Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan (2 page)

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Authors: Paula Marantz Cohen

BOOK: Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan
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C
arla and
STEPHANIE RETURNED FROM THE STATIONERY store just as Carla's mother, Jessie Kaplan, was taking a casserole out of the oven. Ten-year-old Jeffrey was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of chocolate milk and kicking his foot against the refrigerator.
“Stop kicking the refrigerator,” Stephanie ordered her brother angrily as soon as they came in the door.
“I can kick it if I want,” replied Jeffrey. “Grandma doesn't mind.”
“Well, I mind. You'll dent the refrigerator,” said Stephanie, suddenly concerned about the well-being of this appliance.
“Dent the refrigerator?” exclaimed Jeffrey. “That's the stupidest thing I ever heard!”
“Don't call me stupid,” said Stephanie, darting forward and punching Jeffrey on the arm.
“She hit me!” screamed Jeffrey. He had jumped up from his chair and gotten hold of his sister's T-shirt, which he was pulling violently around the collar.
“He's stretching my Michael Stars T-shirt!” shrieked Stephanie. “He's ruining it! It cost thirty dollars!”
The two had by now recessed to the living room, where they
were battling each other noisily. The stretched Michael Stars T-shirt had provoked Stephanie to grasp the stiff wedge of hair that stood out on Jeffrey's forehead in the style popular with preteen boys.
“Oww, she's hurting me, she's hurting me!” Jeffrey screamed. “She's pulling my hair out. Help!”
Carla, too tired to intervene, had fallen onto the kitchen chair, while Jessie calmly poked the casserole with a fork.
Jessie Kaplan was unfazed by the screams emanating from the other room. In fact, she was unfazed by turmoil in general. She had raised two children of her own: Carla and her younger sister, Margot. Carla was the easy one; Margot was the handful (and at thirty-four, still a handful). Having raised Margot, Jessie was used to carrying on in a climate of mayhem and strife.
Jessica had been living with Carla's family for several months now. For most daughters, this would have been a trial, but Carla counted herself blessed. Her mother was one of those rare specimens: an even-tempered, uncomplaining Jewish woman, who performed household chores with cheerfulness and efficiency. Carla sometimes believed that her mother had been switched at birth and was actually the product of a nice Protestant family who had been saddled, in her stead, with someone who refused to vacuum for fear of breaking a nail.
On this particular day, while Carla and Stephanie had been engaged in the exhausting stationery outing, Jessie had spent the afternoon straightening up and making dinner.
She now handed her daughter a mug filled with a pale yellow liquid: “A glass of mead?” she proffered, as the children could be heard knocking over the andirons in the other room.
“Mead? Is that something you picked up at Whole Foods?” Carla asked suspiciously. Whole Foods was the area's specialty supermarket where one could buy a wide array of “gourmet organic” foods (an ingenious combination that permitted the food to taste like sawdust and still cost an arm and a leg). The contents of
the mug looked and smelled like apple juice, but that hardly prevented it from having been sold at an astronomical price as something more exotic.
Jessie didn't answer; she was staring dreamily into space. Carla looked at her mother, then gazed down at the alleged mead.
That was the beginning. Other oddities soon followed.
The next night, Jessie prepared a new recipe for the family's dinner that, upon interrogation, she pronounced to be “venison stew.”
“Venison—what's venison?” Jeffrey asked.
“Venison is deer,” Mark translated unadvisedly, at which Stephanie jumped up from her chair and bolted from the room. Carla wondered when Whole Foods had begun to carry venison. It certainly wasn't available at the Acme.
Then, later that evening, after Jessie finished stitching up a hole in Stephanie's jeans, she turned to Carla and asked if Mark's doublet needed mending.
“His doublet?” Carla looked at her mother in bewilderment. “What's a doublet?”
“It's the tunic worn over the hose,” Jessie answered matter-of-factly.
Carla had tried to react casually: “No doublet, I'm afraid, but you could reinforce the buttons on his dress shirt”—at which Jessie had nodded agreeably and gone ahead and worked on the buttons.
Carla managed to put these strange remarks out of her mind until a few nights later, when Mark was late for dinner.
