A Catered Affair

by Sue Margolis

  But Frank and I didn’t work out. Our relationship fell apart when he was cast as Danny in the school production of Grease, and he and Dawn Braithwaite, who played Sandy, ended up onstage, snogging for real—with tongues—in front of the entire audience. So much for Frank being a nice Catholic boy.

  “Why on earth would you bring up Frank O’Rourke?” Mum went over to the stove and opened the oven door. “That was years ago. The boy was a yutz.”

  She took a look at the chicken and roasted potatoes and said that they would need another twenty minutes.

  “Mum.”

  “Umm.” She was rummaging in the freezer now.

  “I wish you could get over this problem you have with Josh. You’ve known him for over a year now, but you’re never at ease with him. It’s like you’re always holding back.”

  “Oh, not again. We’ve had this conversation. Peas or green beans?”

  “I’m easy.”

  “Or I’ve got some cauliflower florets.”

  “Mum, honestly, I don’t mind … This whole thing is upsetting both of us. Josh feels that you’re judging him without trying to know him.”

  “Maybe we’ll have cauliflower for a change. I could make cauliflower puree. You like that.”

  “I know it upsets you that I’m with a ‘boring’ doctor,” I said, “but Josh isn’t remotely boring. He can be funny and witty. He often makes me laugh.” Josh was my hero. I adored this handsome, gifted doctor who devoted himself to saving the lives of children and spent a month each year in India or Africa, helping out in remote village hospitals. I was always bragging and telling people how proud of him I was.

  “And since you’re the one marrying him, that’s all that matters, but I don’t always find him easy. Sometimes he can be a bit aloof and standoffish.”

  “That’s because he’s so involved with his work,” I said. “His mind is often on other things. He doesn’t mean to be rude. You need to cut him a bit of slack.”

  “OK, I guess it must be hard for him, doing the job he does. And you’re right—I haven’t gotten to know him. I promise to make more of an effort.” She put the bag of cauliflower florets down on the counter.

  Even though I wasn’t sure how she’d take it, I decided to say something that had been on my mind for ages.

  “The way you feel about Josh,” I said. “It has to do with Dad, doesn’t it? To you he was boring, conventional, cerebral—and there were times when he made you miserable. You’re worried because you think I’ve chosen somebody like him.”

  Mum dropped a handful of cauliflower florets into a pan. She didn’t look at me. Although she was more than happy to advise other people, she could be surprisingly reticent in her own relationships. “I think I probably am,” she said. Her expression was thoughtful—sad even.

  “But I take after Dad. I’m a boring lawyer. I’m not an overgrown teenage rebel like you.”

  She rolled her eyes, but not without humor. The remark didn’t offend her. She’d heard it from Scarlett and me many times.

  “I guess my outlook on life is pretty conventional,” I went on. “I’m engaged to be married. I want to settle down, have kids, live in a nice house. What’s wrong with that? I wish you could respect me for who I am.”

  “I do respect you. How could you even think that I don’t? Look at the work you do. You’re a human rights lawyer. One of the things you do is fight for people who are escaping persecution and trying to get asylum in this country. You challenge government decisions on a daily basis.”

  “Yes, but you’d prefer it if I did something arty and creative or performed onstage like Scarlett.”

  Mum was standing at the sink now. “Now you’re just being ridiculous,” she said. But we both knew I wasn’t. She turned on the tap and covered the cauliflower with water. “It’s funny, because when your dad and I first met, he was such fun. On our second date he took me canoeing! Me, in a canoe—can you imagine? I have no coordination and I practically get seasick in the bath! But he insisted I had to go. And as it turned out, I wasn’t too bad. Back then, he was so full of life and up for anything—that’s why I fell in love with him. We had all these plans. As soon as I’d mastered the art of canoeing, we were going to learn to sail. We were going to fix up an old yacht and go round the world. Afterwards, we were either going to open a bed-and-breakfast in Mexico or emigrate to Israel and live on a kibbutz. But once we were married and I got pregnant with you, real life took over. Your father changed, but I didn’t. I made the mistake of holding on to our dreams. He accused me of refusing to grow up. I guess he had a point …” Her voice trailed off.

