Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan (7 page)

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Authors: Paula Marantz Cohen

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“
W
hy didn't
YOU TELL ME ABOUT THE NEW DATE FOR Back-to-School night?” Carla asked, standing in the door of her daughter's room. Stephanie was sprawled out on her bed, studying her French vocabulary, listening to her haftorah tape, and using the curling iron on her hair.
Stephanie's room was in a chaotic state. Carla had recently read a magazine article that counseled against criticizing children for minor infractions like messy rooms. The advice had seemed logical enough at the time, but when faced with a week's worth of clothing on the floor, an entire cosmetic counter on the bureau, and a veritable trash heap of crumpled tissues on the bed, she found that logic went out the window.
Lately, she had tried to adopt a see-no-evil approach and taken to squinting when entering her daughter's room. This was an art she was beginning to perfect, and she noticed that her peripheral vision had now weakened to the point that she could look at Stephanie and see her as if etched in relief against a blank background.
“Didn't you have a sheet about the new Back-to-School Night that you were supposed to give me?”
The original date for Back-to-School Night had been changed
when the middle-school principal tripped on a skateboard left unattended in front of C Hall and had to spend two weeks in traction. When Carla heard about the accident, her first thought was of Jeffrey (her tendency was to think of Jeffrey when any school-related mishap occurred). In this case, however, her suspicions were ill-founded, since Jeffrey was in elementary school and, despite an impressive level of hyperactivity, could hardly have made it across town during fourth period to leave his skateboard in front of the middle-school C Hall.
Part of Carla's irritation about Back-to-School Night came from feeling she should have known about the new date. It was one of the disadvantages of being a stay-at-home mother that any failure to keep abreast of the myriad of details attached to the children's lives seemed like an unconscionable breach of responsibility. A twinge of guilt took hold as she peeked out from the corner of her eye at a pile of papers near the foot of her daughter's bed. One was inscribed in bold print with the message MARK YOUR CALENDARS: NEW DATE FOR BACK-TO-SCHOOL NIGHT.
“Isn't that the sheet?” asked Carla, motioning accusingly toward the paper.
“What?” said Stephanie. It was hard to say whether her attention was more engaged by the sound of the cantor's voice on the tape or the need to hold the curling iron in one hand while balancing the French book in the other.
“Would you turn that thing off?” said Carla in exasperation.
“You don't have to yell!” Stephanie used the phrase “you don't have to yell” as a catch-all in any situation in which she felt herself the object of criticism. Carla generally failed to deflect this strategic move and would become caught up, before she knew it, in a pointless quarrel about tone of voice.
“I said”—Carla kept her voice as steady as she could—“that I didn't know tonight was Back-to-School Night. If I hadn't run into Mrs. Gupta in the supermarket on the way home from seeing Aunt Margot, I would never have known.”
“Sorrreee,” said Stephanie in an unapologetic tone. “I thought you did.” She picked up the sheet at the foot of her bed and held it out. “Here.”
“It doesn't do me much good now.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“Well, I don't know how we're going to handle this,” said Carla with annoyance. “Your father is at an important medical meeting, and I have an appointment with Dr. Samuels. It takes months to get an appointment with him, so I can't cancel.”
“Have Grandma go,” suggested Stephanie with a shrug. “She's nice and the teachers would like her.” (The implication was that Carla was not nice and the teachers would not like her. Stephanie was adept at this sort of oblique insult.)
“I don't think that your grandmother is really in any shape for it right now,” said Carla. “You know how strangely she's been behaving lately.”
“Oh, my teachers wouldn't mind,” observed Stephanie. “Most of them are so out of it, they wouldn't even notice. Besides, the weird words would go over big with my English teacher, Mr. Pearson. He likes weird old words. He's the one who makes us memorize all that Shakespeare.”
Carla nodded in recollection. There had been something of a fracas early in the term regarding this teacher's requirement for memorization. At first, Stephanie had reacted violently in opposition: “He's like back in the Dark Ages. No one expects you to memorize poetry anymore; it's a waste of time. I could be learning capitals for Mr. Perrone.” (Mr. Perrone taught cultural geography and was forever assigning them capitals of countries that kept changing.) “Can't Daddy write a note saying that I have some kind of dyslexia with memorizing stuff?” (Mark, as a physician, had been prevailed upon in the past to write notes to get Stephanie out of gym class for such dubious complaints as an ingrown toenail, sprained pinky, or heat rash.)
