Wedding in Great Neck (9781101607701)

by McDonough, Yona Zeldis

  Betsy despised every single thing about Pippa, from her cloying singsong voice to her obnoxiously officious manner and her name, which, coupled with the woman’s emphatic Brooklyn accent, seemed insufferably pretentious. Pippa. True, the new Princess of Wales had a sister with that name. But she was British, after all. Not some phony putting on airs.

  Pippa thought that she and only she was capable of making any informed decision about this wedding and that Betsy’s input was superfluous at best, an impediment at worst. It was a new experience in humiliation for Betsy, who prided herself on her competence, and she was privately smarting about the fact that her daughter had chosen to inflict it on her.

  The front doorbell chimed, and Carmelita went to answer it. “Morning, morning, morning!” trilled Pippa. Betsy’s jaw clenched. Here it comes, she thought. Here we go.

  “Good morning, Pippa,” she said, striding into the foyer and willing her expression into some tolerable facsimile of a smile. “I have my list right here.”

  “Oh, that!” Pippa said with a dismissive flick of her wrist. She was a small woman, but with her upswept hair, four-inch heels, and enormous bust, she seemed larger, more menacing. Betsy thought she resembled a puff adder, inflating herself to scare her enemies. And she was sure that Pippa was not wearing the correct bra to contain her ample assets; she was surprised that Lenore had not told her so yet, but, then again, the day was still young.

  Pippa approached Betsy and made a kissing gesture somewhere in the vicinity of Betsy’s face. “I’m sure your lists are very useful to you, but I have all the information we need right here.” She tapped on the iPad she was clutching. “I’ve got the master list on this baby.”

  “Fine,” said Betsy, determined not to start an argument, not today of all days. “May I see it?” Never mind that she had a master list of her own; she would be cooperative, a team player.

  “Well, actually, I wanted to go over a few things with the bride herself,” Pippa said. “Is she around?”

  “She’s upstairs,” Betsy said. “But I’m sure I can have a look.”

  “Now, Betsy, you know that there are some things that are just too important to delegate, even to your mother! Let me just give her a little ringy-dingy and see if she has a minute for me.” Out came her iPhone.

  Ringy-dingy, thought Betsy, taking deep, calming mouthfuls of the surrounding air to keep from screaming. Why was she even having a conversation with a person who thought ringy-dingy was an acceptable substitute for phone call?

  “Angelica?” Pippa said conspiratorially into the phone. “I’ve just gotten here, and I wanted to touch base with you.” There was a pause while she listened to the response. “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” She screwed up her face into a parody of concentration. “Got it. I’ll be right there.” Powering off, she shot a look—was it really triumphant, or did Betsy’s loathing cause her to interpret it this way?—in Betsy’s direction. “I’ll just be a jiff,” she said. “Is there something you can take care of until we need you?”

  Something she could take care of until they needed her? How about dealing with the caterer, ensconcing the hair and makeup girls in the den downstairs, and finding a private spot for the final fitting of Angelica’s dress? Or dealing with the florist, who would be here any minute, the two bridesmaids who had just arrived at the station, and the photographer? Did any of those things count at all? How was it that this interloper had managed to usurp Betsy’s authority and make her feel unwanted and peripheral right in her very own home?

  I am not going to make a scene. I am not going to make a scene, Betsy chanted to herself. Instead she thought of her daughter, resplendent in a dress that even she had not been shown, and she tried to be calm. Angelica was getting married today, and all would be well. She firmly turned her mind to the things she could do: check the weather again to see whether that afternoon shower that had been predicted was still in the forecast, and ask Carmelita to make up another bed, this one in the small study off the media room downstairs; Gretchen’s husband, Ennis, was going to be joining them after all, and he would need a place to sleep.