  Mum and Dad spent the first few years of their marriage living with Mum’s parents, Nana Ida and Grandpa Joe. Dad had refused to go to university after school because he had all these great plans to travel the world and wouldn’t waste three years studying; then, however, he began studying for a law degree. Afterwards, he joined a small, local firm of attorneys who specialized in property and divorce. He stayed there until he died twenty or so years later.

  It was Dad who insisted on raising Scarlett and me in a middle-class suburb and putting money aside so that we could go to private schools. Mum—who had no time for sensible—would have been happy to bring us up in one of the poor, crime-ridden, but oh-so-boho areas of east London and let us take our chances at the local state school. She would have seen it as character building. What was more, it would have horrified her parents and she would have gotten a kick out of that.

  Nana Ida—whom Scarlett and I often pumped for information about the family—said our mother had always been a bit of a rebel. At sixteen she was spending her Saturday mornings standing outside the town hall, selling Militant, the Marxist newspaper. The same year, she formed an all-girl punk band called Angry Zit Chicks. Even now Nana slapped her hand to her chest in despair when she recalled Mum’s shaved head with the huge red-and-purple Mohawk running down the middle.

  It often occurred to me that Mum didn’t have it easy, growing up with German immigrant parents who were so grateful to the government for allowing them to come to this country that they practically turned convention and conformity into their second religion.

  They trimmed the hedges, mowed the lawn, kept their flower beds neat and never hung out washing on a Sunday. Grandpa Joe joined the Rotary. Although they didn’t “keep” Christmas, every Christmas Day, they showed their respect by watching the Queen’s traditional TV broadcast. Even now, Nana Ida kept a portrait of the young Queen Elizabeth on her mantelpiece.

  By the time she was eighteen, Mum was over her Militant punk phase and focusing all her energy in a new direction. She wanted to perform on the West End stage and sing in musicals. Even though her music teacher at school said she had a remarkable voice and deserved a shot at trying to break into showbiz, Nana Ida and Grandpa Joe were horrified by the idea. They called it mad, ridiculous, outrageous. It couldn’t possibly work out. She was bound to fail. What would she do then? What would she have to fall back on? Nothing—that was what. It didn’t occur to them for one minute that she might succeed.

  Nana Ida and Grandpa Joe were determined that she should get a “proper” job. They wanted her to learn shorthand and typing and become a secretary or go into personnel at Marks and Spencer. When Mum refused, Grandpa Joe threatened to have a stroke.

  Mum got her parents off her back by enrolling at the local secretarial college. Only she never showed up. Nana Ida would wave her off every morning, but instead of going to the college, Mum caught the Tube up to the West End. She had a job working as a receptionist for a Mayfair clairvoyant-slash-astrologer who was happy to let her take time out to go to auditions.

  Mum finally landed a part in the chorus of Hello, Dolly! The clairvoyant was sad to lose her but said he had seen it coming. Nana Ida and Grandpa Joe did an astonishing and immediate about-turn and became their daughter’s biggest fans. Our Shelley? Singing on the West End stage? They were ecstatic. On her first night they came to see her and br
ought the entire family.

  When the show finished its run, Mum started auditioning again. This time she wasn’t so lucky, and work came in dribs and drabs—mainly short stints in underwhelming, provincial versions of Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar.

  She bashed away for two or three years—not nearly long enough, she would later admit—but the rejections and living off cornflakes and cold baked beans had started to get to her. Plus, once again Grandpa Joe was threatening to have a stroke if she didn’t move out of that flophouse she called an apartment.

  In the end she did the secretarial course for real and started applying for office jobs. To their credit, my grandparents chose not to rub her nose in her failed showbiz career. After six months she got a job working as a receptionist at Fein Management, one of the largest film and theatrical agencies in the world. Dad was the Lou Reed look-alike, leather-clad dispatch rider who used to deliver scripts and contracts.

