Spin Doctor (27 page)

 

Me:
I
should take a leaf from Alice Finnegan's book. When the universe asked her to cope with so many big changes simultaneously, she discovered that she was able to navigate through them in an emotionally healthy way. If there's one thing I've learned over the years, in case after case, it's that we are much more resilient than we believe ourselves to be. I'm referring primarily, of course, to people like my laundry room ladies, not to people who are clinical—who require medication in order to stabilize the chemicals in their brains.

Something else I've been thinking about…the parent-child paradigm. No matter how old your child gets, you still think that as his or her parent you're still entitled to be the boss. William Robertson is in his thirties, and Meriel still wants to run the show, even in his place of business. William is still trying to please his mother while asserting his right to independence. Molly and Ian will be the same way, of course. And, Lord knows, my mother is the same way with me. Just because I'm considered an expert in the field of human behavior by virtue of my profession, it doesn't mean that the four of us are off the hook.

So, how do we keep the parent-child relationship healthy and stable, especially in the face of upheaval within the family: a death or a divorce?

Ask me again in a few months' time. I'm still learning.

MERIEL

“You are looking at a happy woman,” Meriel announced when we next met. “I am going to give Mrs. Amy my two weeks' notice at de end of de day today.”

“That's wonderful! Have you decided what you're going to do next?”

“You are looking at de proud new chef of No Problem Jamaican restaurant in Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York!”

“Goodness! I thought you'd wanted to stay out of William's kitchen.”

“You nevah know how tings might change. After we been open awhile and we see daht business is not getting bettah, we wonder why No Problem is not catching on; so we taste-tested all de recipes for de last month, his and mine, and people like my cooking bettah dahn William's. I told you he good, but Mama bettah!” She laughed. “So William see where de bread is buttered and he now going to be de owner-mahnager. He be greeting de customers in de front, and you know, he love people so much daht it's bettah for him to be out front and centah dan back in de kitchen hidden away. Wit' William out front and
Mama in de kitchen, he got a money-makah for sure! You be reading all about us soon in de red restaurant guidebooks. Next week on Sahturday night is de grand reopening, and I want to invite you and de children to be our guests. I tink even Mrs. Amy and Mr. Eric might want to come. And you tell Mrs. Faith daht we gonna have more jerk chicken on de menu dahn she can carry in a wheelbarrow, so she come along too! And tell her to bring her handsome boyfriend.”

“I'm going to miss you as a client,” I told her. “You're a very special lady.”

Meriel laughed at me. “Oh, don't tink you gonna get rid of me so fast. I might need to talk to a specialist from time to time, you know, and just because dey might be terapists a little bit closer to home, don't mean dey as good as
you.
”

ME

We were now nearly a month into spring and I had thought it would be lovely to gather together all of my laundry room clients for some sort of celebration. They had come so far over the past several months, and in doing so, had brought tremendous value to my life when it seemed to be going the way of Stevo's washing machines.

The Passover seder was Amy's idea, actually. “Do you have anywhere to go for the seders?” she asked me. “It's such a family ritual, as well as a communal one; you shouldn't be alone.”

“Well, the kids and I were planning to do a mini-seder on the first night. They've been through it so often that it's no longer as much fun for them, even though they do enjoy the ritualistic aspects of the celebration. That's the sort of stuff that makes all of us feel warm and fuzzy and grateful to be alive to see an
other year; and that God willing, we still live in a country where Jews have the freedom to openly worship. But Molly and Ian have always kind of liked to fast-forward through all the prayers and the parables and get to the dinner as quickly as possible. You know, Four Questions, Four Sons, get through the juicy stuff about Joseph and Pharaoh and the ten plagues, sing ‘Dayenu,' and then hurry up and part the Red Sea so we can eat!”

“That's more or less the right order.” Amy laughed. “So you don't do it in Hebrew, I take it.”

“None of us know any,” I confessed. “As I once told Alice, we Lederers are ‘Christmas tree Jews.' We're pretty assimilated. Does phonetically reading the transliterations count? Ian's very good at that.”

