The Blonde of the Joke

by Bennett Madison

  This is nothing new, I know. This is an older brother.

  On Christmas morning, Jesse cut his eyes in my direction when my mom opened the Swarovski unicorn figurine I’d gotten for her, and then again and with a raised eyebrow when Jack opened that stupid pepper grinder from Williams-Sonoma. Mom and Jack seemed to appreciate the gifts but didn’t have a lot to say about them. When we got to the stuff that Francie and I had gotten for my brother, Jesse just tore into them, tossing crumpled paper at his feet. His face was mottled with the glow of the tiny white lights on the tree, and as he examined each present, I could see something returning to him, his cheeks reddening, shoulders perking up. The Christmas lights dimmed, just barely, as his eyes widened and twinkled.

  “Footy pajamas!” Jesse said, truly happy. He smiled up at me, and for the first time in as long as I could possibly remember, he looked healthy. “You’re the best,” he said, kissing me. His lips felt warm on my cheek. And I thought about what Francie had said when we’d left the mall with his gifts in hand. A gift that is stolen means more. It had seemed like just another one of her silly, overdramatic pronouncements. But the fact is that when Jesse had kissed me two days ago, I’d questioned whether he had a pulse left at all. Now I could feel his blood pumping.

  Jesse’s gift for me was a small leather notebook. Apparently his friend in New York made them and sold them on consignment in fancy little shops. It was nice, even though I couldn’t think what I’d write in it.

  But then, after breakfast and back in my room, I took the notebook out, ran my fingers over the blank pulpy pages, and finally took out a pink jelly-roll pen and wrote, in perfectly neat and tiny handwriting:

  Leather motorcycle jacket

  Dior eyeliner, liquid

  Swarovski unicorn sculpture

  I kept going, listing the things I had stolen one by one. It wasn’t everything—I was sure I was forgetting stuff here and there—but it was a start. I decided that from then on I would catalog everything I shoplifted in the little leather notebook. A record is important for various reasons. Even when it comes to crime.

  When I was done, I looked down and back over what I had written. And with the beginning right there on paper, I had a funny thought: Where is the end? As a rational person you know that every road leads eventually to some depressing, tacky cul-de-sac. But at that point I could not imagine that I would ever stop stealing. I could not imagine that my brother would die. Even with all evidence to the contrary, with Francie so far out of pocket, I could not imagine that she and I would ever not be friends.

  The next day, Jesse and I finally had a chance to talk. He grabbed me by the elbow when I was standing in front of the open refrigerator and dragged me out to Mom’s old Ford Taurus. “Quick, before she notices I’m gone,” he said.

  It was cold out but not too cold. Inside the car, Jesse blasted the heat and rolled the windows down, turned the radio up. We took the parkway along the creek, heading nowhere specific as far as I could tell.

  “So you’ve taken up shoplifting,” Jesse said. He had one hand on the wheel and another dangling out the window with a cigarette. He kept both eyes on the road. “Either that or dealing drugs. But let’s face it, you’re not the drug dealer type. That statue thing you got Mom must have cost at least a couple hundred dollars.”

  “Three,” I said. I was too surprised to play dumb. “So? It’s not like she even noticed.”

  “Then you admit it,” he said.

  “What, like you’re a cop now?”

  “I’m not going to tell on you. I’m just curious. Liz and I used to be pretty amazing shoplifters, you know.”

  “You’re forgetting that I don’t know the first thing about you, really,” I said. He looked at me like I had honestly wounded him, and I felt kind of bad. It was true, though. The details of my brother’s life had always been entirely mysterious. “So you used to steal?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Liz got me into it, but in the end I was even better than she was.”

  “It must run in the family.”

  “I guess so. And wanna hear something weird? I used to imagine I was a girl when I did it. For some reason that made it easier—if that’s not totally the queerest thing ever.”

  I snorted like it was without a doubt the queerest thing I’d ever heard in my life, but the truth was that it made total and perfect sense. “Well, girls are better thieves,” I said. “Everyone knows that. Anyway, I seriously doubt you could have been as good as me and Francie,” I told him. “We can steal anything.”

  “Just don’t get caught,” Jesse said. “Over five hundred dollars is a felony. As in you go to jail. Or at least court. Also not fun. Who’s Francie?”

  “She’s this girl,” I said. “I mean, she’s my friend, I think. Long story, basically.”

  “Tell,” Jesse said. And I told him the whole story—how I had met Francie, how she had taught me how to shoplift, how she’d changed my life, and how she’d disappeared.

  It had started to flurry, and with no place to go we were now driving in circles, back and forth, up and down the parkway. No one else was on the road. “Sometimes people have shit to take care of,” Jesse said.

  “You would know about that.”

  “Ouch!” Jesse said.

  “Well, it’s true,” I said. This time I didn’t really care if I hurt his feelings.

  “I’ll explain someday,” he told me.

  When we got home, we poured ourselves bowls of cereal, went down to the basement, and kicked Jack off the television. There was a Designing Women marathon on Lifetime, and we basically didn’t get up off the couch for the next couple of days. It made me nearly forget that Francie was gone. But not quite.

  Chapter Nine

  Francie 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.

  Franc
ie 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.

  Chapter Ten

  There 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 coul
d 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.