The Matzo Ball Heiress (9 page)

Of course I know that. I’m still sorting through my emotions. “Yes, we had a lot of e-mail from there.”

“Didn’t Susan Sarandon narrate that?” he asks with a twinkle in his voice.

“Yes.” I soften. But not much softer: the way my week is going, Jared probably just wants my Emmys to open some doors for him. This time I
am
a whit wiser. Every time I think I have chemistry I can later chalk it up to schmoozing. I’ve had half a dozen “Let’s be friends” get-togethers from new acquaintances who seemed genuine but then tacked on a “Can you do me a small favor?” at the end of brunch or coffee. Maybe Jared even suggested the live
seder
to that bastard Steve. “Well, good luck with your film. I’m very late for my appointment.”

As I rush to Bettina’s, once again the memory of my September 11 washes over my brain in a thousand broken bits.

I didn’t lose anyone; I never endured that level of pain. But when I turned my head back momentarily, I saw the second tower crumble in the far distance as I fled my office on Twenty-second Street. It’s an image I’ll never forget. Vondra was safely holed up with her sisters in a B&B in Vermont, so there was no one with me with whom I could contemplate the tragedy that had a world in shock.

Because Manhattan phone lines were overloaded, I was connected to my other friends only by e-mail. The only person I knew who worked at the Trade Center was a friend I’d partied with at the Los Angeles Film Festival; she had won the special critics’ citation for her insider look at her banking firm. On September 11, my festival friend mass e-mailed that she was alive. She had been late to work. Even though her offices were on a low floor and all of her coworkers were accounted for, she was understandably devastated. I sent her an empathetic e-mail saying to call me if she wanted to talk to anyone. Later that day, another e-mail popped up, this time from Dad in Bali.

R U and your m both OK? I love U both 2 pieces. Jake and Siob? Email/call SOON as U can.

I e-mailed him back and printed the original message out for Mom as she didn’t know how to use e-mail then. When the NYC phone system was still overloaded at 10:00 a.m., I walked the short distance to her apartment building. I rode up with the elevator operator and a shaken lady who hadn’t heard from her husband yet. I walked down Mom’s hallway like they taught us in a self-defense class required in high school, keys between each knuckle, I grasped down for grit, a warrior. I keyed open my childhood apartment, but Mom wasn’t there. I figured it was best to stay put at her place. I sat in her apartment glued to CNN, occasionally weeping with the rest of America.

I peeked in Mom’s refrigerator. It was packed with pricey aged beef her cook always buys from Lobel’s, Madison Avenue’s upper-crust butcher, and costly fruit and vegetables from the Vinegar Factory. Some rich women love to cook, and can bore you with recipes they clipped from
Food and Wine
. But my mother, whose own snooty mother never taught her to cook, is a throwback to those turn-of-the-twentieth century women who never touched a dishpan but supervised the help as their main job.

Around 11:00 a.m. Mom opened the door and saw me horizontal on her steel couch that took first prize at the Chicago Furniture Show, crying at the CNN coverage.

She said, “Come here, honey. I was having a breakfast date at the Stanhope with Pamela Levine.”

Mom had said “of course” to a rare request by her live-in cook, Angela, to leave Manhattan for her mother’s nursing home in Yonkers. Angela had wanted to check on her mother’s emotional state after such a tragedy. Mom asked Wilson, still handsome and her chauffeur after all these years, to bring along a stash of improvised sandwiches in the Lincoln Town Car in case he and Angela got stuck in traffic.

“Have
you
eaten?” Mom asked when her two employees had left with a shopping bag full of turkey and romaine baguettes. “The pantry is plenty stocked.”

It was. I’d peeked in there too; the cabinets were piled high with a designer-mustard collection and assorted preserves from London’s Fortnum & Mason. Does my mother feel worldlier knowing that if the munchies strike, she can make a quince sandwich?

“What would you like me to fix us?” I asked.

“Darling, you relax. I’ll cook.” Mom poked around in the stuffed refrigerator, and started in on the first meal I’d ever seen her make. I strolled back to the living room and took it all in, this alien but familiar environment, the apartment I grew up in, forever being redecorated.

“Come eat!” Mom called and I joined her under my old dining room’s Austrian chandelier. I’m not quite sure what my mother’s September 11 meal was meant to be. She’d boiled unsnapped green beans until they were soggy and spooned them on the plate without draining them enough. She steamed strips of expensive beef until they were dead gray. Garnishing it all off was an uncooked baby eggplant cut into fat slices.

