That evening, when I got back home, back to that limbo, I was rocked by a headache that obliterated any rational thought. A heavy fatigue kidnapped my body. I felt too weak to look for aspirin. I just lay on my bed and went over all the roles I’d been cast in. I can’t do this anymore, I thought. Be the confidante, the mistress, the gravedigger, the daughter. When I closed my eyes, I saw Emily in her white dress. I saw Alice, as illustrated in Wonderland, drowning in her tears, mistaking a mouse for a walrus or a hippopotamus. Oh, Charles Dodgson! He knew what life is all about, I thought. Drowning and mistaking mice for hippos.
I wanted to talk to someone without actually having to talk to anyone, so I signed into Facebook.
Ximong is being John Malkovich!
Melissa is work 10–6, class 7–9, drinkssssssss!
Tierney is coup de foudre.
Django is a reptilian humanoid.
Oh, Django—I forgot about him all the time. Not that he was so forgettable, but I remembered him as Bernie Boggs, which was the name he’d had when he transferred to my school in third grade. He looked like his name. Like a round, furry creature from the swamp. My friend Sharon said Bernie smelled like egg salad, but I doubt she ever got close enough to find out. If any of the girls had to sit next to him in class, or be his badminton partner, we would make a big show of moving our bodies as far out of his sphere of influence as possible.
In high school, he finally grew taller and thinned out, and his single mother remarried, so he was able to legally change his name when his stepfather adopted him. Bernie Boggs became Django Davis, and choosing a slightly handicapped, Gypsy jazz guitarist for inspiration probably saved his life. He grew some facial hair and started dating a girl who wore leopard print pants. After graduation, he joined the army.
You’d think that once I was old enough to realize how much damage I’d likely done to his self-esteem when I was eight years old by laughing at him with the other girls, I’d apologize, but instead I just friended him on Facebook.
Esther is to pandas as Angelina Jolie is to Cambodian orphans.
Let them figure that one out.
I went to get some cereal, food of the gods.
The Fourth of July was almost upon us. As always, there would be a carnival in the wide grassy fields between the community garden and the police station. There would be a Ferris wheel, Tilt-a-Whirl cars, and bingo tents. Bands who’d had a hit in 1993 would come and play to a crowd of dads in Coors logo tank tops. Eleven-year-old girls and boys would be left alone to roam the carnival aisles unsupervised, to eat cotton candy and pick lucky rubber ducks and hold each other’s sticky hands at twilight, while waiting for the fireworks to start.
My mom was planning a party for the afternoon of the Fourth, a pre-carnival barbecue. Like our annual holiday party, it was a social event my dad would allow if she handled the details and all he had to do was show up and flip the burgers.
First, she made three dozen invitations with scalloped edges and sealed each envelope with an American flag sticker, which she delivered from our minivan for the extra personal touch.
Then she spent hours making little children out of balsa wood. She drew their happy faces with marker and glued curly red doll hair on top, and then impaled their balsa bodies on wire so they could stand as centerpieces on our picnic tables at the party. On the refrigerator, there was a recipe for a patriotic angel food cake with “1776” spelled in white frosting with fresh strawberries. Once she got started on a project, my dad and I knew it was best to stay far away from home, because if she caught us with nothing to do, we would be given a hot glue gun and coerced to help with some doodad and tchotchke assemblage. She was like Balto, the determined sled dog. The Balto of crafts.
I opened the pantry. Granola with raisins. Granola without raisins. Cheerios. Apple Jacks.
There she was. At the dining room table with her reading glasses on, scissors in hand. Our table was an antique, a relic from my grandparents, and my dad had decreed that it be covered in a foam tabletop pad at all times. He was trying to preserve it, but preserve it for what—the pad never came off, we never got to see the varnish underneath. There was not a single occasion or holiday that was important enough for him to remove the foam and risk a scratch.
“Are we out of Cinnamon Toast Crunch?”
“Did you look?”
“I am looking.”
“We must be out, then,” she said, adjusting her headband.
I used to think that if someone told me they were going to show me a lineup of potential parents, including my own, and I could take home any pair I wanted, I would choose a salt-and-pepper-haired dad, a George-Clooney-playing-a-lawyer-in-a-movie dad, and a mom who wore the best-fitting jeans, who would happily drive her children and all their friends an hour each way to Great America, without ever proposing she go inside the park with them.
