Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  Margot happened to fall into the latter category. She had been characterized as “scary smart” ever since junior high school, when she was often first to finish the timed math tests. Boys, dazzled though they were by her thick lashes and sweetheart mouth, were petrified that she would make them look like fools.

  In the end, only fools and men with monumental egos or bank accounts dared to approach her. According to Mark, here lay the root of her problem: She scared off the nerds, who ultimately had the best characters and made the best husbands. “Look at me,” he liked to tell her, “I’m a nerd with a capital N. But you wouldn’t give someone like me the time of day.” He seemed pleased by this notion. As much as he loved his sister-in-law, the idea of being married to her raised the hair on the back of his neck.

  “I’ve decided to carefully assess all future dating prospects,” Margot announced to Carla now, throwing an empty mussel shell rather violently into the bowl as if it were Kevin, complete with Maserati and dirty underwear. “As a first order of business, I’m going to compile a checklist of what I want in a man, and I won’t bother with anyone who doesn’t measure up.”

  Carla found herself objecting to this approach: “I like the idea of your being more discriminating, but you can’t be so scientific about it. You’re not buying a car or a pair of shoes; you’re looking for a soul mate.”

  “Since when do they have to be mutually exclusive?”

  “Are you saying that a pair of shoes can be a soul mate?”

  “No—though I’ve gotten a lot of solace from a nice pair of Manolo Blahniks. I’m saying that I don’t see why I shouldn’t be at least as careful finding a husband as I’d be buying a luxury item. When I purchase a car, I read Consumer Reports, take a test drive, and look under the hood—or at least I get Calvin to look under it for me.” (Calvin was the mechanic at the service station near Rittenhouse Square where Margot lived, and who existed in her thrall. When men did not dub her an A-1 bitch, they tended to operate in slavish servitude to her—or as Mark put it: “to play Igor to her Dr. Frankenstein.”) “I think I ought to do at least as much research and evaluation if it’s someone I plan to spend the rest of my life with. Besides, I’m a very high-end item, and I wouldn’t want to sell myself short.”

  “But people aren’t like cars,” protested Carla. “There can be problems with the engine and they can stall out occasionally but still be worth holding on to. And with your attitude, you may end up with nobody.”

  Carla was now beginning to sound like their late father. Milt Kaplan had often warned Margot that if she continued to be so snooty she would never get married. (Jessie, by contrast, had never voiced concern on this score. “Let her take her time and look around,” she used to tell her husband, who sometimes wondered if his wife would have liked to have looked around a bit more herself.)

  “And so what if I don’t get married?” Margot replied testily to her sister’s advice. “I have an interesting job and a nice salary. It’s not as though I need the diversion or the security. And for love and companionship, I always have Mom, not to mention you, Mark, and the children.”

  Carla was always disarmed when Margot made this point. Her sister was, she knew, a devoted daughter and deeply attached to the Goodman family, for whom she was forever buying unnecessary gifts: an Italian silk smoking jacket for Mark (“for my evenings relaxing over a cigar at the club,” noted Mark facetiously), a Smith Brothers T-shirt the size of a postage stamp for Stephanie (its price inversely related to its size), a top-of-the-line skateboard for Jeffrey (who needed a skateboard like a hole in the head and which Carla feared it was likely to produce). Margot was also a regular provider of coveted Flyers tickets for Mark and Jeffrey (sky box, gourmet cheesesteaks included), and was known, on Sunday afternoons, to whisk Jessie, Stephanie, and Carla off for afternoon tea at Philadelphia’s Four Seasons Hotel (a repast which cost as much as dinner for ten at Sal and Joe’s). She also had the habit of picking up designer “pieces” for Carla and Jessie (a Chanel suit, a Gucci bag, a Hermès scarf). Carla wore these items on the infrequent occasions when she wanted to impress the glitzier elements of Cherry Hill. Jessie hung them in her closet and didn’t wear them at all.

