Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  Margot responded sheepishly. “Sorry,” she said, banishing the ascot from her consciousness and giving Carla her full attention. “So tell me again what’s going on.”

  “Okay—remember how I mentioned she’d been acting strangely lately? Well, now it’s a full-blown delusion, very elaborate and detailed. She actually thinks she had an affair with William Shakespeare in another life—‘Will,’ she calls him, if you can believe it. She thinks she was the so-called Dark Lady of his sonnets.”

  “That’s pretty amazing,” said Margot. “I wonder where she picked up that story.”

  “I haven’t a clue. But, believe me, this is no small-time fantasy. She has loads of background material. More than I ever learned in my Shakespeare course at BU. Maybe she’s been reading on the sly—which seems unlikely, since you know she was never one for books. Or maybe she has all this stored memory based on movies—like you suggested last time—or things she heard in the past. You know how they say that sometimes people who have strokes or mental trauma can suddenly speak languages they never learned, just because they heard them spoken once or twice? It could be something like that.”

  “Could be,” said Margot, chewing her lip.

  “But I can’t imagine what triggered it,” continued Carla. “She didn’t hit her head or anything, and there’s no evidence of a stroke—Mark ruled that out. Dad’s death, of course, was painful—you remember how blue she was for a while—but I wouldn’t call it traumatic. Anyway, it’s been over two years since he died.”

  “If it’s Dad’s death that’s behind it, it is strange,” mused Margot. “Not that they didn’t have a good life together. But given that she married Dad on the rebound …”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She told me about it once when I was going out with that Harvard guy who was supposedly related to the Kennedys. He turned out to be sleeping with three girls in my dorm—which at least verified his pedigree. I got kind of sad when I found out, though, as you can imagine, it was mostly my pride that was hurt. But Mom seemed to take it worse than I did. She said she’d been in love with someone once—a Saul something-or-other—and he two-timed her with one of her friends. That’s what made her decide to accept Dad so quickly—not, she said, that she ever regretted it. But obviously that other relationship made an impression. It must have happened at least thirty years before the time she mentioned it to me.”

  “So mom has an authentic secret history as well as an imaginary one,” mused Carla.

  “Yes—and maybe the latter is some odd manifestation of the former. You know: repressed desire, secret longing, that sort of thing.”

  “Come on,” said Carla. “I’m the psychology major. Mom’s a doll, but complicated she’s not. Repressed desire—give me a break!”

  “I don’t know,” considered Margot, “I think you’re just used to seeing her in a certain way. I’ll tell you what: Let me probe the situation a bit. I’ll speak to her and see if she gives me the same story. If there’s consistency to it, that at least tells us something about the tenacity of the delusion. It might help us get at the precipitating cause.”

  Carla nodded. She found her sister’s detached and logical approach to the situation reassuring. Not for nothing was Margot Philadelphia magazine’s choice for the best criminal lawyer in the Delaware Valley, with a list of mobsters a mile long waiting for her to defend them.

  “Then we can decide whether to do anything,” continued Margot.

  “I’ve read there are antihallucinatory drugs.”

  “But from what you say, she’s not hallucinating exactly; she’s—what does she call it?—remembering.”

  Carla shrugged. “She’s remembering hallucinations. Or maybe hallucinating memories. I don’t see that it matters.”

  “The question is whether or not it’s doing her harm.”

  “It can’t be doing her good to live in a dream world.”

  “I’m only saying that we have to weigh what’s best for her. You know how depressed she was before.”

  Carla considered this. There was no denying that her mother’s spirits were much improved and that she appeared happy in her delusions. But that was part of what was so disturbing. It was as though Jessie had found an alternative world that suited her better than reality.

  “You can’t imagine how upsetting it is to have Mom talking this way.” Carla sidestepped the issue of her mother’s mood. “You know how levelheaded she’s always been.”

  Margot nodded sympathetically. “I could take her in for a while, if you want. A change of scene might do her good.”

