Plus One

by Christopher Noxon

  “Hear me roar,” Figgy croaked, still half asleep. Figgy adored Jane. Where Alex felt a mix of embarrassment and bitterness when it came to his mom, Figgy was amused.

  Jane went on: “Oh! And that dress! Sumptuous.”

  “Mom, gross,” Alex piped in. “I’d swear you’re trying to pick up my… girl.”

  “Oh yes, Alex,” she said, her voice darkening. “Did you see yourself? On the TV? Carol taped it and you come on right after Figgy does the power salute with her fist. We’ve been rewatching it all morning. Oh, Carol—freeze there! Right there—on Alex’s face.”

  Jane quieted down. He pictured his mother at home on the couch, snug in her sweatpants and reading glasses pushed down her nose, a honeyed mug of chamomile in her lap. “That’s unfortunate,” she said, the receiver dropping away as she assessed the frozen image of Alex on TV. “Do you see? I can’t tell if it’s the camera angle, or what? It’s only a second or two, but do you see how sickly? How waxy? Did you have some kind of makeup on? Some kind of… cakey base?”

  “No, Mom—that’s just my face,” Alex said. “My waxy, cakey face.”

  “Oh sweetie,” she said. “I’m just saying. With Figgy looking so splendid, it’s just such a contrast. Did you have to pee, honey?”

  A parental alert had gone out, apparently, because not twenty seconds after they got off the phone with Jane, Figgy’s folks called to weigh in. Joanie Zicklin was an opinionated, anxious shut-in with a thicket of Clairol-red hair. She’d had troubles with pharmaceuticals in the eighties, which had led to a brief affair with Figgy’s birth dad—a plastic surgeon she called “a putz with no business raising a child”—and then, when Figgy was eleven, a marriage to Clive. He’d been a stabilizing presence for Joan, but he and Figgy never quite connected—to this day, he seemed weirdly competitive with his stepdaughter.

  As usual, Clive and Joan spoke at high volume and simultaneously, in only occasionally related monologues. Joan’s revolved around a call that morning from her poker friend Audrey. “She was full of mazel tovs and how wonderfuls, but oh, how it was killing her,” she said. “Do you know what her daughter the Ivy League lawyer is doing right this minute, while you’re home with your Emmy and those gorgeous grandchildren? Divorced, thirty-seven, and in Zanzibar or Zaire—one of the Zas. Signed up with a Jewish legal charity something-or-another to examine ballots and get malaria.”

  “Ma, Pam’s in Zambia,” Figgy said. “We emailed last week. She’s doing great. Met a pro surfer. Having the time of her life.”

  Joan barreled on. “And remember when she was at Northwestern and you were working at that yogurt shop? Passing out samples on La Cienega, wearing that horrible visor? Living with that Hispanic boy? Just a few years until Sylvie starts putting you through such worry—just wait, honeybee, your turn’s coming.”

  Meanwhile, Clive’s basso profundo boomed on a simultaneous track, reviewing the morning trades. “You see the Internet today? ‘Academy Wowed by Zicklin’s Tricks!’ That is some nice coverage—whose palm did the network grease for that? Listen—I know you’ve got a lot on your plate, but when you talk to Deadline, see if you can work in a plug for Top Dog. You’re talking to Deadline, aren’t you? For their Emmy wrap-up?”

  Clive was supposed to be retired—he’d sold his video distribution company to Paramount fifteen years ago. And while Figgy pointed out that his actual job had been about as glamorous as that of an auto parts distributor, he had somehow managed to exploit every industry perk and, to Alex anyway, pulled off a respectable version of the shaggy, glam, Robert Evans–era showbiz mogul: He drove a smoke-spewing Alfa Romeo, which he piloted to Fitzerman’s Deli in Chatsworth three afternoons a week for cabbage soup and rice pudding, devouring his lunch while swiping his perpetually wet lips with a silk calico-print kerchief. For the past few years he’d been shopping around reality-show ideas, his latest about a family of dog trainers.

  “We could really leverage this, honey,” Clive said. “Build on your cable success? Help get Top Dog on track? These network guys just need a reminder—this could really get us some momentum.”

