She sat on the couch with the baby on her hip, jiggling him up and down. No Steve. She stabbed his number on her cell phone. “Where are you? You were supposed to be here at six, remember? Lia had to go to Mas, and I’ve got a party…”
She could hear the sounds of traffic in the background—engines and horns blaring. “There’s, like, a five-car pileup just past Aramingo,” Steve said. “I’ve been stuck here for forty-five minutes. Nothing’s moving.”
“Can’t you get off and take back roads?”
“As soon as I get to the exit, I will, but I can’t exactly drive through other people.”
“What am I going to do?” she moaned. Lia was gone, she’d never be able to get a sitter on such short notice, she didn’t know the neighbors well enough to leave Oliver with them, and if she didn’t leave soon she’d be late for the party she was managing that night.
“Can you take him with you? It shouldn’t be for very long. As soon as I get off the highway I’ll meet you at the party and take him home.”
“Fine, fine,” she said, grabbing the diaper bag and her purse, giving Steve the address, hanging up the phone and running out the door.
The hostess’s name was—Kelly flipped open her dayrunner as she got out of the cab—Dolores Wartz, and the event was a holiday party in an apartment building’s function room for her sorority alums. Dolores Wartz was fortyish, a squat bulldoggy woman with heavy makeup caked in the grooves that ran from the corners of her mouth to her chin, and lipstick the color and consistency of strawberry jam caked on her lips.
“Kelly Day?” she said, beaming. Her smile evaporated as she caught sight of the baby. “What is that?”
“This is my son, Oliver,” Kelly said.
And he’s not a what, he’s a who.
“I’m so sorry about this. My husband was supposed to be home but I guess there was a big accident on 95…” Oliver squirmed in her grasp, and there was the unmistakable sound—not to mention smell—of a baby filling his diaper.
Shit,
Kelly thought. “I’m just going to run to the bathroom. My husband should be here any minute.”
“I hope so,” Dolores Wartz said, fingering the heavy gold sorority pin on her lapel.
Great,
Kelly thought. She hurried to the bathroom, where there was, of course, no changing table. She locked a stall, set the baby on the floor, trying not to think about the germs crawling on the tile, knelt, and changed him as fast as she could. She washed her hands and hurried back to the foyer, where Dolores Wartz was glaring at her and Marnie Kravitz, Elizabeth’s assistant, was shifting her weight from foot to foot like a little kid who needs to use the bathroom and is afraid to ask permission.
“Kelly,” Marnie said.
“Yes?” Kelly said, noticing that Marnie had taken their boss’s “festive seasonal attire” directive very seriously. She was wearing a green skirt, red-and-white snowflake-patterned tights, and a red sweater with fluffy white reindeer cavorting across the bosom.
“We are having a
crisis,
” she said, laying her hand across Rudolph’s blinking nose for emphasis. “We have no
napkins!
”
Kelly pulled her gaze away from Marnie’s hypnotic reindeer. “Excuse me?”
“The tablecloths came, and the liquor, and the caterer’s setting up, but they thought the florist was bringing the linens, and the florist said you only told her to bring tablecloths…”
Oh, no. Kelly grabbed for her Palm Pilot and saw its red light flashing. Dead battery. Just her luck. And Marnie was practically wringing her hands. Kelly saw she’d painted her fingernails in alternating red and green stripes.
“What are we going to do?” Marnie moaned.
She reached into her purse and handed Marnie her emergency fifty bucks. “Run down to the Seven-Eleven on JFK and buy some.”
Marnie’s eyes bulged. “But they’ll only have paper! Kelly, we can’t use paper napkins!”
“It’s not the end of the world,” Kelly said. She tried to keep her tone light, but Dolores Wartz was looking at her as if maggots were crawling out of her mouth. Oliver took the opportunity to swing his hand and bash her on the ear. Steve, she thought, goddamnit, as her ears rang, where was Steve?
“Couldn’t you hire a sitter?” Dolores Wartz asked coldly.
Kelly took a deep breath. “As I said, my husband will be here as soon as he can.”
“I have two children. Twelve and fourteen,” Dolores Wartz said. She said nothing else. But then, Kelly thought, she didn’t have to. The subtext was perfectly clear.
I had two children and I never had to bring either one of them to work with me. I had two children and I managed much better than you are.
“I’m going to see how the caterer’s doing,” Kelly said. She settled Oliver against her hip and hurried through the first guests, past the bar set up in the corner, into the kitchen, where she slumped against the side of the ovens and closed her eyes.
