The Matzo Ball Heiress (12 page)

We took two trips my senior year of high school, unusual for the Sol Greenblotzes. The first was down to Mom’s parents’ ritzy house in Miami—I’m still not sure where my mother’s parents got their money from. This visit was a big, big deal. The decades-old rift between Mom and her parents began when they sat her down at the age of twelve and told her that there was something she should know. She thought she was about to hear she was adopted, but the truth was even more upsetting: They had never wanted children. She was a mistake. Not expecting she could conceive at forty-six, Mom’s mother (my grandma Bertha) carried five months before realizing she was pregnant not menopausal. Mom quickly confided this whole story to me in the rented Cadillac while Dad was in a 7-Eleven paying for gas. “Such cold demeanors!” (Um, like guess who else? I thought.) She’d hardly seen them since college, but they were both old and sickly now, and she wanted to make amends with them before they died. For a good chunk of their lives, Mom’s parents were German-Jewish Gurdjieffians, adherents of a philosophy verging on cult. From the beginning of his rise, Gurdjieff, who I have since read up on, had many rich and famous disciples including
Mary Poppins
author P.L. Travers. Way after Gurdjieff’s death, his ideas caught on among progressive rockers Robert Fripp, Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel. According to his worshiping biographer, he never tarried over words and believed cold hard facts—like telling your children the most awful truths—were good for the soul.

No wonder Mary Poppins just up and left when she was done with her charges, Jane and Michael Banks. Her creator was a hard-ass.

“I told her a little more about my upbringing, Sol,” Mom said when Dad was back from the 7-Eleven. “About Gurdjieff and the speech they gave me ‘for my own good.’”

Dad took over the conversation for the remainder of the car ride to my grandparents’ house. “This is who they followed? I think Gurdjieff was evil,” he said, checking his road map. “What a master manipulator. I read he had one of his followers build a wall and then tear it down just because he could make him do that.”

“Gurdjieff sounds awful,” I said to both of them. “Heartless.”

“Now you know what awaits you on this visit,” Mom said with a sigh.

I’d met my Grandma Bertha only twice before, when I was a week old, and when she and my grandfather came to a political convention in New York around my tenth birthday.

Grandma Bertha pecked my mother on the cheek, but for me and my father she could only muster handshakes. Her face was quite wrinkled, with indentations at her cheeks—she looked like a giant peanut. She also had no saliva, so she continually sipped a Fanta.

Grandpa Irving looked like Confucius with a Semitic nose. His gray beard was so long and ragged that the tip of it singed when he was lighting a smuggled Cuban cigar, creating the awful odor of burnt hair.

There was a stiff conversation between my grandmother and Mom about some imported Israeli cabinets that were falling apart. Grandma Bertha blamed the cheap Israeli glue and in doing so sounded just like Mom about to forcibly return a silk blouse with a snag.

My grandfather said to my father, “I was thinking about the invention of butter today.”

“Butter?” Dad said politely.

“Who first invented butter?” Grandpa Irving said.

Dad quickly glanced at Mom. “It must have been a happy accident.”

“What accident takes two days, Sol? Put some milk in a bucket. Take a plunger and go up and down for two days. Then you have butter?”

Dad nodded politely. Mom looked at Grandma Bertha like a five-year-old running from the playground with a fresh gravel rash, waiting for her mother to hug her and stroke her and call her Lamb. I was startled to see my mother so raw and needy. I kept waiting for some emotion to leak out of my grandparents. “We missed you, Jocelyn.” Or, “It is thrilling to meet up again with our only grandchild.”

But Grandma Bertha just sipped more Fanta.

We had planned on staying the entire afternoon, but there was an unrehearsed change of plans. Tight-lipped, Mom stood up and bid a quick goodbye to her parents. Grandma Bertha gave us polite kisses on our foreheads, and Grandpa Irving shook my father’s hand, and patted me and Mom on the back before the door closed behind us.