But at that moment, if faced with a lineup, I would have chosen my own: a dad who had been going bald for years and never mentioned it, who bought DVDs of movies he had fallen in love with twenty years ago, who laughed at his own jokes; a mom who wore overalls and hairstyles most conducive to storing pencils, who dedicated herself to personalizing our home with every hand-sewn napkin, every monogrammed towel, lest we forget that all these things she and Dad had earned were ours.
I poured the Cheerios. I often felt like my parents and I were roommates, passing each other in the hallway, or bumping into each other at the kitchen sink, bewildered to find we weren’t alone, but now my mom was looking at me with the most embarrassing tenderness. A look that said she wanted to make up for all the missed looks in all the time I was ever away from her. A look that said I had come from her body and that meant I was forever a part of her.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said, and took off her glasses.
“You’re staring at me.”
“I’m not staring at you. You’re my daughter.”
I felt sorry we were a real mother and daughter, and not actresses playing the parts, sorry to not know my next lines, something like, I’m sorry for everything and I loved you always and let’s begin again.
“I wanted to make sure you knew I didn’t make any invitations for your friends,” she said. “I figured you could invite them to the party with instant messaging.”
“Which friends?” I thought of May.
The tenderness in her eyes shifted to confusion. “What do you mean, ‘which friends,’ ” she said. “Why don’t you call Pickle right now so you don’t forget later.”
I was chewing. She was watching me chew. I realized I was supposed to call him now, in front of her, so she would know I’d done it.
“Hey,” I said when he answered. “My mom wants me to invite you to our house on the Fourth for a barbecue. My dad’s making bratwursts and my mom’s making special napkins or something.”
“Did you fuck Jack or what?”
“And angel food cake,” my mom whispered. “Angel food cake.”
“Who told you that?” I said, and turned the volume down so she wouldn’t be able to hear him.
“Did you?”
“Does it matter?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, man, I better call Pickle right away so he’s the first to know.’ ”
“Jack told me.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said. “One o’clock. Bring a salad if you want to, but my mom says your company is present enough. Can’t wait to see you!” I hung up the phone.
“See,” my mom said, “you do have a friend.”
Somehow I was able to maintain a neutral facial expression. “Do you need the minivan for the next couple hours?” I said.
“I was going to go to Hobby Lobby to buy some raffia before they close, why?”
“Where’s Dad?”
“At Home Depot.”
I had to go somewhere. If I didn’t go somewhere I knew that I would retreat to my bed and find a book to take me to Nazi Germany.
“Then I’m going to go for a bike ride,” I said.
“Will you be home for dinner?”
“Yeah, sure, who knows if I’ll even make it around the block?”
I assumed my old bike was still in the garage. I went back to my room to change into a pair of plaid pedal pushers and green low-tops. I was going all out. I was going to look like someone who was born to ride.
I don’t know what the bike of my dreams would look like, but I know it wouldn’t look anything like the bike in the garage, the one I’d had since I was fifteen, which was hot pink and lavender and about as chic and sleek as a Barbie Hummer.
But it was too late to change my mind. I fastened the straps of my ladybug-patterned helmet under my chin and prepared for my great adventure through the even, well-planned streets of my hometown, streets named after dead presidents and disease-prone trees.
I rode north. I tried to change gears. There had been a time in my life when I knew which gear was for what, but now they all seemed arbitrary; it was difficult to pedal no matter which one I selected. Was I doing something wrong? Probably. I turned right on Cleveland, left on Hickory. This is recreational, I told myself. You are recreating. The air was hot and sticky, even in the fading daylight. Lawn sprinklers waved their slow hellos. I passed a couple of kids chasing fireflies, clapping at phantoms in the air. I knew how they felt. I’d always thought that if I completed the right steps, in the right order, each next step would magically reveal itself to me, like the blink of a lightning bug, or the glint of a skein of gold spun from straw. I got good-enough grades, I got into a good-enough school, where I got more good-enough grades, I made the plays, I graduated. I had learned so much—how to drink imaginary hot coffee, the definition of chlorofluorocarbon—and yet I was prepared for nothing. I didn’t know how to shift bicycle gears.
What if I kept going? How far would I get?
When I saw homeless people my age, sitting on the bridge near the Lyric Opera, or under the Belmont red line stop, I wondered if this was how they got there. Maybe they went for a bike ride and never looked back. Maybe their hometowns were worse than this one. Or maybe they were like me—maybe they were from here, too.
My legs ached. Good idea, Esther. Way to get away from it all. I kept pedaling. I was going to go as far as I could, and then turn around and go back. Eventually I would reach the park near the library, and I could rest beside the koi pond, and check to see if all the fish were alive.
