Jane Austen in Boca

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  “Normally, I would be against your traveling a thousand miles to watch thirty eight-year-old boys squirt water guns at each other. But given your mopey state, I think this might be just the medicine you need.”

  Carol, who had a preternatural ability to sense indecision and take advantage of it—in the way a predatory animal can sense the vulnerability of its potential prey—continued to call every night with added reasons why May must come to North Jersey.

  “I need you to help me with the goody bags for Adam’s party,” she insisted at one point. “They’ve become a big thing. No more lollipops and jump ropes. You can turn your child into a social outcast giving things like that. The kids are educated consumers nowadays. Which means it takes work. And, by the way, I had a thought. Since we give shmendricks to the children, why not to the mothers? It’s a nice gesture, and no one’s done it yet. You could make your truffles; they’d make a nice gift.”

  Carol had already checked the flights for the next two days, and when May failed to refute her suggestion for a Thursday evening departure forcefully enough, the tickets appeared the next morning by FedEx. What could she do? May packed her bags, put her truffle recipe into her purse, kissed Flo good-bye, and went.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  AMY RUNCIE-SLOTKIN WAS THE TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER of Flo’s brother’s son, Philip, and his wife, Meredith. Amy was a free spirit and the bane of her parents’ existence. She had always acted contrary to expectations, choosing to play the drums instead of the piano, to pierce her nose rather than her ears, and, subsequently, to go to NYU Film School instead of Yale. Flo had tried to point out to Amy’s parents that their daughter’s rebellion was fairly benign, there being no evidence of drug addiction, pregnancy, or serious eating disorders, and that Amy seemed a happy young woman with a great deal of enthusiasm for the things that interested her. But her parents, who had decided when Amy was in preschool that she would become a lawyer like themselves (though a career in medicine was not to be ruled out), were endlessly complaining about her perverse interests and underachievement.

  They had asked Flo, whom they knew had leverage in being eccentric, to speak to Amy before the fateful Yale decision. Flo had told her great-niece that, personally, she thought being a filmmaker, even an unsuccessful one, was more potentially gratifying than being a lawyer. This advice had put something of a pall on Flo’s relationship with her nephew and his wife. But it had earned her Amy’s eternal friendship.

  Lately, the issue of a documentary film project had been Amy’s overriding preoccupation. She had been e-mailing Flo almost daily, trying out ideas and picking her great-aunt’s always fertile brain. Topics relating to the homeless, Korean markets, rock bands, and in vitro fertilization had all been raised as possibilities and then quickly dismissed as being trite or done to death. Flo had suggested a piece on New York delicatessens (the subject of her bonding experience with Saul Bellow), but after a bit of research, Amy discovered that the subject had been used last year, and had even won third place at the senior awards festival. Apartment hunting in New York City was also given a bit of consideration, especially since Flo knew a successful East Side real-estate agent, a part-time Boca Festa resident, who would jump at the prospect of being followed around by a camera. But Amy reported that last year’s winning film had been about house-hunting in Westchester, and the idea seemed to her too close for comfort.

  In the course of their correspondence, Flo had supplied her niece with running commentary on the minutiae of Boca life. It was not an unfamiliar subject to Amy. She had visited what she liked to call “shopper’s paradise” over the years with her parents, long before Flo had moved down, and had enjoyed herself-immensely

  “I admit it, I love to shop,” she confessed when Flo had shown surprise at Amy’s desire to spend hours going through racks of leather pants at Mizner Center or poring over about ten thousand pairs of earrings at the Festival flea market. “It’s one of the few things my mother and I have in common, though since she’s a shiksa and I’m only half of one, I’m better at it than she is.”

  The day after May left, Flo got an e-mail message from Amy in her characteristically brief and cryptic style: “By George, I’ve got it! Inspired subject for my film! Will be down tomorrow, arriving West Palm Airport at 5:30. Love and kisses, Amy.”