My father had happily agreed to go to what was supposed to be the Kaufman Family Denouement. He thought it would be good for his wife and also a chance for the three of us to later see the Everglades. For more than an hour we drove along in silence in the Caddie until my mother faked a laugh and said, “Glad that’s over.” We sailed through Alligator Alley, an expressway that cuts through the Everglades reserve. Three pelicans whooshed down the highway for a crustacean lunch. Dad stopped the car by an official Everglades learning center.

A park ranger paced the packed mini-auditorium like a clown taking a walkabout in the Big Top, pausing briefly for his stopact: “The barred owl’s two-colored plumage makes it appear like he’s got bars of color.”

Dad took enthusiastic notes. He had recently attended a lecture in which the travel memoirist and fiction writer Paul Theroux advised, “You can predict the future in your writing. Just write down everything you hear exactly. I don’t know why this works, but it just does.”

Mom read a mystery she’d bought at the airport; she hid it behind an array of environmental newsletters that Dad had shoved in our hands as we’d walked through the door. I caught my mother’s eye; she smiled and moved her head back and forth like an owl’s. I couldn’t help a snicker.

“Determined as a screwdriver to have a bad time, both of you,” Dad said crisply when we were back in the Caddie. “That’s the last time I try and seek out something new to do with you. You would think after seeing your parents, Jocelyn, you would have learned how important it is to keep this an active family unit.”

Using my grandparents as ammunition was a huge miscalculation. Mom was mute until we returned to New York.

I thought we’d never go away together again. But we did. We had that last hurrah at the end of the very same year, my senior year of high school. First the Russian Tea Room, and then a trip to Australia. Money wasn’t an issue for these lavish graduation gifts. Interaction was.

Our optimistic itinerary was three cities north to south. First the gateway to the Barrier Reef, Cairns, then Sydney and then Melbourne. My mother wasn’t snorkeling then, and somehow when I was out with my newly graduated friends it got shortened to the latter two. Mom wanted to skip the Great Barrier Reef and head straight for big-city action.

On our second day Down Under, Dad went solo to a matinee at the Sydney Opera House. Mom and I shopped The Rocks, an urban mall in a neighborhood paved with pick and shovel by the first convicts sent over from England.

The next night, after another speech by Dad urging us to be more of a unit, the three of us saw a revival of
South Pacific
. Dad sat next to a swishy theater historian who delighted him during the intermission with tidbits about the original production in 1949. He went on and on about Mary Martin, about how when she played Ensign Nellie Forbush, she washed her hair onstage every night during “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair,” and about when Martin washed her hair so much that she had to cut it short and wear it tightly curled with poofy sides and bangs. “That was the start of the poodle cut,” the historian said. “The hairstyle later mistakenly became a trend attributed to Lucille Ball.”

Dad, still on his Paul Theroux kick, wrote everything down in the bulging notebook he had labeled
THE IDEA CATCHER
.

“Here’s something dishy to write down,” his new friend said as he leaned in and touched Dad on the arm. “Ethel Merman was demoralized by Martin’s success and told everyone around her after a
South Pacific
performance how uncouth it was for an actress to shampoo onstage.”

“
Ethel Merman
was threatened?” Dad marveled.

Mom was less than impressed, not only with this man’s expertise, but also with her husband’s never-ending jottings. There was some pretty nasty bickering that night back at our suite in the Regent Hotel.

“You talked to him with a shine in your eye and corked me if I asked you the littlest question.”

“Jocelyn, don’t be moronic. He was a nice guy, that’s all.”

“Just because I’m not gaga about opera and theater doesn’t make me moronic. Most
normal
people share my views. Give me a drama any day. It’s less—embarrassing.”

“I don’t butt in when you’re talking about hemlines with your girlfriends, so if you don’t cork me when I’m talking to people who share
my
interests, we’ll get on fine.”

“Cork you? That’s my line! Now you’re quoting your moronic wife to your moronic wife.”

On the plane to Melbourne, Mom took the open seat in front of us. Dad seemingly forgot I was eighteen not eight, and read me the most unusual Australian-animal names from his guidebook. He especially loved the sound of moon jellyfish and sea walnuts.

