Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  “I suppose,” said Jeffrey, unimpressed by this insight. “But I still wish I had some.”

  “Well, I’m going to tell you something, young man,” said Samuels, peering over his bifocals and assuming a more severe tone. “I’m going to ask you to not have any more chocolate for a while. Milk, yes, it’s a necessity for a growing boy—but you’re to cut out the chocolate milk.”

  “What!” cried Jeffrey in an outraged tone. So this was what came of telling a doctor about your diet. “I gotta have chocolate milk. I’ll die without it!”

  “No,” said Samuels, “I assure you that you will not die without it. In fact, you will be much better without it.”

  “I don’t want to be much better! Please,” whined Jeffrey, “let me have it. I promise to be good.”

  “It’s not a question of your promising anything. The chocolate is having an adverse effect on your system. It’s not within your ability to control its effects.”

  “You mean like the monster in Alien that takes control of the bodies it gets into?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Neat,” said Jeffrey. “But I still want to drink it.”

  “Of course you do,” said Samuels. “We all want to do things that aren’t good for us. But we use our will power and don’t do them.”

  “I don’t want to use my will power,” moaned Jeffrey. “I love chocolate milk.”

  Samuels was silent for a moment, looking ruminatively at the boy over his bifocals. Finally, he spoke with great seriousness. “Did you see the movie Spider-Man?”

  Jeffrey nodded sulkily. “Sure,” he said.

  “Do you remember what happens at the end of the movie?”

  “Yeah. He tells the girl that he can’t be her boyfriend cause he has to be Spider-Man.”

  “Exactly,” said Samuels. “He gives up the girl in order to do what he has to do. You have to give up the chocolate to do what you have to do.”

  “It’s not fair,” said Jeffrey. “It’s easier to give up the girl.”

  Samuels nodded. “That means you have to be tougher than Spider-Man.”

  Jeffrey considered this. “Tougher than Spider-Man?”

  “Yes, you have to do something harder. Are you up to the responsibility? Are you capable of such heroic action?”

  “I guess,” said Jeffrey, obviously taken with the notion of being tougher than Spider-Man.

  “I think you are,” said Samuels. “And I think you’ll find that you’re a lot happier without the chocolate milk. You’ll be able to concentrate better in class and have more friends, because they’ll think you’re smarter.”

  “They will?”

  “Absolutely, I guarantee it,” said Samuels. “You’ll be a better version of yourself. Sort of a super-Jeffrey. You’ll like yourself better.”

  “Cool,” said Jeffrey.

  “Now go into the other room and wait while I talk to your mother.”

  “Are you saying that the whole problem was the chocolate milk?” groaned Carla, once Jeffrey had left. She buried her face in her hands. “How could I have let this happen?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Samuels, dismissively. “It happens all the time. It’s not the end of the world. These things sort of creep up on us. That’s why we go for help. You did absolutely the right thing, so don’t have a moment’s guilt about it.”

  “I should have put it together,” sighed Carla. “I should have been more aware. My mother told me he was drinking too much chocolate milk, but I said she was being old-fashioned.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Samuels repeated reassuringly, “though I will say your mother is to be commended for her insight.”

  “When I think he might have gone on Ritalin,” wailed Carla, suddenly realizing this.

  “That wouldn’t have been the end of the world either. But it’s better that we solved the problem this way. I may be wrong here, of course, we’ll have to see how he is in a few days, but my instinct tells me: Cut out the chocolate milk, and your boy will concentrate just fine. Make sure he drinks a few glasses of plain skimmed, but keep him off chocolate for a while. Now send in your mother. You can run Jeffrey home, so he can get started on his homework, and come back. I estimate I’ll want a bit more time with her.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  When Carla RETURNED AFTER DROPPING JEFFREY AT home, Jessie was still sequestered with Dr. Samuels. They remained so for almost two hours, which, considering that Samuels had dealt with Jeffrey in a little over half an hour, struck Carla as a source of concern. What could they possibly be talking about for so long? Perhaps Samuels was ascertaining the precise degree to which her mother was psychotic. As the minutes ticked by, she became increasingly agitated. Finally, the door opened and Jessie emerged with Dr. Samuels bending toward her, deeply engrossed in conversation.