  When Dad qualified as a lawyer, he and Mum moved into Cedars Close—a quiet suburban cul de sac full of twitching curtains. I’m not sure she ever forgave him for condemning her to what she always referred to as spiritual death by garden sprinkler.

  Mum set about scandalizing the neighbors by sunbathing topless in the back garden. During general elections, our house was the one smothered in VOTE WORKERS’ REVOLUTIONARY PARTY posters. She also took to driving a lime green VW camper with bubble-gum pink drapes, which she always kept parked on the street. Since she was now working part-time at Fein Management, she was always there to pick me and Scarlett up from school—in the camper. The first time she came to collect us, Scarlett and I walked the mile home rather than let anybody see that the vehicle had anything to do with us.

  Even now, Mum didn’t fit the Cedars Close profile. For starters, she didn’t look the part. Understated and conservative had no place in her style vocabulary. At sixty—and on the heavy side, as she would be the first to admit—she wore her hair in a severe, geometric bob, which she dyed London bus red. There was also the yin-yang tattoo on the back of her shoulder. Being large, she knew she couldn’t wear fussy styles, but she could get away with offbeat. She went for long, black, asymmetric jackets that she picked up each year in the Yohji Yamamoto sale. She wore these over palazzo pants and scooped-neck, gently fitted tunics that ended just above the knee. These “blank canvas” outfits enabled her to put her foot down on the gas when it came to accessories: massive handbags, wide hipster belts and lashings of chunky, arty jewelry that she picked up at Spitalfields market. She had drawers full of heavy gold and silver necklaces and rings with stones the size of small asteroids. When she set off for the Tube each morning, she looked about as inconspicuous as a disco ball at a funeral.

  Mum always said that if she’d had the money to move to a trendier part of London, she would have sold up after Dad died. But even the rough East End neighborhoods had become gentrified now and were out of her price range. Unless she won the lottery or married a millionaire, she was stuck in the burbs.

  Mum could have earned more by going for a job in a higherpaying industry. Thirty-five years after joining Fein Management, she was still there. Even though she was now PA to the veep, the money wasn’t great. Scarlett and I often asked her why she stayed so long and on such a mediocre salary. Her answer was always the same: Even though she hadn’t made it on the stage, working at Fein made her feel that she was still part of the showbiz world. She loved the glitz, the gossip, getting dolled up for the awards ceremonies, bumping into Bette, Whoopi and Dame Judy in the ladies’.

  When we were children, Mum was always closer to Scarlett than to me. I don’t think that Scarlett was her favorite exactly—she would have been horrified at the suggestion—but because Scarlett could sing and act, landed the lead in all the school plays and was clearly destined for the stage, Mum cheered her on, organized after-school singing and drama lessons and generally lived vicariously through her—not that Scarlett always appreciated it. A family occasion was never complete without Mum nagging her to get up and perform. “Come on, Scar, do your Cher. What about ‘The Shoop Shoop Song’? Everybody loves that.”

  Scarlett was no shrinking violet, but even she went through an awkward adolescent stage. At age thirteen or fourteen she didn’t take kindly to being cajoled by her mother to perform at family events in front of a bunch of smelly rellies. Dad would always rally to her defense and tell Mum to back off, but she just shushed him in that what-do-you-know? way of hers. When Scarlett turned bright red and refused to do her party piece, Mum couldn’t resist grabbing the limelight for herself … “Does he love me I want to know …”

  By now, Dad would be glaring at Mum, and Scarlett would be accusing her of being weird and embarrassing. Scarlett would leave the room in tears. Dad would go after her to try to calm her down. “She’s a bit shy—that’s all,” Mum would say. Then Nana Ida would add something guaranteed to put everybody at ease, like: “It’s probably her time of the month. She needs some carbs. Would she like a banana?”

  If Mum lived through Scarlett’s achievements and talents, Dad lived through mine. I was the serious, thoughtful, academic one who got straight As at school. Dad took me on long walks in the park and encouraged me to talk about life, the universe and everything.

  “You’re smart, Tally,” he’d say. “You could go into the law, medicine—become an academic maybe. You are capable of great things. But you have to study hard. Success doesn’t come automatically. You have to make it happen.”

