The Trouble with Good Ideas

by Amanda Panitch

  Dallas elbowed her in the side, using all the arm strength she didn’t get to use playing for our school soccer team. Deanna shrieked a laugh, and just like that, they were batting at each other, Dallas finally stealing a victory by swiping Deanna’s pretzel sticks. “I’ll give them back if you say pretty please,” Dallas said, dangling them just out of reach.

  Back on the outside again, I checked my phone for any messages from Lexy and Julie. We’d talked a little bit over the weekend about planning a get-together, but future weekends were busy. They had a lot of stuff going on: Purim preparations and things to do with stupid Naomi. It was pretty sad, thinking about it, how I was orbiting on the outside of two different friend groups right now.

  I wasn’t going to let Lexy and Julie drift away, though. I texted them my insides feel like gummy worms right now you guys—an inside joke—and tucked my phone back away. They couldn’t share that one with Naomi. She hadn’t been there.

  “Leah?”

  I jerked my head up. The Three Ds were looking at me again. “Yeah?” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “You said you were playing soccer with your neighbor,” Dallas said. “Do you play, like, for real?”

  I snorted. “No, I’m terrible.” Then I blushed because maybe I didn’t want to share how terrible I was at anything when I wanted people to like me. “I mean, maybe not terrible, but not good enough to play on a school team.”

  “Oh,” Dallas said, sounding disappointed. “Well, do you play any other sports?”

  I shook my head. “Not really.” There weren’t too many sports where “falling over your feet” was a positive. “Unless you count chess as a sport, I guess. I like chess.”

  Deanna shrieked and pounded her fist on the table. “No way! You play chess?”

  I could feel the earlier blush draining out of my face, leaving me sickly pale. Oh no. Had I just admitted to something that would get me made fun of?

  “I love chess!” Deanna exclaimed, her whole face lighting up. I relaxed, becoming hopefully slightly less sickly pale. She elbowed Dallas beside her. “I’ve been trying to convince these nerds to start up a chess club with me so that I could play with someone other than the old people at the library, but they won’t bite.”

  Daisy rolled her eyes. “We’re the nerds?”

  Deanna smiled big at me, so big she showed the edges of her gums. “This is so exciting. Leah, we have to play sometime.”

  I gave her a tiny smile in response. I wasn’t sure if I could play chess with anyone other than Zaide. It would feel like betraying him. And what if I was actually terrible at chess, too, and Zaide just hadn’t wanted to make me feel bad? Then Deanna would think I was an idiot, which meant the other two Ds would think I was an idiot, too.

  My phone buzzed. I grabbed for it, relieved to have an excuse to look away. Julie had messaged me back. So weird mine are feeling like celery stalks?? Another inside joke. My smile stretched, growing as wide as Deanna’s. Or at least I thought they were the same. I was too busy looking at my phone.

  * * *

  Nothing notable happened the rest of the day, except that Isabella Lynch spilled something down her front during lunch and walked around all day with a bright red splotch on her white shirt and didn’t even seem self-conscious about it. I didn’t have to stay after for anything, so I went home and stretched out on the couch in front of the TV, turning on some anime. As soon as I heard the rumble of the garage door, I jumped off the couch, turned the TV off, and spread my textbooks and binders out on the table in front of me. I picked up my pencil just as my mom walked through the door.

  I set it down, sighing and flexing my fingers as I did, like they were cramped after working for hours. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hi, hon.” She sat down at the table with a heavy sigh. “How was school?”

  I literally always answered that question the same exact way. “School was fine.”

  “Good. Are you almost done with your homework?”

  I shut my binder with a snap. “Basically.” I could always do it during homeroom tomorrow.

  “Good.”

  “Did you go to Zaide’s today?” I asked. Mom usually stopped by his house every single day. To check on him, she said, and make sure he was doing okay. I half suspected it was because Zaide was very old, and she just wanted to make sure he wasn’t dead on the floor.

  “Not yet,” she said. “I was just stopping home to drop off my stuff before heading over. Want to come?”

