The Fallback Plan (10 page)

Tierney and I met in a beginning rock climbing class. She was a political science major with a blunt set of bangs and a messenger bag covered in buttons that advertised her support for organic hemp farmers and Ralph Nader. When I had scenes to memorize, she would come over and read lines with me until I had mine down verbatim, and she was better at it than anyone in the theater program because she wasn’t a show-off. She didn’t have a repertoire of voices and impersonations to impress me with.

By the time I entered Northwestern, I’d lost contact with Summer, who had signed my yearbook,
Never forget the dressing room! I see you in there!
, an inside joke I forgot immediately after graduation. Or maybe it had never been a joke between us. Maybe she thought I was someone else when she wrote it.

Freshman year I was at my thinnest, and got cast in a scene as a pill-popping Mormon housewife. The next year I played the wife of a heroin addict who’s in love with her brother-in-law. There must have been something in my face that said,
I’m the person you fall in love with until you leave them for someone better
. I auditioned for Nina in
The Seagull
, and was cast as Masha, to mourn for my life.

That semester, I took a technique class with a guest professor from New York, a sixty-year-old woman with eggplant-colored hair, who would sometimes interrupt class to preach on of the ethical superiority of vegetarianism.

She also taught us sense memory. For the first week, we worked on holding cups and imagining they were filled with liquid. We had to imagine not only the weight but the heat, the steam, the cool click of the imaginary ice.
Don’t think
, she’d say,
do
, and I would change the hold of my mug in my hands, dispersing the imaginary heat. I was desperate to be noticed, to be given even the smallest breath of encouragement, but when I used a pantomime straw to drink my iced tea, she scolded me. “Don’t be so original. On stage you’d have a real straw,” she said. “It’s only the drink we’re trying to create here.”

We practiced putting on real lipstick in an imaginary mirror. We lay on the floor in a circle, head to head, and did relaxation exercises, muscles clenching and releasing. Once we were sufficiently comatose, she asked us to visit someone who’d hurt us and tell this person how we felt. The Brazilian girl next to me became hysterical in Portuguese. I thought of my high school boyfriend, Kyle, how he hadn’t wanted me to go to school because he wouldn’t be going himself.
Nobody makes it as an actress
, he said.
You’ll just end up back here any way. A
week into my freshman year, he started dating my best friend from first grade. In the circle, I traveled from one emotion to the next, like stepping stones
in water. We were supposed to be conjuring demons we could use later, building an arsenal of wounds.

At the top of Act One in
The Seagull
, Masha rejects Medvedenko the schoolteacher, who walks twelve miles each day only to be met by her sullen indifference. Every time I did the scene, I thought of this necklace Kyle had given me, with a tiny diamond pendant. It was the gift that couldn’t make me stay. At the shows, I kept it in the pocket of my black dress, touched it to steel my heart when Medvedenko said he loved me.

In the spring of senior year, I got Blanche in
A Streetcar Named Desire
, and after beating so many other girls for the part, I was determined to prove I deserved it, not because I was an upperclassman but because I was the best.

I bleached my hair and avoided almost everyone I knew. When I didn’t have to go to class or rehearsal, I stayed in my bedroom, in the bathrobe my mom had sewn out of Prince-purple fleece, and drank Southern Comfort. A private joke I kept with Blanche.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t just
pretend
to be her. I could have pretended. But why pretend when you can be? I wanted to leave no trace of myself.

There were nights I slept with Tyler, the boy known for having a ponytail that fell to his belt, a friend whose attraction toward me was stronger than mine toward him. He
spoke softly of submicroscopic physics and liked strategic multiplayer board games. My Mitch. He didn’t bring me flowers, but he always brought me Raisonets once I mentioned that I liked them.

Other than that, I don’t remember much else of those weeks. I couldn’t go to class because it took me two hours just to get out of bed. I stopped taking showers. When I stopped answering my phone my mom began leaving concerned voicemails, suggesting that I not work too hard, that I should spend more time outside in the sun, “playing Frisbee or whatever it is you like to do.” With the obsession and dedication that other people spent writing their honors theses, I answered online mental health questionnaires. Did I do things slowly? Did I feel trapped or caught? Did I spend time thinking about
how
I might kill myself?