  No pressure there, then.

  A couple of weeks before he died, we went for our usual Sunday-morning walk on Hampstead Heath. We were almost back at the car when he said something completely out of the blue that I never forgot. “I know that at sixteen you won’t have given marriage a second thought, but one day you’ll think about settling down. Don’t do it too early. First, discover who you are. That way you stand a better chance of finding the right person. It’s important you choose somebody who not only thinks like you do and shares your worldview but who also has a similar education and professional background. That way you stand the best chance of finding your soul mate.”

  There was no doubt in my mind that his advice was based on his own mistakes. He was telling me that he and Mum had married too young—before he, at least, had a chance to find out who he really was. In their early twenties Mum and Dad had believed they were soul mates. A few years down the line, once Dad had his degree and had started working as a lawyer, they discovered how different they really were.

  By the time Scarlett and I were teenagers, we were aware that things weren’t right between them. Mum was always nagging Dad to go with her to the movies or the theater—working where she did, she never had difficulty getting free tickets to West End shows. But Dad, whose interests had become far more cerebral over the years, wouldn’t have been seen dead at Les Mis or Phantom.

  When Mum tried to engage him in chitchat or gossip, he rarely responded with more than a grunt. He didn’t see the point in lowbrow conversation. He preferred to discuss politics. Mum was happy to join in, but only up to a point. I could see her zoning out when he went on about monetarism or fiscal reform. When he accused her of not listening, she would turn on him: “Of course I’m listening. Can’t you see me yawning?” Mum was no fool, but the intellectual gulf between them was obvious—even to kids like Scarlett and me.

  That day on Hampstead Heath, I had no idea how Dad’s advice—in effect his last words to me—would shape my life. After he died I was filled with the urgent, powerful need to stay connected to him. I sought his approval more than ever. Had he lived, I would no doubt have challenged his views. That’s what teenagers do. But Dad was gone. My memories of him and the thoughts he’d shared with me were all I had left. So it was that he influenced not only my choice of career, but also—with the exception of the totally irresistible Frank O’Rourke—my choice in men. There was no doubt in my mind that he would have thought Dr. Josh Eisner was perfect.

  Dad died doing on
e of the things he loved: eating at his favorite East End curry place. It was early on a Saturday evening and he’d been to see his team, West Ham, lose three-nil at home to Manchester United.

  According to Madhu, who owned the Lahore Kahari: Genuine Spicy Taste, Dad had almost finished his saag chicken, tarka dal and two rotis when he slumped forward, his face ending up in a basket of papadum. Madhu dialed 999 and found Mum’s work number in the small diary Dad kept in his breast pocket.

  When Mum, Scarlett and I arrived at the hospital, Madhu was already there, pacing up and down, wringing his hands. I recognized him because once or twice we’d eaten at the restaurant en famille. The moment he saw us, he came rushing up to Mum and started pleading with her not to call “the authorities.” He swore on his mother’s life, his children’s lives, his own life, that his food was of the highest quality, prepared in the most sanitary of conditions—which we were free to inspect anytime—and hadn’t been the cause of Dad’s collapse. Then he promised us all free dinners for life.

  Just as Madhu was handing Mum his takeaway menu, a doctor appeared and took Mum to one side. Scarlett and I watched as she broke down.

  “He’s alive,” Mum said, coming over to us, tears falling down her face. “But he’s had a massive heart attack. There’s nothing the doctors can do. It’s just a matter of time.”

  “You mean Dad’s dying?” Scarlett said. “Right now?” She was fourteen. She suddenly looked about three. Mum could only nod.

  While a nurse led us down the corridor to Dad’s room, we could hear Madhu frantically cross-examining the doctor. Was he one hundred percent sure that it was a heart attack and not some form of food poisoning? Would he be prepared to put that in writing?

  As we went into the room, Mum took a deep breath and tried to compose herself. Scarlett and I exchanged glances that I remember being more fearful than heartbroken. Holy shit. We were about to watch our dad die.