The Blonde of the Joke

by Bennett Madison

  That night, I fell asleep with my brother on the couch, my face planted in his armpit, the ceiling fan whizzing steadily in time with our breathing. And I drifted off that night with the surest feeling—the most unwavering, irrational certitude—that everything was going to be okay.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Sometime later, it was midnight, and Max was over again.

  He had started showing up more and more lately. Sometimes he showed up at night. Other times I’d tell Francie I had to study and he’d come over straightaway after school. He had been here last night, too, and three nights before, and the afternoon before that, too, never with any clear purpose beyond the obvious. He wasn’t usually that intent on the obvious, either.

  In some ways it was actually pretty annoying. I had things to do: homework, a shower, um, sleep. Yeah, I was, like, somewhat in love with him, or whatever, but that only goes so far. It would have been different if we’d had anything to talk about. But Max’s secret late-night visits were usually about 75 percent silence, 24 percent chitchat, and 1 percent makeout session. Sometimes we snuck out to the backyard and smoked a bowl, and didn’t talk out there, either.

  Sometimes I wanted to say, Max, it’s a school night. I wanted to ask, Max, what do you want from me, anyway? Or Why don’t we cut this bullshit here and get right to the good part?

  But there were things I liked about him, too. He was sort of funny. He was smart, and weirdly tough. Despite his pathological distractability, I knew that he had the best intentions. Plus he was hot. It was all of that.

  Of course, that stuff’s not all that important. Anyone can be smart and funny and a slightly good person. Actually I would say that most people probably are. Others are hot on top of it all, too. It’s rare, I guess, but not, like, anything to get all excited about.

  No. What I liked most about Max was this: he was him and I was me. He wasn’t trying to change anything. He didn’t want me to be anything more to him than a sort of girlfriend. He expected very little from me. I could walk away at any moment—he could walk away—and neither of us would take a piece of the other with us. He was just Max. I was Valentina Martinez.

  That night he was lying on my floor, amid laundry and CDs and year-old fashion magazines. He had his arms flung over his head, T-shirt riding up to reveal the tan, flat stomach, the thin line of darkness leading into his jeans. He seemed to be staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, even though the lights were on and you could barely see him. I was staring at him. We were both staring. He was beautiful.

  And this time when he kissed me, I was ready for it. We had kissed a lot since his first visit a few weeks ago. It never lasted for more than three minutes, give or take two and a half minutes. He sat on my bed, with his hands on my hips and mine on his shoulders, and inched his way up to my boob as we chewed on each other’s lips. Even though I know you’re not supposed to open your eyes when you’re kissing someone, I let my lids drift open, and I saw him staring back at me.

  We stared at each other like that for a few seconds, pupils only millimeters away, and his tongue down my throat the whole time. Caught in the intensity of his glance, I felt nervous. I had to laugh and pull back.

  He grabbed my wrist and pulled me back on top of him.

  “Let’s have sex,” he said. “I brought a condom.”

  It felt like my eyes might pop out of my head.

  “Uh, no!” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “We can’t even figure out how to kiss right. And now you want to start doing it?”

  “We were kissing fine.”

  Max pulled his shirt off. His body was tan and muscled and perfect, his collarbone jutting out from between his shoulders in a smooth and undeviating ridge. I wish I could say that I kicked him out right there, that this was the final straw. But I couldn’t help faltering. Max on my bed looking at once predatory and unbearably vulnerable. His lips half parted, blue eyes wide and implying a million things all at the same time. He ran a hand through his hair self-consciously, but didn’t try to move any closer.

  He looked sexy, okay?

  “Come on,” he said.

  I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Max seemed like the kind of person whose feelings were easily bruised. But I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t that I was being precious about my so-called virginity, because really, the thing to do about that seemed to be to get it over with. It was something else.

  “You don’t really want to,” I said.

  “Yes I do. Why would I be sitting here like this if I didn’t want to do it?”

  “I don’t mean it that way,” I said. “It’s just that if I have sex with someone, I kind of want it to have something to do with me. I’m not sure that this has anything to do with me at all.”

  “That’s the most retarded thing I ever heard,” he said. “How could it not have to do with you? If it didn’t have to do with you, I’d just be jerking off, right?”

  It was no surprise that he didn’t get it. “Just put your shirt on.”

  He didn’t move at first, but then he stood, and then, arms across his chest, he was dressed. He turned his back to me.

  “Don’t be mad,” I said.

  He tilted his chin in my direction, but he was still only half facing me. “You want to know what I think?” he asked. All I could make of his expression was a flicker of eyelash.

  “What?”

  “I think this has to do with Francie,” he said.

  “It’s just…” I started. But I didn’t know how to finish the thought. He had caught me off guard.

  “Am I wrong?” he said.

  “I’m not a lesbo,” I replied.

  Max rolled his eyes. “You don’t understand what I’m saying at all.”

  From my window I watched Max’s bike drift through the night, a lazy arrow of unformed intention shooting toward a target that neither of us could know. I wondered if I would ever see him again, and then realized that with Max, the uncertainty was in itself something of a guarantee.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Things 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 whe
re 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.