The Matzo Ball Heiress (11 page)

“Is Bali a gay Eden?” I said.

“Balinese men walk down the street hand in hand with their male friends, oblivious to Western disgust at the sight.” If my old co-worker is right about my father’s Eden-seeking, then Dad’s recent move to Amsterdam would fit the pattern. I heard recently on NPR that the Netherlands was the first country to recognize same-sex marriages. And Dad moved before Canada followed suit.

Dad forgot to specify whether this Dutch
new luv
he’s sharing a house with is male or female. Like I can’t guess. I’m sure he’ll fly in for a weekend soon with a boy-toy and an impressive bouquet of pink roses and give me a big kiss on the cheek, and ask, “How’s my pumpkin?” He’ll probably want me to join him for yet another Broadway musical, even though Dad spoiled Broadway musicals for me in 1982 when he treated me to a summer matinee of
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
. Right around the time Joseph was telling his treacherous brothers about his dream of their stacks of wheat bowing down to his stack of wheat, Dad whispered to me that his friend Timmy who had come with us to the Royale Theater was a “very special friend.” Then he tacked on that it was extremely important to him that I like Timmy even though he’d leaned right over me and my freshly cast broken arm to say to Dad, “Andrew LloydWebber is going to be huge. He’s like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He gives the public what they want.”

Even at the age of eleven I understood enough to know that other fathers don’t talk about their “very special friends” to their little girls. But I never said anything to my mother.

Whenever Dad gets back to New York next, and he’s once again raving about the brave new musical he read about that we should really see, I’m not about to remind him of my preference for meaty Pulitzer-worthy dramas. Reminding my parents of anything important to me is opening a Pandora’s box and liberating thirty-plus years of venom and anomie.

My day doorman, Verne, buzzes to tell me there’s a deliveryman on his way up with flowers. Verne is always sending people up without checking if it’s okay, but my annoyance quickly subsides. The bouquet of irises and hyacinths is huge and gorgeously blue.

The card reads:
Forgive me for my shocking lack of tact. Please let me see those Greenblotz blue eyes again
.

From that creep! I lay in bed again like a rabbit hiding in the brush until danger passes. But danger isn’t passing. I can save Izzy Greenblotz’s dream, but I’ll have to sacrifice my self-respect.

I dial Steve’s cell-phone number.

“Hel-lo.”

I take a breath and speak, “It’s Heather.”

“Hey. You’re talking to me?”

My voice is treacle sweet. “Yes. I want to apologize for kicking you out.”

“You do? I figured you have my picture up on the wall as a dartboard. My timing is not so great, huh?”

“Well, no. But let’s talk seder first. I think it’s a great idea. My family would enjoy doing the broadcast, and frankly it would be good for business.”

Steve pauses, perhaps considering how to read my directness. “I spoke to my boss. I told him I’d spoken to you and you were, uh, undecided. He’s incredibly gung ho. He wanted me to approach you again, but I didn’t know how. This is uncomfortable for me—I wanted to see you on a personal basis again too.”

The flowers. The rhetoric. Yecch. But before I can tell this snake to slither out of my life, Steve says, “Do you want to play with the piano or the felt?”

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry, not you. I’m baby-sitting my niece.” Several ivory keys are hit loudly and discordantly. “Now Charlotte’s using more technique,” he says after a laugh. “What a pro. The little girl breaks my heart she’s so beautiful.”

There’s something about men talking to and about small children. Catnip. “How old is she?” I say despite my plan to get what I need from Steve and get off the phone.

“Fourteen months. My sister’s ready to kill me because the baby’s just got over a urinary tract infection, and I messed up, big-time.”

“What did you do?”

“The doctor attached a teeny pee bag to skin under her diaper for a sample. But Charlotte didn’t pee when Mommy was home, so I was supposed to remove the bag when it was full and keep it fresh. I thought my sister meant keep it fresh in the freezer, not the fridge.”

“Yikes. Be careful not to eat the yellow Popsicle.”

“You mean the peesicle.”

I laugh loudly—that
was
funny—and Steve’s voice brightens even more. “So when can we meet to discuss all this? How about in two hours?”

“Okay,” I say, interested again, defeated.

As I sit waiting near the dog run in Tompkins Square Park for Steve, the sight of him launches a battle between my brain and my libido. I don’t think anyone this attractive has ever given me the time of day.

