Jane Austen in Boca

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  They were followed by Pixie Solomon, resplendent in gold mesh, who announced the birth of her grandchild, Hannah Gittel Solomon. “Can you believe the names they’re choosing nowadays?” she asked, while her neighbors at table 6 shook their heads in agreement. “You’d think they were back in the shtetlinstead of living in a big house in Short Hills with a live-in nanny.” Rudy, at this point, saw fit to intervene and explain, politely but firmly, that births weren’t technically permitted as testimonials, since if he allowed them, they’d be there all night. Pixie Solomon sat down, miffed; she had wanted to describe her daughter-in-law’s difficult pregnancy and recount the baby’s birth weight and Apgar score.

  Bobbie Tarkoff got up next to remember her dead husband, Milt, and to recall that he never once forgot her birthday or their anniversary—”and I have the jewelry to prove it!” Applause followed.

  Two other women invoked dead spouses, with one, Minna Freedman, confessing, “When he was alive, I didn’t appreciate him. Now that he’s dead, I see he was a jewel”—to which there were murmurs of “So true” and sympathetic clapping.

  Zelda and Stephen Freed rose to reaffirm their vows and forty-five years of “bliss.” The secret, Zelda confided: “separate beds.” Laughter and applause.

  Trudy and Dan Lebarque (changed from Lebowitz) also testified to fifty-one glorious years. “No woman could be more wonderful than this one,” said Dan. “She lights up my life.” There was a murmur of appreciation and extended applause. (Pixie Solomon, who knew Trudy, whispered loudly to her neighbor: “She doesn’t deserve him.”)

  It was after this that, to the surprise of the group, Hy Marcus jumped to his feet and, glass in hand, declared he had a special announcement. “Lila Katz,” he said, gesturing to Lila with a self-satisfied flourish, “has consented to be my bride.” There was an impressed “Ooh” followed by applause before he continued—for he clearly intended to hold the floor as long as he could.

  “I just asked her this morning and was pleased to receive a reply in the affirmative. She didn’t know I was going to announce it,” he continued complacently, “but I say, why hold back? At our age, there’s no point being modest. Lila and I will be leaving next week to spend some time with my children, who are eager to wish us the best: Steven, a gastroenterologist on Central Park West—you wouldn’t believe what he charges—and his lovely wife, Candace, who converted and is active in Hadassah, along with my daughter, Sarah, a lawyer, and her husband, a hot-shot corporate raider like out of that movie with Michael Douglas. They’ll be taking us out to dinner, and we’ll be staying over at Sarah’s mansion in Great Neck. I’ve told Lila that marrying me will put her in clover, and I hope her friends will have the same good luck, with no more money worries and plenty of naches. I know one couple at least”—he looked meaningfully over at May and Norman—”that should be following us to the altar soon enough.”

  There was some laughter and pointing over at May and Norman as Hy sat to applause and murmurs of “Mazel tov.” May blushed violently at Hy’s words, and Norman, Flo noted, seemed distinctly flustered and shot a glance at Stan, who looked poker-faced—but then, he’d looked that way all evening; he hadn’t uttered a word since his speech on Mel Shirmer. Flo saw that Lila was conscious of the crudeness of Hy’s remarks and was clutching her napkin and staring straight ahead with a fixed smile on her face. Feeling sorry for her friend, Flo reached over and patted her hand. She did not, however, glance at Stan Jacobs again. There was too much to think about in that quarter, and she preferred, as she put it to herself, to rest her brain for the time being.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  THE NEXT DAY AT LUNCH, LILA PUT DOWN HER FORK, TOOK A breath, and turned to her two friends. She had summoned them together for a farewell meal before taking off with Hy to meet his much-vaunted family on Long Island. Now, as she began speaking, she looked at May and Flo with an expression that was both plaintive and determined.

  “I want you to be attendants at my wedding,” she said, “and I don’t want you to say no.”

  “Attendants?” said Flo. “Am I hearing correctly? Could we be talking bridesmaids here?”

  “Flo,” said Lila, “I knew you would laugh at me, but I’m serious. I want to have a big wedding and I want you two to be there at my side. Call yourself bridesmaids, matrons, attendants, whatever. It’s what I want, and I beg you to make an old woman happy and do it.”

