Filthy Rich (4 page)

“Keep your shirts on, guys,” Neil told them with a friendly smile. “I just want to see if I can do this. We’ll get to Moses and the Red Sea in a jiffy, I promise. Besides, the chicken soup isn’t going to run away if the Seder takes a couple of extra minutes. At least it never has before. That I know of.”

Rather than blame Neil for this bone-headed hijacking, however, I blamed myself. I should have warned him, I thought as he laboriously rounded what I assumed was the Third Question since he was flashing three fingers. The Mallowitz family has very definite ideas about how to celebrate Passover, and one of the most definite is that a leisurely bilingual retelling of our people’s deliverance from Egyptian bondage is only for sissies and the Orthodox. In my progressive family, a Seder means a speedy but respectful revisiting of a few essential high points as succinctly retold in worn Maxwell House Haggadahs that were a supermarket freebie back when Charlton Heston had real hair, and still dearly treasured as the enduring Gold Standard for accelerating arrival at everyone’s favorite part of the evening—the part when we eat.

Eventually, Neil achieved his dubious goal of completing the Four Questions in Hebrew. “Yes!” he shouted, punch
ing one hand in the air, as if pissing off my famished relatives on an important Jewish holiday was some kind of major Olympic event. However, even his bombast could not revive ancient Great-Aunt Beatrice, who by then had fallen sound asleep. Her blue-haired head was resting on a damp section of tablecloth near her plate, where someone had earlier accidentally spilled their glass of Manischewitz, and she was snoring loudly.

My mother, on the other hand, seemed nearly as impressed by Neil’s offensive linguistic feat as the handsome lad himself. Looking at my mother looking at Neil struggle with Hebrew letters he hadn’t seen or thought about since his bar mitzvah more than twenty years before, I could tell exactly what she was thinking, even if I was a little lost by her logic: If there’s anything finer for my Marcy than a handsome and successful Jewish orthodontist who can recite the Four Questions in Hebrew. Now there’s a catch!

Determined to do nothing that might jinx my prospects with this “find,” Mom bit her tongue when I violated Mallowitz Moral Law, handed down through the ages, by letting Neil move in with me without getting married, and, even more dismaying from Mom’s standpoint, before any formal engagement. Instead of expressing her displeasure, she tried to be encouraging, buying us our own new brass mezuzah, for example, to replace the old, blackened one hung outside the door by previous occupants. “Every couple should have their own,” she said, reaching mysteriously into her hand
bag to pull out a hammer and nail brought from home to tack the thing up. Predictably, dear Mom also brought with her a large foil package of the baked brisket Neil fell for that crazy Seder night. Indeed, his affection for my mother’s brisket was such that I sometimes thought he loved her tender, well-seasoned beef more than he loved me, that is, if he ever
really
loved me at all, which is something I would no longer wager my little Palm Pilot Vx on.

Mom’s fondness for Neil extended to making excuses for the chintzy crystal ring Neil bestowed on me as a so-called preengagement gift even after my low-key father gave it a withering dead-roach count that amounted to calling Neil cheap.

“No spraying needed for this thing,” said Dad matter-of-factly, looking over the ring on my hand and slowly shaking his head at the stinginess of Neil’s gesture. “The roaches are safe.”

“Herbie, be quiet,” my mother ordered. “You’re just still ticked off about the Seder. Neil’s love for Marcy isn’t something that can be measured in roaches. Besides, he’s probably saving up to buy her a fabulous engagement ring.”

But, of course, all of this was before the acrimonious finale of
Filthy Rich!
, which famously concluded with me chucking the insulting bauble back in Neil’s face.

Glancing now at the two spritzers in the bathroom we once shared, I was overcome with a wave of sadness. Face it, I said to myself, he’s not coming back.

I was unsure about a lot of things, but not this: Due to a
regrettable but not typically life-threatening deficit in my knowledge about Sonny and Cher’s Hour of Yucks, or whatever that damned show was called, I would never be Mrs. Neil Postit.

Distracted, I picked up the “Hers” spritzer the wrong way, accidentally pressing down its trigger, to send a warm, thin stream of water cascading down the big mirror in back of the sink. The effect was surreal. It was if the room itself was weeping at Neil’s departure, calling into question my own lack of tears.

