A Week as Andrea Benstock

Saturday May 10, 1975

Although their twelfth wedding anniversary came on a Monday, the Benstocks decided to celebrate it on the preceding Saturday. Andrea began working on the guest list early in March, and before long it had grown to the point where the party could not be held at their home. The new house on Lebrun Boulevard was larger than the old house in Tonawanda but it was still too small to hold all the people on her list.

“So I guess it’s the club,” she had told Mark. “Either that or seat all these people on each other’s laps.”

“Might be fun. Who would I get on my lap?”

“I don’t know. Someone fat and ugly, I guess. Sheila Caplin? How’s that?”

“Oh, God.”

“I’d better see about booking the club. Do we have to give them dinner? I suppose we do, don’t we?”

“Maybe we could tell them to bring sandwiches. Anyway it’s not the food that’s a killer, it’s the booze. I wonder where that myth came from that Jews don’t drink. Our friends seem to drink like fish. How many people are we having, anyway?”

“I have ninety listed, but not everybody will come, I’m sure. I suppose—”

“Ninety people? I don’t know ninety people.”

“The hell you don’t.”

“I don’t know ninety people well enough to buy food and booze for them. Or do I?”

She handed him the list. “Tell me who to cross out,” she said. “Go ahead. Bearing in mind who you have to invite if you have someone else. Go ahead.”

He stood reading through the list for a few minutes, then went into the other room for a pencil. He returned with it and went over the list making checkmarks. “Take a look,” he said.

“Cass and Ellie, Roger and Eileen, Barb and Jerry, Eddie and Terri — are you crazy? These are the people we’re really close with.”

“I know.”

“So you want to drop them?”

“I want to drop the others. I checked seven couples. That’s fourteen, sixteen with us, and you can seat sixteen at the dining room table with the extra leaves in, can’t you?”

“I think so. Or make it buffet, it’s no real problem. I thought you wanted to have a big party.”

“I did, but not ninety, and you’re right that it’s impossible to pare your list down to size. But we can have seven couples and not worry about anyone else feeling left out because it won’t be such a big deal in the first place. You look doubtful.”

“Well, we owe a lot of people.”

“So we’ll owe ’em a little longer.”

“We never had a big housewarming, and—”

“You want to have a big housewarming party at the country club? I don’t follow the logic.”

“No, no, no. We’ll have the seven couples you checked and have a big party next year. No, next year’s our thirteenth, isn’t it? Hardly the time for a major celebration. Well, in three years we can celebrate our fifteenth. I feel old thinking about it. I guess I don’t have to call the club tomorrow.”

“Unless you want to book it for three years from now.”

“No, I suppose it’s a little premature.”

“And maybe we won’t be able to afford it then, either.”

She put her hand on his arm. “That’s the reason, huh?”

“What else?”

“Is it that bad?”

“Well, it’s not good. It’s not bad enough to worry about yet. We don’t have to start feeding the kid dog food and the bank’s not going to take the house away from us, but it’s bad enough to keep me from spending a thousand dollars on drinks and dinner for ninety people.”

“Would it cost that much? Yes, I guess it would.”

“Or damn close to it. The damnedest thing is that business isn’t all that bad. We get the work all right. What we don’t get is paid. Everybody owes us money, and I don’t mean just individuals. I mean all the companies we do work for. Everybody’s slow-paying everybody else, so that even a business that’s doing well winds up hurting for cash.”

“Everything will straighten out, won’t it?”

“You mean for us or for the whole country? I think we’ll come out of it all right. I don’t know about the country. If things don’t turn around soon there’s going to be a ton of personal bankruptcies in the next year and that could have a chain reaction effect. And I’m relatively optimistic. You should hear Cass on the subject.”

“I can imagine.”

“The Republicans only know one remedy for inflation, and it’s called depression. And I haven’t noticed that it’s having any effect on the inflation anyway.”

