Fancy Pants

by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  “I'm proud of you, Mom,” Teddy said. She gave him a squeeze.

  “You looked almost as good up there as that Korean dress designer,” Holly Grace told her. “Did you know he had on pink socks with rhinestone butterflies?” Francesca appreciated Holly Grace's attempt at good humor, especially since she knew it was mostly pretense. Too much of Holly Grace's sparkle had faded over the past few months.

  “Over here, Miss Day,” one of the photographers called out.

  She smiled into the camera and talked to everyone who came up to greet her. Her former runaways lined up to meet Dallie. They flirted with him outrageously, and he flirted right back until he had them all giggling. The photographers wanted pictures of Holly Grace, and each of the networks asked to film a brief interview with Francesca. After she had finished the last one, Dallie pressed a cup of punch into her hands. “Have you seen Teddy?”

  Francesca glanced around. “Not for a while.” She turned to Holly Grace who had just come up next to them. “Have you seen Teddy?”

  Holly Grace shook her head. Dallie looked worried and Francesca smiled at him. “We're on an island,” she said. “He can't get into too much trouble.”

  Dallie didn't seem convinced. “Francie, he's your son, too. With a gene pool like that to draw from, it seems to me he could manage to get into trouble just about anywhere.”

  “Let's go look for him.” She offered the suggestion more from a desire to be alone with Dallie than from any concern about Teddy. The island was closed to tourists for another hour. What harm could come to him?

  As she set down her punch cup, she noticed that Naomi was clutching Ben Perlman's hand and looking up into the sky. Shielding her eyes, Francesca looked up, too, but all she saw was a small plane circling overhead. And then she noticed that something seemed to have dropped from the plane. As she watched, a square-canopy parachute opened. One by one, the people around her gazed up into the sky and observed the descent of the parachutist toward Liberty Island.

  As he fell, a long white banner gradually unfurled behind him. It had letters printed on it in black, but they were impossible to read as the wind whipped the banner in one direction and then the other, threatening to tangle in the parachutist's rig. Suddenly the banner straightened.

  Francesca felt a set of sharp fingernails digging into the sleeve of her silk shantung jacket. “Oh, my God,” Holly Grace whispered.

  The eyes of every onlooker—as well as those of the network television cameras—were glued to the banner and the message it carried:

  MARRY ME, HOLLY GRACE

  Although he was concealed inside a helmet and a white jumpsuit, the parachutist could only be Gerry Jaffe.

  “I'm going to kill him,” Holly Grace said, venom dripping from every syllable. “This time he's gone too far.” And then the wind shifted and the banner's other side was visible.

  It held a drawing of a barbell.

  Naomi came up next to Holly Grace. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I tried to talk him out of it, but he loves you so much, and he refuses to do anything the easy way.”

  Holly Grace didn't reply. She kept her eyes glued on the descent. The parachutist dropped closer to the island and then began to drift. Naomi let out a small squeak of alarm, and Holly Grace's fingers dug deeper into Francesca's arm. “He's going into the water,” Holly Grace cried. “Oh, God, he'll drown. He'll get tangled in his parachute or that stupid banner—” She broke away from Francesca and began running toward the seawall, shrieking for all she was worth. “You stupid commie! You dumb, stupid—”

  Dallie draped his arm over Francesca's shoulder. “You got any idea why he has a picture of two doorknobs on that banner?”

  “It's a barbell,” she replied, holding her breath as Gerry just cleared the seawall and landed on the lawn about fifty yards away.

  “Holly Grace is really going to give him hell for this,” he commented, thoroughly enjoying himself. “Damn, she's mad.”

  “Mad” wasn't the word for it. Holly Grace was furious. She was so enraged she could barely contain herself. While Gerry struggled to gather up the parachute, she screamed every foul word at him that she could think of.

  He balled the parachute and the banner together and threw them down on the grass so that he finally had two hands free to deal with her. When he saw her flushed face and felt the heat of her fury, he realized he was going to need both of them.