“I’m a little rusty.”

I swallowed another chunk of the flavorless meat. “It’s really okay. It’s just nice to eat with you.”

It was. The end of the world loomed outside, but it felt good to have her taking care of me. It felt good to have that short but obviously heartfelt e-mail from Dad saying how concerned he was. Most days I feel as if I’m on the rim of a carousel that goes around and around and I’m never fully joining in the thrill. But for a moment, with New York in physical and emotional chaos, I got a taste of what it would be like to have grown up with doting parents. Then the horror of the greater circumstance hit me again, and I vomited in the master bathroom with the built-in spa.

I’m still goosey when I reach the buzzer for Bettina’s ground-floor office in her swanky brownstone.

I chew up a third of my exorbitantly priced therapy time telling her about my unsettling BBC encounter. I take a breath and Bettina hands me a glass. “Try my lemonade. A very famous chef who’s my client gave the recipe to me.”

“Very good,” I say after a polite sip.

“So, shall we begin our work?”

After a few leading questions about the week that was, I explain that the one man I thought was interested in me was Steve Meyers of the Food Channel, and indeed he called, but I see now his only interest in me is for a
seder
segment. And I’m certain Jared S. is all about the same crap. “That’s all I am to them,” I say, “a woman with a colorful ancestor and a lot of industry connections. What’s most laughable is that Jake wants me to follow through with this asinine seder business, pretend we’re a functioning family, and even make up family members if we have to. He claims the business is in dire straits.” I look up, eager for sympathy. I’m sure that came out sounding awfully whiny, but I’ve shielded Vondra and Jake from my self-absorption, and Bettina is being paid good money to listen.

Instead of calming me, Bettina is reproaching me. “Your cousin is absolutely right. You need to help the family if the business is jeopardized. From all you’ve said these past months, Jake and you are each other’s lifelines.”

“My family will be exposed as freaks.”

“Isn’t everyone worried that their family is on the outskirts of respectability? How are you freaks?”

Hasn’t she been listening for a year? “Everything about us is freaky. From little to big. Let’s have my mom talk about her new bathroom spigots from Germany. That’s what she spent her last two conversations with me talking about.”

“She’s a smart woman, you’ve said that yourself. I’m sure she has more sense of what a live special needs than you’re giving her credit for.”

“Or hey, how about I get my confused dad back in town so he can tell us who he’s dating. Michael or Michaela?”

“I think this is a larger issue for you that we may need a series of sessions on. If it turns out your father smokes bloke from time to time, does that make him a
freak
?”

“What?” I snort. “Smokes bloke?”

Bettina smirks. “That’s an Aussie expression.”

“A colorful one,” I concede with the smallest of smiles.

“Right, we’re talking lightheartedly now. Easier to work with. Give me an example of what hurt you when you were young. Keep it little, love. If you stay with little it will be easier to talk about big.”

I have to think. “Try games,” I finally say. “Every family played games with their kids, right? Trouble. Operation. Mousetrap. Life. My parents never once played a board game with me.”

“Heather, I find that hard to believe.”

“Well, Mom did get a big kick out of her version of ‘This Little Piggy,’ but that wasn’t a board game—”

“How did it go?”

The corners of my mouth turn up a bit. “This little piggy went to Bloomie’s, this little piggy went to Lord & Taylor, this little piggy went to Bergdorf’s, this little piggy went to Saks. But this little piggy went wee wee wee all the way to Mays—Mays was a department store like Kmart that was down on Union Square when I was little.”

Bettina smiles with newly bleached teeth. (From my last two fees?) “That’s quite funny.”

“It is,” I accept.

“My parents never played board games with me, we played make-believe games,” Bettina says.

“But at least your parents played with you,” I say in that aggrieved voice you get when reliving the lesser moments of a life. So much for lighthearted. “My parents forgot I was a child. I never saw one Disney movie, not one! That’s kind of freakish, don’t you think?” At this point I completely lose it and sob.

“Heather, we’ve done a lot of personal work, and I’ll say it again—I think it’s the right time to tackle your bigger family issues. If you never confront them you’ll never be free of this sadness you carry around. Why don’t you confront them once and for all instead of sticking your head in the sand?”

“You mean in the matzo meal,” I joke wearily through my tears.

“If it’s a lousy family reunion, so what? It’s a family reunion. Some progress will be made just by having everyone sit down at the same table.”

