A Catered Affair

by Sue Margolis

  I groaned. We’d been to a party the night before and hadn’t gotten in until after two.

  “Ooh, and Sarah Palin is planning to adopt an alien baby.”

  “Good for her.”

  I decided I ought to rouse myself. We—that is, Mum, Scarlett, Grace and I—were having Sunday brunch at Nana Ida’s and she was expecting us at twelve. Josh couldn’t make it because he was helping his best mate, Andy, move house.

  I pulled back the duvet to see Josh standing over me in his boxers. He was cradling the usual stack of Sunday newspapers—broadsheets for him, tabloids for me. These days I made no apologies for watching How Clean Is Your House?, buying CDs with titles like Classical Music for Your Family Road Trip and reading the tabloids. By the time I got home after a day in court, or hours spent reading up on case law or legal precedent, I was desperate for an easy-listening, watching or reading fix.

  Whereas I read trashy thrillers to get me to sleep, Josh would choose a tome from his nightstand, which was piled high with books on quantum physics, string theory and postmodernist philosophy.

  I especially looked forward to the Sunday tabloids. It was like getting my comics when I was a kid. I lapped up the headlines: SINGING NUN IN DRUG SUICIDE PACT … PEDO, GAY, LEFT-WING TRANSSEXUALS TAKING BRITISH JOBS … I FOUND FACE OF JESUS ON MY POP-TART. I knew my tabloid habit annoyed Josh. So much so that if we were expecting people for dinner, he would do a thorough sweep of the flat looking for stray copies of the News of the World.

  “They’re all boned,” he said, meaning he had gone through the papers and removed those annoying, loose bits of advertising. He let go of the pile. It landed beside me with a thud. A couple of glossy magazine supplements slid off the bedspread onto the floor.

  “You are good,” I said, reaching down to pick up the Sunday Times Style section.

  “I know. That’s why you keep me. Tea or coffee? And I’m making Marmite toast.”

  “I’d rather have sex,” I said. Fully awake now, I appeared to have an urgent case of lady wood. I started giving him come-to-bed eyes, but as come-to-bed eyes went, I doubted they were my best, since I hadn’t removed yesterday’s makeup and they were probably smeared in black mascara.

  He practically dived back into bed. “Your wish is my command.”

  I started laughing. “Idiot.”

  Before you could say IUD, he was tugging at my pajama bottoms.

  Josh had been feeling particularly upbeat, not to say frisky, all weekend. One of his leukemia patients, an eight-year-old boy who had caused him much anxiety after his first bonemarrow transplant failed, had undergone a second and finally been given the all clear.

  Josh lifted up my top and started kissing my breasts. I reached inside his boxers. “Wow.”

  “Josh Eisner—human broomstick—at your service.”

  He couldn’t have been inside me more than twenty seconds when the phone trilled. We carried on for three or four rings. Finally Josh rolled off me. He lay on his back, forearm over his eyes. “It’ll be your nana. We’ve told her we don’t want doves being released after the ceremony. Why can’t she let it go?”

  I leaned over Josh and picked up the receiver.

  “Tally, it’s me.”

  “Hi, Nana. What’s up?”

  “I’ve been thinking about this issue with the doves.”

  “Doves?” Josh whispered.

  I nodded.

  “Bloody hell’s bells.”

  “You know what?” Nana said. “I’ve come to the conclusion you’re right. The idea is a bit tacky.”

  “You’ve come to the conclusion that I’m right and the idea is a bit tacky,” I repeated for Josh’s benefit.

  “Thank God for that,” he muttered.

  “Well, I’m glad we’re agreed,” I said to Nana.

  “Me, too. Now then, my niece Janice called. Your cousin Elliot wants to sing ‘Angels’ during the ceremony. He’s such a talented boy. Lovely voice. He sings on all the cruise ships. She said he’s got a fabulous white tux he could wear.”

  I repeated this aloud—emphasizing the bit about the fabulous white tux. Josh looked at me, his expression one of quiet desperation. “So now we’ve got your cousin Elliot singing as well as the Manischewitz Jewish gospel choir your mother just booked.”

  “Behave,” I whispered, trying not to laugh. “It was a Jewish steel band and I put a stop to that last week.”

