Hostile Makeover Read online

  Howard Mellnick smiled back. “Therapist-patient relationships are unethical.”

  “Yes, but I don’t think dating scruples are part of the Jewish Mother code of ethics. You’re male and Jewish and a doctor; that makes you fair game.”

  He coughed to try to hide his laugh. “Does it occur to you that your parents genuinely love you and want what’s best for you?”

  “Occasionally. But the fact that my mother pays you to talk to me makes everything you say suspect.”

  Dr. Mellnick went ahead and laughed, which was one of the reasons she kept showing up.

  “Okay,” he said, “we’ve spent the requisite ten minutes on your mother. Why don’t we move on to what happened with the presentation yesterday? The one we’ve been talking about for two months, the one you prepared for like Noah prepared for the flood.”

  Shelley groaned. “It was Trey’s birthday. We ended up in a room at the Ritz.”

  Mellnick just waited—a task at which he excelled—so Shelley went ahead and divulged her birthday orgasm theory.

  The best thing about Howard Mellnick—after his sense of humor—was that he never looked shocked or overtly disapproving.

  “So let me see if I have this straight: As of yesterday morning, you were poised and ready to turn your career situation and your relationship with your father around. Yesterday during lunch you decided Trey Davenport’s sexual satisfaction was more important.” His eyes behind the frameless glasses were kind and at the same time merciless. “Any idea why?”

  “Isn’t that what you’re being paid to find out?”

  He smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes this time. “I can keep pointing out the ways in which you shoot yourself in the foot, Shelley, but I can’t keep you from loading the gun. The ultimate goal is to recognize the self-sabotage before you blow your toes off.”

  They stared at each other for a time.

  “There’s nothing wrong with being a Jewish American Princess if that’s what you want to be. There’s nothing wrong with refusing to be one, either. But you’ve got to declare yourself. You’re stuck in that netherworld. You continue to rebel against what your parents expect, but you won’t go after what you really want.”

  “I want to be taken seriously.” She said it quietly, but she knew he heard and understood.

  “And yet you choose to give a boyfriend an orgasm rather than show up and pitch an account.”

  “Well, it wasn’t like I had a scale there and was weighing the pros and cons. The man was naked and it was his birthday. Frankly, I thought I could do both.”

  Shelley looked down at her watch and back up at Howard Mellnick. Their fifty minutes was up. “I don’t suppose you’d like to go handle my mother and the accountant while I straighten out your six o’clock appointment’s life?”

  “No, thanks, but I’ll look forward to hearing the details next week. Oh, and do me a favor. Be gentle with the accountant. Chances are he isn’t any happier about this fix-up than you are.”

  chapter 3

  Howard Mellnick was wrong. Richard Friedlander was ecstatic to be there. Ecstatic to make her acquaintance. His eyes widened at first sight of her, which told her he’d been anticipating the worst.

  Since her father continued to refuse to discuss the Easy To Be Me account and had told her not once, but three times, not to “worry her little head about it,” exceeding anyone’s expectations felt incredibly nice. Of course, she reflected as she looked into his round, earnest face, this might not be the compliment she was assuming; there was no telling what kinds of women had been thrown at Richard Friedlander since he’d arrived in Atlanta.

  His hand was clammy when he shook hers in greeting. He beamed at her out of relieved brown eyes, probably still thanking his lucky stars she hadn’t been wheeled in on a forklift. But then, Richard Friedlander wasn’t exactly God’s gift to women. Or even a party favor, for that matter.

  Trying to be generous, she factored out the sweaty palms and told herself that even someone who looked like a marshmallow might have something to offer.

  “Just call me Dick,” he said as he pumped her hand for far too long. Shelley forced herself to smile as if this might actually happen. Then she shoved a glass of wine at him, led him to her father and brother-in-law, who were jockeying for position around a plate of her mother’s chopped liver, and fled to the kitchen.

