The Blonde of the Joke (15 page)

T
hings were getting out of control. I hadn’t seen Max in a week or so and Francie and I were back to going to the mall every day. I could not stop stealing.

Before, at the mall, I’d held Francie in my mind at every step. I could be at Claire’s, facing the wall of earrings, and know, with absolute certainty, exactly what Francie was doing in the opposite corner of the store. I could always feel her electricity, know the precise path of her hands as they grabbed and grabbed. Her heat was always burning on the back of my neck.

Now that heat was gone, and I just, truly, didn’t care. Francie could tag along with me if she wanted, but we were each doing our own thing, and what Francie’s
thing
was, if she even had one, was no longer my concern.

In Bloomingdale’s with Francie in the spring, the tables were overflowing with things that I could take. Comfortable wool sweaters; long, scented candles and bottles of translucent blue bubble bath; a set of good cutlery; and a Belgian waffle iron with six settings. What was the point, because it wasn’t going to help anything anyway. But there must have been a point, because I went a little overboard.

“I think Julia Child is my shopping partner,” Francie said, as we rode the escalator down to Intimates. “What do you want with fancy cooking knives?”

“I just like them. They’re sharp, okay?”

“Maybe you shouldn’t take anything else. You’ve got a good haul,” Francie said.

“Maybe you should leave me alone,” I told her. “Maybe you got me into this in the first place.”

“Well, fuck you, too,” Francie said without conviction.

We didn’t say anything after that, but we both knew how it was. Walking through the racks of bras, we were quiet.

In the beginning it had been Francie’s idea to start stealing. We were going to steal everything. But the thing is, we had not made a dent; we had amassed thousands of dollars worth of complete junk only to find ourselves right where we started. No one had noticed our efforts. The racks and shelves of the mall were still overflowing.

Somehow it just made me want to take more. Somehow the futility of it was exactly what made it so important. When you take on an impossible goal, you first have to
accept certain impossibilities as premise, and when those impossibilities prove impossible, you throw your own talents back at them.

That day at the mall, Francie didn’t look great. She’d stolen these genuine-fur eyelashes from Eyelash Bar, and had caked mascara and eyeliner on top of them until they were clumpy and crusty. She was wearing plastic rings on every finger, but they were dull and cheap-looking, like she’d gotten them with quarters from dispensers at the supermarket, which I happened to know she had.

Francie knew something was wrong. You could tell from the way she moved, all tentative and jittery. You could tell from the way she deferred to me at every turn, always asking what I thought about one thing or the other, and waiting for my answers with fidgety uncertainty. She stole with a dim, flickering glow and a nervous look in her eyes. I worried she would be caught any day, and wondered what I would do if it happened.

We walked through the mall together, side by side, but really by ourselves. I could sense Francie looking at me, again and again, out of the corner of her eye. When we passed one of those freestanding kiosks that sells those personalized nameplate necklaces, she just reached out and plucked one from the rack. We kept on walking.

“Jennifer,” Francie said, holding the nameplate up to her chest. “What do you think of me as a Jennifer?”

“I don’t know if it works,” I said. “I can’t think of a
name that would fit you as well as Francie. Maybe
DeeDee.
I don’t know.”

“I wonder if I would be different as a Jennifer,” Francie said, fastening the nameplate around her neck. “Like, if I had been born Jennifer and raised that way, would my life be any different?”

“Of course not,” I said. “That’s ridiculous. What’s that thing they say about a rose is a rose is a rose?”

“Well…” Francie said. She seemed to really be considering it. The corner of her mouth was twitching ever so slightly. There was a small, barely noticeable catch in her voice. “I read Gertrude Stein over the summer and it’s hard to know exactly what she meant when she wrote that. I mean, you can take it a couple of different ways. She was crazy anyway, so who cares what she thinks? I am not a rose, and if my name was Jennifer, I think I would probably be a happier person. Or better yet!
Jenny.
If I was Jenny, don’t you suppose I would be sort of pleasantly plump and always smiling?”

“If you say so, Francie,” I said.

“Jenny,” she corrected me. She had reclaimed her composure. “It’s Jenny from now on.”

We went to visit Liz at the Gap.