I thought I saw Kelly VonderHeide pass me in a red Ford Taurus, smoking a cigarette with her arm dangling out the driver’s side window. It could have been someone else, but the driver was the right age, and I thought I recognized Kelly’s glossy ponytail, the posture of a ringleader. Part of me wanted to yell and ask for a ride. I’d never stopped blaming her for that party, not really.
But Hickory was beginning its downward slope into the center of town and I could pedal more fluently, faster. I dodged low-hanging leafy branches like a samurai. I aimed for sprinklers and they aimed for me. What do you want to do, Esther? Just tell me and I’ll let you do it. We’re in this together.
I want to move, I thought. To a city where no one knows me.
Okay, then. Let’s move. Who is this?
Who’s talking?
The pocket of my pedal pushers began to buzz and vibrate.
I pulled over to the curb and hopped off.
“Hello?” I said. I had to wedge the phone beneath my helmet.
“Esther?”
“Amy?”
“Sorry,” she said. Her voice was low. “Is this a bad time? Can you talk?”
“Uh, sure,” I said. “I’m just a little out of breath.” A Dodge Caravan drove past, blasting mariachi music. Across the street, a porch light flickered to life.
“Where can I meet you?”
I told her I didn’t exactly have a car, but I could ride my bike a few blocks to the strip mall near the cemetery, and we could meet at Burrito Express.
“See you in a few,” she said.
Since I’d last seen her earlier in the day in the attic, Amy had changed into cotton shorts and a t-shirt that looked like it’d been rescued from a thrift store carousel. The thinness of her legs made her knees look disproportionately large, like broomsticks and grapefruits. I tried not to stare. As soon as she sat down at the table, she raised her hands near her head and made a face like she was screaming, without making any sound. Then she laughed.
I made the same face and laughed with her.
AHHHHHHHHHHH.
“Do they sell alcohol here?”
“Uh, I don’t think so,” I said. “Do you wanna go to O’Malley’s?”
It was two doors down. I’d never actually been inside, but having grown up here, I knew that all my friends’ parents who had fought in Vietnam, and/or rode motorcycles, drank there.
We left my bike inside Amy’s van since I didn’t have a lock for it, and then found barstools. I put my helmet in my lap. We’d forgotten to leave it with the bike, but Amy didn’t seem to notice that I still had it.
“So,” she said, raising her glass.
“So,” I said.
“To Arizona.” Amy clinked hers against mine. She wasn’t smiling. “My therapist says when I’m thinking about self-injuring, I should call a friend to talk, but this is the first time I’ve actually done that.”
“To Arizona,” I said, ignoring the second remark, and drank. She came here to tell me she’s moving home, I assured myself. She was doing what everyone did when they felt confused—move back in with their parents. I tried to picture Arizona, but I’d never been there or any place like it. All I could imagine were fields of cacti, undulating in the sun like flowers, which didn’t make any sense.
Amy took off her glasses and began to rub her eyes with the heels of her hands. I waited for her to start crying, or to pick a fight with the bartender, or to make a joke about the three bikers sitting at a table in the back who all had ponytails, but she just rubbed her eyes like she wanted them out of her sockets.
“Stay” by Lisa Loeb came on the jukebox.
Girls like this song. Girls listen to this song when they’re drunk and lonely.
“I haven’t thought about doing it in such a long time,” she said. “I used to, in high school, with a razor. In college, I bought a scalpel set. I don’t know why I kept it, after I got married and had kids, but it’s there, at the bottom of my jewelry box.”
“Maybe you should just throw it away,” I said.
Amy sipped at her beer. “I know,” she said, “but for whatever reason I can’t. It would be like throwing away something that happened to me. I feel safer knowing it’s there if I need it.”
I thought about the paper lantern the Streetcar cast had brought me in the hospital. I remembered how my parents had packed all the flowers and the Mylar balloons in the car to take home, and how I’d kept the lantern in my lap, like a kitten, because I knew it would be the only real survivor. I’d carefully folded it back into its original octagon and stashed it with the Christmas decorations in the basement. I knew that I would never throw it away. I would keep it like a piece of evidence, like proof of the past spring, but the difference between Amy’s souvenir and mine was that mine never beckoned me to return to it.
I didn’t know what Amy wanted from me. Did she want me to rescue her? Give her permission to injure herself? Permission to leave what was left of her family? She thought she’d been doing such a great job of holding everything together, but now I felt like I was watching a lone shopping cart, hurtling through a vacant lot, at the mercy of a great wind.
