The Fallback Plan (4 page)

“You could be the violinist,” my mom was saying to her nodding friend. “We need a violinist and Esther says she won’t.”

“Jeanine, I only have two hands.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m coming. Excuse me for just a minute.” She tucked her accordion back into its red upholstered bed as carefully as if it were a child and locked the case. Left with nothing to do and no one to talk to, her friend turned around to look out into the room, probably hoping to catch the eye of someone she knew. I recognized her. She taught history and language arts at the middle school where my mom taught science and math. Mrs. McGowan.

Someone began to play a slow, haunting “O Tannenbaum” on the piano in the next room. Amy closed her eyes. “Uh oh, that sounds like my husband,” she said, feigning embarrassment like he was actually playing a toy piano, or a kazoo. “We don’t have a piano at home.”

“Do you want to go watch?”

“I don’t know if I can stand up right now,” she said.

I took a cocktail shrimp off someone else’s hors d’oeuvre plate forgotten on the windowsill and that’s when Amy’s eyes went wide, and she noticed my name tags.

Before the party, I had helped my mom print sheets of them on blank address labels. Half said, “I’m Jewish. Ask me about Hanukkah.” The other half said, “I’m not Jewish. Tell me about Hanukkah.”

“I don’t want to discriminate against our guests,” my dad said when he saw what we had done.

“Paul,”
my mom teased, “your anti-Semitism is showing.”

“It’s not.”

“It is. This isn’t a requirement. This isn’t a yellow star.”

He wouldn’t wear one, and said we couldn’t actually offer them to guests; we were only allowed to leave them on a small table near the bathroom where the light wasn’t very good.

I thought it would be clever to wear both, so I did.

We weren’t religious Jews. We went to synagogue twice a year in the fall, for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish
New Year, and Yom Kippur—the Day of Atonement; we proved our reverence by fasting until sundown and turning off the radio in the car on the way to temple. It was usually windy and raining. My dad would borrow a yarmulke, I would suffer from caffeine withdrawal and forget the words to prayers, we would ask for forgiveness and it would be given to us, and then we would go out for steak at the first sight of the sun slipping below the horizon.

“I guess you didn’t see them, on the table by the bathroom.”

“Nope.”

“I don’t completely remember the story and I thought it would be funny if someone asked me and I made it up,” I said.

“I was taught to believe an angel revealed golden plates to Joseph Smith, which he translated deep in the woods so no one else would see them. You could tell me anything and I’d believe it.”

“Well,” I said, and checked to see if anyone was around to hear before continuing, “I guess the Jews were being persecuted and slaughtered as usual, and so they had to fight against the bad guys to get the Temple of Jerusalem back.” I wondered why no one had ever made a Claymation movie of this. Or maybe they had, but I’d never seen it. I would probably know the story better if I had.

Amy leaned in. “Who were the bad guys? Christians?”

“Mormons, probably. Mormons or Internet predators.”

Amy laughed and nodded. “Or both.”

“Exactly,” I said. “But anyway, they won the temple back, but when they got inside they saw that they only had enough oil to light the lamp for one night even though it’s supposed to always be lit. And they were all like,
What are we gonna do, this sucks so hard.”

“Oh, I think I remember this now,” Amy said.

“But the oil ended up lasting for eight nights until new oil could be found or made or blessed or whatever, a Hanukkah miracle. And so, each night we light another candle and we place the menorah in the window of our home to testify to the miracle, to let everyone know that even though we may have a Christmas tree in our living room, we’re still Jews. Because we believe in walking across the desert for forty years, we believe in parting seas, we believe in the mysterious love of a God who would allow horrible atrocities to befall us again and again.”

“Like the Holocaust,” she said, with the inebriate’s talent for the obvious.

“Like the Holocaust,” I said.

“So you celebrate Christmas? The tree isn’t just for the party?”

“Right.” I was only slightly less drunk than she was, and tried to appear otherwise, as I straightened my posture and focused my eyes. I couldn’t remember all of what I had just said; I wouldn’t have been able to repeat my butchered Hanukkah story for any other listener.