I take a breath and pull myself together before I speak. “But assuming we could get everyone there, which is itself a laugh, what if everything blows up in our face on camera? And where do I even start?”

Bettina slams her right hand down on her clipboard. “Call your mother. The natural start.”

“I guess I could do that tomorrow morning.”

“Where will you be, at your office or the factory?”

“Tomorrow? Work. I need to catch up.”

“Don’t be surprised if I call you to get you off your bum!”

The Parent Trap

W
hen I open my office door Vondra is standing by the window and chatting up a French film-festival director on her red cell phone. I have never seen Vondra Adams without well-applied lipstick and sultry eye shadow. She’s wearing skintight black jeans and a low-cut black bodysuit that reveals significantly more cleavage than should be possible on a yoga body almost exclusively fed fruits, vegetables and tofu.

“Bonsoir,”
Vondra says as she clicks off her phone. She sees my eyebrows rise half an inch when I get the full frontal view. “Water padding. You like?”

“Definitely vavoom. But I have a feeling I’m not the one you’re advertising for.” No use bringing my personal baggage to work with me. I am
determined
to be chipper. “Did I miss much yesterday? Sorry to overload you this week.”

“Family obligations. I understand. Anyhow, the only thing going on businesswise is a fax from our international rep. We sold the Riker’s Island film to Finland and Norway. Three thousand dollars between the two of them, nothing to write home about, but enough to pay the rent for a month and a half. And also some kook keeps faxing us about showing our film in his festival, which he says is world-class.”

“Why do you say he’s a kook?”

“The festival’s at his house. The Third Annual Fred Diamond Festival of American Cinema.”

I snort. “One of us should go, just for the cocktail-party story.”

“Yeah, you first. Oh, we also have a new intern from the City as School starting Monday. His name is Roswell…” She pauses to look at the paperwork and adds, “Birch.”

“What’s ‘City as School’?”

“It’s a citywide New York program that allows high-school seniors to gain real-world experience before they leave school. The administrator called me to see if we could place this kid since she had read in a profile of us that I went to Stuyvesant High School, where Roswell goes. He’d expressed an interest in filmmaking.”

“High school? Wouldn’t someone from NYU or Columbia be better?”

“We needed the extra hands and I thought, how stupid could he be if he passed that Stuyvesant entrance examination?”

“I’ll trust you on that one.”

“The administrator—her name is Jacinta—is dropping by later to speed up our paperwork. But I have much bigger news on the personal front, so get your damn coat off already and let me tell you.”

“Go on.” I drape my powder-blue quilted jacket on the IKEA coatrack that the previous tenant left in the office.

“I met a fabulous man. We had one incredible date together and I’m seeing him again tonight.”

“Aha, now I get the bra.”

“I’m pulling out all stops. I have a feeling that this may be the one.”

“What’s so special?” I wait for her answer while she signs for a FedEx package. The deliveryman gives Vondra a very broad smile. I may be a lost cause, but I’ve always known Vondra would hook up with her version of Mr. Right, however anachronistic that sounds. With her body, brains and spark, she can afford to be choosy.

“He’s refined, adventurous and unfuckingbelievably handsome,” she says after the FedEx guy leaves.

“Sense of humor?”

Vondra thinks. “Well, to be fair, I don’t know him that well yet. But did I tell you he has the coolest job? He’s a diplomat.”

I lift an imaginary teacup, pinkie raised. “How did you meet him?”

“Remember we were looking for that Egyptian woman who studied sexual views of Africans. Bahiti Rateb—the Virginia Masters of Africa?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, since it was so quiet here yesterday, I called the Egyptian consulate, and a secretary accidentally put me through to Mahmoud Habib. He said his mother is practically sisters with Bahiti Rateb and to come over and he’d have his assistant pull together background information, and he’d be willing to talk more about his personal acquaintance with her. We talked for three hours, and we continued the conversation—”

“Where, at his house?”

“No, bitch, at the Beekman Hotel at their deco bar, Top of the Tower—”

I blow out air enviously. That’s one place I’ve always wanted to go on a date. (Well, that and Union Square Café, but look where that got me.) “I’ve heard that place is so romantic.”

“Is it ever. I couldn’t believe how generous he was with his time. Heather, he’s cultured and very open-minded. He spoke to both sides of the Palestinian issue, and didn’t flinch when I said my business partner was Jewish. He’s buddies with everyone in his countries from the latest Egyptian rock stars to Omar Sharif. And, get this, he worked under Anwar Sadat!”

