Hostile Makeover (3 page)

“No.” Judy put down her wine and picked up two bowls, motioning Shelley to do the same. “She just figures if she throws enough shit against the wall, something’s going to stick.”

“I definitely could have lived without that image,” Shelley said as she followed her sister out to the dining room. “And, of course, if she keeps flinging shit, sooner or later one of us is going to step in it.”

For the next thirty minutes Shelley annoyed her mother by being helpful. Though she normally went to great lengths to avoid housework and preferred the family dinners where her mother’s longtime maid, Delilah, served and cleaned up, tonight Shelley used the cleaning woman’s absence to her advantage. The first to jump up when something needed to be done, she fetched more soup from the kitchen, got up to pour refills of water and wine, and cleared the table by herself, which allowed her to avoid Richard Friedlander without being rude.

Her mother shot her pointed looks and protested every time Shelley volunteered to do something, but even a master kvetch couldn’t come out and complain that a daughter was helping
too
much. Shelley had already chipped a nail and gotten a brisket stain on her white silk blouse, but the defeated expression on her mother’s face more than made up for it.

As a coup de grâce, she insisted on loading the dishwasher while her mother took coffee out to the table. At a nearby counter a strangely subdued Judy unpacked Tupperware containers of baked goods and began to arrange them on silver trays.

With sure fingers she arranged perfectly formed rugelach, brownies, cookies, and strudel slices into artful patterns.

Shelley’s heart sank. Someone else might look at the rows of sweets tucked into their colored paper baking cups and see dessert. Shelley saw a cry for help. Others might turn to drugs or alcohol when distressed; Judy Blumfeld baked. If her sister were to dial a suicide help line, the conversation would begin with “Help! I can’t stop sifting!”

“That’s a lot of goodies you’ve got there,” Shelley said.

Judy shrugged and finished filling the first tray. Without missing a beat, she started to fill another.

Was there such a thing as a baking intervention? Should she try to start a chapter of Overbakers Anonymous?

“So how’s Sammy’s bar mitzvah coming along?” Shelley asked, edging closer to the rows of treats.

“Fine.”

This was not good, either. If there was anything Judy normally liked to expound on, it was the progress of THE bar mitzvah.

“Did you decide on a theme?”

“I’m not sure we really need a theme this time.”

There was a moment of shocked silence while Shelley tried to absorb this heresy.

“What does Mandy say about that?” Mandy Mifkin was the bar mitzvah coordinator who had implemented the Gladiator theme for Jason’s bar mitzvah two years ago. The theme had allegedly been designed to dovetail with her oldest nephew’s interest in wrestling and to take advantage of the popularity of Russell Crowe’s movie, but Shelley had thought it an odd choice for descendants of a people who had been so heavily oppressed by the Romans. Forcing the band members and waiters to wear togas had been just one of Mandy’s signature touches.

“I don’t know. I guess I’m just having some second thoughts.”

The theme music for
The Outer Limits
began to play softly in Shelley’s head. “OK, who are you? And what have you done with my sister?”

Judy snorted and popped a brownie in her mouth, which was another thing Judy never did. For all her sister’s baking, Shelley hadn’t seen her consume chocolate in public since she was pregnant with Sammy, which was approximately thirteen years ago. The Schwartz women consumed their high-calorie items behind closed doors.

Back at the dinner table Shelley stirred her coffee and idly pushed a piece of strudel around on her plate. She snuck surreptitious glances at her sister while congratulating herself on minimizing her contact with Richard—who appeared slightly bewildered that she had not, in fact, flung herself at his feet.

With her last sip of coffee she decided that as soon as the meal ended she was going to get her father alone to try for one last shot at the account that had fallen so unceremoniously into Ross Morgan’s lap.

She intended to be coolly professional, and had actually prepared a sort of mini sales presentation in her head while she loaded the dishwasher. She prayed her father would be receptive, but if all else failed she’d stick out her lower lip and let it quiver pathetically. If she had to, she’d cry. She was prepared to go to the mat on this one.

Shelley glanced up at Harvey Schwartz. In his early sixties, with salt-and-pepper hair and an interestingly craggy face, he was still an impressive man. She had his height and his build. Up until her sixteenth birthday, she’d had his nose.

