Mr. and Mrs. Goldman rose to greet me warmly as we entered the living room. I needn’t have worried about fans—instead I worried my hair would look worse than after a ride along the coast with Ada driving and no scarf.
“Shirley has told us so much about you.” Mrs. Goldman spoke loudly to be heard over the noise of the fans. I shot a glance at Freddy, wondering both if he had mentioned me and if he had made the connection that I was his sister’s new friend before I arrived.
“All lies,” I said. She looked confused. “I’m kidding.”
“Of course,” she said and laughed loudly to punctuate it. And I immediately understood that Ada would never set foot in this house. They didn’t know my family in New York—they were trying to impress me because Ada was Oxford Circle royalty. And Mrs. Goldman’s desperate laugh to prove she got a joke that went over her head was entirely so I would form a good impression. Freddy and Shirley or no, this was going to be a long evening.
Mr. Goldman insisted I sit in his chair, the place of honor in the living room, which was mildly uncomfortable as the whole family sat on two sofas, staring at me.
“Tell us everything about yourself, dear,” Mrs. Goldman said. “I want to know everything there is to know.”
“Goodness, that would be terribly boring.”
“Not at all,” Freddy said with a laugh. His mother shot him a death stare, and he hid his smile behind his glass.
“You’re from New York, of course. What does your father do?”
“He’s a doctor.”
“And your mother is a Heller.”
If you went back to my great-grandparents that was true, but it didn’t make sense to correct her on the branches of my family tree, especially when she was telling me, not asking. So I nodded, taking a sip of an extremely weak sloe gin fizz.
“Do you have any siblings?”
“A brother, Harold.”
“A brother,” she said, looking at Shirley. “How wonderful. You’ll have to invite him down to meet our Shirley. We could have a double wed—”
“Mama!” Shirley interjected.
“You’re right, of course,” Mrs. Goldman said, smoothing her dress. “He could be twelve. How old is he?”
“Twenty-five and married—sorry, Shirl.” It was my turn to hide behind a drink. There was a good chance I was going to start laughing if I didn’t.
Shirley shook her head. “Mama, really. Enough.”
“Marriages don’t always last—do they seem happy?”
“Mama!”
“What? I’m just trying to look out for you, dear.” She leaned in toward me conspiratorially, as if I weren’t there at her daughter’s request. “You’re not offended, are you?”
“Ah—um—no, of course not.”
Mrs. Goldman leaned back in her seat, flashing Shirley a closed-mouth smile of victory before turning back to me. “And you? Are you engaged?”
“Quite the opposite.”
Mrs. Goldman nodded sagely. “Which is why you’re here, of course.” Then she looked to Freddy, who was glaring at her, and her husband, who was making a stop gesture across his throat. “I don’t mean here,” she said, gesturing wildly around the room. “I meant with your aunt. To find you a match.” She wrung her hands fretfully until her husband reached over and put a calming hand on her leg.
“Let the poor girl breathe, Arlene,” he said. “She didn’t come here to be interrogated.”
To be honest, I was wondering what I was doing there at all now. Neither Shirley nor Freddy reeked of the desperation of their parents, so it was no wonder I had accepted the invitation, but it would take a lot more gin and a lot less fizz to get me back here again.
“It’s fine,” I reassured Mrs. Goldman. “But no. I’m not here to find a husband. I have two more years of college left and then—well, we’ll just see what happens. I don’t go in for all that matchmaking business.”
Freddy hid another smile. “No?”
“Not for me.” He winked, and I raised my drink again. At this rate it was probably a good thing that whoever made the drinks had barely waved a bottle of gin over my glass.
A maid in a crisp uniform entered and announced that dinner was served. She stood in stark contrast to Frannie, who wore what she chose. Ada, stickler that she was for so many traditions, seemed to be the champion of workers’ rights.
The meal itself was a preposterous affair of a multitude of courses, all of which were far too heavy for a hot evening, leaving me worried that I would doze off before we even reached the turkey that was finally brought out. I wanted to ask if they ate like this every night or if they had gone all out for little old me. But I knew the answer already. And I wished there was a polite way to tell them to stop trying so hard. It was the primary difference between their family and my own. We had nothing to prove. The Goldmans tried so hard to impress everyone that they failed to impress anyone.
But finally the meal ended with a seven-layer cake, and Mr. and Mrs. Goldman retired to the den to allow me and Shirley to spend some time on the porch swing. The sun was setting over the bay, and the air had finally turned cooler on the porch, which faced the ocean, away from the street, though the view was heavily obstructed by the dunes.
“Sorry about them,” Shirley said quietly while we rocked gently in the breeze.
“All our parents are ridiculous,” I reassured her.
“You’d be hard pressed to find a more ridiculous pair than Howard and Arlene,” Freddy said from behind us, startling me. He struck a match on one of the porch columns and lit the cigarette held between his lips.
“Have another one of those?” I asked.
“Do well-bred young ladies smoke?” he asked, grinning as he passed me the one he had lit and pulled the pack from his pocket.
“I wouldn’t know.”
“What say you, sis? Want to try a puff?”
Shirley shook her head. “You know they’d kill me. And you for offering.”
“Me? Their golden child? Never. You—well, they’d be dredging the bay for your body.”
She looked to me. “I wish he were wrong. But they want me to be absolutely perfect.”
I gave her a sympathetic smile. “My parents did, too, but they gave up on me a long time ago. I’m a bad egg.”
“Make some room,” Freddy said, nudging his sister away from me and coming to sit between us over her protests. “You don’t seem like such a bad egg,” he said softly.
“Frederick Joseph Goldman, don’t you even think about it,” Shirley said, jumping up. “Marilyn isn’t interested. Go smoke your cigarette somewhere else.”
“Why not let Marilyn decide if she’s interested?”
“You said she already did multiple times. You leave the poor girl be.”
I tried not to laugh. I did. But being referred to as a poor girl was too much and I couldn’t hold it in. And once I started, so did Freddy. Shirley’s face fell. “Oh, Shirley. No. Freddy knows I’m not allowed to date while I’m here. They’d be pulling my body out of the bay along with yours. Or worse, shipping me back to my parents, and you’d never find my body in the Hudson along with so many others.”