At this point she would always add this aside to the story: “Now, it wasn’t how handsome Daddy looked, even though he was. It wasn’t the gorgeous suit he was wearing, even though that was a part of it. It was the way he said those words to me in that deep assertive voice he has when I hear him talking to clients on the phone: ‘Nothing could make you look more beautiful.’ ”
“Excuse me?” Grandmom said. Grandmom was wary of this man from the first moment.
“Mrs. Firestein,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Bill Dorenfield,” he added in that same self-assured voice. “I’m going to marry your daughter.”
My grandmother took a step back and looked him over. He was leaning over the scarf display like he was lounging at the pool.
“Not with that swagger you are not,” she said, taking my mom’s hand.
Grandmom and Mom talked about it later. Grandmom heard all about Bill Dorenfield from Lil Feldman because he had taken out Lil’s daughter, Rona, and tried to have his way with her, which in those days meant a kiss. Rona always joked whenever she ran into my parents in later years, “I would have given him more had it not been the fifties.”
The next day two-dozen white roses arrived at the house, one bunch for Mom and one for Grandmom, with no card attached.
“No card,” Grandmom said, dumping the flowers in the trash. “Who does he think he is? Doesn’t he know that a woman needs to hear the words?”
From that moment, my mom said, she stayed out of it. She knew. If he could get through to my grandmother then he was going to get the pretty Maxine Elaine.
The next day he sent my grandmother’s favorite tapioca pudding from Horn & Hardart’s, the one with the huge pearls, not the runny, bitsy ones everyone else sold.
Then he sent tickets to the symphony.
“No card,” she said, throwing them in the trash. “He’s sky out of his mind.”
The next day he sent Grandmom’s favorite perfume. He never told anyone how he knew it was her favorite.
“It’s not my favorite anymore,” Grandmom said, dabbing some on her wrists and throwing it in a drawer.
The next day it was a bottle of French wine.
“Cheap,” she said, looking at the bottle.
Then he appeared at the door.
“What’s it going to take?” he asked her.
“Why don’t you just say the words?” she demanded.
“I want to marry your daughter,” he said.
“Take her on a date first!” she said.
“Fine!”
And so he did.
My parents were married the following May. Word has it, you never saw two people in this world who were happier than my grandmother and my father.
Don’t you just love that story? Don’t you just love how my mother knew from the first second she saw my dad? Don’t you just love how she let my grandmother take over? That’s my mom. Feminine, beautiful, and able to get what she wants without ever saying a word. I was never like that. Like my grandmother, I always had to repeat the words over and over until someone got the point. All my mother had to do was rely on her grace and femininity.
When I was about ten, and my parents were celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary, I had come home from school to find a brand-new lemon-colored Cadillac Coupe deVille and, oddly enough, my father. He was never home so it was really strange to find him there.
“Did you get a new car?” I asked him.
“No, I’ve got to drop that off someplace,” he told me. “Why don’t you come along?”
So I did. To be with my father in the middle of an afternoon on a workday was prize enough for me. To go for a ride, well, that was another.
We drove up to my grandparents’ house as my grandmother came outside.
“What’s this? Another new car for yourself? What about one for my daughter?” she shouted out as she crossed her arms.
“It’s for you,” he said, agitated, handing her the keys.
“What am I going to do with this car?” she complained to him. “It’s too nice. People will think I’m showing off.”
“Tell them your son-in-law gave it to you for twenty years of wedded bliss.”
“Fine,” she said, adding, “I suppose I have to give you a ride home now.”
That kind of bickering between my grandmother and my dad went on and on and on, by the way. The day my grandmother died, though, I don’t think anyone cried more than my dad. Come to think of it, I guess she must have really loved him, too, since she’s still driving that car up here.
So now you know the ins and outs of the love affair between my parents. You can imagine how they must have felt when they couldn’t have children.
To tell you the truth, they never really talked about what they went through. My mom said that after I was born all that talk didn’t matter, but I can only imagine it was awful. I’m assuming that tests and procedures were performed and tries were made, but with no success. My dad has always had it out for doctors, and I can’t help but think it has something to do with that time.
So here’s how my first best day happened, which is kind of sad, but, as you know already, it has a really good ending. My parents, by the way, never told me this story; my uncle Morris did when he was babysitting for me once. When I asked them if it was true, they didn’t say it wasn’t, but they brushed it off in the way parents do when they don’t want to talk about difficult times with their child. That’s how I know it’s true.
My mom had gone to the doctor for her yearly gynecological checkup, real routine. My mom always goes around Thanksgiving, and so do I (or I did) because she took me with her for my first visit and I just started on that schedule.
Anyway, this particular year, 1968 to be exact, there was a problem. uncle Morris told me they’d found a lump in her breast.
Now remember, this was the late 1960s. Women weren’t banged on the head to check their breasts every month like they are now, so if it was a lump, it was even scarier, and according to my uncle Morris, my father was petrified. My grandmother was hysterical. The only one who wasn’t as scared, as you could imagine, was my mom.