  “No,” said Carla quickly, “she needs the routine of the house. Besides, you’re at work during the day, which would leave her alone too much of the time.” (The idea of Jessie puttering around Margot’s Rittenhouse Square apartment, with its white-on-white minimalist décor and empty refrigerator, seemed like the worst possible idea.) “I can certainly handle having her. It’s just that with Mark so unhappy with his practice and the teachers saying that Jeffrey should go on Ritalin, it comes at a bad time. And there’s the bat mitzvah to worry about, and the fact that Stephanie can’t find a dress. It’s all I need to have Mom channeling Shakespeare’s girlfriend.”

  “Well, one thing I can do,” Margot responded with relief. “I can help Stephanie find a dress. That can’t be too hard … .”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Why didn’t YOU TELL ME ABOUT THE NEW DATE FOR Back-to-School night?” Carla asked, standing in the door of her daughter’s room. Stephanie was sprawled out on her bed, studying her French vocabulary, listening to her haftorah tape, and using the curling iron on her hair.

  Stephanie’s room was in a chaotic state. Carla had recently read a magazine article that counseled against criticizing children for minor infractions like messy rooms. The advice had seemed logical enough at the time, but when faced with a week’s worth of clothing on the floor, an entire cosmetic counter on the bureau, and a veritable trash heap of crumpled tissues on the bed, she found that logic went out the window.

  Lately, she had tried to adopt a see-no-evil approach and taken to squinting when entering her daughter’s room. This was an art she was beginning to perfect, and she noticed that her peripheral vision had now weakened to the point that she could look at Stephanie and see her as if etched in relief against a blank background.

  “Didn’t you have a sheet about the new Back-to-School Night that you were supposed to give me?”

  The original date for Back-to-School Night had been changed when the middle-school principal tripped on a skateboard left unattended in front of C Hall and had to spend two weeks in traction. When Carla heard about the accident, her first thought was of Jeffrey (her tendency was to think of Jeffrey when any school-related mishap occurred). In this case, however, her suspicions were ill-founded, since Jeffrey was in elementary school and, despite an impressive level of hyperactivity, could hardly have made it across town during fourth period to leave his skateboard in front of the middle-school C Hall.

  Part of Carla’s irritation about Back-to-School Night came from feeling she should have known about the new date. It was one of the disadvantages of being a stay-at-home mother that any failure to keep abreast of the myriad of details attached to the children’s lives seemed like an unconscionable breach of responsibility. A twinge of guilt took hold as she peeked out from the corner of her eye at a pile of papers near the foot of her daughter’s bed. One was inscribed in bold print with the message MARK YOUR CALENDARS: NEW DATE FOR BACK-TO-SCHOOL NIGHT.

  “Isn’t that the sheet?” asked Carla, motioning accusingly toward the paper.

  “What?” said Stephanie. It was hard to say whether her attention was more engaged by the sound of the cantor’s voice on the tape or the need to hold the curling iron in one hand while balancing the French book in the other.

  “Would you turn that thing off?” said Carla in exasperation.

  “You don’t have to yell!” Stephanie used the
phrase “you don’t have to yell” as a catch-all in any situation in which she felt herself the object of criticism. Carla generally failed to deflect this strategic move and would become caught up, before she knew it, in a pointless quarrel about tone of voice.

  “I said”—Carla kept her voice as steady as she could—“that I didn’t know tonight was Back-to-School Night. If I hadn’t run into Mrs. Gupta in the supermarket on the way home from seeing Aunt Margot, I would never have known.”

  “Sorrreee,” said Stephanie in an unapologetic tone. “I thought you did.” She picked up the sheet at the foot of her bed and held it out. “Here.”

  “It doesn’t do me much good now.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “Well, I don’t know how we’re going to handle this,” said Carla with annoyance. “Your father is at an important medical meeting, and I have an appointment with Dr. Samuels. It takes months to get an appointment with him, so I can’t cancel.”