  A holler came from the front hall, and Alex took the excuse to say goodbye and get off the phone. Sam was standing at the front door, scratching his belly and squinting into the buttery light. On the front stoop stood… something. Sprouting up from an enormous wicker basket was a thicket of jungle flora, a chaotic web of tendrils splayed around a dome of tropical blossoms in full flower. It wasn’t so much a bouquet as an ecosystem.

  “Oh, it’s the big basket.” Figgy had joined him on the porch. “It’s gotta be from Jess. His assistant told me: Big clients get the big basket. There’s gotta be a card—find it, will you?”

  “No way,” Alex said. “I think I saw a cheetah crawling around in there.”

  Figgy made a face and dug the card out. “ ‘To the new Queen of the Jungle. From Jess and all your friends at Forefront,’ ” she read, flipping it over. “Oh my God. It’s the Supreme Tropical Paradise.”

  She dropped the card and crumpled in laughter, picking up the arrangement with a grunt and hurrying inside. “Come on!” she called. “Let’s look it up!”

  They fired up the kitchen computer and checked the website of the florist: The Supreme Tropical Paradise retailed for $600.

  The figure jumped out at Alex. “That’s how much I paid for Doug.” Doug was the name they had for the dented, mustard-colored Datsun B210 that had reliably if unfashionably transported him around L.A. in his temping days, when they first started dating.

  “You overpaid for that car,” Figgy said. “This is in another league entirely.”

  Alex took a second. Look at the two of them! Figgy, whose mom had grown up dirt poor in the Bronx, whose grandfather fled the Nazis for a factory job in the U.S., whose great grandparents had been terrorized by Cossacks. Then he flashed on his own ancestors, Iowa farmers and Ontario Quakers who, from what Alex could tell, spent their entire lives catching infections in drafty meeting halls. Now here they were, staring down a flower arrangement that cost more than a car.

  The florist’s website showed the Supreme Tropical Paradise in a sleek, modern kitchen, a burst of lurid color in an otherwise placid expanse, like a sculptural piece of farm equipment on a polished glass coffee table. It was what was called, Alex recalled from the home décor reality show he guilt-watched, a contrast item.

  Not here it wasn’t. He looked around at their cluttered countertops and overflowing shelves. They owned nothing but contrast items. Their plumbing was bad and the electrical system was fritzy, but they’d amassed a hive of tchotchkes, evidence of Figgy’s extensive travels through the thrift shops and estate sales and discount emporiums of Southern California.

  Once upon a time, back before kids in the days of $600 cars, Alex was an eager accomplice. She taught him which San Gabriel Valley Sally Armies were off the radar and which ones were picked over by the Melrose Avenue scouts. She showed him where to find 1960s three-button suits and obscure punk rock LPs for a quarter a pop.

  Alex had appreciated thrifting in the abstract, as an act of rebellion against disposable retail culture. He liked Figgy’s name for it: urban archeology. The actual experience of thrifting, however, made him sad. He always seemed to bump into a lady reading a Robert Ludlum paperback to an invisible best friend, or trip over a kid cradling a moldy stuffed animal. Even the stuff itself freaked him out: the amateur oil painting of the big-eyed poodle, the Dollywood ashtray, the picture frame with the photo of the cross-eyed kid still in it. Each item had a person attached to it, and a lot of these people, he knew, were diseased, demented, or just plain dead.

  Alex finally had enough during a thrifting holiday in Vegas. Figgy had heard the shops near the strip were packed with the treasures of transients and gamblers. One afternoon Alex was looking through an assorted bin near the register of a shop near Fremont when he saw it. On top of the pile, marked with a price tag reading ONE DOLLAR, was an old jock strap. He picked it up. The front
section, the little beige pouch where you put your business, was splattered with blood.

  Alex stood at the register, the item dangling limply from his pinched thumb and forefinger. He couldn’t even begin to comprehend the back story. It was all too horrifying… someone had a jock strap, somehow got blood on it, and now it was in his hand, for sale… for a dollar.

  And that was it: the end of Alex’s career as Figgy’s thrifting wingman. From then on, when asked if he’d accompany her, he need only utter those three words: bloody jock strap.

  Figgy kept right on, of course. The arrival of the kids may have cut down on her shopping time, but it gave her expeditions a new urgency. Now, along with the glass grape centerpieces and Franciscan dishware, she began amassing vast numbers of Little Golden Books, Fisher-Price toys, and View-Master slides.