  Betsy looked down at the list that Pippa hadn’t even deigned to glance at. I am not going to make a scene. There. It was working. Sort of. So Pippa had demoted her. That didn’t mean she wasn’t useful, that her help was not necessary. Betsy had always been a list maker and knew the value of lists within lists—sublists and sub-sublists that broke the world and its staggering array of tasks into manageable bite-sized bits. For a project of this magnitude, Betsy knew she needed one master list with at least six sublists, all of which she kept track of in her yellow spiral-bound notebook, completely ignoring the expensive, exasperating iPad with which Don had presented her—elaborately wrapped and beribboned—on her last birthday. Exactly the sort of iPad that Pippa had and had just used to insult Betsy.

  “What color sheets, Mrs. Betsy?” Carmelita asked, when Betsy mentioned the bed.

  “What do we have down there?” Betsy asked. “Ivory? Light blue? Whatever you think works will be fine,” she said and then checked the item that said Carmelita, bed off her list. Even if Pippa had no use for her, checking off an item still gave Betsy a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.

  Upstairs the dog barked. Betsy momentarily considered asking the maid to bring her downstairs but remembered that the dog often snarled at poor Carmelita, so she decided to go up instead. She was perfectly aware that no one in her family could stand the creature and that they made fun of her—an aging empty nester besotted with a small, spoiled dog—quite openly. But Betsy did not care. After years of forbidding pets of all kinds—she had categorically said no to kittens, puppies, rabbits, hamsters, snakes, mice, and even goldfish—she felt as if she had been born again, and now found her heart overflowing with love for this diminutive creature who adored her to the exclusion of every other being on earth.

  Betsy mounted the stairs quickly. She was in excellent shape: five feet five, 122 pounds, and a perfect size four. She watched every morsel of food that passed from fork to lips, adhered to a routine that included regular sessions with a trainer, laps in the pool, and weekly tennis games or long, brisk walks with her little coterie of friends. She might not be young, but she could certainly stay trim.

  Angelica understood the importance of this kind of self-discipline, but Gretchen unfortunately did not. Betsy had noticed with some mild disapproval that her older daughter had put on some weight recently. Not that she was going to say anything about it, but it did concern her. She’d seen the way Gretchen had eaten at the rehearsal dinner last night: diving into the bread basket, slathering butter on every bite. Two helpings of the pasta; an indecent mound of whipped cream on the peach pie. It was clear she was not even trying to control herself.

  It was a pity too, because Gretchen was an attractive woman. Not a beauty like Angelica, true. But she was impressively, majestically tall (almost six feet; where in the recesses of the gene pool had that been hiding?) and with her mass of dark, curly hair (Betsy did wish she would let someone shape it, even just a bit) and her white skin—both of her daughters had inherited her mother’s creamy skin, which had, alas, skipped Betsy entirely—she had a real presence, if only she would stand up and claim it.

  The dog was on the king-sized bed Betsy shared with Don—sprawled on her back, thumping the mattress with her hind paw in a soft, but insistent rhythm. The taut pink belly, the exposed throat, the look of utter bliss that seemed to descend slowly over her canine features when Betsy began to stroke her—all these things knotted the cord of love and attachment to the animal even more tightly.

  “Who’s my girl?” she said softly. “Who’s my puppy?” The dog’s ears flattened, and her mouth opened slightly, revealing the tip of her long pink tongue and her sharp, dainty teeth—teeth that had never, ever been used or even shown in aggression towards Betsy. So what if her children thought she was a doting fool? Betsy was happy with the dog, just like she was happy with just about everything else in h
er present life. And the kids were filled with plenty of scorn for that too.

  When Betsy and Lincoln were young, Great Neck was a place to which Betsy had longingly aspired. The beautifully tended homes, the lovely leafy streets, the excellent school system. East Meadow had always felt to her like the poor relation and never quite measured up. She projected the various dissatisfactions of her marriage onto the external grid of the place, and the phrase if we lived in Great Neck…was a familiar refrain in her mind. If they had lived in Great Neck, they wouldn’t be scrambling for the money to buy a new washer/dryer or to have Teddy’s woefully misaligned teeth straightened. If they lived in Great Neck, Angelica could be in the honors program and take four years of Latin, Gretchen would hang out with a better crowd, Caleb might have found that he enjoyed sports after all. If they lived in Great Neck, they would have a pool, belong to a tennis club, mingle with an altogether more interesting, more successful group of people. Lincoln wouldn’t need to drink; Betsy wouldn’t need to be so bitter.

