Wish Upon a Star (4 page)

But for that Saturday night, New Brunswick was perfect.

Everything was simple in Jersey—I could be Amy’s little sister, Justin’s relatively tolerant aunt. I feasted on Tater Tots, discovering that I was ravenous after two solid days of moping around. It was Super Soldier Saturday, the time each week when Justin completed a scrapbook page for his father, coloring pictures of what he’d done during the preceding seven days. Justin demanded that I draw Soldierman, a flying superhero who swooped in to help out the good guys whenever they needed an extra hand. I tried not to take it personally when he said that my stick figures looked stupid.

After Justin went to bed back in Amy’s room, my sister and I worked our way through the better part of a jug of cheap Chablis. I was well past tipsy when I said, “I just can’t believe how easy it was to picture my married life with Sam. It should have been perfect. He’s a lawyer. He’s rich. Settled. I was totally ready to jump into Instant Motherhood.”

“Yeah, right,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

“You aren’t ready to do
anything
responsible.”

“That’s a lousy thing to say!” I glared at her.

“It’s the truth. You always have a boyfriend, and you always shape your life to match his. But you get really lost in guys. You always have.” Having shared that profound thought, Amy sat up on the couch, very straight and very proper. That was the first time I realized how drunk she was. How drunk I was. She held her head very still as she enunciated. “You need to make a plan, if you want to change your life.”

I splashed wine over the lip of my goblet, refilling my glass. “What sort of plan?”

“A Master Plan!” she announced. When I stared at her as if she were insane, she repeated, “A Master Plan. Like a business plan, but for your life.”

I rolled my eyes, but Amy ignored my skepticism. “You need to think out of the box, Erin. Do a complete drill down, a total cost-benefit analysis of all this relationship stuff.” I started to protest—I hated all that business school jargon—but she closed the fingers of her free hand around my wrist. “Erin, you’re a strong and independent woman, but you always hide that by latching on to a guy. You don’t need Sam back. You don’t need anyone.”

I blinked away tears, suddenly overwhelmed by sisterly loyalty. Or too much Chablis. I swallowed noisily and said, “Except for you.”

“Except for me,” Amy agreed, and then she hid a small burp behind her hand.

“But what will a Master Plan do?” I asked. I was pretty sure that slurring my words wouldn’t be part of the new regimen.

“It will revitalize your brand.”

“Brand?” Even under the influence of way too much alcohol, I took offense at that. “I’m not some new car or something, for you to advertise in a marketing class!”

“You’re not anything new at all,” Amy said. “But you will be. You’ll be you, Erin. Not some guy’s idea of what you should be.”

I wanted to protest. I wanted to complain. I wanted to say that Amy wasn’t being fair, that she was making everything too simple, that she didn’t understand.

But she was right about one thing. I really did need a break from the relationship merry-go-round. I needed to figure out why things never, ever worked out, not with any one of the guys I’d dated for way too many years. I sagged into the cushion on the couch and tried not to pout when I asked, “So, what do I do?”

“First!” Amy said, holding up one finger. “You need to get a plant.”

“A plant?” I wondered if I was even more drunk than I thought I was. She wasn’t making any sense at all.

“A plant. Something small. A houseplant that you can keep in a corner of the kitchen.” I nodded as if that was logical, and Amy elaborated. “You’re going to develop a core competency in caring for your plant.”

I was awed by the responsibility. “Core competency,” I said, and I drained my glass. This might be my last chance to get good and drunk, if I were going to be responsible for a plant.

“And then!” Amy announced, holding up a second finger. “One month later, you’ll get a fish.”

“A fish?” I barely righted the bottle in time to keep from flooding the couch with cheap wine.

“A fish,” Amy confirmed. “Nothing fancy. A neon tetra, maybe. Something small. Hard to kill. You’re going to leverage your core competency. You’re going to grow the relationship.”

“Great,” I said, but she was already moving on to the next stage.

“And after you keep the fish alive for three months, then you can get a kitten.” Amy cocked her head to one side, as if she were evaluating
me
for potential adoption, and then she said, “Well, maybe a cat. They’re less trouble than kittens. You’ll really be able to gain traction with a cat.”

