I Can't Complain (3 page)

Bobbie married a man named Dan in 1987, when Julia was six. Soon Bobbie and Dan begat Max. Even with a blue-ribbon stepfather on the scene, there was no displacing Rick, who nested in the family tree in varied and original ways. Rick went on
Max’s
field trips and was authorized to pick him up at school. During Christmas vacations and on most weekend outings, Rick took both Julia and Max, whether it was to Disney World or Grandma’s house or down the street for pizza. “That’s the family,” Rick explained. “You don’t take one child and not the other.”

In 1993, I attended Julia’s bat mitzvah. Julia’s mother and stepfather are Jewish. Rick is Irish Catholic from a devout family. Rick’s sister, brother, and widowed mother came to Sudbury from New York. Another brother came from Philadelphia; a cousin flew in from Texas, an aunt from Alabama, and a great-aunt from New Mexico. Except for the sister who taught in Great Neck, New York, neither Rick nor his relatives had ever attended a bar or bat mitzvah before, or danced the hora, or, as Rick observed, “ever eaten challah bread.” His relatives phoned him for advice from the moment the invitations arrived. What does one wear? Bring? Say? Does one genuflect upon entering a synagogue? Calling it a dress rehearsal, Rick went to a stranger’s bat mitzvah and literally took notes.

On Julia’s day, Rick sat proudly between Bobbie’s mother and Max, whose adoration for Rick was everyone’s best shot for peace and quiet. The rabbi of this Reform synagogue called Rick up to the
bima,
introducing him as Julia’s dad, to read an
aliyah,
an honor, from her portion of the Torah. (Rick had offered to read in phonetic Hebrew, but it was decided to keep it in English for his relatives.) Julia gave a speech explaining that the themes of her Torah portion were forgiveness and appreciation. She said, “I must stop more often to give thanks that I grew up surrounded by an attentive and loving family. My mom, my two dads, my brother, Max, and six wonderful grandparents made my childhood years very special.”

Julia, I should add, is a beautiful girl, one of those genetic meldings that produce a sum greater than their contributing parts. After she finished chanting her portion of the Torah in a melodic and clear voice I credited to her Irish side, she smiled more broadly and rhymed, “Dad, you’re our honorary Jew/Please come up and light candle number two.” The ice was broken, and the crowd erupted. To applause and cheers, Rick scrambled forward, lit his candle, kissed Bobbie and Julia for all the world to see, and sat down. From there, Julia’s couplets were a
This Is Your Life
roll call: her stepdad’s parents (“Orlando’s second most famous sight/Candle number three awaits your light”); Julia’s squirming little brother (during her bat mitzvah speech, Julia said that if the Palestinians and the Israelis could make peace, she should be able to forgive Max, who’d destroyed everything she’d ever owned); and Rick’s mother, tall and elegant in her black organdy dress and picture hat (the band played “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling”).

Who could imagine such a day, with a peace and joy that were almost biblical—the stepfather dancing with the birth father’s sister; Jews with Catholics, Republicans with Democrats, labor lawyers with management. Watching Julia with her school and camp friends, I searched for the embarrassment that an ordinary thirteen-year-old would exhibit at any deviation from the norm. But it wasn’t there. Uncles, aunts, grandparents, total strangers claiming to be her mother’s best friends accosted and kissed her, and every reminiscence evoked a smile.

There are more threads to the story, but who would believe them? Julia’s stepfather, adopted as an infant forty-five years before, had just found his birth family after thirteen years of searching, and there they were, at my table, crying and beaming. The blended family was multiplying before my eyes, never more unified. The weather was perfect, and so was the star of the day in her dark French braid and her raspberry dress. Could a director have pulled this off? Could Hollywood have come up with three grandmothers named Sara, Yetta, and Kathleen?

Bobbie said she wouldn’t have changed one thing about the day but was relieved when it was over. The two dads were depressed. They conferred from their respective offices, talking each other through the letdown. Rick took Julia to a Notre Dame football game soon afterward as a cure for the post–bat mitzvah blues.

