The Cast

by Amy Blumenfeld

  “Golf, actually.” She started inspecting her manicured nails—a childhood habit of hers that suddenly felt familiar to me again. “He didn’t even bother to feign working. He just said there was a tournament at the country club that he couldn’t miss because ‘all the guys will be there.’ You’d think he was a teenage boy trying to fit in with the cool kids, instead of a forty-five-year-old man with children of his own. He knew for months that this trip was on the calendar.” She cleared her throat. “But anyway . . .”

  I felt sorry for her. “Well, I’m glad you made it. It’s good to see you. It’s been a long time since the whole group was last together,” I said, trying to find a more upbeat topic as I turned out of my illegal parking spot.

  “You know, I don’t think I’ve actually seen you since I moved to Chicago.”

  “When was that?” I pulled up to a red light.

  “Right after my honeymoon, fifteen years ago.”

  “Seriously?” I turned toward her in surprise. “That long?”

  “Yup.” She nodded.

  “Wow! And don’t you have, like, seventeen kids or something?”

  “Something like that.” She laughed. “Actually, I’ve got three. Two boys and a little girl. The oldest is starting high school in the fall.”

  “You have a kid in high school?” Though it was almost inconceivable that a woman who could easily pass for twenty-five was actually the parent of a ninth-grader, the fact that she was the first one in our group to have children wasn’t completely incongruous with Lex’s personality. She had always been ahead of the curve—the first to go on a date, the first to try alcohol. As the youngest child of a large family, she yearned to catch up to her siblings. When she was only five years old, she asked our kindergarten teacher to call her by her given name, Alexandra, instead of her nickname, Lexi, because she wanted to sound more “manure and fassisticated.” In fifth grade, there was a two-week period when she would answer only to Xandra, but no one bought in, so she settled on Lex and it stuck.

  “This is the first time I’ve ever left my kids.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s true. I’m not one of these women who do girls’ weekends or anything. I’d miss my babies too much.” She patted her heart, and I noticed how her gigantic, diamond-encrusted wedding band protruded awkwardly, like a massive wart, from her delicate hand.

  “But for Becca . . . ” I said.

  “Exactly. This trip was too special to pass up.” She grew quiet. “It would have been nice for Jack to see everyone.” Her tone had shifted, and I sensed something dark underneath what she was saying. It was too soon to pry, so I just kept my eyes on the road.

  For a moment, all we could hear was the air-conditioning pumping through the vents.

  “And how about you?” she asked enthusiastically, her wide grin reappearing, as if she’d had a shot of espresso. “How’s your job? How are the lay-dees?”

  “Job’s great. Love it. Really love it, actually. Took me a little while to figure out the right path, but I got there. As for the ladies, well”—I chuckled—“I do okay.”

  “Are you kidding? Bec tells me you do more than okay.” She winked knowingly.

  I could feel my cheeks flush. “Actually, my girlfriend is going to join us tomorrow. She’s got to work tonight, so she’ll catch a bus in the morning.”

  “She’s an actress, right?”

  “Mmm, no, that was my previous girlfriend.”

  “But Becca just told me about her a few weeks ago.”

  I smiled. “What can I say? I’m making up for lost time.”

  “I’d just say you peaked a smidge later than others, that’s all,” she said generously.

  “That’s kind of you.” I laughed.

  “Come on, Seth, it’s understandable. How could you not have been scarred by the whole weigh-in thing with your mom? It would have taken anyone years to recover from that.”

  I could feel my smile collapse as if someone had suddenly removed pins holding up the corners of my lips.

  “You knew about that?” I said.

  Her hand flew to her dropped jaw.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Yes, everyone knew. You didn’t know we knew?”

  “Seriously? You all knew?”

  “I mean, I knew whatever I heard from my mom,” Lex said. “We felt so badly for you.”