  “But what are you talking about, Lila?” asked Flo. Her friend, who had once seemed reasonable enough, appeared lately to have gone completely off her rocker: first, to encourage Hy Marcus, then to agree to marry him, and now, to contemplate a wedding with bridesmaids. The whole thing convinced Flo again of what she too often forgot: that even the most apparently sane and down-to-earth people were capable of frightening lapses in sense.

  “The truth is,” said Lila, “I’ve always had a thing about weddings. I never had one of my own, and it’s always bothered me. Do you know that I look at brides’ magazines in the supermarket and imagine myself wearing the dresses? Of course you don’t. You don’t know what it is to have been cheated out of one of life’s most important events. Mort and I got married in City Hall. He was cheap, but more to the point, he wanted to escape his mother. She hated me. Even at her eightieth birthday party, she toasted Mort and never mentioned my name. Do you know what she did the last time I saw her? She was dying—she couldn’t walk and could hardly breathe—but she looked me up and down like I was a bad cut of meat the butcher was trying to put over on her. She asked me what he saw in me: ‘You’re not pretty, no education, no family, no money, and as barren as a stone.’ That was the thanks I got for taking her good-for-nothing son off her hands.”

  “Sounds like something out of the Brothers Grimm,” said Flo.

  “Worse!” Lila exclaimed indignantly, with the clear intention of elaborating further; recalling the injustices of the past had inspired her to new levels of eloquence: “I wore a blue suit to the ceremony—white was too stark, Mort said; we didn’t want to advertise too much. And our only witness was his cousin Sam, that louse—he borrowed a hundred dollars to join a swim club and never paid us back. Mort was cheap about everything, but he had to lend his cousin Sam, the biggest lowlife you would ever hope to see, a hundred dollars to join a swim club. For dental work, for life insurance, for the kids’ college tuition—that I could understand. But a swim club? And never a thank you. Never even an invitation to the swim club. When I’d mention it to Mort, he’d say I was ungracious. Me, ungracious? When his mother never thanked me once for the Shabbes dinner I cooked her every Friday night for forty years. Did anyone ever cook for me? Did anyone throw me a party? I know you think I’m crazy to want a wedding, a woman of my age. But I do. And Hy has no objection; he likes the idea. It gives him a chance to show off his family and pay for a lavish spread. So I want to have a wedding like the kind I should have had when I was twenty-one, and I want you and May to wear long matching dresses and walk down the aisle and carry bouquets. And if you won’t do it, I’ll never forgive you.”

  May and Flo were silent. Lila’s outburst made Flo’s usual quipping impossible, and yet the idea of being bridesmaid to Lila’s bride was so patently ridiculous that she tried to find some sensitive but straightforward way of telling her friend that it was out of the question. But before she could gather her thoughts, May had spoken.

  “We’d love to be your attendants, Lila,” she said. “You’re our friend, and anything that would make you happy would give us pleasure.”

  Lila smiled weakly and reached out her hand to May, who clasped it. But she didn’t dare look at Flo, which was just as well.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  FLO AND MAY GAZED AT EACH OTHER IN THE MIRRORS OF LOEHmann’s communal dressing room. They were wearing matching aqua taffeta dresses with mutton sleeves and sequined bodices—“cocktail dresses” was the way Lila had described them. She had picked them out herself from Loehmann’s Back Room before she left with Hy for Long Isl
and, and had them held for her friends.

  “I think the idea of matching bridesmaid’s dresses at our age is obscene,” said Flo. She had hardly recovered from the shock of Lila’s idea; now here she was helping to implement it.

  That they were doing so at Loehmann’s was hardly surprising. There is a great deal of shopping in Boca Raton—a plethora of department stores and boutiques, outdoor and indoor malls, and flea markets and bazaars specializing in all manner of clothing and accessories. Yet despite the array of shopping opportunity, it is Loehmann’s where women invariably find themselves when they want to buy something “for an occasion” or, for that matter, for everyday. Here are racks and racks of remaindered Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren jackets, of Sonia Rykiel dresses and Oleg Cassini tops. Zones of the store are designated for handbags, shoes, jewelry, belts, and scarves, and in the Back Room, a cordoned area of spacious proportions, are the more exotic designer pieces. Everything is drastically reduced.