“And you don’t even have to do the grocery shopping. Well, to hell with feeding ninety people. We’ll have seven couples and us, and maybe I’ll give them all hamburger. Or better yet Hamburger Helper.”

“Oh, things aren’t quite that bad.”

“I certainly hope not.”

But the main course was neither hamburger nor Hamburger Helper. It was a roast tenderloin of beef, and Andrea and her mother stood admiring it Saturday afternoon before it went into the oven. “I won’t even ask what it cost,” Mrs. Kleinman said.

“That’s good, because I don’t want to think about it. It’ll feed sixteen with no trouble, anyway.”

“Easily.”

“It would feed seventeen just as easily, you know. I wish you would come.”

“I’d only be in the way.”

“That’s ridiculous. You know everybody, you like them all, they like you—”

“It’s all people your own age, Andrea. And tonight’s all my favorite programs.”

“I think Mark would like to change places with you. He’s got a thing for Mary Tyler Moore. You won’t change your mind?”

“Thank you, but I won’t. It’s enough satisfaction for me helping you get things ready.” She lowered her eyes. “A couple of years ago—”

“I know, Mother.”

“I felt terribly helpless, you know. I wanted to be able to comfort you in some way and I didn’t know how.”

“I had to work things out for myself.”

“Yes, I realize that. Andrea? You’re happy with how things worked out, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am.”

“You’re very fortunate, you know. You do know that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

The preparations for the party had not been difficult. With her mother’s help, Andrea was able to do most of the cooking in advance. That afternoon Robin went bowling with a girl friend at whose house she would have dinner and spend the night. Andrea was dressed and ready by the time Mark was peeling lemons and setting up the bar. The invitations had been for six-thirty, and at six-thirty Roger and Eileen Fradin were the first to arrive. “I know we’re early,” Eileen said, “but my sitter was early for a change and I hate hanging around the house once the sitter’s there. It makes them twitchy.”

The Fradins were followed within a few minutes by Jeff’s sister Linda and her husband Arnie Polakoff, and then the rest of the guests came in a steady stream, with the Drozdowskis completing the party at five minutes of seven. The group had drinks in the living room, then moved to the dining room at seven-thirty. They filled their own plates from serving dishes on the sideboard and sat around the dining table, which was just large enough with the extra leaves to accommodate all sixteen of them. The wine went around, and Cass got to his feet and tapped his fork against his wineglass.

“A toast,” he said. “To Andrea and Mark, who in the course of ten wonderful years—”

“Twelve,” his wife said.

“In the course of ten wonderful years—”

“Twelve!”

He turned and stared loftily down at her. He was really losing his hair rapidly, Andrea noted, and for the first time in his life he was putting on weight, but if anything these elements of aging added to his presence. “I said ten wonderful years,” he said. “Ten out of twelve is a damned good average, honey.”

There was just the slightest pause before everyone laughed. “To Andrea and Mark,” Cass went on, “who have served as an inspiration to us all. May you have many more and may we celebrate them with you. God bless.”

Everyone took a sip of wine.

At one point in the evening, after they had all returned to the living room, Andrea tried to imagine the room as it might look filled with the ninety people on her original list. Then she began glancing around the room, peopling it with other persons from her life who had not been invited. She seated John Riordan on the sofa next to Eileen Fradin. Calvin Burleigh she posed in the doorway, leaning against the jamb with one foot crossed in front of the other and talking earnestly to Jerry Singer. She brought Jeff Gould back east and let him stand near the fireplace glaring across the room at his ex-wife and her husband for six months. And Winkie, and other friends from Bryn Mawr, and the people she had known in New York. And her father.

And Mark’s parents, who lived year-round in Florida now.

For a moment she could almost sense those alien presences in her living room. Then she took a deep breath and willed them away and made a show of paying attention to what Terri Santora was saying to her.

