“Yeah,” Ella says, “forget dental insurance. Be happy.”
“Wasn’t that a song?” Amy says, and everyone laughs. She looks genuinely surprised. Since her arrival she has worked really hard to make friends, and I get the idea that wherever she comes from, she probably isn’t all that outgoing. That’s the best part of this job. You show up here, then spend half your time being someone you’re not. Pretty much like high school, only we get paid for it.
“They will never shut it down,” Cass says. “They can’t. This place has a life of its own. The people are secondary.”
“She’s right,” Ella says. “It’s like McDonald’s. Someone quits a place like this, it’s like you or me breaking a shoe-lace.” She chips away the last of the gum.
“That’s not what I meant,” Cassie says.
“So, have you?” Amy says.
“Have we what?” Prince Charming asks her.
She rolls her eyes. “Pay
attention
. Have any of you heard about the phantom guy?”
Just when we start to ask what she’s talking about, the loudspeaker crackles on, and Call-me-Bill Tubbs summons us upstairs for another motivational speech. In the background the PA system plays “We Are Family.” Mr. Tubbs tells us to have a Disney day.
You can tell all of us are morphing into full-blown adults, wingtip adults, because all the time now the Big Question is, What are you going to do? After the summer, about your scholarship, about choosing a college, after graduation, with the rest of your life. When you are thirteen, the question is, Smooth or crunchy? That’s it. Later, at the onset of full-blown adulthood, the Big Question changes a little bit—instead of, What are you going to do? it turns into, What
do
you do? I hear it all the time when my parents have parties, all the men standing around. After they talk sports, they always ask, What do you do? It’s just part of the code that they mean “for a living” because no one ever answers it by saying, I go for walks and listen to music full-blast and don’t care about my hearing thirty years from now, and I drink milk out of the carton, and I cough when someone lights up a cigarette, and I dig rainy days because they make me sad in a way I like, and I read books until I fall asleep holding them, and I put on sock-shoe, sock-shoe instead of sock-sock, shoe-shoe because I think it’s better luck. Never that. People are always
in
something. I’m in advertising. I’m in real estate. I’m in sales and marketing. When Dad gets that question, I always hope he will say, I’m in holes, or I’m in dirt, but he never does. He says that he is in speculative resource development, and most of the time people don’t even bother to ask what the hell he means.
It comes up again, that question, during the picnic. After Mr. Tubbs’s motivational speech he “surprises” all of us with a picnic lunch, not realizing that the last place we really want to be is outside in the heat again, eating in the town square at the end of Main Street, U.S.A. We sit in the bright grass and on the low stone walls holding our paper plates of wraps and coleslaw and brownies. Cass has been quiet since we were in the laundry room, but she sits so close to me on the brick wall that her thigh is angled up against mine.
“Hi,” I say, touching the small of her back.
“Hi.” She smirks at me. “I think we’d better make sure this seat is taken.” She reaches over and pats my lap with her tanned hand, looking at me.
“What do you mean?” I glance past her long enough to see Ella loading up her plate with food at the tables, laughing at something Prince Charming is telling her.
“We’re both smarter than that, Luke,” she says. “Do you really want to have the whole conversation?”
I shake my head. “We’re just friends, O jealous one,” I say. “I think she’s funny.”
She nods, shrugs. “Okay, how about I find a ‘friend’ and rub an ice cube up and down his thigh while you watch. Would you like that?” She looks at me over the rim of her cup as she takes a sip of lemonade.
When I picture it, someone else touching Cassie, my stomach knots up. I shake my head again. “No, I guess I wouldn’t like that,” I tell her. I think back, trying to see myself from the outside, trying to see myself as some shrugging, aw-shucks guy while Ella sits there chipping away at the frozen gum, see myself rolling my eyes at my girlfriend to let her know I don’t want to be there any more than she wants me to. I make that picture for myself, but how true is it? I think about what’s stored in my head—Ella’s hair swaying in shiny strands, Ella’s hands with their freckles and veins, Ella’s vanilla smell. Even now I want to ask Ella, How true is your memory of an hour? Because I know her answer would interest me. How do you get past the person you think you are if he’s always standing in your way? I look at Cass, really look at her, then lean across and give her a kiss, taste the lemon and sugar on her mouth. “I’m sorry,” I whisper, but barely hear myself because Ella is laughing behind me.
