“The Ghost of Grandpa Reuben must have gotten to your Irish lass in her sleep.”
“Boo,schmooe, you’re not a Jew!” Jakes chants in a very good and slightly scary impersonation of our raspy grandfather.
“Instead of borscht, why don’t you have Siobhan serve matzo ball soup? We want to push the matzo meal. I’ve heard customers tell me during the factory tours that matzo balls never fail if made in batches of twenty-six. Can’t imagine why, but maybe that would help.”
“I’m writing that down because matzo ball soup is an excellent idea. So it’s coming together, huh? You’ll do fine. You don’t need your dad.”
“My therapist thinks I should go to Amsterdam and track him down,” I confess. “She thinks it would calm me down to drag him back and have him there.”
“Worth a try. I could use your help over there anyhow. Jan Quacken from Albert Vroom Supermarkets recently dropped his entire order. He was our biggest buyer in the Netherlands, and now he’s not returning faxes.”
“Quacken’s really his name? Poor guy.”
“Uh, hello, your name is Greenblotz!” We both snort, and Jake adds, “If you want to go, I’ll share the cost.”
“Jake, I have the money.”
“I guess you got your dividend check.”
“Yes, thanks.”
“If you want those checks to keep coming, we have to go through with this Food Channel thing.”
“I’ll go for a weekend if you can handle the high season by yourself—”
“If getting your dad here will calm you down, I’m all for it.”
“First I have to find him. I’ve had no luck so far.”
When I get off the phone with Jake, I take a break from the dad search and check my e-mail. I have two, one from Vondra who, unsolicited, asked Mahmoud if he has any contacts for me in Amsterdam. He’s given her the number of Prince Willem-Alexander and Princess Maxima, whose wedding he attended as the official representative of Egypt. Prince Willem-Alexander as in the crown prince of the Netherlands.
Honey, I know you have a short trip, but Mahmoud thought maybe you can scoot over to The Hague—V
Yeah, like I’m going to follow that one through: “Uh, hello, is this the Crown Prince? You don’t know me, but a mutual friend of ours told me to call…”
Vondra’s enthrallment with Mahmoud’s power is getting on my nerves. It’s official. There’s also a creepy e-mail from a bachelor in New York who checked out my America Online profile—the one I thought I’d deleted a month ago when I started getting bombarded with creepy e-mail from a bachelor in Alaska.
Dear HeatherG23: I see you live in New York City too and that you enjoy books and good television. I think you’d be a good match for me. I’m 38 + handsome. I collect old Zenith televisions and I’m looking for a steady. ZENITHGUY
I compose the nicest possible Fuck Off I can think of, one that would leave this weirdo’s ego intact:
Dear ZENITHGUY. I am 87. Thank you for your interest. You sound like a very kind young fellow. It really made my day. HeatherG23.
I start checking on flights to Amsterdam and open my file cabinet to make sure my passport is current. It is; there are six more months before I need to reapply.
My expired passports are also in that drawer, in the Important-Paper File, and I can’t resist checking out my teen self, a mousy girl in an argyle sweater and a ponytail. My old yearbooks are there too, and I pull the 1988 yearbook from Dalton and turn to my page. In this picture my hair is shoulder-length and notably flat even without a nineties flatiron. (No bad perm for me—I religiously performed the eighties grooming step of a crème rinse.) My smile is decidedly forced. I’m wearing the same brown argyle sweater in the Dalton picture as in my passport. I wasn’t a geek, or particularly unpopular. Just there, under the radar. I had a few close friends who were equally low-key, the kind the popular kids nod to and occasionally invite to a party. My shopping addiction started later, when my parents finally broke up for good. My mother’s shopping got out of control around the same time. Sometimes I’d see bags from Madison Avenue boutiques near her bed, untouched for over a month. Back in high school though, most of my shirts and pants and dresses were still different shades of tan. I can fake my well-being better these days. It’s amazing what a bright red outfit can do for your image.