  All of which contributed to an atmosphere of barely controlled chaos at home. Their house was nice enough, a compact Craftsman in Atwater Village, what real estate people hopefully called “a transitional neighborhood.” The house had good bones, actual character, and, if you stood on tippy toes from the patio, a view across the concrete drainage ditch of the L.A. River to Griffith Park. But what had seemed funkily adventurous when they were cohabitating singles now felt shabby and inadequate.

  Clearing away a pile of crap in the entry hall to make room for the flowers, Alex felt breathless and jumpy. There was no way he could spend the whole day here, with Figgy holed up in the bathroom with her winged lady and the Supreme Tropical Paradise lording over him as he navigated through goat trails of clutter.

  So in a rush, he got the kids dressed and announced the commencement of a Sherman-Zicklin Family Adventure Day. Figgy agreed, quickly rallying and calling up a page on her iPhone listing ethnic festivals within a fifty-mile radius. (Lithuanians! Koreans! Greeks! Alex was pretty sure that since the advent of Family Adventure Day, he’d consumed every global variation of fried dough and barbecued meat.) As they hustled out the door, Figgy leading the pack, Alex smiled. Figgy was his playmate, his co-conspirator; whatever happened with her work, she was still the girl who’d drop everything and get up and go. She was game—always had been.

  Today’s Sherman-Zicklin Family Adventure Day began as it always did, strapping the kids into Alex’s trusty green Subaru. As he buckled Sylvie in, Alex felt a wave of calm descend over him. They were contained. Their range of wrongdoing had been reduced.

  “You’re a girl,” Sylvie announced to Sam as they pulled out into traffic, apropos of nothing. Second only to her love of food was her enthusiasm for bugging the living shit out of her brother.

  Figgy looked up from her iPhone. “Honey, don’t. Please.”

  “It’s true,” she said. “You’re a girl.”

  “Stop!” shrieked Sam.

  “You’re so a girl.”

  “Cut it out!”

  Alex peered through his rearview mirror at Sylvie, who was now gazing calmly at the passing traffic. How did a second grader who still seemed baffled by the mechanics of wiping her own ass know so well how to engineer a full meltdown in her older brother?

  “Girl,” Sylvie said, economizing.

  “Sylvie, what’s the first family rule?” asked Figgy.

  A bright smile lit up her face as she spat out the oft-repeated line: “Don’t be a dick.”

  “That’s right,” Figgy nodded. Alex cringed. He’d never liked Figgy’s habit of addressing the kids like college roommates, even as he marveled at how the kids’ use of what Figgy called “strong words” (“Because there are no ‘bad’ words,” she’d say) would often distract them from whatever nonsense had caused a fight in the first place.

  This time, however, Sylvie was too far gone to pull back. After a momentary pause, she took a deep breath and started singing, the words linking together into a lilting Broadway show tune: “Girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl—”

  Sam began to screech.

  Alex swiveled his head back. “Order in the court, the monkey’s going to speak,” he said. Sylvie took the bait and got quiet. She loved this game. “Speak monkey speak!”

  Silence followed. By the rules of the game, after someone called out the opening line, everyone got quiet. It would last a minute, maybe two, before one of the kids either spaced out and forgot about the game or blurted out something, thereby prompting the rest of the family to call out, in a precise descending melody, “Mon-key!”

  Mom was first to speak: “I’m hungry.”

  “Mon-key!” came the reply, Alex reflexively joining the kids.

  “Okay, I’m a monkey,” said Figgy. “But I’m a hungry monkey. So let’s vote. What do you want for lunch?”

  Alex held his breath, the choice of where to eat being for the Sherman-Zicklins a notoriously agonizing negotiation. Fast food was obviously out of the question, the children having accepted Alex’s explanation that all chains save In-N-Out belonged in the same general forbidden zone that encompassed tattoo parlors, gun shops, and North Korea. Which left mostly small, loud, shabby, ethnic restaurants whose first-generation immigrant proprietors, Alex maintained, were simply more comfortable with families. Figgy wasn’t so sure; she’d seen plenty of annoyed Thai waiters and peeved Chinese hostesses. Maybe, she suggested, Alex simply didn’t mind bothering foreigners as much as he did white people.

  Sam and his sister hollered out, in unison, their choices: “Tapas!” “Hamburgers!”

