Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  Noting that her son-in-law looked especially tired and irritable tonight, Jessie placed her palm on his forehead and inquired solicitously, “Would you like—”

  “Some mead?” Carla interrupted, glancing slyly at her mother.

  “Some Tylenol?” Jessie continued, appearing not to notice the interruption.

  “Tylenol would be great,” said Mark, smiling wanly. “And I could sure use a scotch with that. God, what a day!”

  Jessie hurried off to fetch the Tylenol and the scotch, leaving Mark to embark on the familiar lament about how thankless the practice of medicine had become.

  “How about getting a partner to ease some of the burden?” Carla suggested, launching into the litany of possible solutions they had rehearsed many times before: “Hire someone, or join a group.”

  “How can I hire someone when I’m barely taking home a decent wage myself?” protested Mark irritably. “And what group am I going to join? I’ve been competing with the other GI groups for five years, so naturally we hate each other. And besides, I wouldn’t want to work with them—they only care about money.”

  “You care about money,” pointed out Carla. It seemed the only thing he ever talked about lately.

  “I care about making a decent living,” clarified Mark. “But I want to practice good medicine. The two things shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.”

  “Why don’t you speak to someone at HUP?” suggested Carla, referring to the area’s medical mecca, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where Mark had done his training. “You could teach and see some patients on the side. You liked doing that when you were doing your fellowship.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said impatiently. “You can’t just decide to have an academic career. I’m too old. Besides, it would mean a drastic pay cut.”

  “I thought you didn’t care about the money.”

  “I don’t,” sighed Mark. “But there’s you and the children. We have expenses.”

  This was true. The bat mitzvah alone had become a fearsome extravaganza, the costs mounting scarily by the day. She could imagine her poor husband doing assembly-line colonoscopies for years just to pay for it.

  “I could get a job—a real one,” Carla suggested. She knew this was ostensibly the logical course of action. In the lexicon of feminism, instilled in her from her college days, she was not operating up to par. Her college roommate was now a senior vice president at Maidenform, and her sister, Margot, was one of the highest-billing criminal lawyers in Philadelphia. Of course, her roommate was divorced with a fifteen-year-old son already in rehab, and Margot was without the appendages of husband or children. But even as she noted these qualifying factors, Carla scolded herself for stooping to note them. Tallying the failed marriages and delinquent or nonexistent children of high-powered working women was one of the pettier pastimes of the stay-at-home mother. Besides, for every professional woman with a dysfunctional family, there existed a more domestic one whose family was no Leave It to Beaver. Her own—she could hear the kids screaming like banshees at each other in the living room—left something to be desired.

  But the fact was that Carla was already busy doing what might have counted as several jobs. She supervised the temple book fair and soup kitchen, was secretary of the Home and School Association, helped Mark at the office two mornings a week, and volunteered three afternoons at the Golden Pond Geriatric Center. On top of all this, she shouldered the mundane but labor-intensive tasks associated with running a household of four: shopping, cleaning, and cooking.

  The latter was a particular challenge given her family’s fastidious tastes. Stephanie, for example, was lactose intolerant, grossed out by tomatoes, and allergic to all berries; Mark wouldn’t eat anything orange (an aversion developed, according to his mother, when he was frightened by a Halloween pumpkin at the age of three); and Jeffrey required constant vigilance because he was liable to ingest anything that came within range of his mouth. Just the other day, he had consumed an entire jar of beef jerky, bought at the 7-Eleven with his allowance money, and had diarrhea for three days afterward.

  “You do so much already, and I’d hate to see you give up the geriatric center,” Mark responded to Carla’s suggestion that she get a “real” job. “Not many people can do that kind of work. It’s one thing to deal with human beings clinically, the way I do; it’s another to help them go to the bathroom and tie their shoelaces.”

  It was Mark’s greatness, Carla felt, and one of the reasons she had fallen in love with him, that he didn’t believe that what he did, in having greater social prestige, was superior to what she did. If anything, he admired her more for dealing with the emotional aspects of life that often confused and frightened him.

  Mark and Carla had fallen in love during their sophomore year at Boston University. He was pre-med and she was a psych major, which meant that he helped her do the math and she explained to him what the professor really wanted on the exams—a division of labor they had held to ever since. As Carla’s sister, Margot, put it: “You had an arranged marriage, only you arranged it yourselves. It’s actually kind of disgusting. You even look alike.”

  Carla protested that this wasn’t true. Mark was thin and fair—his parents descended from German Jewish stock, a fact that Rose and Charles Goodman managed to relay by a certain superciliousness of manner that would have bothered a more prickly daughter-in-law. Carla was darker and more robust in the style of her Mediterranean roots—Jessie’s side of the family had Sephardic blood. Yet Margot had a point in noting a resemblance between her sister and brother-in-law. It sprang from deeper points of correspondence: Carla and Mark came from basically the same economic background, shared the same religion (albeit with different degrees of piety), and were the same age (with Carla, in stereotypical female fashion, six months younger than Mark). They had been pleased to discover on their third date that they both wanted to raise their kids in the suburbs, preferably a girl and a boy, with the girl coming first to act as a calming influence (future events would accommodate them here in letter if not in spirit).