  The memory-charged aromas of matzo ball soup and brisket hit her as she entered. Plates of gefilte fish, each arranged on its bed of lettuce with a dollop of horseradish by its side, sat on the kitchen island waiting to be served after the soup. Miriam Schwartz didn’t do Shabbas dinner on a weekly basis, but when she did she approached the meal exactly the way her mother, Nana Rose, always had—as if she were auditioning for a part in Fiddler on the Roof.

  Tonight, every dish was intended to accomplish two things: remind her family that they were loved, and demonstrate to Richard Friedlander what kind of meals he might expect as a part of said family. Miriam Schwartz still believed that the most direct way to a man’s heart was through his stomach; Shelley had reason to believe the road began somewhat lower.

  Nana Rose’s younger sister, Sonya, perched on a bar stool at the counter and watched Judy ladle matzo ball soup into bowls that said “Jewish penicillin.” Great-aunt Sonya lived in the Summitt Towers, where she made papier-mâché animal heads and insisted the maids were sneaking in at night and rearranging her apartment.

  Shelley gave her great-aunt a hug and slid onto the stool next to her. “Can we take some things out of the oven so I can fit my head in?”

  “That bad?” Judy kept ladling. Despite the heat of the kitchen and her proximity to the stove, neither her hair nor her clothes drooped. She was six years older and four and a half inches shorter than Shelley. Like their mother, Judy was petite and curvy.

  Trying to follow in her older sister’s too-tiny footsteps had left Shelley feeling like an ugly stepsister trying to squeeze into Cinderella’s glass slipper. She’d been twelve or thirteen when she finally stopped trying.

  “He wants to be called Dick. He’s shorter than the mortician, has less hair than the chiropractor, and is pudgier than the rodeo clown.” Shelley cheered briefly. “Do you remember how incensed Mom was when she found out ‘clown’ was his occupation and not a comment on his sense of humor?”

  As if summoned, Miriam backed through the swinging kitchen door with the empty chopped liver dish in her hands. “I don’t want you hiding in here, Shelley,” her mother said as she grabbed a waiting replacement tray of hors d’oeuvres. “Richard’s a very nice young man. Marilyn tells me he’s thinking about opening his own firm.”

  Before Shelley could respond—not that she intended to—her mother was already hurrying back to her current and potential sons-in-law, the plate of food extended in front of her like a sacrificial offering.

  Judy finished ladling. Putting the lid on the pot of soup, she poured herself a glass of wine and moved to join Shelley at the island. She looked distracted, her expression at odds with the crispness of her hair and clothes, as if she’d gone through all the usual motions but didn’t really mean it.

  “I liked the wrestler,” Sonya commented as the door swung closed. “He looked great in tights.”

  “He was a total ten from the neck down,” Shelley agreed, remembering how pleasantly surprised she’d been when she first spotted the blond-haired Adonis. “Unfortunately, I think that was also his IQ.”

  Shelley placed an arm around Aunt Sonya’s bony shoulders, surprised, as always, by her increasing fragility. Her great-aunt seemed to be shedding flesh as she aged, getting rid of all the unnecessary bits and pieces.

  “Why won’t she give up?” Shelley asked. “Does she really think that one day I’ll walk in, see a plump proctologist eating her chopped liver, and say, ‘Be still, my heart’?”

  “No.” Judy put down her wine and picked up two bowls, motioning Shelley to do the same. “She just figures if she throws enough
shit against the wall, something’s going to stick.”

  “I definitely could have lived without that image,” Shelley said as she followed her sister out to the dining room. “And, of course, if she keeps flinging shit, sooner or later one of us is going to step in it.”

  For the next thirty minutes Shelley annoyed her mother by being helpful. Though she normally went to great lengths to avoid housework and preferred the family dinners where her mother’s longtime maid, Delilah, served and cleaned up, tonight Shelley used the cleaning woman’s absence to her advantage. The first to jump up when something needed to be done, she fetched more soup from the kitchen, got up to pour refills of water and wine, and cleared the table by herself, which allowed her to avoid Richard Friedlander without being rude.

