The Trouble with Good Ideas

by Amanda Panitch

  I bristled as he dove into the candy bowl—he obviously knew things weren’t right, but he didn’t want to think about it. With him distracted and Matty on her phone ignoring me, I pulled out my own phone like that was what I’d been planning to do anyway. I had actually missed some messages from a few hours ago in the group chat with my best friends from back home, Lexy and Julie. After we moved two hours away from them a few months ago, I’d seen them only a handful of times, at bar and bat mitzvahs or the occasional Sunday when we persuaded each set of parents to drive an hour to a mall that sat exactly between our two towns.

  You aren’t supposed to use your phone on Shabbat—the Jewish day of rest, aka Friday at sundown to Saturday at sundown—but my family is, let’s say, relaxed about the rules. The same went for Lexy and Julie, who were currently at temple. They’d sent me a few selfies of themselves barricaded in the bathroom, then a picture of their deck of cards laid out on the floor. I felt a twinge in my chest. Sneaking out of morning services and playing cards with my friends in the bathroom was one of my favorite things to do. I sent, Who won?

  The response came immediately from Lexy. Naomi. But you probably would have won if you were here.

  Naomi? Who was Naomi? I squinted at the photos they’d sent me. They weren’t actually selfies after all. Somebody else had taken them. Somebody else was behind the camera.

  This Naomi person.

  “Lssshhh gerrrr errrrtserrrd,” Jed said before I could ask Lexy and Julie anything else. He had a mouth full of candy, but I was pretty sure he meant, Let’s go outside. Matty nodded, still staring down at her phone.

  The kitchen had a door that opened into the backyard, so we didn’t have to walk through the house. Which was good because I didn’t know if I could handle seeing Zaide looking at me like that again. Like I was some stranger. So when Jed opened the back door, I hurried outside as if it were a shimmering portal to another world.

  Zaide’s backyard was a backyard in the sense that it was an outdoor space in the back of the house. Remember, the house was once a telephone company, and telephone companies had no use for fields of green grass and wildflowers waving in the breeze. The backyard was pavement like the surface of a road, pitted and pockmarked with holes from years of snow and rain and maybe meteors or something. A tall chain-link fence circled it, separating it from the parking lot of a squat brown building, whose purpose we’d never been able to figure out, since nobody ever seemed to be over there.

  Jed went up to the fence and wove his fingers into it like he was going to climb over. Matty stayed bowed over her phone. For some reason I didn’t want to go back to mine, afraid I’d swipe away the lock screen and there would be a picture of Lexy, Julie, and Naomi having all the fun in the world while I was here being sad. I kicked at a piece of gravel, sending it skittering over the asphalt. It stopped right at the edge of the soup pot.

  The soup pot wasn’t a real soup pot, just like the backyard wasn’t a real backyard. The soup pot was what we called the biggest pothole behind the house. When we were little, we’d pick holly berries off the bushes out front and dandelion flowers and bits of sparkly rocks and dump them in the soup pot, then we’d mix it up and serve it in bowls to the grown-ups. They never ate it, which was super insulting to six-year-old Leah.

  I thought about them all inside now, hovering around Zaide. “Do you think everything’s okay in there?”

  Neither one of them looked at me. Neither one of them said anything, either. Maybe they hadn’t heard me. So I repeated the question, but louder.

  “I heard you the first time,” Matty said crossly.

  Jed kicked the fence. It clanged against the ground. “You know what I think?” he asked. “I think we should’ve brought the candy bowl out with us.”

  “Those chocolate caramels were delicious,” Matty said. “Maybe one of us should sneak in to get them. You’re the smallest, Leah.”

  The last thing I wanted right now was candy. My stomach was churning. If I ate anything, I’d probably throw it up. “I don’t want candy,” I said. “Can’t we talk about what’s going on in there?” The two of them just looked around shiftily. I ground my teeth. Why wouldn’t they just answer me?

  All I wanted was for them to tell me that everything would be okay. That we’d always have our Saturday afternoons. No matter what was happening at school. No matter what wasn’t happening at temple. That what just happened with Zaide wouldn’t change everything.