  “I'll never forgive you for this,” she cried, taking a punch at his arm, to the delight of the network cameramen. “You don't have enough experience to make a jump like that. You could have been killed. I wish you had been!”

  He pulled off his helmet, and his curly hair was as disheveled as a dark angel's. “I've been trying to talk to you for weeks, but you wouldn't see me. Besides, I thought you'd like it.”

  “Like it!” She nearly spit at him. “I've never been so humiliated in my life! You've made a spectacle out of me. You don't have an ounce of common sense. Not one single ounce.”

  “Gerry!” He heard Naomi call out and from the corner of his eye, he saw the statue's security people running toward him.

  He knew he didn't have much time. What he had done was definitely illegal, and he didn't doubt for a moment that they were going to arrest him. “I just publicly committed myself to you, Holly Grace. What more do you want from me?”

  “You publicly made a fool of yourself. Jumping out of an airplane and almost drowning with that stupid banner. And why did you put a dog bone on it? Do you mind telling me what you meant by that?”

  “Dog bone?” Gerry threw up his arms in frustration. No matter what he did, he couldn't seem to please this woman, and if he lost her this time, he would never get her back. Just the thought of losing her gave him a cold chill. Holly Grace Beaudine was the one woman he'd never been able to bring to heel, the one woman who made him feel that he could conquer the world, and he needed her the same way he needed oxygen.

  The security people had almost reached him. “Are you blind, Holly Grace? That wasn't a dog bone. Jesus, I just made the most terrifying commitment of my entire life, and you missed the whole point.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It was a baby rattle!”

  The first two security men grabbed him.

  “A baby rattle?” Her fierce expression melted in surprise and her voice softened. “That was a baby rattle?”

  A third security officer pushed Holly Grace aside. Apparently deciding Gerry wasn't going to give them any real trouble, the officer cuffed Gerry's hands in front of his body.

  “Marry me, Holly Grace,” Gerry said, ignoring the fact that his rights were being read to him. “Marry me and have my baby—have a dozen of them! Just don't ever leave me.”

  “Oh, Gerry...” She stood looking at him with her heart in her eyes, and the love he felt for her swelled in his chest until he ached. The security people didn't want to look like bad guys in front of the press, so they let him lift his cuffed wrists and slip his arms over her head. He kissed her so intently that he forgot to make sure they were turned to face the network television cameras.

  Luckily, Gerry had a partner who wasn't as easily distracted by females.

  Far overhead, from a small window in the crown of the Statue of Liberty, another banner began to unfurl, this one a bright canary yellow. It was made from a synthetic material that had been developed for the space program—a material that was lightweight and could be compacted for portability into a package not much bigger than a wallet, and then would generously expand once it was released. The canary yellow banner slipped down over Lady Liberty's forehead, unrolled along the length of her nose, and gradually opened as it came to a stop at the base of her chin. Its message was clearly legible from the ground, simply printed in seven thick black letters.

  NO NUKES

  Francesca saw it first. And then Dallie. Gerry, who had reluctantly ended his embrace with Holly Grace, smiled when he spotted it and gave her a quick kiss on the nose. Then
he lifted his handcuffed wrists to the sky, tilted back his head, and balled his hands into fists. “Way to go, Teddy!” he cried.

  Teddy!

  Francesca and Dallie looked at each other in alarm and then began running across the lawn toward the entrance to the statue.

  Holly Grace shook her head at Gerry, not sure whether she should laugh or cry, knowing only that she had an interesting life ahead of her.

  “It was too good an opportunity to pass up,” he began to explain. “All these cameras—”

  “Be quiet, Gerry, and tell me how I go about getting you out of jail.” It was a skill that Holly Grace suspected she would be making good use of in the years to come.

  “I love you, babe,” he said.

  “I love you, too,” she replied.

  Political actions weren't unknown at the Statue of Liberty. In the sixties, Cuban exiles chained themselves to Liberty's feet; in the seventies, anti-war veterans hung an upside-down Hag from the crown; and in the eighties, two mountain climbers scaled the surface of the statue to protest the continued imprisonment of one of the Black_Panthers. Political actions weren't unknown, but none of them had ever involved a kid.

