Invasion of the Blatnicks

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “There isn’t any bar here,” Steve said. “This is a wedding. But stick around, it might be good for a laugh or two.”

  By the time the rabbi arrived, the audience was seated. The rabbi changed the music on the tape player to the wedding march, and everyone got quiet and looked around behind. The first bridesmaid was a waitress from the hotel restaurant. She was on a coffee break, and still wore her starched white cap.

  Dolores followed her, and then behind them Jerry and Mimi brought Sheryl down the aisle, one on each side of her like they were making sure she didn’t run away again. Morty and Richie, who was serving as best man, came up to the tiki hut from the side. They were wearing modified tuxedos made of khaki, featuring epaulets and brass buttons that matched the bride’s gown. It was, as Estelle put it, a very tropical look.

  The ceremony was mercifully short, because it was very hot out on the sand. Morty stamped down hard on the glass and he and Sheryl turned to walk back down the aisle.

  Mrs. Blatnick said, “Rice! Who brought the rice?”

  The Blatnicks and the Bermans all looked at each other. No one had rice. Richie picked up a handful of sand and threw it at the bride and groom. Everyone else did too as Sheryl and Morty ran up the aisle, stumbling on the uneven ground.

  A buffet table and bar were set up next to the pool for the wedding reception. Everyone stood around eating, drinking and talking. Estelle and Joe kept bringing potential customers over to examine the wedding gown. Morty drank champagne and made jokes in Latin that no one understood. Richie gulped rumrunners and complained to anyone who’d listen that Sheryl shouldn’t get all the attention just because she was the one who got married.

  Steve and Dolores sat next to each other on deck chairs in the shade of a banyan tree. “Why did you convince Sheryl to marry Morty this morning?” he asked.

  Dolores took a sip of champagne. “She really wanted to marry him. All she needed was somebody to tell her she was doing the right thing.” She paused. “I hope if I get scared on my wedding day, somebody does the same for me.”

  Sheryl and Morty came over then, continuing a conversation. “I’m still bummed that we can’t go on a honeymoon,” Sheryl said.

  “Well, Sheryl, you know your uncle’s trial is next week and I’m his attorney,” Morty said. “We can’t go on a honeymoon now. Maybe after the trial.”

  Sheryl frowned. “I don’t want to wait until after the trial. I want to go now. A honeymoon isn’t official unless you go right after the wedding.”

  Morty took her hand. “We can have our honeymoon right here in the hotel. I’ll make it up to you, honey. I’m sure I can make you have an orgasm this time.”

  Sheryl’s eyes lit up. “Really? You’re sure?”

  Morty nodded. “I’m sure. I’ve been practicing.”

  Steve wondered briefly who Morty had been practicing with. Not Dolores; Steve had been keeping her too busy.

  “Then what are we waiting around down here for? Let’s go upstairs!” Sheryl jumped up and took Morty’s hand. They ran toward the hotel doors.

  Dolores got up to get a refill on her champagne, and stopped on the other side of the pool to talk and laugh with Rita and Mimi. Steve wondered if he and Dolores would ever get married, if he’d know any more or less than Morty Fleischmann about his bride on their wedding day. He had already seen many different sides to Dolores, from the first time he met her by this very pool, when she had seemed hard and cheap. He still saw occasional flashes of that girl, but now Dolores seemed to have as many facets as a diamond.

  A lizard scuttled by Steve’s foot and disappeared into the croton hedge. He resisted an impulse to chase it into the bushes, grab it and turn it over to see how pink its stomach was. Maybe he could sic his father and the Florida Club on the Neuschwanstein Palace. He laughed and took another sip of his drink.

  32 – It’s Not Perjury to Say Something Nice

  While Sheryl and Morty spent the day after their wedding locked in the honeymoon suite at the Neuschwanstein, the rest of the family recuperated around the pool. “I guess Morty’s going to make Sheryl have an orgasm or die trying,” Richie said to Steve, elbowing him and winking.

  That afternoon, Steve drove to the hospital to visit Mary and Australia. “We’re going up to Lake Worth tomorrow,” Mary said, sitting up in bed with Australia in her arms. “Me and Tunisia and the baby, to stay with my father. John’s getting his cast off Thursday, so we’re hoping he can get a job. You think there might be something for him at the mall once it starts up again?”