Amy had wide, bright eyes like speckled bird eggs that made you feel lucky to have her undivided attention, but
sometimes they left me, and roamed the room, in an anxious search for some unknowable thing, like she’d forgotten what it was she couldn’t remember, and after a minute I could see her make the conscious effort to return.

It was strange, to feel left behind without the other person moving an inch.

• • •

Before I left the party, I snuck in and stood at the back of the crowd singing “Silent Night” in four-part harmony in the dining room, while Nate played the piano. He had broad swimmer’s shoulders and a strong back. He was attractive, just as Amy was attractive, in a way that was especially apparent at a party with people fifteen, twenty years their senior. As he played piano, he sometimes hesitated, trying to find a chord, and leaned in so close to the sheet music that his nose touched the page, but no one cared how well he played as long as the melody continued uninterrupted, something to sing to, an anchor.

After the song ended he stood and took a little bow. Someone handed him a drink—something caramel-colored over ice. Where had that come from? Was that something from our cabinets? “Play ‘Auld Lang Syne’!” a woman in the crowd yelled out.

“It’s too early for that! Play ‘White Christmas.’ ”

“I think I’ve tortured everyone enough for now,” Nate
said, and nervously tugged at one of his ears. Up close and from the lines around his eyes I could see he was older than I thought, older than Amy. After he stopped playing, the crowd reluctantly dispersed.

“You play better than I do, and I’m the one they bought the piano for.”

“I’ve had more years to practice,” he said, and took a sip from his glass. It was one of our Heroes of the To rah glasses—I had found them in the cabinet above the refrigerator where we kept the party napkins. Nate’s glass had Shlomo HaMelech, otherwise known as King Solomon.

Amy had found her sea legs and joined us; she stood next to Nate, close but not touching. “Esther and I are best friends now, did she tell you?”

“Small world,” Nate said, not paying attention. He was looking at me, but he put his hand on the small of Amy’s back and I thought it was strange that she didn’t lean in; she continued to stand straight and apart from him.

“We should probably get going soon,” Amy said. She turned to look at him.

“I have to go, too,” I said. “I promised some friends I’d meet them.”

“Well, it was very nice to meet you finally,” Nate said. “We’ll have to get you to play next time.”

“Sure, next time,” I said. “We’ll get out the book of duets.”

And then I left.

It was the only house on the block with sunflowers in the yard.
Happy people live here
, the sunflowers said. They lined the driveway and bloomed in the garden near the front porch, topping stalks of purple iris and the heads of tiger lilies, bowed in prayer. The sight of the garden made up for the lawn, which was a patchwork of dry grass and white clover.
I’m depressed and I don’t care
, the lawn said.
The end is near
.

I walked up the flagstone path to the porch and knocked on the door frame. A half dozen wind chimes pealed as a breeze blew in through the screened walls.

Was I hungover? I was. Did one of my fingers hurt when I moved it? It did. Had Pickle and Jack and I hopped a fence the night before? I couldn’t remember, but the fact that I wondered if we had made me think the answer was yes.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice called from inside.

“Hello?” I said.

“Esther?” she said. “Come in, you don’t have to knock.”

The front door opened into a small foyer. There was a stairway straight ahead and to my right Amy and May were sitting cross-legged on a rug in the living room, piecing
together a puzzle of what looked like a dragon. Amy stood when I came in and shook my hand.

“Thanks for coming over,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m shaking your hand.”

“That’s okay.” We both smiled. We smiled like new friends with no common language. Her hair was the same dishwater blond as I remembered from the party, but the red-rimmed glasses were new, at least to me. She was wearing a shirt with a screenprint of a woman with antlers on her head. Amy’s arms were long and thin. She was barefoot.

“Should I take off my shoes?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter, does it, May?” she said. “Can you say hi to Esther?”

Since my entrance, May had been watching us suspiciously from the middle of the room, holding a small chenille throw blanket in the air like a toreador’s cape. When I waved, she seemed surprised that I could see her, and ran to the couch. Once on top, she pulled the blanket over her head like a veil and made herself a ghost.

Amy’s daughter was her exact replica in miniature, and all I could think was how frightened that would make me, to see myself as a child, running around, hiding under blankets.