He extends a hand and bends his knee in front of his bench. “Forgiveness, milady.”

“Let’s talk seder first, and then I’ll bust your chops.”

Steve laughs and rises. He sits extremely close to me on the bench. “Thanks for coming downtown. So do you want to go over what will happen at a live feed?”

“Yes. I’ve only ever taped video for my films.”

Two pugs hump vigorously behind the bars of the dog park. A bear-size black Newfoundland, the dog park’s gentle giant, is roused out of his sleep to chase the female pup.

“We’d keep it small and intimate,” Steve says after the ensuing melee between the respective dog owners settles down. “There’ll be a remote truck parked outside your apartment—”

“We’d do it at my cousin’s house in West Orange.”

“That’s fine. Anyhow, as I was saying, inside the room it will feel less intrusive. I’ll get Jared as the DP. You liked Jared, right?”

“Yes,” I say.

“The beauty of Jared is that he understands lighting as well as the lens. There’s nothing he can’t do. Tonia told me he developed this crazy method when he couldn’t change the lighting in a room. He floated a teeny battery-powered light over the interviewer’s head with helium balloons.”

“Isn’t that a fire danger?”

“It worked, what can I say? He’s insane, but he’s creative.”

I laugh a little. “I wished everything floated in helium, imagine books on a string. You could really get use out of it.”

“I love the way your mind works,” Steve says with a large white smile.

Steve’s as smooth as Muhammad Ali during his finest hour. He always knows the exact thing to say to keep himself in the ring.

“We’ll have Tonia there. She’s a great girl.”

I study his face. Did he have a fling with Tonia? Steve’s a pro. Nothing revealed.

“When this seder is over, how are we going to celebrate?”

“Any suggestions?” I say.

“Have you ever been ballooning?”

“No.”

“With all this helium talk, I’m thinking we could pack a champagne lunch and go ballooning.”

“That sounds unusual,” I say, even though my mind says to run the other way.

“So,” he picks up. “Back to the seder. Can you give me the names of who’s going to be there, and how they are related to you?”

“Let’s start with my father’s mother, Grandma Gertie. She’s the one who runs our little store.”

“She’s your grandmother? I thought you said during the tour that she died a while back. Is this your mother’s mother?”

I panic. “Did I say grandmother? I meant that she’s like a grandmother. She was my father’s mother’s sister.”

After more initial planning, we leave on patched terms. He plants a kiss on my lips before he rushes off to his shoot of East Village coffeehouses.

A Google search gets me to Telefoongids, the Dutch White Pages, in a twenty-first-century second, but I have no such luck with Dad’s Telefoonnummer. Plenty of Ganesvoort and Groesbeck but no Greenblotz. I try other search engines, looking for any correspondence he might have written in newsgroups, but come up cold.

Then, taking Bettina’s suggestion, I call the American consulate general in Amsterdam. As I suspected, Dad isn’t registered.

Jake calls. “I got my intern, Dimple, to buy me
Judaism for Dummies
.”

“Oh, please. That’s going to save us?”

“They’re really good, those
Dummies
books. That’s how I learned Excel. Remember how condescending you were when you tried to teach me?”

“I wasn’t condescending. Everything was a joke to you. You wouldn’t buckle down and listen.”

“Anyhow, I’ve got the whole seder memorized. Go ahead—test me.”

“I remember there’s something bitter we serve, right? Horseradish or beets or something like that.”

“Yup. That’s the
maror
. To remind us of the pain of our ancestors even as we have a big meal. You can grate it yourself, but with all we have to do, a jar of Silver’s horseradish is fine for the
maror
. It’s balanced with
haroset—
the sweet stuff. Siobhan found a great recipe for
haroset—
with walnuts, prunes and apricots. She’s got the wine for the kiddush and the menu planned already for the main meal. We’re having—wait, I wrote it down for you—chopped liver and sliced tomato, hot borscht, smothered chicken, piquant carrots, a mixed-vegetable salad and lemon pie.”

“Isn’t the pie against the Passover rules?”

“Not if it firms through refrigeration, and not rising.”

“I’m impressed.”

“All we needed to get our engines going was
Judaism for Dummies
. I ordered you your own copy.”

I laugh. “Are you getting a commission from the
Dummies
publisher?”

