by Laurie Graff
“Who’s side? The bride or the groom?” I heard the sound of an elderly woman’s voice. I didn’t know how much time had elapsed when I heard the chatter from the sink outside the bathroom stall. I heard the water turn on and turn off. The delicate noises of lipsticks, combs and compacts clattered against the marble countertop.
“Groom,” answered another voice in a flat New York accent. “Me and my husband know him from junior high. We all grew up in Flushing. This is a big day. We all took bets he’d never marry.”
I pressed the black button to flush the toilet, again, so no one could hear me gulp. This was exactly what made me crazy! When I met men that no one thought would ever marry, they didn’t disappoint. They completely lived up to their expectations. But for other people, people like Brooke...
Brooke meets a guy like Mitch Weintraub and... Boing! How does that happen? I had to find out. I unlatched the door, somewhat calmer than when I had entered, smiled at the women at the sink and joined in.
“When I first met Mitch, I thought, boy—if this guy were dating me it would be another hit-and-run. Another three-month dating accident,” I said, clicking open my purse to gloss my lips with a color called Flirt. “But with Brooke, it was IT from the start. How does that happen?”
The older woman stood back and watched. True, she had initiated the original question, but she was just being friendly. This much information she could live without.
The other one, my peer, looked at me and said, “Easy. Brooke is exotic. That Waspy look. A gorgeous, blond shiksa. Mitch never thought he’d get a girl like that growing up. How could he? Look who was in his class...me!” She pointed to herself in the mirror. Dark hair, a bump on her nose, a little plump. But she was attractive, and she looked like she felt that way.
“There’s got to be more to it than just looks,” I said. “Though I know what you mean. I know the type. I grew up near all of you guys in Queens.”
“Yeah, but you...” She surveyed me closely. “Could be weird for you, you know. You’re in the middle. For those guys you’re not like me, but you’re no shiksa goddess, either.”
My upstairs neighbor, Mr. Schindleheim, a retired garmento, had the tendency to sermonize in the lobby, keeping me up-to-date on modern Jewish ways and culture. Most recently Rabbi Schindleheim—a name I believe he’s earned—told me that based on current statistics I had a better chance of getting run over by a truck than finding a nice-looking, successful Jewish guy in my age group who would want to marry me. This breaking news came as he held open the door to the incinerator while I was throwing out my garbage.
“So, what you’re actually saying is... What are you actually saying? Uh, excuse me, what’s your name?”
“Susan.”
“Karrie. Hi.”
I heard the bathroom door swing open and shut behind us as the other woman escaped back into the safety of her cluster.
“Never mind,” said Susan who seemed to be losing points in trying to make hers. “Maybe you’ll catch the bouquet.”
“She’s not throwing one.”
Susan swung open the door and left the ladies’ room. My perplexed image stared back at me from the gilded mirror. If I could only get out of this bathroom.
The impetus to move finally arrived, but by the time I exited, everyone was being ushered into a huge banquet room for the ceremony. I set my champagne flute down on the nearest table and followed the crowd. Two sides of the room had floor-to-ceiling windows that faced the Hudson River, now sparkling, since the rain had miraculously stopped and the sun was shining. The sunshine elevated everything.
I stopped and looked around. Gosh, it was beautiful. White-and-gold chairs, the long white aisle, white candles, and... Why was I so surprised to see a white chuppah up front?
The traditional wedding canopy was beautifully draped in white silk with rose petals strewn over it. The rabbi presiding would stand under it and wed the couple. And there you had it. Exotic, my ass.
Mitch may have originally been blindsided by Brooke’s Bostonian beauty, but now that he was getting married he chose to do it in a conventional Jewish way. As for Brooke, she was an Intro to Judaism class graduate from their early courtship days, so from the beginning she had readily agreed.
How exotic was that? I thought, while my eyes searched for a row with an empty seat.
“Karrie Kline, you look great, girlfriend!” The voice made me jump, and I swirled around when I felt a hand tap me on the shoulder. “Hi!”
“Oh my goodness! Diane? What are you doing here?”
“I’m friends with Brooke, from commercial shoots. I know her for years. I did her makeup today.”
“That’s an amazing coincidence! Hey—what do you think of mine? I ran out and bought all the colors you used on me that day.” I fluttered my eyelids for her to see.
“Very good,” she said looking at me from a few angles. “See how that yellow shadow makes your blue eyes pop!”
“I thought you did a terrific job, you and Tina. What a great photographer she is.”
“Well, I’m very happy for you,” said Diane. “We totally loved your show! And the article was awesome.”
“It sure helped sell tickets!”
“Have you heard anything new?”
Although there was nothing available, Diane still looked to the right and the left for a seat near to her. I took the opportunity to check out her makeup and her perfect French braid, curious to see how a real makeup artist made up when she was the one going out.
“It’s going well,” I said. “The Wow Women piece made a gigantic difference. We have reservations now!”
I still couldn’t believe what was starting to happen. I was afraid if I talked about it I might give it a jinx. I turned to the side so Diane couldn’t see, and quickly made a fake spitting sound through my forefinger and middle finger as not to give myself a kaynahora. As not to give myself the evil eye.