The blanket only covered May’s head and shoulders. She folded her hands in her lap and didn’t move.

Amy gave me a sly look. She was going all out. “Did you see where May went?” she whispered.

I knew a right answer would be my initiation into their world of animal crackers and tiny barrettes, Dr. Seuss and tag.

“She moved so fast I lost track,” I whispered back.

“Olly olly oxen free,” Amy called. “Come out come out wherever you are.” She went to the couch and began to lift all the pillows and cushions around May and pile them on top of her body. “She has to be in here somewhere,” she said. “Tell me if you see her before I do. I’ll check inside the pull-out bed.”

May giggled at the bottom of the heap.

“Did you hear that?”

Amy stopped to listen with one hand cupped around an ear.

“Hear what?” I said. “That little mouse?”

“Was it a mouse?”

“Is there a mouse in the house?”

“It could be a louse,” Amy said, frowning. “It could be a louse of a
grouse
,” she said, and then pounced on her daughter, tickling her until she screamed for mercy and emerged from the upholstery, breathless and flushed.

Amy pushed her glasses up. She, too, was out of breath. “Say hi to Esther, Mayflower. You two are going to have a lot of fun together, I think.”

“I’m not a
mouse
,” May said. “I’m a baby
dinosaur
.”

She made a strangled, squeaky noise like that little girl dinosaur from
The Land Before Time
, and jumped from the couch onto Amy’s back. Amy carried her around the
room. I briefly wondered if my mom had the story wrong. Maybe one of my dad’s other coworker’s wives had lost her baby, but it couldn’t have been Amy. She didn’t seem depressed. The two of them had the frantic energy of a flea circus. I wondered if every day was like this one—if they woke up and ate Cheerios with bananas and put together puzzles of mythical beasts and dressed up in costumes and played hide-and-go-seek until someone made them turn the lights out and go to bed, like how I imagined the lives of identical twins to be. I could picture them reading together under the covers with a flashlight. Unless, of course, once May was asleep Amy locked herself in the bathroom to drink an entire bottle of Chardonnay and cry.

“I’m going to go outside for a minute,” Amy said. “Is that okay?”

“Sure,” I said.

“No,” May said.

“Just for a second, pigeon. To s-m-o-k-e,” she whispered to me. Amy put May down to go look for something in the drawers of the table in the foyer.

“I know how to read,” May said.

“You do?”

She took my hand and made me sit down on the demolished couch. Then she crawled under the coffee table to look for something. I heard the back door click shut when Amy left.

It was more of a library than a living room. A living
library. A library you could live in. There was no TV or stereo. The walls were covered in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves made of dark wood. Whatever books were too oversized to fit were piled on the floor, or on the ledge of the rolltop desk in the corner, beneath the window that overlooked the porch and front garden. The batik window shades were raised, and the sunlight illuminated all the slow-moving particles in the air, making it visible like a screen.

I fixed the couch cushions while May continued to search for whatever was missing. She looked like one of those indigenous children they photograph for
National Geographic
, crouched above an unusual bug on the ground, seriously plotting its capture. “I think I hurt my finger,” I told her, “but I don’t remember what I did.”

“Maybe you broke it a little bit,” May suggested.

“I can still move it. Kinda.”

“We have ice packs. I have a Hello Kitty ice pack that’s pink and has Hello Kitty on it.”

“Did you get it at Target?”

“My mom got it.”

“I think I saw those at Target,” I said.

The books that had been under the table were now spread in a mess across the floor.
Points of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-garde Cinema
lay next to
Bless Me, Ultima
and an educational DVD for teaching your infant Spanish. The dragon puzzle was back in pieces.

“Come on,” May said, in the voice of an adult at the end of her rope, and I followed her to the kitchen.

When Dateline NBC does special reports on parents who neglect their children, the kitchens in the re-enactments are made to look like Amy’s did. Rows of bowls filled with Fruit Loops floating in pinkish milk lined the counters. Flower vases had become Kool-Aid pitchers. There were a dozen emptied containers of microwavable macaroni and cheese and a baking pan with a picked-over chicken carcass on the stove. It smelled like rotten fruit.