But she did admit that no one ever threw a meatball. Certainly none of the adults. The whole concept, not only that a grown man would throw a meatball but that the meal would continue on after the mess had been cleaned up—after Gladys Greenberg left and Slip apologized to Estelle and Aunt BoBo—was beyond Laurel’s comprehension.
Nonetheless, that’s the way it was. The kids returned to the kitchen. Conversation returned to murmurs. Plates were cleaned. Dessert was skipped because, in case you forgot, it was Christmas and everyone—nogoodnickas or not—was eager to see the movie. From there, we’ll fade to black.
In her handout on twists and turns, which I begrudgingly read on my flight home from Chicago, Laurel talked up the use of the unexpected guest as a technique for creating a third-act twist. If well used, she wrote, the twist will be a moment of truth, revelation, and surprise for the main character as well as the audience. I like to think that the concept worked well in my movie with the introduction of Gladys Greenberg and Lucille Garlovsky. But I can tell you from experience that the ploy worked much better in real life when Laurel showed up as the unexpected guest three weeks later at our Yom Kippur dinner.
She arrived at Marcy’s door on Monday, September 16 in much the same fashion that Gladys Greenberg and Lucille appeared at Aunt BoBo’s door in my movie—just in time for dinner and with a challah in hand. Marcy plunked the challah down on the dining room table just as Lucille did with her poinsettia. I suppose we can draw further parallels between my movie and my life, between then and now. Gladys Greenberg and Laurel are both Antagonists, while Aunt BoBo and Marcy are both the Idiots. My role, however, in each scene is different. In 1977, I was the scared and sober ten-year-old. In present day, I was the scared and less sober thirty-five-year-old who, this time around, was on to subtext.
I’m not saying I interpreted all of Laurel’s signs and silences correctly, but at least I knew they meant something. Her decision to show up at all, right into the lions’ den of the Melman clan, when she’d been so uninterested in meeting them a month ago, had to mean something. Her choice of attire—a hideous, long grey skirt and a scarf she’d wrapped over her head, the same kind of bright colored shmata (to borrow a term from Laurel’s Yiddish playbook) the women in Florida used to wear—had to mean something. Although even with this getup, she still had on the cowboy boots. I did not know what to make of that.
When we heard the knock on the door, my brothers-in-law, my father, and I were stuffed onto a couch eating mixed nuts and gearing up for Monday Night Football. The females were—as they usually are, as they certainly were that night at Aunt BoBo’s—gathered in the kitchen. Only this time, they weren’t analyzing meatballs. Aside from the soup my mother had made, the food came from Barney Greengrass. In lieu of cooking, Rachel was showing Marcy pictures of Julia in her play. Marcy was showing my mother designs for a new Knead Some Dough logo for her donut boxes. My mother was tending to her soup and singing along to her Jewish music.
Paula Melman has been playing the same record during the High Holidays for as long as I can remember. After all these years, I don’t think anybody but her even registered that music was playing. However, to fully appreciate the evening, it should be noted that the dinner was backdropped by a woman named Debbie Friedman singing prayers about peace, love, and compassion.
Everyone in the family, regardless of activity, regardless of the concept of the Yom Kippur break fast meal, was also eating at the time of the knock on the door. Nuts, as I mentioned, for the men in the family room. The boys were stealing cookies from the dining room. My mother was stealing bits of this and that from the deli tray. Marcy’s apartment is open access, a giant circle with half-walls separating the family room from the dining room, the dining room from the kitchen. Everyone could see everything. So when the knock came and Marcy answered, all eyes were on Laurel.
My first thought was that she’d made a mistake. She either had the wrong date or the wrong apartment. My second thought, after I took in her attire, was that she’d gone ahead and married the rabbi and was coming to break the news. Or, perhaps in her new capacity as the rabbi’s wife, she was coming to bless our dinner. The truth didn’t hit me until Marcy thanked her for the challah and said, “I’m so glad you were able to join us.” With those words, all became clear.
“You invited her?” I blurted out. I was dumbfounded.