  “Sure,” I said casually, even as my heart leaped. I hadn’t heard from the golem since I left her there on Saturday. This would be the first time I’d get to see what sort of job she was doing.

  At first look, she seemed to be doing well. Mom and I walked through Zaide’s front door and shouted “Hello!” and were greeted by Zaide, who sounded in good spirits and didn’t ask who we were. We walked in farther to find him sitting on the red velvet couch, the TV showing something in black and white. I didn’t even realize they still showed TV in black and white.

  Before stepping forward to give Zaide his customary kiss on the cheek, I performed a surreptitious sweep of the room with my eyes. No golem in sight.

  Maybe she’d nodded and smiled and hadn’t come here after all. She could have lied about needing to obey me. Worry pricked me. I hadn’t actually watched her go inside Zaide’s house. I’d told her to wait outside and go in at night, when it was dark and he’d be sleeping. She could be anywhere right now.

  “I was just about to make some tea,” Zaide said when I pulled away.

  “I’ll make some,” my mom said, already moving off toward the kitchen. I trailed after her, looking around for any sign of the golem. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for, but I didn’t see anything that made me think she was here.

  Except … “Wow, look how neat Zaide’s desk is,” Mom said, raising her eyebrows as we passed by. Indeed, the desk usually covered by stacks of paper and scattered scraps was now neatly organized, piled with file folders that even had colored tabs in them. They looked a little bit like the binders I used for school. “It’s about time—I’ve been telling him to organize it for ages. I was starting to think I’d have to do it after … Well, let’s not think about that.” After he died, she meant. I gave the desk a beady eye. Golem work?

  Mom’s surprise didn’t fade away in the kitchen. “Wow!” she said, running a finger over the table. “I think this is the first time in my life it’s not all sticky!” Not only was the table’s surface not sticky, it was free of coffee rings and crumbs and dirty plates. There weren’t even any plates in the sink. Golem work?

  Mom put the water on to boil and went in search of Zaide’s tea bags. “I’m going to go to the bathroom,” I announced.

  “Have a party,” she said in response.

  I was not going to have a party, but I also was not going to the bathroom. Not like I would’ve had a party in the bathroom anyway. I had no idea why my mom said things like that. I waited until my mom’s head was fully submerged in the cabinet and then darted in the opposite direction. With Zaide staring at the TV and the volume blasting for his poor half-deaf ears, it was easy to open and close the door of the second bedroom without anyone noticing.

  The second bedroom was probably the place in Zaide’s house I’d been in least, simply because there was never much of a reason to go in there. Most of my bubbe Ruth’s old things were stored in here: her antique sewing machine and sewing basket filled with scraps of fabric and pincushions porcupined with needles, a closet full of old-lady dresses and hats. The bed sat in the middle of the small room, taking up a good half of the space.

  From under the bed stretched a lock of brown hair like a sea creature extending a leg from the water. I crouched down cautiously and looked beneath the bed. The golem stared back. “Um, hello,” I said. I didn’t think I had to worry about anyone overhearing me, what with the TV on extra loud, but I lowered my voice anyway. “How are you doing?”

  “Fine,”
the golem said back. She spoke so quietly I had to lean in to hear her, contorting my neck uncomfortably, but I figured it was the least I could do. “He’s a nice old guy. I cleaned everything up for him. The house was pretty messy.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Everything looks really good.”

  “Yeah, it does.” Again, I was struck by her confidence. How she didn’t even have to thank me for the compliment, because I was just telling her something she already knew. “He got a little bit confused last night, but I stuck with him and stopped him from doing anything that might hurt him.” She pushed out her lower lip, but not like she was sad—like she was deep in thought. “I’m pretty sure he thinks I’m a ghost.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. It didn’t matter what he thought she was, if she could calm him, keep him safe, and stop him from doing anything that might panic Mom and Dad. “Thank you.”

  She blinked at me like an owl. “You don’t have to thank me. This is what you created me to do.”

