Jen Lancaster - If You Were Here

I close my eyes and try to envision her beau. I imagine a round face with soft jowls and a jawline that dips down into his collar. His hair is gray — or missing — and although his eyes show his age-borne experience, they’ve grown paler and a bit cloudy. He has crow’s-feet and his lips have thinned. He’s got laugh lines and forehead wrinkles and a host of other age-related maladies that I pay a lot of money to eliminate so my young-adult audience relates better to me at live events. 21

“I guess in my head he looks like. . Carroll O’Connor.”

She snorts. “Archie Bunker? That’s where your mind goes when you imagine an older guy?”

I nod.

“For your information, he does not look like Archie Bunker. He’s been a weight lifter for thirty years and he’s a vegetarian. He has a full head of hair that’s got less gray in it than mine. I assure you he’s in better health and shape than either of us.”

I counter,“Yet I’m willing to bet his closet’s filled with cardigans and Rockports and pastel Sansabelt pants.”

Tracey’s sheepish grin tells me everything I need to know.

“Maybe you should do your hair like Rita Hayworth tonight. All the GIs from the Greatest Generation loved her!” I call as she heads down our steps and out the heavy iron gate.

“Screw you and your sheet sign!” she cheerily calls back.

“Coffee at eleven tomorrow?”

“It’s a date! See you at Lulu’s!” She gets into her car and pulls away while I wave from the porch. The sheet sign whips in the breeze above my head while I quickly text her, It’s not a date; I’m too young for you.

I go back inside and gather up all the detritus from our tea, depositing the dishes in the pristine farmhouse sink. After the kitchen’s clean, I go upstairs to work on a new chapter featuring gratuitous barn building and brain sucking.

The wind must have picked up, and I can hear the sign flapping against the wall outside. Time to take that thing down. I walk over to the intercom and call for Mac. “Hey, honey, church is in session tomorrow and the joke’s getting old.”

Also? I’m tired of people yelling, “Who’s ORNESTEGA?” from their cars.

Mac comes up to my office, a parade of dogs and kittens in his wake. We go to either side of my bay window and release the zip ties securing the sheet. Once the sign’s inside, we close the windows. I’ve just turned out the light and I’m about to shut the woven wooden blinds when I spot a shadowy figure moving quickly back and forth in the street in front of our house. What the. .?

“Mac, honey, get back here — what’s going on out there?”

We see a hooded person on the street swivel his ski-mask-covered face around a couple of times and then pull what looks like a Powerade bottle out of his hoodie. The figure fumbles with something and then sticks a strip of fabric in the bottle. He whips out a lighter, ignites the bottom of the cloth, and hurls the bottle toward our house.

The first problem is that our fence is higher than the Masked Revenger anticipated, so when he throws his Molotov cocktail, it hits one of the finials on top of the gate and ricochets back toward him.

The second problem with Señor Ski Mask’s plan is less about execution and more about design. Sports-drink bottles are efficient in their ergonomics because their wide openings allow for quicker refreshment deployment. When one’s body is hot and thirsty for electrolytes, one wants to be able to gulp down that artificially flavored lemon-lime liquid as quickly as possible.

The thing is, there’s a reason you never see James Bond blowing shit up by slinging a Gatorade container. Not only is a Château Lafite bottle a more elegant solution, but it melts at a higher temperature and its neck is much slimmer. Plus, being glass, it shatters on impact. However, the mouth on a sports-drink bottle is far too wide, and unless one stuffs in, say, an overnight maxipad, whatever fabric is placed inside is going to fall out once it’s in motion and the bottle will melt once the fabric’s ignited. 22

Anyway, the person out front has found himself caught in a perfect storm of stupidity. One second he’s standing there looking all smug and menacing in his ski mask, and the next, he’s covered in turpentine and flaming harder than Boys Town on Pride weekend.

With the kind of deft swiftness one can employ only when one is, you know, on fire , our assailant whips off his mask, hoodie, and accompanying shirts and, in a single swift motion, hops out of his low-hanging pants. He then runs down the street screaming, clad in nothing but basketball shoes and a pair of colorful jockey shorts.

We’re both quiet for a moment, taking in the gravity of what we just witnessed. I talk first. “I guess that’s why ORNESTEGA doesn’t wear a belt.”

Mac nods. “But he has neatly answered the eternal boxers-orbriefs question; I give him that.”

We silently watch the flames sizzle out when they reach a snowdrift, and finally Mac speaks again. “You realize this means we have to move to the suburbs.”

“Totally.”

Mac is pensive for a moment before picking up the phone to call the police. “Of course, before we go, we’ll have to change the sign to reflect recent events.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning now it’s going to read, ‘ORNESTEGA wears Spider-Man underpants.’ ”

“Turn left here. Left! Here! Turn left right now! The map says left! Left, left, left! Now, now, now!”

Mac glances at me in the rearview mirror, raising a single eyebrow. Okay, would everyone stop doing that? It makes me very self-conscious.

“Why are you not turning left? The blue line on this map is the most direct route to where we’re going,” I yelp. “Go! Left! Leeeeefffttt!”

Calmly, Mac replies, “Because I trust the GPS system more than I do your cartography prowess, and because the line you’re looking at is a river.”

Mac, Liz, and I are navigating our way up to see houses in the exclusive suburban town of Abington Cambs. We chose to concentrate our search in the Cambs 23for a couple of reasons, but mostly because. . this is Shermer ! I’m so keyed up I can barely stay in my seat.

Abington Cambs was not only Hughes’s inspiration for the fictional town of Shermer, but so many of his outdoor scenes were filmed here. We’ve already driven past the little stucco-and-beam shopping plaza from Ferris Bueller , and I’m pretty sure I just spotted the McCallister house from Home Alone . I mean, how perfect is that?

This is the most beautiful community I’ve ever seen; that’s probably because it’s also one of the wealthiest. Forbes magazine recently called Abington Cambs “the Hamptons of Middle America.” Everything here is landscaped and manicured and tidy, exactly like I remember from the movies. I’m pretty sure if ORNESTEGA wrote his name on anything, the zoning board would publicly execute him on the bucolic grounds of the market square.

Naturally this is where stupid, undeserving Vienna grew up, and, yes, that fact kills me a little inside.

Anyway, when I graduated from college and moved to Chicago, I was dying to see the Cambs firsthand. As it so happened, my first job was in sales, and I ended up servicing some hospital accounts close to here.

I’d often head to the Cambs after my meetings just to spot landmarks, and sometimes I’d stop to hit their McDonald’s. The first time I went there, I almost missed it. Instead of sporting the familiar red-shingled roof and a big golden-arched sign, the McDonald’s in the Cambs is a pretty green wooden building with cream trim and shake shingles. Were it not for the tasteful little sign at the parking lot entrance, no one would know it wasn’t a beautifully appointed — albeit oddly placed — barn.