But on this day when things were playing out so poorly, we walked and walked, and my grandma talked not of the past but about how silly it was to make yourself so reliant on one person.
The day was one of the few genuinely nice ones of our visit, and the deck was loaded, to borrow my grandma’s phrasing. I remember looking around as we walked, scanning the crowds for Slip, particularly when we got toward the shuffleboarders. If he ever hit the deck, the shuffleboard area was his spot. I didn’t see him. My grandma didn’t see him, either. She didn’t say she was looking, but I knew she was.
The audience also will notice her glancing around for him as she says to me, “Marriage, my Davy, is hard no matter how old you are. If you ask me, love matters a little, but luck matters more.”
I will watch my grandma’s feet turn out like a ballerina’s as she talks.
“It’s all one big crap shoot. You never know how things are gonna end up, and there’s no good way to hedge your bets.” She’ll sigh and stare out over the water before adding, “But I imagine it is a bit easier for girls nowadays because they have more choices and independence. They call it Women’s Lib, Davy. And between you and me”—she’ll pause again here to tug my shoulder toward her thin body—“if I knew where they were selling it, I’d go get me some.”
I did not have enough zinc oxide on my shoulders, and I was aware of both the feeling of them burning and the awkwardness one feels when one momentarily, like a flash in the pan, glimpses a person as just that—a person—and not a parent or grandparent. “I don’t know where to find Women’s Lib, either,” I’ll tell her.
I didn’t. But I did know that I had to help my grandma. I saw it as my responsibility. She had, after all, confided in me.
“I guess this is why they tell you to not put all your eggs in one basket,” she’ll say.
“Why?” I’ll ask.
“In case the basket turns out to be missing marbles,” she’ll say, and then chuckle at her joke.
I don’t care how he does it, but at this point, the actor who plays me will have to let the audience know that the wheels in his brain have begun to spin. I remember that day feeling the vibrations of the deck, like barely perceptible earthquakes, each time a car pulled in or out from the top floor of the parking garage below us. Perhaps the vibrations subconsciously gave me the idea.
I have no clue how to translate this osmotic creation of an idea onto the big screen. In the movie, as I saunter barefoot over the cement, perhaps the narrator will explain that below the pool deck was the parking garage. Every apartment came with two parking spaces. My grandparents’ top-floor slots, however, housed only one car—my grandfather’s brand-new Cadillac—which he gladly parked in the middle of both spaces.
Why did Slip have a free space? Simple: my grandmother couldn’t drive.
As the Davy character thinks, his grandma will say something like, “I bet Rachel and Marcy will get to be anything they want.” She’ll bet that Rachel becomes boss of something big, like the whole country. “But Marcy . . .” She’ll shake her head and sigh. “I don’t think she’d make her way through steno.”
Steno, I knew from previous walks, was short for stenography class, where my grandma was sent after she finished high school. The classes, along with ballet, were offered free at the Association House where she met my grandfather. By then he already had a car, and my grandma had legs, long dancer’s legs, which my grandfather would drive home every afternoon. They’d been driving together ever since. Estelle had never had any need to learn to do it herself.
Until this day, when Slip did not come home after breakfast to drive her to bridge before moving on with his afternoon. Today was a first, and I think that with this failure, my Grandma Estelle began to worry in earnest—because when I casually suggested, “Maybe you can learn to drive so you can take yourself to the Marco Polo,” she didn’t dismiss me or laugh at me the way I’d expected, the way that Laurel did when I suggested that she get a New York driver’s license.
On our next swing by the yellow chairs, my grandma and I asked my father to join us on our walk.
“There’s a cool boat I want to show you,” I hollered to him, and my grandma winked at me.
When the three of us reached the far side of the deck, I hung over the side of the cinderblock wall, studied the waves rolling into the bottom of it and the cars parked against it, and told my father my plan.
