Hostile Makeover (2 page)

She cocked her head to the side and looked at him from beneath her lashes. “I think I’ll just run out and get my nails done, maybe do a little shopping.”

He didn’t try to stop her, didn’t argue, didn’t do anything but look at her out of those serious blue eyes. As if she were some alien species that he’d never run across before.

Her pride was about all she had propping her up, so she kept her tone light and her chin up as she turned to leave. “I’m pretty sure that’s what daddy’s girls are supposed to do.”

chapter
2

S
helley shopped until the stores closed. Like an alcoholic hanging in until the last call, she prowled the aisles of her favorite stores until the doors locked behind her at ten
P.M.
The hurt had begun to numb in the lingerie department of Saks. By the time she picked up a new Kate Spade bag at Bloomingdale’s, she was close to philosophic. No one really expected her to work a full-time job, and her salary was clearly not dependent on her performance.

So she’d made a mistake. So she’d shown up late and embarrassingly disheveled for the most important business meeting of her life. Beating herself up about it was getting her exactly nowhere.

Letting herself into her Buckhead condo, Shelley dropped her shopping bags in the foyer, moved into the black-and-white kitchen, and dialed her voice mailbox number. Cradling the phone against her shoulder, she flipped the kitchen shutters closed on the view of midtown Atlanta and sank onto a kitchen chair to listen to her messages.

“Shelley, it’s Nina. I’m taking a personal day tomorrow. I’m thinking the nine
A.M.
Pilates and lunch at Panera’s. Then I was thinking facial. A best friend is supposed to tell a girl when her pores look like moon craters.”

The next voice belonged to her mother. As usual, Miriam Schwartz wasted no time on a greeting.
“Daddy told me you left early today.”
There was a pause.
“I hope you’re not too upset; there’ll be other accounts. Don’t forget dinner tomorrow night. We’re going to do the whole Friday night thing. Marilyn Friedlander’s grandson is in town and I invited him to join us.”

Shelley rolled her eyes.

“Don’t roll your eyes at me.”
Even through the receiver and cyberspace, or wherever this message had been stored, her mother’s irritation was clear.
“He’s a very nice boy. An accountant. A girl could do worse.”

Yes, a girl could, Shelley reflected as she listened to the remaining messages, and often had. Her mother’s steady stream of Jewish men had covered every legitimate profession and a few that told her just how desperate her mother had grown. She’d known she was in deep shit when Malcolm the Maccabee, a rising star on the professional wrestling circuit, had shown up for a family meal.

Of course, she hadn’t done that well on her own, either. Her choices were almost always blond-haired, blue-eyed, and athletic like Trey. It was no fun to be out with someone you thought you could hurt or outwrestle—but their one common attribute had been their non-Jewishness and their inability to commit—at least to her.

Trey’s message reminded her that some good had come out of what she now thought of as the Ritz fiasco.

“Thanks for the, uh, birthday send-off.”
The smile in his voice was clear.

She smiled in response as she remembered his shout of pleasure and the warmth with which he’d shown his gratitude.

“I’m leaving for that white-water trip in the morning, but I’ll call you when we get back to civilization.”

Good old Trey, so Waspy, so rugged. As long as he didn’t expect her to rough it with him, they’d get along just fine.

Her older sister’s voice came next—rushed and out of breath as usual. Most of Judy Schwartz Blumfeld’s calls were placed via cell phone from car pool lines or Little League fields. And they were almost always instructional in nature.
“Shel, will you bring those fabric swatches I left at your house to Mom and Dad’s tomorrow night? The bar mitzvah coordinator wants to see them. I’m thinking about using them for the central color theme.”

Her nephew Sammy’s bar mitzvah, whose theme was apparently “Bigger Than Ben-Hur,” was a mere five months away.

“I understand Mom found you an accountant this time,”
her sister concluded.
“Maybe you should bring your tax forms so it isn’t a total loss.”

Ha, ha
. Shelley moved to the refrigerator and pulled out a Diet Coke. Easy for Judy to joke. She’d married a lawyer and produced two sons, thereby fulfilling their parents’ fondest hopes. She had done everything Shelley was now supposed to do, but didn’t want to. And tomorrow night Judy would have her whole perfect family with her. If you added the accountant to the equation, you had the perfect end to the perfect week.