“That’s such a kind way to welcome our guest,” Marcy said. “And on Yom Kippur. Of all days to not be generous of spirit. Yes, I invited her. She’s my friend and it’s my apartment.”
“Uncle David, it was actually my idea to invite her,” Estie said. “She wanted to experience a traditional Yom Kippur. I hope you’re not mad.”
As Broc commented that ours was hardly a traditional Yom Kippur, I told Estie I wasn’t mad at her. “I’m mad at your mother.” Then, to her mother, I said, “How could you not tell me?”
Marcy smoothed out her apron. “I decided it would be better not to.” She moved her hands to her hips. “In case you reacted like a fool and put up a fight.”
“You’re the fool,” Rachel informed Marcy as she moved toward the fishbowl that was the foyer and said, “Let me guess, you are the Mormon film writing teacher.” Rachel, in her perfectly tailored pantsuit, held a hand out to Laurel.
Laurel gave Rachel her hand and said, “I assumed you knew I was coming, so I didn’t think I’d need an introduction, but I guess not.” She laughed, a self-conscious kind of chuckle I hadn’t heard before. I felt a little sorry for her, but I felt more sorry for me.
Until this point, I’d been having a great weekend. I’d taken my nephews, Ryan and Connor and Bradley, to the top of the Empire State Building. Rachel, Peter, Broc, Marcy, and I had gone to see The Producers. I’d gone with Estie, Julia, and Rachel on a carriage ride in Central Park. For the first time in weeks, I’d had a break from the sorry-ass array of issues currently making up the life and times of David Melman. The mastermind—the Post should have said—behind not only Omnipotence but his own impotence as well.
And now this.
“I have to be honest,” my father said, “I didn’t know who the hell you were when you walked in, but Rachel’s introduction summed it all up.”
My mother said Rachel’s introduction was actually quite rude. “I’m sure she thinks of herself as more than a Mormon film writing teacher.” She turned to Laurel. “Don’t you?” Without waiting for Laurel’s response, she threw her arm around her back and ushered her deeper into the apartment. “I’d never have known you were Mormon from looking at you,” she added.
“So it was a good thing I included that detail in my intro,” Rachel said. Now it was her turn for the awkward laugh. She opened her mouth wide but no sound came out.
Laurel apologized. “I didn’t mean to blindside anyone.”
Peter told her not to apologize. “The holiday needed some livening up.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I added, heading into the kitchen, where Marcy had set up a makeshift bar on the counter behind the kids’ table. Not the most logical place for alcohol but then again, as evidenced by the unexpected guest, Marcy has never been the most logical person.
I generally don’t drink when I’m with my family. I like to have my wits about me when my sisters and mother are around. Nevertheless, I poured myself some vodka, straight up, and drained it down. Then I plunked the empty glass on the kids’ table and said, “Laurel is welcome to stay. However, I’ll be eating here.” I pointed to the seat in front of me. “Estie, you can have my place in the dining room. You can sit right next to our guest if you want, since you like her so much.”
So it was that Yom Kippur ’02 unfolded in the same manner as Christmas ’77, with tension in the air and David at the kids’ table. This time, however, not only was I entitled to alcohol, I had unlimited access to it. All I needed to do to refill my glass was turn around in my chair, and I did so steadily.
Marcy’s kitchen is separated from the dining room by
a ledge with posts, like fancy prison bars, running from the top of the ledge to the ceiling. Because she had this Tibetan tapestry hanging on the dining room side of the posts and Estie’s and Ryan’s artwork on the sides that faced the kitchen, I couldn’t see through the posts into the dining room—unless I leaned about six inches to the left, in which case I had an unobstructed view of Laurel sitting in between Marcy and Estie. My mother and father sat across from her. Their backs, fortunately, were to me. My brothers-in-law sat at the heads of the table and Julia, who’d protested when Estie got promoted to the dining room, was squished in between Marcy and Rachel. My four nephews, ranging in age from five to ten, were in the kitchen, behaving with the least amount of civilized behavior necessary to keep them out of trouble. No one was paying attention to me.