  Her mother shot her pointed looks and protested every time Shelley volunteered to do something, but even a master kvetch couldn’t come out and complain that a daughter was helping too much. Shelley had already chipped a nail and gotten a brisket stain on her white silk blouse, but the defeated expression on her mother’s face more than made up for it.

  As a coup de grâce, she insisted on loading the dishwasher while her mother took coffee out to the table. At a nearby counter a strangely subdued Judy unpacked Tupperware containers of baked goods and began to arrange them on silver trays.

  With sure fingers she arranged perfectly formed rugelach, brownies, cookies, and strudel slices into artful patterns.

  Shelley’s heart sank. Someone else might look at the rows of sweets tucked into their colored paper baking cups and see dessert. Shelley saw a cry for help. Others might turn to drugs or alcohol when distressed; Judy Blumfeld baked. If her sister were to dial a suicide help line, the conversation would begin with “Help! I can’t stop sifting!”

  “That’s a lot of goodies you’ve got there,” Shelley said.

  Judy shrugged and finished filling the first tray. Without missing a beat, she started to fill another.

  Was there such a thing as a baking intervention? Should she try to start a chapter of Overbakers Anonymous?

  “So how’s Sammy’s bar mitzvah coming along?” Shelley asked, edging closer to the rows of treats.

  “Fine.”

  This was not good, either. If there was anything Judy normally liked to expound on, it was the progress of THE bar mitzvah.

  “Did you decide on a theme?”

  “I’m not sure we really need a theme this time.”

  There was a moment of shocked silence while Shelley tried to absorb this heresy.

  “What does Mandy say about that?” Mandy Mifkin was the bar mitzvah coordinator who had implemented the Gladiator theme for Jason’s bar mitzvah two years ago. The theme had allegedly been designed to dovetail with her oldest nephew’s interest in wrestling and to take advantage of the popularity of Russell Crowe’s movie, but Shelley had thought it an odd choice for descendants of a people who had been so heavily oppressed by the Romans. Forcing the band members and waiters to wear togas had been just one of Mandy’s signature touches.

  “I don’t know. I guess I’m just having some second thoughts.”

  The theme music for The Outer Limits began to play softly in Shelley’s head. “OK, who are you? And what have you done with my sister?”

  Judy snorted and popped a brownie in her mouth, which was another thing Judy never did. For all her sister’s baking, Shelley hadn’t seen her consume chocolate in public since she was pregnant with Sammy, which was approximately thirteen years ago. The Schwartz women consumed their high-calorie items behind closed doors.

  Back at the dinner table Shelley stirred her coffee and idly pushed a piece of strudel around on her plate. She snuck surreptitious glances at her sister while congratulating herself on minimizing her contact with Richard—who appeared slightly bewildered that she had not, in fact, flung herself at his feet.

  With her last sip of coffee she decided that as soon as the meal ended she was going to get her father alone to try for one last shot at the account that had fallen so unceremoniously into Ross Morgan’s lap.

  She intended to be coolly professional, and had actually prepared a sort of mini sales presentation in her head while she loaded the dishwasher. She prayed her father would be receptive, but if all else failed she’d stick out her lower lip and let it quiver pathetically. If she had to, she’d cry. She was prepared to go to the mat on this one.

  Shelley glanced up at Harvey Schwartz. In his early sixties, with salt-and-pepper hair and an interestingly craggy face, he was still an impressive man. She had his height and his build. Up until her sixteenth birthday, she’d had his nose.

  He gave her a private wink and she smiled in return. She had always had his love; it had been the bedrock on which much of her life had been built. But recently she’d begun to crave his approval and respect with an intensity that she didn’t understand. She dreamed of earning a heartfelt “well done,” or the kind of look he normally bestowed on Ross Morgan.

  She opened her mouth to ask him something, but before she could get the words out a strange expression washed over his face. His eyes closed briefly and he clamped a hand around his upper arm.

  “What is it, Daddy?”

  He started to speak, and she leaned forward to hear what he was saying, but although his lips moved, no words emerged.

  “Daddy!”

  The table fell silent, no doubt at the urgency in her tone. Or maybe they’d seen the same things she had.