“So what does she have for you this time?” Dr. Howard Mellnick was in his mid-forties, and attractive in a gray-templed serious sort of way.

“An accountant.” Shelley made a face as she imagined the receding hairline and glasses, the beginning-stage paunch. All that sitting and squinting at numbers rarely buffed up a body.

“And you’ve already written this guy off because?”

“His primary selling point is that he’s related to Marilyn Friedlander—which believe me is nothing to brag about—and my mother is going to spend the entire evening shoving us at each other. He fits all her criteria: He’s Jewish, he’s breathing, and he’s not on death row. She’s probably already calling the caterer.”

“So you still think all Jewish men are either unexciting or training to be ax murderers.”

They considered each other across the therapist-patient divide.

“Well, I’m willing to exclude present company,” Shelley said. “But to borrow your trick of answering a question with a question, why do you think my mother insists on paying for these sessions?”

He shrugged comfortably. “Because you’re hopelessly stuck in rebellion and you need to grow up?”

“Possibly, but the fact that you’re Jewish and divorced doesn’t hurt. She’s hoping you’ll fall madly in love with me so that we can add a shrink to the family.” Shelley smiled. “Can I tell her there’ll be a family discount?”

Howard Mellnick smiled back. “Therapist-patient relationships are unethical.”

“Yes, but I don’t think dating scruples are part of the Jewish Mother code of ethics. You’re male and Jewish and a doctor; that makes you fair game.”

He coughed to try to hide his laugh. “Does it occur to you that your parents genuinely love you and want what’s best for you?”

“Occasionally. But the fact that my mother pays you to talk to me makes everything you say suspect.”

Dr. Mellnick went ahead and laughed, which was one of the reasons she kept showing up.

“Okay,” he said, “we’ve spent the requisite ten minutes on your mother. Why don’t we move on to what happened with the presentation yesterday? The one we’ve been talking about for two months, the one you prepared for like Noah prepared for the flood.”

Shelley groaned. “It was Trey’s birthday. We ended up in a room at the Ritz.”

Mellnick just waited—a task at which he excelled—so Shelley went ahead and divulged her birthday orgasm theory.

The best thing about Howard Mellnick—after his sense of humor—was that he never looked shocked or overtly disapproving.

“So let me see if I have this straight: As of yesterday morning, you were poised and ready to turn your career situation and your relationship with your father around. Yesterday during lunch you decided Trey Davenport’s sexual satisfaction was more important.” His eyes behind the frameless glasses were kind and at the same time merciless. “Any idea why?”

“Isn’t that what you’re being paid to find out?”

He smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes this time. “I can keep pointing out the ways in which you shoot yourself in the foot, Shelley, but I can’t keep you from loading the gun. The ultimate goal is to recognize the self-sabotage
before
you blow your toes off.”

They stared at each other for a time.

“There’s nothing wrong with being a Jewish American Princess if that’s what you want to be. There’s nothing wrong with refusing to be one, either. But you’ve got to declare yourself. You’re stuck in that netherworld. You continue to rebel against what your parents expect, but you won’t go after what
you
really want.”

“I want to be taken seriously.” She said it quietly, but she knew he heard and understood.

“And yet you choose to give a boyfriend an orgasm rather than show up and pitch an account.”

“Well, it wasn’t like I had a scale there and was weighing the pros and cons. The man was naked and it was his birthday. Frankly, I thought I could do both.”

Shelley looked down at her watch and back up at Howard Mellnick. Their fifty minutes was up. “I don’t suppose you’d like to go handle my mother and the accountant while I straighten out your six o’clock appointment’s life?”

“No, thanks, but I’ll look forward to hearing the details next week. Oh, and do me a favor. Be gentle with the accountant. Chances are he isn’t any happier about this fix-up than you are.”

chapter
3

H
oward Mellnick was wrong. Richard Friedlander was ecstatic to be there. Ecstatic to make her acquaintance. His eyes widened at first sight of her, which told her he’d been anticipating the worst.