Sometimes these days it was hard for her to believe that she had ever left. For almost four months she had lived in New York in an apartment that would have fitted quite comfortably into her living room in Tonawanda and would not have more than half-filled the living room of the Lebrun house. For almost four months she had worked from nine to five at the bookstore on Fifth Avenue, shuttling to and from work on airless subway trains. For all that time she had kept coming into contact with new people who darted furiously in and out of her life, until the day when she packed her suitcase and took her life onto a plane and away from all of them.

It was never difficult for her to remember those months. They were etched upon her memory in sharp relief, and she could recall them more clearly and in more precise detail than more recent stretches of time. The months she had spent in New York served as a boundary in her life, a line of demarcation, with everything else to be placed either before or after that line.

And yet, as vivid as they were in memory, they seemed at the same time quite unreal. As if they had happened to someone else, or as if they had happened to her in some parallel universe, some series of desperately real interlocking dreams, utterly involving and lifelike while you dreamed them but gone forever when the alarm clock woke you.

Occasionally she thought that she might like to discuss the months in New York with Mark, but more often she was grateful that he never brought up the subject. Nor did her mother, or her other Buffalo friends and relatives. There was evidently a tacit agreement that her deviation from normal behavior was to be carefully overlooked, and this approach spared her any number of unpleasant conversations while depriving her of the opportunity of using her friends as sounding boards to put what she had gone through into perspective for herself.

Just recently she had finally brought up the subject herself with Eileen Fradin. She had begun by trying to explain how her memory of that time was at once clear and unreal.

“I think I can understand that,” Eileen had said. “It stands out in your memory because it was so different from your life in Buffalo. You were working, you were meeting people, you were involved in something new every day. Around here, let’s face it, it’s hard to remember whether something happened last year or the year before because the years are pretty much alike, aren’t they? You have to try to tie the events to something, like did Jason chip his tooth before or after we got the new washing machine.”

“Then why does it seem as though it happened in a dream?”

“Because it did.”

“Huh?”

“Well, not in a dream, but like a dream, because it happened to somebody else. That wasn’t you in New York.”

“Who do you think it was, then? The winner of the Andrea Benstock look-alike contest?”

“Oh, I don’t know what I mean. Sometimes I say things that don’t mean anything.”

“Hey, come on, Eileen. Don’t play dumb with me. I want to know what you meant.”

“Oh, I don’t know. But if I moved to New York it wouldn’t really be me. Because the person I am lives in a certain house with certain other people and shops at this market and drives that car and has these friends, in other words lives a certain kind of life, and if you took me out of that life I wouldn’t be me, I’d be some other person entirely.”

“In other words I’m Mark’s wife and Robin’s mother and Sylvia Kleinman’s daughter.”

“And my friend, and a lot of people’s friend.”

“And that’s what a person is. The other people in her life and where she goes and what she does.”

“Did I say something wrong, Andrea?”

“No, of course not. No, I just — oh, it’s so strange. I met a lot of people in New York but I only had one friend.”

“A girl?”

“Well, that’s close.” Eileen looked puzzled, and she laughed and explained about Cal. “We became quite close,” she said. “Even after he quit his job we went on seeing each other and talking to each other on the phone. Well, he was the only person I would call a friend, but there were a lot of other people I saw and a great many I would nod hello to. People in the neighborhood, people at stores where I shopped. It amazed me how quickly I began putting down roots where I was living. Of course no one has a car and you do all your shopping right in the neighborhood, so it’s different there.

“Then when I decided to come home, and it was like a spontaneous thing, nothing really figured out, I packed without being sure whether I would leave or not, I was very upset, but when I was all packed and everything I just went outside and got in a cab and that was that. I never said good-bye to anyone. I never told my boss I was quitting, I never said anything to the landlord, I never so much as called Cal. I had built this whole little life for myself and I was able to move right out of it without even saying goodbye, without even so much as waving to anyone.