  Teddy sat by himself in the hallway outside the statue's security office. From behind the closed door, he could hear his mom's voice and occasionally Dallie's. One of the park rangers had brought him a can of 7-Up, but he couldn't drink it.

  The week before, when Gerry had taken Teddy over to Naomi's to see her new baby, Teddy overheard Gerry and Naomi arguing, and that was how he learned about Gerry's plan to parachute onto the island. When Gerry had taken him home, Teddy questioned him. He felt like a hotshot when Gerry finally confided in him, even though he thought it might have been just because Gerry was feeling sad about losing Holly Grace.

  They had talked about the No Nukes banner, and Teddy begged Gerry to let him help, but Gerry said he was too young. Teddy hadn't given up. For two months he had been trying to think of a social studies project spectacular enough to impress Miss Pearson, and he realized this was it. When he tried to explain that, Gerry had given him a long lecture about how political dissent shouldn't be undertaken for selfish reasons. Teddy had listened closely and pretended to agree, but he really wanted an A on his social studies project. Dorky old Milton Grossman had only visited Mayor Koch's office, and Miss Pearson had given him an A. It defied Teddy's imagination to think what she might do to a kid who helped disarm the world!

  Now that he had to face the consequences, however, Teddy knew that breaking the window in the crown had been stupid. But what else could he have done? Gerry had explained to him that the windows in the crown opened with a special key some of the maintenance people carried. One of those people was a friend of Gerry's, and this guy had promised to slip up into the crown as soon as the President's security people left and unlock! the middle window. But when Teddy got to the crown, all sweaty and out of breath from having climbed the stairs as fast as he could to get there ahead of everybody else, something had gone wrong because the window was still locked.

  Gerry had told Teddy that if there was a problem with the window he was supposed to climb right back down and forget about the No Nukes banner, but Teddy had too much at stake. Quickly, before he had time to think about what he was doing, he had snatched the metal lid from a trash can and banged it against the small center window a few times. After four tries, he finally broke the glass. It had probably only been an echo in the crown, but when the glass broke, he thought he could hear the statue cry out.

  The office door opened and the man who was in charge of security came out. He didn't even look at Teddy; he just went right on down the corridor without saying anything Then his mom was standing in the doorway, and Teddy could see she was really mad. His mom didn't get mad too often, unless she was really scared about something, but when it did happen, he got a sick feeling in his stomach. He swallowed hard and slid his eyes down, because he was scared to look her in the face.

  “Come in here, young man,” she said, sounding like she'd just eaten icicles. “Now!”

  His stomach did a somersault. He was really in trouble. He'd expected to get into a little trouble, but not this much. He'd never heard his mom sound so mad. His stomach seemed to be turning upside down, and he thought he might have to throw up. He tried to stall for time by dragging his good shoes as he walked toward the door, but his mom caught his arm and pulled him into the office. The door shut hard behind him.

  None of the statue people were there. Just Teddy, his mom, and Dallie. Dallie was standing over by the window with his arms crossed over his chest. Because of the sunlight, Teddy couldn't see his face too well and he was glad about that. On top of the Empire State Building, Dallie had said he loved Teddy and Teddy had wanted to believe it so bad, except he was afraid that Dallie had said it just because his mom had made him.

  “Teddy, I'm so ashamed of you,” his mother began. “What in the world made you get involved in something like this? You vandalized the statue. How could you do that?” His mom's voice was quivering a little bit, like she was really, really upset, and her accent had gotten thicker than normal. He wished he wasn't too big to be spanked, because he knew a spanking wouldn't hurt as much as this did. “It's a miracle they're not going to press charges against you. I've always trusted you, Teddy, but it will be a long time before I'll be able to trust you again. What you did was illegal....”