The reverse was not true. No siree, I was all ears at the Yom Kippur dinner.
The listening portion of the evening began right after the blessings over the bread and the wine, which Laurel was able to articulate like an Orthodox woman from the Old Country, with utter seriousness and a covered head. I choked on my wine when my mother commented, “That’s very impressive, Laurel. I’d never know you weren’t a Jew.”
“Was that an insult or a compliment?” Rachel asked.
As she doled out bowls of soup, my mother said, “I meant it as a compliment.”
My father reinforced the sentiment. “You’re a Jew in my book, honey,” he told her. “You know more Hebrew than I do.”
At this point, I heard Marcy explain to the table, “Even though Laurel’s not Jewish, she’s a huge fan.”
“It’s true,” Laurel offered. “Though I never met a Jew until I arrived here in Manhattan.” Her voice was calm and composed—the opposite of how my voice felt, which was why I wasn’t using it.
“Really?” my mother chimed in.
“There aren’t many in the small towns of Utah. However, I will tell you that I was pleasantly surprised after spending some time here. It’s the live-and-let-live credo that I really enjoy. It’s the total antithesis of my upbringing. The Jews are a non-judgmental people, and I like that.”
“I don’t know what Jews you’ve been talking to,” Rachel said. “I’ve never met a Jew who doesn’t judge. That’s what Jews do.”
“Speak for yourself,” my mother said. “I’m incredibly open-minded.”
I was glad I’d had the sense to sit in the kitchen. I don’t think I could have survived the strain in the dining room, even with the vodka racing around my veins. I didn’t even want to lean the six inches to my left because I couldn’t bear to watch. At the kiddie table, I felt removed. As if the dining room conversation were simply dialogue in a movie and my reactions, including my wince when Laurel offered that she knew some Yiddish, could not be seen.
I began to think that maybe Laurel’s outfit, like her conversation, was for my mother’s benefit. At first I could only hear bits and pieces of her dialogue with my mother, because of the rest of the family’s chatter. Then they began speaking Yiddish to each other, and everyone else followed suit. Peter, a non-Jew, threw out “Oy vey.” Broc went for kvetch. Julia offered schlimazel, not intentionally referring to me, but Marcy and Rachel both looked in my direction and my nieces started to laugh. So did my mother and father. The tension, I could tell, was leaving the room. From the perspective of an inebriated outsider who still had feelings for the unexpected guest, the atmosphere was taking an irksome change for the better. Everyone was suddenly having fun, which was not how I’d imagined things going down. I’d figured Laurel’s reception would be more akin to the reception Gladys Greenberg had received: she would be seen as the enemy and stoned—if not with a meatball, then at least figuratively.
I never thought that Rachel—the one who’d cautioned me against Laurel, who’d warned ages ago that I was on a slippery slope to Lucille Garlovsky, who’d encouraged me to make sure the coffee maker was the only thing we had in common—would make a special trip into the bar area and whisper to me as she poured this and that into a glass that she didn’t even carry back to the table, “She’s lovely, really. What a fabulous sport.”
When I heard my mother ask, “Are you only taking conversion classes for research or are you actually planning to convert?” I leaned over in my chair towards the dining room and offered my two drunken cents: “From the way she’s dressed, it seems like she’s already converted.”
Marcy started to retort in her friend’s defense but Laurel stopped her. “Nice to hear from you, David, and it’s nice to see you haven’t lost your sense of humor over the past few weeks. But no, I have not converted.” She looked at my mother and, as she played with the hair—newly straightened—hanging out the bottom of her shmata, added, “Though I would be happy to convert for the right man.”
I assumed, from her emphasis on the word right, that I was the wrong man.
I leaned further forward in my chair, as if I’d benefit my cause by having other people hear what I was about to say. “That’s good to hear because, as good as you look in the garb, I don’t think conversion’s the way to go.” The folks around the table all turned to stare at me and I began to ramble about how another Holocaust is inevitable, judging from 9/11, which I experienced firsthand, although slightly sedated from the dentist’s office in Midtown where I was undergoing an emergency root canal, and which in my mind was basically an insurgence against the Jews. “The next rounding up and offing of our people is just around the corner,” I said. “So, if you married a Jew and had kids, it would make more sense, for the good of the children, if their mother played for the other team.”
