Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  Only yesterday there had been a particularly dire note from the principal: “Dear Mrs. Goodman,” the missive read, “Your son has once again thrown an eraser out of the second-floor window. This time, it hit Mr. Fialkow, our vice principal, grazing the side of his head. A direct hit would certainly have caused a concussion—or worse. We cannot emphasize enough the seriousness of this infraction and the need to make sure that no such possibly fatal incidents occur again.”

  The stress engendered by such notes was considerable, and Carla found herself in a continual round of meetings with the nurse, the guidance counselor, and the vice principal (now liable to be less understanding as the recipient of a potentially fatal blow).

  Jessie, however, was one of the few adults with a surefire strategy for managing Jeffrey. It all seemed to hinge on her potato latkes. Jessie’s method went like this: “Jeffrey, if you finish your math homework, you get a latke. No math homework, no latke.” Jeffrey would finish his math homework and get a latke. “Okay, the math is done.” Jessie would nod approvingly. “Now, to study the vocabulary. Study the first ten words, you get a latke.” The ten words studied, Jessie tested him; if he answered correctly, the latke was forthcoming; if not, it was back to more studying. This went on until all the homework was completed. The method was labor-intensive, and Carla worried that without the coveted reward to concentrate his mind, Jeffrey would accomplish very little—a fact supported by his performance at school, where there were no latkes to be had.

  Carla told Jessie to make sure that Jeffrey was in bed by ten (with no Game Boy under the covers) and to take a message should there be a call from the elusive bar mitzvah entertainment motivator—the name now given to the once-lowly deejay, and much harder to get hold of under this more august title.

  Jessie assured her that everything would be done, and they were almost out the door when she called after them in a concerned voice: “I do hope the ostler remembered to saddle the horses!”

  Mark had originally speculated that his mother-in-law’s remarks might be a side effect of her blood-pressure medicine, and had advised her cardiologist to change her prescription. But Jessie had been on the new medicine for two weeks now, with no apparent improvement. The odd remarks kept coming, to the point that Carla had placed a large dictionary on the table in the front hall for consultation when her mother said something particularly cryptic.

  “I think we’d better try a neurologist,” said Mark as they got in the car. “Not that it’ll make any difference. Except for treating seizures and migraines, neurologists can’t do anything but give bad news.”

  “Maybe it’s a seizure,” said Carla hopefully.

  “Trust me, it’s not a seizure.”

  “So you think she’s just losing it?” Carla said sadly. It was a thought that had occurred to her and she had tried to put out of her mind. Now she was struck by the depressing symmetry of the situation: Just as her daughter was entering the age of reason, her mother was leaving it. Time spent volunteering at the geriatric center had given her a vivid sense of where this process might lead.

  “I wouldn’t jump to conclusions,” said Mark, seeing his wife’s distress. “It may simply be a passing phase. And it hasn’t kept her from doing what she’s always done. That was a nice sweater she just knitted for Stephanie, for example, and she’s still one hell of a good cook.”

  “There was the venison stew,” Carla reminded him.

  “But it was tasty, whatever it was,” said Mark. “She hasn’t lost her touch. Give it time. See how she is in a few weeks.”

  They all got in the car, but before backing out of the driveway, Mark paused and turned to Carla. “By the way,” he asked, “what’s an ostler?”

  Chapter Six

  The caterer WAS LOCATED IN WHAT LOOKED LIKE AN ABANDONED warehouse in the farthest reaches of northeast Philadelphia. They were greeted by one of the owners, a middle-aged man named Moishe, who bounded toward them wearing a yarmulke on top of a toupee—something that struck Mark as particularly redundant.

  The inside of the building was cluttered with aluminum pans, serving bowls, and cardboard boxes, but an area had been cleared in one corner where a small table had been carefully set with three place settings. There was a magenta cloth on the table, matching magenta napkins, and plates with magenta trim, as well as glasses and cutlery. This apparently was where the Goodmans were to sample the bat mitzvah meal.

  “I set the table according to the color scheme that our bat mitzvah girls tend to favor,” said Moishe, motioning to the table and addressing Stephanie, “but of course we have the books for you to look through to choose what you like if this isn’t to your taste.” He gestured to a library of black leather volumes on shelves across the room.