  “Harvey?” Her mother’s voice was sharp. “Do you need Rolaids? Quick, somebody get a Zantac. I told you not to eat so much!”

  But no one moved. They sat there straining to hear him, waiting an eternity for him to get the words out, unsure what to do or say.

  “I . . . I feel like an elephant’s sitting on my chest and I can’t feel the left side of my body,” he finally said in a strangled voice she barely recognized.

  “Oh, God,” Shelley shouted as he fell face-first into his dessert, “forget about the Rolaids. Somebody call nine-one-one.”

  chapter 4

  Shelley spent the rest of Friday night and most of Saturday morning bargaining with God. At any other time she might have questioned the likelihood that there was a supreme being hanging around up there, waiting to answer prayers or to enter into negotiations with someone who only showed up for temple on the High Holidays. But when you were sitting in a hospital waiting for your father to make it through an emergency bypass, you clung to any available straw. Right now Shelley was clinging to both God and Dr. Manny Shapiro, whose job it was to open up her father, reroute his blood around those clogged arteries, and then appear in this waiting room to utter the medical equivalent of “piece of cake.”

  Only they hadn’t seen Dr. Shapiro for hours, and her mother—who hadn’t speculated on Dr. Shapiro’s marital status or uttered a single word since her father had been wheeled back to the operating room—continued to stare into space with a lost look on her face that Shelley had never seen before.

  Across from Shelley, Judy slept with her head on her husband Craig’s shoulder, her chin mashed to her chest. Periodically Judy’s eyes fluttered open, but she didn’t lift her head from Craig’s shoulder. Shelley didn’t blame her. If she’d had a shoulder to burrow into, she wouldn’t have come up for air, either.

  Trey’s shoulders were even broader than her brother-in-law’s, but Trey’s shoulders weren’t here. They were out floating down a river somewhere in Colorado. But even if Trey had been in town, would she have called and invited him into such a personal and painful place?

  It was almost as hard to picture as a favor-granting God. She spent a few minutes imagining what Howard Mellnick would say about that little admission. Then she went back to negotiating with the Almighty.

  She’d already promised to give up sex in return for the Easy To Be Me account while she was racing back to the office from the Ritz, but He hadn’t taken her up on her offer. Which led Shelley to wonder how much God really cared who she had
sex with and how often. And whether she could now rescind the offer of abstinence since the prayer accompanying it had not been answered. It was enough to make her wish she were Catholic so she could have some saints to appeal to.

  Shelley repositioned herself in the molded plastic chair and contemplated her sister (still sleeping) and her mother (still staring). Maybe God was looking for something a little more G-rated. Maybe God would come through if she promised to get along better with her family.

  What if she stopped arguing with them? What if, no matter how annoying they got, or what they said or did, she simply smiled agreeably and kept the peace?

  She sat up straighter, certain she was on to something here. If God would spare her father, she’d turn over a whole new leaf. Kind of like Yom Kippur without the fasting and praying. If her father came through this surgery, she’d stop envying and baiting her sister. She’d go out with any Jewish man her mother . . . Shelley shot a look toward the ceiling and squashed that thought.

  If God didn’t care about her sex life, why would he concern Himself with the religious affiliations of the men she dated? Surely He didn’t sit around up in Heaven shaking a finger at Jewish girls and telling them it was just as easy to fall in love with a Jewish man as a non-Jewish one.

  Shelley unfolded her body out of the chair and stretched. Her hair stuck out in undreamed-of directions, and her mouth felt as if someone had snuck in during the night and stuck a dirty sock in it.

  “Mom, do you want some coffee?”

  “No.” Her mother’s makeup had eroded during the night, leaving her haggard expression bared for all to see. “What if he doesn’t make it?” she whispered. “If that man dies on me, I’ll kill him.”

  Shelley shook her head. “There’s not going to be any dying. I’m bringing you a coffee and something to eat so you can keep up your strength.” Was this really her encouraging her mother to be stronger? Wasn’t that like trying to shore up Fort Knox? “You don’t want Daddy to think you’ve given up on him.”