In this instance, however, Mark dug in his heels and took the
side of the teacher. He happened to have had a positive experience in the sixth grade memorizing “The Cremation of Sam McGee” and could still remember raising his voice and shaking his fist during the key scene of McGee's incineration. “Best educational experience of my life,” he pronounced. “Wish I'd done more of it.”
As it turned out, Stephanie's opposition to memorizing poetry evaporated when the first assignment was from
Romeo and Juliet
, a play that, despite the passage of over four hundred years, still speaks eloquently to the hormone-driven sentimentality of early adolescence. It didn't hurt that Stephanie was given the Juliet portion of the balcony scene to memorize, and that Kyle Chapin, seventh-grade heartthrob, was assigned the part of Romeo.
Stephanie had commandeered Jessie to help her with this assignment. Since moving in, Jessie was usually game to drill her granddaughter on vocabulary words and math formulas, and so it seemed only a short step to ask her to read the part of Romeo in the assigned scene.
In that first session, grasping the book tightly in her hands, Jessie had listened with rapt attention as Stephanie launched forth in Juliet's immortal words:
O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer be a Capulet.
This was Jessie's cue, but, enthralled by Stephanie's recitation, she had lost her place. Stephanie patiently pointed out to her grandmother where they were in the text.
“‘Aside,'” said Jessie.
“You don't say ‘aside,'” Stephanie stopped her to explain. “It means that you speak the next lines directly to the audience. Juliet isn't supposed to hear them.”
Jessie nodded in apparent comprehension and turned to address the wardrobe across the room: “‘Shall I hear more or shall I speak …'” She paused here, as this was the end of the line, and then abruptly added the words that began the next line: “‘At this?'”
Stephanie intervened again: “You don't have to pause at the end of the line if there isn't any punctuation,” she explained carefully. “Just read it like ordinary speech.” (Jessie's mistake was one committed by half of Stephanie's class.)
“Okay,” said Jessie, who appeared to grasp this more quickly than most of her granddaughter's peers. She turned toward the wardrobe again: “‘Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?'”
Stephanie nodded and now embarked on the meat of Juliet's speech—that portion that packed a romantic wallop guaranteed to spark love in Kyle Chapin (or whatever romantic feeling a seventh-grade boy is capable of). Stephanie placed her hand on her heart as she recited the famous lines:
'Tis but thy name that is my enemy.
Thou are thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face.
(Here, Stephanie gestured to each of the bodily parts enumerated in what she took to be an original piece of dramatic business.)
O, be some other name!
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name;
And for thy name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.
“Beautiful,” murmured Jessie, and took up Romeo's next line with apparent ease: “‘I take thee at thy word. Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized.'”
Here, however, she paused, as if the line had sparked an unforeseen rumination. Then, she read the line again:
“‘Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized.'”
“Gram, you said that already. Go on to the next line: ‘Henceforth—'” she prompted.
But Jessie seemed confused and Stephanie finished off the line herself—“‘Henceforth I never will be Romeo'”—then closed the book. It was the end of the assigned passage, and she sensed she had strained her grandmother's attention beyond its limits—a fact she understood, since her own attention was often so strained. She thanked Jessie for her help and trotted from the room, full of anticipation of iambic flirting with Kyle Chapin, and of using the new styling mousse to create tendrils that Juliet would no doubt have worn for the occasion.
Since that initial practice session, Jessie had been called upon again and again to help Stephanie memorize portions of Shakespeare. Carla had noted, listening as she often did at the door, that her mother quickly grew at ease with Shakespeare's language, which was rather surprising for a woman of seventy-two who hadn't gone beyond the tenth grade. Obviously, Jessie had an affinity for this sort of material that had never been tapped.
It now occurred to Carla that these sessions might have been responsible for precipitating her mother's Shakespeare delusion—though it was hard to see how they could have sparked something so detailed and elaborate.
“So he's a good teacher, this Mr. Pearson?” Carla returned to the subject at hand: Back-to-School Night and Stephanie's English teacher.
“I don't know,” said Stephanie, drawing back at this effort to enlist her on the side of an adult value judgment. “He's cool, I guess.”
“He's young?” asked Carla
“I suppose.” Stephanie now appeared doubtful. “Not that young. Not as young as me—but not as old as you.”
“Thanks for clarifying that,” said Carla dryly.
