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Authors: Paula Marantz Cohen

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BOOK: Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan
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T
he caterer
WAS LOCATED IN WHAT LOOKED LIKE AN ABANDONED warehouse in the farthest reaches of northeast Philadelphia. They were greeted by one of the owners, a middle-aged man named Moishe, who bounded toward them wearing a yarmulke on top of a toupee—something that struck Mark as particularly redundant.
The inside of the building was cluttered with aluminum pans, serving bowls, and cardboard boxes, but an area had been cleared in one corner where a small table had been carefully set with three place settings. There was a magenta cloth on the table, matching magenta napkins, and plates with magenta trim, as well as glasses and cutlery. This apparently was where the Goodmans were to sample the bat mitzvah meal.
“I set the table according to the color scheme that our bat mitzvah girls tend to favor,” said Moishe, motioning to the table and addressing Stephanie, “but of course we have the books for you to look through to choose what you like if this isn't to your taste.” He gestured to a library of black leather volumes on shelves across the room.
“The young lady should sit here.” Moishe gestured to the center of the table. “And I'll take her order for a beverage.” He bowed
his head in pleasing subservience to Stephanie. “Your choice of Diet Coke or iced tea.”
“Diet Coke,” said Stephanie demurely.
“And the folks should sit on either side,” motioned Moishe, more perfunctorily, failing to take their beverage order.
“We're going to give you a sampling of some of our most popular items,” he explained. “But you also have a list here.” He handed them a calligraphied sheet that seemed to go on forever. “These are other options that you can choose from. Here you see the meat menu and here the dairy. Note that some are starred to indicate a cost over and above the standard package fee. Some, with the dagger, are seasonal, and some, which require additional time to prepare, are in italics”—his hand swept across the menu quickly, indicating a veritable jungle of symbols and typescript. “Generally,” he said, as he saw Mark and Carla looking confused, “the items we'll be serving you tonight are the ones most people choose, and they fall within the standard package price.”
He turned to Stephanie to give a personalized translation: “I'm simply showing what we have, because we want the bat mitzvah girl to be happy, and sometimes she wants to choose something out of the ordinary. But as I say, most choose from among the items you'll get to sample today—and I'll be frank with you about which ones are the all-out favorites with the teens.” He turned to Carla and Mark in an aside: “I'll send on the hors d'oeuvres menu another time. The hors d'oeuvres tend to get a bit complicated, and I like to leave it to Mom and Dad to make those selections at a later date.” (Experience had shown that it was best not to overload the customer, especially with the child present, since messy scenes were likely to result.)
“So without further ado, let's have Eduardo, our chef, bring out your first course.” Moishe retreated to a mysterious area behind the cluttered office that one assumed to be the kitchen. Almost immediately, a large Hispanic man, wearing a chef's hat and a mildly irritated expression, emerged holding a tray with three
bowls of salad. “This is Eduardo, the best kosher chef in the Northeast.” Moishe gestured toward the chef. “And here's your salad course,” he announced, “a very good starter, since if they want to go up and schmooze or do the hora, it won't get cold. We're doing a meat meal for you, since that tends to be the favorite with the kids. Our nondairy ice cream is awesome,” he turned to Stephanie, “and the cheese on the cheesesteaks—you'd think you were at Pat's in South Philly, not that I know myself, but I've been told.
“Anyway, the salad has croutons, tomatoes, cucumber, walnuts, a little arugula for those who like the fancy lettuce, with a nice vinaigrette. A big favorite.” Mark and Carla sampled the salad and observed that it was good. Stephanie, who didn't eat salad, waited patiently.
“Okay, that's the salad,” said Moishe, “Now for the soup. It's good to get everyone settled down with the soup. We have a nice matzo-ball soup—lightest matzo balls in the Delaware Valley—no offense to Grandma.”
The soup was brought out by the surly chef. Stephanie, who liked matzo-ball soup, agreed that it was good.
“The kids can have the matzo-ball soup too,” said Moishe. “Usually we give them mozzarella sticks as a first course—tastes just like real mozzarella—but we can substitute the matzo-ball soup if you want; we do it a lot.” Stephanie said she wanted the matzo-ball soup instead of the mozzarella sticks.
“Done,” said Moishe.
“Next, we have a palate cleanser, a nice sorbet.” Eduardo brought out three dishes of sorbet: two yellow, one red. “Raspberry or lemon, your choice.”