“I can handle a kitten!” I pulled my sleeve over the heel of my wrist to mop up the wine that I’d just spilled on the coffee table.

“Of course you can,” Amy said, with the maddening doubt of an older sister. “And after one year of keeping your cat alive,
then
you can consider dating a guy.”

“A year!”

“Twelve months,” Amy said, nodding with absolute certainty. “The whole idea is to slow things down. Focus on you—what you want, what you can do. Land more roles, even if they’re small ones, like the ones you’ve already had. You need to forget about men, about what you think they want, what you think they expect of you. It’ll take twelve months to transition all the way from cat to man. Trust me. This Master Plan will be game-changing.”

Tick. Tick. Tick. My biological clock didn’t think I needed to change my game. Or maybe that was just my bladder talking. My kidneys were working overtime. “So let me get this right,” I said. “One month for the plant. Plus three months for the goldfish. Plus twelve months for the cat. You’re talking about…” I had to stop, to add up the numbers, which proved surprisingly difficult in my inebriated state. “Sixteen! Sixteen months!”

“You dated Sam for longer than that, and where did that get you?” Amy shook her head with all the fierce certainty of an older sister, and a business school student besides. “This is for your own good!

Sixteen months. It couldn’t be worse than what I’d just gone through, than the decisions that had left me drunk on my sister’s couch, jobless, homeless and manless.

In college, I’d changed my major every quarter, more often than not because I had a new boyfriend and was following him to new and exciting classes. We were talking about less than a year and a half to improve myself under Amy’s Master Plan. Certainly I could devote that much time to making myself a better person. A more independent person. A happier person.

I raised my glass. “To the Master Plan!” I exclaimed. Amy clinked my goblet with hers, and we both downed the wine that remained. For good measure, we decided to break into the emergency stash of chocolate in the freezer. By that time, it was three in the morning, and we were both exhausted. I barely stayed awake long enough to wash down a couple of aspirin with a giant glass of water. I fell asleep reciting the steps of my Master Plan.

Justin, of course, was up before dawn, sneaking into his room to retrieve his transport helicopter toy. Despite my dark-of-night aspirin consumption, my head was pounding. I wished that I could invent a fail-proof hangover cure, a perfect pill that would banish aches, nausea and the fuzz on the roof of my mouth. I barely managed to keep from snapping at Justin. After all, it wasn’t
his
fault that he had a drunk for an aunt.

I finally gave up on sleep and made the phone call that I’d avoided the entire day before. Of course, Sam didn’t answer his cell, but I left him a breezy message, trying to sound glib and carefree when I told him he was off the hook. I asked him to call me, and I hung up with a little laugh, as if I didn’t bear him any grudge, as if I were happy with everything in the entire world.

Once again, I wondered why New York’s finest directors were never around to witness my acting coups.

Amy stumbled out of her bedroom just as I snapped my cell phone closed. Bleary-eyed herself, she fortified us with strong coffee, stacks of hot buttered toast and more than a few wisecracks about how we were both getting old. Before my body had fully forgiven my alcoholic assault the night before, I stumbled back to the bus stop and into the city.

I spent the ride telling myself that I was starting over. Clean slate. New me. With my Master Plan in place, I would hit every possible audition I could. I would find a new Survival Job. I would turn my life around. I would take charge of my career. I was a free and independent woman who could do whatever I wanted to do, whenever I wanted to do it.

Go, me.

I had plenty of time to perfect my pep talk. Door-to-door took an hour and forty-five minutes. I made a better connection for the bus than I had heading out to Amy’s, but I still had to get downtown to the Mercer.

This was never going to work, long-term.

Sunday was always crazy in the box office. There was a matinee at two, and an evening show at eight. Inevitably, patrons left their tickets at home, or they thought they were ticketed for the other show, or they just wanted to check next season’s dates against their calendars, so that they could work out exchanges for next December’s performance seven months early.

Just to make the day a little more challenging, my scheduled coworker didn’t show up. I supposed that was karmic retribution—after all, I’d called in sick on my last shift. Nevertheless, I felt more and more sorry for myself as the afternoon wore on.