“Wow, what a cutie!” one of the waitresses said.
“You want him?” Kelly asked. “I’m not kidding. Take him. He’s yours.” She looked around. Shrimp cocktail, crabcakes, cheese straws. Real creative, she thought, as the waitresses loaded silver platters and filed out the door.
She grabbed a cheese straw off a tray and ate it fast, realizing that she hadn’t had anything all day except espresso. She was finishing a crabcake when a smiling woman in a lavender suit stuck her head into the kitchen. “Sorry to bother you, but do you know where I could find a napkin?” She pointed ruefully at a blob of cocktail sauce on her lapel, and beamed at Oliver. “Ooh, what a cutie!”
Kelly gave her a grateful smile and dug in her diaper bag for the packet of baby wipes. “This should work.”
“Perfect!” said the woman. She blotted the sauce, squeezed Oliver’s foot, and headed out the door just as the waitresses returned.
“Hey,” said one of them, peering at Kelly’s head. “You’ve got…” She reached out with two long fingernails and plucked something out of Kelly’s hair. Kelly blinked at it. A Cheerio. She’d given some to Oliver the day before. Had she been going around for twenty-four hours with cereal stuck in her hair?
“New fashion,” Kelly said crisply.
“Excuse me.” Dolores Wartz had shoved through the door. “Kelly. Your husband is here.”
Thank you, God,
she thought. She managed to smile at Dolores before she race-walked to the door and shoved Oliver into his father’s arms. “Go now!” she hissed.
“Why?” Steve asked. “Is something on fire?”
“Just go!” she said, trying to tuck the diaper bag under Steve’s arms. “I’ve got work to do!”
Steve looked up. “Hey,” he said. She followed his gaze. Mistletoe. Left over from someone else’s party, she thought.
“Steve, I’ve got a million things to do…”
He leaned forward and pecked her cheek. “Go,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”
She wiped her hands on her skirt and faced the crowd—sixty women, most of them with glasses of wine in their hands, nibbling cheese straws and swaying to the Christmas carols.
The bar was busy; Marnie had given some napkins to the waitresses and set out more on the cocktail tables. Under control, Kelly thought, and let herself relax.
At eleven o’clock the caterers were gone, the guests had departed, the last of the linens had been folded away, the last of the dishes replaced. Kelly said good night to Dolores Wartz, who grunted something in return. She slipped off her shoes in the elevator and limped onto the sidewalk. She’d finally managed to find a cab and had settled herself into the strawberry incense-reeking backseat when her cell phone rang.
“Kelly?” Elizabeth’s voice was colder than Kelly had ever heard it. “I just got a very disturbing phone call from Dolores Wartz. Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“Well, that was fast,” Kelly said. It looked like good old Dolores hadn’t wasted a moment saying hello or good night to her kids. Just had to get right on the phone and tattle on me. “Look,” she began, “there was an accident on 95. Steve was late, so I had to bring Oliver, but he was only there for, like, half an hour, and he wasn’t bothering anyone.”
“Dolores said that he was crying and that he was never taken out.”
“He wasn’t crying,” Kelly said. “He was maybe making noise, but he wasn’t crying. And Elizabeth, he’s a baby. He’s not a bag of trash!”
“She was very disappointed,” Elizabeth continued. “She said you were paying more attention to the baby than you were to her party.”
Well, the party didn’t need its diaper changed,
Kelly thought, but she bit her lip and said nothing.
“She’s asking for her money back.”
Kelly balled her hands into fists. It took her a moment to recognize the unfamiliar sensation that caused her eyelids to prickle with tears. It was something she hadn’t felt since the fifth grade, when the principal had called her into the office and said that, while he admired Kelly’s entrepreneurial spirit, it wasn’t fair for her to charge admission to the jungle gym. She was in trouble. No. Worse. She’d screwed something up. “Fine,” she said. “Whatever my commission was, you can send it to her. Tell her I’m very sorry she was so disappointed.”
“Fine.” Elizabeth paused. “Kelly, we had this conversation when you started working again. You need to learn to keep your personal and professional life separate.”
“I’m sorry, Elizabeth,” Kelly said, feeling somewhere between deeply ashamed and furious. “But I can’t control the traffic!”