  This was pure fantasy, she knew, and yet she had stubbornly clung to it. So when she learned that Don’s house was in Great Neck, on the coveted Swan’s Cove Road, no less, some atavistic flame had leapt up in her heart. Even if the Great Neck of today, filled as it was with Iranian Jews, was a different place than the Great Neck of her youth, it didn’t matter to Betsy. The life she lived here was closely enough allied with her fantasies, and she felt as if she had at long last arrived.

  Her children either didn’t know or didn’t care about any of this. They teased her about Don’s house, the pool, the maids, and the posh, pampered world that she had suddenly entered, like Alice, as if she had gone through the looking glass. She knew too how snide they could be; she’d heard the little asides, the faintly hostile observations. Heard them all and didn’t care, because Betsy loved, loved, loved money and loved the untrammeled freedom it permitted her. The breast cancer and AIDS research she regularly—and generously—contributed to? Funded by money. The repaired cleft palates in Ecuador and the literacy programs in those grim neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn? Money made those possible too.

  That old adage about money not buying happiness? Dead wrong. Money did buy happiness, just like it bought comfort, security, and ease; money was love; yes, it most certainly was. And Betsy was intent on spreading the love—along with the money that intoned its name—around liberally.

  Did her scoffing children know, for instance, that Don had put both Carmelita and Esperanza on the pension and health insurance plans of his company? Or that she was making sure both women got their GEDs and hosting study sessions in her kitchen on the weekends? And that she paid for Esperanza’s daughter’s new flute and soccer camp for Carmelita’s two boys? Then there was private school for Justine and Portia, and the repairs to Gretchen’s house she would have happily funded had not her daughter been so stubborn in her refusal. When Teddy needed money to start his new business or Angelica needed help with her lavish wedding, it was Betsy’s well-manicured hand with its platinum and diamond eternity band that wrote the checks.

  Just last week she had met Caleb for their monthly lunch at Bergdorf, just a short distance from Barneys, where he worked. The restaurant on the top floor overlooking Central Park was sparkling and airy, opening onto the city like a little jewel case; it was their favorite spot, and their lunches always had a festive quality. But as Betsy nibbled at her Cobb salad and sipped her iced tea, she noticed that Caleb seemed glum; he barely touched his seared scallops and was oddly silent, not offering her any of the little work-related tidbits that were often the staple of their conversations.

  “Are you all right?” Betsy ventured after he had declined the waiter’s offer of dessert. “Things with Bobby okay?”

  “Bobby’s great,” he said, his whole face brightening. “But there is something else….” He lowered his voice and leaned in closer. “I’m just not very happy at work, Mom.” Then the full story tumbled out: the promotion he’d been hoping to get that did not materialize, the frustration with his present position, his increasing boredom.

  “Could you look for another job?” she asked. “At a different store?”

  “More of the same,” Caleb said. He speared a scallop, no doubt stone cold by now. “The thing is, I want to leave retail entirely.”

  Betsy, well schooled in conversations with adult offspring, said nothing but took what she hoped was a contemplative sip of her tea and waited.

  “I want to go to cooking school,” he announced and then guiltily looked around the room, as if someone he knew from work might have been listening. “To become a pastry chef.”

  Betsy remembered the period of intense baking when Caleb was a boy; she and Lincoln had called it the Year of the Scone because Caleb had tried—and perfected—no fewer than sixteen varieties before it passed. They had eaten raspberry scones in the morning, currant scones in the afternoon, pumpkin ginger scones before bed for weeks; Betsy had gained three pounds and was relieved when his interest moved on.

  “A pastry chef!” she had said. “What a wonderful idea.” And of course the conversation—now much more effervescent—concluded with her writing the check for the first tuition payment at the culinary institute in the south of France (because where better to study pastry making?) Caleb had selected. So let them tease. It wouldn’t stop her from giving the money as long as she had it to give. And it clearly wouldn’t stop them from taking it.

