Plotnick
BY ELIZA GILBERT
As a child, in the incubator, I was practically fluorescent. The way my father told it, the piss-light of the Lenox Hill NICU shone straight through my skin. You were a dark pink gummy bear, he said. You were three pounds, eight ounces of naked mole rat. Of newborn opossum. You were a tiny rotisserie chicken full of tubes.
He called me Shrimp, and Gumbo, and Scampi, and on the day the nurses removed me from my enclosure, he trundled me across the ward in the crook of one elbow, whooping and stiff-arming around the reception desk. He puppeteered my hands to wave hello to pretty nurses. He dreamed me up an Elmer Fudd voice. When he brought me downstairs to my mother’s recovery room, he held me in the style of that mandrill from The Lion King—my steamed shrimp body raised and sanctified above his head as he beat-boxed to “The Circle of Life.”
It wasn’t long before the nurses forbade his theatrics. Mom’s blood pressure was capricious enough as it stood, and the dialysis exhausted her to the point of cruelty. She called him Parasite, and Man Child, and Fuckhead. When he protested that Jesus’ Son was one of her favorite books, she made a low throaty noise and spat at him. By that point, there was so much fluid pooled up in her body—she looked like some preternatural collage of bloat and bone—that the spit reached all the way to his clavicle. Really, he should have known better. Mom had a long-standing issue with him modeling himself after Denis Johnson characters.
My mother was twenty-seven, my father was twenty-nine, and they lived in a walk-up on Clinton Street above a new-agey ramen shop. They were not in love, my father would explain to us a decade later from Nan’s couch, after his second stint at the swanky Patchogue rehab. Eva 1 and I were on our bellies on the pink shag rug, playing mermaids. Aunt Louise was in the kitchen, on the phone with Dad’s methadone clinic. We could faintly hear her chattering about take-home doses with his counselor.
“No, never in love,” Dad said, circling his hands. “We never even tossed the word around. We were more mature than that. You know?”
Eva and I gave affirmative whacks of our pretend tails.
“But we lived together excellently, your mother and I.” His eyes trailed off to some dream in the middle distance. “We kept a clean apartment. A beautiful Scandinavian kitchen. She liked Mad Men; I liked MasterChef. Once Eva got over the colic she was a very cool kid, very fun to hang out with. But we were young parents, you understand. Even worse, we weren’t quite young enough for the sympathies and allowances of, say, a pregnant eighteen-year-old. So it was all very tricky. We were reading articles about preschool and potty-training, but at night we still wanted to bar-hop on the Lower East Side, you know? There was sacrifice involved.”
Aunt Louise came into the living room then, with a drawn expression and a little paper cup of Dad’s pills. Eva and I went up to the attic crawl space to play hostages.
In those days, Aunt Louise was a fan of white linens and boiled broccoli. The surfaces in her East Moriches cottage ranged from cream to ivory, with the occasional accent of beige. She didn’t drink. She didn’t eat gluten. She didn’t like music. Dad liked to say that Aunt Louise’s sphincter was so tight she only farted once a week, on Sundays. Years later, when Dad was good and dead and I was about sixteen, these sphincters would suddenly and gloriously loosen. Louise would begin to cuss, to eat KFC, to play in a senior softball league. To bake cannabinoid angel food cake. And, most salaciously, to tell me the story of my conception.
Determined to salvage their twenties, Louise informed me one night, out on the porch in East Moriches, where the stars were like chunky sea salt, my mother and father often allowed each other to bring hook-ups back to the apartment. This blowing-off of steam occured on a rotating schedule, in which the on-duty parent would haul a pillow to the couch and get up early to pour cereal for Eva.
Still, sometimes, mostly for convenience’s sake, they ended up on top of each other once again.
When I was born, Eva was three, and she already knew how to place an LP on the platter without grubbing up the record. During the months our parents and I were in the hospital, Mom with the preeclampsia and the shot kidneys, me with the strabismus and the gunky lungs, little Eva stayed at Andy Plotnick’s apartment. Andy was the guitarist in Dad’s jazz band. Once-divorced, twice sober. He had a geometric neck tattoo and three turtles.
Eva talked a lot about Andy Plotnick once we became teenagers. After Dad kicked the bucket, Eva and I moved permanently to Aunt Louise’s place in East Moriches, a tiny pseudo-Hamptons town most known for the Boeing 747 that exploded off its coast in ‘96. Eva always figured Andy would come for her one day—cruise up the L.I.E. in his green Jeep and silk button-down, whisk her back to Manhattan. Eva would become his groupie. Tend to his tube amps and turtles. Andy Plotnick would even ask her to sing backup on a few records.