“Under Sadat? How old is Mahmoud?’

“Not that old. He’s a former journalist who started his career very young.”

I stare her down like a camp counselor. “How old exactly?”

She clenches her teeth and spits it out. “Fifty-five.”

“Ouch. Kids?”

“No, but he was married. He got divorced a few months ago. He was married to an Egyptian model but the distance was getting to them.”

“Oh, you’re not going to get blindsided,” I say like a churlish narc. “A divorce takes a long time to heal from.”

Vondra shrugs and smiles. “I’m a big girl, Heather.”

“Don’t mind me, I’m a jealous bitch.”

“You’ll
love
him. He’s stopping by tomorrow for lunch. What’s your favorite country? He knows
all
the diplomats—”

We’re interrupted by a perky knock on the door. It’s Jacinta, the City as School internship administrator. She’s a happy, happy woman with woolly eyebrows and plump cheeks. Jacinta hands Vondra the paperwork.

She admires the framed photo on Vondra’s desk of us two dames from Two Dames Productions accepting our first Emmy. “Roswell was thrilled when I told him about your respect in the industry,” she adds. “He’s ready to learn.”

As soon as we sign the paperwork she breathes heavily, and says, “Oh, terrific. If I can be honest with you, it’s a big relief. We didn’t know where we would place him, and the term started yesterday.” She pauses before she continues, “He didn’t click with the more traditional intern outlets for film like New Line and Miramax.”

“Is there something you’re not telling us?” I ask.

“Oh, no,” she says after what feels like a pretty long pause. “You girls will love him. He’s a little unconventional. A charmer though.”

When Jacinta leaves, Vondra, sensing my concern, says, “Don’t worry, we can cut him loose if he doesn’t work out. Oh, I forgot to tell you, some cranky woman named Batyna called. English, I think.”

“Bettina. Australian.”

“Well, she was a pain. Wanted to know if you have made your phone calls, whatever that means. Wouldn’t leave a number. Who was she, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“My therapist.”

“You pay for that? I never understand why white gals are so nuts about their therapists. Black gals have
mommas
to talk to.”

I come very close to telling Vondra that she doesn’t have my momma, a woman who hasn’t held more than a fifteen-minute conversation with me since 9/11. We’re interrupted by a phone call from—wouldn’t it figure,
her
mother—who apparently has some hilarious story to share with her beloved daughter.

Vondra ribs her family a lot. From my observation, that seems to be a thing happy families do. “You mean you’ve been eating my banana cake, Momma, and now you like hers better?” Ten minutes of laughter and whooping subside with a “Godspeed, Momma, I love you!”

“She’s such a riot,” Vondra says after she hangs up. “She’s waiting for my dad to pick her up from her Weight Watchers meeting, and she was bored. She always calls me when she’s bored. An incurable chatterbox.”

“Uh-huh,” I say.

Vondra opens her bag and hands me a ten-dollar bill. “I’m going to get cigarettes.” (Vondra’s body is a temple except for her lungs.)

“So, you’re paying me penance?”

“No, I ordered us sushi. That’s for my share if the guy comes while I’m down in the deli.”

“See ya.” When the door closes, I finally feel free to ring Bettina back.

“Did you call your mother yet?” Bettina barks at me.

“No, I just got in.”

“Well, that should be the first thing on your list. Call me when you’ve spoken to her.”

“But I haven’t even told Jake I’m prepared to do the family seder yet.”

“So call him now, and then call your mother,” she says. “Let’s try to get both done this hour. Forward march!”

After I put down the receiver, I count to three and call the factory, and reach a female matzo underling. She must be a recent hire because she dutifully asks, “Heather? Does Mr. Greenblotz know what it’s in reference to?”

“So, are we doing this?” my cousin says as a greeting.

“I think I might be able to handle it.”

“Now we’re talking! You’re the best.”

“You’re going to have to be the main person overseeing it though. I’m not sure I have the stomach for that.”

“I can do that if you want.”

“That wasn’t a choice. By the way, before we discuss this travesty more, who was the girl who picked up the phone?”

“That was Dimple, our sexy little high-school intern who started yesterday.”

“Dimple?”

“She swears that’s her real name. Dimple Goldstein. I picked her right away from the bunch of students who wanted to work here. From the back she’s Judaism’s answer to J. Lo.”

“Nice to know a big butt is a qualification for learning the matzo trade.”

“Always.”

“Nice.”