  The more she talked, the lower Teddy's head dropped. He didn't know which was worse—hurting the statue or upsetting his mom so much. He could feel his throat start to close up and he realized he was going to cry. Right there in front of Dallie Beaudine, he was going to cry like a jerk. He kept his eyes glued to the floor and felt like somebody was shoving rocks into his chest. He took a deep, shaky breath. He couldn't cry in front of Dallie. He'd stab himself in the eyes before he'd do that.

  A tear dropped and made a big splat on the top of one of his good shoes. He slid the other shoe over it so Dallie wouldn't see. His mom kept talking about how she couldn't trust him anymore, how disappointed she was, and another tear splatted on his other shoe. His stomach hurt, his throat was closing up on him, and he just wanted to sit down on the floor and hug one of his old teddy bears and cry real hard.

  “That's enough, Francie.” Dallie's voice wasn't very loud, but it was serious, and his mom stopped talking. Teddy took a swipe at his nose with his sleeve. “You go on outside for a minute, honey,” Dallie said to her.

  “No, Dallie, I—”

  “Go on, now, honey. We'll be out in a minute.”

  Don't go! Teddy wanted to scream. Don't leave me alone with him. But it was too late. After a few seconds, his mother's feet began to move and then he heard the door shut. Another tear dropped off his chin and he made a soft little hiccup as he tried to breathe.

  Dallie came over next to him. Through his tears, Teddy could see the cuffs on Dallie's trousers. And then Teddy felt an arm slip around his shoulders and pull him close.

  “You go ahead and cry all you want, son,” Dallie said softly. “It's sometimes hard to cry real good with a woman around, and you've had a rough day.”

  Something hard and painful that Teddy had been holding rigidly inside him far too long seemed to break apart.

  Dallie knelt down and pulled Teddy against him. Teddy wrapped his arms around Dallie's neck and held on to him as tight as he could and cried so hard he couldn't catch his breath. Dallie rubbed Teddy's back underneath his shirt and called him son and told him that sooner or later everything would be all right.

  “I didn't mean to hurt the statue.” Teddy sobbed into Dallie's neck. “I love the statue. Mom said she wouldn't ever trust me again.”

  “Women aren't always reliable when they're as upset as your mom is right now.”

  “I love my mom.” Teddy hiccuped again. “I didn't mean to get her so mad.”

  “I know that, son.”

  “It makes me feel scared inside to have her so mad at me.”


  “I'll bet it makes her feel scared inside, too.”

  Teddy finally got the nerve to look up. Dallie's face seemed all blurry through his tears. “She'll take away my allowance for a million years.”

  Dallie nodded. “You're probably right about that.” And then Dallie cupped Teddy's head, pulled it against his chest, and kissed Teddy right next to his ear.

  Teddy held on, not saying anything for a few seconds, just accustoming himself to the feel of a scratchy cheek against his own instead of a smooth one. “Dallie?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Teddy buried his mouth in Dallie's shirt collar so the words came out muffled. “I think—I think you're my real dad, aren't you?”

  Dallie was quiet for a moment, and when he finally spoke he sounded like his throat was closing up, too. “You bet I am, son. You bet I am.”

  Later, Dallie and Teddy went out into the hallway to face his mom together. Except this time, when she saw the way Teddy was holding on to Dallie, she was the one who started to cry, and before he knew it, his mom was hugging him and Dallie was hugging her, and the three of them were standing right there in the middle of the hallway at the Statue of Liberty security office hugging each other and crying like a dumb old bunch of babies.

  Epilogue

  Dallie sat in the passenger seat of his big Chrysler New Yorker, the brim of his cap tilted over his eyes to block the morning sun, while Miss Fancy Pants passed two semis and a Greyhound bus in less time than it took most people to say amen. Damn, he liked the way she drove a car. A man could relax with a woman like her behind the wheel because he knew he had half a chance at arriving at his destination before his arteries hardened from old age.

  “Are you going to tell me yet where you're taking me?” he asked. When she'd shanghaied him away from his morning coffee, he hadn't protested too much because three months of married life had taught him that it was more fun to go along with his pretty little wife than to spend half his time arguing with her.