  Margot’s acts of generosity toward her sister’s family did not go unappreciated. Stephanie and Jeffrey viewed her as their beloved, nutty aunt, and even Mark, liable to suspect the worst in people, acknowledged that Margot had a good soul, though you wouldn’t know it looking at her.

  Carla, for her part, viewed her sister’s devotion with a pang. She suspected it involved large amounts of what in psych class they called “displacement.” Though there were times when she envied Margot’s high-powered career and was fed up with her own workday routine, she still believed that a good marriage was fundamental to a happy life. She sensed deep currents of loneliness in her sister and fervently hoped that she would soon find that most valuable of life assets: a soul mate.

  “So how’s Mom?” Margot brought forth at last, throwing the final mussel shell into the bowl. “I spoke to her last night and she sounded more cheerful than I’ve heard her in a long time.”

  “She is more cheerful,” Carla agreed. Jessie’s mood had not been what she wanted to discuss, but she had to admit that Margot was right. Both sisters had been concerned when their mother had acted draggy and depressed for a prolonged period following their father’s death two years ago. Carla had finally insisted that Jessie give up her Vineland apartment and move in with her own family in Cherry Hill. It had now been three months since the move, and there was no doubt that Jessie’s spirits had improved.

  “She’s definitely happier,” Carla continued carefully, “but she’s happy in a strange sort of way. Her behavior”—she struggled for the right word, and took refuge in Stephanie’s vocabulary—“is weird. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it. Mark thinks she should see a neurologist—or maybe a psychiatrist. Frankly, it’s hard to know what to do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Carla saw she had finally captured her sister’s attention.

  “It’s her speech: odd words and phrases inserted into her everyday conversation.”

  “Odd in what sense?” Margot assumed her lawyerly, inquisitional tone.

  “‘Archaisms,’ I suppose you’d call them. They seem to date back to maybe the sixteenth or seventeenth century.”

  Margot considered this for a moment. “Perhaps she’s been watching some of the old movies on the Turner Classic Movie channel,” she finally suggested. “Robin Hood with Errol Flynn or Henry VIII with Charles Laughton. I loved those movies when we used to watch them on Million Dollar Movie, remember? The vocabulary from the films could be affecting her.”

  “It’s possible,” said Carla doubtfully, “but she doesn’t really watch that much television. And if she were absorbing the vocabulary, that would be odd in itself, wouldn’t it? Since when do people start talking like old movies?”

  “Well, she is getting on in years—and she’s lonely,” said Margot with a trace of wistfulness. “I wouldn’t mind having a movie in my head where Prince Charming comes along and sweeps me off my feet.”

  “He will,” said Carla reassuringly. “Just be patient.”

  “Well, maybe you should be patient with Mom, too,” counseled Margot, who, when not dealing with her own life, possessed a good deal of common sense. “Let’s talk about how she’s doing next week. I have a case coming up, but I’ll work in a lunch with my big sister next Wednesday if you can make it into the city.”

  “It’s a date,” said Carla.

  “I wish!” sighed Margot. “If I could have you cloned in male form, then maybe I could have a relationship that lasts.”

  “You just need to look in the right places and be more open-minded.” Margot glanced at the admiring Al Pacino near the pizza oven, and Carla hurried to qualify: “And I don’t mean in that direction; he looks like he’s about nineteen.”

  “Older woman, younger man is in,” observed Ma
rgot—then, seeing her sister’s annoyed expression, “Okay, okay, I’ll try to look for a bona fide nerd, preferably with a medical degree. But I’m late for court now, and the judge is already mad at me for not letting him look down my blouse.” She put a twenty-dollar bill on the table, shot the young man near the pizza oven a parting glance, and strolled out of the restaurant in her Manolo Blahniks.

  Chapter Eight

  The following FRIDAY AFTERNOON, CARLA STOLE A FEW hours to do some errands. She made a brief stop to pick up Mocha Twists and frozen chicken satay at Trader Joe’s (staples in the family diet), to look for some 30A bras for Stephanie at Marshalls, and to buy some replacement glass tumblers at Williams-Sonoma (every few weeks, the family’s collection of water glasses diminished through mishaps generally related to Jeffrey).

