Invasion of the Blatnicks Read online

  Sheryl and Mimi’s brother Sheldon shuffled in behind her, and everybody kissed and hugged. Sheryl had bleached her brown hair blonde, but it was a poor dye job and the roots showed clearly. A rhinestone tiara on a plastic headband was balanced between her ears. She was dumpy and she had a false front tooth that had been stained brown by nicotine.

  While the adults settled down, Sheryl and Steve walked out onto the balcony overlooking the Intracoastal where Rita was raising dozens of hibiscus. She was proud of her ability to keep so many of them in bloom, in shades of red, pink and peach.

  “How’s life in New Jersey?” Steve asked.

  “Pretty boring,” Sheryl said. “Most nights your options are ordering a pizza or slashing your wrists.”

  “So, you like it down here?”

  “We just got here two days ago,” Sheryl said. “I haven’t exactly had the time to come up with an opinion.”

  “But my mom says you’re staying for the winter.”

  “It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do,” Sheryl said. “Somebody had to stay with Grandma and I got nominated.”

  It was not clear whether Sheryl had ever held a paying job, though she had spent part of a summer working in her father’s office, losing files, disconnecting phone calls, and demonstrating that all she had learned in her high school typing class was how to chew gum and comb her hair. She had sampled a number of community colleges and junior colleges, but never stayed at any one long enough to accumulate a transcript, much less a degree.

  “What about your Uncle Sheldon?” Steve asked. “Didn’t he drive down with your grandmother?”

  “Nobody’s gonna trust Uncle Sheldon to look after a cat,” Sheryl said. “You think he can look after Grandma?”

  Steve shrugged. “I think someday your Uncle Sheldon will fulfill his true potential and become an ax murderer, so I can see your family being reluctant to leave him in charge of your grandmother.”

  Sheryl rarely understood Steve’s jokes, and she had perfected a dull stare to use whenever he talked to her. She broke off a hibiscus blossom that was just orange enough to clash with her lavender dress, and stuck it into her cleavage.

  Though Steve made fun of the Blatnicks, he considered them comic relief for the Jews, after centuries of persecution and pogroms, and he was glad his mother had kept in touch with them. It did not surprise him that the Blatnicks had been invited to dinner for Rosh Hashanah. What he found surprising was that the Blatnicks were able to live independently in the world, without more responsible people to look after them and make sure they arrived where they were supposed to.

  When Steve and Sheryl came back inside, everyone was sitting down at the dinner table, which glistened with Rita’s good crystal, her sterling flatware, and a pair of porcelain candelabras she had picked up for a song at an antique shop in Philadelphia. Steve sat across from Sheldon, who was no relation of his at all, and for whom he always felt a special dislike.

  Sheldon reminded Steve of a Yiddish phrase his father had used about a man who lived down the street from them in Pennsylvania. His father spoke of how “the dumbness sat on his face like a blanket.” Sheldon dressed very well, though, and his Italian sports jacket must have set him back five hundred bucks easy. Steve coveted the tan leather loafers Sheldon was wearing without socks.

  Steve was smarter than Sheldon, and he made what others might consider an excellent salary, but he was also struggling to live in Manhattan and he knew he couldn’t afford to dress the way Sheldon did. It made him resent Sheldon even more.

  Sheldon was another unemployed Blatnick. He had given up on fashion photography and encyclopedia sales, and lived on a trust from his father’s estate and whatever he could steal out of his mother’s pocketbook when she wasn’t looking. He was about forty-five and never married, but stupidity and his inability to stick with anything made him nobody’s prize catch. He had brought with him a shopping bag stapled shut at the top and he insisted on keeping it with him.

  Rita brought the pot roast out, swimming in a thin brown gravy with potato carcasses bobbing around the meat like little sailors drowning in a cruel sea. Harold said the blessings over the wine and the bread and the Blatnicks and the Bermans attacked the meal like the Maccabees falling onto the Romans.

  “So, Sheryl,” Rita said. “What are you going to do while you’re here in Florida?”

