Oh, Ma, How Suite It Was

Ma, you shoulda been there. If only you had lived to see the day. Me, Ma--your little girl--being ushered into a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel as if I was some kind of fancy lady. Ma, I did not feel at home.

Here’s the best part, though. I wasn’t paying. Some guy wasn’t paying. A major corporation was paying!

They’ve been putting me up in expensive hotels, Ma. These are the kind that get described in the travel books as “understated elegance.” I finally figured out what that means. It means that they keep the TV locked up in a cabinet.

There must be a town somewhere whose major industry is building TV armoires for understated-elegance hotels.

It also means no chocolate on the pillow. Nope. Chocolate on the pillow is tacky. With understated elegance you get fruit. If it’s really understated, you get nothing.

Your bedtime snack at the Beverly Wilshire comes in a three-tiered crystal dish. Five perfect strawberries on the top. Sour cream in the middle tier. Brown sugar on the bottom. Like a lo-cal blintz.

Because of the computer, I had a suite! The computer showed my room wasn’t clean so they “upgraded” me. I think they wanted to get me out of the lobby fast.

You know, Ma, I thought heads turned when I walked through in my shawl and babushka. Well, I wasn’t really wearing those things, but that’s how I felt. All the people working at the hotel seemed fancier than me; but they were just like you. They were from the Old Country.

No one spoke English very well. So when I asked the nice man in the white gloves about dry cleaning, he said, “We already clean room today.”

Ma, there were three TVs and four phones in the suite. There was real art on the walls. I ordered room service because I didn’t feel I had anything nice enough to wear to the Lobby Lounge for breakfast.

There were five dishes and six linen napkins with my muffin and coffee. There were little hermetically sealed vats of Crabtree and Evelyn jam. I put them in my suitcase for the girls.

No, Ma, I’m sorry. I didn’t take anything else. Not a towel. Not a high-quality terry robe. Not a silver bottle opener. Ma, they didn’t even have the stuff nailed down here. You’d have cleaned the place out, I’m sure. But I just couldn’t.

What if someone in the accounting room of Simon & Schuster (who set me up here) noticed on the bill: muffin, coffee, one Oriental vase, one crystal cotton ball holder, one framed botanical wall hanging . . . ? Ma, they’d know I was from peasant stock.

One time I stayed at this nice hotel as a guest of the Times Mirror Co. It wasn’t understated elegant, so they had X-rated movies. By mistake, I let the X-rated movie run past the five minutes. That means it automatically went on my bill. So now those folks know what they’re dealing with.

Is life strange or what? One generation you’re in Poland running from Cossacks; the next you’re in Los Angeles having other immigrants bring you muffins on a silver tray.

Ma, I do my best to pass. But when the man in the white gloves showed me the TV in the bathroom, I let out a little “Oy, vey.”

When I was all alone in the suite, I picked up all the remotes and turned on all the TVs and lights and opened up the Evian, and I missed you. You should’ve lived to see it. It would have meant more to you.

I remembered your telling me about eating an orange when you arrived at Ellis Island. You said an orange was the most luxurious thing you could imagine. You said someday you wanted to be rich enough to waste something.

We made it, Ma. We made it.