“How long have you been in therapy?”
“This time? Six months. Seven months.”
“And it’s helping?”
“No,” she said, “not really. I just need to get away. That’s the only thing that will help.”
“Maybe you should find a new therapist.”
“Too late,” she said. “I told Nate tonight that May and I are going to Arizona, to stay with my parents.”
When I heard May’s name I felt as if I’d fallen from a great height in a dream. Even though she’d mentioned it once before, she hadn’t seemed serious, and a part of me could not believe she would take May with her. May wasn’t anywhere in my cacti vision. Didn’t we spend almost every waking moment together? And didn’t I know not to shut her door completely at nap time because it stuck in the frame? Didn’t I love her? And by loving her, didn’t she partially belong to me?
“What did Nate say?” I felt like I was rehearsing lines, reciting words in rapid fire and not paying attention to what was underneath them.
“He said he wouldn’t let me. That I could go, but he wouldn’t let me take her.”
“You could go by yourself. Take a vacation.”
She shook her head, her eyes clenched shut. “We’d had a couple drinks, May was watching a video on the TV in our room, and so I asked him if he wanted to see the attic. He said sure; he said he was so glad he was going to finally get to see what I’d been working on. I felt like I was in grad school again. Like I was his cool girlfriend who made stuff, who was good at making stuff. We went upstairs. I turned on the lights. I sat in the chair, I did what you did, I did the whole bit.”
She swallowed the last of her beer.
“And?”
Amy stared at me. For a second, she said nothing.
“And all Nate would say was that he couldn’t believe he’d been paying someone nine dollars an hour so I could make that.” She laughed, but it came out dark and humorless. Her eyes were red from when she’d rubbed them. She reached in her purse and fumbled for something.
“Order one more round,” she said, “will you?”
I caught the bartender’s eye. My glass was still half full, so I worked on finishing it. What had Nate expected to be shown? Didn’t he know her? Couldn’t he imagine?
Amy found what she was looking for. “Here,” she said, and handed me a check. “That’s for this week, up to today, plus an extra week, but consider yourself released. You don’t have to come by anymore.”
“I don’t have to come by anymore?”
I imagined May, chewing clover. On a swing. Sleeping.
Standing at the window, her hands pressed against the glass.
Amy shook her head. “He’s so full of empty threats,” she muttered. “He said, ‘I’m calling your psychiatrist.’ ‘I’m telling your parents you’re unfit to travel with May.’ I finally talked him into letting me take her for the rest of the summer. I said we could talk in August. He was crying.” There was a trace of cruelty in her voice, as if the thought of him crying secretly pleased her.
“It’s his guilt. He thinks it’s his fault Annika died, and if anything ever happened to May he’d think it was his fault because he let me take her. But I’m her mother. She needs me. I told him that if he took her away from me, I’d kill myself. But maybe that’s what he wants.”
We both drank with the thirst of wandering Jews. I didn’t feel sorry for Nate, for his guilt over Lila. I didn’t even feel sorry for Amy anymore; she had drained my compassion, and now she was taking May, too. I tried to remember the woman I’d met at the party. Amy’s bright eyes. How quick I could make her laugh at my stories. How approachable she’d seemed then, the youngest mother in the room, the pretty wife. They’d been a picture-perfect family. That was the Amy I sent my condolences to. This one felt impossibly far away, unreachable.
You have over five hundred dollars in your pocket, I told myself, but at that moment I didn’t even care. I only felt sorry for May. I wanted to go home.
“When are you leaving?”
“On Tuesday,” she said. July third. “You could come with us, there’s room at my parents’. Go swimming, finish your screenplay. Buy a one-way ticket.”
“I’m not going to Arizona,” I said. I looked down at the bar and drank my beer, so she wouldn’t see that I was crying. I didn’t know why I was crying. I’ll kidnap May, I thought. I’ll rent a Winnebago. I’ll change my name to Loretta Lynn or Alice or Hiawatha. We’ll drive to Canada. To Prince Edward Island.
“I should go home.”
“I’ll drive you,” she said.
“No,” I said, “I’ll ride my bike.”
“That’s silly. You’ve been drinking.”
“So have you.”
I put my ladybug helmet on and fastened the chin strap like a high school football star. Amy watched me.
“Suit yourself,” she said. “But think about it tonight: Arizona.”
