Table of Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Also by
Acknowledgments
Copyright Page
To my sister, Rosetta
Although I draw on facts relating to the life and work of William
Shakespeare, this book is an act of imagination and fantasy and
not of literary or historical scholarship. In short, a great deal of
poetic license is taken with the subject matter. Please note as well
that any resemblance between characters in the novel and living
people is purely coincidental.
—Paula Marantz Cohen
Chapter One
“This one LOOKS NICE.”
“I hate it!”
“How about this one?”
“No!”
Carla and Stephanie were leafing through a sample book in the fancy stationery store, trying to pick out an invitation for Stephanie’s bat mitzvah.
Things were not going well.
What Carla liked, Stephanie hated, and what Stephanie liked, Carla couldn’t help saying, “Are you sure that’s what you want?”—a question guaranteed to drive any daughter crazy.
Carla hadn’t thought that picking out an invitation would be so complicated. How hard could it be to choose a good paper stock with a colored border and some curly type?
But she had failed to take several things into account.
For one thing, invitations were not as simple as they used to be. Now, not only was there a dizzying array of paper stocks, borders, and typescripts to consider, but ornamental features like gold leaf, ribbons, and stars; whimsical inserts like confetti, whistles, and gold coins; and high-concept design elements like holograms, taped messages, and scratch-and-sniff panels.
Then, there was the additional complication posed by the bat mitzvah girl herself. Stephanie Goodman was at that highly sensitive and volatile age where choices of any kind tended to stress her out. The many trivial, hard-to-differentiate variables involved in picking out a bat mitzvah invitation were just the sort of thing liable to cause a meltdown.
“What’s wrong with this one?” Carla held up a sample invitation with a pink border and a matching pink bow. A little packet of pink sparkles was also included as a “fun feature”—guaranteed to spray out when the envelope was opened, get embedded in the recipient’s sweater, and remain there through numerous dry cleanings.
“Too girly,” pronounced Stephanie.
“And what’s wrong with girly?” asked Carla, succumbing to sarcasm: “You’re a girl, aren’t you?” In point of fact, Stephanie and her friends liked to advertise their gender—what with the makeup, the tight-fitting tops, and the heavy dousings of cheap perfume that, in the words of Carla’s husband, Mark, made the car (when he drove them to their favored destinations, Friendly’s and Starbucks) smell like a French cathouse. Yet for some reason, certain tried-and-true artifacts of girlhood had been thrown by the wayside. The color pink was one of them.
“I like the turquoise,” said Stephanie, ignoring her mother’s remark (in Stephanie’s world, mothers weren’t allowed to be sarcastic).
“That’s nice.” Carla tried to sound noncommittal.
“You don’t like it!”
“The turquoise is fine.”
“You’re lying! You don’t like it!”
“What does it matter what I like? It’s what you like that counts.”
“I don’t like the turquoise,” said Stephanie with sudden decisiveness. “I like this one.” She pointed to an invitation with pinkish trim and a pinkish bow, similar to the one Carla had just picked out.
“Lavender is very popular,” said the salesgirl diplomatically.
“Yes,” said Stephanie, glad to see her choice—in actuality pink—identified as not pink. “I like the lavender.”
“So that settles it,” said Carla with relief.
“Lisa’s invitation had her voice recorded in it,” Stephanie noted, not content to close the case so easily.
“We have speaking invitations,” said the salesgirl. “They’re really neat.”
Carla felt like swatting the girl, whose skin-tight jeans and heavy eyeliner—not to mention the fact that she wasn’t a day over twenty-three—obviously gave her an unfair advantage. “No speaking invitations,” she said firmly. “Everyone we plan to invite knows how to read.”
“I was just asking!” said Stephanie. “I wasn’t necessarily saying I had to have them.”
“Well, you aren’t going to.”
“I didn’t say I wanted them. I was just asking.” Stephanie’s voice had grown shrill but she managed to mutter under her breath, “You’re so mean! I hate you!”
Carla held herself back from responding. All the books said that the teenagers’ goal was to get the parents angry and on the defensive. It was important not to let them win—or at least know they had. Carla pursed her lips and handed the salesgirl her credit card.
“Do you have a ballpark figure of how many you plan to send out?” asked the salesgirl sweetly.
Carla sighed and shook her head. The original plan had been for a modest brunch—the modest brunch being the common starting point for all bar and bat mitzvahs, though none ever seemed to take this form. In the Goodmans’ case, the brunch had been nixed by Mark’s parents, who had argued that they and their friends weren’t about to schlep up from Florida to have the event over on Saturday afternoon. Better to do an evening affair, with a nice spread for the out-of-towners the next morning to stretch things out.
Once an evening affair was settled on, other variables followed in inevitable succession: a sit-down meal, a band as well as a deejay, a prima-donna entertainment coordinator with entertainment facilitators in matching outfits—not to mention high-end favors, prizes, and other specialty items that the bar mitzvah marketers stipulated as de rigueur for evening affairs.