  Flo liked to say that Amy used e-mail the way people used telegrams in the old days. “You’re not being charged by the word,” she often wrote back. But Amy’s existence seemed too hectic to allow for elaboration in any medium, even e-mail, where everyone else had a hard time staunching the tide of verbiage. Flo used to try to phone to fill in some of the gaps in their correspondence, but had learned that Amy was never in her apartment. Among her set, going out did not necessarily mean coming back—at least not at any hour when a reasonable person could be expected to be awake. Without thinking too deeply on what her niece planned to do—a docudrama on the endangered Florida alligator or on shopping in the Boca malls?—Flo made sure to be at the airport waiting when Amy’s plane came in. Her great-niece was one of her favorite people, and the prospect of spending some time with her, especially with May and Lila gone, was a source of pleasurable expectation.

  Amy was nearly the last off the plane—she and two companions, each carrying a large and unwieldy collection of cameras, tripods, lights, microphones, and assorted equipment. With their appearance and their baggage, they made for a distinctive presentation among the passengers in pastel jogging suits.

  Amy was wearing very short cutoffs, a black leather halter top, a nose stud, and (this was a new addition) a swatch of pink hair over her left ear. She had Flo’s large-boned, lean body and angular features, and she walked with the purposeful air of a woman who, even if she didn’t know where she was going, was determined to make where she was going into a destination. With her was a very tall, young black man whose hair was half in cornrows (as though he had lost interest in the idea halfway through) and another young man in a tight half T-shirt and an earring. Amy ran forward to greet her great-aunt with the same delight and abandon that she had displayed at age ten. “Auntie!” she screamed, hugging Flo. “Isn’t this the neatest idea? Aren’t I a genius?”

  “I know you’re a genius,” said Flo, “but I don’t think I’ve fathomed the idea.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Amy. “I e-mailed you. We’re going to film at your place—what’s it called, Boca Festa?—a documentary on senior life in the mecca of Jewish retirement, Boca Raton: the intricacies and vagaries of life in a gated community under the Florida sunshine. ‘From cukalane to clubhouse’—right, George?”

  She turned to her friend with the cornrows who was carrying the camera and tripod.

  “What’s a cukalane again?” asked George.

  “Well, it’s something to do with Jews taking vacations, though I’m not sure what,” said Amy. “It sounds good. Flo can fill us in. She’ll have loads of ideas. She always does. And she’s a librarian, so she can help us with research.”

  Flo must have looked confused, because Amy hugged her and took a breath.

  “Let me start again; maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. First, I’ll introduce you. This is George.” She motioned to the half-braided giant with the cameras. “He’s my boyfriend, and he’ll do most of the shooting. He has a way of getting in anywhere he wants.”

  George shook Flo’s hand and smirked at Amy.

  “This is Jordan.” She motioned to the earringed young man in the skimpy T-shirt. “He’ll handle the mike—he’s also a crackerjack editor. Oh, and he’s gay. He always likes people to know that up front so they’re not surprised later.”

  “Thank you, Amy,” said Jordan sarcastically, “for being so considerate.”

  “They’re really nice guys,” continued Amy cheerfully, “and we’re doing this advanced DV project together, and we’re all really talented, and now, since we have an absolutely awesome idea, we intend to win first prize at the student festival. I promise we
won’t bother you at all. We’ll sleep in the kitchen or the bathroom or something—you won’t even know we’re around. There’s one thing, though. We need to get permission to shoot in the complex. I told George and Jordan that you would handle it, since you’re my brilliant, eccentric great-aunt and can handle anything.” She gave Flo the look, half stubborn defiance and half little-girl pleading, that Flo remembered her using on everyone since she was five to get whatever she wanted.

  The prospect of having Amy and her friends camping out in her living room did not pose a particular problem for Flo, who had never been one to care about the condition of her rugs or to put too much stock on personal space. But she was a bit concerned about how her neighbors would react, and she was uncertain about her ability to finagle permission for the group to film on the grounds of the complex. Normally, such a thing would be impossible. The people at Boca Festa paid for privacy and predictability, and the appearance on the scene of the road show from Hair was likely to fluster and intimidate all but the hippest of residents. Fortunately, Flo realized she had a resource that might help in obtaining the permission her niece needed: Rudy would be on her side.