“That’s a good idea. Maybe we even make some immediate money off our airtime with Jewish-product placement.”

“It would defeat the purpose of the whole thing. We want to look like we know what the hell we’re talking about. Now listen, don’t forget to tell Siobhan she’s a lifesaver for pulling that menu together.”

“Will do. I was going to get it catered but Siobhan wants to learn the meaning of the seder by cooking it.”

“The Ghost of Grandpa Reuben must have gotten to your Irish lass in her sleep.”

“Boo,
schmooe
, you’re not a Jew!” Jakes chants in a very good and slightly scary impersonation of our raspy grandfather.

“Instead of borscht, why don’t you have Siobhan serve matzo ball soup? We want to push the matzo meal. I’ve heard customers tell me during the factory tours that matzo balls never fail if made in batches of twenty-six. Can’t imagine why, but maybe that would help.”

“I’m writing that down because matzo ball soup is an excellent idea. So it’s coming together, huh? You’ll do fine. You don’t need your dad.”

“My therapist thinks I should go to Amsterdam and track him down,” I confess. “She thinks it would calm me down to drag him back and have him there.”

“Worth a try. I could use your help over there anyhow. Jan Quacken from Albert Vroom Supermarkets recently dropped his entire order. He was our biggest buyer in the Netherlands, and now he’s not returning faxes.”

“Quacken’s really his name? Poor guy.”

“Uh, hello, your name is Greenblotz!” We both snort, and Jake adds, “If you want to go, I’ll share the cost.”

“Jake, I have the money.”

“I guess you got your dividend check.”

“Yes, thanks.”

“If you want those checks to keep coming, we have to go through with this Food Channel thing.”

“I’ll go for a weekend if you can handle the high season by yourself—”

“If getting your dad here will calm you down, I’m all for it.”

“First I have to find him. I’ve had no luck so far.”

When I get off the phone with Jake, I take a break from the dad search and check my e-mail. I have two, one from Vondra who, unsolicited, asked Mahmoud if he has any contacts for me in Amsterdam. He’s given her the number of Prince Willem-Alexander and Princess Maxima, whose wedding he attended as the official representative of Egypt. Prince Willem-Alexander as in the crown prince of the Netherlands.

Honey, I know you have a short trip, but Mahmoud thought maybe you can scoot over to The Hague—V

Yeah, like I’m going to follow that one through: “Uh, hello, is this the Crown Prince? You don’t know me, but a mutual friend of ours told me to call…”

Vondra’s enthrallment with Mahmoud’s power is getting on my nerves. It’s official. There’s also a creepy e-mail from a bachelor in New York who checked out my America Online profile—the one I thought I’d deleted a month ago when I started getting bombarded with creepy e-mail from a bachelor in Alaska.

Dear HeatherG23: I see you live in New York City too and that you enjoy books and good television. I think you’d be a good match for me. I’m 38 + handsome. I collect old Zenith televisions and I’m looking for a steady. ZENITHGUY

I compose the nicest possible
Fuck Off
I can think of, one that would leave this weirdo’s ego intact:

Dear ZENITHGUY. I am 87. Thank you for your interest. You sound like a very kind young fellow. It really made my day. HeatherG23.

I start checking on flights to Amsterdam and open my file cabinet to make sure my passport is current. It is; there are six more months before I need to reapply.

My expired passports are also in that drawer, in the Important-Paper File, and I can’t resist checking out my teen self, a mousy girl in an argyle sweater and a ponytail. My old yearbooks are there too, and I pull the 1988 yearbook from Dalton and turn to my page. In this picture my hair is shoulder-length and notably flat even without a nineties flatiron. (No bad perm for me—I religiously performed the eighties grooming step of a crème rinse.) My smile is decidedly forced. I’m wearing the same brown argyle sweater in the Dalton picture as in my passport. I wasn’t a geek, or particularly unpopular. Just there, under the radar. I had a few close friends who were equally low-key, the kind the popular kids nod to and occasionally invite to a party. My shopping addiction started later, when my parents finally broke up for good. My mother’s shopping got out of control around the same time. Sometimes I’d see bags from Madison Avenue boutiques near her bed, untouched for over a month. Back in high school though, most of my shirts and pants and dresses were still different shades of tan. I can fake my well-being better these days. It’s amazing what a bright red outfit can do for your image.