  When I was growing up, my parents were extremely strict. The kitchen “closed” in our house at 7:59 every night, after which no one was permitted any snacks. Candy was forbidden, but I kept a stash hidden inside a hole I punched in my bedroom wall. One day when I was twelve, my mom found the hole, filled with Snickers wrappers, while cleaning my bedroom. After that, I couldn’t play Atari for a month. My parents had struggled with their weight for years, and they feared my brother and I were genetically destined to follow in their footsteps. Even though I wasn’t obese or even overweight—just a little pudgy—my mother insisted I “learn portion control from the experts.” So, for most of junior high, she took me to her Weight Watchers meetings. It took me nearly a decade to get over my nightmares of women in 80s-style tracksuits pinching my cheeks, telling me to get my tush on the scale, and measuring me with their eyes. If I reached my goal at the weigh-ins each week, Mom would take me to Burger King for a Whopper. Even when I was a kid, the irony of being rewarded for dieting with fast food wasn’t lost on me.

  “Jesus, I can’t believe that was public. I worked so hard to keep it a secret,” I said, running my fingers through my hair. I was still mortified, even after all those years. “Anyway, I survived. It’s all good.”

  “Clearly!” She posed her hands like a game-show hostess next to my biceps, as if they were the grand prize. “And it seems like the whole college-and-career debacle worked out for you, too. God knows our mothers were en fuego analyzing that one.”

  “How could I forget? Those conversations were the soundtrack of my early twenties,” I said, and rolled my eyes. As a senior at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, I received a coveted college scholarship to Princeton University. Unfortunately, I managed to lose that scholarship by the end of my first year because I had cut the majority of my classes to play poker with my dorm mates. By the end of sophomore year, I’d flunked out of school. Gossip-laden hypotheses abounded among the neighborhood yentas back in Queens about how this shanda (Yiddish for disgrace) could have occurred. The consensus was that I simply shut down in the face of stiff competition. That if I couldn’t be the best, if I couldn’t be number one, I didn’t want to compete. At least, that was the theory my mother’s friends went with during their standing mah-jongg games in our living room on Thursdays between 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. I used to listen to the whole thing from my bedroom, and when I’d had enough, I’d cover my ears with my Walkman headphones.

  “What really happened at Princeton? I never did get the scoop.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, and let out a long sigh. “Probably just your run-of-the-mill case of a kid getting his first taste of freedom.”

  Lex cocked her head and looked at me curiously. “Really? That’s it?”

  “Okay, maybe sprinkle in some cynicism and being pissed off that bad things happen to good people and deciding that killing yourself over academics is pointless if one day you’ll wake up with a terminal disease, knocking on death’s door.” I looked over at Lex for a reaction. Her lips were slightly parted; she looked a bit shocked. “What? Too dark? Too deep?” I smiled.

  “Mmm, just a bit. I was sort of expecting you to go with ‘par-tied my ass off’ or something along those lines.”

  “Oh, well, yes, I did that, too, but I figured I’d go a layer deeper, you know? Give you the psychological underpinnings of my carpe diem impetus to party.”

  Lex turned toward the passenger window and mumbled something I couldn’t quite decipher, but I could make out the words “like my impetus to get married.”

  “I’m sorry—did you say something?” I pressed.

/>   “Oh, nothing—just thinking aloud,” she said, turning back to face me. “So, what did you end up doing when you moved home after Princeton? Did you just hang out in your bedroom, making crank calls telling people if they named thirty-one ice cream flavors in thirty-one seconds, they’d get a thirty-one-dollar coupon to Thirty-One Flavors?”

  “Ah, yes,” I said, letting out a long sigh. “The crank calls. So, is that the ingrained image you have of me from childhood—lying on the floor of my bedroom, dialing random numbers on a massive cordless phone and laughing hysterically?”

  “Oh, Seth, don’t worry—that’s just one of many pathetic images I have of you.” She laughed. “But in your defense, you had accomplices. The other girls and I were right there, egging you on. In fact, I was the one keeping track of the phone numbers you had already dialed so you wouldn’t repeat any.”

  “That’s true. I also recall one time when I got the cordless phone’s gigantic retractable antenna stuck in your bangs, and how you kept kicking me because you’d used half a can of Aqua Net getting your hair into position and I’d messed it all up. Jordana came to my rescue.”