“It’s a good one,” my father declared. He patted my grandma’s back, and then replaced his own few strands of windblown hair as he explained that lessons would begin the very next morning in the Publix parking lot. “Early,” he told us, “before anyone sets out to do their grocery shopping for the day.”
My grandmother raised her brows in excitement. I slapped her a high-five. Then, while she was busy bantering about what fun the lessons would be, I quietly pointed out to my father that my grand-father’s Cadillac was still not in its space. My father shook his head. He was already aware.
CHAPTER 8:
Objects and Affections
When I rang Laurel’s buzzer on Sunday evening after our family dinner, I was nervous. My decision to go to her place was spur of the moment, propelled by guilt from my mother and curiosity ignited by Marcy’s remarks about the rabbi. I didn’t mention my plan to Marcy, I just left her house at my regular time, a polite interval after finishing two slices of apple pie.
I don’t do drop-ins, even on people I know. A lawyer like Rachel would classify the drop-in as an invasion of privacy. To a branding guy like me, it’s just plain Rude.
Hence, when Laurel asked through the intercom who was there, I identified myself as my alter ego, Mort Chuckerman. He was already dead, I figured, so how embarrassed could he be?
“This is a surprise.” Her raspy voice was garbled further by the speaker. “Is everything okay?”
I told her yes, that I’d just had a little trouble understanding some things that went on in our last class.
She said okay and buzzed me in. “Walk slowly,” she added. “I need time to put away some stuff.”
I wondered as I paced myself up the three flights whether “stuff” included the rabbi. The possibility that the two of them might be up there doing Yiddish on the side didn’t cross my mind until I was two flights into the climb. I was even more nervous by the time I reached the top than I’d been at the bottom.
But my angst was for naught, because the minute the Mormon Rodeo opened the door and I stepped into her foyer, I realized that ten rabbis, an entire minyan, might be holed up in her house and I’d never know it, the clutter was that bad.
The foliage was worse. Ferns and some sort of hanging stuff draped over the windowsill. An orchid was in the mix, along with a rose bush and vegetables. My eyes darted from them to the plates and pans filling the sink to the stacks of papers covering her couch and coffee table to the mounds of books and videos lined on shelves to a white cat (which Laurel later introduced as Chloe) sitting smugly on the end of a bed and then to Laurel, standing before me in shorts, a T-shirt, and the same horrible robe she’d worn in class.
I don’t know what I was expecting when I decided to drop in on her, but this scene was not it.
“I guess I should have walked slower,” I said, looking past her and into her natural habitat. I’d pictured neat white walls, or maybe pale pink, with an old-fashioned desk and papers tucked in files. I’d pictured shelves organized like a library, with a section for audio/visual and a section on Judaica. I’d figured she’d have, as Marcy does, a piece of her floor designated with a mat for yoga and meditation. I’d imagined a poster, one of the vintage SKI UTAH ones they’re using for the Olympics, on the wall.
She rolled her eyes at me and said, “I’ve been busy, I’ve been gone, and I wasn’t expecting company.”
I nodded and smiled as I took in Laurel’s Sunday night routine—which, from what I could tell, included eating grilled cheese, drinking a beer, and grading papers in her robe with all the window
s wide open and the air conditioner unit blasting.
“You sure do have the air flowing.”
“It gets hot in the robe,” Laurel said before holding out her grilled cheese and offering me some.
“Well, it is the end of June,” I said. “It might make more sense to take off the robe.” I then said no to the grilled cheese; I was still full from the pizza at Marcy’s, and Laurel’s kitchen looked so cluttered with pans and mugs and watering cans, I didn’t know how she’d find space to cook.
“I always wear the robe on Sunday nights,” she said, and before I had a chance to ask why, she put a hand to her hip and followed up with, “So, what brings you here?”
She motioned me toward her couch, a brown leather love seat that looked like it might have been cut from the same cloth as her messenger bag. She plopped herself down and began to scoop scripts from a cushion to make room for me.