“If it’s something, we’ll take care of it,” uncle Morris said Mom said at the time. That’s so my mother. I bet she was nuts inside though. Knowing my mom, she probably cried in the bathroom then dried her tears and put on a smile before anyone caught her. She’s just never been a public freaker about anything, unlike me.
Anyway, my dad called all the best doctors he could find in Philadelphia and New York. He even called some as far away as London and Paris. A biopsy was done. They still weren’t sure. My father insisted that a doctor in New York check it out, so my parents and grandparents went up to New York. My father rented suites at the Plaza.
The doctors needed to dig even more. So my mother let them. Another biopsy.
Days went by before the results from the biopsy came back. Everyone was on edge, especially my dad, who didn’t go to work for three weeks, something that, as you know, never happened again.
Finally, the tests came back.
Benign!
My father wanted another test. They went back to the doctors in Philadelphia.
Benign!
He went back to New York to check with the doctors one more time.
Benign!
That night some kind of big celebration went on with my parents.
It was only a few weeks after that, though, that my mother wasn’t feeling well again and everyone feared the worst, especially my dad.
“Damn doctors get everything wrong! All of them are no good,” my uncle Morris told me Dad shouted.
My mother couldn’t keep anything down. She was tired all the time. My dad was out of his mind. They went back to New York; they went back to the doctors in Philadelphia. Tests were done.
“There is nothing wrong,” the doctors in New York and Philadelphia told my parents.
“Then why is she upchucking in the bathroom all the time, smart-ass doctor
s?” my dad complained.
“She’s pregnant,” the doctors in New York said.
“She’s pregnant,” the doctors in Philadelphia said.
And nine months later, I was born.
Now if you are a doubter, and you believe like I do that my parents’ previous difficulty conceiving was the result of dad’s malfunctioning sperm, you might start to wonder if my mother had an affair with Frank the mailman. If you knew my mom, though, you’d know she had no affair. If you knew how much love there was between these two people, you’d know that neither would ever stray. I truly believe that it was their love that got them through my mother’s breast cancer scare and then brought them together that exhilarating night to conceive me.
My parents were always much older than the other parents at school. My mom was thirty-three when she had me. My dad was forty-two. Today that’s nothing, but back then it always irked me a little. I was always afraid they would die when I was young. (Ironic, huh?) I loved the times they came from though. I loved when they would tell me about decades past, before cell phones and iPods and the Internet—before television, if you can believe it! I loved that I got a firsthand account of what department stores were like in the fifties. I loved that my house was filled with Sinatra and Ella and Gershwin and Cole Porter all the time and how they danced cheek to cheek, instead of like my generation who grinds butt to butt. In other words, whatever might have happened between us, I don’t know how I got so lucky as to have them as parents.
When I think about it sometimes, I wonder what gave me the strength to be the only sperm that could swim hard enough to come into this world (or that world). I’ve never been a good athlete, so those other sperm must have been some real weaklings.
You know how you inherit your dad’s nose or your mom’s laugh? Maybe you also inherit their love for each other and that’s what gave me the strength to get through . . . I don’t know. You’ll have to let me in on what the deal is with that.
SOS from Heaven!
Did that suck?
Seriously, did you like the first day I described, or did it suck?
Am I doing a good job so far?
Normally, in situations like this, when I’m at my wits’ end, I usually call Penelope or my mom to talk me off the ledge. That usually works, but of course I can’t do that. I need my mom. If I could just hear Penelope say, “That was so good!”
Should I have mentioned that I was a C-section baby? Do you get sympathy points if you’re a C-section baby?
Why can’t I contact my mom? On earth they were able to put a man on the moon and build the Internet. Here in heaven they have shoes that don’t pinch and no cellulite. You mean to tell me in all this time that heaven has existed, no one has ever figured out a way to talk from heaven to earth besides appearing in people’s dreams? Where’s that Alexander Graham Bell? I’m sure that guy’s in seventh heaven just lolling his days away sipping mai tais when he could be figuring out a way to make a cell phone work from my Len Jacobs house to Penelope’s apartment in Manhattan or my mom’s bedside table.
Lazy-Ass Graham Bell. That’s what they should call him now.
2
There are two big questions that are always in my mind. The first one: how much money makes you rich?
I saw that on a billboard once. It was an ad for some homeless charity. Right next to the question in big bold letters there was a picture of a homeless guy, unshaven, crackly looking, but he had this huge smile on his face. His two front teeth were missing, a couple on each side, too. I imagined him with a photographer holding a camera in his face and people around him holding meters and shining reflectors at his body. I wondered if in that one moment in the guy’s life, none of the bad stuff mattered. It didn’t matter that he was homeless or had to go through Dumpsters for food. At that point he was the richest man in the world, and it had nothing to do with money: all eyes were on him and that’s why he was smiling.
Then again, the whole picture could have been staged. He might have been an actor making $500, the crackly face was makeup, and they blacked out his teeth. I go back and forth with these conclusions from time to time. It depends on my mood.
Either way, I sent them ten bucks and then they bombarded me with junk mail for the rest of my life (addressed to Mr. Alexander Dorenfield, which was annoying in its own right), but that’s beside the point. They did bring up a remarkable question.