  The ten or so minutes Betsy spent bent over and petting the dog were like a tonic. When she straightened up, she felt refreshed and even more ready to tackle the day with all the complexities it held: ex- or almost-ex-husbands, eccentric and worrisome mothers (Gretchen had actually allowed Lenore to drive this morning), potentially volatile new in-laws (Ohad’s family seemed so intense, it made hers look like the most reticent of WASPs in comparison), and the evil mutant wedding planner who had bewitched her daughter. She took the nightgown she had worn last night and spread it out across the bed; the dog liked to nestle in her clothing in her absence. Giving the pink tummy a final pat, Betsy left the room and closed the door quietly behind her.

  As she walked briskly down the hall, she caught a glimpse of her granddaughter Justine skimming down the stairs. In the past her twin granddaughters had liked fooling people about their respective identities and had insisted on dressing identically. But this had changed, and now Portia sported a streak of fuchsia in her long hair, whereas Justine had gone for the piercings, something that made Betsy shudder. Of course that was the whole point, wasn’t it? To make the adults cringe? Betsy remembered the overalls she had worn the better part of her freshman year at college; she knew that Lenore had wanted nothing more than to burn them.

  But where was Justine going in such a hurry? Where did she have to be, other than outside under a gorgeous rented sailcloth tent at seven o’clock this evening? Even with all the myriad people and demands making claims on Betsy’s attention, something about the girl’s demeanor—and not just right now—made her want to know more. Was she having trouble in school? Or with a boy? Betsy knew that the separation had been hard on the girls; they loved their father and had blamed Gretchen when he moved out. Wasn’t that often the way? Her own kids had been furious when she’d made Lincoln go, even though he had been an out-and-out drunk for years.

  Betsy glanced at the Mickey Mouse watch on her wrist—another gift from Don—and wondered when Ennis would arrive. Lincoln had already gotten here; Caleb had gone to the airport to pick him up. But she wouldn’t see him until the wedding; though she had invited him with great sincerity to stay at the house, he had declined, choosing instead some fleabag outside of town. That was Lincoln all right: so filled with his cockeyed principles. It was defensible to escape into drink, essentially abandoning wife, kids, and all semblance of a responsible life. Yet it was compromising to stay under her roof and bury the hatchet for the sake of their children. The door slammed, and the dog commenced upon a frenzy of yapping. “Gretchen?” called
out Betsy.

  “I’m downstairs,” Gretchen called back. “Ennis is here. I just let him in.”

  Betsy hurried in the direction of her daughter’s voice. She knew it would be difficult for Gretchen to see Ennis, and she wanted to help smooth over the rough edges. But the sound of laughter—Pippa’s distinct, wheezing chee, chee, chee, the more melodious peals emitted by Angelica—stopped her. It was coming from Angelica’s room; Angelica and Pippa were behind the closed door, giggling like a pair of teenagers on a sleepover. Why did this make Betsy feel so utterly bereft, as if she too were a teenager, an unpopular one, condemned to remain outside the charmed circle of their intimacy?

  “Mom?” Gretchen called up. “Are you coming?”

  Betsy forced herself to move away from Angelica’s door. She knew she was being ridiculous. Angelica was her daughter, for heaven’s sake. Pippa was nothing, no one. By tomorrow, once the wedding was over, she would disappear from their lives, vanishing as if she had never been.

  This cheering thought propelled Betsy down the stairs into the foyer, where Gretchen, Ennis, and Justine had gathered. Ennis was looking well—hair neatly cut and a pressed, pale blue shirt—if a bit awkward. Gretchen was studying with rapt interest the black-and-white marble tiles that composed the entryway floor.

  “Hello, Ennis,” Betsy said. She leaned in to give him a quick peck on the cheek.

  “Isn’t it great that Dad’s here?” Justine said. Her voice had a manic edge. “I mean, I didn’t know he would be coming, but I’m so glad he did.” She grabbed his hand.

  “Does anyone want anything to eat?” Betsy said brightly. Once a Jewish mother, always a Jewish mother. “Esperanza set out croissants and fruit in the breakfast room.”