  “Yeah, you were always sort of wimpy that way. But the beating-up was deserved. I mean, if you had devoted an entire hour of your morning trying to look hot for Gavin O’Rourke and were planning to casually walk past him and his varsity baseball buddies outside the movie theater later that day, you, too, would be pretty pissed that your perfect, gravity-defying bangs were now limp and cockeyed,” she said, adjusting her posture.

  “Jeesh!” I said, grinning. “Still sensitive, are we?”

  “All I’m saying is, back in high school, my hair routine was a top priority, and you ruined that day for me,” she said, folding her arms and turning up her nose, before a giggle emerged, forcing her to break character.

  Although I knew she was joking, I must have looked hurt. “Oh, I’m just teasing you, Seth,” she said, and put her hand on my shoulder. “So, um, how did the workout stuff come about? You look absolutely amazing now. Did you start exercising when you were living at home?”

  “Yeah. I guess when you spend six months sitting on your parents’ Barcalounger, eating Doritos, you realize you’re pretty much up shit’s creek. So I got my ass off the pleather and rented an apartment with a guy who worked as a personal trainer. He made me go to the gym with him, and I started to really enjoy it. I decided to get certified as a trainer. I worked nights to pay the rent while I took physiology and biology classes at Queens College during the day. Training people was the first time I really felt inspired and excited. I loved the science of it and really enjoyed interacting with clients. I know it sounds cheesy, but I felt like I was able to help people make a positive change in their lives. Physical therapy became the obvious path.”

  “What is that saying, ‘Man plans and God laughs’?” she said. “It’s like you think you’ve got it all figured out, and then you wake up and realize maybe . . .” She turned and looked out her window.

  “That maybe it wasn’t the right path to begin with?” I said.

  Lex turned to me and perched her sunglasses on top of her hair.

  “Exactly,” she said softly, raising a perfect eyebrow. “You know, I just saw this documentary called Race to Nowhere. It’s about how we’re putting so much pressure on kids to be ‘successful,’ but what does success even mean?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” I nodded.

  “I mean, look at you,” she continued. “You were Bronx Science valedictorian—”

  “Salutatorian.” I corrected her with a finger in the air. “That fucker Felix Kim beat me.”

  “Salutatorian, whatever.” She rolled her eyes. “My point is, you had the brass ring within reach, but you blew it, or so everyone thought. But maybe you’re having the last laugh. You got your shit together on your own time frame. I’ve only been with you for forty-five minutes, but you look amazing and you seem genuinely happy. And then there are people, like the ones who surround me every day, who do exactly what they’re supposed to do—go to the right schools; get the big-name degrees; have multiple kids, the minivan, the dog, the family vacations; join the right clubs—and yet they feel suffocated the moment they wake up in the morning. It just makes you wonder.”

  “What does it make you wonder?” I asked.

  “I don’t know—maybe what the race is all about? Where are we running? What’s the goal?”

  Just then, her cell phone rang.

  “Hi,” she said, her tone suddenly becoming flat. “Yeah, the sunscreen is on the top shelf of the closet. It’s there. Jesus, Jack. Just move things around. Try looking behind the beach bag. No? So maybe it’s in the beach bag? Did you look in the bathroom? Okay. Good. Don’t forget to spray their ears and the tops of their feet. Yeah, I’m with Seth. Seth Gottlieb. Remember? Yes. We’re driving up now. Fine. Bye.”

  She hung up, lowered her sunglasses again, and looked out the window.

  “Everything okay?” I asked.

  She cleared her throat. “Just fine.” She reached over and turned up the volume on the sound system with her French-manicured fingers. It was Billy Joel’s “Miami 2017.”

  I sang aloud while drumming the beat on the steering wheel, and we both shouted and pumped our fists in the air when the lyrics referenced Queens. When the sirens played at the end of the song, I noticed that they seemed particularly realistic. In fact, when the song ended and the sirens kept going, we both looked into our side-view mirrors.

