Plus One (6 page)

Once upon a time, back before kids in the days of $600 cars, Alex was an eager accomplice. She taught him which San Gabriel Valley Sally Armies were off the radar and which ones were picked over by the Melrose Avenue scouts. She showed him where to find 1960s three-button suits and obscure punk rock LPs for a quarter a pop.

Alex had appreciated thrifting in the abstract, as an act of rebellion against disposable retail culture. He liked Figgy's name for it: urban archeology. The actual experience of thrifting, however, made him sad. He always seemed to bump into a lady reading
a Robert Ludlum paperback to an invisible best friend, or trip over a kid cradling a moldy stuffed animal. Even the stuff itself freaked him out: the amateur oil painting of the big-eyed poodle, the Dollywood ashtray, the picture frame with the photo of the cross-eyed kid
still in it
. Each item had a person attached to it, and a lot of these people, he knew, were diseased, demented, or just plain dead.

Alex finally had enough during a thrifting holiday in Vegas. Figgy had heard the shops near the strip were packed with the treasures of transients and gamblers. One afternoon Alex was looking through an assorted bin near the register of a shop near Fremont when he saw it. On top of the pile, marked with a price tag reading ONE DOLLAR, was an old jock strap. He picked it up. The front section, the little beige pouch where you put your business, was splattered with blood.

Alex stood at the register, the item dangling limply from his pinched thumb and forefinger. He couldn't even begin to comprehend the back story. It was all too horrifying… someone had a jock strap, somehow got blood on it, and now it was in his hand, for sale… for a dollar.

And that was it: the end of Alex's career as Figgy's thrifting wingman. From then on, when asked if he'd accompany her, he need only utter those three words: bloody jock strap.

Figgy kept right on, of course. The arrival of the kids may have cut down on her shopping time, but it gave her expeditions a new urgency. Now, along with the glass grape centerpieces and Franciscan dishware, she began amassing vast numbers of Little Golden Books, Fisher-Price toys, and View-Master slides.

All of which contributed to an atmosphere of barely controlled chaos at home. Their house was nice enough, a compact Craftsman in Atwater Village, what real estate people hopefully called “a transitional neighborhood.” The house had good bones, actual character, and, if you stood on tippy toes from the patio, a
view across the concrete drainage ditch of the L.A. River to Griffith Park. But what had seemed funkily adventurous when they were cohabitating singles now felt shabby and inadequate.

Clearing away a pile of crap in the entry hall to make room for the flowers, Alex felt breathless and jumpy. There was no way he could spend the whole day here, with Figgy holed up in the bathroom with her winged lady and the Supreme Tropical Paradise lording over him as he navigated through goat trails of clutter.

So in a rush, he got the kids dressed and announced the commencement of a Sherman-Zicklin Family Adventure Day. Figgy agreed, quickly rallying and calling up a page on her iPhone listing ethnic festivals within a fifty-mile radius. (Lithuanians! Koreans! Greeks! Alex was pretty sure that since the advent of Family Adventure Day, he'd consumed every global variation of fried dough and barbecued meat.) As they hustled out the door, Figgy leading the pack, Alex smiled. Figgy was his playmate, his co-conspirator; whatever happened with her work, she was still the girl who'd drop everything and get up and go. She was game—always had been.

Today's Sherman-Zicklin Family Adventure Day began as it always did, strapping the kids into Alex's trusty green Subaru. As he buckled Sylvie in, Alex felt a wave of calm descend over him. They were contained. Their range of wrongdoing had been reduced.

“You're a girl,” Sylvie announced to Sam as they pulled out into traffic, apropos of nothing. Second only to her love of food was her enthusiasm for bugging the living shit out of her brother.

Figgy looked up from her iPhone. “Honey, don't. Please.”

“It's true,” she said. “You're a girl.”

“Stop!” shrieked Sam.

“You're
so
a girl.”

“Cut it out!”

Alex peered through his rearview mirror at Sylvie, who was
now gazing calmly at the passing traffic. How did a second grader who still seemed baffled by the mechanics of wiping her own ass know so well how to engineer a full meltdown in her older brother?

