Carla and STEPHANIE RETURNED FROM THE STATIONERY store just as Carla’s mother, Jessie Kaplan, was taking a casserole out of the oven. Ten-year-old Jeffrey was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of chocolate milk and kicking his foot against the refrigerator.
“Stop kicking the refrigerator,” Stephanie ordered her brother angrily as soon as they came in the door.
“I can kick it if I want,” replied Jeffrey. “Grandma doesn’t mind.”
“Well, I mind. You’ll dent the refrigerator,” said Stephanie, suddenly concerned about the well-being of this appliance.
“Dent the refrigerator?” exclaimed Jeffrey. “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard!”
“Don’t call me stupid,” said Stephanie, darting forward and punching Jeffrey on the arm.
“She hit me!” screamed Jeffrey. He had jumped up from his chair and gotten hold of his sister’s T-shirt, which he was pulling violently around the collar.
“He’s stretching my Michael Stars T-shirt!” shrieked Stephanie. “He’s ruining it! It cost thirty dollars!”
The two had by now recessed to the living room, where they
were battling each other noisily. The stretched Michael Stars T-shirt had provoked Stephanie to grasp the stiff wedge of hair that stood out on Jeffrey’s forehead in the style popular with preteen boys.
“Oww, she’s hurting me, she’s hurting me!” Jeffrey screamed. “She’s pulling my hair out. Help!”
Carla, too tired to intervene, had fallen onto the kitchen chair, while Jessie calmly poked the casserole with a fork.
Jessie Kaplan was unfazed by the screams emanating from the other room. In fact, she was unfazed by turmoil in general. She had raised two children of her own: Carla and her younger sister, Margot. Carla was the easy one; Margot was the handful (and at thirty-four, still a handful). Having raised Margot, Jessie was used to carrying on in a climate of mayhem and strife.
Jessica had been living with Carla’s family for several months now. For most daughters, this would have been a trial, but Carla counted herself blessed. Her mother was one of those rare specimens: an even-tempered, uncomplaining Jewish woman, who performed household chores with cheerfulness and efficiency. Carla sometimes believed that her mother had been switched at birth and was actually the product of a nice Protestant family who had been saddled, in her stead, with someone who refused to vacuum for fear of breaking a nail.
On this particular day, while Carla and Stephanie had been engaged in the exhausting stationery outing, Jessie had spent the afternoon straightening up and making dinner.
She now handed her daughter a mug filled with a pale yellow liquid: “A glass of mead?” she proffered, as the children could be heard knocking over the andirons in the other room.
“Mead? Is that something you picked up at Whole Foods?” Carla asked suspiciously. Whole Foods was the area’s specialty supermarket where one could buy a wide array of “gourmet organic” foods (an ingenious combination that permitted the food to taste like sawdust and still cost an arm and a leg). The contents of
the mug looked and smelled like apple juice, but that hardly prevented it from having been sold at an astronomical price as something more exotic.
Jessie didn’t answer; she was staring dreamily into space. Carla looked at her mother, then gazed down at the alleged mead.
That was the beginning. Other oddities soon followed.
The next night, Jessie prepared a new recipe for the family’s dinner that, upon interrogation, she pronounced to be “venison stew.”
“Venison—what’s venison?” Jeffrey asked.
“Venison is deer,” Mark translated unadvisedly, at which Stephanie jumped up from her chair and bolted from the room. Carla wondered when Whole Foods had begun to carry venison. It certainly wasn’t available at the Acme.
Then, later that evening, after Jessie finished stitching up a hole in Stephanie’s jeans, she turned to Carla and asked if Mark’s doublet needed mending.
“His doublet?” Carla looked at her mother in bewilderment. “What’s a doublet?”
“It’s the tunic worn over the hose,” Jessie answered matter-of-factly.
Carla had tried to react casually: “No doublet, I’m afraid, but you could reinforce the buttons on his dress shirt”—at which Jessie had nodded agreeably and gone ahead and worked on the buttons.
Carla managed to put these strange remarks out of her mind until a few nights later, when Mark was late for dinner.
“Did he stop at the Wild Boar?” Jessie asked in a disapproving tone.
“The Wild Boar?”
“The tavern up the way.”
“No-o-o-o,” said Carla slowly, “Mark is not at the Wild Boar. He’s at a meeting with a drug rep to discuss the side effects of a new colitis drug.”
She was about to ask her mother where precisely “up the way” the Wild Boar Tavern was located (and how an establishment so-named had managed to escape her notice)—but a phone call from Jeffrey’s social studies teacher intervened. It seemed that Jeffrey had pulled down the map of the continental United States, ripping it from its roller and entirely disrupting the lesson on the Finger Lakes. The resulting damage was to the tune of $144.99, for which the Goodmans would be billed.
“Under no circumstances is your child to touch the map, the globe, the worksheets on my desk, the other children’s pencils, papers, notebooks, or anything not belonging exclusively to himself,” said the teacher, in what Carla took to be an unnecessarily snippy tone.
After this phone call, she might have returned to probe the reference to the tavern—not to mention the earlier references to the mead, the venison, and the doublet—but somehow she wasn’t in the mood.