Chapter One
"Mrs. Grafstein is dead!"
"Uh-huh." Alan Newman nodded without raising his head
from the stock market page.
"Hel-lo!" Carol Newman leaned toward her husband, her
face, like a small, high-intensity lamp, positioned above the top
of his paper. "Can I have your attention, please?"
He looked up.
"Listen to this-" Carol cleared her throat and read aloud
crisply from her section of The Star Ledger: "`Norman Grafstein,
former owner of Grafstein Leather Imports, will be honored for
his generous gift to the South Orange Beautification Committee
in memory of his late wife, Marilyn. Grafstein, formerly of South
Orange, now resides in Boca Raton, Florida. His son, Mark, of
Scotch Plains will be present at the committee breakfast to receive
the plaque in his father's honor.'" Carol put the paper
down and looked meaningfully across at her husband.
"So?" Alan responded.
"Did you know Norman Grafstein had lost his wife?"
"How would I know? I haven't seen Mark since our last high-school
reunion."
Carol sighed. "Honey, don't you get it?" She tapped a long,
mauve fingernail on the table between them. "Norman Grafstein.
Boca Raton. Your mother."
"Carol, please ..."
"Alan-" Her voice took the sharper tone generally reserved
for their seven-year-old. "Do you want your mother to be
loved, to be happy, to have someone to take her to dinner? Why
don't you exert yourself? Call up Mark Grafstein, tell him you're
sorry about his mother"-she gave her hand a wave to suggest
the routine preliminaries that would need to take place-"and
tell him your mother's in Boca. Arrange a meeting with his
father."
"Carol, my mother doesn't want to meet anyone. She's fine
the way she is. Leave her alone."
"She's not fine," countered Carol. "She's miserable."
"She's fine."
"She's miserable."
Alan began to feel dizzy.
"You want her to be miserable"-Carol picked up a magazine
and began to thumb through it-"let her be miserable."
Alan shifted uneasily in his chair, anticipating defeat. It was
possible to be irritated by Carol, but it was hard to oppose her
for long. The fact was that she had a big heart-literally (the
result of twice-a-week classes in high-impact aerobics at the
JCC) and figuratively. Carol not only felt for the plight of others,
she saw it as her mission to set things right for them. Last year,
she helped the homeless in their town by organizing crisis career
workshops and a low-fat soup kitchen in the library annex. The
year before that, she raised math scores by 60 percent in the
district by taking charge of the after-school homework program
(even poor Jimmy Hahn, said to be ineducable, buckled down
so as not to have her fingernail poked in his shoulder one more
time). Carol was not one to sit idly by in the face of adversity,
human weakness, and error. She was constantly striving to improve
the lives of those around her, whether they liked it or not.
Alan vaguely understood that Carol carried a great weight of
responsibility on her small shoulders. It fell to her to sustain that
network of human relations called civilization-at least as it existed
in the northern New Jersey suburbs. She was forever sending
her friends to her hairdresser, passing the word about a new
caterer, and arranging large family gatherings that involved hunting
down estranged cousins and convincing them to let go of
the grudge they'd been holding for thirty years and attend. She
had been committee chair of last year's most successful event at
their synagogue-an interfaith hootenanny in which Methodists,
Baptists, and Jews, all wearing yarmulkes, crowded inside the
cavernous blond-wood sanctuary, whose astronomical cost her
herculean fund-raising efforts had helped pay for.
You could take one of two tacks upon finding yourself married
to someone like Carol. You could resist and be caught in a
debilitating struggle that you could not win. Or you could succumb
and discover the pleasures of being managed by an expert.
Alan Newman, an accountant by profession, was a philosophical
man. Life was hard. Life was short. He saw no point in
swimming against the tide of this powerful and well-meaning
force that was his wife. And so he succumbed and was, as far as
such things are possible, happy.
Copyright © 2002
Paula Marantz Cohen
All right reserved.
Chapter Two
May Newman, widowed for almost two years, had been
living undisturbed in her Florida condominium until the day the
previous spring when her son and daughter-in-law, arriving earlier
than expected, had found her in her kitchenette in a housecoat.
Alan had seen nothing noteworthy in this, but Carol
insisted that it could only mean one thing: His mother was lonely
and depressed.
"Any woman wearing a housecoat at two in the afternoon is
depressed," she declared. "And why shouldn't she be?" she added
when Alan attempted to argue on behalf of the comforts of a
housecoat. "It would be more surprising, given the circumstances,
if she weren't!"
