The Blonde of the Joke (8 page)

F
rancie ranc back. You knew she would.

She returned on the last day of winter break, appeared there on the doorstep, just like Jesse. Francie was shivering cold, a pink cashmere scarf thrown around her neck but otherwise dressed completely inappropriately for the weather—really, for almost any occasion—in a black sequined off-the-shoulder dress with a chiffon bubble skirt. Bare arms and no jacket in thirty-degree weather. At least she was wearing tights.

Francie had never been to my house before, and I’m not exactly sure how she even knew where it was. I guess it wasn’t too hard to figure out. Jesse beat me to the door to let her in. He had been expecting Liz all morning, and he’d been waiting on the couch in the living room next to the front
door, pretending to read The New York Times Magazine but definitely anxious, fidgeting and adjusting and flipping back and forth between the same two pages for at least an hour. He’d cleaned himself up for her, which was weird to me, because he was the one who had dumped her, years ago, to become a fag. So why should he care whether he looked good or not? But he did.

I watched him meet Francie from the landing on the stairs, and it was easy to see from the way her face changed that she fell in love with him the moment she laid eyes on him. Even though I couldn’t see Jesse’s expression, I had a feeling that he fell for her, too. I didn’t really know Jesse that well, but he was still my brother, and I knew him enough to understand that the flagrant, almost ceremonial gesture of Francie’s insane outfit would appeal to him.

Francie liked him, obviously, because he was cute.

“I’m a friend of Val’s,” she said. She kissed Jesse on the cheek and stepped inside without being invited. He stood there with his hand still on the doorknob and waited a pointed beat before turning to me, still on the landing, meeting my eyes with an expression like
You’ve got to be kidding
but at the same time totally charmed and I
love her already.

Francie hadn’t spotted me yet. She was standing in the foyer fidgeting with my mom’s tchotchkes on the front table, not quite sure of the etiquette of what to do next. Jesse just looked at her with good-natured bemusement.
Francie seemed, uncharacteristically, to be avoiding eye contact with him.

“Hey, bitch,” I said after a while.

Francie looked up with starry, charmed openness, shrugged happily, and made a kissy-face. “Hey, bitch,” she said.

I wanted to be pissed at her. Because where had she been and why hadn’t she called me? But with the feeling of relief I had, watching her standing there in my house for the first time, out of her element like I’d never seen her before, I just had to laugh and bound down the stairs and throw my arms around her.

“Where have you been?” I asked, kissing her on the cheek.

“You know Sandy. The day before Christmas, she just, like, decides we’re going to the Bahamas, like
right now.
We didn’t even have tickets when we got to the airport—we bought them at the counter. That woman is crazy. It’s a good thing she’s rich, because I don’t know how we’d survive otherwise. She’d probably be sponging off of me instead of off her parents. I’d be working in a cannery or a paper mill or something. Imagine what it would do to my complexion!”

Jesse laughed in that stuttery way that was kind of a hiccup, like it had caught him by surprise, a completely reflexive response. “Not your complexion!” he said, clasping his chest. Francie looked like she couldn’t decide whether to be
embarrassed or pleased by his reaction. She tossed her hair and batted her eyelashes. We headed down to the basement, and Jesse followed, unable to resist Francie’s lure.

“Val never talks about you,” Francie babbled. “It’s, like, this whole mystery or something. Man, it is freezing out there. So what’s your deal, anyway?”

“My deal?” asked Jesse.

“I’m not trying to be rude or anything; I’m just curious,” Francie said.

“It’s kind of a long story,” Jesse said, and changed the subject. “So I hear you’ve introduced my sister into a life of crime.”

Francie blushed and giggled. “Uh, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you guys have the Game of Life? I love that one. I love how you get to have those funny babies in the back of the car.”

I pulled the Game of Life down from the top shelf of the basement closet and spread out the pieces on the gray-blue wall-to-wall carpeting.

Liz showed up a half hour later. We were still sitting on the floor in the basement playing the game when she arrived; she just walked in and came straight downstairs without knocking. I guess that even after all these years she knew our family well enough to know that any form of politesse would be completely wasted on us.

“I’m pink,” Liz said, before even saying hello. Jesse just started laughing, and she slid in next to him on the floor and
mussed his hair and kissed him on the forehead. He really did look happy.

“You look great,” Liz said. “I mean, you look like a new man.”

“I’m feeling a lot better these days,” Jesse said. “I mean, these days as in the past couple of days. I had to leave New York. Being back here—it’s like overnight everything’s so much better. Ever since Christmas.”

Francie gave me a curious look.

“New York will fuck you up,” Liz said.

“Wait, so you’re staying?” I asked.

“I moved back into my old place,” he said. “The girl who was subletting got knocked up and moved in with her boyfriend. It’s gonna be just like old times.”

