Evidently the Becksteins didn’t think about the fact that there would be several dozen women and girls vying for a place at the mirror in the club’s ladies’ rooms. There’s as much elbow jabbing as primping, and a great deal of space hogging.
“Now aren’tcha glad you’re goin’ to be a nun?” Maureen asks her daughter. “None of this silliness.”
“Ah, I knew that was the reason I decided to marry Christ!”
“Don’t they teach you in that community house not to sass your own mother?” Maureen replies huffily. “Tessa, that bronzey-brown suits you,” she adds, complimenting my cocktail dress. Well, maybe a kindly disposed heart does beat under that sturdy brassiere after all.
Inside the reception hall itself (no need for a sign; our noses guide us), cooking stations line the perimeter, serving up what Jamie dubs the Foods of All Nations. There are, in fact, flags to aid the guests in locating the tapas, sushi, pasta and antipasti, dolmades and spanikopita, blini with sour cream and caviar, mini quiches, egg rolls and dumplings, sticks of sate, and for the Ashkenazi Jews who can’t skip a meal that doesn’t include our own brand of “comfort food,” there are knishes, and a carving station offering slices of corned beef and pastrami, with plenty of mustard and seeded rye to match.
Watching Jamie’s mother load up on the corned beef, I feel compelled to remark, “See, Maureen, we have something else in common besides loving your son and being born in New York.”
The cocktail reception is a gourmand’s wet dream, and I have no doubt we’ll all be exhorted, if not commanded, to dance it all off in another couple of hours. Needless to say, there is an open bar, and trays of champagne and red and white wine are making the rounds for those who prefer the grape to the grain or are too lazy or impatient to suffer the crush at the liquor tables.
Dinner is just as lavish and just as international in flavor (though everything is short on taste—in both meanings of the word): choice of gazpacho or vichyssoise; Chilean sea bass with Peruvian purple potatoes or steak au poivre with pommes frite; and for dessert, tiramisu, baklava, or crêpes suzettes—however, for someone who may find the portions too small, the traditional Viennese table groaning with gooey pastries and petit fours is open for business. Clearly no one was concerned about having a kosher menu unless the dairy items are faux-milchig.
“What do you think they do with all the leftovers?” Brigid wonders. “I hope they donate them to a soup kitchen. You could feed half the poor people in Dublin with what’s not being eaten to night.” I can see she’s not comfortable with the wretched excess. Then again, what normal person would be? Maureen was nonplussed by the contents of the goody bags that had been placed on each guest’s seat prior to their arrival in the banquet hall. Included with the Toblerone bars, and bottles of Ralph Lauren’s Polo fragrances, is a tooth-whitening kit and a coupon good for a 20 percent discount off one of Dr. Beckstein’s periodontal procedures.
Yet all of this is staid and stodgy compared to the pièce de résistance—the entertainment. Suddenly the room goes dark and a DJ pumps up the volume. Jamie estimates it’s 10 percent melody and 90 percent percussion. My chair starts to wobble and dance on its own from the vibrations.
“Let’s hear it for the Beckstein twins!” the motivator booms into a microphone, as behind him a wall of screens is illuminated and flashes with quick cuts of Emily and Jacob, a video photo album from birth to thirteen, accompanied by a pounding beat that would give a deaf person a migraine.
“Are you ready to party hearty?” the motivator shouts, then turns the mic on the guests. “Gimme a YES!” he encourages.
“Yes,” the guests reply in unison.
“A little louder. Gimme a YES!”
“Yes.”
“I can’t hear you!”
“YESSS”
The motivator then shouts, “And now let’s give it up for the people who made it all possible—Mom and Dad: Dr. Sid Beckstein and his lovely wife, Imogen!”
And, to the accompaniment of tumultuous applause, on come Sidney and Imogen, dancing all the way, waving their hands in the air as though they’re at a rave. The two of them are on to outfit number three, Sidney in his tux and my cousin wearing a sparkly blue gown straight from the Pamela Anderson collection for mothers of the bar mitzvah. It plunges everywhere and Imogen doesn’t have the hard body necessary to carry it off. They join hands and kiss cute in front of the screens, which now display a montage of snapshots from their marriage.
“Now give it up for Big Sister!” the motivator commands, and Shauna, looking sheepish and out of place in a black pantsuit, joins the rest of her family.