  “She might take some courses at the community college,” Mimi said.

  “That would be nice,” Rita said. “What do you think you’d like to take up?”

  “Space,” Steve mumbled under his breath.

  “She might take a course in Spanish,” Mimi said. “Or maybe something with computers.”

  “I have a tongue, Mother,” Sheryl said. She stuck it out at Mimi. There was a large yellow lump of potato kugel on it. “See? I can talk for myself.”

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full, sweetheart,” Mimi said.

  Rita gave up on Sheryl and turned to Sheldon. “Are you staying down here for the season, too?” she asked.

  Sheldon shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not,” he said. “My brother Dusty and me might buy a restaurant in West Orange.”

  “Over my dead body,” Mrs. Blatnick said. In her anger she spilled some gravy down the front of her white dress, and Mimi swooped in with a napkin dipped in ice water. Steve saw Rita cringe.

  The tablecloth and napkins had taken on a kind of totemic significance in the Berman family. For a long time, one of the twelve matched napkins was missing. It disappeared after a Thanksgiving dinner at the Bermans’ house in Pennsylvania, and they didn’t find it until the following August, when Harold handed Steve a rag he’d been using to clean the oil and caked grass from the lawn mower engine.

  “Dad, isn’t this one of Mom’s napkins?” Steve asked. He held the rag up and spread it out. Sure enough, there on the corner was the lace insert.

  “My napkin!” Rita said. She was planting marigolds or something in the side yard, where there was never enough light for anything to grow. “Harold! How could you!”

  She grabbed the napkin from Steve and stalked inside, where she washed it at least a dozen times. It finally came clean, but if you looked closely you could see where several of the lacy veins had been torn irreparably. Rita wrote up the experience and sent it to the detergent company, and they sent her a coupon for a free box.

  The incident was a testament to Rita’s ability to keep her fractious family together as much as to keep her set of twelve napkins intact, and seemed to Steve to symbolize Rita’s determination to keep in touch with Mimi even after they were no longer legally sisters-in-law.

  Everyone watched silently while Mimi tidied up her mother’s dress. When she was finished she dropped the crumpled napkin next to her plate, and it sat there like a dead egret, its beautiful white feathers finally folded in on itself. Steve could tell that Rita was longing to jump up and throw it into the washer.

  In the silence, Steve could hear a low ticking sound. At first he thought it was coming from the kitchen, but careful listening indicated it was coming from the shopping bag at Sheldon’s feet.

  “Sheldon, what’s in the bag?” Steve asked.

  “It’s personal.”

  “It’s not a bomb, is it? Because I can hear it ticking.”

  Sheldon frowned. “Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t,” he said.

  “Shelly, it isn’t polite to bring a bomb when someone invites you for dinner,” Mimi said. “Maybe you should put it out on the balcony.”

  “Is it a very big bomb?” Rita asked. “You know, all my hibiscus are out there, in clay pots. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to them.”

  “If he’s got a bomb he should take it outside,” Harold said. “Put it in the dumpster. You wouldn’t want to put it down the trash chute. What if it exploded on the way down?”

  “I didn’t say it was a bomb,” Sheldon said. At that moment, the bag stopped ticking and began to ring with a noisy clatter that made everyone at the
table jump. Sheldon reached down and slapped the bag, and the ringing stopped. “I have to take my pill,” he said. He pulled a grubby looking red pill from the pocket of his jacket, and popped it in his mouth.

  Mrs. Blatnick belched, a long, mellow sound that was almost musical and reminded Steve of contented cattle lowing in the fields. “Mother!” Mimi said.

  “I can do better,” Sheryl said. She belched, too, and hers sounded like the horn of a New York taxicab.

  Sheldon belched. His was more like a croak, like a frog on a lily pad serenading his sweetheart.

  “Honestly, Rita, I’m mortified,” Mimi said. Rita smiled weakly.

  When everyone was finished, Rita, Mimi and Sheryl cleared the table. “I have a special treat for dessert,” Rita called from the kitchen.

  “How about an after-dinner glass of brandy?” Steve asked.