  Josh said he was going to make tea and toast.

  “You know what, Nana,” I said, “I’m not sure that the rabbi will approve of a pop song being performed during the service.”

  “You don’t think ‘Angels’ counts as religious music, then?”

  “Not really. Look, why don’t you tell Janice that we’d love Elliot to sing, but I think it will have to be at the reception.”

  “Yeah, preferably before the guests arrive,” Josh muttered as he left the room.

  At the beginning of January, Josh and I had been planning a small, intimate wedding. A couple weeks later, after I’d announced our engagement to Mum, she had insisted on paying for a slightly bigger, less intimate affair and we’d accepted. By the end of the month Nana had stepped in and everything changed again.

  When Nana found out that we weren’t planning a big fat Jewish wedding and were going for something smaller and slimmer, she was—in the nicest possible way—up in arms. I explained that Josh and I wanted to keep things simple and that even if we’d wanted a fancy-schmancy wedding, Mum couldn’t afford it and she was refusing to let us contribute. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Nana said. “Of course you want a big wedding, and I will pay for the whole thing. It will be my present to you and Josh. I don’t want any arguments.”

  Josh and I insisted, as did Mum, that Nana hang on to her savings because living into advanced old age—and we were all convinced she would—didn’t come cheap. But Nana clamped her hand to her chest and played the I’m-not-long-for-this-world-let-me-do-this-one-last-thing-before-I-die card, and in the end Mum threw up her hands in defeat. Josh and I accepted Nana’s offer rather more graciously and took her out for dinner to say thank you.

  Our wedding was now going to be a lavish do for two hundred people with an eight-piece band, a toastmaster and a close-up table magician.

  Nana was happy to admit that one of the reasons she wanted to give us a big wedding was to show off to her friends. After all, her granddaughter was marrying a handsome doctor—a specialist no less. The moment she found out we were engaged, Nana called everybody from her cleaning lady to her chiropractor. All Nana’s friends at the day center, everybody she met at the queue at the kosher butcher, the deli and the doctor’s surgery, knew that her granddaughter the lawyer was marrying a brilliant cancer specialist.

  “By the way,” she said at one point, “I bumped into Estelle Brownstein the other day at a Ladies’ Guild lunch. There she was, all hoity-toity because her granddaughter’s marrying a pharmacist with three shops. I soon put her in her place.”

  Of course, Nana had wanted to know about Josh’s parents. He told her the truth—that his dad had walked out on the family and that these days he had almost no contact with him. He wouldn’t be invited to the wedding. I watched Nana’s eyes fill up. She reached out and took his hand. “Your father is a fool. He has lost a wonderful son.”

  It turned out that ours wasn’t the only wedding Nana Ida intended to pay for. She had decided that if Scarlett and Grace ever tied the knot, she would pay for that, too. If they chose not to get married, then she would give them money.

  In the same way that Nana had no trouble with Scarlett being gay, she had no trouble with Grace being black. As somebody who’d escaped from Nazi Germany on one of the last Kindertransports out of Berlin, she had no interest in bigotry and racism. To make her point, she went to considerable effort to welcome Grace into the family. Having insisted that Scarlett bring her to Friday night dinner, Nana went over the road to a Jamaican Rastafarian family she had befriended to ask how she might make Gra
ce feel at home. That Friday, we arrived to find a framed photograph of Haile Selassie hanging on the wall next to the portrait of the Queen. Bob Marley was singing “Buffalo Soldier” on the old seventies stereo. “Now, then,” Nana said after we’d all sat down, “who’s for some sweet lime chicken?”

  If Nana’s over-the-top welcome made Grace feel uncomfortable, she didn’t show it. She ate all her chicken, asked for seconds of fried yams and kept saying how wonderful it all was and how she couldn’t believe that Nana Ida had gone to all this trouble to make her feel welcome. I had taken to Grace the first time I met her. She was one of those rare people who seemed to have no agenda—no beef with the world. She was kind, easygoing and gentle.

  As soon as the wedding plans got under way, Josh and I had decided that our families should meet. We’d agreed on Sunday lunch at a French bistro in Camden Town.

