The Matzo Ball Heiress (17 page)

“Have you been to the Andes?” I ask. “My mother’s going there and then on to the Amazon this week.” I bite my lip to shut myself up. I keep forgetting that Jared is with the team filming my “family” seder. I have to be more careful or the horrid truths of Chez Greenblotz will leak out.

“You’ve never been to Second Avenue Deli and I’ve never been to the Andes. But I’ve read the new South American issue of
National Geographic
.”

I smile, and inside I’m relieved. He didn’t think any more of it.

“So are you firing Roswell?” Jared says as we cross Fourteenth Street.

“I think it’s easier to let it be. I don’t have the heart! But I just can’t understand how he got into Stuyvesant. I thought you have to take a ridiculously hard test to get in.”

“You forget. All seventeen-year-old boys are like that.”

“You think? Vondra went to Stuyvesant. We once went shopping for shower curtains—she ran into some of her old friends and they ended up arguing about the subspecies of the fried fish being served in the Kmart café.”

Jared snorts. “My neighbor’s kid got in because he had a tiny dictionary hidden between his legs.”

“Your neighbor
told
you that?”

“Her son did. Cheaters can be very proud.” A driver in a limo honks.

(It’s somebody trying to look important in an hourly rental. Here’s another little rich-people secret I picked up from my mother: you can always tell a New York limo is rented by the letter Z in the license plate.)

“Anyhow, I’d be disappointed in you if you fired him. You’re his first break. How often do you get an opportunity to mentor someone in this world? You know so much about filmmaking. And you should teach him all of it.
Noblesse oblige
. You are obliged to be noble, I genuinely believe that. What would you say to him if you could really be open, and have a heart-to-heart?”

I think. “That his Maysles project is ridiculous. He doesn’t even know to be embarrassed. He should watch and learn, and gain the skill set needed for good filmmaking. Then he should find the fire in the belly and make films he has a passion for.”

“Well said.”

“Thank you.”

“So tell him that in a language he can understand at seventeen.”

Am I really being too harsh on the kid? I mull over his take on Roswell as we cross another street. Jared has apparently moved on from my lack of mentoring skills, as he says, “Oh, this is an odd story. Did I tell you there’s an all-out alert for my mother’s new poodle in Westchester? It went AWOL on Thursday evening.”

“That’s awful. I thought the allergy-pills story was bad. Are all the dogs in your family cursed?”

“My sister stupidly left out an open bottle of pills on her kitchen table, but I think my mother’s dog brought this on herself. Mom says Gigi wasn’t having it when her stylist gave her a froufrou cut. My mother was devastated when I gave her pooch three days to live.”

“Three days at most. A feral poodle?”

“But get this—she just left a message on my voice mail that a woman over in Larchmont called to say she thought she saw Gigi with a rabbit in her mouth.”

His cell phone rings with sitcom timing. “You found her? Mum, I’m with a friend, I’ll call you tonight—No, I heard she’s fine. Still has charcoal on her paws, but running around like nothing happened—I love you too.” He clicks off. “A happy ending,” Jared says to me, and grins when I smile.

I bet Steve can’t say I love you that easily to his mother. The ones in love with themselves never can. Jared is the one I’d pursue if given a second chance. Damn. He may not know anything about how much of a whore I was with Steve, but he will. Guys talk.

On Second Avenue and Twelfth Street we pass an old movie theater currently named City Cinemas Village East.

“You ever go in there?” Jared asks.

“No.”

“At the turn of the century it was a Yiddish theater. I saw
The Matrix
there and when I looked up, I noticed the ceiling has a giant Jewish star in the middle. It looks like a religious cookie cutout from a giant blue and white Wedgwood plate. So I read up on it. Steven Jay Gould even wrote a piece about the theater just before he died.”

“The science writer?”

“Yes, he was as amazed as I was that such a relic could survive. There used to be Yiddish productions up and down Second Avenue. They called it the Jewish Rialto. All the stars of the day played here, Molly Picon, Jacob Adler—and across the street from here was Café Royal where the Jewish actors and artists hung out.”

The Yiddish-star names mean nothing to me, but Jared’s sunshiny demeanor is just what I need in my insecure state. “I love your enthusiasm, Jared.”

“I’m a bit of a trivia buff.”