“It takes on a life of its own,” said Carla’s friend Jill Rosenberg, who was still recuperating from her son Josh’s bar mitzvah a year ago. “But you don’t want to fight it. If you resist, they make you f
eel guilty, so it’s better to give in and go with the flow.”
Carla had taken Jill’s advice and watched unprotestingly as the guest list grew and grew. Stephanie’s list alone drew from three substantial constituencies: her camp friends, her middle-school friends, and her Hebrew-school friends—each group to be treated as inviolable and not to be mixed under any circumstances.
Mark’s list was also substantial. He had to invite all the referring doctors in his hospital (or risk never getting a referral again) and those nurses who had dropped hints as to how they’d love to observe this wonderful Jewish ritual (or risk their developing weird scenarios as to what went on when so many Jews got together in one place).
Carla’s mother, Jessie, planned to invite large contingents from both sides of her family. This included the highly sensitive Scarsdale Lubenthals—to omit one was to bring down the ire of the entire clan—and the lively but disreputable Brooklyn Katzes, likely to show up with new spouses, a doubling effect in itself.
Carla’s in-laws seemed intent on inviting practically everyone in their condominium community in Southeast Florida, including people they frankly detested.
“Invite them,” her mother-in-law said. “They won’t come anyway and it’ll make them feel bad for not inviting us to their grandchildren’s.”
“But what if they do come?” Carla protested. She had learned from friends that people were unpredictable that way and you never knew when someone might be in the mood to hop on a plane and go to a bat mitzvah. Just the other day she had heard a horror story about a woman who invited her husband’s cousins in Venezuela, and had them all show up on her doorstep the morning of the affair.
“If they come, you add a few more tables,” her mother-in-law counseled lightly. Carla’s in-laws were always making such casual pronouncements, until they saw the bill and were appalled. Carla thought they might be suffering from a rare form of Alzheimer’s in which their memory was affected only with regard to what things cost.
Finally, there was the associative principle attached to the invitations. This was the principle whereby asking X meant having to ask Y and Z, who would be mortally offended if they found that X was invited and they weren’t. In short, each invitee immediately spawned two or three more, making compiling the guest list akin to the breeding of rabbits.
“How about a five-hundred-dollar down payment?” said the salesgirl, noting that Carla’s eyes had glazed over at the prospect of giving an estimate. “We can make up the difference when you have the exact count.”
Carla said this would be fine.
“And if you need to change any of the options, we’d be more than happy to accommodate. It’s such an important event; we want the bat mitzvah girl to have everything she wants.”
The salesgirl glanced slyly at Stephanie and her mother as she spoke. She was close enough to her own bat mitzvah to know that what the bat mitzvah girl wants wasn’t always in line with what the mother of the bat mitzvah girl thinks is appropriate. The prospect of a clash of wills filled the air as she saw Carla and Stephanie dart angry looks at each other. It was nice to think that certain things remained the same, mused the salesgirl. Even as you grew older and the world changed around you, others followed in your footsteps and repeated the age-old patterns. That’s what rituals were all about, weren’t they?
Chapter Two
Carla and STEPHANIE RETURNED FROM THE STATIONERY store just as Carla’s mother, Jessie Kaplan, was taking a casserole out of the oven. Ten-year-old Jeffrey was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of chocolate milk and kicking his foot against the refrigerator.
“Stop kicking the refrigerator,” Stephanie ordered her brother angrily as soon as they came in the door.
“I can kick it if I want,” replied Jeffrey. “Grandma doesn’t mind.”
“Well, I mind. You’ll dent the refrigerator,” said Stephanie, suddenly concerned about the well-being of this appliance.
“Dent the refrigerator?” exclaimed Jeffrey. “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard!”
“Don’t call me stupid,” said Stephanie, darting forward and punching Jeffrey on the arm.
“She hit me!” screamed Jeffrey. He had jumped up from his chair and gotten hold of his sister’s T-shirt, which he was pulling violently around the collar.
“He’s stretching my Michael Stars T-shirt!” shrieked Stephanie. “He’s ruining it! It cost thirty dollars!”
The two had by now recessed to the living room, where they were battling each other noisily. The stretched Michael Stars T-shirt had provoked Stephanie to grasp the stiff wedge of hair that stood out on Jeffrey’s forehead in the style popular with preteen boys.
“Oww, she’s hurting me, she’s hurting me!” Jeffrey screamed. “She’s pulling my hair out. Help!”
Carla, too tired to intervene, had fallen onto the kitchen chair, while Jessie calmly poked the casserole with a fork.
Jessie Kaplan was unfazed by the screams emanating from the other room. In fact, she was unfazed by turmoil in general. She had raised two children of her own: Carla and her younger sister, Margot. Carla was the easy one; Margot was the handful (and at thirty-four, still a handful). Having raised Margot, Jessie was used to carrying on in a climate of mayhem and strife.
