The Fallback Plan (3 page)

“No, no, nothing happened. Are you having a good time with your friends?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re watching
Aladdin
.” I was kidding, but I wondered if she’d even notice.

“That’s a cute one. Listen, I won’t keep you long. But Dad just got off the phone with Nate Brown and he and Amy are looking for a babysitter.”

“Amy Brown?”

Jack and Pickle were watching me. I got off the couch and went into the bedroom. “Move,” I whispered to Pickle.

“They live on Elizabeth. Do you remember them from our Christmas party last year? They have a little girl named May.”

“I thought their daughter died,” I said. Or was I getting the story wrong? I remembered talking to Amy at the party because she stood out; she was the youngest wife there. And I remembered getting the phone call from my mom in January when I was back at school, sitting on my unmade bed, staring at the Egon Schiele drawings I had thumbtacked to my wall, listening to her tell me that when they got home from our party, they had found their baby dead in her crib.

“Their baby died, but they have another daughter named May. Nate called Dad tonight because they’re looking for a babysitter, so Amy can go back to painting or whatever it is she does. I know your dad said she was an artist. Maybe she makes earrings.”

I sat down on Jack’s bed.

“Of course your dad and I said you’d be more than happy to help.”

“Help with what?” I said.

“Play with May, run the dishwasher, make sandwiches. They said they’d pay you nine dollars an hour, which I’m sure is more than what you’d make working at the movie theater, and you’re so good with kids. That’s what Dad told Nate, how good you are with kids.”

When I was thirteen I organized a summer camp for
neighborhood kids in our backyard. It was called Camp Rainorshine. For two weeks, it rained. I sat the kids in front of the TV and made them watch musicals on VHS tapes. From
West Side Story
, they all learned to say “Beat it!” to their parents, when they came for pick-up.

“You already told them I’d do it?”

“I told them you’d go over there at ten tomorrow morning. I wrote the address on the pad near the phone. It’s close enough to walk. Anyway, that’s what I called to tell you. I’m going to go to bed now. Everything okay with you?”

I wanted to protest, but I couldn’t think of a good angle. I didn’t have any money. I didn’t have my own car. Soon my recreational Vicodin habit would have to end, and then what would I do?

“Yeah, Mom, I’m fine.”

“Okay. Good night, Esther.”

“Good night,” I said. “Bye.”

I couldn’t believe I now had a job. My job was going to be playing with a four-year-old? Part of my brain immediately attempted to calculate the amount of money I’d get to spend on screenwriting books after I paid my parents rent, part of my brain said,
You’re stoned, about to go on a drug run, and someone is going to trust you with their small child
, and part of my brain cast me as Mary Poppins in an adaptation directed by Stanley Kubrick.

I’ll be good
, I thought,
after tonight. After tonight I’ll be a model citizen
.

When I came out of the room I saw that they were at the game again.

“This is it,” Pickle said. “If I win, Jack drives.”

“Even Esther knows that’s impossible.”

“Didn’t see that cliff coming, did you, Jack? Did that cliff just come out of nowhere?”

“It must be hard to play video games when you have the manual dexterity of someone with Down’s syndrome,” Jack said. He drove into a star and moved into second place. Pickle shifted away from him on the couch.

“Don’t touch me, man,” he said. “Don’t cheat like last time.”

I watched as Pickle slipped on a banana and Jack took the lead. It was like watching a man in a cape tie a woman to a train track, but I knew that in this case the train would indeed come. Jack swerved around the next turn, but there was no way for Pickle to catch up. “Motherfucker,” he said. “Cocksucker.”

Jack crossed the finish line and stole Pickle’s hat.

“Got you,” he said.
Gotchou
. “Let’s roll.”

We walked outside together with the bravado of soldiers during peacetime. The stillness of the humid night was punctuated only by the sounds of car engines cooling in the parking lot, and the sprinklers on the lawns of the surrounding houses along the streets named after trees that do not grow there.

The night of the party, I’d watched from the picture window as they parked their car, and then observed Amy as she scaled our steep driveway two steps ahead of her husband. She was hatless even though the snow had been falling all afternoon and into the evening in slow gray curtains.

