The Fallback Plan

by Leigh Stein

  Jack had spent most of his teenage years locked up in treatment centers for kids with personality disorders, which is why we didn’t know each other in high school. He told me that his parents once sent him to a wilderness program in Kentucky that was supposed to help him manage his aggressiveness, but instead of going outside he stayed in his room, and beat “We Will Rock You” against the wall with his head, for hours. His parents didn’t seem to care if he ever graduated; they’d pay the bills as long as he kept his part-time job at Best Buy, which is where he met Pickle. When they had to stay late to stock they went out behind the strip mall and lit things on fire.

  I was in love with Jack. Not just because he looked like a Grecian statue, or an athletic convict on the verge of a prison break, but also because there’s something devastatingly attractive about wild cards and loose cannons. He was the antithesis of the drama fags, the pale overachievers, and the anemic trumpet players I’d gone to college with. He was James Dean and I was Natalie Wood, and I just wished he’d put on a red jacket and we could go find a cliff to play Chicken on.

  Mario crossed the finish line and Jack threw his controller to the ground like he’d just scored a touchdown.

  “Call your guy,” Jack said, grinning like a jack-o’-lantern.

  “That was the deal.” He opened a bag of peanuts and cleared a space on the coffee table on which to discard the shells.

  “It’s a girl,” Pickle said. “I know this girl who used to go out with my brother and she has to know someone. She works at Whole Foods.”

  “Whole Foods smells the way baby kittens would smell if they were beaten to death with patchouli by a motorcycle gang,” Jack said.

  “I like the way it smells,” I said, looking at my feet. “It smells like handmade soap, like if Amish people made it.”

  Jack stared at me without blinking. “How much money do you have,” he finally said.

  “None. I don’t have a job.”

  “Get one, Jew,” he said. “Pickle, see if you can get a twenty sack.”

  “L’chaim,” I mumbled, celebrating nothing. To Jack, I wasn’t Natalie Wood. I was Yentl. I was the ethnic diversity in the room.

  It had taken me that long to realize that Jack’s girlfriend Jocelyn wasn’t here; she wasn’t squeezed between them on the couch, chain-smoking cigarettes that didn’t belong to her and telling inane stories, presuming that if they happened to her, we cared. Once, she told us, a customer at Old Navy thought she was a mannequin! Isn’t that a scream? she said. I hoped we wouldn’t have to pick her up later. She didn’t know how to drive. That’s what I had to remind myself, whenever I heard she got cast in another play or commercial because she had perfect bone structure, and not because she’d gone to Northwestern. I couldn’t hate her for living with her parents because I lived with my parents, but I could hate her for never learning how to drive because she assumed there would always be someone there to chauffeur her. I once sent her a text message from a number she wouldn’t recognize that said, Congratulations on your face.

  “Where’s Jocelyn?” I said.

  “Fuck if I know,” Jack said, without taking his eyes off the peanut shells, and I fantasized briefly that she had been hired to play Belle in Disney on Ice and had to leave immediately for training without time to say goodbye. I imagined Jocelyn inviting Jack to the show when it came to Chicago, and his face when she twisted her ankle and fell and had to be carried off the ice with the painful knowledge that she would never fully recover, that from then on she would have to settle for less and less, just like the rest of us.

  “It’s ringing,” Pickle told us. “It’s telling me to enjoy the music while the subscriber’s being reached.” You could always count on Pickle for a play-by-play. “Beth? Pickle. Hey, listen. Who do you know that we could get a sack from tonight?”

  Jack wiped his hands on his jeans and asked me to hand him his iPod. It was on a bookshelf near my beanbag chair, next to an ashtray and a DVD called Panty Party IV.

  “Watch,” he whispered, and turned on a ZZ Top song. “Now put it back in the stereo thing and turn that shit all the way up.”

  I could still feel the Vicodin. I had taken a second one in the car on the way because I hadn’t felt the first one yet but then I felt both. I looked at the hand that was holding the iPod and saw that it was attached to a wrist and an arm, but I didn’t know what was inside it and I didn’t know how to find out and then I thought maybe I shouldn’t be thinking this right now because probably nobody else is, and then I wondered if Jack could read minds. If anyone could, it would be Jack. I wondered if he knew what I had just wished upon Jocelyn.