The second question I’ve always thought about is this: how many friends do you really need in the world? Remember that famous Lee Iacocca quote? He was the president of some car company, was it Chrysler? It doesn’t matter. Anyway, he said . . . actually, it wasn’t even him who said it, it was his dad, but he paraphrased it. He said, “My father said, ‘If you’ve got five real friends, you’ve had a great life.’ ”
I think that’s bull.
I think if you have one real friend, you don’t need any backup. And you can quote me on that (just make sure the quote is attributed to Ms. Alexandra Dorenfield and not Mr. Alexander, ha!).
I had a lot of friends in my short time on earth. When I look back, I see a lot of dinners, a lot of clubbing, a lot of partying. I see shopping and gossiping. I see the friends I made in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Some of them were really nice people. Still, none of them were friends with a capital F.
See, I have the greatest friend that anyone could ever have. After her there was no point in getting close to anyone else.
I met my best friend, Penelope Goldstein, in the fourth grade at the Friends School. But before I tell you about her, I have to give you a little more background so you can get the whole picture.
I’ve always been sort of misunderstood (at least I felt that way). As you know, I’m special. I was a miracle baby. Not only was I a miracle baby, I was also an only child. I was also an only grandchild and an only niece. I had no cousins or even a distant cousin. Sadly, the Dorenfield line ended with me. (Gosh, that just made me really sad to realize.) So here’s the thing. If your child/grandchild /niece was not only the miracle child but the last heir to the throne, wouldn’t you treat this girl like a fragile princess?
If you wouldn’t, well, whatever, my family did.
From birth to the age of twenty-five, I got everything I ever wanted (materially and, sure, yeah, lots of hugs and kisses). When I look back on my childhood, if there was a doll or a toy or some clothing I wanted, I got it. Not only was I the miracle child, but my father was the miracle real estate man. We were rich, no bones about it.
There goes that question in my head again though: how much money makes you rich?
Was I a happy kid? Let’s look at the evidence: I had a carnival at my fifth birthday, with a merry-go-round and a Ferris wheel. For my sixth birthday, fifty clowns came out of a tiny Volkswagen and then circled around me with balloons, presents, and cakes. (That actually scared the crap out of me. Errsshh . . . thinking about it still freaks me out.) On my seventh birthday, a helicopter picked up my parents and me, and we had lunch as we flew around Philadelphia. My eighth birthday was a trip to New York to the FAO Schwarz toy store. The store shut down just for me, and I had five minutes to pick out anything and everything I wanted. The first gift I picked was a life-size giraffe. My parents were laughing hysterically, watching little me trying to drag that thing while also trying to grab a Barbie paint-by-numbers set off a shelf.
How cool were all those birthdays?
And really, how amazing was my childhood with all the toys FAO Schwarz could provide? Well, it was okay. See, there was one problem: for all those birthdays and all that stuff, I never had a friend to share them with.
Poor little rich girl. That was me. It goes back to the question I asked in the beginning: how much money makes you rich?
Now you get where I’m coming from.
I’m not saying it wasn’t awesome to have all that stuff. It was like seventh heaven on earth. It would have been a bitch of a decision if my parents came to me one day and said, “You get a choice: all thi
s great stuff or five really good friends.” Thank goodness that question never came up.
(Wait. I just thought of this. Is this something I’m supposed to learn from writing this essay? Does all my stuff in seventh heaven equal my childhood? Is that the reason for this essay? Are you giving me a choice? Fine. I’ll take seventh heaven, with my grandparents and Adam. That wonderful guy and my family make seventh heaven worth all of it. If fourth heaven had five really great friends, though, I’d have to think about it. From what I’ve heard about fourth heaven, though, I strongly doubt it. It doesn’t, does it?)
Now, back at the Friends School the kids didn’t like me very much. I didn’t like them much either. Truthfully, they didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand them. My friends were my parents and grandparents and uncle. When my parents went out on the weekends, either my grandparents or uncle Morris babysat. I never had a nanny or a regular babysitter—what outsider could be trusted with the miracle child?
While I suppose the other kids were having sleepovers and playdates on the weekends, I was learning how to play bridge. I was pretty good at it, too. Other kids got to go to McDonald’s and Roy Rogers, but I developed a distinct taste for kasha varnishkas. I heard stories from my grandmother about growing up in Strawberry Mansion (which you’d think was a mansion, but actually it was the name of a poor neighborhood in Philly). Because of uncle Morris, I know the difference between the smell of a cheap Phillie Blunt and a Cuban Montecristo, how they’re rolled, and why one is so much better than the other. My grandfather taught me to recognize the voice of the old Philadelphia Phillies play-by-play man Andy Musser so well that once when I dialed a wrong number and somehow accidentally called Musser, I knew it was him immediately, just from his “hello.” We talked for an hour and a half about his retirement and the glory days of the 1980 World Champion Philadelphia Phillies with Tug McGraw, Pete Rose, and, of course, Mike Schmidt.
The Ten Best Days of My Life Page 5