  “I know,” I said, but the thought of not thanking her for doing this massive thing for me made me squirm inside. “I still mean it, though.”

  She shrugged as best she could while hiding under the bed. In practice, it meant she shimmied around a little bit like there was something with a lot of legs trying to crawl up her shirt. “Whatever,” she said, and her tone made it clear that the conversation was over.

  She wasn’t the boss, though. “Keep it up,” I said. “Keep doing the same things, and we’ll all be fine.”

  She worked herself farther beneath. The tendril of brown hair sucked itself under the bed and vanished.

  Outside the room, the volume of the TV had lowered, and Mom and Zaide were talking. Well, Zaide was talking, and Mom was yelling. I paused, the door half-open.

  “Did you think about what we discussed last time?” Mom shouted directly into his ear.

  Zaide didn’t turn to look at her, just kept staring at the TV. “Yes.”

  “And what did you think?” Mom smiled encouragingly. “Wasn’t the facility I showed you nice? You’d be able to keep most of your independence, and—”

  “I won’t go.”

  My heart lifted. Zaide was on my side after all. And nobody could beat Zaide when he set his mind to something. Checkmate, Mom.

  “Zaide, we’re worried about you,” Mom said. And she did sound worried, but that didn’t mean she knew what was best for him. “How can we—”

  “I renovated this place from the ground up. Everything but the outside walls and cement floor, I built,” Zaide said. “I’m staying in my home, and that’s the end of that.”

  I gave myself a silent fist pump of victory, which bumped into the door and made it creak all the way open. Mom turned to look at me, and her brow furrowed. “What are you doing in there?”

  I shrugged, stepping out and closing the door behind me. “Nothing.” No need for Zaide to find Elsa living under the bed and have a heart attack. I noticed the two steaming cups of tea on the coffee table. “Where’s mine?” I asked.

  “In the kitchen,” Mom said. “I only have two hands.”

  I snorted. “Keep up the human disguise, you Jewish octopus.”

  I heard her laughing darkly as I went toward the kitchen. The people who hated Jews—there were, unfortunately, a lot of them—sometimes drew us as octopuses spreading our tentacles across the continents because, apparently, we controlled the world or wanted to control the world or whatever.

  We had to turn it into a joke because if we didn’t turn it into a joke, it meant too much thinking seriously about how many people hated people like me even though they didn’t know me. They hadn’t even seen my nose.

  Stop thinking about that, I told myself. Focus on the good things. The golem was maybe literally a godsend. She was doing everything she was supposed to do, and maybe some jerks half the world away or in the next town wanted me dead, but that didn’t matter right now. They could hate me all they wanted.

  One thing at a time. As long as the golem was working out, that would be enough for now. As we said at the Passover seder: dayenu.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I GOT HOME LATE FROM school on Thursday because I had a chorus rehearsal, and Mom and Dad were already home talking in the kitchen. I crept up the hallway so that they wouldn’t hear me, because sometimes—no, I’d say most of the time—eavesdropping is the best way to get information from your parents. It had worked before—it wasn’t like they would have volunteered on their own that they wanted to lock Zaide up in a nursing home.

  “… something’s changed,” Mom was saying. “His house is so clean. He hasn’t seemed any worse than confused when I went over there. No distress calls in the middle of the night.”

  “That’s great,” Dad replied. “Maybe it’s a change for good.”

  “We can only hope.”

  Nobody else could see me, and there was nothing to knock into this time, so I let myself do it: a victory fist pump, and not just a baby one, a big one from my face all the way to my chest. So long, nursing home.

  * * *

  The afterglow of victory lasted well into the next day. Friday was always a good one at school because everybody knew we wouldn’t have to be there the next day. The Three Ds were all smiles; one of Dallas’s moms was extremely pregnant, and Dallas was hoping she’d get a new sibling soon.

  “It’s going to be a boy,” Dallas was saying, practically bouncing up and down in her seat. Her cheeks were a bright, excited red against her pale skin and hair. “I told them they should name him Noah because Noah is an adorable name. Or Joey. I just like two syllable names.”