From then on, May's case had been a theme in the Newman
household to be picked up and examined at those odd intervals
of the day or night when Carol found herself with nothing else
to do.
"Your mother needs to move in with us," Carol announced
one night, just after Alan had fallen into the deathlike slumber
that preceded his six A.M. wake-up to catch the early commuter
train into the city.
"Wuh?" mumbled Alan groggily. He had been enjoying a
dream of skiing down a mountain in Aspen.
"Your mother. It's our duty to take her in."
"Fine," he said, rolling over to continue the downward run,
the wind whipping at his face. He was in no mood to put up
even the semblance of a fight.
But the next day, when Carol broached the idea with her
mother-in-law, she was surprised to find opposition from this
quarter.
"No, dear," said May, "I'd rather stay where I am."
"But Mom, you'd be happier with us. You'd get to see the
children all the time."
"I'm not sure the children would want to see me as much as
that," demurred May gently. And though Carol cajoled and bullied,
May would not budge.
This left Carol with a definite challenge. If her mother-in-law
were nearby, she could drag her to senior functions, sign her up
for art appreciation classes, and take her on as an assistant to her
own numerous charitable and community activities. But directing
May's social life from a distance of a thousand miles was
another story. It required more elaborate intervention.
"Did you see the announcement about the senior bagels-and-lox
brunch at the Reform temple?" Carol asked her mother-in-law
over the phone as she ran her eye over the Sun-Sentinel
spread out on the kitchen table (she had the paper expressed up
so as to keep abreast for May's benefit). "Go! You never know
who you'll meet."
May always said she would check things out-it was easier to
say yes to Carol than to say no-but she rarely followed through
on her promises. When her daughter-in-law called for a report,
she always had an excuse: an attack of dyspepsia, a heavy rain, a
made-for-TV movie that she wanted to watch. For someone like
Carol, used to having her initiatives stick, May's mild-mannered
but unwavering refusal to cooperate was frustrating to say the
least.
"We need to go down," Carol announced one day to her
husband soon after the newspaper had drawn her attention to a
widowed Norman Grafstein. "We need to visit your mother and
get things moving."
"We were just there in December, and we'll go again in
June," said Alan wearily, for he detected the fateful note of determination
in his wife's voice. "You know I can't take off again
until tax season is over."
"June is too far away," pronounced Carol. "This is the
plan"-for, of course, she had one. "I'll go down with the kids
next week; you can meet us for a long weekend. I've already
reserved the tickets. But you'll have to call Mark Grafstein before
we go. Tell him we'll stop in on his father, to pay our respects,
when you arrive."
Alan knew it would all be done.
Copyright © 2002
Paula Marantz Cohen
All right reserved.
Chapter Three
May Newman sat in her kitchenette with Lila Katz and
Flo Kliman, fellow residents of the Boca Festa retirement club.
Boca Festa was one of many clubs in Boca Raton, Florida, former
scrubland developed in the early 1970s as a haven for
modest-to-well-to-do retirees. The population was mostly
Jewish (though with a definite sprinkling of Italians) and mostly
from the tri-state metropolitan area (though with a vocal minority
from Chicago, Cleveland, and Montreal).
Boca Festa was built on a plan that resembled the other clubs
in the area. It was set on a large expanse of manicured grounds
with a Tara-like clubhouse at the center and an Olympic-size
pool alongside. The surrounding complex was divided into three
"estates," each reflecting a superficially different (but structurally
similar) architectural style. Each estate was in turn divided into
ten "pods," and each pod into fifty condominium units. At the
center of each pod was a small pod-pool and pod-clubhouse.
The entire complex was thus parsed and organized like a collapsible
set of mirrors-a mix of the quasifuturistic and the
quasihistorical. The estate names-Fairways, Eastgate, and Crestview-suggested
the stylish manor houses featured on popular
1980s TV series like Dynasty. May lived in pod 3 in the Crestview
Estate; Lila and Flo in pod 9, Eastgate.
It was to her daughter-in-law that May owed her company.
Lila's niece was a friend of a member of Carol's coffee group,
and when the coincidence of the women's mutual residence had
been unearthed, a meeting had been inevitable. Lila and Flo
were neighbors in their pod and had known each other for several
years.
"So what are we doing tonight?" asked Lila as the three
women sipped their Sankas at May's kitchen table.
"Why do we have to do anything?" countered Flo.
"We have to do something. It's Saturday night!"
"Oh my God!" cried Flo. "Saturday night and I don't have
a date!"