  The back door creaked open. Matty and Jed darted over, relief bright on their faces. My dad was standing there in the doorway, my aunt and uncle peering over each one of his shoulders. “Guys, we’re going to head home,” he said. He sounded exhausted, like it was one of those times I’d woken him up in the middle of the night because of a nightmare.

  “Is Zaide okay?” Matty asked.

  My dad hesitated a moment before answering. I might not have known what was going on, but I knew that hesitation never meant anything good. “Aunt Caroline is going to stay with Zaide for a bit,” he said to her. Aunt Caroline was also known as my mom. “He’s going to be okay. He just needs some time.”

  Some time. I hated it when adults said give it time. What that actually meant was they were hoping I’d forget about it and stop asking questions.

  “Leah, we’ll head around the side of the house,” Dad said. I was tempted to push my way through the back door to see Zaide for myself, but the thought made my stomach hurt even more.

  I turned to Matty and Jed. “Are you guys coming over for lunch?” I asked hopefully. Maybe they’d be more open to talking about all this when their stomachs were full. “We brought snacks.”

  My aunt and uncle stepped outside. Aunt Jessie checked her watch. “As tempting as that is, Lee, if we hurry we can still make it to Matilda’s soccer practice.”

  “Yessss!” Matty pumped her fist in the air.

  My shoulders slumped. Matty and Jed lived an hour away, so we went to different schools. Our once-a-week visit was the only time I really got to see them. I didn’t want to wait till next Saturday to talk about all this with them. “But you’re here anyway, so why not—”

  “Let’s go,” Matty said quickly. She wasn’t even listening to me. She gave me a quick one-armed squeeze, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. “We’ll hang out next week, Lee.”

  “I guess,” I said, like I actually had a choice. “Bye, Jed. Bye, Matty.”

  Matty wrinkled her eyebrows at me. “Matilda.”

  “Right,” I said, but I didn’t actually say the word Matilda. “See you next week.”

  My dad and I walked past Zaide’s squat brick house and then past all of our new neighbors, the gabled green Victorian and the two-story white colonial and the ranch house with the red roof. We didn’t say a word the whole time.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MOM DIDN’T GET BACK FROM Zaide’s until really late. She hadn’t even texted me back when I asked if she was coming home for dinner. And when she finally dragged herself inside, her whole face was sagging like she’d aged ten years in this one day. I ran up to her, my own face a question, and she shook her head. “I can’t talk about it right now, Leah.”

  Right. Give it some time. Ugh.

  At least she told my dad the same thing before heading to bed. It’s the worst when adults tell you they don’t want to talk about something and then immediately go talk about it with another adult.

  I didn’t see her much on Sunday—she spent most of the day alone with Zaide and then came home exhausted and not wanting to talk. She was still sleeping the next morning when I got up for school. She must have called in sick to work. She does something with taxes—I’m still not sure exactly what, even after years of career-day presentations at school.

  Dad was already gone, which left me to make my own breakfast. You are twelve years old and perfectly capable of pouring yourself a bowl of cereal, Mom liked to say.

  It was funny how I was all grown-up when she wanted me to do something and
still a little kid when she didn’t.

  I zombied my way through the bus ride and most of the school day. I still felt out of place at Grover Cleveland Middle School, even though I’d been here since the beginning of the school year. I still sometimes went to say the bracha, the blessing, over my lunch the way we used to at Schechter, my old Jewish school.

  I did that today, looking down at my turkey sandwich splayed out on the cafeteria table like I was about to dissect it. I opened my mouth in the shape of Baruch atah Adonai—after six years of Jewish school plus preschool, the words came as automatically to me as breath—then stopped myself. The girls at my table would look at me like I was weird. I made a fake cough like that was why I’d opened my mouth in the first place, then stuffed some sandwich inside.

  It might have made me look weird to bless the food, but it felt even weirder to eat food I hadn’t blessed first. Like Hashem—God—might strike me down from above with a thunderbolt. Or just make me drop dead like the firstborn sons of the Egyptians in the story of Passover.

