Jane Austen in Boca (21 page)

Carol met May at Newark Airport with the declaration that “there’s loads to do and we better get busy.” Of course, with Carol, there was a certain paradox attached to her frenetic busyness. She was like a farmer who keeps horses in order to haul away the manure that they generate. She was forever devising complicated chores out of the most seemingly straightforward and simple tasks. One would have thought, given the energy she was expending now, that she was planning the entertainment of an important business colleague or a high-level community official, not the birthday party of an eight-year-old. But the fact that Carol did not draw such distinctions was part of her success. It showed a refusal to give anyone or anything short shrift. Truth be told, it had a disarming effect on those with whom she came into contact. Even as she irritated many people, she also, strangely, endeared herself to them by giving them her complete and undivided attention.

“We have to go pick up the cake,” she said as she wove expertly in and out of the heavy traffic leading out of the airport.
“Wait till you see it. I designed it myself and went over it with the baker yesterday to be sure he followed the sketch. I tried to color code, but bakers tend to be color-blind.” (These were the sorts of bizarre but often accurate observations that Carol excelled in.)

When they arrived at the bakery, the cake was ready, on display at the counter, and already being admired by a group of women who seemed to find it entrancing. It was in the shape of a baseball field. It had candles in the shape of players and peppermints designating the bases. “All my idea,” Carol explained to May. “They say they’re going to make it a standard from now on. And I have extras of the mints”—she took a bag from her pocketbook and shook it consolingly—”so each of the boys can have one. You know how they fight about things like that.”

Once arrived at the house, while May made the truffles, Carol laid out the materials for the boys’ goody bags, carefully checking to be sure that there were an equal number of the requisite items: a yo-yo that played the
Star Wars
theme, a key chain with a miniature catcher’s mitt, and sundry erasers, stickers, and whistles, all of which would no doubt be lost or thrown away as soon as the guests got home from the party, but were nonetheless de rigueur as ritualized talismans. Carol had also bought small baskets for the mothers, which she planned to fill with May’s truffles along with containers of hand cream and lip gloss. It was clear that with the brainchild of the matriarchal goody bags she had reset the bar for children’s birthday parties in the northern New Jersey suburbs. They would be that much more labor-intensive from now on.

The family went out to dinner that night. Carol had deemed cooking impossible in a kitchen in which the counter space had been turned into a miniature assembly line and the table taken over by boxes of paper plates, plastic knives and forks, hats, noisemakers, and the like, all of which held to the baseball
theme. At one point, Adam proclaimed that baseball bored him and he wanted to take up hockey. Carol had responded that he was to like baseball for at least one more day, and then they’d talk about it.

The restaurant chosen for dinner was called the Jolly Traveler and had a definite kid-friendly atmosphere. It featured a large-screen TV showing cartoons in the corner and a kids’ menu longer than the adults’—just the sort of atmosphere that Boca Festa residents loudly decried. It was a source of ongoing discussion among May’s peers that their children were spoiling their grandchildren and creating a new generation capable of God knows what. “I’ve never seen such a thing,” it was observed. “What with the lessons and the special schools and the taking them to Europe as though the Catskills weren’t good enough, no wonder the children talk back. We would never have stood for it.” The idea that this generation of parents was creating monsters of entitlement by tailoring the world to their needs was one of the few generally agreed upon notions in Boca Festa (no one breathed, of course, that the notorious Jewish American Prince and Princess, not to mention the young Philip Roth, had been the product of
their
generation of child-rearing). They also suspected that what their children were doing was somehow in retaliation for what they had done, and hence they sensed in it a definite accusation. It didn’t help, of course, that the whole thing placed them in the double bind of wanting to prove that their children were on the wrong track while at the same time not wishing misery and failure upon their grandchildren.