  Pickle got off the couch, and I took his spot next to Jack. Then the music came on and I forgot why I was staring at my arm. Jack laughed, and hit the coffee table with his fist. Pickle looked at us, incredulous that we’d set the volume at such a maximum level. What the fuck, he mouthed, and threw an empty Sprite can at Jack’s head.

  Jack caught it and threw it back, harder.

  Pickle ducked. It hit the wall below the dartboard. “Hold on a sec,” he told Beth, putting his hand over the mouthpiece. “Dude, I’m on the phone for you.” Jack laughed. Privately, he had once asked me if I thought Pickle could tell the difference between when we were laughing at him or with him. I had never thought of it before, but I understood what he meant. Pickle didn’t have a clue.

  Jack tried to balance a Gatorade bottle on the top of his head and Pickle went into the bedroom and closed the door.

  I had met Pickle in kindergarten. I was one of the few kids in our class who already knew how to tie their shoes, and so the teacher had me help everyone else get ready for recess or gym class, especially Pickle, then known as James. I have never let him forget the fact that he would have tripped over his shoelaces and fallen down, repeatedly, had it not been for me, Florence Nightingale.

  Since he lived within walking distance, I spent summer afternoons at his house, and we would take the juice leftover in pickle jars, pour it into ice cube trays, add toothpicks, and make Popsicles.

  “Let’s do something,” I said. “We never actually do anything.” I took my sandals off and put my feet on the edge of the table. Jack scooted toward the edge of the couch, away from me, and then back to where he’d started, teasing me with restlessness.

  I felt bored. With boredom came the relief that I didn’t have to feel anything else. When Jocelyn was bored she looked sexy. She was bored all the time. If I looked like Jocelyn I would try to get on a reality TV show as soon as possible.

  “Hey,” Jack said. “Hey, Esther.”

  “Hey what,” I said. ZZ Top wasn’t playing anymore. “Folsom Prison Blues” was on.

  “What do you tell a woman with two black eyes?”

  “I don’t know, what?”

  “Nothing. You’ve already told her twice.”

  He smiled and held his hand up for a high five.

  “I don’t think I can give you a high five for that one,” I said.

  “I’ll put it in the lost and found. You can reclaim it later.”

  “Very funny.” I put my neck back and closed my eyes. “Your couch feels so nice,” I said. “Try it. Sit like this.”

  “Today I had to meet with my English professor and she asked me what grade I thought I deserved and I said a B and she said she’d give me a B,” Jack said.

  I didn’t want to talk about grades, not even someone else’s. “I’m a writer,” I said. “I’m writing a screenplay.”

  “Can I be in it?”

  “It’s just for pandas.”

  Pickle came out of the bedroom. His Cubs hat was turned backward. Had it been backward before? I couldn’t remember. “She said she’s at a party and we can drop by and get some off someone there,” he said.

  “Pickle,” I said, “fix your hat.”

  “Where’s the party?”

  “In Darien.”

  “Esther can drive us,” Jack said.

  “I’m not driving.”<
br />
  “Well, my car’s on E and I don’t know where Darien is.”

  “Google, asshole,” Pickle said, and held up the back of his hand, where he had written the address with a Sharpie. (My mom had once told me that when Pickle’s mom was pregnant she was well overdue, but the doctor didn’t want to induce labor. When Pickle was finally born they found that he had detached from the placenta and had been starving to death. “It’s a miracle he survived and his brain wasn’t damaged more,” she’d said.)

  “You drive,” Jack told Pickle. “You find it, you drive us, you get it. This was all implied in our deal when I killed you at Mario Kart Hotel Rwanda style.”

  Pickle hadn’t moved from the doorway. “What’s wrong with my hat? I always wear my hat like this.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes I do. I always do.”

  “You look like a tool.”

  “Your purse is vibrating,” Jack said, and handed it to me.

  It was my mom. Her ringtone was “Ride of the Valkyries.” “Hello?” I said. “Mom?”

  “Sorry to be calling so late.”

  “Did something happen?” Had someone died? Would she say sorry to be calling so late if someone was dead?

  “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.

  HEROES OF THE TORAH

  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.