“I guess there's two camps,” Amy chuckled. “The speed-reading ‘Fed Ex commercial' version, and the one that seems to do its best to mimic those forty years in the Sinai. In our family, the seders go on forever. We do Hebrew, English, then everybody's kid gets to read the Four Questions—it's democratic, but interminable—and every branch of the family knows their own version of the songs, plus a few new ones every year. By the time you get to the macaroons and ‘Chad Gad Ya'—you remember, the story of the goat who was bought for two zuzim—you really know why they say that Jews understand the concept of suffering better than most any other group. Although, I'm telling you, I can't wait until Isaac is old enough to recite the Four Questions, so I can get my revenge on my smug sisters who are so proud of their little Shoshie and Ben and Dinah and Jordan!!”

She'd made me laugh. “I'm not entirely sure that using your young son as an instrument of revenge upon your sisters, nieces, and nephews, is a healthy desire, you know!”

“Okay, then. Pretend I was making a joke. That said,” Amy added, “why don't you invite all of your laundry ladies to cele
brate the second seder with you? After all, with the subject of our freedom from the bondage of slavery, Passover is about re-birth and renewal, in a way. We should make it a women-only feast night, if that's all right with everyone. I'll be your first RSVP. In fact, I'll even leave Isaac with my mother. Or let Eric take him to
his
mother's house.” Amy clapped her hands with a schoolgirl's gleeful enthusiasm. “Oh, my
God,
it feels good to
organize
something again!”

She thought it would be more fun if the seder was conducted in the laundry room, instead of up in my apartment, and suggested that in order to make it even easier on me, each guest could be responsible for one of the dishes: a Passover potluck. Everyone would need to bring a chair, since there were only two or three of them that “lived” in the laundry room, and the couch was too low to be a viable option, although, as Amy pointed out, it would certainly give a couple of us the chance to “
really
recline at the table.”

Amy also insisted that I be the one to lead the seder, despite my comparative lack of experience and education when it came to my own cultural heritage. “You know much more about this than I do,” I protested. “Eli was always the leader in our house, and even then, it was a pretty truncated version of the celebration. I told you, we more or less skimmed the Haggadah.”

“Excuse me,” Amy said, hands on her hips, “but I have a therapist who is always encouraging her clients—gently but forcefully, if that's possible, but you know what I mean—to get outside their ‘comfort zones' and take risks. And hey,” she added, softening and draping one arm over my shoulder, “we're all here to catch you if you fall.”

 

So late in the afternoon before the second seder, Faith used her shopping cart to schlep her mother's antique silver flatware and
damask table linens into the laundry room. With the skill and efficiency of Emily Post, she set out place settings for ten on the long table in the center of the room. I noticed that she was no longer wearing her wedding ring. Faith apologized for buying gefilte fish instead of making the appetizer from scratch, but I assured her that I would have done the same thing.

Amy made sure that plenty of the traditional kosher wine had been chilled, but had also purchased a more sophisticated alternative—although I happen to love the popsicle-sweet and sweetly nostalgic Manischewitz. It's “comfort booze.” Amy had also made a trip to the local bookstore and bought an edition of the Passover Haggadah that presented the story of the Israelites' exodus from Egypt in a way that our multicultural guest list would surely enjoy. It contained concise and entertaining explanations of the traditions, included sheet music with all of the songs, and was peppered with famous authors' pithy quotes about freedom. She'd also purchased the matzoh and provided the silver goblet to be used as Elijah's cup. The cup would be filled at the beginning of the meal and remain on the table as an offering to the Old Testament prophet, who, according to Passover tradition, paid a symbolic postmeal visit to every Jewish home. Molly wondered aloud, and with some asperity, whether he'd know to find us in the basement.

I took charge of the key items on the menu, roasting the turkey with my mother's matzoh stuffing recipe and creating all the emblematic fixings for the seder plate that would rest on the center of the table—the roasted egg, bitter herbs, and so forth, with the exception of the roasted lamb shankbone, which Meriel offered to provide. Molly was in school that day, so I had to assume her responsibilities as well. She's always loved to chop the apples and nuts for the
charoses,
which represents the mortar the Israelite slaves used in the building of the pharaohs'
pyramids. She also enjoys taking out her frustrations on the chopped liver, which makes a good hors d'oeuvre on matzoh crackers.

Alice cooked two of her Gram's favorite recipes: chicken soup with matzoh balls, and stewed carrot and prune
tsimmes,
which is so sweet for a vegetable dish that it's almost like cheating.

Once Talia heard that there was going to be music as part of the seder meal, she schlepped her portable synthesizer down to the laundry room. She was walking on her own now. In fact, she was so anxious to show me how well she had healed that she began doing
fouettés.
“Look Ma, no popping!” she crowed ecstatically each time she whipped her bum knee off her pirouettes.