“Did he stop at the Wild Boar?” Jessie asked in a disapproving tone.
“The Wild Boar?”
“The tavern up the way.”
“No-o-o-o,” said Carla slowly, “Mark is
not
at the Wild Boar. He's at a meeting with a drug rep to discuss the side effects of a new colitis drug.”
She was about to ask her mother where precisely “up the way” the Wild Boar Tavern was located (and how an establishment so-named had managed to escape her notice)—but a phone call from Jeffrey's social studies teacher intervened. It seemed that Jeffrey had pulled down the map of the continental United States, ripping it from its roller and entirely disrupting the lesson on the Finger Lakes. The resulting damage was to the tune of $144.99, for which the Goodmans would be billed.
“Under no circumstances is your child to touch the map, the globe, the worksheets on my desk, the other children's pencils, papers, notebooks, or anything not belonging exclusively to himself,” said the teacher, in what Carla took to be an unnecessarily snippy tone.
After this phone call, she might have returned to probe the reference to the tavern—not to mention the earlier references to the mead, the venison, and the doublet—but somehow she wasn't in the mood.
“
H
ow was
YOUR DAY?” CARLA ASKED HOPEFULLY WHEN Mark finally arrived home that night.
“A disaster,” he snapped. “Mrs. Connor lost her health insurance when she was laid off last year and now she comes in with rectal bleeding. And Jack Morris—you know, the guy who sold us our Volvo, nice fellow—finally developed an ulcer and his insurance doesn't cover the cost of an endoscopy; I had to drop that carrier six months ago.”
“So what are you going to do?” said Carla, thinking about poor Mrs. Connor and Jack Morris, bereft of medical coverage.
“I'm going to treat them,” sighed Mark, “but I'm not running a charity ward. And it doesn't help that some of the others give me a hard time about the twenty-dollar co-pay. You'd think I was soaking them for their life's savings. Not that they'd give a second thought to buying a hundred-and-twenty-dollar pair of running shoes, or paying thousands to the vet to treat their beloved Fido.”
He slumped wearily in his chair, and Jessie ran to cluck over him. She had, in the manner of many elderly Jewish women, an enormous respect for physicians, whom she placed on a metaphorical dais above all other human beings. Mark greatly appreciated this attitude. It always gave him a lift to overhear his
mother-in-law referring to him reverently as “the doctor,” as in, “What do you think the doctor would like to have for dinner tonight?” Lately, with Jeffrey's behavior problems and the screaming fits erupting between Stephanie and her mother over the bat mitzvah, Jessie was about the only member of the family Mark could bear to have around.
Noting that her son-in-law looked especially tired and irritable tonight, Jessie placed her palm on his forehead and inquired solicitously, “Would you like—”
“Some mead?” Carla interrupted, glancing slyly at her mother.
“Some Tylenol?” Jessie continued, appearing not to notice the interruption.
“Tylenol would be great,” said Mark, smiling wanly. “And I could sure use a scotch with that. God, what a day!”
Jessie hurried off to fetch the Tylenol and the scotch, leaving Mark to embark on the familiar lament about how thankless the practice of medicine had become.
“How about getting a partner to ease some of the burden?” Carla suggested, launching into the litany of possible solutions they had rehearsed many times before: “Hire someone, or join a group.”
“How can I hire someone when I'm barely taking home a decent wage myself?” protested Mark irritably. “And what group am I going to join? I've been competing with the other GI groups for five years, so naturally we hate each other. And besides, I wouldn't want to work with them—they only care about money.”
“You care about money,” pointed out Carla. It seemed the only thing he ever talked about lately.
“I care about making a decent living,” clarified Mark. “But I want to practice good medicine. The two things shouldn't be mutually exclusive.”
“Why don't you speak to someone at HUP?” suggested Carla, referring to the area's medical mecca, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where Mark had done his training. “You
could teach and see some patients on the side. You liked doing that when you were doing your fellowship.”
“You don't understand,” he said impatiently. “You can't just decide to have an academic career. I'm too old. Besides, it would mean a drastic pay cut.”
“I thought you didn't care about the money.”
“I don't,” sighed Mark. “But there's you and the children. We have expenses.”