Whenever the subject of child-rearing was raised, it invariably led to the recounting of the famous Weintraub incident near the Boca Festa pool last year. Tara Weintraub-Kaplan, age six, had told her mother that she would not wear flip-flops to the clubhouse, “and you can’t make me,” whereupon her grandmother, Hettie Weintraub, announced to her daughter, Cindy, that she would never have allowed Cindy to speak to her that way
Cindy, instead of muttering under her breath as she generally did in these cases, was suffering from PMS and reacted violently, throwing the flip-flops at Hettie and screaming that maybe if she had, she wouldn’t be taking 150 milligrams of Zoloft a day The scene, played out in front of at least twenty residents, was talked about for months with that particular brand of schadenfreude reserved for incidents striking very close to the bone. Everyone knew that it could just as well have been their daughter, which of course did not prevent them from shaking their heads over poor Hettie.

At the Jolly Traveler, the children had indeed taken over the establishment, and May found it difficult to digest her salad in a setting in which there was so much shrieking, as sodas spilled, crayons broke, and toddlers were thrust into and pulled out of booster seats. Carol, May noted, appeared to thrive on the mayhem (she had cut not only Adam’s meat, but the boy’s at the next table), while Alan, in the fashion cultivated from his own childhood, remained unperturbed, his mind occupied elsewhere. It was not relaxing, May thought, but it was lively, and in her droopy state, it had a cheering effect. By the time they got home, the two-year-old was asleep in her car seat and Adam, who had been whining loudly about wanting to take up hockey and buy the needed implements immediately, had also fallen into a weary stupor. May, too, felt tired, and thought finally she would be able to get a good night’s rest. She looked forward to climbing into the bed in the guest room, which Carol had decorated in a riot of color and design coordination. The bedspread, sheets, curtains, rug, and even the tissue box holder all shared the same basic motif of black and lavender flowers—a veritable carnival for the eye that had initially made May squint. Tonight, finally, tucked under the dizzyingly colorful sheet and, more important, under her daughter-in-law’s wing, she would sleep.

The birthday party was held the next day at a roller-skating rink outside of town. Carol had rented the rink for three hours
in the afternoon and had replaced the in-house DJ with one of her own choosing. The regular musical fare, she said, was “too rinky-dink”—an odd criticism, thought May, for the music of a roller-skating rink. Carol had also hired a roller-skating game leader (a rarefied version of the
tummler
May remembered from vacations in the Catskills), who led the thirty boys in various roller-skating tricks and games. Carol had assigned May the task of waiting near the opening of the rink with a box of Band-Aids and tissues, with instructions to minister to injured or otherwise disgruntled boys who sought to exit. No one, as it happened, seemed inclined to do so. The boys remained in a state of frenetic activity within the parameter of the rink, lunging, shouting, attempting with variable success to roller-skate, occasionally kicking and grabbing at each other and having to be torn asunder by the roller-skating game leader. Their mothers sat, huddled and exhausted, at a picnic table in the corner of the room. It was clear, looking at them, why Carol predominated within her circle. She alone appeared energetic and bouncily efficient, her brightness undimmed even by the demands of thirty preadolescent boys. She was wearing black leggings, a long Donna Karan wraparound sweater, and black mules, giving her the look of a high-fashion security guard as she flitted back and forth among the group of mothers; Alan, whom she was directing in the use of the camcorder; the DJ, with whom she had struck up a lively rapport and whose business card she had promised to distribute to her friends; and May, whose well-being she was not above considering. Carol had even found May a comfortable swivel chair in the rink manager’s office. Though the manager was sitting on it, she had snatched it out from under him and dragged it over to May with the order that she sit down and relax.

The next morning, Carol directed May to help Adam write his thank-you notes while she fielded calls from the mothers. At some point in each call, she would pause in her conversation to
shout out that “Billy’s mother wants the recipe for the truffles,” only to cover the phone with her hand and mouth in an exaggerated whisper: “Don’t give it to her.”

It should be noted that among the calls received that morning one was from Carol’s friend Sandy, a resident of Scotch Plains, whose son Jeremy was in a play group with little Benjamin Graf-stein. Sandy, it must be added, was privy to Stephanie Grafstein’s intention to purchase an armchair for the corner of her living room that weekend—a fact to be kept in mind when considering ensuing events of the day

In the afternoon, it was decided they would go to the Short Hills mall to look for pillows for the den. Carol had already visited several department stores and seen a number that she liked, but she was a fiercely thorough comparative shopper. Every possible version of the item in question had to be inspected, its merits cataloged and weighed, before the idea of purchase could begin to be contemplated.