“Where you been all my life?” Liz called from a ladder by the denim wall. Francie and I sauntered over, and Liz climbed down from her perch, carrying a pair of jeans that someone had left crumpled in a little ball. Liz laid the jeans on top of a pile of T-shirts and began to fold.

“It’s been ages,” Liz said. “I thought maybe you guys had reformed your ways or something.”

“Nah,” I said. “We’ve been around.”

“Well, I’ve been holding a bunch of stuff for you. I think you’ll like it.” Liz winked at Francie.

“Goody,” Francie said. “I’ll be back in a second.” She marched off to the bathroom to retrieve the loot that Liz had stashed for us there.

“She looks like shit,” Liz said when Francie was out of earshot. “Did something happen?”

“Not that I know of.” I shrugged. I was watching Liz fold the jeans. She would fold them perfectly, then let them fall to the floor, then pick them up and fold them all over again. Fold, drop, fold, drop, fold. Repeat.

“I would watch out for her,” Liz said. “A girl like Francie starts letting herself go and something’s not right.”

But when Francie came back only a few minutes later, she was back to her old self, buoyed by the stolen Gap merchandise. She waltzed up to me and Liz, her shopping bag swinging with a new weightiness, her
JENNIFER
nameplate gold and sparkly. Francie’s hair was now impeccably tousled, the lines of her makeup were smooth and finely drawn, and her boobs were perky and bouncy in a tight black bustier. She looked taller than ever on six-inch patent-leather heels. Liz didn’t seem to notice the difference.

“Come on,” Francie said. “Let’s get out of here.” She wiggled her bag in the direction of the exit, and we floated
away, past the clerks at the cash register, past the mulish customers with all their stupid questions, and through the beeping sensors at the front of the store, out into the mall.

As we left, I could hear Liz saying, “Oh, you must be mistaken. I know those girls.”

On the escalator I looked up at Francie, standing tall. Francie, who could do anything, who had been sent to me to change something. Strange visitor. I trusted her. For a few minutes, it was just like it used to be.

Francie and I breezed along, up the escalators to the top floor, heady with the thrill of theft. The shopping-mall air was cool and fragrant with that smell I recognized from before I had met her: cinnamon, makeup, the future. Francie in the bustier, the miniskirt. Long, long legs. Me in my motorcycle jacket. We may not have looked alike, but Francie and I were sisters, like it or not.

We stood next to each other on the balcony, looking out over everything that was already ours. From up there, the shoppers on the ground floor looked like…I don’t know. They didn’t look like ants. They looked like what they were, which is tiny people. And me and Francie—towering over them—we were giants. If I had wanted to, I knew, I could have reached down and picked any one of them up and flung them clear from one end of the mall to the other. Flicked them like marbles. But that was not what I wanted to do. I was a benevolent god.

Francie pulled a hair band out from somewhere inside her bustier and wrapped her hair into a lazy topknot.

“Why are you so mad at me?” she asked.

“I’m not mad at you,” I said.

She rested her hand on my chest, the flat part right under my clavicle. “Be straight with me, Val. I’m a clever bitch. I can tell something’s wrong.”

“We can be friends without having to, like, share a brain,” I said. “It doesn’t mean I’m mad at you or anything like that.”

She was speechless at that. “I don’t know what I would do without you,” she finally said.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think you realize how lonely I was,” she said. “I mean, sometimes I would go for days without speaking to a single person except Sandy. Can you even imagine?”

“Francie, come on,” I said. She dropped her hands to her side and turned away.

“And I don’t know what I did,” she said. “I must have done something, though, right? All this—” She fluttered her hand in that way she had. “Did I do something to piss you off? I mean, I don’t know what I did, and if I did something, it was legitimately not on purpose, so just tell me and I’ll make it up to you.” She searched me, imploring, and tugged at the
JENNIFER
nameplate around her neck.

“Francie,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

“I thought you could protect me,” Francie said. “From
the minute I saw you in Ms. Tinker’s class, I said to myself, There is a girl who has been through some shit and come out harder on the other side. There is a girl who is untouchable. Someone with certain weapons at her disposal. Someone who can love something and keep it safe.”