“Everyone reads Wow Women, and with that glamour shot of you on the roof of your theater, I think you’re going to get a real run off-Broadway. Hell, I think you’re going to get a movie deal, girl.”
“Well, making a living might be a good place to start, but Ryan, the head of MTW—My Theater Workshop—decided to keep it going since Wow Women came out, and now I’m getting a cut from the door.”
Boy, who knew Jay Kohn would turn out to be so helpful? When I saw him on opening night I could never have believed that he would have been able to get a huge magazine like that to do a story on me. He even told me he’s trying to get the New York Times to come down. Ryan hired him, but he’d been pushing hard for me in exchange for a couple of dating tips. Since he saw the show he thinks I’m a dating how-to. The truth is I’m a dating how-not-to. But he and The Girlfriend reconciled, and now my show was getting hot. One girl’s frog was another girl’s prince...and another girl’s publicist.
“It’s gonna happen for you,” said Diane. “I can feel it. Can’t you?”
“I just think it’s amazing that I was able to turn all those stories into something besides torture,” I said. “I mean it was just a fluke that I even put it together. You know I was supposed to do another one-act, but the director got a gig and the show got canned. Speaking of happy endings, do I get to meet your husband?” I searched the row for the face I thought might be Diane’s husband.
“He’s working today. On Sunday. Life of a freelancer. Hey, so where are you going to sit? There’s no room in this row.”
I surveyed the room that had suddenly opened up with possibilities and saw one seat on the other side. “Over there,” I pointed, and blew her a kiss. “I’ll see you later.” Then I slipped into my seat, noticing that the whole view had changed.
* * *
Craaaacccckkkk!!!!
Mitch stomped on that glass like a jubilant hunter, before claiming his catch and sealing it with a kiss.
“Mazel tov!”
Cheers.
Applause.
Standing ovation.
>
The six-piece band burst into “New York, New York” as I made my way to the bar for a glass of Pinot Grigio picking up a crusted crab cake, two goat cheese truffles and a bite-sized cheese-and-pesto pizza along the way. I couldn’t imagine what would be served at dinner. There was so much incredible food. Brooke’s dad was going to be footing some bill! Unless he’d been saving since she was a kid.
Growing up I didn’t have a lot of chores to do at home. It was not out of my mother’s utter kindness. More compulsive than kind, Millie always felt if you wanted something done right you should do it yourself. I didn’t mind. It took most of my concentration to just get my one chore of setting the table done on a nightly basis. Henry, my stepfather, took out the garbage. Millie would come home from work and cook, either she or Henry would do the dishes, and when there was no way out I would dry.
When I went over to visit my friend Rachel, it was another story entirely. Rachel’s mom, Esther, had her hoppin’. Rachel was the only girl in a family of two other boys, and she was the oldest. As an only child I always envied Rachel, except for when I would go over to her apartment to play and find her sorting laundry, or even worse, ironing.
So one day I was over at Rachel’s, lying on her bed that was covered with a loose-leaf notebook adorned with flower-power stickers, and Nancy Drew’s The Hidden Staircase and Secret of the Old Clock that I shoved up to the side of the wall so I could sit and watch Rachel separate the whites from the darks, something in life I’ve still yet to master, let alone do, when Rachel told me about her wedding.
“I want a lot of bridesmaids,” she said. “And flower girls. And I want all the girls to wear red velvet dresses. And I want to get married in a church or a shul, I don’t really care.” I will interject that Rachel Smith was a half-Jewish and half-Christian combo through and through.
“And I want it to be really, really romantic and I want to do it when I’m twenty-one,” Rachel continued, as she threw her father and brothers’ underwear into the white pile, which kind of confused me because there were light-colored stripes in all of the underwear which I thought had qualified them as a color, and that is probably why to this day although my apartment remains clean, my whites tend to be very gray.
“So what about you, Kar? What is your wedding going to be?”
“My wedding? How do I know? I’m twelve.”
“But don’t you think about it all the time? Don’t you have a wedding fund? I’m the only girl in my family and I’m not getting a Bat Mitzvah so my father made me a wedding fund.”
“I never think about it and I don’t have any wedding fund.” Was that because I was going to have a Bat Mitzvah? “I have a Christmas Club,” I told her.
Millie had me make weekly deposits at the bank in a Christmas Club fund so I always had my own money at the end of the year to buy presents. But we weren’t making weekly deposits to save for any wedding! Never gave the thing a second thought. But I certainly thought about boys. I thought about boys all the time. I always thought about boys, but I never thought about the other thing.
“You can throw in a few cubes of ice,” I told the bartender as he poured my wine and I looked for a place to dispose of my newly acquired toothpick-and-napkin collection.
The couple to my left had just wrapped their arms through each other’s and clicked their glasses together. I wondered if, perhaps, you needed a wedding fund to think a wedding was a viable thing that was going to happen. A build-it-and-they-will-come type thing. My Grandma Rose had left me her wedding band to be married in. Millie had it locked in a vault for safe keeping. Was that the same thing?
“There she is,” someone called out, snapping me back to the moment. Who was that? A blue-haired, slightly robust woman came barreling towards me accompanied by another woman I didn’t know.