From Melbourne we drove in near silence to Philip Island, three hours away and a token gesture of compensation from Mom to Dad for skipping the reef. Dad had read in a guidebook that there was close viewing of koalas to be had, and also a stand set up on the beach for the Penguin Parade, a daily spectacle of thousands of penguins returning to land at dusk.

After five-star hotels, Mom was disappointed by the only accommodation available, a low-key guest house that had a roach or two and framed jigsaw puzzles of tall ships and flowers in our room. But Dad, who was now reading Theroux’s
The Great Railway Bazaar
on his downtime, was pleased to receive a kiss of kismet to color our heavily planned-out trip.

“It’s fine, Jocelyn. There’s nothing wrong with this. We have a beach view and beds. This isn’t Paris.”

“This is ridiculous,” Mom hissed. “I wouldn’t have come if I had known it would be like this. You could have asked the travel agent if there was more than a shanty on this hellhole. We’re Jews. We ask.”

“You were born a snob and you’ll die a snob.”

The next day got off on an equally bad foot.

Mom and I took an early-morning walk on the beach to catch the sunrise and sand down our calluses. The gift stores weren’t open. Mom had left her sun visor in Melbourne and the only replacement she could find at 8:00 a.m. was a novelty octopus hat she borrowed from the owner of our guest house.

As we walked toward a good spot on the sand, Mom sneered at my beloved ripped jeans, and declared she’d “take me shopping back in New York.”

I scowled at her and laid out my towel. There was quite an eyeful on the beach: gorgeous half-naked Aussie men everywhere, baking in the sun like adobe bricks. I reached into my Le Sportsac for my baby oil. Who the hell replaced it with sunblock?

“You shouldn’t use oil.” Mom said from her towel. “You’ll thank me in twenty years when you’re not a raisin.”

“I live in Manhattan. For one day I can get some color.”

Mom pushed one of her felt tentacles away from her face. “Everything I say doesn’t need a smart answer. Why do you write us off as friends? We just want to help.”

That night at the Penguin Parade stands, Mom was hunched against the cold in her rich citified clothes, and had a sinus attack from the wet and impossible night. But when the tiny alpha penguin came ashore to signal to his kin that it was okay to head to the beach, and then twos and threes and fours and fives of penguins waddled to their nests, falling over but picking themselves up again through sheer determination, everyone oohed—even teenage surly me, even Jocelyn Greenblotz. That night mysteriously transformed into the best I ever remember. We ate in a locals’ pub, and were joined at dinner by a chatty fisherman who had caught a cow skull in his shrimp net. Back in our one-star room, we still yakked away about the characters we’d seen at the pub until a late hour. Dad decided we should take a midnight swim in the rain. Mom and I agreed.

We raced out in the ocean waves, hand in hand, a happy threesome.

I felt so damn normal.

I forgot about the rumors that my dad liked to do more than just hang out with other men.

I forgot my mother was more aloof than anyone else’s I knew.

I swam back, dug my feet in the wet sand at the edge of the water and smiled at the barely visible moon and the light raindrops falling on my head, diamonds.

The Hall of Ocean Life

R
oswell Birch, a lanky, blond, and pimply seventeen-year-old, arrives on Friday morning at the offices of Two Dames Productions looking as if he just dragged himself out of a hardcore mosh pit. I take his German army jacket (which stinks of just-smoked weed) to hang on the coatrack. His office attire is a vintage, or more probably reissued, Clash concert T-shirt, and black jeans so holey as to border on offensive.

After brief niceties, Roswell fills out some paperwork then savors Vondra’s ass when she bends over to a bottom drawer to show him the filing system.

Vondra gives him the classic bullshit speech every intern on earth has had to endure: “Filing is an excellent way to get a basic understanding of what we do. That’s how I started at PBS. I read everything before it was put away. Once I was an invaluable assistant to my boss, he gave me meatier projects until I was a bona fide producer.”

The shrewd kids know they are being vetted and chirp, “Yes, I’m going to work hard.”

But Roswell says, “That’s fine for a day or two, but I have a film idea I was hoping to develop while I’m on this internship.”