“You always said
you
were going to protect
me,”
I said, shocked at her admission.

“Yeah,” she said. “I did say that. And haven’t I held up my end of the bargain?”

We took the J-12 home. On the bus I listened to the hum of the engine and wondered why I was so angry at Francie, and why her honesty had made me all the angrier. I tried to close my eyes and picture the scenery crawling by, tried to ground myself in the familiar rhythm of the traffic lights, but I couldn’t concentrate.

“My brother is dying,” I finally said. “Everyone seems to think it’s just this done deal, that there’s nothing we can do.”

“There are things you can change and things you can’t,” Francie said.

“Maybe there are things that
you
can’t change,” I said. “But I’m going to find it. Maybe you’ve given up. I thought you were better than that, but I guess I was wrong. And I am going to find it.”

“Find what?”

“The Most Beautiful Thing,” I said. “The Holy Grail.”

Francie looked at me like she was sad to discover exactly
how fucking insane I really was. She laid her head down across my lap, right there on the bus, looking up, her face wide and open and exhausted. She stretched one arm out into the aisle and put the other one around my shoulder, arched her back. “Val,” she said. “I am telling you this for your own good. We’re not going to find the Holy Grail. We’re not going to steal the Grand Canyon, or the Declaration of Independence, or even
one
of Marie Antoinette’s wigs, or anything like that. There are a lot of things we’re not going to do. I mean, I was just playing around.”

She gave me a sheepish wince, like it was the most obvious, unavoidable truth, like she just couldn’t hide it anymore but knew I would understand.

That was the biggest betrayal of all: the fact that she didn’t even realize it was a betrayal.

“Fuck you, Francie,” I said. The bus was just pulling to a stop, and I pushed her off of me and stood up, gathering my things as quickly as I could. I climbed from the bus into an unknown neighborhood, miles from home. From the middle of the deserted street I called Max.

“Dude,” he said when he answered. “You’re crying. What the hell?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know. Things are, like, getting kind of out of control, I think.”

I sat in the bus shelter but didn’t get on any of the buses that passed by. I just waited.

And I wondered about things. I was starting to realize
that I had questions; things that I had never considered before.

Questions like:

What if my brother was going to die? What if Liz was going to Australia? What if Max had no use for me anymore? And what if, what if, what if? What if Francie had never been at all what she seemed? What if I was alone?

Maybe I was alone. But my brother would not die. Everyone else had given up, if they were even trying in the first place. I would not give up.

After an hour or so I saw Max appear as a distant speck, gliding toward me on his skateboard.

“Hey,” he said, making a messy stop in front of me, flipping his board up onto its end.

“Hey,” I said.

He sat down next to me, and we both stared out at the traffic. “I’m glad you called,” he said. “I didn’t know if you were going to. I mean, like, ever. Is everything all right?”

“I’m sorry about the other night.”

“Me too. I shouldn’t have acted like that. Like you’re some slut. You have your principles. It’s cool.”

“It’s not principles,” I sighed. “I don’t believe in principles. It’s just…let’s just forget it.”

“Forgotten,” Max said. He reached out and touched my hand, then grabbed it and placed it under his, on my knee. “What’s the matter, anyway?”

“Francie’s just a fucking liar,” I said.

“You let her boss you around too much,” he said.

“That’s not it at all,” I told him.

“Well, I still think you give her too much credit,” he said. “You’re not as helpless as you think you are. I kinda don’t think you ever have been. Here, have a drink.” He pulled a small metal flask from his pocket and took a swig, then offered it to me. Floppy blond hair flirting with long dark eyelashes. When I touched the flask to my lips, I could still taste him on it. Or maybe Max tasted like whiskey to start with.

A quick, burning sip; a glimpse of something endless.

Max stood and led me off, away from the bus stop and into the bright asphalt hills of the suburbs. That easy, sheepish shuffle, skateboard cradled in the crook of his arm. Sunlight streaming through the tallest trees, leaving shadows of leaves on our cheekbones, my hand in his the entire time. The walk took forever, and we passed the flask back and forth between us as we strolled along. When we were pleasantly toasted, we took turns saying the alphabet backward and were both surprised at how easy it turned out to be.