  “Oh, shit!” I moaned. There was a police car directly behind me. I shut off the radio and glanced at the odometer, where the numbers were quickly diving down from the low seventies, then pulled over to the side of the Taconic State Parkway.

  “License and registration, please,” the officer said, leaning his face into my window and glancing around the car.

  I handed over my license while Lex fished the registration out of the glove compartment.

  “Do you know how fayst you were going, sir?” the officer asked.

  “No, sir, I’m sorry, I don’t.”

  “You happened to be going seventy-fayve miles an hour. The speed limit is fifty-fayve.”

  I struggled to place the officer’s accent.

  “Where ya goin’ in such a rush?”

  “We have a party,” I said, remembering the advice a lawyer friend had given me, to answer only the question and offer nothing more.

  “A party, eh—”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt.” Lex smiled, leaning over from the passenger seat. “By any chance, are you from the Chicago area?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I am,” he said, straightening his posture.

  “Oh, I could tell by your accent,” Lex said, wildly exaggerating the slight Midwestern inflection she’d picked up over her years spent living in Illinois. “I’m visiting the Big Apple from Chicawgo for the weekend to see friends. Where’d you grow up at?”

  I was shocked. The Lex I remembered knew better than to end a sentence with a preposition.

  “Glenview,” he said, softening.

  “Noo way!” she said, with a bit of flirtation. “My son is starting Glenbrook North High School in the fall. Did you go to North or South?”

  “South.”

  “Oh, but I bet you went to Stanley Field Junior High, no?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “So, did you live south of Willow Road, near the Plaza Del Prado shopping center?”

  “Exactly! Is the hot dog shack Dear Franks still there? I haven’t been back in a while.”

  And with that, I knew I was home free. You can’t bond over a hot dog shack and then hand over a ticket.

  “No,” Lex said. “They changed owners, and there’s a new name, but it’s still a hot dog place. Nothin’ like good old Vienna beef, you know what I’m talking about?” She winked and flashed her gorgeous smile.

  Cha-ching! The officer handed my license and registration back.

  “Please be mindful of the speed limit and be safe this weekend, si
r,” he said. “And enjoy your party. Happy Independence Day.”

  “Oh, you have a happy July Fourth, too, sir!” Lex waved from her seat.

  I rolled up the windows and stared at her in astonishment.

  “What the fuck was that?” I said, grinning. “Where did you learn to talk like that?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, thickening her accent even more. “I just think gettin’ pulled over was bad karma and we don’t need it. Say it with me, Seth: baaayd karema.”

  “Baaayd kaaare-ma.” I snorted, and she burst out laughing.

  “That was Oscar-worthy, Lex.”

  “Oh my God, I don’t remember the last time I laughed that hard,” she said. “It’s so good to be home.”

  I pulled back onto the highway. “Need I remind you that you’re on the Taconic Parkway in Bumblefuck, New York?”

  “No,” she said. “This definitely feels like home.”

  I wondered what she meant by that. I parsed her words for the next two miles as I stared out at the rolling green mountains in the distance and she checked email on her phone. A sign for food broke my concentration and I declared that it was time for a pit stop. I pulled over to a restaurant on the side of the road with DINER spelled out in red capital letters over the roof. I parked and immediately unlocked the door to stretch my legs. Ever since I started working out, I haven’t been able to take a long drive or a flight without the urge to flex and move—something I rarely craved back in my couch-potato days. I got out and did a few deep knee bends. When my cell phone dinged in the cup holder, Lex brought it out to me. “Text,” she said.

  She glanced at the phone, and her brow furrowed. I took it from her and saw the words she must have seen. They were from Nolan:

  We need that surgical referral ASAP. Please send. Thanks.

  Shit, I thought.

  Lex stood with her hand on her hip, awaiting an explanation.

  “It’s Nolan,” I finally said. “He fell off his bike training for the NYC triathlon and broke his collarbone.”

  “Yeah, I heard about that. Bec told me about his accident. She always said he was a klutz.”