Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan (5 page)

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Authors: Paula Marantz Cohen

BOOK: Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan
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“It's possible,” said Carla doubtfully, “but she doesn't really watch that much television. And if she were absorbing the vocabulary, that would be odd in itself, wouldn't it? Since when do people start talking like old movies?”
“Well, she
is
getting on in years—and she's lonely,” said Margot with a trace of wistfulness. “I wouldn't mind having a movie in my head where Prince Charming comes along and sweeps me off my feet.”
“He will,” said Carla reassuringly. “Just be patient.”
“Well, maybe you should be patient with Mom, too,” counseled Margot, who, when not dealing with her own life, possessed a good deal of common sense. “Let's talk about how she's doing next week. I have a case coming up, but I'll work in a lunch with my big sister next Wednesday if you can make it into the city.”
“It's a date,” said Carla.
“I wish!” sighed Margot. “If I could have you cloned in male form, then maybe I could have a relationship that lasts.”
“You just need to look in the right places and be more open-minded.” Margot glanced at the admiring Al Pacino near the pizza oven, and Carla hurried to qualify: “And I don't mean in that direction; he looks like he's about nineteen.”
“Older woman, younger man is in,” observed Margot—then, seeing her sister's annoyed expression, “Okay, okay, I'll try to look for a bona fide nerd, preferably with a medical degree. But I'm late for court now, and the judge is already mad at me for not letting him look down my blouse.” She put a twenty-dollar bill on the table, shot the young man near the pizza oven a parting glance, and strolled out of the restaurant in her Manolo Blahniks.
T
he following
FRIDAY AFTERNOON, CARLA STOLE A FEW hours to do some errands. She made a brief stop to pick up Mocha Twists and frozen chicken satay at Trader Joe's (staples in the family diet), to look for some 30A bras for Stephanie at Marshalls, and to buy some replacement glass tumblers at Williams-Sonoma (every few weeks, the family's collection of water glasses diminished through mishaps generally related to Jeffrey).
With these missions accomplished, she continued down the highway to the area's mega-bookstore to check out the books in the psychology section. It was her hope that the experts would say that throwing erasers out of windows was to be expected from high-spirited pre-adolescent boys, and that strange archaisms were not uncommon coming out of the mouths of septuagenarian widows.
As Carla approached the bookstore, she realized that an event was in progress. The place was packed with half the female population of Cherry Hill. Who could possibly draw such a crowd? Carla's first thought was that the attraction must be a former overweight celebrity who had written a book on how she lost two hundred pounds through strenuous diet and exercise (with a little help from stomach stapling) or a chef from one of Philadelphia's most expensive restaurants hawking a collection of low-calorie gourmet recipes
(the low-calorie gourmet meal being to the credulous suburbanite what alchemy had been to the credulous medieval scientist).
But the sign near the front of the store soon made it clear that the featured attraction was neither a former celebrity fattie nor a calorie-conscious gourmet chef. The personage in question was Dr. Leonard Samuels, well-known Cherry Hill psychiatrist and author of the new self-help book
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love My Mother-in-Law.
Carla had certainly heard of Dr. Samuels. Her friend Jill Rosenberg had consulted him prior to her son Josh's bar mitzvah: “He made it so that I almost had a good time,” said Jill by way of testimony to Samuels's miraculous abilities, “and I've never had a good time in my life.”
Samuels was also a frequent guest on the local public radio show
Voices in the Family,
and was much quoted in the area's much-maligned but scrupulously read local newspaper, the
Camden Courier Post
, on issues ranging from school violence to geriatric sex.
In short, Samuels had a reputation in Cherry Hill, and now, with his new book, he was on his way to an even bigger one. Why, thought Carla fleetingly, couldn't Mark do a little of this sort of self-promotion? He too was a doctor, superlatively trained and with a pleasant way with people when he wanted to make the effort. He too was providing a valuable service—albeit one involving a lower end of the anatomy, though no less important for that.
But Carla had no time to dwell on possible pubic relations opportunities for her husband right now. There was too much going on around her. As she entered the store, she saw that Samuels's books had been arranged on a large display table in an intricate pyramid at which women, eager to obtain a copy, were violently grabbing, so that harried salespeople were obliged to continually reassemble the pyramid on an ever-diminishing scale.
“I love the title,” one matron was overheard to say. “It's taken from that Woody Allen movie.”
The title was actually an allusion to the 1964 classic Stanley Kubrick film,
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned
to Love the Bomb.
But the origin of the title hardly mattered to the assembled throng. They liked it because, quite simply, they really wanted to stop worrying and learn to love their mothers-in-law.