  Deanna, Dallas, and Daisy would probably blink at me on the floor, all like, Well, that’s too bad, then go back to talking among themselves like they were doing right now. I thought of them as the Three Ds because they were always together. Like triplets, even though they looked very different—Deanna was Black with a puff of dark hair; Dallas was pale with hair so blond it was almost white; and Daisy was somewhere in the middle with light brown skin and long black hair—I thought of them as almost identical somehow. They moved the same way, propping their chins on their hands and laughing with their heads tossed back, and they all sounded the same when they spoke.

  They seemed to like me, in that they didn’t make me leave their lunch table. We’d met because we all had to partner up for a science project. With me on the roster, our class had an even number of people, so they couldn’t be a group of three the way they’d wanted. So Deanna and Dallas were partners, and I paired up with Daisy. I was new and had nobody to partner with, and she asked me quickly before she could get stuck with someone like Eugene Morton, who picked his nose and wiped it under his desk.

  We got an A on the project, and I didn’t know anyone else at Grover Cleveland Middle at the time, so I started sitting with them at lunch. It was better than sitting by myself, but I didn’t speak much. Sometimes I laughed along at their jokes, though, like that would show them how much I belonged.

  I tried not to think too hard about how I didn’t. Belong, that is. We hadn’t really had cliques at Schechter, and everybody mostly got along with everyone else, since the school was so small. And now I missed the feeling of knowing everyone, and of everyone knowing me. Grover Cleveland Middle was so big that it seemed like the only people who got to feel that way were in the popular crowd sitting at Isabella Lynch’s table. I shot them a wistful look. They were all giggling, like they were just so happy at how wonderful their lives were.

  Speaking of giggling, at my own table, Deanna was winding up a story in that laughing tone that meant there was a punchline coming. I chewed fast and swallowed so that I’d have a food-free mouth in time. Nothing grosser than going to laugh and spraying wet crumbs all over the table.

  “… and Madison said, ‘The thing we wanted was the blanket!’”

  Dallas and Daisy burst out laughing. I laughed along, too, even though I’d missed most of the joke.

  Deanna shot me a glance. “Sorry I didn’t invite you, Leah,” she said. “I was only allowed to invite a few people. And it was Friday night, so I figured you probably wouldn’t be able to come anyway.”

  That would be the one thing she’d absorbed from me talking about my Jewish school at the beginning of the year. Somebody in class, hearing about the school I’d come from, asked if we had a Sabbath the way his family did on Sunday. I told him about Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest. If you’re really religious, observing Shabbat means that you can’t do anything considered work from sundown on Friday night to sundown on Saturday night. If that just meant homework or chores, I could get on board with that. But work traditionally also meant things like using electricity, pushing buttons, and driving. I like reading well enough, but that’s basically all you can do on Shabbat, aside from going to temple for hours at night and in the morning.

  But my family isn’t that observant—back when I was at Schechter, I’d usually go to services on Friday night or Saturday morning, but not both. And we still drove and used electricity and stuff. Mom liked to say we tried to follow the spirit of Shabbat—relaxing more than usual and spending time with family. That’s why our visits to Zaide were on Saturday afternoons.

  I wondered what I hadn’t been invited to. “No big deal,” I told Deanna breezily, like I didn’t care at all. My voice could have been rustling the fronds of a palm tree on a warm tropical beach. “But you know, my family isn’t really strict about that.”

  Deanna exchanged a glance with the other two Ds. “Oh. We didn’t realize.”

  What did that glance mean? Was it a glance like, You guys were right—she’s so weird? Or a glance like, This is awkward now? Or, How can she say that with a nose that size?

  They each had a small, snub nose. When they looked down at their shoes, there probably wasn’t a blurry eyeful of nose in the way.

  Now they were all glancing down at their trays or brown bags. Oh no. Was I supposed to have said something? I should say something to make this less uncomfortable. But what? What was I supposed to say?