They sit near us in the grass, Ella and Prince Charming, and Amy right behind them. Mark (he has started wearing his official Disney name tag when we aren’t in costume) is telling them more from his storehouse of Disney trivia. Did they know that the only three attractions working on opening day in 1971 were the Swiss Family Treehouse, the Jungle Cruise, and the Tropical Serenade? That only Bill Clinton and George W. Bush recorded their own voices for the Hall of Presidents? He keeps talking, and I keep thinking that he looks like a male model during the Renaissance. Someone says he should be in charge, the new Walt Disney, and he smiles and says he just might, and then there is that question again, What are you going to do?
Jesse says he wants to be a stuntman who specializes in falling from buildings and crashing through walls.
“They specialize?” Amy says, looking at him.
He nods. “Just like doctors except, you know, instead of pediatrics it’s like getting shot or walking on trains. The train walking, that’s a little hard to practice.” On her turn Amy says that she always wanted to teach high school English or band, since she plays the oboe. Prince Charming is going to major in business management. I’m sitting there feeling like we are talking about our Halloween costumes this year, not our entire lives. Why am I not ready for all of this? What’s wrong with me? Cassie starts talking then, on and on about Brown, about her scholarship, about her triple major. Her plans seem so much bigger than anyone else’s that I can feel the rest of us shrinking in comparison.
Finally it’s Amy who interrupts her, though I know all of us, even me, are thinking the same thing.
“What are you doing
here
?” Amy asks her, then blushes. “I mean, that’s not meant to be bitchy or anything. I’m just curious.”
Cass smiles. “Listen,” she says, “I live in Florida. Around here Disney is like the world’s biggest sorority and fraternity, all rolled into one. Later on I just mention this place, it’s like I’m part of the club. It’ll open doors.”
I wonder about that, the idea that the world is just a big private club full of secret doors. I think about how my parents used to be, the ones I see in the photo albums, back when they were attending all the conventions, dressing up in costumes. Back when they were giving me and my brother our oddball names. They weren’t much older then than I am now. They are smiling in all those pictures, laughing and silly, until someone told them that they would never be able to join the club if they kept acting like that. “Grow up,” someone said, and they did, and they got to join the club, buy the house, own the cars and the pool. The only trade-off—you have to give up the costumes and the laughing.
“Okay, Luke S-stands-for-something Krause,” Cass says, “your turn.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I didn’t apply to any colleges, not yet. I don’t know what I want to do. Maybe I’ll make a career of Dale.”
“Like that phantom guy,” Amy says.
“He made a career of Dale?”
“No, dumbhead,
you’re
Dale. But he made a career of someone. I mean, how much would that suck?”
Cass shakes her head, frowning. “Luke, stop messing around. Tell them about your dad’s business.”
“You seem to know as much as me. You tell them.”
I mean it to be sarcastic, but she doesn’t hear it that way, and she starts in telling them about my dad’s company, how he went public last year and made all this money in stocks, how he did the drilling for the university, how he started with nothing and made himself rich. “Just like in the movies,” she says. I sit there the whole time like I’m Exhibit A, on display. And what can I say? Cass knows all this stuff because I told her all of it the first night I met her. I told her because I was trying to impress her with my father’s money and success, like everything he has to show for his life is a flashy car I can borrow and ride around in, honking the horn, pretending it’s mine. And the whole time she is talking, I can’t look at Ella. For whatever reason, I can’t. But I can feel her looking at me.
Cass is finishing her sales pitch of me. “And while we’re sitting in a dorm eating ramen noodles,” she says, her hand on my shoulder, “this guy is going to be starting out at fifty thousand a year, with his own office, and driving a company truck. I mean, how cool is that?”
All true, all true of Ben before me, all part of my opening night bragfest to Cassie. Now the whole idea of it makes me feel stupid, like all I’ll ever do is play grown-up, as opposed to actually growing up. “Well, I don’t know,” I say before I even realize I’m saying it out loud.
“You don’t know what?” Cass says, her hand moving across my back.
“I don’t know about any of it. If I want to do that.”
“You
have
to do that,” she says. “The rest of us would kill for a job like that.”