  “When he’s ready, you have him ask for me,” Steve said, walking around to the side of the bed to get a good look at the baby. “I’m real glad things have worked out so well.”

  “We’re not home safe yet,” Mary said. “But I got a good feeling about the future. How about you?”

  “Me, too. Things are definitely looking up.” He talked about Dolores for a while, and about how he hoped to get the site back to work soon, and then Mary yawned. “I better let you get your rest. You’re going to have your hands full.”

  When he got back to the hotel, Steve helped Richie move into Sheryl’s room, and he moved his own things to the living room of Rita and Harold’s suite, where there was a sofa bed.

  The next morning, Tuesday, he met the Florida Club at the site, and showed them, Uncle Max and Junior the area where Mary had found the lizards. Harold could not make it because he and Rita had to be at their apartment to receive their new cabinetry, but Rose Whitman and several members of the Florida Club’s board agreed to recommend that the nature preserve be located at the rear of the site. “All we have left is the EPA,” Steve said.

  On Wednesday afternoon Steve went shopping for new furniture with his parents. “I asked Dolores to come with us, too,” he said, as they left the suite. “I said we’d pick her up.”

  “Dolores?” Rita asked. “Aren’t you getting serious with her very fast?” Rita turned to Harold. “I told you it was funny how that girl was always around. See, she’s got her eye on Steve.”

  “Mother.”

  “Didn’t she used to go out with Morty?” Rita asked. “I’ll bet she grabbed you up as soon as Morty dumped her.”

  “She probably thinks we’re rich like the Blatnicks,” Harold said. “You with your suite at the Neuschwanstein Palace.”

  Steve wondered if Dolores really had taken him up as a substitute for Morty. But he shook his head. “She doesn’t think anything about you at all,” Steve said. “She likes me, and I like her. You’re always complaining I never bring my girlfriends around to meet you. So I’m bringing.”

  They rode down in the elevator in silence. Rita said, “You know, I never asked her. Where did Dolores go to college?”

  “She went to beauty school, not college.”

  “Steven, sweetheart, I’m just looking out for you. You have two degrees, from very good universities. I think you might be happier with a girl who’s as intelligent as you are.”

  “Dolores is very sharp,” Steve said. “You don’t have to go to college to be smart. Look at you. You didn’t go to college, and Daddy married you.”

  “Things were different back then,” Rita said. “My parents were immigrants. They didn’t have the money for college.”

  “Dolores’s parents are immigrants. Just like yours.”

  “All right,” Harold said, as they pulled up in front of Dolores’s building. “That’s enough arguing. Nobody says this girl wants to marry Steve anyway.”

  “Why not?” Steve demanded. “You don’t think somebody would want to marry me? What’s wrong with me?”

  “Here she comes!” Rita said fiercely. “We’ll talk later.”

  Dolores got into the back seat with Harold. “It’s so nice of you to invite me along,” she said. “Your whole family has been so nice to me. You’re lucky to be so close. My parents live in Tampa and my sister’s in New York, and I never get to see them.”

  “Really?” Rita asked, turning in her seat. “
What does your father do?”

  “He’s a doctor,” Dolores said. “He speaks very good English, but they make it so hard for a doctor who was trained in a foreign country to practice here, so all the time we lived in Puerto Rico, he had to work as a technician at a hospital. He finally passed his tests when he was forty years old and we moved to Miami. He and an old friend opened a medical clinic in Tampa two years ago.”

  She and Rita chatted while Steve drove to a discount furniture store in west Dade. Dolores agreed with everything Rita liked, and Steve could see his mother warming to her by degrees. After they had bought a bedroom set, a sofa, and a coffee table, Rita suggested they stop and have a snack.

  At the restaurant, Dolores excused herself to the ladies room. “Her father is a doctor,” Rita said. “That’s good.”

  “But she didn’t go to college,” Steve said.

  “So maybe you were right. You don’t have to go to college to be a smart person.”

  “What do you think, Daddy? Do you like Dolores?”