“You should have had a backup plan in place…”
“Well, clearly…” Kelly forced herself to be quiet. She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” she said again. And she was—but not for the reasons Elizabeth probably thought. She was sorry for Oliver, sorry that she’d subjected him to spending even a minute in a room full of toxic bitches who couldn’t bring themselves to be the least bit understanding or the least bit kind. “Send her my money,” she said.
“Fine,” Elizabeth said. Her voice was fractionally warmer. “Let’s try and put this behind us, Kelly. You know you’re one of my most valued employees.”
Kelly knuckled her eyelids and willed herself not to cry.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I’ll call you in the morning.” She flipped her phone shut, pressed her cheek against the cracked black vinyl of the backseat, and sobbed for the sixteen blocks home.
The war started innocently enough, with a package in the mail addressed, in Mimi’s scrawling hand, to
A. RABINOWITZ.
Mimi still had not let go of the idea that her granddaughter should have been named Anna Rabinowitz.
Like it would kill her to write Rothstein,
Becky thought, tucking the package under her arm. She tossed it on the kitchen counter and forgot about it for two days. When she finally got around to opening it, she wasn’t sure what she was seeing when something satiny slithered out of the box. Something made of red and green diamonds, with Ava’s name embroidered at the top.
“Is this what I think it is?” she asked Andrew, holding the offending item pinched between her fingertips.
Andrew glanced up briefly. “It’s a Christmas stocking,” he said.
“Andrew.” Her husband looked up from his coffee cup. “This may come as a surprise, but as it turns out, we’re Jews.”
“Well, yes, but…” He shrugged and took another sip. “Mimi does Christmas. And now that she’s in town, I guess she wants to do it with us.”
“What do you mean, Mimi does Christmas? Is that like
Debbie Does Dallas
?” Becky turned the box over and groaned when a red-and-green
BABY’S FIRST CHRISTMAS!
bib fell out.
Andrew poured himself more coffee. “She just figured that just because we are Jewish is no reason for us to be deprived of Christmas.”
“We don’t believe in Jesus. That’s a pretty good reason.”
“Becky, please, let’s not fight.”
She folded the stocking back into its box. “So you had a Christmas tree?”
Andrew nodded.
“Hung up stockings?”
Another nod.
“Sang carols?”
“On occasion.” He added milk to his cup. “She thought Christmas was more of a secular national holiday than a religious event.”
“But…” Becky’s mind was whirling. “So now she thinks that Ava’s going to celebrate Christmas.”
He shrugged, shifting his weight in his seat. “I never discussed it with her.”
“Well, I think we should. We’re not even going to be here on the twenty-fifth. Remember? We’ve got tickets to go see my mom.”
“So I’ll tell her,” Andrew said. “It’s not a big deal. Really, it’s not. I’ll call her tomorrow night.”
But first thing the next morning, there was a knock on the door and seven feet of fir tree on the front steps.
“Thanks, but we don’t need a tree,” said Becky to the short man in jeans and an Eagles jacket all but obscured by the branches.
“Delivery,” he grunted, shaking the tree at her. Pine needles drifted down around her feet. “Paid for already. Sign here, please.”
“Just leave it on the curb,” Becky said after she’d signed.
“You serious?” the man asked.
“You can have it, if you want.”
The man looked at Becky, looked at the tree, shook his head, spat on the sidewalk, and left the tree leaning against her stairs. “Merry Christmas,” he said.
“Happy Chanukah,” Becky called and shut the door, vowing that she and Andrew were going to have a meaningful discussion about the true meaning of Christmas as it pertained to the Rothstein-Rabinowitz family as soon as he got back from work.
Twenty minutes later, the telephone rang. “Oh, you’re home!” Mimi trilled. “Did the tree arrive?”
Becky drew herself up straight, tensing her muscles, readying herself for the inevitable fight. “Yes, Mimi, about that tree.”
“Isn’t it just heavenly?” her mother-in-law asked. “I do love the smell of a fresh fir tree!”
“Listen, Mimi, about the tree…we’re not Christian.”
“Well, I know that, silly!” Mimi giggled.
“So…” Becky was starting to feel as though she’d slipped into Wonderland, where up was down and down was up and even the simplest, most obvious facts in the world required elaborate explanation. “We aren’t going to celebrate Christmas. We aren’t even going to be here for Christmas. We’re going to be in Florida. So we really don’t want the tree.”
When she spoke again, Mimi’s voice was as cold as the December air. “You’re not having Christmas?” she demanded.