Since her father continued to refuse to discuss the Easy To Be Me account and had told her not once, but three times, not to “worry her little head about it,” exceeding
anyone’s
expectations felt incredibly nice. Of course, she reflected as she looked into his round, earnest face, this might not be the compliment she was assuming; there was no telling what kinds of women had been thrown at Richard Friedlander since he’d arrived in Atlanta.

His hand was clammy when he shook hers in greeting. He beamed at her out of relieved brown eyes, probably still thanking his lucky stars she hadn’t been wheeled in on a forklift. But then, Richard Friedlander wasn’t exactly God’s gift to women. Or even a party favor, for that matter.

Trying to be generous, she factored out the sweaty palms and told herself that even someone who looked like a marshmallow might have something to offer.

“Just call me Dick,” he said as he pumped her hand for far too long. Shelley forced herself to smile as if this might actually happen. Then she shoved a glass of wine at him, led him to her father and brother-in-law, who were jockeying for position around a plate of her mother’s chopped liver, and fled to the kitchen.

The memory-charged aromas of matzo ball soup and brisket hit her as she entered. Plates of gefilte fish, each arranged on its bed of lettuce with a dollop of horseradish by its side, sat on the kitchen island waiting to be served after the soup. Miriam Schwartz didn’t do Shabbas dinner on a weekly basis, but when she did she approached the meal exactly the way her mother, Nana Rose, always had—as if she were auditioning for a part in
Fiddler on the Roof
.

Tonight, every dish was intended to accomplish two things: remind her family that they were loved, and demonstrate to Richard Friedlander what kind of meals he might expect as a part of said family. Miriam Schwartz still believed that the most direct way to a man’s heart was through his stomach; Shelley had reason to believe the road began somewhat lower.

Nana Rose’s younger sister, Sonya, perched on a bar stool at the counter and watched Judy ladle matzo ball soup into bowls that said “Jewish penicillin.” Great-aunt Sonya lived in the Summitt Towers, where she made papier-mâché animal heads and insisted the maids were sneaking in at night and rearranging her apartment.

Shelley gave her great-aunt a hug and slid onto the stool next to her. “Can we take some things out of the oven so I can fit my head in?”

“That bad?” Judy kept ladling. Despite the heat of the kitchen and her proximity to the stove, neither her hair nor her clothes drooped. She was six years older and four and a half inches shorter than Shelley. Like their mother, Judy was petite and curvy.

Trying to follow in her older sister’s too-tiny footsteps had left Shelley feeling like an ugly stepsister trying to squeeze into Cinderella’s glass slipper. She’d been twelve or thirteen when she finally stopped trying.

“He
wants
to be called Dick. He’s shorter than the mortician, has less hair than the chiropractor, and is pudgier than the rodeo clown.” Shelley cheered briefly. “Do you remember how incensed Mom was when she found out ‘clown’ was his occupation and not a comment on his sense of humor?”

As if summoned, Miriam backed through the swinging kitchen door with the empty chopped liver dish in her hands. “I don’t want you hiding in here, Shelley,” her mother said as she grabbed a waiting replacement tray of hors d’oeuvres. “Richard’s a very nice young man. Marilyn tells me he’s thinking about opening his own firm.”

Before Shelley could respond—not that she intended to—her mother was already hurrying back to her current and potential sons-in-law, the plate of food extended in front of her like a sacrificial offering.

Judy finished ladling. Putting the lid on the pot of soup, she poured herself a glass of wine and moved to join Shelley at the island. She looked distracted, her expression at odds with the crispness of her hair and clothes, as if she’d gone through all the usual motions but didn’t really mean it.

“I liked the wrestler,” Sonya commented as the door swung closed. “He looked great in tights.”

“He was a total ten from the neck down,” Shelley agreed, remembering how pleasantly surprised she’d been when she first spotted the blond-haired Adonis. “Unfortunately, I think that was also his IQ.”

Shelley placed an arm around Aunt Sonya’s bony shoulders, surprised, as always, by her increasing fragility. Her great-aunt seemed to be shedding flesh as she aged, getting rid of all the unnecessary bits and pieces.

“Why won’t she give up?” Shelley asked. “Does she really think that one day I’ll walk in, see a plump proctologist eating her chopped liver, and say, ‘Be still, my heart’?”