There was dead silence when I got done. Even Debbie Friedman had stopped singing.
“Well it’s true,” I said. “We all saw Schindler’s List. History has a way of repeating itself.”
“What if you don’t have kids?” Estie asked.
“If you’re not going to have kids, what’s the point of getting married?” I said.
My mother turned around in her chair to glare in my direction. “Stop talking,” she ordered. There was no question whose side she was on. I was the nogoodnicka in this scene. To Laurel, she said, “Sweetheart, if you like the religion, you should convert. And regardless, I think you are just lucky to have found a rabbi who is willing to let you sit in on classes.”
“So basically, she’s auditing Judaism,” Rachel stated.
“Exactly,” my mother said. “An audit of Judaism, what a lovely experience.” She reached across the table and tapped Laurel’s hand.
At this—the praising and the tapping—I forced history to repeat itself. More out of irritation with my family than with Laurel, I pulled myself into a standing position and ambled toward the dining room. “Yeah,” I said, “I guess you could say that the rabbi is giving her a lot of bang for her buck.” I didn’t throw anything but I emphasized the B words the same as Slip had done with the Fs.
Estie asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Marcy told her, “Nothing.”
If a platter of meatballs had been on the table, I’m quite sure my mother or my sisters would have pelted me. Instead, only remnants were left on the deli tray my mother picked at as she apologized to Laurel for whatever she’d done wrong as a mother.
My brothers-in-law started to laugh.
My nephews got up from the kiddie table and crowded around me.
Laurel said, “I think it’s time for me to leave.” She set her napkin on her plate and smiled gently at Marcy. Subtext, I knew, for “I told you so.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother said. She asked Laurel to please stay and directed me to apologize to her.
I repeated her words: “Don’t be ridiculous.” I may have even thrown my hands in the air the way my mother had done.
My dad raised the bottle of wine. “Who wants another drink?”
“I don’t think Uncle David needs one,” Estie said. “He’s swaying.”
“Maybe he’s the one who should leave
,” Marcy suggested.
I told Estie I was not swaying. “The boys are pushing into me.” I put my arms around them and we did a round of high-fives. “We’re the nogoodnickas,” I told them.
My father said that he thought nogoodnicka was a word his mother used to use.
“It is,” Laurel said. “It’s in his movie.”
“Yeah, it’s in my movie,” I said, now using the prison bars on either side of the entryway for support. “Which is actually pretty good. I’m almost done with it. Hey, maybe I’ll move out to LA too,” I said to Laurel, who was moving toward the coat closet where Marcy had put her shawl and messenger bag. “Me and you, we’ll head out West. What do you say?”
“What do I say?” She spread the shawl over her shoulders. “Well, to your sister, I say thank you for having me. To your family, I say you are a lovely group of people and I apologize for ruining your dinner, I shouldn’t have come here tonight, I thought it would go better, I thought David knew I was coming, I thought it would be a nice gesture on my part.” She turned to me. “A way of saying I was sorry for shutting you down at the bridge and not calling. This is the day of atonement, after all.” She finger quoted “atonement.” “Unfortunately,” she added, “being called out in front of your whole family for sleeping with the rabbi was not what I had in mind.”
The audience—that’s what my family had become—fell silent again. The line on Rachel’s forehead grew deeper, more entrenched. The Mormon Rodeo had shocked the Botox right out of her system.
I heard Rachel whisper to Marcy, “She was cheating on David with a rabbi?”
Marcy nodded her head yes, quickly, her eyes never coming off of me and Laurel.
“That’s bad,” Rachel whispered again.
“He’s really hot,” Marcy said, as if that explained everything. Then she got up and headed toward the buffet. “If Laurel is going to leave early, and who can blame her, she’ll have to take dessert with her.” She looked at me as she spoke.
Chuckerman Makes a Movie Page 25