My descent was both sudden and gradual, unannounced and expected. I wallowed at the bottom. The entirety of my days meant nothing until I got to rehearsal, where I could weep and feel superior to everyone else in the cast because they were pretending and I was not.

A week before we opened, I showed up to rehearsal an hour late with my shoes in my hand. I must have meant to put them on and then forgotten. There were scratches all over my arms and I couldn’t explain how I got them. I still don’t remember. I never performed. The director let my understudy, Carolyn, a redhead I resented for her false kindness, rehearse that day, and the assistant director walked
me to the student health services office. They admitted me to the hospital. I was considered a danger to myself.

I asked that they call Tierney, thinking that if anyone would know what to do she would, and she stayed with me until my parents could get there. We played hangman.
Chlorofluorocarbon, dastardly, phlegmatic
. I kept asking Tierney if she thought they’d really let Carolyn go on as Blanche, because she was too fat to fit in my costumes, and her accent sucked. Tierney said she was sure I’d be fine and they’d let me out as soon as my parents got there.

“Maybe they’ll let me do the show if I promise to come right back,” I said.

“Maybe,” she said.

“You could be my chaperone. You could be my shadow. Penumbra.”

But as soon as my parents got there, I was admitted.

The cast sent flowers and a Chinese paper lantern to put over the bulb in my room, but there wasn’t a bulb. There were fluorescent lights, and they flickered on and off throughout the night.

I don’t want realism. I want magic!

I didn’t need that many more credits to graduate, and I finished the semester like an invalid, by writing papers and mailing them to my professors. It was a reclusive finale to four years of public performance, a couple of months of a drug-induced fog, more long days in my bathrobe, a finale I think Blanche would have appreciated.

Every night, I dreamed I was standing alone on stage in front of a full house and when I opened my mouth to speak my lines, nightingales flew out and I choked on them.

I sent Jack a text message after I parked. When I got to his building, I looked up and there he was, smoking on the balcony with an air rifle across his lap. It was close to midnight. I waved. He threw me his keys. I don’t know why he never just buzzed me in, but the throwing of the keys was a ritual I now depended upon; it made me feel like my life was an Italian movie. I wondered if he threw keys to Jocelyn.
On our wedding night
, I thought,
I will confess how much I love this key-throwing, and he will say, I’m so glad you do, because Jocelyn hated it, and I will say, Aren’t you glad you chose me?

And when we are old
, I thought, walking up the carpet-stained stairs,
and live on the floor for dementia patients together, and he can’t throw keys or climb stairs anymore, he will hold open all the doors to all the rooms for me. We will take turns pushing each other in wheelchairs to the sun room or, if they are electric, we will race
.

The hallway outside Jack’s door smelled like tacos. I let myself in. I’d never been to Jack’s without Pickle. There was an opened jug of cheap chianti on the table and before he said anything, he handed me a glass.

“Drink,” he said.

“Where’s yours?”

“I’ve already had three.” Jack sat on the couch with one arm along the back of it. He was wearing a dark gray t-shirt that said, “Bruce Lee Is My Homeboy,” underneath a striped dress shirt, and a pair of red gym shorts. A white candle burned in an empty tuna fish can.

“Notice anything different?” he said.

I didn’t. The apartment was just as messy as it always was, even with the candle’s added ambiance. There were dishes piled in the sink, empty frozen pizza boxes on the counter, and a paper towel on the carpet that was soaked through with wine. I felt overcome by the same twitchy urge to clean I felt at Amy’s. I wanted to put on an apron and a red bandanna and a smile. I wanted to sit next to him on the couch.
Make out with me and I’ll clean your apartment
.

I continued to stand next to the table.

“Are there more BB holes in the wall than last time?” I guessed.

“Nope.”

“Is it the candle? You made that candle holder out of a can of tuna?”

“Come on,” he said.

“Did you get your hair cut?”

“Today’s my
birthday
,” Jack said, in his best imitation of bashful. He looked down at his feet and then lifted his
eyes without lifting his chin, like a puppy who knows he’s in for it.