  “Christ,” said Alex. “Fig, you choose. Second family rule—this is not a democracy.”

  “We know,” Sam said, clumsily mouthing the line: “It’s a benevolent dictatorship.”

  “That’s right,” Figgy said. “Okay, Sam, fine. Shake N’ Burger’s right off the freeway. They’ve got those amazing curly fries.”

  “Tapas!” Sylvie screamed.

  “It’s Shake N’ Burger, honey,” Alex said. “The decision’s been made. You like Shake N’ Burger.”

  “I hate hamburgers!” Sylvie hollered, her voice ascending to a shriek. Tears began welling up on her lashes.

  “Come on honey—relax,” Figgy said. “It’s just lunch.”

  “But I’m starving!” Sylvie sputtered.

  “Black dot!” said Sam. In one of his fitful efforts at actual proactive parenting, Alex had tacked up a poster board where the kids were rewarded with gold stars for acts of generosity, civility, or kindness and given black dots for acts of disobedience, vandalism, or general douchebaggery. Poking your brother in the eye was a three-dot offense. Saying you were “starving” when your lunchbox overflowed with food and other children not so far away were actually starving, earned you a dot. Ten stars equaled a toy or trip for gelato. Dots negated stars. Sylvie was currently at negative sixteen stars.

  “I hate you!” Sylvie said.

  “Please, guys, cut it out,” Alex said. “Sylvie, remember what we talked about—about your blood sugar? Hate is too strong a word. So is starving.”

  “I know an even stronger word,” said Sam.

  “Sam, honey, stay out of this,” said Figgy.

  “I do!” Sam said proudly.

  Sylvie continued the caterwaul. Alex steadied himself and tried to focus on the road. “Please, please calm down, Sylvie honey,” he begged.

  Figgy switched off her phone and swiveled around to the kids. “Look: stop,” she said. “If you can get control of yourself right now, we’ll go for tapas. Just calm down.”

  Sylvie instantly quieted. The echo of her cry hung in the air.

  Alex directed a pleading look at his wife. “Wow, thanks,” he said. “Negotiating with terrorists. Great.”

  “Cock!” blurted Sam. “That’s a much stronger word.”

  • • •

  Figgy’s agent, Jess, called just as they sat down to eat. It was, in keeping with Jess’s special knack for interruption, terrible timing. Sam was in a deep sulk over his hamburger defeat, head plopped on the tabletop. Sylvie, meanwhile, was in a snit over a proposed substitute for her favorite chori
zo appetizer. Figgy put the cell phone on the table and turned on the speakerphone, just in time to capture Sylvie’s tantrum revving up anew: “No chorizo blanco!” she hollered, fresh tears bursting from her face. “Nooooo chorizo blanco!”

  “Fig, honey—get that girl whatever she wants,” came the voice of Jess. “Get her some caviar! Pop that girlie some champagne!”

  Fig leaned forward, pulling her hair forward over her face. “She’s seven, Jess. It’s bad enough she knows from Spanish sausage.”

  “You get the flowers?” he asked.

  “I did. Gorgeous. Nowhere to go but down from here. Now it’ll be all the more devastating when you send supermarket carnations after the backlash next year.”

  “Oh please,” Jess said. “The approval cycle’s not that short. You’ve got at least two seasons before the honeymoon ends. Do you have any idea what we’re gonna do with this? As far as your deal? Serves the studio right for being so cheap last go-around. They got their three-year commitments from the cast, but your contract is wide open. You see the TV today? All the morning shows are running that ‘girl power’ clip. You’re the face of the show!”

  “No thank you,” Figgy said. “That’s Kate’s job. I’m strictly behind the camera.”

  “Speaking of, tiny talent issue,” he said. “Got a message from the studio this morning. They want to see outlines for the first three episodes ASAP. Herb’s taking a personal interest. Wants to have lunch next week. I’ll run interference, but they’re talking about pushing production up three weeks. Your star has a commitment. Something about a graduation?”

  Katherine Pool’s children had become a constantly evolving X-factor in production, every play date and pediatrician appointment throwing a wrench into the show’s schedule.

  “For Christsakes, the kid’s graduating preschool,” Figgy said. “We are not holding up production for Bingwen Pool’s glorious entry into kindergarten.”