The Trouble with Good Ideas

by Amanda Panitch

  “So the nurse doesn’t have to come all the time—they can come sometimes,” I argued. “And—”

  My dad broke in. “Leah. This is getting emotional. Let’s table this discussion for now.”

  Right. He might as well have said give it time.

  “Whatever,” I said. “Fine.” Maybe they realized how upset I was right now, and I could use their guilt to my advantage. “I wanted to ask you—I know I’m not supposed to have apps on my phone, but can I get Clicksnail? Lexy and Julie are on it.” My dad was already squinting at me in the way that meant no, so I hurried to speak before he could actually say it. “It’s not dangerous. It’s just sending photos back and forth. You can even add me on it so you can see the stories I post.”

  “We’ve discussed this, Leah,” said Dad, and he didn’t even have to say the no. It was there in his voice.

  Hate burned through me right then, quick and fierce. It was like they were purposefully trying to destroy my life. They were making me lose Lexy and Julie to this stupid Naomi. They were trying to lock Zaide away when anybody could see he was fine. And without our Saturday afternoons at Zaide’s house, I wouldn’t just lose Zaide and all my skills at chess, I’d lose Matty and Jed to soccer and baseball and their cooler, older friends.

  I’d already lost so much. I couldn’t lose them, too.

  I opened my mouth, then closed it. If I let myself say what I wanted to say, I’d get grounded till the earth froze over. So I stomped up the stairs and slammed my bedroom door behind me, just so my parents would know how mad I was.

  * * *

  The rest of the week flew by. I didn’t say anything stupid to the Three Ds, because I didn’t say much of anything at all. I laughed along with their jokes, whether or not they were funny, and they didn’t roll their eyes at me or exchange any more of those glances. I tried to text Lexy and Julie at least once a day around lunch, something funny I thought of or asking them how they were doing. They’d text me back, but it didn’t feel like our friendship before. I didn’t know what was happening with them day to day anymore, and they didn’t know what was happening with me. Probably because they were busy on Clicksnail with Naomi.

  On Thursday, I wore a pink shirt and jeans to school the same day Isabella Lynch wore a pink shirt and jeans, and she stopped by my locker and flashed me a rare smile. “Hey! Twinsies!” I smiled but totally blanked on an acceptable response, so I stayed quiet. Better to be quiet than accidentally say something stupid and look like a loser in front of the most popular girl in the sixth grade.

  By the time Saturday afternoon rolled around, I was determined to get Matty and Jed on my side. My insides thrummed impatiently as they greeted Zaide and answered the usual small-talk questions from my mom. (“How’s school?” School was always “good” or “fine,” Mom. That’s a stupid question.) Finally, I was able to lead them from the kitchen, where the adults gathered, to the living room, where we clustered on the red velvet couch.

  “You guys,” I said, lowering my voice and leaning in. I had to tell them right away. And not just because I didn’t want to give them the chance to ask me about school. “I heard my parents talking the other day. They’re thinking about putting Zaide in a nursing home.”

  I waited for Jed and Matty to erupt. They might even be loud enough for the adults to hear and come running. This is an outrage! How dare they! We’ll fight to the last man—or girl!

  I kept waiting. They just looked calmly at me, not even raising their eyebrows with surprise. They knew. Somehow they knew. I said through clenched teeth, “Who told you?”

  “We overheard our parents talking about it the other day,” Matty said. My clenched teeth relaxed. They’d found out just like me. “We would’ve told you, but it’s not actually going to happen, so it’s not a big deal.”

  She tossed her hair and smiled, like the situation was resolved. But Jed was still looking at me. “Seriously, Lee, don’t worry,” he said quietly. “They can’t force Zaide to do anything he doesn’t want to do.”

  He laid a comforting hand on my arm, and for a second, I let it sit. He was invested in this as much as I was, really. But then I pulled away because he wasn’t being realistic. His hand fell to the floor. “Sure they can,” I said hotly. “They were talking about getting themselves assigned as guardians or something so they could do exactly that.”

  “What can we do about it?” Matty said to me. I frowned because her words were combative, but … her voice wasn’t. She sounded helpless.