“So is my dad. He investigates every oddment he comes across.”

Jared smiles. “Oddment is an oddment of a word.”

“I’m a bit of a vocabulary buff.”

“Jared!” a nasal voice calls out to him from down the block.

“Oh, man,” Jared says. “That’s my ex-girlfriend, Sarah the shopaholic.”

As a tall woman walks toward us, I see she is lugging a nearly bursting Henri Bendel’s bag. (Crap, did I miss a sale?)

“Look at this, a reunion,” Sarah says on the corner of Tenth Street and Second Avenue.

Sarah is pretty. Very. Her severe Cleopatra bob of black hair highlights her long but attractive nose and her striking green eyes speckled with brown circles.

“Hi,” Jared says in a deflated voice.

When it’s obvious he isn’t going to introduce us, Sarah coughs and says: “Sarah Bergman. I’m Jared’s ex.”

“This is Heather,” Jared says against his will.

Sarah’s outsize smile is disturbing. Even though I’m no competition for her lookswise, I’m sure it’s the same smile the evil queen dons as she offers Snow White a poison apple. Sarah slowly moves her eyes toward Jared. You can see the wheels going around in her head. “I’m meeting my fiancé at Second Avenue Deli.”

“That’s where we were going,” Jared says even more miserably.

“Oh, join us. Yes, join us. Uzi would love to meet you.”

“Heather and I are having a very private conversation. We may or may not go.”

“Don’t worry, dolls, of course I’ll leave you alone.” Sarah tucks part of her bob behind her ear, and not so discreetly checks my shoes out before she tootles off in a huff.

(They’re from Charles Jordan, so fuck off, doll.)

“Wow,” I say when the coast is clear.

“She’s still angry that I ended our relationship.” He marks an inch with his fingers and says, “This close to being a stalker.”

“We don’t have to go there if you’re uncomfortable.”

“No, I promised you Second Avenue Deli, and so it shall be. She has no idea how annoying she is.”

“Maybe she misinterprets annoying for sassy.”

“I’m sick of kowtowing to her. She sent me a two-page fax with a list of her friends and acquaintances I’m not supposed to talk to. She’s not taking my restaurants away from me, too. We’ll just sit as far away as we can—unless you don’t want to go—”

“
I
didn’t break up with her.”

Despite Jared’s hunger pains, he is so unnerved that he insists we take a detour to
Love Saves the Day
, a collectibles store three short blocks away. “You really have to check this place out,” he enthuses a bit too hard. “It’s been around for years. I think it was featured in
Desperately Seeking Susan
.”

I give Jared points for anger management.

The small store is packed with hokey seventies and eighties TV memorabilia, including a long line of old lunch boxes.

“There’s Roswell’s Pee-Wee doll,” I say, a few steps in the door. I point to a glass case packed with memorabilia. “And there’s your old lunch box—the one you and Roswell were talking about.”

“Hong Kong Phooey! Where?”

“On the wall.”

“Eagle-Eye Greenblotz.” He picks it up with a huge smile. “That’s the sidekick cat. Spot, that’s the cat’s name.” He checks the tag. “Eighty-five bucks for a lunch box? I’m in the wrong business. Which lunch box did you have? If you still have it, it could be a nest egg.”

“I didn’t have any,” I say.

“C’mon, who didn’t have a lunch box?”

“Me.” Because Wilson came in the limo and took me back to a hot meal prepared by our cook, Angela. Dad was going through a no-food-dyes stage for a few years, and he made Angela buy unappealing food, like gray hot dogs with no food coloring. At Dalton, going back to your house to eat was peculiar. The other kids were often as rich as me, or even richer, but most of their parents saw no harm in childhood rites of passage, like food fights in a lunchroom.

“Which one would you have had then?”

“Strawberry Shortcake maybe?”

“I’m getting it for you.”

“Jared, don’t be silly. That’s an expensive gag.”

“Don’t you be silly. Everybody needs a lunch box. I’m getting my Phooey back too.”

“Save your money.” I laugh, but there’s no arguing the point. As Jared hands the guy by the register his credit card, I flick through vintage copies of
Ranger Rick
, the environmental kids’ magazine we used to get in my third-grade classroom. Rick is a concerned private investigator raccoon who wants children to value animals in the world, and my class project (which got written up in the magazine) was our mail adoption of a sick warthog named Clyde who lived somewhere in Africa. Eventually our many Save Clyde bake sales paid for his veterinary bills and his air flight to the Bronx Zoo.