I wandered aimlessly into the kitchen. After three years together—during more than two of which he was calling my mother “Mom”—there was no good-bye note. Just house keys tossed casually on the Formica counter on the way out the door with all his clothing, his bulky thinking chair, and his beloved vintage dental appliance.

Bone weary from my momentous evening, I got myself ready to go to sleep. I put on an old ratty flannel nightgown Neil despised and made sure both my regular phone and cell phone were shut off. I didn’t want my much-needed beauty rest interrupted by calls from well-meaning friends and family members wanting to commiserate with my nationally televised launch into loserhood.

Then I did something totally subversive—something I didn’t dare do when Neil was around. I went to bed without flossing.

One maddening thing
that happens when you collide with fame is that people who have never met you, will never meet you, and don’t even particularly care to meet you suddenly have nothing better to do than engage in misleading and inaccurate speculation about who you really are. They invent childhood traumas, colorful relatives, drug and drinking issues, and love affairs and one-night stands more numerous and passionate than even Bill Clinton has experienced. Sometimes these false accounts take on a life of their own.

Contrary to the widespread rumor, for example, I did not decide to become a Personal Life Coach because my first career as a member of a traveling troupe of exotic dancers was in a rut. Nor did I experience a spiritual awakening while playing the ukulele topless in a half-filled theater in Dubuque. Indeed, when that rumor first appeared in
People
, I penned an angry letter explaining that I’ve never been an exotic dancer or in danger of visiting Dubuque. The maga
zine didn’t run it, which I suppose is just as well, since it’s doubtful anyone would have paid attention in the midst of the mad feeding frenzy that immediately followed my abrupt and completely unwarranted rise to fame.

Having finally dispelled the exotic dancer rumor, I’ll endeavor to solve the mystery of how I ended up becoming a Personal Life Coach. I can sum up the answer in one word: closets.

After college, when most of my classmates were entering graduate school or beginning to make their way on Wall Street, I struck out in a different direction. Within hours of striding up the aisle to claim my Barnard diploma amid thunderous applause from an appreciative audience packed with dozens of Mallowitzes and assorted family hangers-on from as far away as Toledo, I was sitting at the kitchen table at my family’s house in Brooklyn, earnestly perusing the help wanted ads in the Sunday
New York Times
.

Every few minutes or so, my father would come by in his bathrobe, feigning interest in getting “a nibble” from the refrigerator, and then resume his hard lobbying to get me to enter the family business.

“Why are you going to work for strangers, Marcy, when we could be working together? We’d be a great team. Remember how much fun you used to have going out with me on jobs?”

“Sure I had fun, Dad,” I’d reply. “Why wouldn’t I? I was four years old.”

“To me, Marcy, you’ll always be my little girl. But your
old man isn’t getting any younger. In a couple years, you could be running the whole show. We can change the name right away: ‘Marcy’s Roach Patrol,’ starting tomorrow. I’ll even repaint our trucks. Any color you want. Except pink or purple. And not aqua blue. That’s for richies in Manhattan. What do you think?”

“Dad, I love you,” I kept telling him, “but I don’t want to run an exterminating business. Besides, I’d insist on aqua blue. Trucks
and
uniforms. You’d kick me out in a second, and Mom would have to make something up to tell the relatives.”

“Maybe you’re right,” he’d answer, seemingly convinced, only to keep returning to the kitchen to repeat his pitch. But I wasn’t going to let my dad’s well-meaning interruptions deter me.

There was no shortage of opportunities for someone burning to be a computer programmer or part-time legal secretary. Ditto for those yearning to teach high school algebra or enter the exciting field of private security. Naturally, I skipped right past. This was my Future, and I had my standards. I wanted a challenging position with plenty of room for upward mobility. It had to come with a salary big enough to pay the rent, and even bigger psychic rewards. More than simply earning a living, I was determined to fulfill the burning ambition I’ve harbored as far back as Mrs. Feldbaum’s eye-opening eighth-grade civics class. I wanted to put my talents to work helping people.

For a long time, I hoped to do that by becoming a psy
chologist, which I thought, perhaps simplistically, was a whole lot cooler than becoming a full-fledged psychiatrist, because you get to do more or less the same thing without the expense and tedium of having to go to medical school or traipse around depressing hospitals all night wearing cloddy rubber-soled shoes. My mother, who harbors no respect for the mental-health profession owing to a longtime antipathy to Dr. Joyce Brothers, did her best to try to convince me to become a schoolteacher instead, like Mrs. Feldbaum.