“But he's not married,” added Stephanie. “Pam asked him. He'd be good for Aunt Margot—he's probably about her age—but she'd never go out with him.”
“Why not?”
“Since when would she go out with a seventh-grade English teacher?”
“You have a point there. But you think he'd be good for her?”
“Sure,” said Stephanie. “He's so into poetry—it means he can feel things. And he's kind of cute, even if he's not Abercrombie.”
“Well, you've sold me,” said Carla, feeling a wave of affection for her daughter. She took a breath and stepped into the room, hearing something plastic crunch under her foot but ignoring it. She reached out and hugged Stephanie, who seemed surprised at the gesture, but did not resist. In point of fact, Stephanie found her mother as unpredictable in her responses as her mother found her: She was never sure whether Carla might yell at her or praise her for something. Her friends appeared to have the same problem with their mothers, which they put down to what they'd deduced from various TV specials to be the symptoms of perimenopause.
“I think we should send Grandma to Back-to-School Night and tell her to check out your English teacher for Aunt Margot,” said Carla, after they'd hugged.
“Sure,” said Stephanie, losing interest in the subject and focusing her attention on the curling iron.
Carla began to back out of the room, automatically picking up the crumpled tissues and the empty bottle of Snapple as she went.
“Don't touch anything!” warned Stephanie, holding the curling iron aloft in the manner of a drawn sword.
“But it's a mess in here!” Carla had lost control of her squint and made the mistake of surveying the room. “It's a pigsty!” she
pronounced now as this fact came forcibly home to her. “I can't understand how a girl your age can stand living this way!”
“That's because you're not a girl my age!”
“It's disgusting, young lady, disgusting. I want you to clean it up!”
“You don't have to yell!”
And so it went, until Carla realized that it was six-thirty and if she was going to drop Jessie off at the school and make it to her seven P.M. appointment with Dr. Samuels, she would have to save the rest of the fight for another time.
“
S
o, sweetheart,”
SAID DR. SAMUELS, PEERING IN AVUNCULAR fashion at Carla over his bifocals and leaning back in the plush recliner behind his desk. “Tell me what's bothering you.”
As he had made clear at the bookstore a month earlier, Dr. Samuels was not your conventional psychiatrist. He had no use for the medical mumbo-jumbo that many psychiatrists employ to give their work an aura of importance. He did not pretend to arcane knowledge or boast long years of esoteric training. Instead, he presented what he did in straightforward and pragmatic terms. “Life is mostly common sense,” he liked to say, “though sometimes you need a little help with the sense.”
Leonard Samuels had started his practice thirty-five years ago in Cherry Hill. He had come to this suburb of Philadelphia when it had only recently been settled by Jews eager to live outside the confines of the big city. Denied access to the venerable South Jersey towns of Moorestown and Haddonfield, this population had taken root in the intervening space, creating a sprawling suburb with a wide array of services tailored to their tastes and needs. As the residents liked to say, “We have no cherries and no hills, but we do have the best discount shopping in the Delaware Valley, a few good diners, and more synagogues than you can shake a stick at.”
Struggling with the pressures of upward mobility and assimilation, they also had a predictable cornucopia of neuroses. Leonard Samuels, therefore, had his work cut out for him.
Samuels liked to say that he had originally vacillated between a career in medicine and a career in the rabbinate. He had found the perfect compromise, he explained, in the practice of psychiatry, where he could solve problems and pontificate but did not have to answer to a higher authority.
He based his practice on the assumption that he could help solve his patients' problems because he had similar ones himself. He too had grown up poor and been nagged by an ambitious mother to work hard at school. He too had resented the pressure and the constant criticism (the familiar refrain in response to the 98 percent on the test:“So where's the other two points?”). But in retrospect, as he reminded his patients, who were in the throes of nagging their kids to death, his mother had been right and the pain he'd suffered had been all for the good. “Look at how well I turned out,” he would say, gesturing proudly to the wood-paneled office. “Sometimes it's your duty to make your children miserable.”
Because Samuels believed his patients could profit from his own experience, he made no secret of his personal life. On the contrary, flying in the face of psychiatric convention, he flaunted it. One wall of his office was covered with photos of his children and grandchildren, with a section devoted entirely to pictures from their bar and bat mitzvahs. Another wall was decorated with his wife's neo-Expressionist paintings. (“Had she started earlier, who knows?” he often mused. “She might have been another Picasso or Chagall.”) A third wall contained prized baseball memorabilia. Having grown up in Brooklyn, he had been an avid Dodgers fan as a child, and his subsequent devotion to the Mets was so strong that he was known to tell Yankees fans to go elsewhere. (Now living outside of Philadelphia, he made special allowance for the rubes who rooted for the Phillies.)