“And put your hands together for the man and woman of the hour—Jacob and Emily Becksteiiiiiiiiiiiin!”
I can’t help myself; I begin to laugh because this intro makes the twins sound like they’ve just tied the knot, not broken their ties to childhood. Several of the guests stomp and clap. Jacob and Emily enter—each riding a pony—from opposite sides of the screen. Behind the DJ a burst of fireworks threatens to burn it down. I can’t believe the polo club let the Becksteins do this with their animals—someone must have neglected to disclose the plans for simultaneous pyrotechnics and a throbbing bass line. The terrified horses are then led “offstage” by staff members after the twins dismount.
“Speech! Speech,” demand a number of guests. Imogen and Sidney oblige, acting as mock-shocked as an Oscar winner who pretends not to know they had a one in five chance of taking home the statuette.
“They say that planning a bar mitzvah costs an arm and a leg,” Sid begins, “so when you’ve got twins, I suppose you’re left with nothing but a torso. I guess that makes this my stump speech.” No one laughs. “Anyway—my wife is the funny one in the family—anyway, I’m glad you’re all here to night, and some of you have been with us since this morning, to share in another Beckstein milestone. So eat, drink, dance, and be merry because when the American Express bill comes, I want to know I got my money’s worth.”
I’m mortified by his crassness. It plays into all the awful stereotypes. The Doyles look somewhat stunned. Imogen then delivers a staggeringly maudlin speech recounting in rich detail her long hours of labor, each one of the twins’ personal milestones until now (kind of hard to play This Is Your Life when a kid is barely thirteen), and ends by thanking her precious babies who she knows will always make her proud, and the two men without whom this event would not have been possible: Roger Scheinbaum the party planner, and her adoring and adorable husband Sidney.
I scan the room for Roger and find him leaning by the door, an inscrutable expression on his face.
Jacob then pulls a damp piece of paper from his pocket. Clearly not a natural at this, he stiffly reads his prepared text as though it’s unfamiliar, thanking “my mom, Imogen Beckstein, and my dad, Sidney Beckstein, and my twin sister Emily Beckstein” (as if we don’t know who these people are) “for making my life possible.” He’s followed by Emily who speaks off the cuff, and keeps it short and sweet: “Thank you Mommy and Daddy. I love you both very much.”
Suddenly, the music breaks into a samba and a half dozen muscular African-American guys dressed in gauchos and sombreros, their chests bare and oiled, begin to dance, encouraging the guests to get up and join them. Maureen looks as if she’s gone into shock. When the samba segues into a pulsating hip-hop beat, the gauchos are un-velcroed and the sombreros tossed aside. I take a stab at how the dancers might have gotten the gold lamé yarmulkes to stay on their totally bald heads: double-stick tape.
Maureen now wonders, not without acerbity, what bare-chested black men in yarmulkes have to do with religion, or for that matter, what any of this riotous cacophony has to do with Jewish ritual. Jamie reminds her that Irish wakes tend to be real rip-snorters, too, though he admits that he’s yet to see any half-naked hip-hoppers at one.
“It could have been worse,” I say, trying to be heard above the music. “Imogen invited Venus to come and lead a pole-dancing clinic for the girls
. She wisely declined. Can you imagine those thirteen-year-olds encouraged to dress and act even sluttier than they already do? If I’d gone to a party looking like that at their age, my father would have grounded me for life.”
And then a klezmer band is introduced, solely, it seems, to perform the Hebrew hit parade, starting with “Hava Nagila.” You’ve never really danced the hora until you’ve done it to the accompaniment of manic percussion that nearly obscures the melody. Three hundred people are encouraged to get up from their seats and do the grapevine. The tune, such as it is, morphs into “Siman Tov U Mazeltov,” which means “may good luck come to us,” during which the circle dancing grows more frenetic. Dr. Beckstein beckons to a handful of his friends who plop Emily and Jacob onto a pair of chairs and then hoist the furniture over their heads, dancing and bobbing. Emily, a bit nervous about this little ride screams to her dad, “Don’t drop me!” while Jacob appears to be negotiating with Dr. Beckstein’s dental partners to jog him over to the bar. The men oblige and Jacob is handed a huge glass of scotch.