  “She’s got nice legs,” Harold said.

  “Harold!”

  “So? I’m entitled to look. She seems like a nice person. When you’re ready to get married, let me know. I’ll take a closer look.”

  They bought some lamps, some linens, and a bookcase for Steve’s bedroom, and then they all went out to dinner. “When are you going to be able to go back to your apartment?” Dolores asked Steve, as the waiter distributed the food.

  “I’m still negotiating,” Steve said. “They can’t set me up in one until the fifteenth of the month. That’s still over a week away. I just want to get back.”

  “You must be eager to get back to your apartment, too, Mrs. Berman,” Dolores said. “How is your remodeling going?”

  Rita launched into a long description of her difficulties with the cabinetmaker, the painter and the electrician, which was only stopped when Harold yawned and said that if he had to go to the trial the next day he needed his sleep.

  The next morning the Bermans met Mimi and Sheryl in the coffee shop while they were having breakfast. “What do you want, sweetheart?” Mimi asked Sheryl, opening her menu.

  “I feel like I’ll throw up if I eat anything,” Sheryl said.

  “Morning sickness,” Mimi said. “Did you read that book I gave you about pregnancy?”

  Sheryl turned to face the ocean. “It was boring.”

  “If it wasn’t about orgasms, she wasn’t interested,” Steve whispered to Rita. Rita looked scandalized for a moment, but then a smile crept across her face.

  Sheryl started playing with her hair. “What do you think I should wear to the trial, Mom? Is there anything the wife of the defense attorney is supposed to wear?”

  “I don’t know, honey,” Mimi said. “We could look in the Amy Vanderbilt book and see if she says anything.”

  The trial was not to start until three o’clock, so Steve, Harold and Rita went out to the pool to relax after breakfast. “I can’t wait until this afternoon,” Steve said as he adjusted his beach chair. “The trial should be fun.”

  “They may want your father to be a character witness.”

  “What the hell?” Harold said, sitting up. After a half hour in the sun, he was starting to burn. “I’m not committing perjury for that jerk.”

  “It’s not perjury to say something nice about someone.”

  “Say something nice about Sheldon Blatnick.”

  “Keep your voice down, Harold,” Rita said. She thought for a minute. “He was always very well groomed.”

  “Please your honor, he couldn’t have robbed that 7-11. He was always very well groomed. Don’t be silly, Rita.”

  Rita thought very hard. Steve could tell she was thinking, because she was frowning, and she tried never to frown in the sun. Harold watched her for a minute, and then said, triumphantly, “See? Your brother Jerry was stupid enough to marry his sister. Let Jerry get up and perjure himself.”

  “No one has to perjure himself,” Rita said. “If they ask you, just say no.”

  “Remember when I turned down the aliyah at Richie’s bar mitzvah?” Harold asked. “Just say no, you said. They complained for weeks.”

  “Turn on your stomach, Harold. We’ll worry about it later.”

  Harold grumbled as he turned over. “It’s a good thing you weren’t born when we were slaves in Egypt, Dad,” Steve said. “They didn’t have number twenty-four sun block then.”

  “Why is he with us? He’s twenty-five years old. Can’t we get a baby-sitter?”

  “Harold, Steven, that’s enough. I’m going to take a nap.” Rita rolled on her stomach and closed her eyes, and so did Steve.

  Everyone met for lunch at the coffee shop, where they took over one corner and pushed the tables together. The waitress who had been Sheryl’s bridesmaid poured them all coffee and took their orders. Sheldon wanted French toast.

  “Sorry, but we’re out of powdered sugar in the kitchen so the cook has taken French toast off the menu,” the waitress said. She stood with her pen poised over her pad, waiting for Sheldon to make a split-second decision and choose something else. Steve thought she was obviously ignorant of the Blatnicks and Sheldon’s thinking processes.

  “I want French toast!” Sheldon said. “It’s my last meal, for Christ’s sake. I can’t get French toast?”

  There was a big fuss. Dusty asked to see the manager, Mrs. Blatnick pounded her cane on the floor, and Sheldon looked as if he might cry. The cook agreed to let Sheldon have the French toast without powdered sugar, though he wasn’t happy.