He gave her a private wink and she smiled in return. She had always had his love; it had been the bedrock on which much of her life had been built. But recently she’d begun to crave his approval and respect with an intensity that she didn’t understand. She dreamed of earning a heartfelt “well done,” or the kind of look he normally bestowed on Ross Morgan.

She opened her mouth to ask him something, but before she could get the words out a strange expression washed over his face. His eyes closed briefly and he clamped a hand around his upper arm.

“What is it, Daddy?”

He started to speak, and she leaned forward to hear what he was saying, but although his lips moved, no words emerged.

“Daddy!”

The table fell silent, no doubt at the urgency in her tone. Or maybe they’d seen the same things she had.

“Harvey?” Her mother’s voice was sharp. “Do you need Rolaids? Quick, somebody get a Zantac. I told you not to eat so much!”

But no one moved. They sat there straining to hear him, waiting an eternity for him to get the words out, unsure what to do or say.

“I . . . I feel like an elephant’s sitting on my chest and I can’t feel the left side of my body,” he finally said in a strangled voice she barely recognized.

“Oh, God,” Shelley shouted as he fell face-first into his dessert, “forget about the Rolaids. Somebody call nine-one-one.”

chapter
4

S
helley spent the rest of Friday night and most of Saturday morning bargaining with God. At any other time she might have questioned the likelihood that there was a supreme being hanging around up there, waiting to answer prayers or to enter into negotiations with someone who only showed up for temple on the High Holidays. But when you were sitting in a hospital waiting for your father to make it through an emergency bypass, you clung to any available straw. Right now Shelley was clinging to both God and Dr. Manny Shapiro, whose job it was to open up her father, reroute his blood around those clogged arteries, and then appear in this waiting room to utter the medical equivalent of “piece of cake.”

Only they hadn’t seen Dr. Shapiro for hours, and her mother—who hadn’t speculated on Dr. Shapiro’s marital status or uttered a single word since her father had been wheeled back to the operating room—continued to stare into space with a lost look on her face that Shelley had never seen before.

Across from Shelley, Judy slept with her head on her husband Craig’s shoulder, her chin mashed to her chest. Periodically Judy’s eyes fluttered open, but she didn’t lift her head from Craig’s shoulder. Shelley didn’t blame her. If she’d had a shoulder to burrow into, she wouldn’t have come up for air, either.

Trey’s shoulders were even broader than her brother-in-law’s, but Trey’s shoulders weren’t here. They were out floating down a river somewhere in Colorado. But even if Trey had been in town, would she have called and invited him into such a personal and painful place?

It was almost as hard to picture as a favor-granting God. She spent a few minutes imagining what Howard Mellnick would say about that little admission. Then she went back to negotiating with the Almighty.

She’d already promised to give up sex in return for the Easy To Be Me account while she was racing back to the office from the Ritz, but He hadn’t taken her up on her offer. Which led Shelley to wonder how much God really cared who she had sex with and how often. And whether she could now rescind the offer of abstinence since the prayer accompanying it had not been answered. It was enough to make her wish she were Catholic so she could have some saints to appeal to.

Shelley repositioned herself in the molded plastic chair and contemplated her sister (still sleeping) and her mother (still staring). Maybe God was looking for something a little more G-rated. Maybe God would come through if she promised to get along better with her family.

What if she stopped arguing with them? What if, no matter how annoying they got, or what they said or did, she simply smiled agreeably and kept the peace?

She sat up straighter, certain she was on to something here. If God would spare her father, she’d turn over a whole new leaf. Kind of like Yom Kippur without the fasting and praying. If her father came through this surgery, she’d stop envying and baiting her sister. She’d go out with any Jewish man her mother . . . Shelley shot a look toward the ceiling and squashed that thought.

If God didn’t care about her sex life, why would he concern Himself with the religious affiliations of the men she dated? Surely He didn’t sit around up in Heaven shaking a finger at Jewish girls and telling them it was just as easy to fall in love with a Jewish man as a non-Jewish one.

Shelley unfolded her body out of the chair and stretched. Her hair stuck out in undreamed-of directions, and her mouth felt as if someone had snuck in during the night and stuck a dirty sock in it.