When the twins have been returned to earth, the klezmer band slows the tempo a bit and strikes up a third tune. Grabbing my hand, Brigid pulls me onto the dance floor. “I know this one!” I look at her in disbelief. “It’s a mazinka. Jewish people dance it when the youngest child in a family gets married. I lorned it in the international folk dance class they made us take in secondary school.” Brigid bursts out laughing. “Oh, Tessa, I wish you could see yer face. You look absolutely gobsmacked! C’mon, I’ll teach it to you!”
Brigid is less confident, however, when it comes to other kinds of dancing. Men seem to be drawn to her. Maybe they’re attracted to the nun aura; they just don’t have a clue what it is. But her looks, and the energy she gives off just sitting still have gained her several offers to dance. She turned down the first guy because she didn’t think she should be shaking it in that context. By the fifth request, she was just feeling too shy to dance with a man. By the tenth, she found herself reluctantly acquiescing, but she was so confused by her own decision that she must have seemed quite a cool customer. Oh, if only they knew why!
The motivator announces a five-minute breather, to give people enough time to enjoy a cup of coffee and shovel a pastry or two in their mouths. Meanwhile, thanks to the open bars and the bottles of wine and champagne on every table, the circle dances spin a lot faster—or maybe it’s the room that seems to be revolving at such velocity.
“Okay people, fun’s over! It’s time to shake yaw bootaayyy!” screams the motivator. The lights are doused completely, and the six dancers reappear wearing neon necklaces and bracelets, and twirling neon hula hoops. In the eerie light, they pull a half dozen Long Island matrons to their feet, and toss the hula hoops around them, so that the women find themselves gyrating crotch to crotch with a topless hunky black guy. They seem to be having a great deal of fun, actually.
There is only one slow dance all night. “This one’s for the old folks!” shouts the motivator. “So all you members of the Geritol generation, let’s see you up on your feet!”
“I think they’re playing our song,” Jamie says, extending his hand to me. “May I have this dance, Tessa Goldsmith Craig?”
Under a disco ball the size of Pluto, we sway to the strains of “The Time of My Life,” the theme song from Dirty Dancing. I wonder if Jamie was subjected to dance classes in secondary school, because he’s barely moving, but right now it doesn’t much matter, because it feels so good to be in his arms. Exhausted, and suffering from a raging headache (what a surprise!), I rest against his shoulder, enjoying the feel of his hand pressed against my back, telegraphing through the energy radiating from his palm that he’s here for me. Another five minutes of this and I’ll be fast asleep and therefore in no shape to drive. I hope he knows how to find the way home.
By the time the dancing winds down, at least two hours later, the stilettos have been stashed under the tables, ties have been loosened, jackets removed, Jacob has been caught in the empty cloakroom making out with Emily’s best friend, and Emily has thrown up all over the ladies’ room. But as long as there’s still food to be served, the beat goes on. The chocolate fountain would probably have been a bigger hit, had it been unveiled earlier in the evening. Here, at last, is something the old ladies will have a hard time stuffing into their purses.
Our drive home is mercifully silent. Brigid and Maureen have fallen asleep in the backseat. Jamie the Empath knows how uncomfortable I am with the day’s ostentation. What you saw today isn’t… is what I’d like to tell him—his mother and sister too—but I feel that if I were to apologize for it, in some way it would make me feel like I was apologizing for Judaism. I may not be a religious Jew but I am a proud one.
“Thank you for coming with me today,” I murmur. “It was an insanely long day, emphasis on the insane, and you were a real brick throughout the whole thing.”
He smiles and squeezes my hand. “Ach, I just chalked it up to a study in cultural anthropology.”
“Nevertheless. You’re a prince for doing it and I love you.”
His grin is bright enough to light all eight lanes of the Long Island Expressway. “Now you tell me? When I’m wearin’ a seat belt and can’t do a thing about it?”
Twenty-four
September 20
It might be my imagination, but those three little words—three big words, actually—have magically manifested themselves in a number of wonderful ways. First, I feel fabulous. Having told Jamie I love him, even if it didn’t exactly happen during a Hallmark moment, I feel lighter and unburdened. Sex was good before, but in the past few days we’ve reached a different, and very pleasurable, plateau. As far as Jamie’s charm quotient goes, there’s more swag to his swagger (dare I say more cock to his cockiness?), and miracle of miracles, his unholy messiness is almost a thing of the past. Almost. At least now I can find some of my own things amid the clutter. This new development has Maureen more anxious than any increase in affection between her son and me. Picking up after himself—that one’s got her nervous. Besides, she’s taken to scrubbing my apartment daily, as if to disinfect it, and now it looks as if she might someday be out of a job.