  Everyone talked and traded stories back and forth. “A real family get-together,” Rita said.

  “Yeah, we should do this every time someone in the family goes on trial,” Steve whispered to Harold.

  “Why do you keep saying these things to me?” Harold asked. “You know I don’t think they’re funny.”

  “I do it to aggravate you,” Steve said, taking a rasher of over-crispy bacon off his BLT sandwich and feeding it into his mouth, where it disintegrated into hard little nuggets. “I’m your son. That’s my role in life.”

  “Yeah, well, I want to know who cast this goddamn movie.”

  “Harold, Steven, that’s enough,” Rita said.

  The Bermans detoured over to the art museum to see an exhibit of Audubon’s bird paintings on the way to the courthouse. “But first, I want to run up Collins to this little store I saw,” Rita said. “There was a lovely little end table in the window. I think it would be perfect for your living room, Steve.”

  “I’ve already spent all the insurance money,” Steve said.

  “If you like it, I’ll buy it for you,” Rita said. That was before she saw the price tag; when they drove up to the store and found out that the table was authentic Chippendale and priced in five figures, she changed her mind.

  “We could always come back later, break the window, and steal it,” Steve said. “Or maybe we could get Sheldon to do it for us.”

  “That’s enough, Steven,” Rita said. “Now drive us to the trial.”

  33 – Who Needs Clothes on a Honeymoon?

  Just before everyone walked into the courtroom, Morty put his arm around Sheldon’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, Shel, we’ll blow their brains out,” Morty said.

  “Someone blew Sheldon’s brains out a long time ago,” Steve whispered to Rita. “Like at birth.”

  “You don’t have to come in if you feel that way, Steven,” Rita said. “Go back to the hotel and lie in the sun.”

  “I can’t, Mom,” Steve said. “Sheldon said he’s looking forward to seeing me in the audience. I feel kind of guilty, because I told him to go out and make some action, and then he did. And even though we’re not related, he is kind of like family.”

  Morty and Sheldon sat at a table in front of the judge, and the Blatnicks, Fenstersheibs and Bermans were all seated in the rows behind them. The District Attorney sat at a table on the other side of the aisle. Steve didn’t know any
of the other people in the courtroom, though he was sure some were witnesses. Some, he imagined, were bored and came down to the courthouse to watch trials when things got slow at home.

  The judge called a recess after jury selection, around five, and Morty was enthusiastic about the jurors. “I wanted dumb-looking ones,” he said. “People who could empathize with Sheldon, who might make the same kind of mistake themselves.”

  When Steve got back to the hotel, there were three messages from Uncle Max. The EPA was near a decision, but needed more information. Steve skipped dinner with his parents and spent the time in the hotel room making phone calls. Dolores came over after a while and they watched TV with Rita and Harold.

  “After the trial is over, we’ll be moving back to our condo,” Rita told Dolores. “The work there is almost finished. I hope you’ll come over and see us a lot.”

  “I’d like that,” Dolores said. “Sometimes I wish my mother was here. There are things, you know, you like to do together.”

  “You just feel free to call me,” Rita said. “Maybe we can go shopping. We can have lunch.” She leaned over in a conspiratorial way. “I can tell you all about Steve.”

  “Mother!”

  The next morning, Steve passed all the information he had gathered on to Uncle Max. “Thanks, Steve,” Uncle Max said. “You’ll be at this number all day?”

  Steve looked at Rita, who was waiting in the doorway for him. “I’ve got commitments. I can call you later if you want.”

  “Can you give me a number where I can reach you?”

  Steve was torn. He didn’t want to get into the complicated business of Sheldon Blatnick, but he didn’t want to lie either. “I’ll be in court all day,” he said. “It’s a family matter.”

  “All right. Call me every couple of hours.”

  The family gathered at the courthouse for the continuation of the trial. Dolores, who had the day off, sat between Steve and Sheryl. In his opening argument, Morty said he would prove that this was all a misunderstanding, that Sheldon had never intended to rob the 7-Eleven at all. The D.A. said simply that he intended to prove Sheldon’s guilt.