  “I think the knaidlach recipe is too complicated,” she heard Jessie saying. “Mine is much simpler and, I guarantee, delicious. They’re as light as a feather. Will used to say that his friend Ben Jonson should take a lesson from my knaidlach. You see, he thought Jonson’s plays were too heavy-handed.”

  “Sounds like quite a recommendation for your knaidlach,” said Samuels cheerfully, holding a sheet of paper that obviously contained Jessie’s recipe. “I’ve wanted to make them for ages, but that recipe in the Font of Fressing cookbook scared me off. I’ll give it a try and get back to you.”

  “Don’t forget to use sea salt,” warned Jessie. “You can get it at Whole Foods.”

  “You betcha,” said Samuels. “I’ll follow it to the letter.”

  Carla, who had been watching this exchange in a state of wonderment, now intervened—there was no telling how long they might go on the subject of the knaidlach. “Mom, why don’t you look at a few more recipes while I talk to Dr. Samuels,” she said, trying to keep from registering irritation. It had occurred to her that she was spending two hundred dollars an hour for her mother to talk recipes. She then recalled Samuels’s brilliant diagnosis of Jeffrey and relented. Samuels must know what he’s doing.

  “You mother’s a charming woman,” he said, once they had seated themselves in his office. “She must have been a great beauty once.”

  “She was,” said Carla impatiently. “But that’s hardly the point. She’s suffering from extreme delusions.”

  “Well,” said Samuels, “I suppose in a technical sense she is delusory … .”

  “In a technical sense? What other sense is there?”

  “My dear, there are all sorts of other senses. We don’t want to go about labeling. Labeling is very destructive.”

  “For the love of God,” said Carla, “the woman is talking about hanging out with William Shakespeare. I’d say we need to label her something. Nuts might be about right.”

  “I hardly think it’s necessary to think like that. Your mother is a delightful woman. She had me on the edge of my chair, I can tell you.”

  “What are you saying? You’re not going to do something? Put her on medication? Give her shock treatments? Something?”

  “I think it would be a mistake to do anything at this point. She seems to be functioning rather well. She seems happy. She’s a pleasure to talk to. It’s my opinion that you’d do best to leave her alone. Let this thing work itself out. I have a feeling that it will take its course.”

  “You think the delusions will pass?”

  “I think she’ll move on. And I don’t say that morbidly, though she is seventy-two years old and when you get to that age—and I’m hardly much younger myself, mind you—you think realistically about the end. But she appears to be in excellent health, so that’s not what I mean. I imagine she’ll find something else to occupy her imagination.”

  “So you recommend we do nothing?”

  “In a word, yes.”

  “And when she talks about it?”

  “Let her talk.”

  “And what should we say? How should we respond?”

  “Respond naturally. Maybe ask s
ome questions. Mostly listen. You’d be surprised—you may learn something.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Carla had RECENTLY COME UP WITH THE IDEA OF ASKING Mr. O’Hare, a resident of the Golden Pond Geriatric Center, to help choose the hors d’oeuvres for the bat mitzvah.

  The caterer had recommended that Stephanie be excluded from this process, and Carla felt it best to exclude Mark as well. Both her husband and her daughter were likely to have trouble absorbing the wide range of choices available, and to become confused and quarrelsome, especially when they began jockeying the hors d’oeuvres they liked best against the cost of said items.

  Mr. O’Hare, by contrast, seemed just the person to consult on the subject. Although he could not eat solid food himself, he had strong opinions about food and a decisive manner that might serve well in sifting through the myriad of options.

  Carla had first become acquainted with Mr. O’Hare when her father had been admitted to the Golden Pond Geriatric Center during his final illness. O’Hare had developed something of a bond with Milt Kaplan as a result of his unabashed admiration for Jessie. O’Hare himself had been married twice, “to goddamn shrews” as he put it, so that Jessie’s temperament combined with her physical attributes (still discernible, especially to a sharp-eyed octogenarian) made her a continual source of wonder to O’Hare. Milt Kaplan had not been displeased by this. Even at death’s door, he had warmed to the reminder of his incredible good fortune in a wife.

