Read Online A Catered Affair by Sue Margolis - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Sue Margolis
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sure that the rabbi will approve of a pop song being performed during the service.”
“You don’t think ‘Angels’ counts as religious music, then?”
“Not really. Look, why don’t you tell Janice that we’d love Elliot to sing, but I think it will have to be at the reception.”
“Yeah, preferably before the guests arrive,” Josh muttered as he left the room.
At the beginning of January, Josh and I had been planning a small, intimate wedding. A couple weeks later, after I’d announced our engagement to Mum, she had insisted on paying for a slightly bigger, less intimate affair and we’d accepted. By the end of the month Nana had stepped in and everything changed again.
When Nana found out that we weren’t planning a big fat Jewish wedding and were going for something smaller and slimmer, she was—in the nicest possible way—up in arms. I explained that Josh and I wanted to keep things simple and that even if we’d wanted a fancy-schmancy wedding, Mum couldn’t afford it and she was refusing to let us contribute. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Nana said. “Of course you want a big wedding, and I will pay for the whole thing. It will be my present to you and Josh. I don’t want any arguments.”
Josh and I insisted, as did Mum, that Nana hang on to her savings because living into advanced old age—and we were all convinced she would—didn’t come cheap. But Nana clamped her hand to her chest and played the I’m-not-long-for-this-world-let-me-do-this-one-last-thing-before-I-die card, and in the end Mum threw up her hands in defeat. Josh and I accepted Nana’s offer rather more graciously and took her out for dinner to say thank you.
Our wedding was now going to be a lavish do for two hundred people with an eight-piece band, a toastmaster and a close-up table magician.
Nana was happy to admit that one of the reasons she wanted to give us a big wedding was to show off to her friends. After all, her granddaughter was marrying a handsome doctor—a specialist no less. The moment she found out we were engaged, Nana called everybody from her cleaning lady to her chiropractor. All Nana’s friends at the day center, everybody she met at the queue at the kosher butcher, the deli and the doctor’s surgery, knew that her granddaughter the lawyer was marrying a brilliant cancer specialist.
“By the way,” she said at one point, “I bumped into Estelle Brownstein the other day at a Ladies’ Guild lunch. There she was, all hoity-toity because her granddaughter’s marrying a pharmacist with three shops. I soon put her in her place.”
Of course, Nana had wanted to know about Josh’s parents. He told her the truth—that his dad had walked out on the family and that these days he had almost no contact with him. He wouldn’t be invited to the wedding. I watched Nana’s eyes fill up. She reached out and took his hand. “Your father is a fool. He has lost a wonderful son.”
It turned out that ours wasn’t the only wedding Nana Ida intended to pay for. She had decided that if Scarlett and Grace ever tied the knot, she would pay for that, too. If they chose not to get married, then she would give them money.
In the same way that Nana had no trouble with Scarlett being gay, she had no trouble with Grace being black. As somebody who’d escaped from Nazi Germany on one of the last Kindertransports out of Berlin, she had no interest in bigotry and racism. To make her point, she went to considerable effort to welcome Grace into the family. Having insisted that Scarlett bring her to Friday night dinner, Nana went over the road to a Jamaican Rastafarian family she had befriended to ask how she might make Grace feel at home. That Friday, we arrived to find a framed photograph of Haile Selassie hanging on the wall next to the portrait of the Queen. Bob Marley was singing “Buffalo Soldier” on the old seventies stereo. “Now, then,” Nana said after we’d all sat down, “who’s for some sweet
“You don’t think ‘Angels’ counts as religious music, then?”
“Not really. Look, why don’t you tell Janice that we’d love Elliot to sing, but I think it will have to be at the reception.”
“Yeah, preferably before the guests arrive,” Josh muttered as he left the room.
At the beginning of January, Josh and I had been planning a small, intimate wedding. A couple weeks later, after I’d announced our engagement to Mum, she had insisted on paying for a slightly bigger, less intimate affair and we’d accepted. By the end of the month Nana had stepped in and everything changed again.
When Nana found out that we weren’t planning a big fat Jewish wedding and were going for something smaller and slimmer, she was—in the nicest possible way—up in arms. I explained that Josh and I wanted to keep things simple and that even if we’d wanted a fancy-schmancy wedding, Mum couldn’t afford it and she was refusing to let us contribute. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Nana said. “Of course you want a big wedding, and I will pay for the whole thing. It will be my present to you and Josh. I don’t want any arguments.”
Josh and I insisted, as did Mum, that Nana hang on to her savings because living into advanced old age—and we were all convinced she would—didn’t come cheap. But Nana clamped her hand to her chest and played the I’m-not-long-for-this-world-let-me-do-this-one-last-thing-before-I-die card, and in the end Mum threw up her hands in defeat. Josh and I accepted Nana’s offer rather more graciously and took her out for dinner to say thank you.
Our wedding was now going to be a lavish do for two hundred people with an eight-piece band, a toastmaster and a close-up table magician.
Nana was happy to admit that one of the reasons she wanted to give us a big wedding was to show off to her friends. After all, her granddaughter was marrying a handsome doctor—a specialist no less. The moment she found out we were engaged, Nana called everybody from her cleaning lady to her chiropractor. All Nana’s friends at the day center, everybody she met at the queue at the kosher butcher, the deli and the doctor’s surgery, knew that her granddaughter the lawyer was marrying a brilliant cancer specialist.
“By the way,” she said at one point, “I bumped into Estelle Brownstein the other day at a Ladies’ Guild lunch. There she was, all hoity-toity because her granddaughter’s marrying a pharmacist with three shops. I soon put her in her place.”
Of course, Nana had wanted to know about Josh’s parents. He told her the truth—that his dad had walked out on the family and that these days he had almost no contact with him. He wouldn’t be invited to the wedding. I watched Nana’s eyes fill up. She reached out and took his hand. “Your father is a fool. He has lost a wonderful son.”
It turned out that ours wasn’t the only wedding Nana Ida intended to pay for. She had decided that if Scarlett and Grace ever tied the knot, she would pay for that, too. If they chose not to get married, then she would give them money.
In the same way that Nana had no trouble with Scarlett being gay, she had no trouble with Grace being black. As somebody who’d escaped from Nazi Germany on one of the last Kindertransports out of Berlin, she had no interest in bigotry and racism. To make her point, she went to considerable effort to welcome Grace into the family. Having insisted that Scarlett bring her to Friday night dinner, Nana went over the road to a Jamaican Rastafarian family she had befriended to ask how she might make Grace feel at home. That Friday, we arrived to find a framed photograph of Haile Selassie hanging on the wall next to the portrait of the Queen. Bob Marley was singing “Buffalo Soldier” on the old seventies stereo. “Now, then,” Nana said after we’d all sat down, “who’s for some sweet
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