  With these missions accomplished, she continued down the highway to the area’s mega-bookstore to check out the books in the psychology section. It was her hope that the experts would say that throwing erasers out of windows was to be expected from high-spirited pre-adolescent boys, and that strange archaisms were not uncommon coming out of the mouths of septuagenarian widows.

  As Carla approached the bookstore, she realized that an event was in progress. The place was packed with half the female population of Cherry Hill. Who could possibly draw such a crowd? Carla’s first thought was that the attraction must be a former overweight celebrity who had written a book on how she lost two hundred pounds through strenuous diet and exercise (with a little help from stomach stapling) or a chef from one of Philadelphia’s most expensive restaurants hawking a collection of low-calorie gourmet recipes (the low-calorie gourmet meal being to the credulous suburbanite what alchemy had been to the credulous medieval scientist).

  But the sign near the front of the store soon made it clear that the featured attraction was neither a former celebrity fattie nor a calorie-conscious gourmet chef. The personage in question was Dr. Leonard Samuels, well-known Cherry Hill psychiatrist and author of the new self-help book How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love My Mother-in-Law.

  Carla had certainly heard of Dr. Samuels. Her friend Jill Rosenberg had consulted him prior to her son Josh’s bar mitzvah: “He made it so that I almost had a good time,” said Jill by way of testimony to Samuels’s miraculous abilities, “and I’ve never had a good time in my life.”

  Samuels was also a frequent guest on the local public radio show Voices in the Family, and was much quoted in the area’s much-maligned but scrupulously read local newspaper, the Camden Courier Post, on issues ranging from school violence to geriatric sex.

  In short, Samuels had a reputation in Cherry Hill, and now, with his new book, he was on his way to an even bigger one. Why, thought Carla fleetingly, couldn’t Mark do a little of this sort of self-promotion? He too was a doctor, superlatively trained and with a pleasant way with people when he wanted to make the effort. He too was providing a valuable service—albeit one involving a lower end of the anatomy, though no less important for that.

  But Carla had no time to dwell on possible pubic relations opportunities for her husband right now. There was too much going on around her. As she entered the store, she saw that Samuels’s books had been arranged on a large display table in an intricate pyramid at which women, eager to obtain a copy, were violently grabbing, so that harried salespeople were obliged to continually reassemble the pyramid on an ever-diminishing scale.

  “I love the title,” one matron was overheard to say. “It’s taken from that Woody Allen movie.”

  The title was actually an allusion to the 1964 classic Stanley Kubrick film, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb. But the origin of the title hardly mattered to the assembled throng. They liked it because, quite simply, they really wanted to stop worrying and learn to love their mothers-in-law.

  As Carla inched her way forward through the crowd, she could hear various testimonials to Dr. Samuels’s genius wafting around her.

  “He cured me of my psoriasis,” said one. “He told me that I didn’t have to go to my brother’s Passover seder if I didn’t want to. I said, ‘David, I love you, but I’m sick to death of sitting through you reading every goddamn prayer in the Haggadah and singing all those verses of “Chad Gadya” when you know I have to get up at six A.M. for work the next day.’ Once I’d said it, my skin cleared up in a week.”

  “He gave me my Jonathan back,” said another woman reverently. “He said, ‘Instead of trying to make him feel guilty, tell him to go live with his father, if that’s what he wants. I took his advice. Jonathan stayed with Nathan for a week and that was the end of it. I never heard a peep out of him again about liking his father better. Now he goes to visit the bum on holidays and for a week in the summer and he’s glad to come home. He knows who loves him.”