  And when I looked into her eyes, they were shiny.

  First off, she needed a hug. So I gave her one. Then I leaned back and said words I knew she didn’t want to hear. “Maybe nothing. But we have to try. And we can start by talking about it.”

  “I just don’t want to talk about it,” Matty said. “It’s too hard.”

  “But you can’t just pretend it isn’t happening,” I argued.

  She stared at me. I stared back at her. We were like the opposing queens of a chess set, forever poised for battle.

  Then Jed broke in. He was like a knight, leapfrogging over the pawns to surprise us. “Guys, let’s go sneak into the garage.”

  Matty looked away. I let my breath out in a loud whoosh. “Okay. Fine.” I’d let them off the hook for a little while longer. The garage was always worth a trip, the coolest part of an already cool house.

  “We’re going outside!” Jed shouted into the kitchen. Nobody said anything in response. Come to think of it, it was probably pretty awkward in there, what with Zaide being fully aware that the other four adults in the room were ganging up on him and wanting to send him to what was basically a hospital-jail. At least, it was awkward enough that none of the adults even thought to call back, Why are you going outside when it’s like thirty degrees out there?

  It was pretty chilly in the garage, too. The ceiling stretched two or three stories overhead, and the lights above hardly served to make a dent in the dense tangle of stuff, especially toward the back. We’d been sneaking out here probably once a month for years now, and we still hadn’t been able to examine everything. Half the stuff was rusty old machines and detritus left behind by the telephone company, another half was old farm equipment Zaide and Bubbe Ruth had brought with them fifty years ago when they sold their chicken farm, and a third half was old things they’d accumulated in these past fifty years and couldn’t bear to throw away. Yes, if you were counting, I did just list three halves. There was that … much … stuff.

  Matty was convinced there was treasure hiding somewhere in the back. She had not yet succeeded in convincing me or Jed.

  “Where should we start this time?” Matty asked, but she was already winding her way toward the back, her phone out to act as a flashlight. We’d checked out the front section a thousand times—mostly pieces of old furniture, an armchair with coils poking through the seat and a three-legged table among them—so we obediently followed her. Jed went next, pushing large pieces of equipment out of the way so that they wouldn’t fall over and smash me.

  Being in the back of the garage felt like being in a thicket, the three of us small beneath looming shadows of sharp, dangerous-looking things. Sometimes I was convinced the garage went on forever. I cast an eye around. Something big with blades that I didn’t want to get too close to lurked on my left, so I moved toward the right. There rested an old chest of drawers with a fleur-de-lis pattern, so many chips of paint missing that it was mostly just bare wood now.

  Jed and Matty were somewhere close ahead. Matty whooped. “Lee, there’s a toilet back here!”

  While they were fascinated by the toilet, I slid the top drawer open. A few books were strewn inside. I picked one up and turned it over. It was in either Hebrew or Yiddish; I didn’t understand more than a few words in either, but I could read their common alphabet. This book was a copy of the book of Genesis, and from its tattered black cover and yellowed pages, it looked really old. I flipped through the opening pages, my eyes catching on the year the bo
ok was published. 1882! Really old was right. Even Zaide hadn’t been alive back then. This must have belonged to his own mother and father … or even his grandparents.

  Maybe there were more things in the drawers that Zaide had brought over from the old country, more little bits from his past. The next drawer held a collection of what looked like old electrician manuals, filled with diagrams of plugs and sockets and wires—which made sense, since Zaide had become an electrician after being a farmer. These manuals must have been what he used to study. The third one contained a tumble of costume jewelry and some scarves that smelled like mothballs. Maybe they’d belonged to my grandma or great-grandma. I smiled at the thought of Zaide playing dress-up with them. Those clip-on earrings would look great with his bald head.

  In the bottom drawer rested an envelope—not a letter-size one, but one of the big ones that could fit a whole unfolded packet of paper. I picked it up. Something rustled inside, the sound my shoes made when I got back from the beach and dumped out all the sand.