  She knew this implicitly for two reasons. One, since she was a club benefactor, he would want, above all, to be of service to her. She was glad that she had let drop the other day her disappointment in the conventional nature of Boca Festa’s landscaping. Rudy had explained that the budget did not allow for anything too elaborate, given that the unpredictable climate had a way of killing off more interesting, less hearty plants. “Of course,” he had noted, “this is precisely the kind of thing that would be ideal for a bequest,” and had leaned over to kiss her hand by way of punctuation. She had said nothing, a response she had learned worked well to fuel expectation without in any way establishing a commitment.

  The second reason she counted on Rudy’s support was that he was by nature and inclination a performer. The idea of being part of a documentary film, even a student one—and Flo had no doubt that Amy would effectively sell herself as a future Steven Spielberg—would be irresistible to him.

  “Don’t you see, Aunt Flo, what a good idea this is?” Amy insisted as they walked across the airport parking lot toward the car. “Here we have an enclosed, homogeneous community in which very intricate and elaborate relationships are generated. It’s the ideal narrative material with visual appeal for a postmodern age.”

  “Stop with the metababble,” said George. “Cut to the chase: It’s cheap; it’s doable, and it’ll be funny as hell.”

  In point of fact, the more Flo thought about the idea, the more she saw its possibilities. Boca Festa as the subject of a documentary? Why not?

  “I see what you mean,” she said, nodding as her niece and her friends trundled toward the car. “It’s Jane Austen’s ‘two or three families in a country setting,’ updated and up-aged. And, yes, it could be damned funny.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  MAY WOULD NOT HAVE DREAMED A MONTH AGO THAT SHE would welcome being taken in hand by her daughter-in-law. Generally, she fled from Carol’s desire to direct her life with the twitchy alacrity of a frightened rabbit. Yet given her depressed and lethargic state, there was something comforting about turning herself over to Carol’s direction and being placed into the jigsaw puzzle of her daughter-in-law’s mind-numbingly complicated but highly organized existence.

  Carol met May at Newark Airport with the declaration that “there’s loads to do and we better get busy.” Of course, with Carol, there was a certain paradox attached to her frenetic busyness. She was like a farmer who keeps horses in order to haul away the manure that they generate. She was forever devising complicated chores out of the most seemingly straightforward and simple tasks. One would have thought, given the energy she was expending now, that she was planning the entertainment of an important business colleague or a high-level community official, not the birthday party of an eight-year-old. But the fact that Carol did not draw such distinctions was part of her success. It showed a refusal to give anyone or anything short shrift. Truth be told, it had a disarming effect on those with whom she came into contact. Even as she irritated many people, she also, strangely, endeared herself to them by giving them her complete and undivided attention.

  “We have to go pick up the cake,” she said as she wove expertly in and out of the heavy traffic leading out of the airport. “Wait till you see it. I designed it myself and went over it with the baker yesterday to be sure he followed the sketch. I tried to color code, but bakers tend to be color-blind.” (These were the sorts of bizarre but often accurate observations that Carol excelled in.)

  When they arrived at the bakery, the cake was ready, on display at the counter, and already being admired by a group of women who seemed to find it entrancing. It was in the shape of a baseball field. It had candles in the shape of players and peppermints designating the bases. “All my idea,” Carol explained to May. “They say they’re going to make it a standard from now on. And I have extras of the mints”—she took a bag from her pocketbook and shook it consolingly—”so each of the boys can have one. You know how they fight about things like that.”