“Maybe you should get to know the ropes first,” I say from my desk.

“But you’re gonna want to do this. It’s a documentary about the history of the documentary. I’m going to ask Albert Maysles to narrate. Do you know who Albert Maysles is?”

I highly doubt that the surviving Maysles brother, a godfather of cinema verité, would jump to narrate a film by a seventeen-year-old pothead. “That’s an interesting concept,” I manage to say.

“Isn’t it though?” he says with a self-satisfied nod. “My dad says my grandfather knows him. He helped him get the film about Dylan made.”

“Maybe you mean the one about The Rolling Stones.
Don’t Look Back
was the Dylan one. D.A. Pennebaker directed that.”

“I’m sure Dad said it was Dylan.”

I sneak an exasperated look at Vondra. “Do you want to learn mail merge? I’m the high priestess of Word around here. Although Vondra’s got me converting to the church of Excel.”

During the next hour or so, getting Roswell to merge or file anything right is about as easy as terraforming Mars.

Roswell eats from a large plastic bag full of cherry plums he produced from a bicycle-messenger bag graffitied with his versions of hardcore and punk–band logos. After each plum, he spits the pit into our wastebasket.

I gather what’s needed for a just slightly more exciting task: the latest trade magazines, rubber glue and scissors for our clip book. “Cut and paste down any clips that mention our films or our film subjects.” I plop it all down on the intern table.

Roswell eyes the lot with disdain. “Uh, Vondra, could I make a quick phone call?”

“I’m Heather. And of course you can if you keep it quick—”

“I’m with ya.” He nods vehemently.

It’s hard not to listen. The kid is particularly animated with his phone pal.

“Dude, you’d do Ms. Lambert? No way! She’s full of surgery. She’s like Pruneface in
Batman
.”

Another five minutes later, after a searing look from the real Vondra, Roswell hangs up and asks, “Could I ask you a huge favor, Heather?”

“Maybe.”

“Dude, this is so sad. The government thinks my best friend Abdullah’s a terrorist. He fits their profile.”

“I doubt that if he’s in an American high school.”

“Trust me. He lives with his aunt. His parents live in Saudi Arabia, but he’s such a math god that his parents wanted him to go to Stuyvesant because his cousin went to school there. He graduated in December, ’cause he’s such a brain. But now he’s in trouble because his visa ran out.”

“So what’s the favor?”

“You’ve got to write a letter pretending he’s interning for you a few months. He was going to go to the University of Riyadh but now he wants to apply to Duke and Columbia. If he gets in to either school, the student visa should hold him.”

“Roswell, I don’t know Abdullah.” I sigh. I’m really missing last year’s intern. Darius was a razor-sharp, enthusiastic NYU film major with Rasta braids pulled straight up with a rubber band, so that his head at first glance looked like a pineapple.

“Dude, he’s my friend. He’s not a terrorist. He dates Jews at Stuyvesant. Would a terrorist get a blow job from a chick named Dimple Goldstein?”

“Dimple Goldstein?” says Vondra from her desk.

I make a mental note to share this choice gossip with Jake.

“That’s her name, dude. Her dad is some comedian with Comedy Central. No shit. Her brother is on the Ultimate Frisbee team with me. Flicker Goldstein.”

“Roswell, why don’t you ask Vondra to write that letter? She’s the Stuyvesant alumna.” I laugh to myself as Vondra looks at me from her desk with a crinkled forehead.

“But, dude, you’re the Jew here.”

“Excuse me?” I gasp.

“I think a letter from a Jew with an Emmy is going to carry more weight.”

“I really don’t think it’s my place to write that letter. I’m sure his principal will help him out.”

Roswell shakes his head and says, “I feel so bad for you.”

“Why?”

“It’s not for me to say.”

Call me an idiot, but I had to know what this punky plum chomper had to say about me. “No, it’s fine. I really want to hear this.”

“Your bitterness. It’s your aura.”

Yes, I asked for it, but that stung.

Roswell’s on a roll now: “You must hate your life, right?”