“Great,” Liz said uncertainly. She was counting her cash, and I watched her. I remembered her from the old days in only the vaguest terms: as an intimidating presence that seemed to hold keys to vaults of uncharted knowledge. But now, watching her shuffle those pastel bills in her hand, then reshuffle them, then count them off one more time, I saw something in her tentativeness that indicated she was really just as lost as anyone else.

“So I hear you got a job at the Gap,” Jesse said.

“Ugh,” Liz said. “Don’t remind me—assistant manager. So insanely boring, but a job’s a job. And the whole famous actress thing really wasn’t working out in LA.”

“Montgomery Shoppingtowne,” Jesse said. “Better watch
out for thieves. I hear they have a problem with thievery at Montgomery Shoppingtowne.” He smirked to himself, and Francie shot me a look.

Liz just rolled her eyes. “Yeah. How’s that sweater, anyway, Val?”

I laughed nervously.

“Listen, if someone actually wants that crap they can help themselves. I could give you some pointers, though.” She looked over at Francie. “Jesse and I used to be the best shoplifters around. I was, like, the queen of all shoplifters.”

Francie made the Sign, but Liz just looked at her like she was insane. Francie shrugged at me like,
Well, I tried.
And Liz spun the wheel, moved her car across the board, and drew a card. “Yay, I won the Nobel Prize!” she said, helping herself to a pile of cash from the bank. “I always knew I was destined for something bigger.”

When we were bored with the Game of Life, Jesse went upstairs and snuck a couple bottles of chardonnay and brought them back down for the four of us to pass around among ourselves. Francie and I lay toe-to-toe together, perpendicular on the sectional sofa, mostly listening to Liz and Jesse and only chiming in occasionally. For the first time in ages, maybe ever, I felt like I had a real family. Looking at them—the way they looked at each other, the casual way Jesse’s big toe rubbed Liz’s ankle, the two of them sprawled on the carpet—I wished Jesse and Liz were my parents. I wondered what would have happened if things weren’t the
way they were. If maybe she could have averted his various disasters.

When it had been dark for several hours, Francie stood. You could see she was a little drunk, but just a little. “I should go,” she said. “My mom hates being home alone, especially at night. It makes her go kind of insane.”

“So what did you think of Francie?” I asked Jesse after she left.

“She didn’t get much of a tan in the Bahamas,” he said.

T
here was always something different about the mall.

As well as you thought you knew it, it was never what you remembered. At the mall, you’d put one foot in front of the other only to look over your shoulder and realize that the path you had been following had rearranged itself behind your back.

Stores that were there one minute would be gone the next, replaced by something new and even less practical. In the blink of an eye, Everything Buckets became Eyelash Bar. Francie and I liked Eyelash Bar for a lot of reasons, not the least or most of which was the stupid name. Anyway, who doesn’t sometimes need fake eyelashes?

The mall had a way of giving you what you wanted. It
had a way of reflecting back what you gave it. But you had to know how to read the signs.

Sometimes I dreamed about the mall. In the dream, which was the same every time, I stepped alone from the glass elevator onto a fourth level that didn’t exist, to find a new storefront that I’d seen before in other dreams, but which surprised me every time anyway. The store was called the Thieves’ Guild. It sold things like lockpicks and walkie-talkies and professional-grade booster bags and those little stethoscopes that you use to listen for the clicks on combination locks. Other than the unusual selection of merchandise, the Thieves’ Guild looked about the same as any other third-rate mall store. Not quite as nice as Spencer Gifts and not quite as crappy as Dollar Bin, the Thieves’ Guild had tightly packed shelves and wall-to-wall carpeting and cameras pointed haphazardly in every direction, probably recording nothing. Francie was the manager of the store, and even dream-Francie couldn’t be bothered, I’m sure, to do something so pointless as change tapes in surveillance cameras. Instead, she sat behind the counter, painstakingly working on her makeup without the aid of a mirror, making such tiny strokes with her eyebrow pencil that you could barely tell her fingers were moving. Dream-Francie wore a white catsuit and a gold chain necklace with a giant diamond pendant that dangled suggestively between her breasts. Her hair was even longer and crazier than usual—it hung almost to her ankles and was sort of alive, twisting and hissing like
a nest of snakes. Sometimes she was disguised as Ursula Andress, depending on which angle you caught her from, but even with her in disguise, there could be no confusion about the fact that it was Francie.

Francie in the dream didn’t remember me, but she liked me anyway—I could tell from the way her diamond sparkled. Dream-Francie didn’t speak.

