Excerpt of The Bride Will Keep Her Name by Jan Goldstein

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, having 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 fallen during the tap-dance recital,
splitting your costume before God and the collective
families of the Little Princess Dance Academy of West
Hempstead.

"You wanted this, remember?" she'd lovingly observed,
tearing off what was left of your tights. "Be careful what
you wish for, Madison, and you'll never be embarrassed or
disappointed."

Or when you were eleven, trying to become the "teacher's
pet" by actually taking care of the teacher's pet, a
six-foot python you had volunteered to house during winter
vacation that was last seen slinking down your parents'
toilet bowl from where it presumably ended up swimming with
the fishes somewhere out in Long Island Sound.

"You wanted to be the teacher's pet? Welcome to the
doghouse. Don't I always say . . ."

And there it was, good old Be Careful What You Wish For. Like hot sun on a child's ice-cream cone.

But then the world changed in ways my mother was unprepared
for.

Like when we got a lesson in sex education from the
president and his intern that suddenly made politics really
interesting. Or when Britney kissed Madonna live on
television. Or the horror of watching the twin towers fall,
Bubbe rushing to wrap me in her protective embrace while my
mother sat, arms around herself, staring at the screen,
alone. From IMs to iPods to iMacs—which my mother
refused to learn to navigate—to her shock and awe when
her champion Hillary lost to Barack, the world for her was
becoming increasingly incomprehensible.

And then came my sin of managing to graduate Wellesley magna
cum laude without her having to pull any strings, receiving
a master's in art history that she was fond of pointing out
was of dubious worth in today's information-driven economy,
a marketplace that required targeting a specialty, not
generalizing and thinking it would get you somewhere.

Indeed, through the years of my life, her warnings of the perils of dreaming too big or reaching too far have been as constant as a daughter's desire to please. But somehow, with two best friends working on my con¬fidence file, with breasts too small and baby fat on my hips that refused diets and the gym, I have come to the conclusion that being careful about what you wish for makes about as much sense as enrolling your daughter in Girl Scouts to get a deal on the cookies. (Have you met my mother?) And now at the lived a little but just you wait age of twenty-eight, I am taking this moment to officially declare my candidacy for independence and here announce that I have forever deleted the glass-half-empty sentiment of Be Careful What You Wish For from my hard drive.

I am here to shout to the world, amid church bells and the
sound of a thousand shofars, that wishes do come true.

My proof? Simply that in one week from tonight I, Madison Leah Mandelbaum, am set to marry the awesomely sweet, astoundingly smart, phenomenally hot Colin Wordsworth Darcy, he of the dazzling dark eyes and perfectly Episcopalian chiseled chin, the son of Diana Steinberg Darcy of Fifth Avenue-opposite-the-Met (a totally secular Jew but a Jew nevertheless, rendering Colin kosher in the eyes of the Talmud and JDate) and Sir Hugh Aubrey Darcy of London (heralded British barrister, not of the tribe, whose distant cousinhood to the Queen nevertheless has conferred on him what Bubbe likes to call a certain royal yichus).

 

Now, one week before the event, alone in my Village
apartment, working diligently on my vows, trading e-mails
with my mother who was maddeningly tweaking the seating
chart for the umpteenth time, those six little words of hers
have been noodling my brain, trying to get an
in¬vitation to the big event.

 

Be Careful What You Wish For. Get lost, I order, banishing them from my enchanted world.

Never for a second entertaining the possibility that in less
than twenty-four hours ...they would be back to stay.