I was at the door before she could ring the bell. In previous years, my parents had hired neighborhood teenagers to hang coats and pass out cocktail shrimps, but I had grown into someone who was eager to do anything that kept me too busy to talk to their friends.

“Hi, come in,” I said, taking a wet paper grocery bag as she handed it to me.

“I’m Amy,” she said. “That’s wine. And that’s Nate. Cute dress. Can I use your bathroom?”

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s that way, behind the staircase.” She left small puddles of snow in her wake. Nate leaned over and with one hand began to undo the laces on his boots.

“You’re Paul’s daughter.”

“Esther,” I said. His hand was unexpectedly warm when I shook it.

“Esther,” he repeated. “The actress.”

“You’re not going to ask me what my fallback plan is, are you?”

He laughed quietly, and stepped out of his boots. “I went to engineering school, and now I’m an accountant. Amy went to art school, and now she’s a mother. Don’t tell her I put it like that.”

“I won’t tell her you put it like that.”

Nate stood straight in his stockinged feet. “This conversation never happened,” he said.

• • •

I was home on winter break, and from the moment my parents picked me up from Evanston in the Saturn, I knew what I would do for the next seven days—sleep. I only changed out of my pajamas once, and that was into a clean pair. My mom guilt-tripped me into helping make her annual gingerbread replica of our house (“If you don’t want to, that’s fine; I just remember when you were younger you were such a little helper”), and then we combed the basement for boxes of ornaments and lights on a Sunday afternoon while my dad watched football upstairs. Without taking his eyes off the TV, he told us to let him know if we found anything good.

“Define good,” I said, but he didn’t hear me.

We found everything we weren’t looking for: beach
towels, scrapbooks, warped issues of
National Geographic
, a green satin pump, and a shoe box of rubber stamps with a dead mouse at the bottom. My mom asked if I remembered where our Heroes of the Torah glasses were and I told her I had no idea.

“I know that was your job last year,” she said. “To put them away and remember where you put them.”

“Uh, maybe they’re in the kitchen somewhere,” I said.

“Why would you leave them in the kitchen?”

“Why
wouldn’t
I leave them in the kitchen?”

“That’s not what I asked,” she said.

At school I sometimes longed for the small pleasures of home—the clean tile of our bathroom floor, a stocked pantry, premium cable. But nothing came without its price. At school I was solitary, self-sufficient. At home, all comforts came at the cost of playing the good daughter, the daughter whose picture sometimes appeared in the newspaper, which meant participating in a family life I loved and respected only from miles away.

The day before the party I watched
Gone With the Wind
for the entire afternoon as I mindlessly strung popcorn, accidentally stabbing myself hard enough to bleed when the Union soldiers burned Atlanta.

All the other families I knew growing up had tinsel garlands. We had popcorn, which was somehow so old-fashioned it was inauthentic. Popcorn garlands say, “We try too hard. We care too much.” Everyone at the party
would know right away that the Kohlers were not real Jews; they were Jews who celebrated Christmas with the local Gentiles.

Even the invitations said “holiday,” to indicate to those who didn’t know us very well that every year we put up both a tree and a menorah. It was also my job to arrange our porcelain nativity scene on top of the piano in the cardboard stable I had once accidentally set on fire by putting it too close to the Manischewitz candles. Before I could put the little lambs in the manger, I had to take down the framed photographs that topped the piano lid. There was one of me as a four-year-old, playing a wolf in the first acting class I ever took, nose blackened with eyeliner. Only one other little girl had shown up for our recital, and I’d had to play not only the wolf, but two of the little pigs. The final scene in the house of bricks was my tour de force.

After the nativity was in place, I scattered handfuls of
gelt
, foil-wrapped chocolate coins, across the drink buffet like treasure in the tombs of kings.

If I’d had it my way, I would have put up the last of the lights, filled the punch bowl, and left. But I promised I’d stay until at least ten o’clock. My parents wanted the daughter in the photographs, the one who had won all the trophies displayed on the piano next to the manger, there to say hello to any middle-aged woman in a sparkly sweater set who had ever held me as a baby. Laugh at her
husband’s bad jokes. Make sure everyone tried the brie before it decomposed.