As Carla inched her way forward through the crowd, she could hear various testimonials to Dr. Samuels's genius wafting around her.
“He cured me of my psoriasis,” said one. “He told me that I didn't have to go to my brother's Passover seder if I didn't want to. I said, ‘David, I love you, but I'm sick to death of sitting through you reading every goddamn prayer in the Haggadah and singing all those verses of “Chad Gadya” when you know I have to get up at six A.M. for work the next day.' Once I'd said it, my skin cleared up in a week.”
“He gave me my Jonathan back,” said another woman reverently. “He said, ‘Instead of trying to make him feel guilty, tell him to go live with his father, if that's what he wants. I took his advice. Jonathan stayed with Nathan for a week and that was the end of it. I never heard a peep out of him again about liking his father better. Now he goes to visit the bum on holidays and for a week in the summer and he's glad to come home. He knows who loves him.”
“I was at my wit's end with Ian over the bar mitzvah thank-you notes,” said another woman, who was holding several copies of Samuels's book with the obvious intention of giving them as gifts to needy friends. She was speaking to another woman, who appeared to be hanging on her words. “He refused to write them,” the first woman explained to her companion. “God knows, we did everything. First, we grounded him; then, we took away cable; then network TV; then Nintendo and PlayStation II; then his CD player and the Internet; then dessert.” These deprivations were recited as though they were the plagues visited upon the Egyptians in the Old Testament, and the woman who was listening opened her eyes wider and wider as the punishments were enumerated. “Still, he wouldn't finish them,” explained the woman. “What else was there?” She looked queryingly at her companion, who shook her head in mystification. “So I consulted Dr. Samuels, and you know what he said?” The other woman opened her eyes even wider, as if she couldn't
stand the suspense. “He said, ‘To hell with the thank-you notes! Give him a list of the telephone numbers and have him call everyone and say a few words. They'll love it and he won't have to put pen to paper.' You know what? We followed his advice and it worked!”
Carla had begun to grow genuinely interested in Dr. Samuels. The testimonials were impressive and the size of the crowd, many of them clutching multiple copies of his book, was more so.
At this point she had inched close to the center of the store, where Samuels was positioned behind a small table in preparation for the signing. He was a large man of about sixty-five, with the kind of craggy face and squat, powerful body common to certain Jewish men who had grown up poor and prided themselves on being as tough as the Italian kids on the block (and having the broken noses to prove it). Samuels now stood up from the table and put his hand in the air to establish his intention to speak. Possessing a natural sense of authority, which was at least three quarters of his success, he immediately got results: The loud chatter died down to a hum of excited whispers.
“Let me be frank with you folks,” said Samuels, speaking in the friendly, no-nonsense manner that was his trademark. “There's nothing here that you couldn't find out for yourself.” He held up a copy of his book, which had a picture on the cover of an attractive, smiling woman who had obviously taken his advice and learned to love her mother-in-law. “That doesn't mean, of course, that you don't have to read it.”
There was appreciative laughter.
“When you have kids and parents, husbands—and wives”—he gestured toward the few lone men huddled toward the back of the store—“let's face it, things get complicated. You forget what's important. You fixate, you escalate, you make a big
mishegoss
out of what should be a nothing. What I give here”—he tapped the book casually with his bearlike hand—“are commonsense solutions. There's no magic involved and probably, if you weren't so busy doing whatever it is you do, you could figure it all out yourself. But the fact is, you can't. I've made it my living and you haven't.
“So there you have it. Buy the book. Learn something. But remember one thing—The book is general. That's why they call it self-help: You read it and you help yourself. Not everyone can do that. Some people don't go in for reading books, and some people need more personalized attention. If you fall into that category, call me up and make an appointment. I'll be frank with you: You may have to wait a month to see me—I'm booked solid—but it'll be worth the wait.
“Now, I say this knowing there are those among you who have a problem with seeing a psychiatrist. Seeing a psychiatrist, you think, means you're crazy—like your cousin, the one who had the Ponzi scheme and the drinking problem, and ran off to Vegas with the stripper.”
There was another wave of appreciative laughter.
“You're thinking,
He
needed a shrink, but I don't. But let me tell you—your crazy cousin needed a shrink, but so do you. Everyone needs one sooner or later. The reason? Life is hard, and we can use all the help we can get. After all, you hire someone to clean your house; why not someone to clean up here?” He tapped his head. “One thing I guarantee: If you come to see me, you'll come out of the office feeling better than when you came in.
“So that's it, folks. Buy the book; make an appointment if you need to. Remember, you only have one life. There's no point going through it feeling miserable.”
