Джоанна Скотт - Excuse Me While I Disappear - Stories

I made a big splash, you might say. The audience loved me. Word got out that the show was going to be repeated. Tempting fate, he scheduled the next jump for Friday the thirteenth.

Unlucky Friday, day of scripted doom. He knew what he was doing. He would suffer. He would be buried. And then, hah, he would rise again, dripping wet and as smug as ever. He would climb out of the river and up the ladder. And then, in front of his biggest audience ever, he would humiliate an old, fat bear by pushing him off the platform.

Unless I pushed him first.

I was trained to survive. I have learned not to be particular. I am as readily satisfied with rotten apples as I am with a hunk of corned beef. The only thing I don’t like is to be the center of attention. Survivors will go to great lengths to avoid being the center of attention.

I wanted to be overlooked. He wanted to be noticed. There was no greater difference than this between us. Our friendship was testament to the cliché that opposites attract. He trusted me. I wish he could have gone on trusting me to the end. But in the moment after I discreetly bumped him with my hindquarters, knocking him off the platform, he realized that I wasn’t a true friend. He had no true friends. He was alone, falling through the air into the river. It was necessary for him to be alone.

Instead of falling straight down on this, his final jump, he fell cockeyed. He must have realized what was happening in the split second before it was over. He knew what I’d done to him. He hit the water with a resounding smack. And, at last, he became truly famous.

The audience refused to believe he died that day. People speculated that he hid in a cave behind the falls until the anxious crowd dispersed. In the months that followed, rumors spread, and my friend was the subject of sightings around the world: he was seen boarding a trolley in San Francisco, riding a bicycle through New York’s Central Park, and flying a kite on a beach on the Italian island of Sardinia. The reports continued even after his body was found downriver in the shallows the following spring. He was more famous than he had ever hoped to become, thanks to me.

I am sorry for it. I am sorry not because I caused him to suffer but because I let him trick me into helping him achieve his dream. I thought I was saving myself by shoving him before he could shove me, but in that instant when he was tipping backward off the platform, I looked over my shoulder at him, our eyes met, and I saw a flash of something approaching satisfaction.

I earned my keep by giving him the kind of fame that would outlast his lifetime. I turned him into a survivor—the only kind of survivor he ever wanted to be. He finally became a legend on that day, while I was destined to be forgotten. There’s no room in his story for an old dancing bear. I was left to climb unnoticed down the platform and slip back into the crowd, taking refuge again in anonymity, condemned to survive in my own way and grow ever older, more haggard, hungrier, lonelier, after having succeeded in losing the only friend I ever had.

He came to the door wearing Bermuda shorts and a Jockey undershirt, gripping a ribbed tumbler I assumed was full of water. Only after he stumbled over the weather strip and I accepted his damp hand to shake did I put two and two together: the liquid in his glass was his beloved Smirnoff, poured from a bottle I knew he kept in the freezer because I had seen him reach for it at parties when he was mixing up a round of screwdrivers.

We were all drinkers in our extended family, but my brother-in-law had emerged over the past year as the only full-fledged drunk among us. I congratulated myself on foreseeing his decline. I had always thought he was a loser.

I did not say aloud, My sister had a dozen better men vying for her love, and she made the mistake of choosing you . Instead, I asked him, “How are you?”

“Hanging in there,” he said, pulling his hand from my grip and covering his mouth in a failed attempt to muffle himself as he cleared his throat.

As I stood there awkwardly, waiting for him to invite me inside, his vaguely wearied expression suddenly lit with interest. I turned to see what he was looking at just as Bob, the family cat, crept from behind the trunk of an old hemlock in the front yard, stalking an invisible prey in the pine needles.

“Is Jody ready?”

My question stirred my brother-in-law to action. “Jo!” he howled into the house. “Jo, your aunt is here!”

I heard a distant thud, and Jody’s voice yelling in reply. “Be there in a sec!”

“What do you hear from Ellie?” I asked. Ellie, my sister, was in the hospital, recovering from a double mastectomy.

“She’s coming home tomorrow morning,” he said, which I already knew, since I had visited her the previous day, and every day before that. Today was the only day I would not visit my sister in the hospital, for I had agreed to her request to concentrate on her daughter, who might need, my sister suggested, a little extra attention.

“I would pick Sis up myself, but I have to go into the office early,” I said, while with my eyes I reminded my brother-in-law that he was a lazy pig who had lost his job back in December and had settled contentedly into dependence upon his wife, an overworked high school social studies teacher. And now that my sister had cancer, my brother-in-law could think of nothing else to do but fill his glass with booze.

“No problem, we’re all set. Whoa there!” He staggered, causing his morning aperitif to slosh over the rim, as Jody, dressed in a polka-dot T-shirt and denim overalls with grass stains on both knees, squeezed between her father and the doorway and leaped into my arms.

“My little lady!”

“My bestest auntie!”

“I’m your only auntie.” I spit on my fingers and rubbed the dirt smudge off her cheek.

“And you’re my bestest papa!” she said, leaning out of my arms in an appeal toward her father, grabbing him by his unkempt goatee and pulling his face close in order to cover it with kisses.

“You’re my bestest girl!” her father chimed, beaming, reeking of that particular spirit he preferred because of his idiotic belief that it couldn’t be detected by a Breathalyzer. “Now you be good today, no shenanigans, eh.”

“I’ll have her home by—” I began as Jody wriggled out of my arms. She landed on her bottom before I could catch her.

“Ow!”

“Oh, baby, are you okay?”

Her assurance that she was just fine took the form of crazy giggles and a manic lunge for the cat, which she caught up in her arms and squeezed so hard that any other cat would have scratched in fury, while Bob just settled into the embrace with a loud rattle of a purr.

“Take care of Papa,” Jody ordered Bob. As she lowered him to the ground headfirst, the cat righted himself with a maneuver that looked very much like a backflip.

“Love you,” called her father as I took Jody’s hand and led her to the car.

“Love you back!” Jody shouted, for all the neighborhood to hear.

The year was 1965. Lucky Debonair had just won the Derby and an earthquake had rattled Seattle.

“Did you hear about the earthquake in Seattle?” I asked Jody, turning the page of the newspaper to follow the story.

“Is everyone okay?”

“Yes,” I lied, deciding at the last minute that my little niece was not ready for a tale of death and destruction.

“That’s good.” She put the finishing touches on the smiley face she had been tracing in the dust on the train window. “What are we going to do today?” she asked, forgetting the plans we had made over the phone the previous evening.

“Don’t you want to go to the zoo?”