Jessica had been living with Carla’s family for several months now. For most daughters, this would have been a trial, but Carla counted herself blessed. Her mother was one of those rare specimens: an even-tempered, uncomplaining Jewish woman, who performed household chores with cheerfulness and efficiency. Carla sometimes believed that her mother had been switched at birth and was actually the product of a nice Protestant family who had been saddled, in her stead, with someone who refused to vacuum for fear of breaking a nail.
On this particular day, while Carla and Stephanie had been engaged in the exhausting stationery outing, Jessie had spent the afternoon straightening up and making dinner.
She now handed her daughter a mug filled with a pale yellow liquid: “A glass of mead?” she proffered, as the children could be heard knocking over the andirons in the other room.
“Mead? Is that something you picked up at Whole Foods?” Carla asked suspiciously. Whole Foods was the area’s specialty supermarket where one could buy a wide array of “gourmet organic” foods (an ingenious combination that permitted the food to taste like sawdust and still cost an arm and a leg). The contents of the mug looked and smelled like apple juice, but that hardly prevented it from having been sold at an astronomical price as something more exotic.
Jessie didn’t answer; she was staring dreamily into space. Carla looked at her mother, then gazed down at the alleged mead.
That was the beginning. Other oddities soon followed.
The next night, Jessie prepared a new recipe for the family’s dinner that, upon interrogation, she pronounced to be “venison stew.”
“Venison—what’s venison?” Jeffrey asked.
“Venison is deer,” Mark translated unadvisedly, at which Stephanie jumped up from her chair and bolted from the room. Carla wondered when Whole Foods had begun to carry venison. It certainly wasn’t available at the Acme.
Then, later that evening, after Jessie finished stitching up a hole in Stephanie’s jeans, she turned to Carla and asked if Mark’s doublet needed mending.
“His doublet?” Carla looked at her mother in bewilderment. “What’s a doublet?”
“It’s the tunic worn over the hose,” Jessie answered matter-of-factly.
Carla had tried to react casually: “No doublet, I’m afraid, but you could reinforce the buttons on his dress shirt”—at which Jessie had nodded agreeably and gone ahead and worked on the buttons.
Carla managed to put these strange remarks out of her mind until a few nights later, when Mark was late for dinner.
“Did he stop at the Wild Boar?” Jessie asked in a disapproving tone.
“The Wild Boar?”
“The tavern up the way.”
“No-o-o-o,”
said Carla slowly, “Mark is not at the Wild Boar. He’s at a meeting with a drug rep to discuss the side effects of a new colitis drug.”
She was about to ask her mother where precisely “up the way” the Wild Boar Tavern was located (and how an establishment so-named had managed to escape her notice)—but a phone call from Jeffrey’s social studies teacher intervened. It seemed that Jeffrey had pulled down the map of the continental United States, ripping it from its roller and entirely disrupting the lesson on the Finger Lakes. The resulting damage was to the tune of $144.99, for which the Goodmans would be billed.
“Under no circumstances is your child to touch the map, the globe, the worksheets on my desk, the other children’s pencils, papers, notebooks, or anything not belonging exclusively to himself,” said the teacher, in what Carla took to be an unnecessarily snippy tone.
After this phone call, she might have returned to probe the reference to the tavern—not to mention the earlier references to the mead, the venison, and the doublet—but somehow she wasn’t in the mood.
Chapter Three
“How was YOUR DAY?” CARLA ASKED HOPEFULLY WHEN Mark finally arrived home that night.
“A disaster,” he snapped. “Mrs. Connor lost her health insurance when she was laid off last year and now she comes in with rectal bleeding. And Jack Morris—you know, the guy who sold us our Volvo, nice fellow—finally developed an ulcer and his insurance doesn’t cover the cost of an endoscopy; I had to drop that carrier six months ago.”
“So what are you going to do?” said Carla, thinking about poor Mrs. Connor and Jack Morris, bereft of medical coverage.
“I’m going to treat them,” sighed Mark, “but I’m not running a charity ward. And it doesn’t help that some of the others give me a hard time about the twenty-dollar co-pay. You’d think I was soaking them for their life’s savings. Not that they’d give a second thought to buying a hundred-and-twenty-dollar pair of running shoes, or paying thousands to the vet to treat their beloved Fido.”
He slumped wearily in his chair, and Jessie ran to cluck over him. She had, in the manner of many elderly Jewish women, an enormous respect for physicians, whom she placed on a metaphorical dais above all other human beings. Mark greatly appreciated this attitude. It always gave him a lift to overhear his mother-in-law referring to him reverently as “the doctor,” as in, “What do you think the doctor would like to have for dinner tonight?” Lately, with Jeffrey’s behavior problems and the screaming fits erupting between Stephanie and her mother over the bat mitzvah, Jessie was about the only member of the family Mark could bear to have around.
Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan Page 1