In her oatmeal-colored bedroom at Aunt Louise’s, Eva pinned a photo of Andy Plotnick to the corkboard above her desk. She’d cut it from one of Dad’s old band albums. In it, Andy was long-haired and smiling, his baby blue Telecaster balanced on his knee. Sometimes I caught Eva sitting blank-eyed in front of this picture, lips slightly parted, as if preparing to harmonize. Really, I shouldn’t have been surprised when, later in life, Eva abruptly found God. Really, she’d been looking for him since middle school.
“Andy Plotnick would’ve killed me for not listening to this on vinyl,” Eva told me once. We were on her bed at Aunt Louise’s, streaming Miles Davis’ “In a Silent Way.” Eva’s room was something of a spasmodic shrine, covered in posters of Janis Joplin, Marvin Gaye, Cliff Burton. Genre was no object—the only prerequisite of Eva’s devotion was to have once played music and then died horrifically.
“You don’t actually remember Andy Plotnick,” I said. “You were three.”
For a second, Eva looked stricken. Only a second. Then her eyes narrowed.
“Well, you don’t remember Dad calling you a shrimp,” she said.
“I remember the story. That’s basically the same.”
“Nope.” Eva looked off toward her desk, her corkboard. Andy Plotnick’s hope-blue guitar. “A story doesn’t belong to you. A story’s from someone else’s head.”
I swallowed. I shuddered. I licked a sudden sour taste from the front of my teeth. Bitch, I thought at Eva, a word that felt slick and illicit at thirteen. Who was she to property-manage my stories?
“Andy Plotnick probably doesn’t think about you at all,” I told her.
Eva threw an elbow at my jaw, then, and I bit my tongue so hard blood dripped down my chin, onto my tee-shirt. When I grinned, my teeth glistened red. I let loose a long, jagged, satisfied howl, spittling blood like in the movies. A pause. Then, Eva howled back.
“Please,” called Aunt Louise from across the hall. “Civilized voices.”
Eva and I howled again, together. Desperately together. We spent the rest of the afternoon playing cannibals.
#
Aunt Louise loved us like you love the dog you get after your most special dog dies. Like the slightly misshapen, slightly disappointing new tomatoes that poke up the year after a prize-winning harvest. After all, we were Dad’s children, and we had his tightly-clustered nose freckles, his protruding ears, his malignant affection for dreamlands. His appetite for power chords. We knew Aunt Louise missed her brother, but just as certainly, we knew she was relieved for him. Relieved to be free of him. “The suffering is over,” she sometimes murmured, when she came in at night to coax me through the Lord’s Prayer, in that half-absent way of hers. Not Dad’s suffering; not Aunt Louise’s suffering; not my or Eva’s suffering. The abstracted suffering. The barbed-wire chaplet that hung above our family name. And as it turned out, Aunt Louise’s suffering was alive and well, because here were her nieces, with our wolfish attitudes and our father’s hideous ears, and here was Aunt Louise, an emergency contact all over again. Even knowing the ending, she was forced to play it all back.
Out of grace, and also hatred, Eva and I kept our distance from Aunt Louise. We spent most of our time in the backyard, in the hollow, fort-like space beneath the rhododendrons.
“You two do your thing out there,” Aunt Louise always said, as she fretted over a frittata or a vase of peonies. “You two just do your thing.”
Sometimes, in the evenings, we saw her watching us from the bay window, backlit by the starchy yellow of the kitchen, one hip popped like a greaser girl. But other than to tend to her tomato plants, Louise didn’t often venture into the backyard. She, too, was a kind of hostage. She had games all of her own. We played zombies; she played dead.
I was thirteen. Eva, fifteen. Our play was undeniably immature, yet tinged with infinity. Under the dome of the rhododendrons, we were witches, we were lion cubs, we were beat cops in Chicago on the trail of a vicious lady-killer. We were infants; we were deities. We were back in the living room on Clinton Street.
Late one April afternoon, when the sun was half-mast and the rhododendrons were at their pinkest, we tried a new game. Eva called it “Rich but Normal.” Immediately, we knew we’d stumbled on a winner.
I said, “You’re the mom. I’m the kid. We’re in Fresno, or Scarsdale, or something. You’re mad at me because I used your credit card to buy crop tops.”
I had little knowledge of crop tops, but I liked the way the consonants felt on my tongue.
“Also, you were vaping in the school bathroom,” Eva said. “So I want to kill you, basically.”
“Yes!” I cried. “Good one.”