“Girl,” Sylvie said, economizing.

“Sylvie, what's the first family rule?” asked Figgy.

A bright smile lit up her face as she spat out the oft-repeated line: “Don't be a dick.”

“That's right,” Figgy nodded. Alex cringed. He'd never liked Figgy's habit of addressing the kids like college roommates, even as he marveled at how the kids' use of what Figgy called “strong words” (“Because there are no ‘bad' words,” she'd say) would often distract them from whatever nonsense had caused a fight in the first place.

This time, however, Sylvie was too far gone to pull back. After a momentary pause, she took a deep breath and started singing, the words linking together into a lilting Broadway show tune: “Girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl—”

Sam began to screech.

Alex swiveled his head back. “Order in the court, the monkey's going to speak,” he said. Sylvie took the bait and got quiet. She loved this game. “Speak monkey speak!”

Silence followed. By the rules of the game, after someone called out the opening line, everyone got quiet. It would last a minute, maybe two, before one of the kids either spaced out and forgot about the game or blurted out something, thereby prompting the rest of the family to call out, in a precise descending melody, “Mon-key!”

Mom was first to speak: “I'm hungry.”

“Mon-key!” came the reply, Alex reflexively joining the kids.

“Okay, I'm a monkey,” said Figgy. “But I'm a hungry monkey. So let's vote. What do you want for lunch?”

Alex held his breath, the choice of where to eat being for the
Sherman-Zicklins a notoriously agonizing negotiation. Fast food was obviously out of the question, the children having accepted Alex's explanation that all chains save In-N-Out belonged in the same general forbidden zone that encompassed tattoo parlors, gun shops, and North Korea. Which left mostly small, loud, shabby, ethnic restaurants whose first-generation immigrant proprietors, Alex maintained, were simply more comfortable with families. Figgy wasn't so sure; she'd seen plenty of annoyed Thai waiters and peeved Chinese hostesses. Maybe, she suggested, Alex simply didn't mind bothering foreigners as much as he did white people.

Sam and his sister hollered out, in unison, their choices: “Tapas!” “Hamburgers!”

“Christ,” said Alex. “Fig, you choose. Second family rule—this is not a democracy.”

“We know,” Sam said, clumsily mouthing the line: “It's a benevolent dictatorship.”

“That's right,” Figgy said. “Okay, Sam, fine. Shake N' Burger's right off the freeway. They've got those amazing curly fries.”

“Tapas!” Sylvie screamed.

“It's Shake N' Burger, honey,” Alex said. “The decision's been made. You
like
Shake N' Burger.”

“I
hate
hamburgers!” Sylvie hollered, her voice ascending to a shriek. Tears began welling up on her lashes.

“Come on honey—relax,” Figgy said. “It's just lunch.”

“But I'm
starving
!” Sylvie sputtered.

“Black dot!” said Sam. In one of his fitful efforts at actual proactive parenting, Alex had tacked up a poster board where the kids were rewarded with gold stars for acts of generosity, civility, or kindness and given black dots for acts of disobedience, vandalism, or general douchebaggery. Poking your brother in the eye was a three-dot offense. Saying you were “starving” when your lunchbox overflowed with food and other children not so far
away were actually starving, earned you a dot. Ten stars equaled a toy or trip for gelato. Dots negated stars. Sylvie was currently at negative sixteen stars.

“I hate you!” Sylvie said.

“Please, guys, cut it out,” Alex said. “Sylvie, remember what we talked about—about your blood sugar? Hate is too strong a word. So is starving.”

“I know an even stronger word,” said Sam.

“Sam, honey, stay out of this,” said Figgy.

“I do!” Sam said proudly.

Sylvie continued the caterwaul. Alex steadied himself and tried to focus on the road. “Please, please calm down, Sylvie honey,” he begged.

Figgy switched off her phone and swiveled around to the kids. “Look: stop,” she said. “If you can get control of yourself right now, we'll go for tapas. Just calm down.”