Becky’s hand tightened on the telephone. “Andrew and I have talked about it, and this is how we both feel. Of course, you’re welcome to do whatever you like with Ava in your house. But no Christmas here. I’m sorry.”
“You’re canceling my granddaughter’s first Christmas?” Mimi screeched.
God help me,
Becky thought. “No. Of course not. And like I said, whatever you want to do in your house is fine, but…”
“But what about Christmas dinner? Who’s going to make the HAM?”
Ham. Ham. Had Andrew mentioned a ham?
“I made plans,” Mimi bleated. “I already invited my relatives. How will I ever hold up my head if you cancel? It’s already bad enough that you couldn’t even name your daughter Anna—a beautiful name, a classic name, my mother’s name, in case you’ve forgotten…”
Becky bit her lip. Back to this again.
“But then you cancel my granddaughter’s first CHRISTMAS! I’ve got the recipes all picked out, and I’ve got presents for my granddaughter to put under the tree, and you…you…GRINCH!”
Becky felt a fit of giggles coming on. “Okay, Mimi, let’s not lose our tempers here.”
“You have to have Christmas!” Mimi said.
“I don’t have to do anything except be black and die!” Becky replied.
This shut Mimi up. For all of ten seconds. “WHAT DID YOU SAY TO ME?” she screamed.
“Who gave you the right to tell us what to do?” Becky asked. “Do I call you up and tell you who I’m bringing to your house and what holidays to celebrate and what to cook?”
“Don’t you talk to me like that! You’re out of line! Way out of line!”
“How am I out of line?” Becky asked. Her giggles were gone. Her last shred of patience had also vanished. “This is our house, and Andrew and I have every right to decide what to do here. We can name our baby what we want, we can celebrate what we want, we can invite who we want.”
“I bet this was all your mother’s idea,” Mimi ranted. “I bet your MOTHER wanted you to cancel Ava’s CHRISTMAS. She gets everything she wants, and I get left out in the cold! I get nothing! It’s not fair!”
Becky took a deep breath, determined not to be baited or to quote any more movie dialogue at her mother-in-law. “If you want to celebrate Christmas, that’s up to you. What Andrew and I do in our house, with our daughter, is up to us.”
Mimi’s voice was deadly cold. “If you insist on going to visit your mother, I will never set foot in your house again.”
Hallelujah,
Becky thought. “Well, I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said calmly. “But Andrew and I have discussed this. And our decision is final.”
“You…you…” There was an outraged, wordless shriek. Then a dial tone. Mimi had hung up on her.
Becky stared at the phone. She didn’t think anyone had hung up on her since sixth grade, when she and Lisa Yoseloff had gotten into a fight about whose turn it was to sit behind Robbie Marx on the bus. She clenched her shaking hands into fists and looked at Ava, who was sitting on the kitchen floor, happily clapping her plastic measuring cups together. “I hate to have to say this, but your grandmother is insane.”
“Ehgah?” Ava said.
“If ‘ehgah’ is baby for insane, then yes. But not to worry.” She picked up the phone. “We’re going to call Daddy and get this whole thing straightened out.”
“Can we change the tickets?” Andrew asked.
Becky pressed the phone against her ear. She must have heard him wrong. She’d told him the whole story, from the tree delivery right down to Mimi’s threats, and this was his response?
“Andrew. Your mother called me a Grinch, hung up the phone on me, and she seems to be having some kind of psychotic fantasy in which I’ll be preparing her holiday ham. She’s out of control. I think skipping town is the smartest thing we could do.”
She heard him sigh. “Mimi just called me. She’s pretty upset.” Another sigh.
“Yeah, I figured that out when she hung up on me. Look, Andrew, she’s having a tantrum.”
“You could call it that,” Andrew allowed.
“And you know what you do when a little kid has a tantrum? You don’t give him what he wants. You just walk away. You tell him he needs to calm down and that you won’t talk to him until he does.”
“I just think it would be easier if…”
“…we gave her what she wanted. I know. But look at the history! We always give her what she wants, and it never makes her happy. Not in the long term. Not even in the short term, really. We can’t keep doing the same thing over and over and over, giving her what she wants and giving her what she wants and having her blow up at us anyhow. It’s not working. Don’t you see that?”
There was a pause. “Becky…” Andrew began.