The throng erupted in appreciative exclamations of “I love you, Dr. Samuels!” and “God bless you, you saved my life!” Samuels gave a nod of acknowledgment, then put up his hand in the same gesture he had used when he began speaking, though now it was suggestive of a blessing. Then, he sat down to begin the hard work of signing copies.
Carla picked up one of Samuels's books and took her place on line. When she got home, she thought, she would call for an appointment.
“
N
o!” said
STEPHANIE, GLANCING DISMISSIVELY AT THE dress her mother was holding up for her inspection. They were standing in the junior department of Bloomingdale's in the King of Prussia Mall. The hour was growing late.
For weeks now, mother and daughter had traipsed through the department stores and boutiques of South Jersey and Philadelphia, searching for that elusive garment: the bat mitzvah dress. Only last week there had been an exhausting outing to Franklin Mills, a carnivalesque sprawl of department store outlets, as large as a small city, where drastically reduced designer merchandise was thrown into large, unsifted heaps. Mother and daughter had spent hours digging in bins and pushing through racks without striking pay dirt.
There had already been two previous forays to the King of Prussia Mall, numerous jaunts to the nearby Cherry Hill Mall, and even pilgrimages to celebrated malls in northern New Jersey. To Carla, each mall appeared to contain more or less the same stores and the same merchandise, but Stephanie and her friends, attuned to the fine points of mall ecology, could discern subtle differences among them in the way a trained wine connoisseur could discern the differing qualities of a flight of chablis.
The King of Prussia Mall was the elite megamall of the region. Not to find a dress there was to arrive, more or less, at the fashion terminus, with nowhere left to go.
“Honey, you didn't really look,” Carla protested now, holding the dress above the rack like a bullfighter trying to entice a bull, in this case a recalcitrant twelve-year-old. It seemed to be exactly what her daughter was looking for: black, cut on the bias, scooped neck, no ruffles.
“Puffed sleeves,” Stephanie noted succinctly.
Carla's heart sank. They had seen countless dresses over the past few weeks, some quite lovely, but each with a fatal flaw that disqualified it—in this case, puffed sleeves.
With the bat mitzvah only a few months away, one might have expected Stephanie Goodman to be home, studying her Torah and haftorah portions so as to perform them flawlessly for the family and friends who would be gathered at great price to witness her induction into the religion of her forebears.
But to expect this would be naive. Only a handful of relatives, most of them deaf, had enough knowledge of Hebrew to critique Stephanie's performance of the scripture, while everyone, down to her six-year-old cousin from East Brunswick, could pass judgment on the dress.
Still, there had to be a point when you said
enough already!
“Stephanie,” said Carla, trying to take a casual, enticing tone, “why don't you try the dress on? I have a feeling that the sleeves will flatten out when you wear it.”
Stephanie shot her mother an angry glance. “No!” she said, her voice growing shrill, “I won't wear puffed sleeves. I'm not a Disney character.”
There was no arguing with this. Stephanie was at an awkward age when her body seemed to have been assembled by a dyslexic creator. Her feet were too big, her shoulders too narrow, her face too childish for the makeup she insisted on applying with a trowel every morning. The entire effect, though appealing in an
ungainly sort of way (at least to a mother), was in no sense Disney-esque.
Carla sighed and hung the rejected garment back on the rack. They would simply have to try again tomorrow. The trick now was to get out of the store without a scene.
“I'll never find it!” Stephanie's voice had become a plaintive whine as they walked past the makeup counters where young women proffered spritzes of perfume like barkers at a carnival. “I'll never find one half as nice as Lisa's!” Lisa's, discovered in the backroom of Loehmann's (akin to finding gold in the backyard), stood as the benchmark for the bat mitzvah dress among seventh-grade girls at the Cherry Hill middle school.
“You will, honey, you will,” said Carla reassuringly.
Yet to be honest about it, she had her doubts. They had inspected every dress in the numerous shopping emporiums of the Delaware Valley and would now have to retrace their steps in the hope of new inventory. This prospect made Carla want to sit down in the middle of the King of Prussia Mall and weep.
After hearing Dr. Samuels at the bookstore, she had proceeded to make an appointment. As he had warned, his schedule was heavily booked, and the first opening was four weeks from the day she called. Fortunately, that date was rapidly approaching, and she was relieved to think that on Thursday evening she would finally be reaping the benefits of Samuels's much-touted sagacity. Perhaps he would have some ideas about how to handle her daughter's exacting taste in a bat mitzvah dress—or, better yet, some tips on where they might find it.

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