  “Fine,” Harold said. “Get out the Armagnac.”

  Steve brought the crystal decanter to the table and poured brandy for himself, his father and Sheldon. He took a deep sip, feeling the hot liquid slide down his throat, hoping it would ease the knot of tension in his stomach. He looked up at the rest of the guests and smiled.

  Harold had drifted off for a brief nap between courses. The peaceful smile on his unlined face made him look like an angel from a Renaissance painting, his wispy white hair like a halo around him. Mrs. Blatnick seemed to be focusing on something in the far distance, perhaps an image of her late husband hovering out over the Intracoastal, waiting to be fed a choice bit of chopped herring. Sheldon was playing with matches.

  He kept bending the matches back and striking them against the cover without breaking them off. Mrs. Blatnick moved her gaze from the distant past to the present and said, “Sheldon, stop that!” Sheldon, startled out of his trance, knocked over his brandy glass and dropped the book of matches onto the tablecloth, where the last match he’d lit ignited the spilled brandy and whooshed into flames.

  Harold woke up with a start. “Rita, get the extinguisher!” he yelled. Rita raced in with the spray can kept next to the stove, and Harold grabbed it and sprayed the tablecloth. The fire went out quickly, but through the pile of foam left on the cloth Steve could see an ugly brown hole. The smell of smoke and chemical extinguisher lingered in the air.

  Steve wanted to get up and punch Sheldon, who looked more confused than sorry. But the energy drained from him as he remembered he was unemployed himself, no better than a Blatnick. Who was he to criticize Sheldon? When Sheldon was Steve’s age, his parents had probably thought he had lots of potential, too. Their hopes for him must have been as high as Harold and Rita’s hopes for Steve. Steve slumped back in his chair, his head looking towards his lap.

  Rita surveyed the damage with tears in the corner of her eyes. Then she took a deep breath and smiled bravely. “Maybe we’d better have dessert after services.”

  The Bermans believed in a version of Judaism that had more to do with tradition and culture than actual religion. Rita made hamantashen for Purim because her mother had made them, but her cookies had four corners instead of the traditional three because she could fit more of them on a baking sheet that way. Harold had to be persuaded to synagogue every year at the High Holy Days, but that did not diminish his insistence that Steve marry a Jewish girl and carry on the traditions of the religion.

  None of the Bermans spoke or understood much Hebrew; the only words Steve remembered from his three years of Hebrew school were disconnected ones like eparon, which meant pencil, and boker, which meant morning. When any of those words appeared in the Hebrew text Steve perked up, the way he had in a class where the teacher had peppered his dialogue with the names of students he felt were not paying attention. Steve’s name had come up often, and he was always looking around nervously and trying to pretend he knew exactly what was going on.

  For the most part the Bermans felt services were a ritual of standing, sitting, chanting and reading without much relevance to their daily lives, though they were grateful that they were not Catholic and so did not have to kneel.

  The High Holy Days were a chance to get dressed up and see people they had not seen for a year. It was a family event, the way back-to-school shopping had been when Steve was a child, or the annual neighborhood picnic back in Pennsylvania. The Bermans celebrated Christmas with gifts and a family dinner, even though they lit a menorah and gave Steve eight presents, one for each night. When he was a child, he was given candy eggs in a straw basket filled with artificial grass for Easter. There was an egg hunt on the lawn at his father’s plant every year, and once he had come in second and won a large chocolate rabbit.

  Harold and Rita had joined a synagogue when they moved to Miami, and this year Mrs. Blatnick had bought guest tickets there for herself, Mimi, Sheldon and Sheryl. Services seemed long and slow to Steve, and he looked around often to make sure no one he knew saw him in the company of the Blatnicks.

  There was an unpleasant aroma of fart lingering in the air around Sheldon, and Sheryl insisted on folding and refolding the solicitation letter from the United Jewish Appeal into a paper airplane that Steve was sure would not fly more than one or two pews ahead, but otherwise the Blatnicks were well-behaved.