  Loehmann’s draws the cream of West Boca. Jags and Mercedes line up for weekly, often daily, pilgrimages, their owners running in for a quick survey of the merchandise in the hard-to-fill time before doctors’ appointments (the “truck,” the cognoscenti know, arrives daily with new stock). Indeed, a visit to Loehmann’s is said to lower blood pressure and boost performance on a stress test (this owing perhaps to the vigorous arm exercise necessary to move garments speedily across the rack in advance of the woman behind you).

  Loehmann’s merchandise runs the gamut. It can supply a drop-dead outfit for a swanky affair just as it can provide the proper selection of stretch pants and chic embroidered T-shirts for the daily trek from pool to clubhouse to Early Bird Special to movies. Although the store is aggressively wholesale, no one in Boca sees herself as above Loehmann’s. It is an enduring landmark, a city shrine, known and frequented by all. A nice piece at Loehmann’s is, after all, as nice as you could get elsewhere, so why go elsewhere? Common poolside banter is the proclamation “See this? Twenty dollars at Loehmann’s.” When an outfit is complimented, even at the most elegant affair, the owner will think nothing of responding with pride, “A hundred and twenty reduced from four-fifty at Loehmann’s.”

  Once a Loehmann’s shopper has amassed a suitably unwieldy pile of promising merchandise, she will recess to the dressing room, a large communal changing area, lined with mirrors, located at the back of the store. Individual changing rooms were installed in Loehmann’s years ago in a concession to the possible modesty of customers, but no one uses them. Part of the Loehmann’s mystique lies in the brazen openness of the changing area. It seems to insist that its customers bare their bodies in order to earn the right to purchase at such a discount.

  There is something of the group therapy session about the Loehmann’s communal changing room—with women in nothing but bras and panties loudly bemoaning to other women, perfect strangers, their problems with saddlebag thighs. The atmosphere can also be compared to the creative writing workshop favored in small liberal arts colleges, in which a participant’s poem or story is passed around and critiqued by selected members of a peer group. At Loehmann’s, the work in progress is the draped body, and the peer group a collection of like-minded shoppers. Thus, it is not uncommon for a number of women to engage in a close reading of the fit of a skirt on a less-than-svelte line from waist to hip.

  “I think you can get away with it,” one ample matron observes.

  “It’s cute, but I wouldn’t risk it,” another volunteers, her opinion no doubt informed by her own skeletal slimness.

  “I disagree,” the ample one proposes more vehemently, sensing a personal affront in the other woman’s critique and directing her response to her. “She likes it, kayn-aynhoreh, She should wear it. Who is she, Cindy Crawford?”

  “I’m only saying she might feel self-conscious with the bulges showing,” the anorexic replies testily.

  Meanwhile, the object of scrutiny will be turning this way and that and, depending upon which of her advisers she feels the more kinship with, will buy the skirt or leave it on the center rack—though if she leaves it, a thinner or more confident woman across the room, who has been watching like a hawk for this to happen, is sure to dart over to grab it.

  There is always a certain bravado that reigns in the Loehmann’s dressing room. No garment is too outlandish, too tight, or too short, at least to try on. Everywhere, half-naked women stand appraising themselves in the harsh fluorescent light, a piece of cut-rate designer apparel stretched across hips or bosom. Flo liked to say that the varicose veins and cellulite on display in the Loehmann’s dressing room could keep an army of cosmetic surgeons busy for a decade. Of course, in Boca, many Loehmann’s shoppers have already visited those surgeons, some more than once, a fact that can be gleaned by the shiny, overstretched look of the septuagenarians wearing G-strings. The fluorescent lights spare no one. Indeed, it is another rule of thumb: Nothing ever looks good under the lights of the Loehmann’s changing room. One has to read the label and the price and take it on faith that the thing will look much better at home.

  Lila had hyped the dresses as lovely and capable of being worn again.

  “Wear this again?” said Flo, looking at herself with amazed repugnance. “When, to my bat mitzvah?”