  “Have Grandma go,” suggested Stephanie with a shrug. “She’s nice and the teachers would like her.” (The implication was that Carla was not nice and the teachers would not like her. Stephanie was adept at this sort of oblique insult.)

  “I don’t think that your grandmother is really in any shape for it right now,” said Carla. “You know how strangely she’s been behaving lately.”

  “Oh, my teachers wouldn’t mind,” observed Stephanie. “Most of them are so out of it, they wouldn’t even notice. Besides, the weird words would go over big with my English teacher, Mr. Pearson. He likes weird old words. He’s the one who makes us memorize all that Shakespeare.”

  Carla nodded in recollection. There had been something of a fracas early in the term regarding this teacher’s requirement for memorization. At first, Stephanie had reacted violently in opposition: “He’s like back in the Dark Ages. No one expects you to memorize poetry anymore; it’s a waste of time. I could be learning capitals for Mr. Perrone.” (Mr. Perrone taught cultural geography and was forever assigning them capitals of countries that kept changing.) “Can’t Daddy write a note saying that I have some kind of dyslexia with memorizing stuff?” (Mark, as a physician, had been prevailed upon in the past to write notes to get Stephanie out of gym class for such dubious complaints as an ingrown toenail, sprained pinky, or heat rash.)

  In this instance, however, Mark dug in his heels and took the side of the teacher. He happened to have had a positive experience in the sixth grade memorizing “The Cremation of Sam McGee” and could still remember raising his voice and shaking his fist during the key scene of McGee’s incineration. “Best educational experience of my life,” he pronounced. “Wish I’d done more of it.”

  As it turned out, Stephanie’s opposition to memorizing poetry evaporated when the first assignment was from Romeo and Juliet, a play that, despite the passage of over four hundred years, still speaks eloquently to the hormone-driven sentimentality of early adolescence. It didn’t hurt that Stephanie was given the Juliet portion of the balcony scene to memorize, and that Kyle Chapin, seventh-grade heartthrob, was assigned the part of Romeo.

  Stephanie had commandeered Jessie to help her with this assignment. Since moving in, Jessie was usually game to drill her granddaughter on vocabulary words and math formulas, and so it seemed only a short step to ask her to read the part of Romeo in the assigned scene.

  In that first session, grasping the book tightly in her hands, Jessie had listened with rapt attention as Stephanie launched forth in Juliet’s immortal words:

  O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?

  Deny thy father and refuse thy name;

  Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,

  And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

  This was Jessie’s cue, but, enthralled by Stephanie’s recitation, she had lost her place. Stephanie patiently pointed out to her grandmother where they were in the text.

  “‘Aside,’” said Jessie.

  “You don’t say ‘aside,’” Stephanie stopped her to explain. “It means that you speak the next lines directly to the audience. Juliet isn’t supposed to hear them.”

  Jessie nodded in apparent comprehension and turned to address the wardrobe across the room: “‘Shall I hear more or shall I speak …’” She paused here, as this was the end of the line, and then abruptly added the words that began the next line: “‘At this?’”

  Stephanie intervened again: “You don’t have to pause at the end of the line if there isn’t any punctuation,” she explained carefully. “Just read it like ordinary speech.” (Jessie’s mistake was one committed by half of Stephanie’s class.)

  “Okay,” said Jessie, who appeared to grasp this more quickly than most of her granddaughter’s peers. She turned toward the wardrobe again: “‘Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?’”

  Stephanie nodded and now embarked on the meat of Juliet’s speech—that portion that packed a romantic wallop guaranteed to spark love in Kyle Chapin (or whatever romantic feeling a seventh-grade boy is capable of). Stephanie placed her hand on her heart as she recited the famous lines:

  ’Tis but thy name that is my enemy.

  Thou are thyself, though not a Montague.

  What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,

  Nor arm, nor face.