This was true. The bat mitzvah alone had become a fearsome extravaganza, the costs mounting scarily by the day. She could imagine her poor husband doing assembly-line colonoscopies for years just to pay for it.
“I could get a job—a real one,” Carla suggested. She knew this was ostensibly the logical course of action. In the lexicon of feminism, instilled in her from her college days, she was not operating up to par. Her college roommate was now a senior vice president at Maidenform, and her sister, Margot, was one of the highest-billing criminal lawyers in Philadelphia. Of course, her roommate was divorced with a fifteen-year-old son already in rehab, and Margot was without the appendages of husband or children. But even as she noted these qualifying factors, Carla scolded herself for stooping to note them. Tallying the failed marriages and delinquent or nonexistent children of high-powered working women was one of the pettier pastimes of the stay-at-home mother. Besides, for every professional woman with a dysfunctional family, there existed a more domestic one whose family was no
Leave It to Beaver
. Her own—she could hear the kids screaming like banshees at each other in the living room—left something to be desired.
But the fact was that Carla was already busy doing what might have counted as several jobs. She supervised the temple book fair and soup kitchen, was secretary of the Home and School Association, helped Mark at the office two mornings a week, and volunteered three afternoons at the Golden Pond Geriatric Center. On top of all this, she shouldered the mundane but labor-intensive
tasks associated with running a household of four: shopping, cleaning, and cooking.
The latter was a particular challenge given her family's fastidious tastes. Stephanie, for example, was lactose intolerant, grossed out by tomatoes, and allergic to all berries; Mark wouldn't eat anything orange (an aversion developed, according to his mother, when he was frightened by a Halloween pumpkin at the age of three); and Jeffrey required constant vigilance because he was liable to ingest anything that came within range of his mouth. Just the other day, he had consumed an entire jar of beef jerky, bought at the 7-Eleven with his allowance money, and had diarrhea for three days afterward.
“You do so much already, and I'd hate to see you give up the geriatric center,” Mark responded to Carla's suggestion that she get a “real” job. “Not many people can do that kind of work. It's one thing to deal with human beings clinically, the way I do; it's another to help them go to the bathroom and tie their shoelaces.”
It was Mark's greatness, Carla felt, and one of the reasons she had fallen in love with him, that he didn't believe that what he did, in having greater social prestige, was superior to what she did. If anything, he admired her more for dealing with the emotional aspects of life that often confused and frightened him.
Mark and Carla had fallen in love during their sophomore year at Boston University. He was pre-med and she was a psych major, which meant that he helped her do the math and she explained to him what the professor really wanted on the exams—a division of labor they had held to ever since. As Carla's sister, Margot, put it: “You had an arranged marriage, only you arranged it yourselves. It's actually kind of disgusting. You even look alike.”
Carla protested that this wasn't true. Mark was thin and fair—his parents descended from German Jewish stock, a fact that Rose and Charles Goodman managed to relay by a certain superciliousness of manner that would have bothered a more prickly daughter-in-law. Carla was darker and more robust in the style of
her Mediterranean roots—Jessie's side of the family had Sephardic blood. Yet Margot had a point in noting a resemblance between her sister and brother-in-law. It sprang from deeper points of correspondence: Carla and Mark came from basically the same economic background, shared the same religion (albeit with different degrees of piety), and were the same age (with Carla, in stereotypical female fashion, six months younger than Mark). They had been pleased to discover on their third date that they both wanted to raise their kids in the suburbs, preferably a girl and a boy, with the girl coming first to act as a calming influence (future events would accommodate them here in letter if not in spirit).
“Heartwarming!” noted Margot dryly when told of this coincidence. Secretly she was rather jealous of her sister's marriage.
Having now weathered Mark's familiar lament about the dire state of his medical practice, Carla put her hand against her husband's cheek and kissed him. He smiled despite himself. They had fallen in love in college, and they still loved each other—that was something. They had two beautiful if cantankerous children—that was something else.
“Don't worry,” she reassured him, “things will work out for the best.”
“They'll work out”—Mark sighed in his usual fatalistic tone—“for the best, I don't know, but they'll work out. They always do.”

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