We took two trips my senior year of high school, unusual for the Sol Greenblotzes. The first was down to Mom’s parents’ ritzy house in Miami—I’m still not sure where my mother’s parents got their money from. This visit was a big, big deal. The decades-old rift between Mom and her parents began when they sat her down at the age of twelve and told her that there was something she should know. She thought she was about to hear she was adopted, but the truth was even more upsetting: They had never wanted children. She was a mistake. Not expecting she could conceive at forty-six, Mom’s mother (my grandma Bertha) carried five months before realizing she was pregnant not menopausal. Mom quickly confided this whole story to me in the rented Cadillac while Dad was in a 7-Eleven paying for gas. “Such cold demeanors!” (Um, like guess who else? I thought.) She’d hardly seen them since college, but they were both old and sickly now, and she wanted to make amends with them before they died. For a good chunk of their lives, Mom’s parents were German-Jewish Gurdjieffians, adherents of a philosophy verging on cult. From the beginning of his rise, Gurdjieff, who I have since read up on, had many rich and famous disciples including Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers. Way after Gurdjieff’s death, his ideas caught on among progressive rockers Robert Fripp, Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel. According to his worshiping biographer, he never tarried over words and believed cold hard facts—like telling your children the most awful truths—were good for the soul.
No wonder Mary Poppins just up and left when she was done with her charges, Jane and Michael Banks. Her creator was a hard-ass.
“I told her a little more about my upbringing, Sol,” Mom said when Dad was back from the 7-Eleven. “About Gurdjieff and the speech they gave me ‘for my own good.’”
Dad took over the conversation for the remainder of the car ride to my grandparents’ house. “This is who they followed? I think Gurdjieff was evil,” he said, checking his road map. “What a master manipulator. I read he had one of his followers build a wall and then tear it down just because he could make him do that.”
“Gurdjieff sounds awful,” I said to both of them. “Heartless.”
“Now you know what awaits you on this visit,” Mom said with a sigh.
I’d met my Grandma Bertha only twice before, when I was a week old, and when she and my grandfather came to a political convention in New York around my tenth birthday.
Grandma Bertha pecked my mother on the cheek, but for me and my father she could only muster handshakes. Her face was quite wrinkled, with indentations at her cheeks—she looked like a giant peanut. She also had no saliva, so she continually sipped a Fanta.
Grandpa Irving looked like Confucius with a Semitic nose. His gray beard was so long and ragged that the tip of it singed when he was lighting a smuggled Cuban cigar, creating the awful odor of burnt hair.
There was a stiff conversation between my grandmother and Mom about some imported Israeli cabinets that were falling apart. Grandma Bertha blamed the cheap Israeli glue and in doing so sounded just like Mom about to forcibly return a silk blouse with a snag.
My grandfather said to my father, “I was thinking about the invention of butter today.”
“Butter?” Dad said politely.
“Who first invented butter?” Grandpa Irving said.
Dad quickly glanced at Mom. “It must have been a happy accident.”
“What accident takes two days, Sol? Put some milk in a bucket. Take a plunger and go up and down for two days. Then you have butter?”
Dad nodded politely. Mom looked at Grandma Bertha like a five-year-old running from the playground with a fresh gravel rash, waiting for her mother to hug her and stroke her and call her Lam
b. I was startled to see my mother so raw and needy. I kept waiting for some emotion to leak out of my grandparents. “We missed you, Jocelyn.” Or, “It is thrilling to meet up again with our only grandchild.”
But Grandma Bertha just sipped more Fanta.
We had planned on staying the entire afternoon, but there was an unrehearsed change of plans. Tight-lipped, Mom stood up and bid a quick goodbye to her parents. Grandma Bertha gave us polite kisses on our foreheads, and Grandpa Irving shook my father’s hand, and patted me and Mom on the back before the door closed behind us.
My father had happily agreed to go to what was supposed to be the Kaufman Family Denouement. He thought it would be good for his wife and also a chance for the three of us to later see the Everglades. For more than an hour we drove along in silence in the Caddie until my mother faked a laugh and said, “Glad that’s over.” We sailed through Alligator Alley, an expressway that cuts through the Everglades reserve. Three pelicans whooshed down the highway for a crustacean lunch. Dad stopped the car by an official Everglades learning center.