I’ve been to a lot of bar and bat mitzvahs. No matter how many children are pronounced special, a blessing, a gift, I think of Julia, of her three-pronged family and her three-ring bat mitzvah, and I smile. Rick said the credit was all Bobbie’s—that she was the straw that stirred the drink. Bobbie laughed and said, “I didn’t know he was that poetic.”

So, Rick—I apologize. Your marital reluctance was none of my business, and, besides, what did I know about you? You’re a good man and a great father. I understand that you’ve since married that nice lawyer, Judy, I met at the reception, that Julia was a bridesmaid, Max the ring bearer, and that all parties approved. Congratulations, mazel tov, and best wishes.

Happy birthday, Julia. I’ll never forget your bat mitzvah. I pray you invite me to your wedding.

U
PON MEETING ME
you’d find me pleasant, reasonable, and without question, nice;
nice
follows me wherever I go. But let me step aside and introduce the inner child, the one my father branded “a sensitive plant,” who very much enjoys holding on to a good grudge.

The typical grudge-kindling offense is not weighty or even unforgivable. It’s better defined as a blow to my pride. For example: The famous (famous in my immediate family) case of X whose daughter attended preschool with my son. Eleven years passed without incident. One day at the supermarket, she asked where my son was applying to college. Upon hearing his first choice, Columbia, she hooted, from the gut, “Hah!” followed by a sarcastic and derisive, “Gooood
luck!
”

She might as well have slapped me. Three months later, early acceptance in hand, I found a feeble excuse to phone her, and an even feebler excuse to steer the conversation toward my son.

“Has he heard?” she asked.

I told her the good news casually, as if naming a correspondence school without accreditation. She murmured a bland “congratulations” and changed the subject. Moral of that story: Don’t expect the offender to remember her rudeness, and don’t expect satisfaction.

I do keep trying, though, and persist in imagining a whole drama festival of conversations revisited. My grudges come in all sizes and flavors: there are the mild ones (failure to return calls, to RSVP, or to send a thank-you note for the hand-knit baby sweater with the hand-blown buttons); the ancient grudges (mean boys and idiot bosses); the vanquished grudges (wrote a letter, filed a grievance, called the mother); the consumer grudges (I’ve never returned to the chichi kitchen boutique whose snobby owner was so rude to Aunt Hattie, age eighty-eight, just because she asked if they carried Salad Shooters); the noble grudges (against bigots, anti-Semites, and bullies); the social grudges (rudeness, cluelessness, knowingly seating me at a terrible table at a reception); grudges once removed (against total strangers who have been mean to my friends either in person or via a book review); defunct grudges (against the dead, such as my first-grade teacher, who made the entire class take their seats when meek me accidentally bumped into a window, causing the shade to fly up during an indoor, rainy-day recess).

I’ve recently learned a Yiddish expression,
trepsverter,
literally “step words,” meaning the perfect retort that you don’t think of until you’re walking away and down the stairs. My personal
trepsverter
is the tape in my head, always cued up, of dialogue I might have voiced if life were a soap opera, where good characters scold the bad characters, and the bad characters stand still long enough to hear it.

Real life rarely presents those opportunities. If I find myself in the company of someone who slighted me in, say, 1986, and I excavate the old insult, my conviction and my voice soon fade: this villain remembers neither the conversation, the context, nor me.

At the same time, I believe in accepting apologies. My shallower grievances dissolve immediately upon contact with a sincere “I’m sorry” or at the sight of a florist’s van coming up my driveway. Am I impaired and soured by my grudge impulse and my grudge archives? I say no; it’s human nature. And healthy. If one has feelings and frenemies, one should have grudges.

I
WAS RAISED IN
a family that embraced all invitations, especially the oversize, engraved variety requesting a formal RSVP and a new outfit. There was no discussion: Are we busy? Do we like these people? Is it worth the ten-hour round trip in a Rambler without a radio? Our weekends were gapingly free. When the relatives summoned us, we went.