Before Amy arrived I’d been making repeated trips to the buffet, and walking from room to room with a wineglass in one hand, a tray of hors d’oeuvres in the other. I was friendly enough, but the crab cakes were my excuse to keep moving.
I wish I could hear more about your son’s mission trip, but I have to make sure everyone gets a chance to try one of these delicious crab cakes!

Every time I glimpsed Amy, she was hurrying to either finish or begin a glass of white wine, like a teenager who knows the cops may come at any second, and wants to drink as much as possible before she has to hop a fence. For a while she was engaged in an animated conversation with my mom’s Mary Kay representative. Amy would say something understated, take a sip, and then the woman would laugh hysterically as she checked around her to see if anyone else had heard. Amy was the only woman in the house in a strapless dress. She didn’t stand too near anyone, didn’t scan the room for something to hold on to; she was like an artificial plant, something that needs nothing.

We ran into each other at the buffet. “And here’s the trophy winner,” she said, taking my arm with her cool hand. I passed her a glass of wine, and told her my parents had bought all the trophies at a garage sale to cover up for the years I spent gangbangin’ in the hood.

“Wanna see my tats?”

Amy laughed and let go of my arm. “I hope my own daughters are so lucky,” she said. “Now let’s find somewhere to sit; parties make me nervous.”

“Welcome to my life,” I said.

“Did you help set all this up?”

I nodded. Once I was seated, I could appreciate how everything in the room sparkled and glowed like a movie set. The other guests might as well have all been saying
rutabaga rutabaga
, like background extras.

“You know what’s funny? Before I met Nate,” Amy said, “a long time ago, when I was still in Arizona, I was living with my boyfriend. We were both going to school. My parents invited us for the holidays, but it was the first time I’d ever lived with a man—a boy?”

“How old were you?”

“Twenty? Twenty-one? So a boy. The first time I’d ever lived with a boy, and I wanted to stay with him and make my own Thanksgiving dinner, prove that I was this domesticated woman. I was taking all these gender studies classes in addition to studio art, but he was Mormon and wanted this wifey girlfriend. I would be this radical feminist in the mornings and then come home and do all of Sam’s laundry—”

“He was Mormon?”

“We were both Mormon, but kind of lapsed.” I tried not to stare at her like she was an alien, but that’s what she was now. An alien. We were aliens from different planets.
On my planet, we covered our trees with popcorn strings.

“I guess he was less lapsed than I was,” she said. “I mean, we shouldn’t have been living together if we were really … He never told his parents.” Amy took a long sip of wine. When she lifted her chin, I could see the faint pockets of acne scars along her jaw and across her cheeks, under her makeup.

“Why did I start telling you about this?”

“You said, ‘You know what’s funny?’ ”

“Oh, the turkey,” she said. “We bought a turkey the night before Thanskgiving. I wanted to just buy breasts, and cook those, but Sam was adamant that we get an entire turkey. I didn’t know you had to defrost it for twenty-four hours. It was half frozen when I tried cooking it. I couldn’t find the giblets to remove, so they were just cooked inside. It was basically inedible. At one point I think I cried. We had mashed potatoes for dinner, and I don’t think our relationship ever really recovered from it.” She smiled, but I wasn’t sure which part of the story she was smiling at. “But this,” she said, “this party, this is so beautiful.”

We both watched an older couple as they shared the same glass of eggnog across the room. Then Amy threw back her head and finished her wine in a swallow. Her earrings caught the light like kaleidoscopes. “We have a babysitter tonight,” she told me, and held up her empty glass. Victorious.

My mom was nearby, but she hadn’t noticed I was no
longer catering crab cakes because she was busy showing off her refurbished accordion. “So far I can play ‘Hey Jude,’ ” I heard her say, “but my dream is to start a zydeco band.”

“A what?”

“A zydeco band.”

Her friend nodded and took a sip of wine. My mom assumed that all women, everywhere, listened to CDs of Clifton Chenier, the king of Louisiana French-Cajun folk music, while running errands in their minivans, and it was therefore unnecessary for her to define the term.

Amy and I looked up when the doorbell rang, but my dad was there to show the newcomers where to put their wet boots, and to thank them for their wine bottles, wreathed with bows. “Jeanine?” he called to my mom.