“Lemon,” pronounced Stephanie.
“Lemon it is.
“Then we have the main dish for the grown-ups. We're going to bring you three choices here: the pistachio-crusted sea bass, the chicken with tomato and pesto glaze, and the filet mignon with
shiitake mushrooms and red wine. I'll tell you frankly here that the sea bass and the filet are generally the favorites. Nothing wrong with the chicken, mind you.” Carla and Mark sampled the three dishes and agreed to go with the sea bass and the filet.
“Now we'll bring out the kids' choices,” said Moishe. “Here we have a cheesesteak—and you tell me if you can tell the difference from the real thing. We also have the hotdog and the hamburger, the ten-foot hoagie, the chicken nuggets, and the pasta with meat sauce—all big winners. Generally, we serve three of these, so there's plenty to satisfy if a kid doesn't like something.”
Stephanie was biting into the cheesesteak with the air of a serious connoisseur. “It's pretty good,” she admitted. Mark took a bite to assure himself that Stephanie had not been snowed by an impressive sales job, and had to admit that it was indeed pretty good. Stephanie also chose the nuggets and the pasta, which, according to Moishe, were what most kids chose.
“And now for the final and most important course,” said Moishe, looking knowingly at Stephanie. “The dessert. Can we make it taste like ice cream?—that is the question. Not one of the Four Questions, I'll grant you, but an important one.” Eduardo brought out a tray with the faux ice cream and a variety of toppings, which Stephanie carefully prepared into a sundae.
“It tastes real,” she said, to which Moishe exclaimed, “What did I tell you? For the adults, we serve a nice plate with fresh fruit and a chocolate torte.” He obviously did not intend to bring this out, having accomplished the task of selling the child on the ice cream.
“I'm sure it's wonderful,” said Carla, relieved to see Stephanie behaving with such docility. How, she wondered, might she perfect Moishe's mixture of flattery and bullying so as to ingratiate herself with her daughter?
“Fine,” said Mark, glad to have the thing over with. “We'll take it.”
“And the table setting?” asked Moishe. “Would the young lady like to look through our sample books for other options?”
“I like this one,” said Stephanie, to Carla's surprise. Her daughter had never made a decision this quickly before in her life.
“A wise choice, if I may say so,” said Moishe. “It's our favorite setting by far. Your daughter, I can see, has a good eye.”
“That she does,” said Carla, trying to share in the goodwill that Moishe had generated. Stephanie, however, would have none of it—this was a love-fest between her and Moishe alone—and she shot an annoyed glance at her mother. Still, there was no fighting, and they shook Moishe's hand at the door with a certain amount of relief.
“Now that was easy, wasn't it?” said Carla as they drove home, Stephanie having fallen asleep in the backseat.
Mark grunted. Moishe's brand of salesmanship rubbed him the wrong way, and he still wasn't thrilled by the idea of serving food that imitated other food. But he had to admit that it had all tasted pretty good and that the whole thing had transpired more painlessly than expected. The cost, of course, was another story. He had put down a substantial down payment, and the final bill for the meal promised to be very painful indeed.
“
I
broke
UP WITH KEVIN,” ANNOUNCED MARGOT AS SHE AND Carla settled into a booth at the back of Sal and Joe's, a family-owned Italian restaurant in Maple Shade, just outside of Cherry Hill. It was the custom of the sisters to have lunch at least once a week to “catch up,” mostly with Margot's fast-paced love life. Sal and Joe's was a favorite meeting-place, since they were both partial to the mussels marinara.
In the current instance, it had actually been two weeks since they had last had lunch. This was because Margot had been away in L.A. taking depositions for a big case involving half the Philadelphia mob. (“Construction and union graft are passé with organized crime these days,” Margot explained. “They all want to be in movies.”)
Carla had hoped to begin their lunch talking about their mother's condition, but her sister's announcement effectively preempted this. Margot's latest romantic misadventure would have to be thoroughly worked over before they could move on to other things.
“Which one was Kevin?” asked Carla. She had difficulty keeping Margot's boyfriends straight. It was not only that there were so many but the relationships were so short-lived. In some cases,
calling them relationships was a stretch. Was two weeks together—even if it meant taking a private jet to Paris or relaxing on the shores of Lake Como—a relationship? Carla wasn't sure.