“Mom, do you want some coffee?”

“No.” Her mother’s makeup had eroded during the night, leaving her haggard expression bared for all to see. “What if he doesn’t make it?” she whispered. “If that man dies on me, I’ll kill him.”

Shelley shook her head. “There’s not going to be any dying. I’m bringing you a coffee and something to eat so you can keep up your strength.” Was this really her encouraging her mother to be stronger? Wasn’t that like trying to shore up Fort Knox? “You don’t want Daddy to think you’ve given up on him.”

Her mother blew her nose into a crumpled tissue. “You’re right.”

Shelley went stock-still. “What did you say?”

Her mother sniffed. “I said, you’re right.”

Shelley stole a quick glance out a nearby window to make sure hell had not, in fact, frozen over. If they’d been somewhere other than this hospital under these circumstances, she might have pumped a fist in the air or called the
Guinness World Records
. But her mother’s admission only underscored how dire she thought the straits were.

In the bathroom, Shelley finger-brushed her teeth, gargled with the tiny mouthwash she kept tucked in her purse, and freshened her makeup.

In the hospital cafeteria she bought four coffees and an assortment of fruit and Danish, which she passed out when she got back to the waiting room. Numb, they sipped on their coffees and waited for the caffeine to do its job. Part of her couldn’t bear the waiting another minute, while the other part preferred the fear to the knowing; once bad news was given there’d be no taking it back.

An eternity later, she looked up and spotted Dr. Shapiro heading toward them. Her heart began to pound as she took in his tired eyes and the expression on his face. Sliding into the vacant seat between her sister and mother, Shelley grabbed their hands and held on. It was clear “piece of cake” were not going to be his first words.

Judy squeezed back so hard it hurt. Her sister’s eyes were caked with sleep and had black smudges beneath them. Her lips were chapped and her lipstick had been eaten off a long time ago. It was hard to decide which was more frightening: her sister’s state of dishevelment or her mother’s disturbing silence.

Panic rolled off them in waves: Shelley recognized it because it matched her own. She wondered briefly what sort of bargains they’d been making and whether the sum of all the things the Schwartz women were willing to change or give up would be enough for God.

Together they raised their gazes to meet the doctor’s. There was a collective intake of breath.

“The blockage was much worse than we were expecting.”

Her mother gasped and squeezed Shelley’s hand so hard she had to hold back a gasp of her own. At the words “much worse” Shelley’s brain began to race. Was he making excuses? Preparing them for the fact that they hadn’t been able to save him? If everything was all right, wouldn’t he have said that first?

“The next twenty-four hours will be crucial.”

Her brain stopped racing and she let out a ragged breath as one clear thought emerged. If her father hadn’t made it, the next twenty-four hours wouldn’t be crucial.

Oh, thank you, God, thank you
. She squeezed the hands clasped in her own and drew a steadying breath.

“He’s in recovery right now. Once we have him stabilized, he’ll be moved to ICU.”

“When can we see him?” Judy’s voice was full of the relief Shelley was feeling. Their mother still hadn’t spoken.

“Once they’ve got him situated in ICU, immediate family can see him one at a time. But he should sleep for quite a while.”

“So, he’s all right?” Her mother’s voice was high and tight.

Dr. Shapiro adjusted his glasses. “Well, as I said, the next twenty-four hours are critical. Right now we take it one day at a time. But ultimately, if things go well he’ll be looking at some serious lifestyle changes.” The doctor ran a hand through his short brown hair, and Shelley realized that he’d used that hand to help save her father’s life.

“But assuming he takes this as seriously as he should . . . well, the rest of him appears to be in pretty good shape.”

They were too numb to ask any more questions, too relieved to think about details. As they watched Dr. Shapiro’s retreating back, the fear began to dissipate. Shelley wanted to jump for joy, whoop it up, skip inappropriately through the halls singing at the top of her lungs.

As they began to gather their things, her mother pulled her compact from her purse and applied powder and lipstick with a shaky hand. She popped a piece of spearmint gum into her mouth and offered the pack to the rest of them. Shelley could see her pulling the tattered remnants of real life back around her. When she spoke, it almost felt strange to hear her voice again.