Regina has dressed carefully for this moment–for this rare lunch alone with her daughter, Rose–but the minute she steps into Lublow’s, she’s sees that she’s managed to get it wrong again. Before she’s even seated at the booth in the corner where Rose, wrapped in gloom, sits studying the shiny menu, she can see a flicker of disdain cross her daughter’s face: the subtle narrowing of her wide blue eyes, the quick biting of the lower lip. And then Rose is standing, and forcing a smile.
“Mother,” she says, allowing herself to be kissed. “I hope you don’t mind . . . ?”
Knowing exactly what her daughter is about to say, because, after all, the two of them go through the same litany every time they meet for lunch, Regina raises her palm to the sky and says, “Not at all, honey. I don’t care where we meet, you know that. I’m just happy to see you.”
But she’s lying–or more accurately, fibbing–and both of them know it, and moreover, know that the other knows that she knows. But it can’t be helped. If Regina is to see Rose at all, it has to be on Rose’s terms. Which usually means one of the dismal little kosher restaurants that still flourish in the East Village, or one of the dismal little kosher restaurants that still flourish in Washington Heights. Restaurants, like this one, that serve perogies and blintzes and huge vats of Russian borsht, scrambled eggs and challah, tsimmis and kugel (“One coronary for me,” Regina thinks of saying, “and my daughter would like an early-onset case of diabetes”), and are frequented by bearded men in black hats and thick eyeglasses, and women, like Rose, who seem burdened beyond their years, as if some terrible, eradicated illness–consumption, perhaps–had zapped them of their strength before they’d fully reached adulthood.
“Well, Mother,” Rose, sitting back down again, says. “I’m glad to see you too.”
Regina rather doubts it. As usual, Rose–whose name isn’t even Rose anymore, but Shoshana–is tense, her fingers fluttering from the menu to the salt shaker to her lips and back again, her feet tapping a-rhythmically on the greasy, slanting floor. She eyes her mother suspiciously, and as Regina takes off her raincoat, she sees that her daughter has, in a glance, taken her measure, observing, and then disapproving, of the dark blue dress, a Diane Von Furstenburg, chosen specifically for...
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