In the dream, every time, I approached Francie at the cash register, and she tugged at her earlobes and wiggled her nose. When I made the Sign back to her, she beckoned to me wordlessly from behind the counter and gestured to a small trapdoor under her feet. She stepped aside, daring me, and I crawled onto the floor and opened the door, and jumped into an unknown—only to find myself standing on a stuttering escalator in another mall. A cleaner, brighter mall where everything was new and everyone looked happy. At the other mall, they sold the one thing that I needed. And I didn’t even have to steal it, because it was on clearance for the low price of Free. When the alarm clock rang, I could never remember what that one thing was.

In my dreams, in real life, the mall was always trying to tell me something. It was hard to say exactly what, but one thing was for sure: the mall was more than it appeared. No matter how run-down and depressing it sometimes was, with empty storefronts always popping up to be converted into gloomy “hospitality lounges” with a couple of raggedy office chairs and a fake tree, the mall would always absorb
the loss and come back with something else worth stealing. Something you had to have. The Most Beautiful Thing.

Because the mall wanted to live. The mall would live. And the mall had intentions of its own. You had to wonder if it was setting up dominoes when it delivered Max to us.

Francie and I were smoking in a corner by our emergency exit, the empty part of the parking garage, when he first appeared. It was unseasonably warm for January, and we’d had a big day. Francie had scored herself an iPod from JCPenney by hiding it in a cheap nylon duffel bag and then buying the duffel bag. She’d hidden it on a Monday and come back to complete the scheme on a Friday, a technique she’d read about on the internet. It wasn’t the same as stealing it outright, because she was actually spending money, but it was still a net profit of almost three hundred dollars, if you wanted to look at it that way. And even if you didn’t look at it that way, it was still worth it.

Francie had just unfolded the instructions for the iPod when there was a clackety-clack in the distance. We both looked up, startled. There was never, ever anyone else in the Q section of the parking lot. But that day, suddenly, there was a blur flying around the corner, and a crash, and then, truly out of nowhere, this guy was lying on the ground fifteen yards away in a tangled heap. His skateboard kept rolling without him and settled curiously at my feet like a puppy.

“Things are always getting more interesting,” Francie said.
The boy was lying there, eyes clenched, muscles cramped up in pain.

I looked at Francie. She raised her eyebrows. I reached down to pick up the skateboard, but it was too late. Francie had already tucked it under her arm and was standing up.

“Shall we check it out?” she asked. It was rhetorical; here was a boy, all wounded and sexy and everything, lying on the ground and waiting for us to come along and nurse him back to health. Obviously the answer was yes. And then she was marching over to him.

I half didn’t want to follow her. The skateboard had landed at my feet, not hers. She should have been the one following me. But everything was always meant for Francie; I knew that, too. The idea that something could have been mine by rights would never have occurred to her.

So I followed her anyway.

We stood over the guy and looked at him curiously. He was our age, probably, and kinda hot, I think. I mean, it looked like he was maybe hot. It was actually hard to tell because his face was all screwed up in pain. He was hugging his knee to his chest and writhing.

“Are you okay?” asked Francie. “I brought your skateboard.” She dropped it at his side, and it hung there, tentative. Without meaning to, I rolled my eyes.

“Thanks,” he said. “Give me a second. Ouch.” It looked like maybe he was crying, or about to start.

It occurred to me that we should leave and come back—
give him some privacy—but Francie waited, patient and expectant, while he wheezed, and I stood with her, feeling dumb. Finally he sat up and propped himself on his hands. “Hey,” he said. “Sorry. I thought my leg was broken for a second there. But I’m fine.”

“Hey,” I said.

“I’m Francie. This is Valentina,” Francie said. Sometimes she really had no sense of shame.

“I’m Max,” Max said. He stood up, and I realized that I had been right: he was totally hot, with scruffy sandy hair and blue eyes, his tight, vintagey T-shirt straining at his biceps. It was unseasonably warm out, but not really warm enough for a T-shirt, and I noticed the blond hairs on the backs of his arms standing on end.

“Nice moves you got there,” Francie said. Max looked her up and down, took in the whole picture. Francie had her hair piled into an enormous, teased beehive that day, and the effect was quite something.

“Uh,” Max said, “nice to meet you.” Then he picked up his board and skated the hell out of there before Francie could open her mouth again.

“That was a success,” I said. I could still hear the rattling of Max’s skateboard in the distance, getting fainter.

“Just wait,” Francie said. “If you love something, set it free. He’ll be back.”

We went to visit Liz at the Gap. “Welcome to the Gap,” Liz said when we walked in. “My name’s Liz. What can I
help you find today?” She smiled with exaggerated condescension. Without taking her eyes off of us, she knocked a pile of sweaters onto the floor and walked away.

“She’ll be getting that promotion to general manager any day now,” Francie muttered. She pulled a tube of lip gloss out of her bag and glopped an oily blob onto her mouth.