  It wasn’t something I was particularly looking forward to, the thoughtful, cerebral Eisners breaking bread with the loudmouth Roths.

  Grace—who was, of course, invited—kept telling me to calm down, sit back and let my two worlds collide. It turned out to be good advice. Josh’s brother and sister, who were both rather earnest civil servants, seemed to think Nana was a hoot, especially when she kept referring to their mother—quite innocently—as Mrs. Eisenhower.

  What was more, Josh’s mum and mine hit it off straightaway. I hadn’t realized that despite moving in different professional worlds—Josh’s mum taught troubled teens who’d been kicked out of mainstream school—they had a lot in common. Both women had lost husbands and, instead of remarrying, had devoted their lives to raising their families.

  Mum and Judy Eisner spent most of the lunch swapping stories about divorce, widowhood and being single mothers—and got rather drunk in the bargain.

  We didn’t leave the restaurant until after four, and when we parted it was with kisses and hugs and promises to meet up again after the wedding.

  The moment that Josh and I agreed to a big wedding, the stress began. Since January, we had been drowning in decision making: table centerpieces (high or low?), Viennese table (passé?), chocolate fountain (definitely passé), speeches (how many and length of), toast to the royal family (Nana Ida was insisting), wedding cake (after a big dinner and dessert, does anybody actually eat it?), stretch limos (white or black? Er, that would be neither: Josh and I were groom and bride, not drug dealer and moll), white suede yarmulkes for the men saying: ON THE OCCASION OF TALLULAH AND JOSH’S WEDDING (sick bowl, please).

  Having said that she would leave all the decisions to us, Nana couldn’t resist making “suggestions.” Royal toast aside—which was particularly important to her—she wasn’t the sort to put her foot down or make diva-ish demands. Instead she would call with her latest “brilliant idea.” “Of course it’s only a thought,” she would say. “I wouldn’t dream of interfering. This is your wedding, and you and Josh must do things your own way, but I do think a traditional toastmaster in a red tailcoat would be nice. Otherwise your cousin Neville would have to be MC, and between you and me the boy’s a bit of a yutz. Ooh, and I do think we should put ‘carriages at eleven thirty’ at the bottom of the invitations.”

  At eighty-four, Nana could suddenly be useful again, and she was loving every minute. Even though most of her ideas were old-fashioned and/or a bit tacky, I couldn’t take that excitement away from her.

  Mum was doing her best not to interfere with the wedding preparations. I suspected that Scarlett had had a quiet word with her. On the other hand, she kept letting comments slip like: “It’s all very traditional, but if that’s what you want.”

  I think Mum secretly fantasized about us getting married at the Kremlin or on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

  Josh and I finished our tea and toast, then tried making love again, but the moment had passed. Instead we showered and dressed and went our separate ways—him to Andy’s, me to Nana’s.

  What with the Ikea sale, the Sunday traffic madness on the North Circular was even worse than usual. Then, once I’d gotten to Edgware, I needed to stop off and get Nana a bunch of flowers.

  It was past twelve thirty when I arrived. “Where have you been?” Nana said by way of greeting. “We were starting to worry.”

  “Monster traffic. I tried calling, but my phone’s out of battery.”

  I handed her the flowers.

  “Freesias. My favorite,” she said, leading the way down the hall. “And you got the yellow ones. They’re the ones that smell, you know.”

  Of course I knew. She’d been telling me since I was eight.

  Mum and Scarlett were already sitting at the dining room table. I kissed them both hello. “No Grace?” I said to Scarlett.

  “In Paris,” she said. “Taking pics of Carla Bruni for the Sunday Times Mag. They’re doing a series on European first ladies. With a bit of luck it’ll be the cover story.”

  “Wow, what a coup.”

  I pulled out a chair and sat down at Nana’s walnut dining table. I had eaten hundreds of meals at this table. Nana was a great cook. She didn’t do fancy, but what she did, she did to perfection. Everything she put on the table—from her roast beef to her soups and strudel—was sublime.

  It was Nana Ida who got Scarlett and me into food. That’s because when Mum went back to work after Dad died, she insisted on “helping out” by coming over each day to cook. By then Nana was a retired widow with nothing much going on in her life. Suddenly she was shopping, schlepping and cooking family meals like she had in the old days. She said that being needed again so late in life was a gift from God.