A park ranger paced the packed mini-auditorium like a clown taking a walkabout in the Big Top, pausing briefly for his stopact: “The barred owl’s two-colored plumage makes it appear like he’s got bars of color.”
Dad took enthusiastic notes. He had recently attended a lecture in which the travel memoirist and fiction writer Paul Theroux advised, “You can predict the future in your writing. Just write down everything you hear exactly. I don’t know why this works, but it just does.”
Mom read a mystery she’d bought at the airport; she hid it behind an array of environmental newsletters that Dad had shoved in our hands as we’d walked through the door. I caught my mother’s eye; she smiled and moved her head back and forth like an owl’s. I couldn’t help a snicker.
“Determined as a screwdriver to have a bad time, both of you,” Dad said crisply when we were back in the Caddie. “That’s the last time I try and seek out something new to do with you. You would think after seeing your parents, Jocelyn, you would have learned how important it is to keep this an active family unit.”
Using my grandparents as ammunition was a huge miscalculation. Mom was mute until we returned to New York.
I thought we’d never go away together again. But we did. We had that last hurrah at the end of the very same year, my senior year of high school. First the Russian Tea Room, and then a trip to Australia. Money wasn’t an issue for these lavish graduation gifts. Interaction was.
Our optimistic itinerary was three cities north to south. First the gateway to the Barrier Reef, Cairns, then Sydney and then Melbourne. My mother wasn’t snorkeling then, and somehow when I was out with my newly graduated friends it got shortened to the latter two. Mom wanted to skip the Great Barrier Reef and head straight for big-city action.
On our second day Down Under, Dad went solo to a matinee at the Sydney Opera House. Mom and I shopped The Rocks, an urban mall in a neighborhood paved with pick and shovel by the first convicts sent over from England.
The next night, after another speech by Dad urging us to be more of a unit, the three of us saw a revival of South Pacific. Dad sat next to a swishy theater historian who delighted him during the intermission with tidbits about the original production in 1949. He went on and on about Mary Martin, about how when she played Ensign Nellie Forbush, she washed her hair onstage every night during “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair,” and about when Martin washed her hair so much that she had to cut it short and wear it tightly curled with poofy sides and bangs. “That was the start of the poodle cut,” the historian said. “The hairstyle later mistakenly became a trend attributed to Lucille Ball.”
Dad, still on his Paul Theroux kick, wrote everything down in the bulging notebook he had labeled THE IDEA CATCHER.
“Here’s something dishy to write down,” his new friend said as he leaned in and touched Dad on the arm. “Ethel Merman was demoralized by Martin’s success and told everyone around her after a South Pacific performance how uncouth it was for an actress to shampoo onstage.”
“Ethel Merman was threatened?” Dad marveled.
Mom was less than impressed, not only with this man’s expertise, but also with her husband’s never-ending jottings. There was some pretty nasty bickering that night back at our suite in the Regent Hotel.
“You talked to him with a shine in your eye and corked me if I asked you the littlest question.”
“Jocelyn, don’t be moronic. He was a nice guy, that’s all.”
“Just because I’m not gaga about opera and theater doesn’t make me moronic. Most normal people share my views. Give me a drama any day. It’s less—embarrassing.”
“I don’t butt in when you’re talking about hemlines with your girlfriends, so if you don’t cork me when I’m talking to people who share my interests, we’ll get on fine.”
“Cork you? That’s my line! Now you’re quoting your moronic wife to your moronic wife.”
On the plane to Melbourne, Mom took the open seat in front of us. Dad seemingly forgot I was eighteen not eight, and read me the most unusual Australian-animal names from his guidebook. He especially loved the sound of moon jellyfish and sea walnuts.
From Melbourne we drove in near silence to Philip Island, three hours away and a token gesture of compensation from Mom to Dad for skipping the reef. Dad had read in a guidebook that there was close viewing of koalas to be had, and also a stand set up on the beach for the Penguin Parade, a daily spectacle of thousands of penguins returning to land at dusk.