  “The young lady should sit here.” Moishe gestured to the center of the table. “And I’ll take her order for a beverage.” He bowed his head in pleasing subservience to Stephanie. “Your choice of Diet Coke or iced tea.”

  “Diet Coke,” said Stephanie demurely.

  “And the folks should sit on either side,” motioned Moishe, more perfunctorily, failing to take their beverage order.

  “We’re going to give you a sampling of some of our most popular items,” he explained. “But you also have a list here.” He handed them a calligraphied sheet that seemed to go on forever. “These are other options that you can choose from. Here you see the meat menu and here the dairy. Note that some are starred to indicate a cost over and above the standard package fee. Some, with the dagger, are seasonal, and some, which require additional time to prepare, are in italics”—his hand swept across the menu quickly, indicating a veritable jungle of symbols and typescript. “Generally,” he said, as he saw Mark and Carla looking confused, “the items we’ll be serving you tonight are the ones most people choose, and they fall within the standard package price.”

  He turned to Stephanie to give a personalized translation: “I’m simply showing what we have, because we want the bat mitzvah girl to be happy, and sometimes she wants to choose something out of the ordinary. But as I say, most choose from among the items you’ll get to sample today—and I’ll be frank with you about which ones are the all-out favorites with the teens.” He turned to Carla and Mark in an aside: “I’ll send on the hors d’oeuvres menu another time. The hors d’oeuvres tend to get a bit complicated, and I like to leave it to Mom and Dad to make those selections at a later date.” (Experience had shown that it was best not to overload the customer, especially with the child present, since messy scenes were likely to result.)

  “So without further ado, let’s have Eduardo, our chef, bring out your first course.” Moishe retreated to a mysterious area behind the cluttered office that one assumed to be the kitchen. Almost immediately, a large Hispanic man, wearing a chef’s hat and a mildly irritated expression, emerged holding a tray with three bowls of salad. “This is Eduardo, the best kosher chef in the Northeast.” Moishe gestured toward the chef. “And here’s your salad course,” he announced, “a very good starter, since if they want to go up and schmooze or do the hora, it won’t get cold. We’re doing a meat meal for you, since that tends to be the favorite with the kids. Our nondairy ice cream is awesome,” he turned to Stephanie, “and the cheese on the cheesesteaks—you’d think you were at Pat’s in South Philly, not that I know myself, but I’ve been told.

  “Anyway, the salad has croutons, tomatoes, cucumber, walnuts, a little arugula for those who like the fancy lettuce, with a nice vinaigrette. A big favorite.” Mark and Carla sampled the salad and observed that it was good. Stephanie, who didn’t eat salad, waited patiently.

  “Okay, that’s the salad,” said Moishe, “Now for the soup. It’s good to get everyone settled down with the soup. We have a nice matzo-ball soup—lightest matzo balls in the Delaware Valley—no offense to Grandma.”

  The soup was brought out by the surly chef. Stephanie, who liked matzo-ball soup, agreed that it was good.

  “The kids can have the matzo-ball s
oup too,” said Moishe. “Usually we give them mozzarella sticks as a first course—tastes just like real mozzarella—but we can substitute the matzo-ball soup if you want; we do it a lot.” Stephanie said she wanted the matzo-ball soup instead of the mozzarella sticks.

  “Done,” said Moishe.

  “Next, we have a palate cleanser, a nice sorbet.” Eduardo brought out three dishes of sorbet: two yellow, one red. “Raspberry or lemon, your choice.”

  “Lemon,” pronounced Stephanie.

  “Lemon it is.

  “Then we have the main dish for the grown-ups. We’re going to bring you three choices here: the pistachio-crusted sea bass, the chicken with tomato and pesto glaze, and the filet mignon with shiitake mushrooms and red wine. I’ll tell you frankly here that the sea bass and the filet are generally the favorites. Nothing wrong with the chicken, mind you.” Carla and Mark sampled the three dishes and agreed to go with the sea bass and the filet.