“Today’s your birthday?”

“Yep.”

“Oh,” I said, and smiled, hoping my teeth weren’t stained from the wine. “Happy birthday. Where’s Jocelyn?”

“Why do you always ask where she is?”

“Because she’s your girlfriend,” I said.

“No, she’s not.”

“She’s not your girlfriend?”

“We got in a fight.”

“About what?”

“Does it matter?”

I decided to drop it. Now that we were standing on the precipice of a relationship that would last the rest of our lifetimes, I figured there would be time for me to bring up the subject again later.

“If I had known it was your birthday,” I said, “I would have gotten you a present.”

Jack didn’t say anything. I felt awkward standing by the table so I walked toward the couch, but he didn’t move his legs so I had to go all the way around the coffee table to sit down. I drank my wine. It was cheap and sweet. I couldn’t wait until we were middle-aged and could afford our own condo and top-shelf alcohol.

“While we were fighting, Jocelyn said that you sent her a text message.”

“Did I?” I finished the glass, and wiped the corners of my mouth with my fingers, trying to make it look like I was just being thoughtful.

“Did you?”

“I don’t even know her phone number,” I lied.

I had found it in his phone, when Jack left it behind in the apartment one night to go stand in the street with Pickle and light a cardboard vacuum cleaner box on fire.

“She said, ‘You talk about Esther all the time. Why not date the Jewess?’ ”

“She said that?” What was I—Gertrude Stein, the town Jew? Actually, yes. Yes, I was.

He finally looked at me. “You’re sitting too close.”

“Sorry,” I said, and moved over. “I feel bad that I didn’t get you a present.”

“You could do my laundry. I don’t have a mom who does mine.”

“My mom doesn’t do my laundry.”

“I bet she at least makes you dinner.”

It was true. “Sometimes,” I said.

“Well, unlike yourself, I had Arby’s for lunch, and then I broke up with my bitchy girlfriend, and my parents said they got me something but they’re going to have to give it to me next weekend because tonight they went to an auction to raise money for my brother and sister’s school. Pickle’s with his cousins at the dunes. I’m an orphan.”

“I’ll do your laundry,” I said. “I’ll even put candles in it and you can blow them out.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Then don’t.”

“Have another drink,” he said. “There’s a bowl of quarters next to the microwave.”

After I stood up he resumed his video game. I went in the bedroom, where his dirty clothes overflowed three laundry baskets, and started to sort. Without even trying, I found lace panties, two pairs of cheerleader shorts, and a stretchy cotton headband. I was tempted to throw these out the window. Instead, I put them inside his golf bag at the back of the closet. The bag was covered in dust. I sneezed. Jack didn’t bless me. He must not have heard. There were helicopter sounds coming from the TV in the next room. Miami was under siege.

When I had a basket of darks ready to take downstairs to the laundry room, I felt a soft hand on the back of my neck. I didn’t move because if this were a movie, and I was in it, that’s what I would do. Jack kissed my ear. He put the top of it in his mouth. I couldn’t tell if I liked the feeling or not, but I wasn’t going to ask him to stop. He reached up the back of my shirt and unsnapped my bra with one hand while the other reached up the front.
Any pins and needles sensations? Loss of feeling in your arms or legs?
I continued to hold the laundry basket. I knew I was not wearing lace panties or cheerleader shorts or a stretchy cotton headband.
Jack reached around and undid the zipper on my jeans.
You don’t have to do anything
, I told myself.
You just have to hold on to the laundry basket. Pretend it’s Jack. Pretend Jack is kissing you
.

It was Jack. I felt confused.

“Put down the laundry basket,” he said, in a normal voice.

I put it on the floor. I asked if he could turn off the lights.

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Not yet.”

We lay on the bed together, side by side, like stargazers. I wondered how long it had been since the sheets had been washed. I tried not to think about it, to think of sexy things instead.
Nate. A Winnebago. Nate would turn out the lights in the Winnebago if I asked him. Jesus Christ. Stop thinking about Nate. You’re with Jack
.