“Andy Plotnick, the dad, secretly thinks I’m overreacting,” Eva said, “but he yells at you anyway because he loves me so much. He takes away the keys to your convertible for a week. But then we go to the Cheesecake Factory and have a great night all together anyway.”
“Yes,” I said. “Keep going.”
In that cupped palm of wilderness, she kept going. She made us a bo-ho sun-bum family with two golden doodles and complicated orthodontic needs. Our house was three stories, a renovated Victorian, with wide eaves and a covered patio. I could almost smell the carpet tile. On the down-low, we had a family band, but not the tambourine-swinging, paisley-jumpsuit kind. More like we were all just so talented it would’ve been a crime not to play together. Andy Plotnick on guitar, Eva on vocals, me on keyboard. Buttery and syncopated and blindingly simultaneous. It was the kind of dream you could wade into. Long after Louise had turned the house lights off, we cocooned ourselves inside of it. The night was opaque, but we required no flashlights. The story lit itself. It was perfect. Ordinary, exotic, and futile. This was how it had always been; the children played orphans and the orphans played house.
#
My father talked a lot about my mother for someone who claimed not to love her.
“You scrambled her kidneys,” he told me good-naturedly one night, when I was eight and we still lived in the Clinton Street apartment. He was lounging on the red frieze carpet, fixing up one of his band buddies’ vintage Strats, fiddling with the truss rod. “You didn’t mean to, of course. The doctors said something about her placenta being abrupt. Then they started talking kidneys, and kidney failure, and I remember imagining them just… Pop.” He smacked his tongue, smiling. “Like water balloons.”
Eva and I were watching Law & Order on the couch. The episode was a boring one about child abduction.
“I almost brought Immy down from the NICU to see her body.” Dad began to strum a C major. “The morgue was in the basement of the hospital, so it would’ve been easy. But then I thought, Nah. Nobody wants to see a baby in a morgue. Least of all your mother.”
Eva and I exchanged a look that read, Bless his heart. He was so sweet, so chronically non-sequitur. The perfect storm of earnestness and inadequacy.
Eva said, “Andy Plotnick told me Mom bled a lot. When Immy was born. He said it was like Carrie.”
Dad sipped his Miller Lite. “Andy Plotnick is sensationalist.”
“Tell it again,” I said, to no one in particular. “Tell how I was pink and I blew up her kidneys.”
My father bit his thumb like it was a cigarette, then ran it slowly across the guitar strings. Then, he told it again.
#
We grew older at Aunt Louise’s.
I joined Eva at the local high school, where she’d collected a few friends from stage-managing for the drama club. They all sported brightly-colored fishnet accents under otherwise run-of-the-mill clothing. I, meanwhile, had Eva, and that relieved me of any other friend-making obligations. All day, I staked out evening. All spring, I staked out summer. Years passed, and all I would remember of them was the smell of the grass, the cycling of the tomato plants, the rhododendrons. And Eva and I, padding out the world of “Rich but Normal,” clasped in our own private pocket of time.
Eva turned seventeen. She started wearing Blundstones, eyeliner. Brightly-colored fishnets. She started sitting with the stage crew at lunch.
Some days, after school, I still waited for her in our bush-fort until nightfall, murmuring to myself, “You’re the mom. I’m the kid. We’re in Fresno, or Scarsdale, or something.”
I didn’t know Eva even wanted to go to college until after she got in. CU Boulder, across the country. They gave her good aid, she said. She had applied as a prospective music major.
At dinner that night, after Aunt Louise brought out the unsprinkled, vanilla-on-vanilla celebration cake, I started coughing hysterically to disguise my tears.
From across the table, Eva shrugged, screwed up her face and said, “Well, what did you think was going to happen?”
#
The last time I saw my father, he was in polka-dotted pajamas, his forehead pressed to the group room window. He would die in Queens, a couple months later, on his bassist’s couch. Andy Plotnick would be the one to call the ambulance.
The Patchogue rehab was nicer than I remembered the Hempstead one being—high ceilings, taupe walls, a zen garden out back. Aunt Louise was by the nurse’s station, dealing with the discharge papers. Eva and I were playing slapsies on a red pleather couch.
Dad said, “Jamie Lee Curtis. That’s who your mom’s OB looked like. I’ve been trying to figure it out all this time, and now? All this time.”
I slapped Eva’s hand. Watched her knuckles turn bright pink.
Dad said, “But actually, her voice was more Glenn Close-ish. Yeah. That’s it.”