“You’re her, right? You’re the girl in that show? The one about the frogs.”
“Uh—yeah,” I said. “How do you know that?”
“We saw you!” said the other woman. They looked like each other and they both looked like matinee ladies. “My sister and I went into the city to see a show and we couldn’t get anything we liked at TKTS, and someone handed us a flier and we figured, if Wow Women went for it how bad could it be? So we walked over. It was great! You were great!”
“I, myself, have had a few dates like that,” said the first woman. “My sister’s married, but I never did. We’re Mitch’s side. We live in Rego Park. In Queens! Where you grew up!” They were so pleased to be privy to this information that had been revealed in my show.
They were beaming. At me. This was the first time I had been sought out. In public. For my performance. In my show. My little solo show that just started snowballing.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m so glad you liked it. I really, truly am,” I said, amazed these people had come up to me. What a hoot.
“Can you give me your autograph?” asked the second one, taking a cocktail napkin from the bar. She pulled a pen out of her black purse and pointed to a spot under the gold-embossed Brooke and Mitchell, June 12, 2005 for me to sign. “Write it to me. Rhoda. I can’t wait to tell Stanley,” said Rhoda, turning into the crowd and pointing to a faraway spot where her husband was apparently waiting.
“Let me ask you something...” The single sister started her question as I signed my name on the napkin for the married one. “How much of that was really true?” she asked. “I may be a little older than you, but believe me, I could relate. I went out with plenty nuts, too, in my day.”
“Oh, you can’t believe some of the frogs Becky went out with,” Rhoda chimed in.
“But you didn’t have that, right?” I asked Rhoda, pointing to her wedding band. “You got a real prince, right?” I figured Rhoda to be married fifty years if she was married a day.
“I like to think so,” Rhoda said, reaching past me to the bar to pick up a few more napkins for me to sign.
“My brother-in-law’s a real prince,” said Becky. But the moment Rhoda’s back was turned she mouthed to me, “Frog!”
Rhoda turned around with the napkins, having just missed the innuendo and said, “Sign one for my sister. Write that it’s never too late for her to meet her prince.”
I winked at Becky while signing her napkin—Just one last kiss may be all it takes! Karrie Kline.
Becky took it from me and smiled. “So what’s doing with you, now? You have your show, you look so nice... Beautyful! Are you here with someone?”
Ah—life’s ironies.
“Me? No. I’m here alone.”
“That’ll change,” said Becky.
“Doesn’t my nephew have any friends for you?” asked Rhoda. “You must be a friend of Brooke’s because you’re an actress like her.”
“We met in an acting class like three, four years ago.”
With that I spotted Brooke and Mitch for the first time since they had become Mr. and Mrs.
“Brooke!” I called out. “I’m so happy for you!” I ran over and hugged her, feeling the beading of her white dress against the palms of my hand. It was a sensational dress with a princess-style neckline, a bodice of teeny, tiny beads and a bottom that flowed to her ankles in panels of soft white chiffon. “You’re stunning!” I told my friend.
“I’m just relieved everything is going well,” said Brooke. “Look. There’s my husband.”
“Wait, is this the first time you said that?” I asked. “The words ‘my husband’?”
“Yes! And it was with you!”
We squealed like two cheerleaders in a locker room for a quick second before Brooke and Mitch were surrounded by more and more well-wishers.
I left the bar and went down the stairs to the outdoor terrace. The sun was soothing against my bare skin, a warm contrast from the rainy morning. I walked towards the white railings overlooking the river. One foot in front of the other. Quick steps that changed tempo and became a melody that played as I moved across the promenade and saw him see me.
He was stand
ing there, in the sunlight, near the railing. A drink in his hand, his dark slacks hanging like the bottom half of an updated zoot suit. Talking to another man. He saw me, left the conversation and the man, and walked towards me in slow motion as I stood and waited.
He was coming. Closer. Sauntering. Slim and athletic with short, light brown hair. And when I saw him in full, from his devilish grin down to his black leather Kenneth Cole shoes, I saw he was wearing a chic yellow T-shirt under a stunning sports jacket. He showed up at this black-tie affair in neither a suit nor a tie. Not even a real shirt. But you could see he had taken pains with his clothing. He looked great. Cool and rebellious, making sure he stood out. He commanded attention. And he had just received mine.
Two
Having smelled food, a frog will immediately make mouth-opening movements, despite the fact the object of desire may, indeed, be very far away.
“Hello,” he said. “Who are you?”
I followed him over to the railing, ready to be led.
“Are you a relative? Brooke’s cousin?” He leaned back against the railing and in with his eyes. They were very green and very bright in the sunlight.
“Not related. Brooke’s friend. You?”
“Friend. Mitch’s.”
We smiled. He had a nice one.
“So. No cousins,” I said, indicating both of us.
“Nope.”
I took a sip of wine. His glass indicated he was drinking something harder.
“I met two of Mitch’s aunts, though. Rhoda and Becky.”
“Aunt Rhoda and Aunt Becky! How are they?”
As if on cue, I turned to my right and saw that some of the clusters had relocated outside to a spot a few feet away.