Jamie says that his mum thinks she’ll wear him down with her presence. The poor man could be a frequent flyer to perdition for all the guilt trips she’s laid on him since her arrival. But she won’t confront me with her Irish-American temper because she’s saving a fortune by not staying in a hotel. Nor, despite her chilly treatment, have I demanded that she leave and leave us alone. I still haven’t found a way to connect to her, even though the paradigm is the same: American woman from New York/Irish man. But, as Jamie would immediately remind me, Maureen’s mission has precious little to do with me. He’s shirked his responsibilities to his family, and the fact that he’s happier than he’s been in years irks her just as much, if not more.
Meanwhile I’ve got plenty else on my plate. I’m gearing up for a speech on Education, and we’re shooting the first of a fistful of campaign commercials tomorrow. Many of David’s usual contributors came through with sizeable donations to my war chest so that I can begin to get my message out to the voters. I’m up against an opponent with limitless funds who has opted out of the Campaign Finance Program so that he can spend what ever he wants. Trotting out the gimmicks, his sidewalk volunteers are handing out dog treats to voters with the phrase “Bob Dobson: Gnawt pawlitics as usual.” Oy. But voters eat them up; or at least their pets do.
Although at present I’m polling nine points below my opponent—which makes me very nervous—Gus Trumbo assures me that I shouldn’t worry. Dobson was able to get a leg up on the name recognition front while David was still in the race by flooding the airwaves with commercials. Voters may not yet be buying into Dobson’s positions, but they sure as hell know who he is. Gus is trying to bolster my spirits by telling me that the women in the district will go heavily for me. I’ve got a lot to say about education, safety and security, and protec
tion of our resources, and that plays well with mothers and grandmothers who want their kids to have safe streets and subways, clean air and water, and an equal opportunity for economic advancement, not to mention the guarantee that I’ll fight like hell to make sure Sesame Street stays on the air. It’s the male demographic he’s more concerned about winning over. Female candidates are often perceived as either not knowing as much as their male counterparts, or not being as tough as guys believe a man would be on a number of issues—crime for instance—or, the converse of that perception—that a woman’s a shrew for demanding accountability and responsibility from corporations, trade unions, and individuals, whereas a man fighting the same fights would be viewed as a strong and capable leader.
In fact, Dobson has been appealing to men by putting himself over as a red meat-eating regular guy (as if I eat what instead? Afalfa?) who knows how to take care of business, given his creds as a CEO who took a single yellow dog dish and parlayed it into an empire. However, my numbers jumped a few points when, unaware that his mic was still on, Dobson told a bunch of reporters that “the little lady never ran a thing in her life, except maybe a bake sale.”
Stephen Sondheim wrote “You gotta have a gimmick,” and ours attracts more attention than throwing the peoplea bone. So if it’s an unfortunate truism that voters remember the candidates by their publicity stunts and not their ideas, the Craig campaign will not be outdone by Len Avariss and his team of spin doctors. We can’t compete with Dobson’s advertising bud get, so we’ve got to go grassroots. Venus, with that drop-dead gorgeous body and all that hair, has been stationing herself outside key venues in the district, wearing a white baby tee that says “I want to talk to you.” Few men can resist. Sad, but true, most of them have spent their entire adolescence and half their adult lives dreaming about a woman like Venus approaching them. And once the fly has entered the web, the Harvard alumna who is as articulate as she is stunning asks about the political and social issues that are important to them right now, and then explains how Tessa Craig will deal with their concerns, handing each guy a white paper on the key subject or subjects. Her method of quite literally attracting the voters has proven to be such a success that Venus has rounded up a number of her former colleagues, given them a crash course in local politics and its relevance on the national stage, and sent them out to hit the pavement. The women have been unkindly dubbed “Trumbo’s Bimbos” by the New York Post, but I’ll bet it’s selling them a lot of papers; every day for the past week they’ve run a photo of at least one of Venus’s sultry satellites. Actually, I stole that last phrase from the Daily News’s coverage of the phenomenon. In this dog-eat-dog campaign, Bob Dobson has suggested that we might have Venus’s women mud wrestle his volunteers instead of he and I sitting down and debating the issues.
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