  Carla had started volunteering at the center after her father’s death and had kept up her contact with O’Hare. In particular, she had assumed the responsibility of helping him eat his dinner (served at the convenient if macabrely early hour of four P.M.). Eating dinner for O’Hare was a complicated task, given that he was not only physically incapacitated but unusually stubborn and cantankerous.

  “We have veal for dinner today, Mr. O’Hare,” Carla would announce in a typical encounter, taking a spoonful of pureed veal and bringing it up to his mouth.

  “You don’t expect me to eat that crap,” O’Hare protested. “Get it away from me, goddammit.”

  “Mr. O’Hare,” Carla responded calmly, keeping the spoon where it was, “you know you need to eat something to keep up your strength.”

  “I don’t have any strength to keep up, and I don’t need to eat that crap,” O’Hare snapped. “I don’t see you eating it either, honey.”

  “You’re right,” agreed Carla. “That’s because I can chew the regular veal that you see Mrs. Stein is eating over there. But seeing as you have difficulty chewing, we simply put the veal into a blender and you’ve got yourself more or less the same thing.”

  “Like hell it’s the same thing,” growled O’Hare, glancing at Mrs. Stein with a mixture of envy and disdain. “If it doesn’t look the same, it’s not the same!” he added with strict, empirical logic. Then, as was common with these obstreperous types, he opened his mouth and allowed himself to be fed the pureed veal without further discussion. Only after Carla had wiped his mouth did he embark on a new subject.

  “How’s your mother?” he asked, his tone softening a bit. “A beautiful woman, your mother, though a lot of good that does me.”

  “Yes,” said Carla, determined to ignore the fuller implication of this remark, “she was devoted to my father.”

  “Devoted, I don’t know,” said O’Hare irritably. “That’s the phrase they use, but it doesn’t mean much. You get used to people, that’s all. Take Gloria—I didn’t like her, but I was used to her. Now, what am I supposed to do with myself?”

  “Well,” said Carla—it seemed to her part of her job to answer this sort of question—“you could get involved with some of the workshops.”

  “Please,” said O’Hare scornfully, “I can’t even feed myself and you want me to make pot holders.”

  “Maybe you could take part in one of the group discussions,” she suggested.

  “Discussions about what?” O’Hare snarled.

  “There are lots of topics. They post them on the bulletin board every morning. Things like politics, money management, pollution. I saw Mr. Pinsky add one this morning on the role of the United Nations—an important subject.”

  “Who wants to discuss the United Nations?” O’Hare snorted. “Besides, Pinsky doesn’t want to discuss; he just wants to quarrel.”

  It was in the wake of conversations like these that Carla had hit upon the bat mitzvah hors d’oeuvres as a project that might engage the fastidious O’Hare. Here was something neither physically taxing nor ostensibly controversial. She broached the subject gently: Would he consider assisting her in making this important selection? It would be a great help to her if he would.

  Surprisingly, O’Hare appeared to be amenable. Indeed, his mood began to improve as soon as she showed him the massive list of options that she wanted him to review. He studied the list carefully, then began to pose questions.

  “What is a chopped liver canapé?” he asked Carla.

  “Chopped liver on a cracker with a garnish of maybe caviar or pimiento,” explained Carla.

  “Aha!” He slowly made a small mark with a pencil on the side of the menu. “And mini-gefilte fish with red and white horseradish dip?”

  “That’s a form of blended fish, chopped and molded into a kind of ball,” explained Carla. “It’s actually very tasty. Come to think of it, you could probably eat it, since it’s ground up and easy to digest. I’ll have Mom make some and bring it in. The red horseradish is milder than the white. Most men go for the white; the women like the red.”

  “You people are very adventurous in the food department,” noted O’Hare. He had come to view the whole thing as akin to an exotic vacation taken without the necessity of leaving his bed.

  Carla agreed that Jewish people did enjoy food and were always willing to try something new.

  “I can see that this bat mitzvah thing is a really big deal,” O’Hare observed. “Nice to put the child center stage like that; builds character. And the party sounds like a goddamn blast. We forget that the kids grow up and so forth,” he motioned feebly with his good hand in the direction of himself.