“I wanted to apologize for running out of class without acknowledging our make-out session,” I said.
“I wouldn’t exactly call it a make-out session, Chuckerman. It was a kiss.” She propped her heels on the edge of her coffee table, leaned back, and pulled the crust from the body of her sandwich. “I didn’t mean to throw you.” She paused. “Well actually, I suppose that’s not true. I guess I did hope to throw you. I wanted to get you out of your head so you’d go back and watch the movie. Shock therapy.”
“Creative,” I said and ran a hand through my hair, as I tend to do when regrouping. I had expected more of an I-just-couldn’t-help-myself response.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Just to be clear,” I went on, my hand still in my hair, “the purpose of your kiss was to get me to watch Schindler’s List?”
Laurel nodded. “Correct.”
“So let me ask you this,” I said, pushing around a few of the papers on the table in search of mine. “If Judd, or say Don, had run out of the room because they didn’t want to watch the massacre, would you have redirected them the same way? French kisses for all?”
She laughed—a breezy laugh, as if she were in a conference room and her breasts were in a business suit, not hanging loose beneath an I HEART LA T-shirt. As if they hadn’t been pressing against me just a few days earlier. Apparently, our exchange in the hallway had had a larger impact on me than her.
“No, probably not,” she admitted. “Although neither of them asked me if I wanted to make out in the hallway.”
“I didn’t think you’d take me seriously. It was a Seinfeld reference.” I explained the episode, the one where Jerry tells Elaine that he didn’t get to see all of Schindler’s List because he was making out with his date.
Her head pivoted in ignorance. “I’ve never seen Seinfeld.”
“How is that possible?”
“How is it possible that you took that kiss seriously?” She picked up her beer to take a sip, but it was empty, so she set it back down and kept talking. “Regardless, you don’t need to apologize for running out. That’s what men do. They bail. I wouldn’t expect anything more.”
“What men are you referring to?” I asked. Perhaps she had the rabbi in mind, though I couldn’t imagine a rabbi would bail.
She didn’t name the rabbi. She named her father, who cheated on her mother, and her old boyfriend, some dude named Hal, whom she met in her MFA program and dated for three years. He drove a motorcycle and apparently left her for a woman in his riding group. “He’s the one who gave me my cowboy boots,” she said.
I nodded. “You dated a guy who rides a motorcycle and yet you won’t drive a car?”
“If you came here to nag me about the driver’s license, you can leave now. Besides, I never drove the motorcycle.”
“I didn’t come here to nag you,” I said, unsure of exactly why I was there. If memory served, I had come hoping for clarity as to how everyone involved felt post-kiss, but now I felt more unsettled than before. Her confidence and lack of emotion threw me. I continued with our relatively safe line of conversation. “However, I do think that anyone who is willing to get on a motorcycle should be willing to drive a car.”
“Hal didn’t drive a car.”
“Well, it doesn’t seem like Hal and I have a lot in common, then. I’d never ride a motorcycle.” I leaned back against the couch and tucked my hands behind my head. “I’d also never bail.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’m a loyalist. Once I take something on, I never get rid of it. Don’t I still drive my grandfather’s car?”
“I don’t know why you do.”
“I told you, loyalty to my grandfather.”
“You know, your grandfather wasn’t such a great guy either. He bailed.”
“My grandfather?” I asked. “No he didn’t.”
“Of course he did.”
“Did Marcy tell you this? ’Cause I know how girls talk. For instance, I know that Marcy somehow knew about our make-out session without me telling her”—I paused while Laurel mumbled a halfhearted apology for providing details to my sister—“but I also know that Marcy doesn’t always know what she’s talking about.”
She handed me her grilled cheese and began to file through the scripts on her table. After a few seconds, during which I sampled the sandwich and wondered how Laurel had gotten the upper hand on my family history, she located what she wanted. “Your Sentencing Scene,” she explained, waving it in the air. She flipped to the end of it, to the remarks about the wandering eye and the gambling. “You said so.”