“If you want to get married and have children,” Francine Mallowitz summarily pronounced, “teaching is the only way to go.” As my erudite mom saw it, Sigmund Freud was just “a lot of mumbo-jumbo hocus-pocus.”

Nothing I said could dissuade her. Mom’s know-nothing view of Freud was set in stone years ago by a single casual viewing of the strange movie in which the legendary shrink was played by Montgomery Clift, who was by then pretty strange himself. No doubt if Paul Muni’s Hollywood oeuvre included a bio-epic of Freud to match his Louis Pasteur and Émile Zola, my mother’s attitude would have been entirely different.

In the end, however, my decision to give up on psychology had nothing to do with my mother or her dubious taste in movie actors. It was based on a realistic assessment that my middling science grades, combined with two years of marks in statistics rumored to be among the lowest ever recorded by the college, doomed my chances of being accepted by any decent psychology graduate program. By
that I mean a program sufficiently respectable for me to stand a chance of ever earning enough money to repay the sizable loans I’d need to take out in order to attend.

My parents had footed the bill entirely for college, and I wasn’t going to drain their savings further to underwrite some psychology pipe dream—not that they didn’t offer. As for the smallish nest egg left to me by my grandparents, my plan was to wait until the housing market softened a bit, and I had a good, steady job, and then use it as a down payment on an apartment in Manhattan, which is just what I eventually did.

I was disappointed to forgo a graduate degree, but hardly heartbroken. By senior year, I’d grown tired of school and was impatient to venture forth into the Real World to seek my Destiny.

After perusing the
Times
employment section for half an hour, I came across an intriguing recruitment ad on the back page for a young California company seeking to expand in New York City. I got a goose-bumpy feeling.
This might be it!

When the office opened its doors the next morning at 9
A.M.
, I was already waiting outside to obtain an interview. An hour later, I was an employee of Santa Monica Spaces, an outfit that dispatches its enthusiastic minions to
help people
organize their closets.
Eureka!
Barely a day out of college, and I had met my goal of securing a meaningful berth in a helping profession, albeit one with the undignified motto “Have Hanger, Will Travel.”

My mother wasn’t pleased. She reacted to the happy
news of her daughter’s employment as if it were a dastardly plot against her hatched by some satanic sitcom creators in Hollywood.

“You’re going to do
what?
” she greeted me with upon my triumphant return from the job interview. “For this we scrimped and saved to send you to a fancy-schmancy college? To clean people’s closets? Tell me the truth, Marcy, this is your
Brady Bunch
lunacy, isn’t it? I could have predicted. I remember, you always liked their maid, you know, whatsername, Hazel. Now you’re trying to be like her.”

“Alice,” I said. “Mom, the name of the Bradys’ maid was Alice. And for your information, she was probably my
least favorite
character. I just felt sorry for her because the family made her wear a uniform and do all the housework while everyone else lazed around in bell bottoms and polyester leisure suits. It aroused my sense of social injustice.”

“So now it’s my fault for playing you Pete Seeger?”

“Mom, this isn’t about Pete Seeger. And liking
The Brady Bunch
in all its shallow, tacky glory just puts me in the American mainstream. My devotion may be a bit excessive, I admit. But it’s just a goofy hobby, like some people carve little sculptures out of Ivory soap to relax. It has nothing to do with my working for Santa Monica Spaces.”

“Okay, Marcy, you win. Do what you want. I’m just going to lie and tell the family you’re a junior executive with Sara Lee. If someone gets nosy and starts asking questions, I’ll say you’re working on their new line of frozen blintzes. Very high finance. You’re selling stock.”

“Do they even make blintzes?” I inquired.

“So suddenly I’m Sara Lee Mallowitz?” Mom replied, demonstrating her own distinctive version of the Socratic method. “How the hell do I know?”

Fortunately, my fictitious career with Sara Lee didn’t last long. Less than two weeks after this conversation occurred, I took some of my hard-earned salary and paid to have my mother’s cramped bedroom closet outfitted with nifty new shelves, racks, and bins from Santa Monica Spaces. The whole works! Mom was so bowled over by the improvement, she called Aunt Gertie in Woodmere, and demanded she drive to Brooklyn right away to see what her “genius daughter” had done. “It’s a miracle,” she declared. “My clothes have room to breathe again.”