“Kevin's the guy in L.A. in ‘development.' I don't know what development is,” noted Margot, “but it seems to involve having lunch with lots of rich, famous people to talk about projects that never get off the ground. How he's managed to make so much money when he's never produced anything is a mystery to me. I suppose I could figure it out if I had more time with him. But that, as I say, doesn't seem to be in the cards.”
“How long did you go out?” Carla wondered how this liaison had passed her by unnoticed.
“Three months. But of course we didn't see each other much, since he was in L.A. and I was here—which helped.” Carla might have said that it hindered, but she supposed that this was a matter of perspective. Most of Margot's relationships fizzled out much sooner. In Kevin's case, the longevity seemed to be a function of tantalizing emails that had piqued Margot's interest until they were replaced by the fact of his person. Probably his work in “development” took the same course, with the money coming in at some intermediate stage.
“He was fine in theory,” Margot sighed. This was not an unfamiliar complaint with regard to Margot's boyfriends. They looked good on paper and often looked good in clothes (and even without them), but did not hold up to sustained human contact.
Margot paused at this point to give the waitress her order—and to note the handsome young man, resembling the young Al Pacino, who was staring appreciatively at her near the pizza oven. He was obviously an employee, neither Sal nor Joe, but possibly a relative of one of them.
Handsome young men and prosperous older ones tended to stare at Margot. As Uncle Sid, even in decline a great admirer of female pulchritude, put it: Margot was “a hot tomato.” People prone to less metaphorical description said she looked like the actress
Rachel Weisz—only better. (Penelopé Cruz and Salma Hayek were other actresses whom Margot was said to look better than.)
“So what was the problem with Kevin?” asked Carla, with mild curiosity. There was a certain sameness to these conversations. Although the reasons for Margot's failed relationships were multitudinous, the basic pattern tended to be the same. The last one had been a real-estate magnate with houses in Aspen and the South of France who, it turned out, had been functionally illiterate and gotten through college on Cliff's Notes. Before that was the British fashion photographer, straight out of a Judith Krantz novel, very handsome and exceptionally good in bed, who turned out to have a video archive of the women he slept with. Margot had escaped taking her place in that library by the skin of her teeth, quite literally—she had seen the reflection of the camera eye in the bathroom mirror as she was brushing them before one of their trysts.
“So what was wrong with this Kevin?” Carla repeated, hoping that they could conclude the conversation quickly and move on.
“Bad personal hygiene,” sighed Margot. “You'd think someone who drove a Maserati would change his underwear.”
“You'd think,” agreed Carla. “But driving a Maserati can exempt you from a lot of things.”
Margot acknowledged this to be true. When would she learn? Her record in love was abysmal; each new foray led to disappointment, though fortunately not to heartache. Margot's heart was rather resilient—at least she liked to give that impression.
Much of the problem, as both sisters had long ago concluded, had to do with Margot's appearance. While Carla was pleasant-looking (the words
cute
and
pretty
came to mind), Margot was something else entirely (
striking
and
stunning
were the operative terms). If Carla had inherited her mother's sweet nature and domestic sense, Margot had inherited her looks.
“You should have seen your mother at your age,” Milt Kaplan used to expound to his daughters, as he sat back after one of
Jessie's excellent meals. “She was a knockout with the disposition of an angel. Boys would come from all the way across town to carry her books when she walked to school, and she used to take a few extra along so nobody would feel left out.”
“So what are you saying, Dad? I should bring extra books to school with me?” Margot would ask, sensing that the story was somehow directed at her.
“I'm not saying anything.” Milt would put up his hands. “I'm just describing. Is it a crime for me to talk nicely about your mother?”
Despite his protests, Milt was indeed intending an object lesson for his daughter. What he failed to understand was that the kind of looks that Margot had inherited from her mother—the shapely figure; thick, curly hair; long, wide mouth; narrow, densely lashed eyes; and high forehead that had made Jessie Kaplan the toast of Vineland—had different effects in the world as it currently existed. In Jessie's day, a beautiful woman was an ornament to grace the arm of some lucky alpha male. In the postfeminist era in which Margot came of age, beauty had become a more slippery signifier. It could brand as much as it could elevate, and often did both at the same time. Thus a dull girl with good looks was immediately judged to be a bimbo, while a sharper one with the same looks would be seen as a bitch, with the capacity to humiliate any man who crossed her path.
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.”
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