“Now, why would you say a thing like that?” Vondra asks as she crosses her well-toned arms.

“I love my life, man. I have good friends, and my folks totally love me. I know your type. You’re just like my old girlfriend.”

“Really? How’s that?” I’m quite rattled, but the filmmaker in me yearns for a camera in hand.
This
should be good.

“Her coldness. Her father abandoned her when she was ten. Did your parents desert you or something?”

I summon up a dignified and pious look.

“Heather, don’t answer,” Vondra says. “That’s plenty enough, Roswell.”

“I’m well adjusted because my parents are beyond cool. When I was a baby, they rushed me to hospital after I ate a sponge. There was nothing they could do. So they waited there nine hours until I shit it out. That’s, like, a legendary story in my family.”

“You shit sponge?” I say shakily.

“Could I talk to you in the hall?” Vondra says to me.

“I didn’t mean to offend you. I’m just a straight-talking guy. That’s what my friends like about me.”

“Excuse me,” I say.

Roswell removes a browned banana from his messenger bag. “Sure.”

Vondra closes the door and motions me closer to the bathroom we share with other businesses on our floor. “Asshole! No one should talk to you like that.”

“I did ask him. And he was spot on about my family. Let’s let him finish the morning out.”

When Roswell takes his bathroom break, Vondra dials Jacinta at the City as School to demand a stop to this.

“Busy,” she whispers. “I’ll try later.”

Vondra calls Jacinta all morning and early afternoon to no avail. She passes me a note on a pink Post-it:
Maybe her line is off the hook
.

At a quarter to three, Roswell springs erect, his shoulders braced as if he was reborn. “So, I’ll see you girls on Monday.”

Before we can answer, he leaves for the day.

“Unthinkable,” Vondra says as the phone rings. She answers and says Uh-huh a lot. When she hangs up, she hits me with troubling news: “Mark Lander just got a feature in Paris. We need a new DP to shoot the next
Grand Ladies
segment.”

“That’s two days away.”

“You’re telling me. I’ll call Tom to see if he could fill in.”

“Tom? God, he’s such a perfectionist on a shoot. We’ll spend two hours setting up for fifteen minutes.”

“Who else could we call?”

“Let me see if I have someone’s number on me.” I fish out the
Jared S
. business card in the depths of my Kate Spade purse. I stare at it for a moment. Should I do this?

“Who’s the someone?”

“A cameraman I met during the Food Channel shoot. A guy named Jared.”

“Can he do lights too? After the last shoot we have no budget for a gaffer and we’re screwed if the museum is too dark.”

“I could just pay for the extra help.” Why hold back? She knows now that I’m loaded.

“No. This is a fifty-fifty business. Let’s proceed as usual.”

“Well, I think he knows lights. If I get him, I’ll ask. He seemed capable. My only worry is that he asked a question and told a joke while the producer was interviewing me—”

“Well, tell him
no
questions. We’re the producers. It’s such a short shoot. I’m sure he’ll do. Can you call him now?”

I’m having second thoughts. “On a Friday night?”

“Yes. We need him Sunday morning.”

I dial the number on his card. After four rings the answering machine picks up:
This is Jared. I’m not able to come to the phone now, but if this is about work I’ll be able to get back to you after Saturday night.

“Hey, Jared. This is Heather Greenblotz from the matzo factory, although I’m calling with my documentary cap on now. Are you free for a shoot Sunday morning? Our regular cameraman got a big job in Paris. You can call our office…”

“Machine?” Vondra says in a disappointed voice.

“I don’t think he’ll get back to us until Saturday. His machine says he’s tied up.”

“No pager?”

I pout. “No.”

“We’re up shit’s creek if we don’t find anyone.”

“I can shoot,” I say.

“If we want our film on a Heather diagonal.”

“My eye isn’t that bad.”

“Not if you’re filming a Van Gogh painting—”

It takes a second to think of that famous picture of Van Gogh’s room on a slant. A delayed smile. “Good joke, bitch.”

“Thank you very much.”