It was pretty obvious that Liz was bored out of her mind. She was perched on a stepladder now, fiddling with her two-way headset. “Breaker, breaker to Dixie Cup!” she was saying. “Dixie Cup, you got a smokey in a brown wrapper knocking at your back door, you copy?”

You could see the clerks rolling their eyes at one another from opposite ends of the store.

“You’re going to get fired if you don’t shape up,” Francie informed her. “I mean, this isn’t exactly professional behavior.”

“These clowns get what they pay for,” Liz said. “I barely make more than an associate!”

“Don’t they get mad at you, though?” I asked.

“I’m a totally different person when the general manager’s around,” she said. “So professional. How’s your brother?”

“I don’t know. Good, I guess,” I told her. “I haven’t seen too much of him since Christmas. He, like, disappeared again. I’m glad he’s better, though.”

“Are you sure he’s better?”

“What’s even
wrong
with him?” Francie demanded.
“People keep talking about how sick he is, but he seemed fine to me! Will someone please fill me in?”

“He’s dying,” I said. “Things were bad, but now I guess he’s better.”

“He’s not better,” said Liz. “I mean, I’ve been burned by thinking that way in the past. You think he’s all fine again and then
wham.
I keep calling him, but does he call me back?”

Liz left the answer unsaid, but Francie’s mind was elsewhere anyway. “Have you ever seen him naked?” she asked me.

“Ugh!” I gagged.

“What?” Francie said. “He’s hot as hell! What’s so wrong about that?”

“He’s my brother!” I said.

“Exactly,” said Francie. “So you must have seen him coming out of the shower. Or something. Right?”

“Wrong!” Francie could be truly disgusting sometimes.

“Well, I’ve seen him naked,” Liz said. “Even if it was a long time ago. And he
is
hot.”

“Ugh!” I said. “Please!”

“Here,” Liz said. She took a pair of dark, stiff jeans off the denim wall, and without even bothering to check if anyone was looking, opened my bag to drop them in. “Those will fit him,” she said. “Use them as an excuse to visit him, and tell him I say hi.”

“Thanks,” I said.

We left the store, and the mall whirled around us—like it
was thinking hard, considering all possible outcomes. The Gap became Waldenbooks became Pottery Barn became Candy Express became Tuesday Morning. I snapped the rubber bands around my wrist to keep from getting disoriented.

“See?” Francie said. “Liz knows it, too. She doesn’t know about the Sign, but even she knows that a stolen gift is something special.”

“Do you think we’ll ever see him again?” I asked Francie.

“Of course. It’s not like he’s in Timbuktu. I mean, it’s not like he’s even in New York! He’s a couple of stops away on the subway. You guys are so weird about him. Come on—you could go there right now, if that was what you wanted.”

“I wasn’t talking about my brother,” I said. For less than a split second, I had the impression that Francie and I were standing in a ruin: that the mall had crumbled around us, and it was just Francie and me with dirt and ancient, weathered marble tiles under our spike heels. A brittle potted palm stood alone a few feet off, pathetic and withered and yellowed by time. I caught my breath and the mall sprung up again, reconstructed itself in the blink of an eye, brick by brick, into a bright and glittering temple that was even better than it had been to start with.

“Oh,” Francie said. “I should have known. You were talking about
him.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Francie said. “I told you, he’ll be back.”

Her dangly silver fishtail earrings were throwing flash everywhere, and it was obvious what she was thinking. She was thinking she could have anything she wanted. All she had to do was want it and it was hers.

Before heading home, Francie and I stepped onto the elevator together—the same elevator that was in my dream. In the glass chamber, our reflections were gilded in gold, and they stared back at us, transfixed, as the food court receded and the uppermost tier of the mall approached. That day, instead of turning to me, Francie spoke to my reflection, and said, “You’re my best friend. You know that, right?”

“Of course,” my reflection said.

“I have your back,” she said. “Do you have mine?”

“I will always have your back,” I told Francie. And I meant it. Of course I meant it.

Francie could do this. She could be bossy, selfish, thoughtless, bug the crap out of me. And then, just like that, she would remind me of not just everything that she had given me, but everything she would always give. Her irrational, unquenchable generosity. A lock of hair had worked its way out of her beehive and was curling around her jaw.

Francie grabbed my hand. It was the real Francie now, no reflection, and my real actual hand. She squeezed it, hard. It was then, feeling her inch-long, foil-plated nails digging into my knuckles, that I knew that Francie was not exaggerating at all. Maybe Francie never exaggerated. She did have my
back. She would not let anything hurt me. She had said it over and over again; it was important to her in a way that I could never totally understand. The way it meant something to her, I knew I could never, ever match.