  That was odd. Why would Zaide have kept an envelope of sand lying around? Granted, an envelope of sand was probably more useful than all the broken machinery that hadn’t been used in fifty years. He claimed he’d learned from the Great Depression never to throw anything away, because you never knew when you might need it. Mom and Dad said that Zaide was a hoarder.

  The envelope was sealed shut, but it had probably been out here for fifty years—nobody would notice if I opened it. I couldn’t even see Jed and Matty at this point. They’d been swallowed by the shadows in the back, but I figured they were okay as long as I didn’t hear any screaming. I cracked the envelope open and peered inside.

  My first thought had been correct: The envelope was full of dirt. I tipped the envelope from side to side, trying to see if maybe there was something hidden beneath the dirt, but … well, it was just dirt.

  Wait. I tipped the envelope a little bit farther to the side. I couldn’t explain why, but my heart started beating fast. Like it knew something big was coming. A hidden birth certificate that proved I was actually the daughter of a famous movie star who’d had to send me into hiding so I wouldn’t be warped by her fame. Or something. Not that I’d ever thought about that as a possibility before.

  It was not a secret birth certificate, movie star–related or otherwise. It was a scrap of paper as yellowed as the pages of Zaide’s old books. When I reached into the envelope to pull it out, a corner of it crumbled into the dirt.

  Upon the scrap of paper were written Hebrew letters. I sounded them out slowly from right to left. A jolt ran through me as I closed my lips over the last syllable. Was that…? It was…?

  Zaide’s words from several days ago ran through my head. At the end, he pushed a paper inscribed with the shem—the true name of God—into the clay figure’s mouth. That would mean … that this was … I squinted into the envelope, like the dirt might suddenly form itself into a person and wave hello.

  It did not.

  I shook my head at myself, sticking the piece of paper back inside the envelope. Nobody was supposed to know the true name of God—it was lost to time. What I was thinking was crazy. Golems were not a real thing, no matter what Zaide said. If he’d been telling that story as fact, maybe it was time for him to go into a nursing home. I snorted, half in laughter and half in horror at myself for making a joke like that, even if it was only in my own head.

  Though … my parents’ words raced by after Zaide’s. It’s hard for him to be alone now, and it’s only going to get harder. If golems were real, maybe one could live with Zaide and keep him company. Make sure he was okay.

  If. That was the key word.

  “Leah!” Matty’s voice had a weird echo. “Look what we found!”

  I stood on my tiptoes to see over the ancient refrigerator in front of me—half the size of the one we had at home—and could just barely glimpse Matty and Jed making duck faces at me in the light from her phone. They must have found an old hat rack, as each of them wore an impressively hideous cap. Matty’s was an old-fashioned fedora with a lime-green plaid pattern, while Jed’s was wide brimmed and bright red, with a feathered plume sticking straight out of it. I couldn’t hold back a laugh as I pictured Zaide wearing either one.

  “Come on!” Matty said. “There are lots more here. Leah, I think you should wear this one to school. That will make you popular.” She waved a neon pink wicker monstrosity at me.

  “I’m coming,” I said, stepping forward. And then stopped. Without thinking too hard about what I was doing, I slid the envelope into my waistband and covered it with my shirt.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THAT NIGHT, I SHOVED MY face into my pillow and made myself go to sleep. The night after, I thought about the envelope I’d hidden away in my desk before I dismissed the thoughts as ridiculous. The night after that, those thoughts lasted another couple of minutes before I mentally told them, Go away, because you are being absurd. And the night after that, when my parents still refused to talk to me about Zaide, that voice in my head was a little bit less convincing.

  On Friday night, I lay in bed in my pajamas and stared at the ceiling. I couldn’t stop thinking about it all. The envelope of dirt and the ancient shem. Which was ridiculous. Magic wasn’t real. Golems weren’t real.

  But … what if?

  No. You’re not a little kid anymore, Leah. You know it’s not real.

  And yet … what if it is?

  I threw the covers off myself. I was getting warm anyway. Like my body was running along with my mind.

