Chapter 1 Be careful what you wish for. These six little seeds of warning were long ago generously planted and watered in my unconscious by the inimitable Melanie Mandelbaum, a fifty-eight-year-old executive buyer for Bergdorf's, affectionately known to my father and to me, her daughter, as the buzzkiller of Long Island. My friend Katrina once described my mother as Oprah in a size 4, only white . . . and Jewish. She pretty much nailed her. The woman is a nonstopping, ever-talking, advice-giving force of nature who has always insisted on having a hand in everything. According to Dr. Seymour Unterman, Madison Avenue proctologist to the rich and irregular, her chronic state of constipation is a result of a life lived over the speed limit. As with my friends' mothers, I had discovered that, along with all of the considerable good it has certainly accomplished, this "need for speed" is apparently one of the side effects of the women's lib movement. These women of my mother's generation had worked to have it all, do it all, accomplish it all, which, we daughters have come to discover, means moms who played at paying attention while distracted with more pressing concerns like jobs, arranging childless evenings in the city, and noting who was getting appointed to what prestigious committee. They were the ones who went back to their careers as soon as they'd pushed out their babies, running like lab rats on cocaine-- mothers who spilled the contents of takeout onto paper plates and offered it up as a home-cooked meal. These guilt-riddled women were forced to navigate their nonstop, strive-for-everything, yes, damn it, I can have it all because Gloria Steinem told me so lives by tossing back wee fistfuls of Xanax and almost single-handedly turning therapy in America into a boom profession as a consequence of not, in fact, actually gotten it all. This was my mother. As a kid I remember her bathroom being equipped with a Rolodex, a three-line phone, and a large bottle of Maalox. To my mother, you couldn't waste time simply doing your business; you had to actually do business. She'd swoop in for dinner or pop into my room at homework time only to disappear seconds later on a phone call or to race off to a meeting in the city, leaving my dad to see to the more mundane childhood endeavors, such as building a dud-free volcano for the fifth-grade science fair or composing a haiku about baby spiders. Would she ever simply sit and watch me do whatever it was daughters do, maybe even kvell, as Bubbe would say? Fuggedabouddit. Not even with an act of Congress, four Ambien, and a liter of scotch. On the day of my bat mitzvah, she was constantly up and busy--checking on the food, retouching her makeup, conferring with the rabbi about some VIP who'd just arrived and would be requiring recognition. He and my dad, the superhumanly patient Morty Mandelbaum, had to all but hold her down during my actual solo. Don't get me wrong. She always loved me. I knew this because she'd say those exact words after inevitably doing things her way. Like the time she'd signed me up for the Mommy and Me classes, only sending me with our nanny so, you know, it was really Nanny and Me, which, of course, my mom spun proudly by pointing out that she loved me and, unlike the other girls, I was picking up some Spanish. And this senior Bergdorf buyer who'd failed to receive the bump to management she felt she'd long deserved, whose wildly successful money-raising, temple sisterhood events had for years been the envy of religious institutions all over Long Island, this Energizer bunny with the newly tightened ass, could always be counted on to drop her awesome little minimantra--Be Careful What You Wish For--at the most inopportune moments. Like the time you'd falle Excerpted from The Bride Will Keep Her Name by Jan Goldstein All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