“At least I can shoot a camera,” I rally. “You just give orders.”

This time Vondra laughs with her hand straight up in a Black Panther fist. With her other hand she flips through her Rolodex for other cameraman possibilities.

“Let’s give it to Sunday morning,” Vondra says to me by phone on Saturday night. “If we have to cancel we have to cancel.”

“Fine.”

“How’re the seder plans going?”

“Well, so far all I’ve got is my cousin Jake, of course, and my cousin Greg from Florida, but he’s a flake—”

“How about your father?”

“No luck. I might have to go to Amsterdam next weekend and look for him. My therapist thinks I should pretend he’s a documentary subject.”

“I could have saved you a session. Remember at PBS how you got the Brooklyn-born oboist in the Mexico City Symphony Orchestra on the phone in five minutes?’

“His name was Murray Bernstein. It wasn’t that hard to find him.”

“You’ll track your father down if you get in the docu-zone.”

“You think?”

“You’ll have to pick up
stroopwafels
for me of course—”

“What’s that? A clog?”

“That’s the cookie that helped me gain ten pounds during my year abroad.”

“Yeah and you were what, a size two then?” I stick my tongue out at her in disgust. “I forgot you went to school in Amsterdam.”

“No, in Leiden. Where Rembrandt studied.”

“So, tell me, world traveler, how long is the flight to Amsterdam?”

“One hour more than London. Six hours. I love Amsterdam. I was there every weekend when I was in Leiden. Great Indonesian food.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“What will really get you going is the shopping. There are cool specialty stores all over. I’m talking microspecialty, like a button store on Wolvenstraat you have to check out. I bought some silver ladybug buttons there I sewed on a summer shirt, and also some reindeer buttons for the Christmas sweater my sister was knitting for my niece.”

“Sounds like it’s worth a look.”

“And oh, there’s a store just for toothbrushes.”

“Great, if I don’t get to my dad, I’ll bring home a designer toothbrush.”

Vondra signs off from our America Online account and looks up.

“Did I tell you I’m going to invite Mahmoud?”

“Where?” I ask absentmindedly.

“To the seder,” Vondra says.

“To the seder?” She’s got my full attention now. “Um—”

“Is that a problem? I thought you needed more people.”

“Vondra. That’s not a great idea.”

“Why? You’re worried that he’s Arabic, am I right? I told you, he’s very open-minded. He doesn’t hate Jews. He’s curious about them.”

“Vondra. He’s
Egyptian
. You can’t have an
Egyptian
at a seder. From what I remember, the whole seder is about how God disses the Egyptians so the Jews can get out of their clutches.”

“You’re nuts. It’s ancient history. I’m sure he’ll love it.”

For a woman with incredible smarts—she knows the capital of every country and still remembers where the anus of a starfish is from her biology classes—Vondra can on the odd occasion be as naive as a fresh-off-the-bus Midwesterner smiling at a pimp in the Greyhound bus terminal.

I quickly strategize. If Mahmoud were asked, and declined himself, I’d be spared any animosity. I have enough problems without having Vondra angry with me. Mahmoud’s a public figure. An Arab public figure to boot: official spokesman for the Egyptian consulate. With all the unrest in the Middle East, the last place he’ll want to be seen on TV is at an American
seder
. To the wrong people, an unseemly choice. He could get assassinated by, take your pick, a) some crazy schmuck from al-Qaeda; b) some crazy schmuck from the Jewish Defense League.

I’m confident in my plan. “Okay, so why don’t you ask him?”

Saturday night I’m alone on my couch watching ten-year-old cable repeats of
America’s Funniest Home Videos
. During a commercial break, I drop the contents of my cooked frozen dinner in the cutlery drawer, and extract everything I can out of the drawer, plucking the last penne pasta off a fork tine, and put the salvaged meal back in the microwave and then drop the tray
again
. I am so determined not to be on the losing end of a battle between a Lean Cuisine box and me that I replate my food off the floor with the floor-tile and culinary-drawer grime and crunch and crap mixed into the cream sauce and head back for the living room.