It was in the mall that May saw him. They had left Bloomingdale’s after Carol quickly ascertained the absence of the desired pillows, and May was standing holding Adam’s hand as Carol maneuvered the stroller out of Ann Taylor, where she had been looking at the sale sweaters. Norman Grafstein was walking with a tall pregnant woman, also pushing a stroller with a toddler in it; Stan Jacobs was on the woman’s other side. Norman must have seen her, too, because she saw him stop for a moment, then lean across and say something to Stan, who looked her way. Before she knew it, they were face-to-face, and May, overcome with emotion, had turned white as a sheet. She felt weak and might have lost her balance had she not had Adam’s hand to steady her.

Norman, looking flustered and excited, was the first to speak: “May Newman, as I live and breathe, what a delightful surprise!”

May was too shaken to say anything, but fortunately, Carol, who was never at a loss, jumped in and took over:

“May came up for Adam’s birthday,” she explained, smoothing her son’s hair for emphasis. “Alan and I think it’s important that he have his grandma with him on such a special day.” She smoothed Adam’s hair again, and he pulled away in annoyance, sensing he was being used. She then concentrated her attention on Norman. “It’s nice to see you again, Mr. Grafstein. This must be Mark’s wife, Stephanie, and this must be little Benjamin.” Carol’s ability to call forth names mentioned in passing at an earlier date was nothing short of miraculous.

The tall woman acknowledged that she was indeed Stephanie Grafstein, and reintroduced Carol to her father. Stan shook Carol’s hand, then turned back to study May. He had registered her paleness and noted that she had not yet spoken.

“These are the Newmans,” Norman continued with more confidence now, his eyes focused on May, who had begun to turn from pale to red as she felt herself scrutinized. “Alan, Carol’s husband, went to high school with Mark, if you remember my telling you. Carol was kind enough to visit a few months ago. May”—he put his hand on May’s arm—”lives in Boca, and has become a good friend.”

Carol quickly engaged Stephanie and Stan in conversation about the comparative virtues of shopping in Short Hills, New Jersey, versus Boca Raton. She had understood, with her usual rapidity of deduction, all the particularities of their circumstances, down to the proportion of Jewishness in Stephanie’s makeup. It was Carol’s gift to be able to take the measure of things very quickly and assume the right tone when the situation demanded. In this case, she knew instinctively to reign herself in so as to give these somewhat aloof, somewhat alien people a chance to orient themselves. During the duration of her conversation with Stan and his daughter, she was not for a moment unaware of the engrossing conversation that was proceeding off to the side between May and Norman Grafstein.

After his original embarrassment, Norman seemed to embrace
the occasion with enthusiasm. The decision to flee commitment had sprung less from his friend’s influence than from his own vanity; he had resisted giving up the heady pleasures of geriatric dating. Suddenly he saw things differently. While he had balked at the idea of being hooked, he now asked himself: Had he really enjoyed the dating scene so much? The answer was no. The various women whom he had squired about were hardly recognizable to him as individuals. He could never recall their last names, and he was often allergic to their perfume. It suddenly seemed obvious to him that May was the sweetest woman he had ever met. He would be happy to have her as his date for what remained of his life.

Though it had taken May several minutes to regain her bearings, she soon felt at ease again. Perhaps she had been wrong in her interpretation of his phone message. Clearly he was glad to see her. Her misery was all forgotten, and she felt herself recovering the spontaneity that had marked her manner with him over the past several weeks.

After ten minutes or so, Carol, having assured herself that Norman and May had sufficiently connected and knowing that too much time can be as detrimental as too little in such circumstances, brought the meeting to a close. She announced the necessity of getting Adam to his swimming lesson at the JCC (though the lesson wasn’t for an hour). Perhaps they could hook up one of these days, she said to Stephanie; Alan would love catching up with Mark. As for her mother-in-law, Carol explained that May would be returning to Boca directly, where she was sure that Norman and Stan would have occasion to see her.