“And I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Then on the plane I started feeling guilty because I hadn’t said anything to Cal, and I decided I would call him some night, but I never did. And then one day I thought about the people in the neighborhood, seeing how well I remembered them, and I realized that they would never notice that I was gone, I knew that early on. They just wouldn’t see me, and after a while they would forget me. It had been very easy establishing myself in the neighborhood, getting to be a part of it, but the roots were all shallow ones and you could pull them up without a moment’s notice. And I guess that was when I knew for sure that it was right for me to come back. And this was after I had been back for some time already. I knew it was right in certain other ways, for Robin’s benefit for example, and also because I evidently couldn’t maintain any emotional stability in New York. I needed to be here in order to keep myself sane, or at least relatively sane. But I didn’t know it was right for me until much later.”

“This is where you belong, Andrea.”

“Yes, it is. It really is, and I still have trouble coming right out and saying that and making myself believe it. Why is that, do you suppose? Why do I have to keep learning the same damn thing over and over? God, I envy you.”

“You envy me? That’s crazy. The other way around, sure. I envy you in a lot of ways. Not in a sense of wanting to change places, but in other ways. Why in the world would you envy me?”

“Because you know who you are. You’ve always known who you are.”

“That’s just not having much imagination, that’s all. But I envy you. Going to New York, having the nerve to do it. Getting a job. Meeting people. I never could have done that.”

“Maybe you know better than to try.”

“Aren’t you glad you went, Andrea?”

“I’m sorry I hurt Mark the way I did—.” Up to a point they’d been even-up in at least that department... And Robin, she seems all right but how do you ever know with children?

“But aren’t you glad you did what you did?”

“Yes.”

“Of course you are. Don’t forget it,” said Eileen Fradin.

The last guests left shortly after midnight. Mark offered to help her clean up but she told him she wasn’t going to bother. “Everything can wait until morning.”

“Tired?”

“I guess I am. It wasn’t really that much work and I didn’t have much to drink tonight but I seem to be exhausted. Let’s go upstairs.”

But halfway upstairs, she changed direction and went to the kitchen for cigarettes. When she got to their bedroom he was standing in front of his dresser removing his cufflinks. She slipped an arm around his waist and settled her head against his shoulder, meeting his eyes in the mirror over the dresser.

“We don’t look so bad,” she said. “For a couple of old farts.”

“I think we look pretty good.”

“Love me?”

“No, I’m just crazy about your ass.”

“Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“And I love you. Twelve years.”

“Not until Monday.”

“Twelve years. Ten wonderful years. Cass, a funny man.”

“I think that line came out of some nightclub comic’s routine.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. It was funny, though, the way he said it. After everybody decided it would be all right to laugh.”

“Oh, I think you’re exaggerating, baby.”

“Probably.” She yawned daintily. “‘To Mark and Andrea, an inspiration to us all.’ What do you think he meant by that?”

“Just something to say.”

“Sure... Are you glad you picked me?”

“Of course I am.”

“Even if I’m a pain in the ass?”

“Everybody’s a pain in the ass sooner or later. Hey, don’t cry, baby.”

“I can’t help it. I don’t even know what I’m crying about. Hold me? That’s better. Oh, Mark.”

“It’s all right, baby.”

“I don’t mean to be a pain in the ass.”

“I know, most of us don’t.”

“Yeah, sensational. Hitler didn’t mean to be a pain in the ass either. Is it a good average?”

“Is what?”

“Ten out of twelve.”

“I think we’re closer to eleven out of twelve, and that’s a hell of a good average.”

“Can we go to bed, Mark?”

“I think that’s a great idea.”

“Can we screw a little?”

“Even better.”

And, after lovemaking, after a warm silence had settled over them, she said, “Mark? Are you awake?”

“A little.”

“I just figured out something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know if it makes sense. I just figured out what I’m going to be when I grow up.”

“What?”

“Exactly the same.”

He didn’t say anything, and she thought that he had fallen back asleep. Then he said, “Yeah, it makes sense.”

“Does it?”

“Uh-huh. It’s scary, isn’t it?”

“Yes it is. But it’s a relief too. Mark?”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing, I guess. Just good night.”

“Good night, baby. See you in the morning.”