  Mimi insisted on treating everyone to dessert at the Dairy Queen, rather than going back to the condo. “You’ve done enough for one day,” she said, patting Rita’s hand.

  Mimi sent everyone to sit on the picnic benches in the center of the parking lot and wrote down their orders on a little note pad. The darkness was punctuated by a couple of high-intensity lamps mounted on the side of the ice cream hut, and the air was redolent with a mixture of night-blooming jessamine and automobile exhaust. “I want a strawberry sundae, but only if they use fresh strawberries,” Mrs. Blatnick said. “You be sure they’re fresh, Mimi. I don’t want any canned strawberries on my sundae.”

  “All right, Ma,” Mimi said. “Fresh strawberries.”

  Steve and Sheryl accompanied Mimi to the window. Of course the strawberries were not fresh, and when the sundae arrived they sat in a glutinous lump around the base of a swirled pyramid of soft ice cream.

  “Mimi! These are canned strawberries!” Mrs. Blatnick said. “Didn’t I ask you for fresh strawberries?”

  “They don’t serve you fresh strawberries in the nursing home either, Ma,” Mimi said. “You get the message?”

  “Rotten kid,” Mrs. Blatnick said as she dug into her sundae.

  The next morning when Steve walked into the kitchen, Rita was standing by the window surveying her damaged tablecloth. She’d had the cabinets resurfaced with pickled cedar a few years before, and the Florida ceiling replaced with recessed halogen bulbs. But even so, she regarded it as a work in progress, not as finished as the living room or the den.

  Her gray hair, which still had a lot of brown in it, fell loosely to her shoulders, and she looked up when Steve came in. “Your Aunt Mimi gave me the name of a place in Paterson that does n that does reweaving,” she said, her fingers worrying the burned spot over and over. “I don’t think it’ll ever be the same.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” Steve said. Rita sat down at the kitchen table and looked out at the waterway. A big sport fishing boat was passing by on its way out to the ocean. There was a man at the helm, and a woman on the foredeck splashing water on a little child. Steve remembered a game he and his mother used to play in the pool, when he was young. She would stand in the shallow end, reach down and behind her for him, and pull him through her legs and up into the air, laughing and cascading water around him.

  Rita had always thought with her heart, rather than with her head. Whenever someone in the condo was in trouble, she was there, with casseroles, sympathy or the name of a very good specialist. She had made her career in interior design not by knowing what colors went together best, but by understanding her customers and what they wanted.

  Harold, on the other hand, was a rational, logical thinker and Steve had always identified with him. He had gone to business s
chool to train himself to use intellect and reason rather than emotion, and in making a career in finance he had done everything by the numbers.

  When he saw Rita holding her tablecloth, his brain said that she would get over the damage even without his help. But he wanted to help her, to spend some time around his parents again. Getting a job in Florida might be easier than going back to New York and competing against hundreds of other MBAs whose credentials were just as shiny as his. In Florida he might have an advantage. And besides, it never snowed in Miami. There was something to be said for that too.

  “Look, Mom, I met a guy on the plane coming down here,” Steve said. “This guy Max Thornton. He’s building some kind of shopping center complex out west of the airport, and he said he’s got a lot of openings. He said I should give him a call if I ever wanted to move down here.”

  Rita’s eyes lit up like a menorah on the eighth night of Hanukkah. “You’d do that? Move down here?” She smiled and said, “Oh, Steven!”

  Steve smiled back at his mother. For the first time since he had arrived in Florida, he felt a sense of relief, an easing of the pressure building up inside his chest. Rita stood up. “Well, there’s no reason to procrastinate,” she said. “I’m going to pack this tablecloth up and send it to be repaired.”

  Steve stayed in the kitchen for a while, staring out at the Intracoastal. There was a steady parade of boats, threading their way through the channel between small islands. It was easy to see the markers from high above, but he thought it must be difficult to navigate down there, with the islands in your way, blocking you from seeing what was ahead. But everyone down there looked so happy and confident from his angle, surrounded by their families and friends, moving steadily forward.

  4 – Alligator Wrestling