  “They’ll look good in the ceremony,” said May. “Lila is wearing the same color.”

  “What are we, fairy godmothers in a Disney movie?”

  “Flo, they’re not so bad,” said May “They’re … festive.”

  “At our age, festive is the last thing a wedding should be. It should be discreet, if done at all. All participants should wear gray and look morose, like the rehearsal dinner for a funeral.”

  “Lila is happy.”

  “How could she be happy with that nincompoop?”

  “Perhaps it’s a matter of what she’s had to compare him with. He’s not a bad man. She needs the security.”

  “But I can’t comprehend how a woman could turn herself over to a—a moron.”

  “I think,” said May, losing her temper, “that it’s time that you stopped the name-calling.” The words and the commanding tone as they issued from her mouth surprised even May herself. She could not remember speaking with such authority since her Alan was a little boy. “It’s her choice,” she added more tentatively. “She’s not asking you to marry him.”

  “May, I’ve never seen you so … forceful.”

  “Well …” May stammered. “I’m only asking you to be nice.” She couldn’t believe that she had had the courage to criticize Flo Kliman. But Flo was not offended.

  “Of course you’re right,” Flo responded in a softer tone. “I’ll try to restrain myself. But you must let me ventilate once in a while. Unless I get the bad vapors out, I might poison myself. You’re lucky that I can’t say a bad word about Norman. He has the good fortune of a sense of humor—he even laughs at himself sometimes. I can’t laugh at someone who laughs at himself I’m deprived of the advantage of getting there first.”

  “Flo, you’re terrible!”

  “You always say I’m terrible, but you don’t really think it. You know that I have a heart of gold.” Flo smirked at this idea of herself. “Okay—let’s say I’m not as bad as I seem. Men, of course, don’t realize this. They take me literally and leave it at that. My husband used to say that if he weren’t married to me, he would probably loathe me. I sometimes thought he was trying to tell me something. But then, I told him frankly that I loathed him sixty percent of the time.”

  “I’m sorry,” said May

  “Don’t be. Forty percent nonloathing is an excellent percentage for me. When I realized that the odds of breaking forty percent with any man were slim at best, I decided to marry him. It was not a bad marriage, all things considered.”

  “I think I would say the same about mine,” May mused.

  “Perhaps next time we’ll break forty percent,” said Flo, and began tugging at the zipper of her dress. “I hate to say this, but I think
I need a girdle with this thing. If I have to wear a girdle, Lila Katz is going to owe me big-time.”

  May laughed. “We should buy them.”

  “You think we have to?”

  “Yes,” said May.

  “Okay,” said Flo, “and we’ll pick up the wands and tinsel on the way home.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “I UNPLUGGED THE PHONE AND SLEPT LIKE A LOG FOR FIFTEEN hours,” explained Mel when he saw Flo at the clubhouse two days after the dance. “It was short and rough, which is more or less the way I like to take being sick, though not, I should add, other things in life.”

  “I’m glad you’re recovered,” said Flo. “You missed a true Boca extravaganza.”

  “I’m sure I did. And I’m even more sorry I had to leave you at the mercy of Stan Jacobs. Forgive me. That must have been an ordeal.”

  “It was,” admitted Flo, “but also interesting, in its way.”

  Mel raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Then, taking a jocular tone: “Well, I was thinking that maybe tonight we could do something quiet. I wouldn’t want to court a relapse. I say we rent a movie and hunker down, if you’re agreeable. I know you’re a movie buff like me.”

  “An old movie buff, I am—and I’m referring to the age of the movies and not my age, though obviously they go together. My tolerance decreases, I’m afraid, as we pass 1960. I favor black and white.”

  “My feelings entirely. The world was better in black and white.”

  “It’s a going topic around here that the old black-and-white films get no respect. The grandchildren won’t watch them. As soon as they see the credits in black and white, they start to bawl.”

  “It’s the decline of Western civilization,” agreed Mel.

  “But there’s hope. My great-niece, who’s studying film at NYU, says there’s a whole new breed that want to work in it. They watch the old movies in their film appreciation courses and think: ‘That’s pretty good, I’ll try that.’ “