The Mercer’s official policy was no refunds, no exchanges, but it was important to keep customers satisfied whenever possible. The line outside my window never ended, and people started asking strange questions that I’d never needed to field before.

Were the theater chairs covered in velvet? Because one woman was allergic to velvet. (The chairs were velvet. I refunded the ticket.)

The sign on the theater door said that this production was simply a reading. One man thought that violated his rights as a season’s ticket holder—he wanted a full, staged production, or nothing. (The program had changed at almost the last minute. I refunded the ticket.)

Had anyone onstage eaten peanuts at any time during the previous twenty-four hours? Because one child’s allergies might be triggered if she was exposed. (I had no freaking idea, but better safe than sorry. I refunded the ticket.)

And then the school bus arrived. It would have been easy enough to throw a stack of group tickets at some unfortunate group leader, but nothing about my day was destined to be easy. The bus was full of bored, mumbling college freshmen, each of whom had bought a separate ticket that needed to be individually claimed at Will Call.

I glanced at my watch. Twenty minutes until the show started, and the line of people waiting for their tickets still stretched around the corner of the building.

Fifteen minutes. I was getting more frantic.

Ten. I was never going to make it.

“Need some help?”

I barely managed to glance up. “Becca! That would be wonderful!”

Becca Morris was the Mercer’s dramaturg. She did background work on every production, researching historic details, doing literary analysis, following through with anything the cast and crew needed to build their onstage reality. Some people said that dramaturgs were in-house critics, helping to sharpen productions, but I’d always thought of them as theatrical psychologists, counseling the show into being the best that it could be.

Whatever Becca’s job description was, her additional two hands made a world of difference in the box office. As if by magic, the students started speaking more clearly. Every ticket was suddenly filed in correct alphabetic order. No one came up with any more brainteasers.

The last patron walked away precisely at two o’clock. I collapsed back in my chair.

“Thank God,” I said. “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t shown up!”

Becca shoved her bright red curls behind her ears. “Some days are more challenging than others.”

“Tell me about it.” I sighed.

“Oh?” she said, her fingers moving automatically to start printing out tickets for the evening performance. “It sounds like there’s a story there.”

“No story. At least, not one that you want to hear.”

“You might be surprised.” She grinned.

I didn’t know Becca well, but I liked her. I saw her most days when I worked in the box office, and we’d both joined various actor-types over at the Pharm, a bar that the Mercer casts frequented.

Not that I’d be heading over to the Pharm anytime soon. I had to get all the way back to New Brunswick at the end of every evening. I suppressed a shudder, thinking of the late-night denizens of Port Authority. “Well, to start with, I had to take the bus in from Jersey.”

She made a rueful face. “I thought you lived on the Upper East Side.”

“I did.” I gritted my teeth and started to alphabetize the evening tickets by patron’s last name. Maybe it was the mindless rhythm of sorting the tickets. Maybe it was the way Becca stayed quiet, making just a few sympathetic noises, but not saying any actual words. Maybe it was my need to sort out what had happened, how and why my life had turned upside down so suddenly. Maybe Becca actually
was
some sort of therapist, some sort of secret psychological counselor who drew out the life stories of those around her.

Whatever the reason, I found myself telling her everything. “Wow,” I said, when I was through, long after all the tickets had been readied. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to go into all that.”

“No,” she said. “Don’t apologize.” She reached out with a quick hand, intending to comfort me. We both realized at the same time that she had a large smudge of dirt on her wrist. She laughed. “Whoops! I was gardening this morning, helping my neighbor set out some seedlings.”

I nodded, as if I knew the first thing about gardening. Becca was obviously someone who didn’t need a Master Plan. I wouldn’t know the first thing to do with seedlings.

She took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. Pinning me with her serious green eyes, she said, “Erin, I’ve got a favor to ask you.”

Great. I didn’t feel up to helping anyone with anything. But Becca had pitched in for the matinee and she’d listened to me drone on and on and on. I owed her one. “Sure,” I said, forcing a smile. “What is it?”