  “Now we’ll bring out the kids’ choices,” said Moishe. “Here we have a cheesesteak—and you tell me if you can tell the difference from the real thing. We also have the hotdog and the hamburger, the ten-foot hoagie, the chicken nuggets, and the pasta with meat sauce—all big winners. Generally, we serve three of these, so there’s plenty to satisfy if a kid doesn’t like something.”

  Stephanie was biting into the cheesesteak with the air of a serious connoisseur. “It’s pretty good,” she admitted. Mark took a bite to assure himself that Stephanie had not been snowed by an impressive sales job, and had to admit that it was indeed pretty good. Stephanie also chose the nuggets and the pasta, which, according to Moishe, were what most kids chose.

  “And now for the final and most important course,” said Moishe, looking knowingly at Stephanie. “The dessert. Can we make it taste like ice cream?—that is the question. Not one of the Four Questions, I’ll grant you, but an important one.” Eduardo brought out a tray with the faux ice cream and a variety of toppings, which Stephanie carefully prepared into a sundae.

  “It tastes real,” she said, to which Moishe exclaimed, “What did I tell you? For the adults, we serve a nice plate with fresh fruit and a chocolate torte.” He obviously did not intend to bring this out, having accomplished the task of selling the child on the ice cream.

  “I’m sure it’s wonderful,” said Carla, relieved to see Stephanie behaving with such docility. How, she wondered, might she perfect Moishe’s mixture of flattery and bullying so as to ingratiate herself with her daughter?

  “Fine,” said Mark, glad to have the thing over with. “We’ll take it.”

  “And the table setting?” asked Moishe. “Would the young lady like to look through our sample books for other options?”

  “I like this one,” said Stephanie, to Carla’s surprise. Her daughter had never made a decision this quickly before in her life.

  “A wise choice, if I may say so,” said Moishe. “It’s our favorite setting by far. Your daughter, I can see, has a good eye.”

  “That she does,” said Carla, trying to share in the goodwill that Moishe had generated. Stephanie, however, would have none of it—this was a love-fest between her and Moishe alone—and she shot an annoyed glance at her mother. Still, there was no fighting, and they shook Moishe’s hand at the door with a certain amount of relief.

  “Now that was easy, wasn’t it?” said Carla as they drove home, Stephanie having fallen asleep in the backseat.

  Mark grunted. Moishe’s brand of salesmanship rubbed him the wrong way, and he still wasn’t thrilled by the idea of serving food that imitated other food. But he had to admit that it had all tasted pretty good and that the whole thing had transpired more painlessly than expected. The cost, of course, was another story. He had put down a substantial down payment, and the final bill for the meal promised to be very painful indeed.

  Chapter Seven

  “I broke UP WITH KEVIN,” ANNOUNCED MARGOT AS SHE AND Carla settled into a booth at the back of Sal and Joe’s, a family-owned Italian restaurant in Maple Shade, just outside of Cherry Hill. It was the custom of the sisters to have lunch at least once a week to “catch up,” mostly with Margot’s fast-paced love life. Sal and Joe’s was a favorite meeting-place, since they were both partial to the mussels marinara.

  In the current instance, it had actually been two weeks since they had last had lunch. This was because Margot had been away in L.A. taking depositions for a big case involving half the Philadelphia mob. (“Construction and union graft are passé with organized crime these days,” Margot explained. “They all want to be in movies.”)

  Carla had hoped to begin their lunch talking about their mother’s condition, but her sister’s announcement effectively preempted this. Margot’s latest romantic misadventure would have to be thoroughly worked over before they could move on to other things.

  “Which one was Kevin?” asked Carla. She had difficulty keeping Margot’s boyfriends straight. It was not only that there were so many but the relationships were so short-lived. In some cases, calling them relationships was a stretch. Was two weeks together—even if it meant taking a private jet to Paris or relaxing on the shores of Lake Como—a relationship? Carla wasn’t sure.

  “Kevin’s the guy in L.A. in ‘development.’ I don’t know what development is,” noted Margot, “but it seems to involve having lunch with lots of rich, famous people to talk about projects that never get off the ground. How he’s managed to make so much money when he’s never produced anything is a mystery to me. I suppose I could figure it out if I had more time with him. But that, as I say, doesn’t seem to be in the cards.”