It was a different era, the 1950s and ’60s, and I don’t believe either parent needed or kept a social calendar. They must have stepped out some evenings, because I do remember my mother’s collection of clutch purses, her special-occasion Estée Lauder perfume, and the Krysiak girls as babysitters, but no scheduling conflict ever required us to send our regrets to the weddings, anniversary parties, bar mitzvahs, or milestone birthdays for which our presence was requested.

So it was an alien
no
that entered my family’s consciousness in 1969 when my sister married her high school sweetheart, and his large circle of aunts and uncles began fêting the couple. One uncle-in-law-to-be, the baby in the clan, Uncle X, attended nothing. “Antisocial!” his siblings decried. I, the eighteen-year-old maid of honor, agreed. Who gets invited to an engagement barbecue in a Lowell, Massachusetts, backyard and doesn’t show?
Inconsiderate black sheep,
I concurred.

Today I look back and marvel at the preponderance of relatives who
did
say yes. Uncle X most likely did what I do now: opened the invitation and performed the social algebra. Will this occasion, this sit-down salmon, this hard-to-find hall where career updates will be shouted over loud music, be fun or be a trial?

This is relatively new—my not responding with an automatic
yes.
Most influential in prompting me to write “not” between “will” and “attend” is the joint husband-and-wife fiftieth birthday party my husband and I went to a decade ago. The first clue that we should have made our excuses was the implication that the couple was adding a table, and we were the lucky beneficiaries of the expanded guest list—news imparted with the telephone invitation. Arriving at the luncheon, we picked up our place card announcing we were at table 1,000, or so it seemed. We took our seats in Siberia with our fellow also-rans. As we chatted, it became clear that our hosts had stuck with the literal conceit of
adding a table,
failing to integrate us into the general mix, because our perfectly pleasant tablemates barely knew the celebrants and seemed equally at sea. The rub here was that as we made our early escape, the hostess gushed that head tablers A, B, and C were such fans of my books, and over there at priority tables 2, 3, and 4 were former colleagues of Bob’s, doctors with the same subspecialty. What a shame we had to leave early before we could circulate!

It was a turning point that became a mental Post-it, reminding me of the potential hazards out there in eventland.

As I confess to evaluating invitations with this combination of vanity and emotional stinginess, I must point out that many of my “No, thanks” represent contentment with my lot. When asked if I want to join friends for that play that got the rave review I failed to notice—$120 for the second balcony—I think,
But I could stay home, watch the “Project Runway” episode I taped on Wednesday, and be in bed with a book by ten.
I was never much of a party girl, nor did I marry Mr. Let’s Go Out. Decades ago, a friend summed us up this way: Bob and I could not be relied on to attend both her Fourth of July cookout
and
troop to the Esplanade to hear the Boston Pops. It was very helpful to have this syndrome identified, because now I can say, unapologetically, “No, thanks. Dinner would be great, or a movie, but you know us: we’re not good at doing two things in the same night.”

It’s not a tendency I’d have advertised at an earlier age—nonrestlessness, the “No, thanks,” without more backing than lack of social ambition. Experience has identified and jelled another inclination, and that is honest self-evaluation about my dependability. For example, a phone call comes in from one of various national charities, asking not for my money but for my time. Will I address envelopes and deliver them to my neighbors on—the caller pauses, checks her list—Winterberry Lane? I used to say yes. Now I say, “I’m a very bad candidate for this. I’m not reliable. You’d send me the envelopes, and they would just sit in a pile of mail. Really, you could do much better.”

And then there is the realm of the professional obligations. Requests fall into eight categories in authordom: Would I write a blurb/endorsement for an upcoming book? Would I read and evaluate a work in progress (a stranger’s)? Would I read and evaluate a manuscript (a friend’s)? Would I have a minute to describe how the entire publishing industry works and how one goes about getting an agent? Would I visit a book group that will be discussing one of my books the day after tomorrow? Will I do a reading at such-and-such bookstore? Will I speak to the inquirer’s fundraiser/association/professional organization/PTA?