To have an established weekly appointment with Dr. Samuels
was highly prized among the cognoscenti of Cherry Hill. Just as area residents believed that an engagement ring should never be less than two carats (“It's an investment!”), they likewise believed in maintaining a standing appointment with Dr. Samuels (“You never can tell when you might go off the deep end”). Even if the bar mitzvah was over and the problem with the daughter-in-law resolved, who knew when a crisis might hit or a child or husband might need to be set straight about something?
It occurred to Carla, seated in the armchair facing Dr. Samuels, that perhaps she didn't have the right credentials to be his patient. She didn't even own a mink coat.
“None of it seems that important,” she said hesitantly in response to his question about what was bothering her. “I'm probably making too big a deal of it.”
“If it bothers you, it's important,” Samuels said encouragingly. “Just jump right in and get your feet wet!” Part of Samuels's success was that he viewed a visit to him as a kind of recreational opportunity: “How often do you get to talk about yourself for an hour?” he liked to remind his patients. “Even your mother won't listen to you for an hour—so take advantage and enjoy.”
“I guess I'm feeling overwhelmed,” began Carla, emboldened by Samuels's encouraging tone. As she spoke, he motioned with his hand, as though directing a car to back up into a vacant space, and she proceeded more rapidly: “Jeffrey, my ten-year-old, has been showing signs of ADHD, and I'm not sure I want to put him on the medicine. It seems like a drastic step. And Stephanie—that's my twelve-year-old—has a bat mitzvah coming up and is acting very oppositional. Not that she's not generally oppositional, but lately it's been more so. And Mark—that's my husband—is having difficulties at work. He's a physician, and the state of medicine being what it is—”
Samuels put up his hand, indicating that he'd heard enough (i.e., the car had made it into the space). It was his operative method to listen for a minute or two and give advice. Most of his
patients appreciated this: “Usually, they make you do all the work,” explained one devotee. “Samuels doesn't waste your time. He gets the gist and tells you what to do.”
“Okay,” Samuels said now, “I think I've got the picture. You've got some stress. Stress is normal. The question is: Are you handling it well? And how much of the stress should really involve you? Let's take a look: First, your son—I'd say, have him come see me. I'll tell you if he needs to go on the medicine. If he does, it's not the end of the world. It'll make life a lot easier for you and he'll be happier.
“Second, your daughter—she's oppositional. Nothing new for a twelve-year-old; it comes with the territory. But you need to lay down certain rules. If she deviates, ground her. It's amazing what grounding can do to get them into shape at that age.
“Third, your husband—that's really a matter between himself and his profession. He'll work it out. He's a physician; you won't starve. But I'll also let you in on a secret: A little self-promotion won't hurt. Look at me.” He pointed to his book prominently displayed on a side table, and to an array of articles with his byline that had been arranged on a bulletin board near the window.
Carla nodded. Dr. Samuels, she could see, had a way of sorting things out. She had sensed the value of self-promotion when she first saw Samuels at his bookstore appearance. Now it came home to her that her husband could do some of the same sort of thing—with her help. The idea of grounding Stephanie for bad behavior and of bringing Jeffrey in for a consultation also seemed like reasonable strategies. She felt better already.
“Is that all?” asked Samuels cheerfully, slapping his hands down on the desk as if to imply that this was small potatoes compared to what he normally saw—a reassuring response in itself.
“Well, there's the issue of the bat mitzvah dress,” added Carla tentatively. She had wondered whether such a trivial point should be raised in a psychiatric session, but decided to plunge ahead.
“Not a trivial matter at all,” said Samuels, as though reading
her mind. “My suggestion is that you drop the young lady off at the mall once a week and let her look. As the affair gets closer, she'll find something—otherwise, she can wear what's in her closet. Let her know that for motivation. Just make clear that it's not your responsibility to find the dress; it's hers. And no need to travel too far. You tell her: Find it in the Cherry Hill or the King of Prussia Mall or go without.”
Carla nodded again. She wondered why she hadn't thought of this herself. (“That's the beauty of him,” her friend Jill Rosenberg had told her. “He'll tell you everything you already know, but somehow you need to pay two hundred dollars an hour to really believe it.”)