  (Here, Stephanie gestured to each of the bodily parts enumerated in what she took to be an original piece of dramatic business.)

  O, be some other name!

  What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

  By any other word would smell as sweet.

  So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called,

  Retain that dear perfection which he owes

  Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name;

  And for thy name, which is no part of thee,

  Take all myself.

  “Beautiful,” murmured Jessie, and took up Romeo’s next line with apparent ease: “‘I take thee at thy word. Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized.’”

  Here, however, she paused, as if the line had sparked an unforeseen rumination. Then, she read the line again:

  “‘Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized.’”

  “Gram, you said that already. Go on to the next line: ‘Henceforth—’” she prompted.

  But Jessie seemed confused and Stephanie finished off the line herself—“‘Henceforth I never will be Romeo’”—then closed the book. It was the end of the assigned passage, and she sensed she had strained her grandmother’s attention beyond its limits—a fact she understood, since her own attention was often so strained. She thanked Jessie for her help and trotted from the room, full of anticipation of iambic flirting with Kyle Chapin, and of using the new styling mousse to create tendrils that Juliet would no doubt have worn for the occasion.

  Since that initial practice session, Jessie had been called upon again and again to help Stephanie memorize portions of Shakespeare. Carla had noted, listening as she often did at the door, that her mother quickly grew at ease with Shakespeare’s language, which was rather surprising for a woman of seventy-two who hadn’t gone beyond the tenth grade. Obviously, Jessie had an affinity for this sort of material that had never been tapped.

  It now occurred to Carla that these sessions might have been responsible for precipitating her mother’s Shakespeare delusion—though it was hard to see how they could have sparked something so detailed and elaborate.

  “So he’s a good teacher, this Mr. Pearson?” Carla returned to the subject at hand: Back-to-School Night and Stephanie’s English teacher.

  “I don’t know,” said Stephanie, drawing back at this effort to enlist her on the side of an adult value judgment. “He’s cool, I guess.”

  “He’s young?” asked Carla

  “I suppose.” Stephanie now appeared doubtful. “Not that young. Not as young as me—but not as old as you.”

  “Thanks for clarifying that,” said Carla dryly.

  “But he’s not married,” added Stephanie. “Pam asked
him. He’d be good for Aunt Margot—he’s probably about her age—but she’d never go out with him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Since when would she go out with a seventh-grade English teacher?”

  “You have a point there. But you think he’d be good for her?”

  “Sure,” said Stephanie. “He’s so into poetry—it means he can feel things. And he’s kind of cute, even if he’s not Abercrombie.”

  “Well, you’ve sold me,” said Carla, feeling a wave of affection for her daughter. She took a breath and stepped into the room, hearing something plastic crunch under her foot but ignoring it. She reached out and hugged Stephanie, who seemed surprised at the gesture, but did not resist. In point of fact, Stephanie found her mother as unpredictable in her responses as her mother found her: She was never sure whether Carla might yell at her or praise her for something. Her friends appeared to have the same problem with their mothers, which they put down to what they’d deduced from various TV specials to be the symptoms of perimenopause.

  “I think we should send Grandma to Back-to-School Night and tell her to check out your English teacher for Aunt Margot,” said Carla, after they’d hugged.

  “Sure,” said Stephanie, losing interest in the subject and focusing her attention on the curling iron.

  Carla began to back out of the room, automatically picking up the crumpled tissues and the empty bottle of Snapple as she went.

  “Don’t touch anything!” warned Stephanie, holding the curling iron aloft in the manner of a drawn sword.

  “But it’s a mess in here!” Carla had lost control of her squint and made the mistake of surveying the room. “It’s a pigsty!” she pronounced now as this fact came forcibly home to her. “I can’t understand how a girl your age can stand living this way!”

  “That’s because you’re not a girl my age!”

  “It’s disgusting, young lady, disgusting. I want you to clean it up!”