  “How long did you go out?” Carla wondered how this liaison had passed her by unnoticed.

  “Three months. But of course we didn’t see each other much, since he was in L.A. and I was here—which helped.” Carla might have said that it hindered, but she supposed that this was a matter of perspective. Most of Margot’s relationships fizzled out much sooner. In Kevin’s case, the longevity seemed to be a function of tantalizing emails that had piqued Margot’s interest until they were replaced by the fact of his person. Probably his work in “development” took the same course, with the money coming in at some intermediate stage.

  “He was fine in theory,” Margot sighed. This was not an unfamiliar complaint with regard to Margot’s boyfriends. They looked good on paper and often looked good in clothes (and even without them), but did not hold up to sustained human contact.

  Margot paused at this point to give the waitress her order—and to note the handsome young man, resembling the young Al Pacino, who was staring appreciatively at her near the pizza oven. He was obviously an employee, neither Sal nor Joe, but possibly a relative of one of them.

  Handsome young men and prosperous older ones tended to stare at Margot. As Uncle Sid, even in decline a great admirer of female pulchritude, put it: Margot was “a hot tomato.” People prone to less metaphorical description said she looked like the actress Rachel Weisz—only better. (Penelopé Cruz and Salma Hayek were other actresses whom Margot was said to look better than.)

  “So what was the problem with Kevin?” asked Carla, with mild curiosity. There was a certain sameness to these conversations. Although the reasons for Margot’s failed relationships were multitudinous, the basic pattern tended to be the same. The last one had been a real-estate magnate with houses in Aspen and the South of France who, it turned out, had been functionally illiterate and gotten through college on Cliff’s Notes. Before that was the British fashion photographer, straight out of a Judith Krantz novel, very handsome and exceptionally good in bed, who turned out to have a video archive of the women he slept with. Margot had escaped taking her place in that library by the skin of her teeth, quite literally—she had seen the reflection of the camera eye in the bathroom mirror as she was brushing them before one of their trysts.

  “So what was wrong with this Kevin?” Carla repeated, hoping that they could conclude the conversation quickly and move on.

 
“Bad personal hygiene,” sighed Margot. “You’d think someone who drove a Maserati would change his underwear.”

  “You’d think,” agreed Carla. “But driving a Maserati can exempt you from a lot of things.”

  Margot acknowledged this to be true. When would she learn? Her record in love was abysmal; each new foray led to disappointment, though fortunately not to heartache. Margot’s heart was rather resilient—at least she liked to give that impression.

  Much of the problem, as both sisters had long ago concluded, had to do with Margot’s appearance. While Carla was pleasant-looking (the words cute and pretty came to mind), Margot was something else entirely (striking and stunning were the operative terms). If Carla had inherited her mother’s sweet nature and domestic sense, Margot had inherited her looks.

  “You should have seen your mother at your age,” Milt Kaplan used to expound to his daughters, as he sat back after one of Jessie’s excellent meals. “She was a knockout with the disposition of an angel. Boys would come from all the way across town to carry her books when she walked to school, and she used to take a few extra along so nobody would feel left out.”

  “So what are you saying, Dad? I should bring extra books to school with me?” Margot would ask, sensing that the story was somehow directed at her.

  “I’m not saying anything.” Milt would put up his hands. “I’m just describing. Is it a crime for me to talk nicely about your mother?”

  Despite his protests, Milt was indeed intending an object lesson for his daughter. What he failed to understand was that the kind of looks that Margot had inherited from her mother—the shapely figure; thick, curly hair; long, wide mouth; narrow, densely lashed eyes; and high forehead that had made Jessie Kaplan the toast of Vineland—had different effects in the world as it currently existed. In Jessie’s day, a beautiful woman was an ornament to grace the arm of some lucky alpha male. In the postfeminist era in which Margot came of age, beauty had become a more slippery signifier. It could brand as much as it could elevate, and often did both at the same time. Thus a dull girl with good looks was immediately judged to be a bimbo, while a sharper one with the same looks would be seen as a bitch, with the capacity to humiliate any man who crossed her path.