Jared taps me when his transaction is done. Lunch boxes in hand—we certainly look like a couple now—we head to the Second Avenue Deli, an establishment heralded by a large sign in English letters designed to look at first glance Hebraic. In the doorway, and spilling onto the street, there’s a raucous line of hungry, chatty New Yorkers, each one worthy of his or her own
Seinfeld
episode.

When our spot on line has moved indoors, I silently admire a small section of an inside wall of an Automat. The Second Avenue Deli owners must have rescued the relic for decorative purposes. As a documentary maker, I’ve seen countless clips featuring Automats while I was seeking appropriate old footage to flesh out my projects. Customers slipped a nickel or a dime into a food slot, and out came a knockwurst sandwich or a nice piece of sponge cake.

The woman in front of me has gray hair sprayed with enough Aquanet to withstand a freak Manhattan twister. “In the old days,” she says as she taps the glass of the display, “you paid a nickel for everything. I used to have to pay to
pish
at the old B. Altman department store, may it rest in peace. My girlfriends had a saying—
Paid my nickel, broke my heart, all I did was have a fart
.”

I smile courteously. I think I remember a department store with metered stalls when I was really, really little. Shopping was the one activity Mom always took me along for, even when she was only a yellow belt.

A fiftyish woman in a powder-blue tracksuit yells, “Over here!” to her fiftyish husband in a matching tracksuit who is pushing his way through the line. “So long to park, Morris? I moved my digital camera to the French mode, and I can’t get back now because it’s in French—”

“Ellen,” her husband flings out in disgust, “I don’t want to hear about your camera, I just want to eat.”

“How long for a table of fourteen?” screams a lady behind us.

Jared leans in close to me, and shout-whispers, “If there’s a louder line in America, I’d be amazed.”

“Name?” asks the hostess after an amused glance at our lunch boxes.

“Silver.”

As we wait, I scan the room. Sarah is nowhere to be seen, and I can tell Jared is relieved.

“You are on sacred ground, my friend. The Second Avenue Deli is one of the great delis in the world. Steve just produced a special on them for the Food Channel.”

“What are the other ones?”

“New York’s also got Carnegie of course, where Woody Allen hangs out. In Florida, Rascal House is a big deal, although Wolfie’s is king. One of the best things we learned during the show was that there was a
Gemini
flight that launched a congressional investigation because John Young smuggled a Wolfie’s corned-beef sandwich aboard for Gus Grissom as a treat to eat instead of the dehydrated space ice cream.”

The hostess sits us next to the one open spot, a seat away from a guy around my age whose head is topped with a felt
yarmulke
sporting the Nike “Just Do It” symbol. I chuckle to myself. Jake, on every Jewish mailing list, once received a catalog of novelty
yarmulkes
and showed it off to my cousin Greg and me at a board meeting. The
yarmulkes
could be made with designs like a chocolate-chip cookie, a smiley face and the yin-yang symbols. Very funny. But then Jake earnestly pitched Greenblotz
yarmulkes
as a mail-in giveaway for our customers—one
yarmulke
for ten proofs of purchase. He’d even ordered a sample with our logo over a matzo background. Greg and I laughed him right out of the rented boardroom.

“What do you recommend?” I ask after Jared and I are seated and the aging waitress with impossibly black dyed hair slams the menus down on the table.

Jared puts down the menu and looks at me with upraised eyes. “Is there any question here? You have to get the matzo ball soup. You’re tiny. That alone will fill you up.”

I feel like the proud lady in the Special K commercial twirling around her newly thinned frame in her red dress. “But that’s not enough for you,” I say without giving away my glee, “you’re a big boy.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of a brisket sandwich.
And
a soup—” Before Jared can continue, his face goes slack in horror: off-kilter Sarah emerges from the ladies’ room still clinging to her bulging plastic Bendel’s shopping bag. She’s working her way to the table next to us, the one with the guy with the Nike
yarmulke
.

Instead of taking her seat, she hovers over us with a pasted smile. “Don’t you love this place?”

“My first time here,” I confess.

“Oh,” Sarah says without losing my gaze.