  “Heartwarming!” noted Margot dryly when told of this coincidence. Secretly she was rather jealous of her sister’s marriage.

  Having now weathered Mark’s familiar lament about the dire state of his medical practice, Carla put her hand against her husband’s cheek and kissed him. He smiled despite himself. They had fallen in love in college, and they still loved each other—that was something. They had two beautiful if cantankerous children—that was something else.

  “Don’t worry,” she reassured him, “things will work out for the best.”

  “They’ll work out”—Mark sighed in his usual fatalistic tone—“for the best, I don’t know, but they’ll work out. They always do.”

  Chapter Four

  “I won’t HAVE KOSHER FOOD, IT TASTES AWFUL!” DECLARED Stephanie.

  They were addressing the first hurdle related to the catering of the bat mitzvah: whether or not the meal should be kosher. Carla had assumed that it would be—since in her experience it always was. But she was judging from affairs held when formidable individuals like Grandpa Abe, Jessie’s father, were still alive. Abe and his ilk were men of adamantine will for whom many things, the food at bar mitzvahs among them, were as immutable as the setting of the sun.

  “There’s Uncle Sid to consider,” Carla reminded Stephanie. Sid was Jessie’s ancient uncle, so old that he no doubt ate very little except pablum. But he stood as the last clear support for keeping things kosher.

  “You said Uncle Sid was in the hospital and probably wouldn’t come,” Stephanie reminded her. For a girl who couldn’t remember to put the juice back in the refrigerator, her memory could at times be surprisingly sharp.

  “Yes, but he may recover,” said Carla. “We wouldn’t want to offend him.”

  “But he’s like a hundred,” protested Stephanie. “He wouldn’t even notice. I don’t see why we have to have the food taste horrible just because som
e dead people want it to.”

  Though her logic was somewhat askew, the spirit of her argument was sound, Mark thought. He had never been one for the fine points of Jewish ritual and had gone along because his wife’s family had found it important. Now that Grandpa Abe was dead and Jessie appeared to care less, he could hardly see the point of holding to the old ways simply for the sake of doing so.

  “Your mother and I will discuss it,” said Mark, having learned through years of marital tongue lashings not to oppose Carla in front of the children.

  “At least we can sample the kosher food,” suggested Carla. “It may taste better than you think.”

  “I know what it tastes like,” said Stephanie. “David Schwartz’s was kosher. The fake cheese on the cheesesteaks was gross, and no one would eat the make-your-own soy sundaes.”

  “Well, I’m sure that there’s good and bad kosher food, just like everything else,” said Carla. “The least you can do is try it. I have an appointment for a tasting with a kosher caterer tomorrow night who comes highly recommended, and if you finish all your homework, you can come with us.”

  “I’ll try it,” Stephanie said with a shrug, “but if it’s awful I’m not going to have it.”

  “You’ll do what we say, young lady!” said Mark, who, though more on Stephanie’s side than her mother’s when it came to the food, was more prone to take offense at her tone—probably because he had less contact with it.

  Stephanie muttered something under her breath and went off to do her homework.

  “I don’t see why we have to make the thing kosher,” said Mark, once she was out of earshot. “It’s not that anyone would care anymore.”

  “It’s the principle,” said Carla. “I can’t help but feel that a bat mitzvah should be kosher. We’re expressing our Jewish identity to our friends and family.”

  “But we don’t keep kosher,” argued Mark. “And Stephanie’s right—the stuff tastes awful.”

  “Some kosher food can be very good. Remember my mom’s?” Mark had courted Carla in the days when the Kaplan family kept kosher, and he had raved about his mother-in-law’s cooking then, as he did now. Though Jessie had let the custom lapse when her own father died fifteen years ago, Carla had remained sentimentally attached to the memory of those earlier times. The image of her grandfather presiding over the Sabbath meal that her grandmother—and later her mother—had scrupulously prepared for the occasion was one of the most compelling images of her childhood. “Having a kosher bat mitzvah is a symbolic gesture,” she explained now. “It shows respect for our heritage.”

  The spirit, if not the subject, of this debate was a familiar one in the Goodman household. Carla was “more Jewish,” as the saying goes, and Mark was “less.” It was not that Mark had been raised in a lax religious household. On the contrary, he had grown up in a Conservative Jewish home and weathered years of religious training, trudging back and forth to Hebrew school, through snow and sleet, to be drilled in the prayers by aged rabbis with phlegmy voices. But though this intensive training had produced the expected piety in many of his peers, it had had the obverse effect on him.

  There were two aspects of his religion (one could say of religion in general) that went against Mark’s grain. First, were the supposed charms of repetition. Religion was predicated on repetition—on rites and rituals performed over and over again. But Mark had no patience for repetition. It bored him.

  Second was the alleged superiority of one God over many. The idea had never impressed him in the way his teachers obviously felt it should. He could still remember being told what differentiated Judaism from those benighted, earlier religions: “We believe in one God,” the teacher had said in a hushed tone while the other five-year-olds opened their eyes wide in reverence. But Mark had not grasped the advantage of this singularity. It seemed to him that there were definite benefits to having more than one God; indeed, the more the better, given how much there was to do.