  Daisy squealed, her long black hair swinging as she clasped her hands under her chin. “Babies are so cute.”

  “Have you ever actually met a baby?” Deanna asked, wrinkling her nose. “Babies are gross and annoying. All they do is eat and cry and poop.” Deanna had two much-younger siblings in addition to her older brother and sister, so she would know.

  “Yeah, but they’re soooo cute while they’re doing it,” Daisy said with a sigh. Daisy was an only child like me.

  Deanna grumbled something like, You’re welcome to have my siblings, and they all started arguing. I smiled along with them, nodding when I thought I should, until some movement caught my eye over Daisy’s shoulder.

  A few of the seventh-grade boys were hurling french fries at one another at the opposite end of the room, and the lunch aides were throwing themselves selflessly into the lines of battle. Probably to save Isabella Lynch, who was presiding over a table nearby.

  I glanced quickly over at that table to make sure she hadn’t been hit, then away. Looking at her and her friends was dangerous, like looking directly at the sun. Except the danger here wasn’t going blind, it was them catching me looking at them. Not that they’d say anything or do anything major, but whoever saw me would get that little wrinkle between their eyebrows that meant scorn, and they’d turn and whisper to the person next to them, and they’d turn around and look at you, too, with the raised eyebrows that meant pathetic, and so on. Just the thought of all of them staring at me with raised and wrinkled eyebrows was enough to make my nose sweat.

  Today Isabella Lynch was wearing an oversize olive-green dress with shimmery, silver leggings underneath, all tied together with a black belt. I didn’t own any dresses like that, but maybe I could borrow a dress from my mom and belt it tight at the waist. I’d seen outfits like that in videos I watched of the runways at the last New York Fashion Week.

  Isabella Lynch tossed her dark hair over her shoulder and turned to whisper to the girl next to her. I didn’t remember seeing this girl at the lunch table before. Did she even go here? She had brown hair, and—I squinted, and then my heart stuttered to a stop.

  No.

  No way.

  “Leah,” Dallas was saying. “You don’t have any siblings, right?”

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Dallas had to prompt me again before I stumbled out with an answer. “On
ly child here.”

  Are my eyes playing tricks on me?

  Daisy gave me a high five. I caught it just a moment too late, as her smile was beginning to flicker. “Here’s to never having to share a room.”

  “So you’d be coming at this from an unbiased perspective,” Dallas said. “What name do you like? Noah or Bartholomew?”

  I didn’t know anything about names. And this was not the time to be thinking about it. Not when a potential crisis was brewing across the room.

  “Leah?” Dallas said.

  It was the golem, just sitting there like she belonged. She saw me staring; my jaw might actually have fallen open. She smiled at me and gave me a little wave. That attracted Isabella’s attention. Isabella waved at me, too, but she looked mystified, like she had no idea why she was doing it.

  If the golem was here, what was Zaide doing? Before I could think too hard about the consequences, I gathered up my books and stood. “Are you okay?” Dallas asked.

  “I just … Um, remember when I told you about my new neighbor? That’s her over there.” I was walking off before I heard Daisy asking, “But I thought you said she was going to private school?”

  Isabella Lynch’s whole table turned to look at me as I approached. The combined force of all those eyes—many mascaraed and eyelinered, unlike mine—was almost enough to make me falter. But then the golem grinned, and I filled up with anger, and that was enough to keep me forging on.

  I kept my eyes fixed on hers. “Can I speak with you in private?” I said through clenched teeth. Everybody was still staring at me. Their conversation had hushed. I knew what they were all thinking. What is she doing here? Look at that nose—isn’t it huge? Does she really think she belongs here, at this table, with all of us? Shouldn’t she know she just doesn’t fit in?

  “These are my friends,” the golem said, her voice ringing loud and clear. Even the Three Ds could probably hear her across the room. “Anything you want to say to me, you can say to them.”