…she is my mother,
Becky concluded in her head. She felt her heart sinking. How could she not have seen this coming? Her husband, wonderful, handsome, sexy Andrew was a mama’s boy of the first order. He wasn’t even really married to her. He was married to Mimi. Mimi was the one whose wishes came first, whose screaming fits got her exactly what she wanted. Becky was just along for the ride.
“Why don’t we just call and see if we can leave the day after Christmas instead of the day before,” Andrew said. “It’s not that big a deal. We’ll still get to spend a whole week with your Mom. We’ll give Mimi her day; we’ll let her have her Christmas.”
Becky shook her head. “No,” she said. Her voice was quiet but firm. She wasn’t going to pull a Mimi. She wasn’t going to scream or threaten or slam down the phone. But she wasn’t going to change her mind. “No.”
“You’re not even willing to do that?” Andrew asked. “To just give her one day?”
“It’s not the day; it’s the principle of the thing. We’ve got to take a stand somewhere, or else we’re going to live the rest of our lives with Mimi running the show.”
His voice was getting more indignant. “It’s not like that.”
Becky thought of all the examples she could give him; the dozens of tiny ways that Mimi manipulated and undermined them. The blueberry muffin she’d shoved down Ava’s throat; the bow she’d cornstarched to her head, the parking tickets she shoved through their mail slot. The way there wasn’t a single picture of Becky and Ava in her house; just pictures of Mimi and Ava, and Andrew and Ava, as if the two of them had grown the baby in a lab or picked her off a tree. The wedding dress that Mimi had worn to their wedding. “The Greatest Love of All.” “Think about Ava,” she said instead. “What do you think this is teaching her? She who screams loudest, who calls names and hangs up the phone on people, gets what she wants? That it’s okay to tell your children how to live their lives? To never let them decide anything for themselves? To never let them grow up?”
“Mimi’s not young anymore,” he said. “She’s not young, and she’s all alone. I’m all she has.”
“And you can be there for her,” Becky said. “She’s your mother. You’re her son. I get all of that. But I’m your wife. Ava’s your daughter. We should come first, don’t you think? At least some of the time?”
There was a pause. “Did you really tell her that you didn’t have to do anything except be black and die?” Andrew asked.
Becky twisted a curl around her finger. “It just popped out. I’m sorry.”
She heard his sigh as if he was standing right there in the room with her. “I’ll talk to her,” he said quietly, as if he was talking to himself. “It’ll be okay.”
Andrew didn’t come home until ten o’clock that night, and when he walked through the door his face was ashen and his eyes were red. Becky looked up from the floor, where she’d been playing with Ava, keeping her up way past her bedtime so that her father could see her before she went to sleep. “I take it things with Mimi didn’t go well?”
Andrew shook his head. “She said we never told her we were going to Florida.”
Becky felt her temper rising. “Do we have to clear it with her before we go anywhere? I’ll double-check the ketubah, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t say anything about needing my mother-in-law’s permission to go on vacation.”
“And she’s disappointed that she won’t be having Christmas with her granddaughter.”
“Well, you’re the doctor, but I don’t think anyone ever died of disappointment,” Becky said, pulling a wooden block out of Ava’s mouth, where she’d been working it over with the single tooth that had popped out the week before. “Easy there, Fang.”
“Khhee!” said Ava and wriggled sideways in search of other prey.
“So you stuck to your guns?” Becky asked.
Andrew nodded. “She was crying.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “But she’ll get over it, won’t she?”
Andrew slumped into an armchair. He picked up one of Ava’s blocks and started twirling it. “I’m not sure.”
“Oh, come on. This isn’t going to kill her. She’s just got to learn to compromise a little. You’re married now. She can’t have you at her beck and call, doing everything she wants. And like I told her, she can do whatever she wants in terms of holidays, religion, whatever, in her house. She just can’t tell us what to do here.”
Andrew buried his face in his hands. Becky got to her feet and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “We’re going to get through this. And then we’re going to be in Florida. Fun and sun! Sand and surf! We’ll put Ava in that little lobster bathing suit and let her float around the shallow end. Right, Ava?”
“Ish!” said Ava and popped another block into her mouth.
“Girlfriend, what have I told you about eating wood?” asked Becky. She replaced the block with a teething ring and kissed Andrew’s ear. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “She’ll find someone else to cook her ham, and someday she’ll get married again, and by the time we come back from Florida, she’ll have forgotten all about it.”
Andrew stared at her bleakly. “I hope you’re right.”