  I missed Schechter. And Lexy and Julie. Even if neither of them had a big nose like mine, I never felt out of place. I always knew what to say to them. I never had to explain what the Jewish holidays were or why I didn’t eat pork. I scrambled for something to say.

  “We don’t eat bread on Passover,” I blurted. Wait. What? Why that?

  But it wasn’t like I could take it back, so I just went all in. “Not bread, and not anything that’s risen,” I continued, waving my hands. “So no pasta or pizza or anything. For eight days. Basically all we can eat during Passover is potatoes and matzah. And matzah is terrible.”

  By the time I finished speaking, the only thing that stopped me from sliding under the table and hiding was how absolutely disgusting the cafeteria floor was. The Three Ds glanced at one another again. Dallas was the one who finally spoke. “That doesn’t sound so bad!” she chirped. “I’ve had matzah before, and it was pretty good! Kind of like a saltine.”

  A shudder rippled through me. It wasn’t even fake. “All non-Jews say that,” I told her. “Because you haven’t been forced to eat it for every meal. It’s basically cardboard.”

  One more glance. Maybe they had a secret language involving blinks and eye twitches, like Morse code. And they were saying, Oh my God, why is she still talking about this? I wanted to shrivel up like the empty potato chip bag next to my feet.

  I pretended a little jump, like I’d felt my phone buzz in my pocket, and pulled it out. Maybe if I stared at it hard enough, they wouldn’t notice how red I was.

  No messages waited for me from Lexy and Julie since we’d texted last night about Julie’s dad’s terrible attempt at a kosher bacon substitute. Was it because of Naomi? It’s hard to be best friends when you don’t ever get to see each other, a part of my mind whispered. Maybe they’ve replaced you. Probably they’ve replaced you. With Naomi, who has a tiny Disney-princess nose.

  I shoved those thoughts away. I had to send something, but I couldn’t think of anything interesting to say. So I just sent our group chat a shouting emoji and typed, Echo … echo … echo … Then a sad face on the next line. Maybe that would guilt them into saving me from this awkwardness.

  Only it didn’t. I just stared at my phone, waiting for something to happen.

  Something. Anything. The Three Ds’ stares were burning a hole into my forehead.

  I’d never been so happy to hear the bell ring. I hopped up, the uneaten half of my turkey sandwich forgotten. “See you in class!” I said like I hadn’t just made a complete and
total fool of myself. I fled before I could see them give one another those looks again.

  I kept my head down the rest of the day, fleeing for the bus before I could say or do anything else embarrassing. Lexy and Julie didn’t answer my echoes, which only made me feel more rotten.

  My mood had lifted a bit by the time I got home. Maybe it wasn’t really so bad what I’d said; it had just felt embarrassing at the time. Maybe the Three Ds wouldn’t even remember it by tomorrow. Maybe Lexy’s and Julie’s phones were both dead. Or the principal had caught the girls using them and confiscated them until the end of the day. It had happened before. Principal Schwartz knew them both on a first-name basis.

  I was in my head so much I didn’t yell out that I was home the way I usually did. Not that it often mattered, since my parents were normally at work during the day. I just liked getting to yell, and it warned any potential thieves or lurking ax murderers that they’d better start running.

  Which was why it was so strange to hear my parents’ voices coming from the kitchen. Then I remembered that my mom had stayed home today. But my dad should still be at work. I crept in the direction of the kitchen, not realizing I was trying to be quiet until I set my backpack gently on the floor instead of tossing it so that it landed with its usual satisfying thump.

  “… worried it’s getting dangerous,” my dad was saying. That was strange. There wasn’t much in our lives I would call dangerous. Dad even made fun of Mom for making us buy a big, blocky car because they were supposedly safer on the road than something flashier.

  Mom sighed. Then she slurped. She was probably drinking tea. She liked to have tea when she was sick or really stressed out. Sometimes she’d make me some, too. I didn’t like it, but I grimaced and drank it anyway. It made me feel grown-up. “I know,” she said. “But what are we supposed to do? He won’t listen to reason.”