  “Yes,” admitted Carla, “but it can get out of hand. Spending so much money and attention on a child isn’t necessarily the healthiest thing in the world.”

  “And why not?” demanded O’Hare, his temper flaring. Having spent so much time with the hors d’oeuvres, he had come to take a vested interest in the bat mitzvah as a whole, almost as though he were hosting it himself. “What the hell do you want to wait around saving your bucks for? Better to spend it on the kids. Wish I’d had one of these goddamn bat mitzvah things for mine.”

  “Well, you’re being a great help to me now,” said Carla gently, trying to deflect what she felt might be the rising tide of O’Hare’s wrath. “By the way, Mr. Pinsky said he wanted to drop by later this afternoon. I told him I’d wheel him in, if you didn’t object. I thought you might like to have some company.”

  “Not Pinsky,” said O’Hare, growing more irate. “All he wants to do is fight about politics. What’s the point, I say? Life goes on no matter what we think.” But then he paused and seemed to reconsider. “Pinsky’s a Jew, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, I suppose he is,” noted Carla, nonplussed by this rather bald query.

  “Well, maybe he can explain some of this goddamn food to me.”

  Carla agreed that Pinsky probably could be of help on this score, and so O’Hare agreed to have him in as a consultant. When Carla left for the day, O’Hare and Pinsky were quarreling, not about UN intervention in the Middle East, but about the meaning of a “mock-sushi station” and an item marked “mashed-potato sundae bar.”

  “Do you think they put chocolate sauce on the potatoes?” asked Pinsky.

  “What are you talking about?” said O’Hare. Having been involved with the hors d’oeuvres longer, he was better able to grasp the metaphorical aspects of the terminology. “It’s a way of putting it, that’s all. It mean
s they have different toppings on the potatoes—gravy, cheese, mushrooms, that sort of thing.”

  “And the mock-sushi station?” asked Pinsky, who had begun to defer to O’Hare’s understanding, despite having actually hosted three bat mitzvahs himself—though admittedly long ago (his daughters were now in their forties), his late wife having handled all the details.

  “Mock-sushi,” said O’Hare with a strained patience, “because you people can’t eat shellfish and most people are afraid of raw fish anyway.”

  “Mini quiche?”

  “Bite-size cheese pies.”

  “Chicken satay en brochette?”

  “Pieces of chicken on skewers with that peanut sauce for dipping.”

  O’Hare certainly knew his bar mitzvah appetizers, Pinsky had to admit.

  Several days later, the two men had assembled a list of selections that included a roast beef carving area, a mock-sushi station, and a mashed-potato sundae bar, along with such circulating hot hors d’oeuvres as baby lamp chops, spinach in phyllo, and that perennial favorite, “pigs in a blanket”—though, in this case, they were mock-pigs. First, second, and third choices were marked in consideration of Carla’s budget.

  “We don’t know what you plan to spend,” said Pinsky, “so we worked it out so you could go all out or opt for something more modest. O’Hare’s for letting out all the stops, but, personally, I think there’s no sense blowing it all on the bat mitzvah. In ten years, you’ll have a wedding to pay for, and then you’ll really have to spend the money. I had three girls, and they had ritzy tastes. Almost put me in the poorhouse.”

  That night, Carla reviewed the final list, which had been carefully transcribed by Pinsky in the capacity of scribe. She was pleased to see that she agreed pretty much with all the choices (though her tendency, in line with Pinsky’s advice, was to go with the less pricey items).

  Chapter Twenty-five

  As Carla SEALED THE ENVELOPE CONTAINING THE FINAL selections that would be sent off to Moishe the next day, a blessed calm pervaded the living room. Jessie was in her bedroom watching Entertainment Tonight, Stephanie had gone to a friend’s house to work on a relief map for cultural geography, and Jeffrey was doing his homework upstairs (the elimination of the chocolate milk making it possible for him to sit down and get it done). Mark was quietly ensconced in the opposite armchair, reading a book entitled How to Protect Yourself from the Malpractice War and taking notes in the event that the material might serve for a future column.