  Our fridge was always full of her homemade goodies. She even baked almond biscuits for us, and God forbid she came round and caught sight of a shop-bought cake. Mum was an OK cook, but nothing like as good as Nana. Plus cooking bored her.

  Today, Nana’s table was covered with her white linen Shabbat tablecloth. I looked at all the deli food. Nana’s imitation crystal dishes were full of herrings (Dutch, pickled and chopped), fish balls (fried and boiled), cucumbers (haimishe and sweet and sour), cream cheese, egg and onion, and chopped liver. The smoked salmon was arranged on a platter shaped like a fish. Underneath the salmon it said A PRESENT FROM NAPLES. Scarlett had gone there on a school trip and brought it back for Nana. The bagels, from the Israeli deli, not the supermarket (God forbid), were piled into a bread basket. Beside them was Nana’s ancient breadboard and serrated knife.

  “Come on. Nobody’s eating.” Nana picked up the bread knife and began slicing bagels. “So who’s got news?”

  “Oh, FYI,” Scarlett said, “we’re still auditioning sperm donors.”

  Scarlett and Grace had been living together for six months and had been talking about getting pregnant almost from the get-go. They’d decided that Grace would have the first baby because she was established in her career and more able than Scarlett to take a year or two out. The problem was that since the law had changed, enabling children to find their spermdonor fathers, there were fewer men willing to donate, and so far they’d found nobody suitable. Then they had a change of heart. Maybe it would be better for the child to have a proper, loving, involved father who would not only be willing, but want to share child care. That meant finding a gay man, most likely, who was ready to become a dad.

  “So how do you go about auditioning a sperm donor?” Nana said. “Actually, on second thought, maybe I don’t want to know.”

  Scarlett said that they’d narrowed it down to three—all gay. One was a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet. Another was a drama student. The third was a photographer on the Sunday Herald picture desk. His name was Richie, and Grace had known him for years. So far he seemed the most likely. “He’s desperate to become a father. We both adore him and know he’ll make a great dad. What’s even more perfect is that he’s white. Grace and I think it’s important to have a mixed-race child to reflect our relationship. Only problem is that Richie’s partner, Tom, isn’t sure he’s ready to become a parent.�
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  Nana was counting on her fingers.

  “So if things worked out, this child would have four parents,” I said, “you, Grace, Richie and Tom. And what about grandparents?”

  Mum did the math and said it worked out at eight including Nana.

  “God,” I said, “Christmas is going to be fun at your house.”

  Scarlett smiled and admitted that it might not be easy. “On the other hand,” she said, “any child we had wouldn’t be lacking in love and affection.”

  “Which is all that counts. Now, come on, eat up. There’s ice cream for dessert.” Nobody asked what flavor. Grandma only ever bought vanilla because it was the only one that didn’t stain.

  “Mum, you OK?” I’d noticed she’d gone a bit quiet.

  “I’m fine,” she said, pouring herself a Diet Coke. “It’s just that I didn’t get the chance to lie in this morning. Eight o’clock I’ve got this guy on the phone threatening to take a bottle of pills.”

  “So what did you say?”

  Mum shrugged. “I told him if he took the bottle he would definitely die, but if he took two, he might actually feel better. I couldn’t believe it when he said he’d give it a go.”

  “Shelley, you’ve got to stop this,” Nana said. “You girls have to tell her. She’s not a trained counselor. One day she’ll get caught and get into trouble.”

  “We’ve told her,” Scarlett said. “It’s like talking to a brick wall.”

  “So anyway,” Mum continued, “he’s been feeling depressed and he goes to see his doctor. He spends half an hour pouring out his problems, and d’you know what the doctor says? You will not believe this when I tell you. He says, ‘I think your problem is low self-esteem. It’s very common in losers.’ ”

  Scarlett burst out laughing. “I don’t believe it. He was winding you up.”

  “Well, he didn’t sound like he was.”

  “That reminds me of your uncle Bernie,” Nana said. “He suffered from psychosis and low self-esteem.”

  “Yeah,” Scarlett said. “He only wanted to kill the deputy prime minister.”