For the next three years, my life was a dizzying blur of fancy apartments, messy shoe piles, overcrowded clothing racks, haphazard shelving filled with useless, dust-covered tchotchkes, and profound conversations about the fears, disappointments, and aspirations of my female clients. My sessions with clients frequently turned deeply personal, as talk about dysfunctional sock drawers led them to share deeper concerns about dysfunctional relationships and job situations.

In time, then, I came to see their closets not as mere storage space, but as a metaphor for their untidy, and ultimately unfulfilling, existence. Inspired by a motivational infomercial by Tony Robbins I happened to catch on a night of Diet Coke-induced insomnia, I immodestly decided I had the personal capacity to help my clients clean up both—their
closets and the quality of their lives. No longer content confining myself to advising clients on how to rearrange their shirt bins, I now wanted to assist them in rearranging their priorities and taking control of their lives.

Muscling past my fears and insecurities, I took action, negotiating a friendly parting of the ways with Santa Monica Spaces to devote myself full-time to building a new career as a Personal Life Coach, or Personal Coach, as many of my colleagues in this fast-bourgeoning segment of the self-realization and personal-growth industry like to call themselves. I choose to insert the word “Life” in my coaching description to clearly delineate the assistance I offer from the overrated but extravagantly compensated “executive coaching” that has lately become standard to improve the leadership skills of top corporate talent and enhance the functioning of the businesses they run. I also think Personal Life Coach sounds peppier.

In a sense, I suppose, my evolving focus from vexing closet issues to a fuller intervention in people’s lives as a Personal Life Coach was not surprising given my early interest in psychology. Yet, for the sake of clarity and to avoid potential lawsuits, I want to underscore that I am not a therapist practicing without a license, as Kingman Fenimore jocularly implied. My decidedly
un
-Freudian coaching does not process the client’s emotional history or diagnose or treat mental-health issues. I call my sessions “Marcy’s Can-Do Hour” because the whole point is to focus on the present and what specific, practical steps the client can take to get unstuck from her present circumstances and achieve the
change she wants to make in her life. I have little patience for weepy complainers. My approach is direct and concrete, a mixture of tough love and tough shove.

The worst thing about being a Personal Life Coach is that people at cocktail parties inevitably ask, “What sport?” when you tell them what you do for a living. Another bad thing is that you’re competing with a lot of charlatans who have never received coach training, or passed the International Coach Federation’s certification exam, and who nevertheless insist on using ridiculous non-verbs like “transitioning, partnering, and career-pathing” and inserting them in pretentious, full-color brochures marketing their services. It gives my profession a bad name.

The best thing about Life Coaching is the opportunity it provides to meet new people, which naturally brings me to the subject of how I met Neil.

I was retained by a client, Jane McDee, the wanly pretty twenty-four-year-old heiress to a vast fast-food fortune, who spoke so quietly I instinctively reached to turn up my hearing aid the first time we spoke, and then realized I don’t wear one.

Jane had two problems she wanted to address. By the way, neither related to the dark roots that poked out embarrassingly from her otherwise impressive crop of long blond hair, which I thought a shame because I know a great colorist to whom I’ve referred any number of other client-victims of Nice ’n Easy do-it-yourself jobs. Anyway, Jane, who wore
a colorful headband to keep her hair from falling in her face, tended to favor denim capris and tight, cropped shirts that exposed more than her midriff, a fashion statement that practically screamed Britney Spears and suggested no one had broken the news to the hamburger princess that her teen years were over.

The reason she sought coaching was that she had reached her wits’ end trying to figure out how to store her extensive bandanna collection to provide easy access and minimize wrinkles. Also, she was tired of never smiling because she was embarrassed by her giant buck teeth. The bandanna issue I could easily solve on my own. For the tooth question, I did a quick search of recent dental-related stories in
The New York Times
, most of which contained extensive quotes from Neil Postit, who was identified in the articles as a prominent New York City orthodontist with a practice strictly confined to treating adults.

More intrepid research—I dialed information and asked—produced Neil’s office phone number. I called and made an appointment to consult with him about Jane’s case.