“I hope I’m making that much, like, when I die,” Amy says. “I’d buy ten cats and a motorcycle. And a pool.”
“Cass is right, dude,” Robin Hood says. “Starting at fifty K? That totally rocks.”
“I know,” I say. “But . . . I don’t know. Maybe I just want to do nothing for a while. Just bum around or something. See things.”
“Okay, right now we dress up like cartoon characters and shake hands with little kids all day. For minimum wage,” Cass says. “
That’s
your nothing. That’s your bumming around.”
“And about a hundred pairs of shoes,” Amy says.
Suddenly everyone has joined in, saying I have to take a job like that, just have to, and pretty soon it starts to feel like it does at dinner on Sunday afternoons, when my father and Ben start in talking about the same things: how they will position me, how I need field experience, how much I could learn from six months in the front office. Talking and talking about me, forgetting that I’m sitting there. Cass slides her hand down my arm and squeezes, still talking, while Amy and Jesse keep listing all the things they would buy if they could, and in the middle of all of it, I look over and see Ella, smiling at something Mark is saying to her, but then cutting her gaze at me, holding it, slowly shaking her head while her mouth forms one word:
No.
Back at the dorm I get messages that I have missed three calls from home. That happens a lot because we are out so much, really just using the dorm for sleep and showers and almost nothing else. Plus, I’m in the costume most of the day and couldn’t even take a call if I was sitting right beside the phone. Usually I just avoid the calls because I know what they will be—my mother telling me that this could lead to other acting jobs if I wanted it to, and my father telling me about the latest brilliant thing Ben said in a meeting. I wad up the messages, throw them into the trash.
That night I slip out of the dorm again, the clock tower showing it to be after midnight. And as usual, I find Ella sitting on the bench behind the castle, in the shadows of the leaves. We’ve met out here twice more since that first night, just sitting and talking—in whispers so we don’t get busted. I sit beside her, nudge her knee with mine.
“Luke, I need to tell you—”
“Wait . . . what did you mean today?”
She kicks off a flip-flop, then slides it back on, kicks it off again. “When?”
“At the picnic. Everyone was telling me how great my life was going to be, and you just looked at me and shook your head. You said, ‘No.’ No what?”
She shrugs. “No, you don’t have to listen to them. No, it’s not that great if you don’t want it. You know exactly what I meant.”
I lean forward, elbows on knees. “Yeah, I guess. But why did you say it?”
She kicks off her shoe again. “I guess I felt sorry for you. Luke, listen—”
My face gets hot. “Felt sorry for me?”
“Everybody ganging up on you. Pelting you with your own success. Yeah, I did.” She shrugs again. “Listen, this isn’t
Happy Days
and you’re not Richie Cunningham having to follow your dad into the hardware business. I’m not the Fonz giving you advice, okay?”
I smile. “You’re not?”
“No, I’m way cooler. Look, just do what you want to; it’s your life.”
“Is that what you’re doing? What you want to do?”
She gets very quiet then, and when I look back across my shoulder at her, I see the tears brimming full in her eyes, shining in the dim light. “What I want to do is impossible. Physics and all. Luke, I’ve been trying to tell you something else—”
I shush her then because I hear footsteps coming. Last time, the security guard found us and spent about twenty minutes explaining the whole concept of curfews. Only this time it’s not a security guard, it’s Mark walking out of the darkness into all the spilled light in front of the castle.
“What is he—”
“I tried to tell you,” Ella says. She shakes her head, wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “I have to go,” she says, then stands and moves off toward him, her flip-flops making their quiet sound against her feet as the clock tower chimes the hour. One chime, then quiet, and they are gone.
5
Ella
The fact that no one was at the airport to meet me should have been enough to turn me around and send me back to Maine, but the truth was, I didn’t have anything to go back to. Our house was empty, a sign from Evergreen Realty poked into the frozen ground. All of our belongings, the ones we didn’t sell, were piled in the Rosen’s barn. Boxes full of photographs and blankets and china. A tangle of bicycles leaning against one another along the back wall. Snowshoes poking out of milk crates. An apple box stuffed with a camp lantern and empty jam jars. Random items, meant to add up to our lives, waiting in the dusty barn for one of us to come back and find them.