It was August. Eva and I had spent a long, dry summer in East Moriches. Dad called often, but never had anything to say that wasn’t tinctured by the past. He attributed all his problems to his mother, who he said had suppressed his artistic instincts growing up. He reminded Aunt Louise that I was allergic to peanuts, and that Eva was afraid of dragons, neither of which was true. He asked Aunt Louise to bring him photo albums from his childhood and ours, but when she did, he refused to touch them, turned away and told her to take them back. He asked to speak directly to Eva and I only about once a month. During these conversations, he often lost himself among long strings of metaphor. “These days,” Dad would say, “it’s all about the blood versus the bleeding. The rubber versus the road.”
I slapped Eva’s hand. She slapped mine. It felt good to agree to hurt each other.
Through the glass between the group room and the nurse’s station, Aunt Louise intermittently flashed us ‘OK’ signs. We blinked back at her to indicate that yes, everything was just as OK as it always was.
“Fine,” Dad said to the window. “I loved her.”
Eva hit my hand so hard I saw light that wasn’t there. I yelped, but didn’t pull away.
#
Many years later, during my senior year at NYU, I was at a dive on the Lower East Side drinking $1 mystery shots with some college friends. I’d just downed what I assumed to be some nightmarish combo of Jäger and triple sec when the band in the corner plugged in their tube amps. Feedback rippled through the barstools.
“Guitarist is kind of a stud, huh?” my friend Tommy said, clicking his tongue piercing against his teeth.
“Maybe he was a stud twenty years ago,” said Samira, Tommy’s very tall girlfriend. “But look at that hair. That’s dad hair. Dad-of-an-adult-child hair.”
“Open your mind,” said Tommy.
“I’m dating you. My mind is open.”
I was eyeing the next mystery shot, which was a radioactive purple, when the guitar started up. The opening riff was low, roiling. Flighty. I knew it instantly. Acid jumped in my throat. Miles Davis: “In a Silent Way.”
“I’m telling you,” Samira was saying. “He’s got three kids and a shih tzu he shares custody of with his ex.”
I kept my eyes down and told myself the guitarist wasn’t going to be Andy Plotnick. At the same time, I decided the guitarist had to be Andy Plotnick. I brought to mind the picture Eva had taped to the basement wall—the mullet, the big white teeth, the achingly blue Telecaster. I counted down from thirty in my head, then threw back the purple shot and made myself turn around.
For the rest of the night, I thought about going up to Andy Plotnick. Raising my hands, stopping the music. Maybe screaming. I thought about calling Eva, who was doing God-knows-what in Salt Lake City, with that terrible boyfriend who led unlicensed ayahuasca retreats. They’d found God together, they said, but really, that meant that Eva had found someone she could exalt, and her boyfriend had found someone he could preach to. Eva and I didn’t talk much. A month or two ago, she’d texted that she was worried for my soul, followed by a link to some vitamins. The strange sequence of emojis that ensued let on that she was high.
Tommy and Samira were up and dancing, now, waltzing without tempo to the lush, bitter lilt of Andy Plotnick’s guitar. It was a Gibson, now. An ES-150. I craved the Telecaster. I craved Eva, the rhododendrons, the imagined house in Fresno or Scarsdale. Mostly, Eva. How warm and captivated she would be, I thought, to discover that Andy Plotnick was exactly where we’d left him.
The band cut off “In a Silent Way” after a few minutes, and though I understood that logically they would never have played the full thirty-eight minute song, a young, rabid part of me was affronted by the edit.
“Thank you!” cried Andy Plotnick into the mic, and I felt myself bristle at the tenor of his voice, so much higher and stiffer than we’d imagined it.
Hunched over the barstool as if gut-punched, I dialed Eva’s number. She picked up after the fifth and final ring.
“Hey,” she said, flippant, a little out of breath, as if we spoke every day.
The purple shot sloshed hot around my gut.
“I’m at a bar,” I said. “I’m not far from Clinton Street.”
The crackle of a vape. “Cool.”
Someone called her name in the background. There was a faint undercurrent of EDM. It felt imminent that she was about to hang up on me.
“Andy Plotnick’s here,” I said. “He’s playing right now. Isn’t that just ridiculous?”
Staticky commotion on her end. A different man, whooping.
“Fuck. Just a second. Hey, Imogen, I can’t really talk right now.”
In the back of the bar, the band had started up again. They were past Davis, onto Dylan. The slow, surly intro of “Desolation Row.”
“Andy Plotnick,” I said. “Eva. He’s really here.”
A pause, and Eva laughed at someone. Decidedly not at me. Her voice was much lower and chalkier than I remembered.
“Immy,” Eva said. “I’m gonna be honest. I have no idea who you’re talking about.”