After five-star hotels, Mom was disappointed by the only accommodation available, a low-key guest house that had a roach or two and framed jigsaw puzzles of tall ships and flowers in our room. But Dad, who was now reading Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar on his downtime, was pleased to receive a kiss of kismet to color our heavily planned-out trip.
“It’s fine, Jocelyn. There’s nothing wrong with this. We have a beach view and beds. This isn’t Paris.”
“This is ridiculous,” Mom hissed. “I wouldn’t have come if I had known it would be like this. You could have asked the travel agent if there was more than a shanty on this hellhole. We’re Jews. We ask.”
“You were born a snob and you’ll die a snob.”
The next day got off on an equally bad foot.
Mom and I took an early-morning walk on the beach to catch the sunrise and sand down our calluses. The gift stores weren’t open. Mom had left her sun visor in Melbourne and the only replacement she could find at 8:00 a.m. was a novelty octopus hat she borrowed from the owner of our guest house.
As we walked toward a good spot on the sand, Mom sneered at my beloved ripped jeans, and declared she’d “take me shopping back in New York.”
I scowled at her and laid out my towel. There was quite an eyeful on the beach: gorgeous half-naked Aussie men everywhere, baking in the sun like adobe bricks. I reached into my Le Sportsac for my baby oil. Who the hell replaced it with sunblock?
“You shouldn’t use oil.” Mom said from her towel. “You’ll thank me in twenty years when you’re not a raisin.”
“I live in Manhattan. For one day I can get some color.”
Mom pushed one of her felt tentacles away from her face. “Everything I say doesn’t need a smart answer. Why do you write us off as friends? We just want to help.”
That night at the Penguin Parade stands, Mom was hunched against the cold in her rich citified clothes, and had a sinus attack from the wet and impossible night. But when the tiny alpha penguin came ashore to signal to his kin that it was okay to head to the beach, and then twos and threes and fours and fives of penguins waddled to their nests, falling over but picking themselves up again through sheer determination, everyone oohed—even teenage surly me, even Jocelyn Greenblotz. That night mysteriously transformed into the best I ever remember. We ate in a locals’ pub, and were joined at dinner by a chatty fisherman who had caught a cow skull in his shrimp net. Back in our one
-star room, we still yakked away about the characters we’d seen at the pub until a late hour. Dad decided we should take a midnight swim in the rain. Mom and I agreed.
We raced out in the ocean waves, hand in hand, a happy threesome.
I felt so damn normal.
I forgot about the rumors that my dad liked to do more than just hang out with other men.
I forgot my mother was more aloof than anyone else’s I knew.
I swam back, dug my feet in the wet sand at the edge of the water and smiled at the barely visible moon and the light raindrops falling on my head, diamonds.
SEVEN
The Hall of Ocean Life
Roswell Birch, a lanky, blond, and pimply seventeen-year-old, arrives on Friday morning at the offices of Two Dames Productions looking as if he just dragged himself out of a hardcore mosh pit. I take his German army jacket (which stinks of just-smoked weed) to hang on the coatrack. His office attire is a vintage, or more probably reissued, Clash concert T-shirt, and black jeans so holey as to border on offensive.
After brief niceties, Roswell fills out some paperwork then savors Vondra’s ass when she bends over to a bottom drawer to show him the filing system.
Vondra gives him the classic bullshit speech every intern on earth has had to endure: “Filing is an excellent way to get a basic understanding of what we do. That’s how I started at PBS. I read everything before it was put away. Once I was an invaluable assistant to my boss, he gave me meatier projects until I was a bona fide producer.”
The shrewd kids know they are being vetted and chirp, “Yes, I’m going to work hard.”
But Roswell says, “That’s fine for a day or two, but I have a film idea I was hoping to develop while I’m on this internship.”
“Maybe you should get to know the ropes first,” I say from my desk.
“But you’re gonna want to do this. It’s a documentary about the history of the documentary. I’m going to ask Albert Maysles to narrate. Do you know who Albert Maysles is?”
The Matzo Ball Heiress Page 11