There was nothing to think about. I was tired. I was so tired of saying the things I thought Amy wanted to hear, of lying to her about her Mary Cassatt rip-off, of mothering May only to lose her.
“I don’t need to think about it because I’ve already made up my mind,” I said. “I’m not coming with you. I have other things to do.” Who was I trying to convince? I was crying again. I put the heels of my hands in my eyes. “And your daughter needs a mother, not a fucked-up, suicidal art school grad.”
Amy didn’t say anything. Her face had gone white and frozen. We looked at each other for another moment, and I willed myself not to apologize. Someone handed me a cocktail napkin from the bar and I blotted my eyes with it.
Then I followed her out into the muggy night to get my bike from her van, and walked it the two miles home.
• • •
The panda arrives in the woods. It is snowing. She is dressed for the weather, in a blue parka and a pom-pom hat. The snow is falling in curtains, as always. The little panda used to be the type of panda who dreamed of falling in a kind of fairy-tale love, but now she sees she never will; she was never meant to fall in love. She was meant to fight a war and save the world like Joan of Arc.
“Hello?” she calls, into the deep emptiness of the wood. Her footsteps crunch against the snowy earth. The tallest trees reach higher than her eyes can see, obscuring the clouds, if there are any. As usual, the littlest panda came out of the wardrobe at the lamppost, but the wood looks different than it did before. More menacing. She isn’t quite sure which direction to take in order to reach the faun.
Come get me, she thinks. Know that I’m here and come get me.
She stops walking and listens. The trees are whispering secrets behind her back. Far in the distance, sleigh bells ring. When the little panda closes her eyes, she can feel the earth turn, and the great gravitational pull, and the weight of her body, solid and warm and filled with blood. Blindly, she follows the bells. She hears a voice—and it isn’t hers, it isn’t the faun’s—telling her she’s close to finding out what she ought to do next, like seeing a flicker of gold.
“How close?” she says, but before any answer can come, a beautiful white sleigh, pulled by two beautiful white horses, appears before her. Inside sits a woman with skin as clear and smooth as milk. Her cheekbones are sharp like icicles. When she tries to smile, the littlest panda thinks she hears the icy skin around her mouth cracking.
She remembers what the faun said: “Aryan white, if you know what I mean.”
“Hello there,” the woman says, in a British accent.
“Hello,” the panda says.
“That’s a very pretty jacket.”
“Thank you.”
“Would you care for a piece of Turkish Delight?”
The littlest panda considers whether or not this is a trick. “Is it like Turkish Coffee?”
The white woman laughs and covers her frozen mouth with a furry white mitten. “Just pop on up here,” she says. Her cold eyes dance behind her silver-framed glasses. The rhinestones in the corners dazzle, even in the thin winter sunlight.
The panda moves closer to the sleigh. She can see the breath of the horses floating in the air like phantoms. The woman holds out a candy wrapped in cellophane.
“What will the Witch do if she catches me?”
“Probably do what she always does: tempt you with a delicious treat, promise you a rose garden, and then persecute you for your religious beliefs.”
“Don’t be shy,” the woman says. “We should go somewhere. You and I.”
And before she can allow herself the chance to change her mind, the littlest panda unzips her parka, pulls out the dagger, and plunges it into the witch’s throat with the strength of a hundred men. Immediately, hot red blood pours forth and streams down the witch’s chest, staining her white lap, her white mittens, the white floor of the beautiful white sleigh. The horses whinny and pummel the frozen ground. The witch’s eyes roll back inside her head. She tries to speak, but it just makes the blood pump harder. She is voiceless. Her hands feebly move toward the dagger handle, but it is too late. She is in the throes of dying, and then she is dead.
The panda shivers. She removes the dagger and holds it up to heaven.
The horses cry. They turn into unicorns and break their reins with majestic strength. All the snow melts, and then chipmunks and children and badgers all emerge from the forest, holding menorahs, triumphant. She sees the faun coming toward her, from far across the wood, except now he is a man, and there is love in his eyes. She knows it is love because daffodils bloom in the wake of his footsteps. The panda feels her fur melt away and when it is gone, she cannot imagine what it was ever like to live inside it. The body of an eighteen-year-old girl that was there all along blossoms as it should. Her hair is long and thick and brown. She is lovely, the loveliest. All this never-ending springtime is hers; now this is her kingdom; they will crown her with gold, and she will reign, Queen Lucy Anne Shirley Laura Lennox Ingalls March, over Narnia, forever, with her beloved.