  Once arrived at the house, while May made the truffles, Carol laid out the materials for the boys’ goody bags, carefully checking to be sure that there were an equal number of the requisite items: a yo-yo that played the Star Wars theme, a key chain with a miniature catcher’s mitt, and sundry erasers, stickers, and whistles, all of which would no doubt be lost or thrown away as soon as the guests got home from the party, but were nonetheless de rigueur as ritualized talismans. Carol had also bought small baskets for the mothers, which she planned to fill with May’s truffles along with containers of hand cream and lip gloss. It was clear that with the brainchild of the matriarchal goody bags she had reset the bar for children’s birthday parties in the northern New Jersey suburbs. They would be that much more labor-intensive from now on.

  The family went out to dinner that night. Carol had deemed cooking impossible in a kitchen in which the counter space had been turned into a miniature assembly line and the table taken over by boxes of paper plates, plastic knives and forks, hats, noisemakers, and the like, all of which held to the baseball theme. At one point, Adam proclaimed that baseball bored him and he wanted to take up hockey. Carol had responded that he was to like baseball for at least one more day, and then they’d talk about it.

  The restaurant chosen for dinner was called the Jolly Traveler and had a definite kid-friendly atmosphere. It featured a large-screen TV showing cartoons in the corner and a kids’ menu longer than the adults’—just the sort of atmosphere that Boca Festa residents loudly decried. It was a source of ongoing discussion among May’s peers that their children were spoiling their grandchildren and creating a new generation capable of God knows what. “I’ve never seen such a thing,” it was observed. “What with the lessons and the special schools and the taking them to Europe as though the Catskills weren’t good enough, no wonder the children talk back. We would never have stood for it.” The idea that this generation of parents was creating monsters of entitlement by tailoring the world to their needs was one of the few generally agreed upon notions in Boca Festa (no one breathed, of course, that the notorious Jewish American Prince and Princess, not to mention the young Philip Roth, had been the product of their generation of child-rearing). They also suspected that what their children were doing was somehow in retaliation for what they had done, and hence they sensed in it a definite accusation. It didn’t help, of course, that the whole thing placed them in the double bind of wanting to prove that their children were on the wrong track while at the same time not wishing misery and failure upon their grandchildren.

  Whenever the subject of child-rearing was raised, it invariably led to the recounting of the famous Weintraub incident near the Boca Festa pool last year. Tara Weintraub-Kaplan, age six, had told her mother that she would not wear flip-flops to the clubhouse, “and you can’t make me,” whereupon her gra
ndmother, Hettie Weintraub, announced to her daughter, Cindy, that she would never have allowed Cindy to speak to her that way Cindy, instead of muttering under her breath as she generally did in these cases, was suffering from PMS and reacted violently, throwing the flip-flops at Hettie and screaming that maybe if she had, she wouldn’t be taking 150 milligrams of Zoloft a day The scene, played out in front of at least twenty residents, was talked about for months with that particular brand of schadenfreude reserved for incidents striking very close to the bone. Everyone knew that it could just as well have been their daughter, which of course did not prevent them from shaking their heads over poor Hettie.

  At the Jolly Traveler, the children had indeed taken over the establishment, and May found it difficult to digest her salad in a setting in which there was so much shrieking, as sodas spilled, crayons broke, and toddlers were thrust into and pulled out of booster seats. Carol, May noted, appeared to thrive on the mayhem (she had cut not only Adam’s meat, but the boy’s at the next table), while Alan, in the fashion cultivated from his own childhood, remained unperturbed, his mind occupied elsewhere. It was not relaxing, May thought, but it was lively, and in her droopy state, it had a cheering effect. By the time they got home, the two-year-old was asleep in her car seat and Adam, who had been whining loudly about wanting to take up hockey and buy the needed implements immediately, had also fallen into a weary stupor. May, too, felt tired, and thought finally she would be able to get a good night’s rest. She looked forward to climbing into the bed in the guest room, which Carol had decorated in a riot of color and design coordination. The bedspread, sheets, curtains, rug, and even the tissue box holder all shared the same basic motif of black and lavender flowers—a veritable carnival for the eye that had initially made May squint. Tonight, finally, tucked under the dizzyingly colorful sheet and, more important, under her daughter-in-law’s wing, she would sleep.