“I told you what happened that night, what other people who did not like my grandfather said about him. But I never said he did those things.”
“C’mon,” Laurel said. “Do you really believe that your grandfather had an undeserved reputation?’
“I think a lot of people have undeserved reputations.”
“Like who?’
“Like my grandfather,” I said. “And Oscar Schindler,” I added, echoing my mother’s earlier example.
“For God sakes, Oscar Schindler couldn’t keep the women out of his bed.”
“Okay, well, aside from the philandering. People thought he was bad but in the end he turned out to be good. So in that sense, his reputation was undeserved.” I nudged her. “See? I paid attention in class. The kissing worked.”
“I’m so glad,” Laurel said. She brought her knees up to her chest and pulled the robe down over her knees. “You know, there’s another side to that story. According to the rabbi, plenty of people think that Oscar Schindler never had pure intentions—that he decided to spare the Jews only after he saw that the Nazis were going to be defeated. Basically, he was only out to save his own ass.”
“Well if that’s the case, what’s the big fuss over the movie?” I began to mimic Laurel’s teaching persona—the excited voice and wild hand-waving—and said, “Pay attention to the girl in the red dress, everyone. This symbolizes Schindler’s ultimate transformation.” In my regular voice, I asked, “Then what was all that about?”
“It’s a movie, Chuckerman,” Laurel said, downing the last of her sandwich. “Like I said in class, if you want to make a good movie, you need to create characters who are complex, who evolve. Otherwise, we wouldn’t want to watch them. The same cannot always be said of people. A volf farlirt zayne hor, ober nit zayn natur.” The unintelligible sounds rolled off her tongue as if she were the Jew on the couch. She threw one leggy leg over the other, smoothed her hair, and smiled.
“I love when you talk dirty to me,” I said.
She tossed my paper back onto the table. “It’s Yiddish, Chuckerman.” She popped to her feet. “It means you can’t make a leopard change its spots.”
“Thank you for translating,” I said. “I recognized the language, but did not expect your command of it. I assumed you only knew words, the usual—oy, schvitz. Not full sentences. You must be working a lot with the rabbi.” I said this hoping for some explanation, but none came; she just shrugged and said she was a quick study.
&nb
sp; Then she pulled the tie around her robe tighter, headed toward the kitchen, and asked if I wanted a beer. She told me that she usually has only one beer on Sunday nights, but tonight, due to the unforeseen circumstance of my visit, she was having two. I told her yes, if she could find one. She said “very funny” and then, as she sashayed into the kitchen area, reminded me again that she hadn’t been expecting company.
Laurel returned with two more bottles of Red Rock Amber Ale. “Utah’s finest,” she told me as she handed one to me and sat down again.
I took a sip and said, “I would like to point out that your Yiddish belief that people don’t change and the David Melman philosophy that history repeats itself are essentially one and the same.” I raised my bottle. “A toast to similarly bleak views of mankind.”
“Cheers,” she said, clinking her bottle to mine and again crossing one leg over the other. Between our outing last Sunday and our evening so far, I’d become fairly well acquainted with Laurel’s legs from mid-thigh down. Her calves were fairly built up, and I wondered, as I studied them again, whether the muscle was due to skiing as a child or if heavy calf development was indigenous to the Mormon population, the same way big hips are for Jews.
Laurel was busy talking now, telling me that as much as she’d like to agree that our views were similar so we’d have at least something in common, there was a critical difference between them. The only critical difference I was aware of was the disproportionality between her slender thighs and the calves. Maybe that’s why she wore the boots, I thought. Maybe that’s why cowboy boots are popular out West, because Mormons have big calves.
I felt a finger under my chin and then my head lifted. “Would you like to go ahead and touch my leg so we can get that out of the way and move on to the listening portion of our evening?”
Chuckerman Makes a Movie Page 12