“Macaroons are pretty big in Italian households too,” Naomi said, arranging the contents of an enormous cookie tin on a lovely red lacquer tray. “Claude and I made these from scratch, though. It's just egg whites and coconut; no flour. We know the Passover rules. It's hard to grow up in New York City and not have at least one Jewish friend! When Claude and I first got together, we used to go to separate seders because we each had our own circle of friends, of course. And, you know, one thing I love about this city is that no one looks at a Chinese woman funny when she's standing around with a group of people talking about where they're spending Passover and she says she's going up to a friend's house in Westchester for the seder. Or when a woman whose last name is Sciorra says she's headed out to Long Island to be with her Jewish friends.”

 

Knowing that we had two-thirds of a book to read before we'd get around to the meal, I set the dinner hour for six
P.M
., figuring we'd first enjoy some hors d'oeuvres (gefilte fish and chopped liver on matzoh crackers) to tide us over.

Meriel arrived carrying a casserole and was cordially greeted by Amy, who had hired a young Irish woman named Siobhan to replace her. There wasn't a trace of animosity between them, which really warmed my heart.

“Here is your shankbone, Mrs. Susan,” she said, handing me a carefully wrapped package. “And for Mrs. Amy, I bring a present for Hector.” She gave Amy a machine-knit dog sweater patterned after the Jamaican flag. “In de casserole is my curried goat. You said I should bring someting from
my
culture to de seder, and I find out from de Internet daht goat is kosher—in case someone observes de dietary laws tonight—and I don't want to insult anyone. Den I realize that some of de Jewish patriarchs in de Old Testament were goatherds and shepherds, so what else dey gonna eat?” Meriel placed the casserole on the side table.

Claude entered the laundry room carrying their new baby. “Oh, she's beautiful,” I gasped.

“Meet Jin,” she said. “That means ‘gold' in Chinese. And our little girl is more precious than gold to us. Jin Sciorra-Chan, meet Susan.” Jin immediately grasped my finger and brought it to her rosebud mouth.

I found myself whispering. I have no idea why women tend to do that around babies. “How old is she?”

“Seven months. She was born in the middle of October. She's a little Libra girl; a seeker of harmony. And well-balanced. So we're hoping she never needs therapy!”

“She was born in the year of the Rooster, though,” Naomi added, “which is supposed to mean that she loves attention and spending a lot of money on clothing.”

Claude gave their baby a kiss. “Is it okay if Jin sits on my lap during the seder? If she gets fussy, I'll just take her outside the room and walk her up and down by the elevator.”

“Jin is very welcome,” I assured her. “And it wouldn't be the first time a seder participant wasn't shy about exhibiting her short attention span!”

“Hey, you guys! Is there room at the inn for one more? Oops, wrong holiday.” Izzy poked her head in the door. “It's one of Valentina's first times out since we came home from the hospital, but we wouldn't have missed this for the world. Don't worry, she doesn't eat much,” Izzy joked. “I wish she would, though. Are there any rules about breast-feeding at the seder table?”

“I don't know whether to think that's cool or gross,” Molly said.

Claude rushed over to introduce them to Jin. “Seven months,” I heard her tell Izzy.

“Two,” Izzy replied, gazing lovingly at her infant daughter. “We don't have the world's longest attention span, though, Susan; it's one of the things we got from our daddy,” she added, shrugging. “But what're ya gonna do? So if she gets antsy—”

“That's funny,” Claude told her, “
we
just went through the same little speech.” She lifted Jin above her head and made her go
“Zoom!”
back into her arms. Jin was in raptures. I can't remember when I'd seen a little kid so animated. She absolutely glowed. Her infectious giggle and radiant smile would melt the polar ice cap.

“She loves playing ‘airplane,'” Claude said. “Probably because she spent so many hours on one in order to get here. She can do this interminably.
I
get tired long before she does.”

“Good thing she's got another mommy to take over! Here; my turn.” Naomi reached for their daughter.

 

As soon as Alice arrived downstairs, her cell phone rang. “Oh, God, you guys, I am so sorry,” she exclaimed. “This is horribly rude. We shouldn't be talking on our cell phones during the seder. But I've been waiting for a call all day. Hello?”

“Don't worry, the seder hasn't officially started yet,” I said.

“Ohmigod! Ohmi
god! Ohmigod!
” Alice yelled into the phone.