“Ssh, you, I have good news. I called your favorite cousin, Greg, to see if I could enlist him for this seder thing. Happy to be asked. Said he was getting sentimental this year. Wants to help our family profile. He asked after you.”

“Please. I’m not on his map.”

“You got it wrong. Greg thinks you’re a rock star, always tells his distributors in Miami when your documentaries are on. He was shocked that you wanted him to come.”

Okay, proof positive that I don’t give people their due. Greg watches documentaries? The last time I had what passed for a conversation with my Floridian cousin, he told me how he picked up his latest girlfriend by showing off his skill for tying cherry stems with his tongue.

“That’s good of him to say, but I never said he should come,
you’re
the one pushing—”

“Well, I told him you said you did. He was ecstatic. He was under the impression you want nothing to do with him, that you thought he was a sleazy idiot.”

I swallow my guilt. “No, I don’t feel that way at all. Tell him I’m thrilled he’s coming.”

Maybe I have everyone in my family wrong. Maybe Bettina and Jake are right, that this will be easier than I’m making out. Maybe the real trouble is all in my horrible head.

“If Greg’s coming, that’s real news. I’m going to call my mother now.”

“Attagirl. I’m sure she’ll be happy to be asked. So your mother’s not the warmest person, but do you ever ask to spend time with her? Here’s a chance.”

“You’re right. I’ll give you a call with updates.” Newly optimistic, I beep Bettina on her emergency number, a number I’m sure half of the fucked-up celebrities in the Tristate area use. She calls back pronto.

“I’m doing it. Wish me well.”

“March on, soldier!” she trumpets so loudly that I have to pull the receiver back an inch.

I touch-dial my mother’s number but there’s no answer, so I have to look up her cell-phone number in my Filofax. She picks up on the fifth ring.

“Mom?”

“Oh, how are you, dear?”

“I’m fine.”

“Working hard?”

“Yes.” I drum my fingernails on my desk. “So, I have something big to ask you about. I have a problem I need to discuss with you.” A pregnant silence ensues. I have hardly asked my mother for anything since I left Brown. Even in college I kept favors to a minimum. Mom has never been the kind to ask if I need anything, and I’m not the kind to volunteer it. I’ve always just held back and listened to her polite prattle in that quasi-British lilt she’s picked up from her many cruises. Sometimes I fear I’m on par with her favorite dry-cleaning clerk, and after she’s determined I’m having a good day, there’s nothing left for her to say.

“A problem, darling? Since when does my little girl have a problem?” The Queen Mother, blissfully ignorant of a brewing Northern England mining strike.

“I’ve been at the factory this week.”

“What factory?”

“It’s March, Mom. The factory. There is something important Jake needs your help with.”

“My help?”

“Have you ever watched the Food Channel, the big cable network?”

“You’re so funny. I don’t have cable, darling, you know that.”

I did know that. The week our Rikers’ film aired I messengered over a VHS tape to her, even though she didn’t ask for it. She left a short message on my voice service—“Congratulations!”—and never mentioned the film again. If I grip the receiver any harder I could remold it.

“Mom, they would like to film the Greenblotz
seder
.”

“But there is no Greenblotz seder,” she says, like I’ve zinged her with a trick question.

“Oh, believe me, I know. But Jake wants us to pull one off. We can pull together a nice family gathering. Greg’s even flying up from Miami, and Siobhan will help us cook.”

“Us?”

“Yes. Usually the women cook on Passover. Maybe we could find some recipes in a Jewish cookbook together. I’ve never cooked with you. It might be fun.”

“Honey, of course you remember that I have travel plans set.”

My voice takes on an anxious vibrato. “I’d really love it if you would join us. Jake and I would be very, very grateful.” I can see that this is getting me nowhere, so I go in for the kill. “Jake just told me a shocking thing.”

“What’s that, darling?”

“That business is declining, and he needs all the PR help he can get.”

“Declining?”

“The other companies have been bought out by conglomerates and Jake’s afraid they can out-advertise us to our death.”

“Baloney. We can advertise too. Your grandfather advertised in the Jewish circulars. Who is Jake’s advertising agent?”

“We stopped printing ads years ago. Grandpa Reuben didn’t want our name lining birdcages. Other than flyers, the current strategy is word of mouth. It could take months to get Marcy and Rebecca to agree to restructure. In the meantime Manischewitz is jumping in and trying to shore up our customer base with their new cash flow, and the others can’t be far behind. We don’t have anything budgeted, and this is a big opportunity—”