods.

  “I hate it. I don’t know why I make it. Habit, I guess.”

  The Littlest Panda isn’t sure if he’s joking. She doesn’t say anything, but takes an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie (her favorite) from the plate on the table so that she won’t have to taste the coffee.

  After a minute, the faun removes the pipe from his mouth and blows a few puffs of smoke in the direction of the icy window.

  “Anyway,” he says, “I’m glad you’re here. We have to save Hanukkah.”

  Nate came home from work holding a newspaper above his head that hadn’t done much to save him from the rain. He walked in the front door with water running down the legs of his suit and pooling at his stockinged feet. He must have left his shoes at the front door to dry out.

  “Oh, hello there,” he said, when he noticed May and me in the shadows of all the dancing flames. “It’s so warm in here.”

  “The lights went out,” May explained, “so we made a church.”

  • • •

  Nate held out his arms to her, and she ran into them.

  “Oh, Daddy, you’re sticky,” she said, before he could pick her up, and came back to the couch.

  “Daddy’s not sticky, he’s just wet. The streetlights are all out along Roosevelt,” he told me, “and the stoplights aren’t working. There’s a detour around the intersection at Main. The water’s two or three feet deep. Welcome to the end of the world, right?”

  “Let’s build an ark,” I said.

  “Can we?” May said.

  Nate laughed and smiled at me instead of his daughter. May held still, waiting for an answer.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” I said.

  “Let me get changed, and I’ll drive you home. I don’t want you to walk in this,” Nate said. “Is Amy home?”

  Why wouldn’t she be home? She was like Rochester’s first wife in Jane Eyre, the madwoman in the attic, but instead of threatening to murder Nate and me, she just kept her daughter on a leash and paid a recent college graduate to be her friend. I felt a pinch of guilt for thinking that—what if something had happened to her up there? What if she’d hanged herself?

&nbs
p; “She’s still upstairs,” I said.

  “I’ll change and be right down.”

  After Nate left us, May clapped her hands twice and the electricity miraculously returned. She was as surprised as I was.

  “How did you do that!”

  “That’s what they do on TV,” she said.

  She clapped again, but nothing happened. I heard the whole house come back to life. All the clocks flashed noon.

  But I wished it had all stayed off. Our cathedral had been destroyed, and our dedications were now just pools of melted wax.

  • • •

  After the faun explains the curse of the evil White Witch (“Aryan white, if you know what I mean”), and how she forbids everyone in the kingdom from celebrating Hanukkah (they are not even permitted to keep menorahs in their homes), and the unbelievably depressing situation of having to live in a place where it is always winter, the Littlest Panda says of course she’ll help. She’ll help in any way she can, to restore the faun’s kingdom to its previous glory, and deliver its people (and/or creatures) from the clutches of the evil Witch.

  “Can I ask one thing, though?”

  “Anything,” the faun says, reclining once more in his chair by the window and inserting his pipe between his lips.

  “What will the Witch do if she catches me?”

  He doesn’t hesitate.

  “Probably do what she always does: tempt you with a delicious treat, promise you a rose garden, and then persecute you for your religious beliefs.”

  “How awful,” the young panda says. A shiver goes up her spine. Maybe this is a riskier journey than she had bargained for.

  “There is one thing that I can give you that will protect you against her, but I’m not sure if you’re ready.”

  “Oh, I’m ready, sir,” the panda assures him.

  “All right, then,” he says. The faun goes to the cupboard and brings back a dagger with a ruby-encrusted handle.

  “Have you ever used a dagger?”

  “Certainly,” she lies, and tucks it into the belt of her dress.

  “Good. Now it’s time for you to go home, gather your brothers and sister, and then let’s go to war for some peace.”

  • • •