Sylvie instantly quieted. The echo of her cry hung in the air.

Alex directed a pleading look at his wife. “Wow, thanks,” he said. “Negotiating with terrorists. Great.”

“Cock!” blurted Sam. “That's a much stronger word.”

• • •

Figgy's agent, Jess, called just as they sat down to eat. It was, in keeping with Jess's special knack for interruption, terrible timing. Sam was in a deep sulk over his hamburger defeat, head plopped on the tabletop. Sylvie, meanwhile, was in a snit over a proposed substitute for her favorite chorizo appetizer. Figgy put the cell phone on the table and turned on the speakerphone, just in time to capture Sylvie's tantrum revving up anew: “No chorizo blanco!” she hollered, fresh tears bursting from her face. “Nooooo chorizo blanco!”

“Fig, honey—get that girl whatever she wants,” came the voice
of Jess. “Get her some caviar! Pop that girlie some champagne!”

Fig leaned forward, pulling her hair forward over her face. “She's seven, Jess. It's bad enough she knows from Spanish sausage.”

“You get the flowers?” he asked.

“I did. Gorgeous. Nowhere to go but down from here. Now it'll be all the more devastating when you send supermarket carnations after the backlash next year.”

“Oh please,” Jess said. “The approval cycle's not
that
short. You've got at least two seasons before the honeymoon ends. Do you have any idea what we're gonna
do
with this? As far as your deal? Serves the studio right for being so cheap last go-around. They got their three-year commitments from the cast, but your contract is wide open. You see the TV today? All the morning shows are running that ‘girl power' clip. You're the
face
of the show!”

“No thank you,” Figgy said. “That's Kate's job. I'm strictly behind the camera.”

“Speaking of, tiny talent issue,” he said. “Got a message from the studio this morning. They want to see outlines for the first three episodes ASAP. Herb's taking a personal interest. Wants to have lunch next week. I'll run interference, but they're talking about pushing production up three weeks. Your star has a commitment. Something about a graduation?”

Katherine Pool's children had become a constantly evolving X-factor in production, every play date and pediatrician appointment throwing a wrench into the show's schedule.

“For Christsakes, the kid's graduating
preschool
,” Figgy said. “We are not holding up production for Bingwen Pool's glorious entry into kindergarten.”

“We'll work it out,” Jess said. “I'm hearing they're about to up their order from thirteen to twenty-three! No hiatus, but you'll bang 'em out. You're a superstar!”

Figgy went quiet. For a second the only sound was the slurp of Sylvie devouring slices of Serrano ham like so many strips of fruit roll-ups.

“Twenty-three episodes?” Figgy said. “Am I finally gonna get paid?”

After a pause, Jess filled the silence with a sound:
beep, beep, beep
.

“Hear that?” he said. Then he did it again, with a fidelity that Alex found surprising, mimicked sound effects not being a talent Alex would expect to find in an Armani-clad TV agent:
beep, beep, beep
.

“Hear that? That's the money truck, Figgy, backin' on up.”

• • •

Alex knew enough not to believe anything that came out of the mouth of an agent. All that crazy
beep-beep-beeping
—that was just theatrics. Alex wasn't even sure what it meant, precisely—tens of thousands of dollars? Hundreds? Millions? How much went to agents, lawyers, and taxes? Figgy certainly didn't seem all that fazed, getting off the phone with a raised eyebrow and a shrug before returning to her ceviche.

It was only later, while the kids worked off lunch inside the humid innards of an enormous indoor play structure, that Alex looked over and found Figgy crying. She was slumped over on a bench beside the snack bar, her shoulders rocking. Alex reached over and pulled her into a hug. She'd been so composed the night before, which Alex chalked up to the fact that big shows of emotion were rare in Figgy. (At the movies when everyone else was doubled over in hysterics, she'd stab out a finger and declare, “That's funny.”) But now, eighteen hours later on a moist vinyl cushion at the Little Critters Indoor Playground, it was all crashing down.