  “I was at my wit’s end with Ian over the bar mitzvah thank-you notes,” said another woman, who was holding several copies of Samuels’s book with the obvious intention of giving them as gifts to needy friends. She was speaking to another woman, who appeared to be hanging on her words. “He refused to write them,” the first woman explained to her companion. “God knows, we did everything. First, we grounded him; then, we took away cable; then network TV; then Nintendo and PlayStation II; then his CD player and the Internet; then dessert.” These deprivations were recited as though they were the plagues visited upon the Egyptians in the Old Testament, and the woman who was listening opened her eyes wider and wider as the punishments were enumerated. “Still, he wouldn’t finish them,” explained the woman. “What else was there?” She looked queryingly at her companion, who shook her head in mystification. “So I consulted Dr. Samuels, and you know what he said?” The other woman opened her eyes even wider, as if she couldn’t stand the suspense. “He said, ‘To hell with the thank-you notes! Give him a list of the telephone numbers and have him call everyone and say a few words. They’ll love it and he won’t have to put pen to paper.’ You know what? We followed his advice and it worked!”

  Carla had begun to grow genuinely interested in Dr. Samuels. The testimonials were impressive and the size of the crowd, many of them clutching multiple copies of his book, was more so.

  At this point she had inched close to the center of the store, where Samuels was positioned behind a small table in preparation for the signing. He was a large man of about sixty-five, with the kind of craggy face and squat, powerful body common to certain Jewish men who had grown up poor and prided themselves on being as tough as the Italian kids on the block (and having the broken noses to prove it). Samuels now stood up from the table and put his hand in the air to establish his intention to speak. Possessing a natural sense of authority, which was at least three quarters of his success, he immediately got results: The loud chatter died down to a hum of excited whispers.

  “Let me be frank with you folks,” said Samuels, speaking in the friendly, no-nonsense manner that was his trademark. “There’s nothing here that you couldn’t find out for yourself.” He held up a copy of his book, which had a picture on the cover of an attractive, smiling woman who had obviously taken his advice and learned to love her mother-in-law. “That doesn’t mean, of course, that you don’t have to read it.”

  There was appreciative laughter.

  “When you have kids and parents, husbands—and wives”—he gestured toward the few lone men huddled toward the back of the store—“let’s face it, things get complicated. You forget what’s important. You fixate, you escalate, you make a big mishegoss out of what should be a nothing. What I give here”—he tapped the book casually with his bearlike hand—“are commonsense solutions. There’s no magic involved and probably, if you weren’t so busy doing whatever it is you do, you could figure it all out yourself. But the fact is, you can’t. I’ve made it my living and you haven’t.

  “So there you have it. Buy the book. Learn something. But remember one thing—The book is general. That’s why they call it self-help: You read it and you hel
p yourself. Not everyone can do that. Some people don’t go in for reading books, and some people need more personalized attention. If you fall into that category, call me up and make an appointment. I’ll be frank with you: You may have to wait a month to see me—I’m booked solid—but it’ll be worth the wait.

  “Now, I say this knowing there are those among you who have a problem with seeing a psychiatrist. Seeing a psychiatrist, you think, means you’re crazy—like your cousin, the one who had the Ponzi scheme and the drinking problem, and ran off to Vegas with the stripper.”

  There was another wave of appreciative laughter.

  “You’re thinking, He needed a shrink, but I don’t. But let me tell you—your crazy cousin needed a shrink, but so do you. Everyone needs one sooner or later. The reason? Life is hard, and we can use all the help we can get. After all, you hire someone to clean your house; why not someone to clean up here?” He tapped his head. “One thing I guarantee: If you come to see me, you’ll come out of the office feeling better than when you came in.

  “So that’s it, folks. Buy the book; make an appointment if you need to. Remember, you only have one life. There’s no point going through it feeling miserable.”

  The throng erupted in appreciative exclamations of “I love you, Dr. Samuels!” and “God bless you, you saved my life!” Samuels gave a nod of acknowledgment, then put up his hand in the same gesture he had used when he began speaking, though now it was suggestive of a blessing. Then, he sat down to begin the hard work of signing copies.

  Carla picked up one of Samuels’s books and took her place on line. When she got home, she thought, she would call for an appointment.