"At our age it's important to get out and mix," said Lila
impatiently. "Otherwise, they say, you lose interest in life."
"Don't worry; I haven't lost my will to live."
"You joke, but it's not funny."
"Okay," said Flo, relenting as she always did after teasing Lila.
"I'll tell you what we'll do: I'll rent a Clark Gable movie and
make some popcorn. You can both come over and watch."
"Sitting home and watching television is not my idea of
Saturday-night entertainment," declared Lila. "I like human
company."
"Clark Gable is better than human company."
"Well, you can stay home," said Lila huffily. "I'm going to
go out. May, will you join me? The JCC has a talk by one of
those guru doctors on lowering your blood pressure through
stress management. They say it will be very well attended."
"Well ..." said May. "I was feeling a little tired-"
"May wants to watch Clark Gable," interrupted Flo. "He
does more for stress management than a guru doctor."
"Flo, mind your own business. Just because you have no interest
in meeting anyone doesn't mean you have to influence
May."
"I'm not influencing May."
"You are!"
"Please," interceded May. "I wouldn't mind going to hear the
guru doctor with you, Lila, only I'm feeling a little tired. Flo
isn't influencing me. I do like Clark Gable."
"All right," said Lila, sighing. "I like Clark Gable, too. We'll
watch the movie tonight, but you have to promise to do something
tomorrow, even if it's only going to the clubhouse to hear
Pinkus Lotman on parking violations in the pods. If we don't
do things, we might as well be dead."
"Agreed," said Flo. "We'll go hear Pinkus Lotman tomorrow.
That is, if May's phlebitis doesn't flare up."
May laughed. She marveled at the amount of time she had
come to spend with the two women and how much she enjoyed
them. Even their bickering, which was fairly constant, was entertaining,
and she never left their company without being
amused and engaged.
Until meeting Lila and Flo, May hadn't realized how lonely
she'd been after Irving's death. For almost a year, her only regular
companion had been her neighbor Carla Rossen, a woman of
seventy-eight who lived in the adjacent condo. They had gone
to lunch and dinner at the clubhouse almost every day, and May
had sat by quietly while her friend rehearsed an endless series of
complaints.
"Do you call this a piece of veal?" Carla would demand, putting
down her fork and looking around her in amazement. "It
tastes like cardboard! How dare they expect me to eat cardboard
instead of veal!"
Everything for Carla was a personal affront. The mailman, in
placing her Boca Times in May's box, was clearly intending to
insult her. "I know what he's up to," she explained knowingly
to May. "He gave me the fish-eye the first time I saw him.
Murray"-Murray was her husband, once a focal point of irritation,
now, in being dead, a saint-"wouldn't have stood for
it."
Carla's ability to find fault was at times so vast and inventive
that it approached the level of a literary gift. Nothing was too
small to evoke her disfavor, from the quality of the plantings
next to the pool to the odor of the air freshener in the club
bathroom. May dutifully listened to Carla's complaints, nodding
and offering explanations as far as she could, until the friendship
was finally severed when May failed to send a thank-you note
for a dozen rugelach that Carla had baked for her birthday. May
had not seen the necessity of a note since she lived next door
and had given her thanks in person, but for Carla the omission
had been a gross breach in etiquette.
"A thank-you note shows respect," declared Carla indignantly;
it was a dictum her mother had taught her when she was
ten years old, and she had held to it unwaveringly for nearly
seventy years. "It's clear that you do not respect me."
May assured her that she did, but Carla would not be convinced
and eventually ceased speaking to her neighbor altogether.
Now, when they passed each other, Carla looked away
with exaggerated disdain, so that Lila and Flo, who knew May's
gentle nature, were mystified as to what could have elicited such
a reaction. For May, Carla's hurt feelings were a source of pain,
though she was also secretly relieved-being audience to so
much constant complaining had been a trial. She felt fortunate
to have met Lila and Flo, women with opinions and ideas who
did not take themselves too seriously and who liked to laugh.
The friendship was odd in its way. Though all three women
were Jewish and over seventy, they were also very different in
disposition and style. Lila Katz was the shortest, barely five feet,
with a trim, bosomy figure and a mass of red-orange hair that
she kept carefully lacquered through weekly trips to the premier
Boca stylist. It was her one indulgence, since she was on a fixed
income and obliged to be vigilant about expenses.
Continues...
Excerpted from JANE AUSTEN in BOCA
by PAULA MARANTZ COHEN
Copyright © 2002 by Paula Marantz Cohen
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Copyright © 2002
Paula Marantz Cohen
All right reserved.