  If golems were real, I could make one and have it take care of Zaide so that he wouldn’t have to go to the nursing home, and I could keep my Saturday afternoons with him and Matty and Jed, and Matty wouldn’t disappear with her cool soccer friends, and Jed wouldn’t fail math. If Mom and Dad noticed something was off, all I’d have to do is remove the shem from the golem’s mouth, and it would crumble back into a pile of dirt. Or maybe they’d even be all for this plan. It couldn’t hurt to try, right? Nobody would ever have to know if I failed.

  But where could I mix this? It wasn’t like I could head down to the kitchen and pull out a mixing bowl, collect a scoopful of dirt from the yard, and roll it out on the kitchen counter like bread dough. One, my parents might wake up and ask me what I was doing, and I would have no idea what to say to them. Two, even if they didn’t wake up, I’d make a huge mess and have to deal with cleaning it up. That crossed anywhere else inside off my list. So I’d have to go outside. I’d need to find somewhere with a big enough bowl to mix a bunch of dirt without making a—

  The soup pot. The soup pot! It was embarrassing that it had taken me this long to think of it. Matty, Jed, and I had mixed enough “soup” in that giant pothole that some extra dirt wouldn’t even be noticed.

  I swung my legs off the side of the bed. If I tried to make a golem right now while nobody was around to watch, I couldn’t be embarrassed when it failed. If Matty and Jed didn’t know about it, they couldn’t say I was being babyish for believing in magic. Even though I didn’t believe in magic. But still.

  Maybe I did believe, a little bit. Otherwise I wouldn’t keep asking myself what if.

  My school clothes from today were still draped over the back of my desk chair: black leggings, a green plaid skirt that looked almost like a school uniform, a white shirt with ruffled sleeves. It was fancier than the type of thing I usually wore, but I’d seen the mannequin wearing the outfit at the store. It had looked exactly like something Isabella Lynch would wear, and so I begged my mom to get it for me, even though it wasn’t on the clearance rack and she usually liked shopping only on the clearance rack. I hesitated, then put on a T-shirt and jeans. I was going to be mixing a bunch of dirt together. I didn’t want to get my Isabella Lynch outfit dirty, even if it was going in the wash soon. Carefully, I pulled the envelope out of the desk drawer.

  Down the stairs, my sock feet slipping smoothly over the wooden surface. I knew enough to avoid the center of
the two steps in the middle, where they creaked. Downstairs, the foyer was dim and gloomy, moonlight filtering in from outside so that everything wasn’t just black.

  I glanced into the living room to the right. Nobody was curled up and snoring on the comfy green couch. To the left. Nobody was enjoying a late-night snack at the dining room table, though my own face stared back eerily from the mirrored curio cabinet, pale as a moon. I stared myself in the eye and took a deep breath. Then I slipped out the front door and into the night.

  Our block was not actually that spooky, even this late. Streetlights cast warm pools of light on the half-dead lawns and sidewalks so that I didn’t have to walk in the dark until Zaide’s backyard. A neighbor I didn’t recognize was out, wearing a heavy coat over what looked like pajamas, yanking a stubborn beagle along on a leash. She called him a bad word as he stopped to sniff every pile of leaves and blade of grass. “God bleep it, go to the bleeping bathroom already.”

  The dog was so cute. I made a mental note to ask Mom for a dog.

  When I got to Zaide’s house, I stole into the side yard. I didn’t have to worry about waking him up, not like my footsteps were going to be loud enough to wake a mouse through three-foot-thick brick walls. He was going a little deaf in his old age. It actually made his house better because he’d had to install Christmas lights that blinked and flashed whenever his house phone rang so that he wouldn’t miss a call.

  I made another mental note to ask Zaide how he expected to hear the person on the other end if he couldn’t even hear the phone ringing.

  Thinking about that kept me busy as I crept toward the soup pot. It wasn’t visible from the front of the house, but it was lit up by the lights of the parking lot behind the fence.

  I crouched on the pavement next to the soup pot and set the envelope down beside me. There wasn’t that much dirt in the envelope, so I’d have to collect dirt from Zaide’s yard to mix with it. I still wouldn’t have enough to make a person-size sculpture, but Zaide hadn’t said anything about making his golem life-size. Besides, nothing was going to happen, and I was going to end up feeling stupid.