  Yet despite the practical and philosophical problems he had with his religion, Mark was not wholly alienated or disenfranchised from it. He identified himself as a Jew, was proud of his heritage, and, after his marriage to Carla, had agreed to join an area synagogue, though only under the stipulation that it be a Reform temple where the services were shorter and the relationship to the deity more metaphorical.

  Carla, by contrast, was of a totally different view. She had strong feelings of affiliation and affection for the religion of her ancestors. Her mind was more emotional and impressionistic than her husband’s, and she found the prayers and rituals to be enormously compelling and consoling. Judaism, as she saw it, was a vast, complex tapestry from which one might follow any thread to arrive at a profound truth.

  She had tried unsuccessfully to convince Mark to join a Conservative synagogue, closer in spirit to the Orthodox one in which she had been raised. In making her case for this traditional affiliation, she relied on all sorts of arguments, and had even put forward the example of the area’s notorious Reform rabbi, incarcerated for life for the contract-killing of his wife some years before. The case, when it first made its explosive appearance in the press, had been a source of morbid fascination and impassioned debate for the Jewish community of Cherry Hill. Many had voiced skepticism: “Okay, maybe he had a few women on the side—not a rabbinical thing to do, but it’s been known to happen. But murder—Jews, and certainly rabbis, don’t do things like that.”

  There had been a trial (in actuality two, since the first had resulted in a hung jury, obviously possessed of a few jurors of the persuasion that “rabbis don’t do things like that”). And while the rabbi had eventually been found guilty and placed behind bars for the remainder of his life, the case continued to be regularly invoked by the Jews of Cherry Hill as an object lesson in any number of things—from the escalating dangers of adultery (said rabbi had dallied with numerous women before taking to murder) to the advantage of an open-office plan (many of the rabbi’s trysts had happened in his locked study—specifically, on his cherry wood desk). But Carla might well have been the first to use the case to argue against Reform Judaism as itself a slippery slope: First, it was shorter services and less Hebrew; next, it was murdering your wife.

  Such an argument, obviously, did not hold weight with Mark, and Carla had finally given up and agreed to membership in a Reform synagogue. To her surprise, she found that the services were not so different from the Conservative ones she had attended in the area—though they were shorter and the cantor did play the guitar.

  Still, when it came to the bat mitzvah, Carla remained steadfast on certain points that pertained to the traditional nature of the event. She bristled, for example, when told of the volkschuls that existed in many affluent suburbs, where educated, highly assimilated Jews staged “special events” in honor of their children’s thirteenth birthdays. These were celebrations of ethnic history and creativity in which the children could do such things as write a research paper on Ellis Island or perform a stand-up comedy routine in the style of Jackie Mason or Jerry Seinfeld (stand-up comedy being seen as a form of cultural expression as close to the actual practice of Judaism as one could get in modern life).

  Events like these were not to Carla’s taste. For her, the bar mitzvah was a sacred marker of the old ways, to be celebrated with all the conventional trappings. And a principal one of these was a kosher meal.

  Fortunately, her friend Jill Rosenberg had done the groundwork and sampled the kosher caterers across the Delaware Valley in preparation for her son’s bar mitzvah the year before.

  “If I have to eat another potato knish, I’ll die,” Jill had reported dramatically in the midst of this evaluative process. In the end, she had declared that one caterer stood out from the pack and could hold his own with the best kosher chefs on Long Island. (Jill grew up on Long Island and saw its offerings in the way of food, clothes, and household appliances as the measure for all things.) This caterer, she said, was the king of kosher caterers: “His soy ice cr
eam’s ambrosia. Josh and his friends practically OD’d on it.” What better recommendation could there be?

  “At least try the caterer,” Carla pleaded with Mark now. “If you or Stephanie don’t like the food, we won’t use him.”

  Chapter Five

  And so, THE NEXT DAY, CARLA, MARK, AND STEPHANIE prepared to drive out to northeast Philadelphia to sample the handiwork of the Iron Chef of kosher caterers.

  Jeffrey was left home with Jessie, who, despite her recent odd behavior, seemed the only person able to get him to sit still and do his work. None of his teachers apparently could, judging by the notes that cascaded daily from his backpack.

  “Dear Mrs. Goodman,” read a recent note from his language arts teacher, “Your son appears to have a chronic need to use the facilities during the class period. His insistence that he ‘must go or else’ is either an indication of some sort of physiological disorder or the sign of an accomplished liar. Kindly instruct him to empty his bladder before class. If the problem persists, I expect a note from a urologist.”

  “Dear Mrs. Goodman,” read another note, discovered last week under Jeffrey’s unwashed gym suit (no telling how long it had been there), “Your son’s incessant belching in homeroom—whether the result of indigestion or misplaced theatrical ambition—has become a real nuisance. It is impossible for the other children to hear the announcements over the PA system. Please speak to him about proper classroom etiquette and/or the importance of a healthy breakfast to settle his stomach.”