“How's your mood?” said Dr. Samuels, leaning forward to inspect Carla more closely over his bifocals. “You look okay to me.” (“He can spot depression a mile away,” Jill had said admiringly. “He had me on antidepressants almost before I came in the door.”)
“I'm not generally depressed. It's just that lately, with the bat mitzvah and so forth, it sometimes seems like too much.”
“I'll tell you something,” said Samuels, gesturing to the wall of bar mitzvah pictures in front of him. “I've been through it. I've seen my daughter go through it. This is a stressful time for any parent. A wonderful occasion, yes—I wouldn't have it taken away—but not an easy one. Even Mother Teresa would be stressed—not that she had to host a bar mitzvah, but you catch my drift. You seem to be handling things fairly well. Just detach a little bit—recognize that everything will turn out, maybe not the way you want but good enough.
“Okay, let's review,” said Samuels now, glancing down at his notes and proceeding briskly as he prepared to bring the session to a close: “Bring the boy in and we'll have him taken care of. Don't worry so much about your husband, except maybe to give a little push for some creative PR. And believe me, your daughter will find a bat mitzvah dress if she realizes that otherwise she has to wear some
shmatta
in her closet.”
This was the wrap-up that Dr. Samuels liked to give at the end of each session. “Never underestimate the need for repetition,” he often explained at the monthly workshops he held for therapists who wanted to follow in his footsteps: “Say it, then say it again. Even the bright ones have a hard time remembering.”
“Thank you,” said Carla, genuinely relieved to see her problems swept into a neat pile. “There is one more thing, though,” she faltered, wondering how to best relay the bizarre nature of this last issue. “It involves my mother.”
“Ah!” said Samuels, settling back. Obviously, the mother was the final piece in the puzzle. “Mothers generally pose a problem around the time of the bar mitzvah,” he observed.
“Well, it's not really that,” said Carla carefully. “My mother was a bit depressed after Dad died, but her spirits improved when she moved in with us. She's been a real help around the house and very easy to get along with—no trouble at all.”
“That's a change of pace,” noted Samuels. In point of fact, he had never heard of such a thing before.
“Yes, she doesn't butt in to our lives at all,” noted Carla. “But lately, she's been behaving strangely. I suppose you could say she's delusional. She actually thinks”—Carla paused to give her audience a moment to prepare for this—“she thinks she existed in another life as the girlfriend of William Shakespeare.”
Samuels cocked his head. “That
is
a new one,” he acknowledged.
“It's particularly odd, since she presents the situation in a very matter-of-fact way,” continued Carla, her confidence growing as she felt she had interested Samuels in a novel situation. “She seems to believe that this was a past life that she is remembering. She says she knows that it's unrelated to the life she's living now.”
“Highly compartmentalized fantasizing,” murmured Samuels, stroking his chin. “Interesting.”
“Yes, and she seems surprisingly happy to remember this past life. It doesn't distress her in any way. She's full of anecdotes and
references—in fact, it's amazing what she's dredged up that I never dreamed she knew about that period.”
“And it disturbs you to see her so caught up in something that doesn't involve you?” asked Samuels, peering over his bifocals and (Carla realized uneasily) echoing the thought Margot had caused her to entertain that afternoon.
“Well, yes, I feel upset. It's as though she wants to create another life that has no connection to the life she's living.”
“And why should she be so gung ho about the life she's living?” (Jill had warned that Samuels could sometimes turn on you and side with the opposition—as when he had refused to condemn Josh's unsupervised trip to the mall and had focused instead on what he called Jill's “narcissistic overprotectiveness”). “Is there anything so exciting going on in her life right now?” repeated Samuels, peering sternly at Carla over his bifocals.
“No,” said Carla, reflectively, “but she has us—her children and grandchildren. We love her and want her to be part of our lives. And it's upsetting to think that she's lost contact with reality. Who knows where it might lead?”
Samuels seemed to consider this for a moment. “Well, I'd say you have two separate issues going on here,” he finally concluded. “One is that your mother may be delusional—certainly a point of concern, especially if it impedes her daily life. The other is your wanting her to make your life the centerpiece of her own. There, the problem lies with you. She has a right to be the center of her own life—and maybe this thing with Shakespeare is a way of allowing her to do that. I'd recommend having her go out more. Find a way for her to meet new people.”

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