The Middlesteins (5 page)

She threw her arms around him and enmeshed her fingers in his hair and kissed him,
hard, and for a while, long enough so that when their daughter looked up at them through
the window, it inspired her to believe in love and the sanctity of marriage, if not
for herself, at least for others.

Later, in the parking lot of Old Orchard—there was a sale at Nordstrom’s, winter coats,
30 percent off—Rachelle began to plot how she would save her mother-in-law. It would
require a commitment from her husband and obviously from Richard, more than anyone.
They would all have to work together to get Edie back on track. Rachelle would happily
prepare meals for her, healthy meals, and she knew a nutritionist who was affiliated
with her Pilates studio. Or maybe she would just sign her up for Weight Watchers.
Rachelle would drive her to the meetings herself, and sit with her if she felt it
necessary. And Rachelle would give up her daytime matinees to go to the gym with Edie
if it meant she would finally get some exercise. Hell, all she had to do was go for
a walk every day! Even that little bit would help. But more than anything, it was
really on Richard to make sure she wasn’t sneaking trips to the fast-food joints.
If that meant he had to work less, then so be it. There was always time to make more
money, but you only have one wife, and one life. And Benny would have to call his
mother every single day and check in on her, and let her know that he loved her. A
call from a son means everything to a mother. Rachelle knew she would want the same
thing someday.

They were all in this together, that was the most important thing. If everyone worked
together, Edie had a shot.

At the dance studio, the kids were sweating and grinning; Emily, in particular, had
a healthy glow to her.

“Mom, we had a breakthrough moment,” she said.

“They did,” said Pierre, and he put his arm around Emily. “They remembered all their
steps without me having to remind them.”

“I could feel the whole thing inside me,” said Josh. He touched his fingertips to
his temples and then pressed hard, his eyes bugging out a bit. “Like I can see it
all in my head.”

“It’s magic when it clicks like that,” said Pierre.

Rachelle drank in all their energy, she felt it ripple through her face and neck and
chest, a warm, milky love, and it melted into the enthusiasm she already had for turning
her mother-in-law’s life around. The kids were jumping up and down. Everyone was laughing.
Rachelle pulled out her checkbook to pay Pierre for the month of classes. She asked
him for a pen. He opened a desk drawer, and she saw inside at least a hundred different
save-the-date magnets, all with different names on them. A pile of invitations. Of
course everyone invited him. He was the most fabulous person ever. Rachelle blushed,
and then felt a little nauseous. She wrote the amount incorrectly on the first check,
and then tore it up, her hands trembling.
This is so dumb
, she thought.
What do I care? I have a mother-in-law to save.

Benny returned just before dinner, sad creases worming their way around his forehead.
He saw the kids and he smiled, and he hugged Emily, though over her head he gave a
wary glance to Rachelle. Something began to tick inside her.

They ate salmon, bright pink, flavorless, and Rachelle eyed everyone as they reached
for a pinch of salt, anything to save this meal, and she whispered, “Not too much.”
Brown rice. “Drink more water,” she commanded. Out-of-season strawberries and sugarless
cookies that sucked the air out of their lives. There would be no fooling around with
food on her watch.

They bundled together in the living room, for the last night of
So You Think You Can Dance
, Rachelle on the sectional next to Emily. Rachelle stroked the top of her daughter’s
head. Emily had showered before dinner, and smelled good; Rachelle could tell she
had used her shampoo. Her son was on the floor below them, his knees hunched up to
his chest, rapt excitement at the upcoming revelation. Her husband was on the settee,
stretched out like a dead man, his hands clasped across his belly. Rachelle looked
at his gut. Was he getting a gut? Was everyone going to have to go on a diet around
here?

During the final commercial break, Rachelle asked her husband, at last, how he was
doing, and from across the room he let out a long, whiny, “Ehhh.”

In the last moments of the show, the host announced Victor as the winner. The kids
jumped up and down and screamed, and even Rachelle found herself clapping, while Benny
did nothing but move his hands from his chest to behind his head. Confetti fell all
around Victor as he hugged the host tightly. He swiped his thumbs under his eyes.
He took the mike from the host and said, “I just want to thank everyone for making
this happen. The viewers for all their support and for voting for me, my parents for
believing in me, Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior, and my first dance instructor,
Pierre Gonzales, for making me into the man I am today.” And with that he gave a giant
wink at the camera. A giant dirty wink? A giant wink. Rachelle didn’t know. “Huh,”
she said. She looked over at her husband, who, for the first time that night, had
cracked a smile.

Out back, under the stars, spring was so far away, months to go. Even longer till
the kids had to get up in front of a roomful of people and pretend they were Victor
Long for the night.

“What happened today?” she asked her husband. The joint was thicker than usual, and
he had been outside long before she got there. He sat on a deck chair, his head on
one hand, twirling the joint in the other.

“My father left my mother,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” she said. That didn’t even make any sense.

“He gave up on her,” he said. “He said he couldn’t take it anymore. He said he couldn’t
watch her kill herself anymore. He said she’s a miserable woman and he couldn’t live
with her another day. She’s having a meltdown.”

He looked at his wife for help. He couldn’t do this alone, and maybe he wouldn’t even
be able to do it with her help.

“He can’t just leave,” she said. Who just leaves a sick person? Nobody.

“He left,” he said. “He seems pretty set on it. He rented an apartment near the pharmacy.”

Rachelle walked over to her husband and sat in his lap, she wrapped one arm around
his chest, and another, loosely, around his neck. Then she told him that she didn’t
want his father anywhere near her children. “Do you hear me?” she said. She said that
any man who would abandon a sick woman was a filthy, horrible person and should not
be allowed near a child. And he should be punished. And that is his punishment. He
would have no access. He had gone insane, and he would have no access. Not her children.
Not this man. Her husband argued briefly—who was in charge here anyway? was it him?
did he even want to be?—but it was swift, and then it was over, because she raised
her voice, she raised it loud enough that Josh heard it through his window. Josh,
who had been thinking about Victor Long intently at that moment, wondering what would
happen if he decided someday that he didn’t want to be a doctor and wanted to be a
dancer instead, if his parents would believe in him the same way, heard his mother
screaming at his father, “I will not have him in my home! I will not have him in my
life!” over and over until his father had no choice but to give her what she wanted.

T
hey were supposed
to meet for a burger at a folk-music club called the Earl of Old Town at 7:00 
P.M.
, but then her father’s test results were scheduled to come in sometime that evening,
maybe the next day—the unpredictability of the timing, of everything, driving Edie
into knotted bursts of tears in the bathroom attached to her father’s hospital room—so
she called her blind date and asked, nicely, if they could dine earlier in the evening
and also somewhere near the hospital instead.

“What a shame,” he said. “I heard that place was the place to go.”

“For what?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “For fun.”

“What does it matter where we eat?” she snapped.

“I just wanted to try something new,” he said.

“Look, I don’t even know you,” she said. “I don’t know what’s new or old for you.”

“This is us, getting to know each other,” he said, and then he started laughing at
her, and she was appalled, because nothing was funny in this world, in her life, nothing.

Her mother had died the winter before, coldly, a stroke, a coma, and one day of lucidity
where she faintly clung to her family members, smiling, speechless, and then she was
gone. The view from the hospital room was of a parking lot, and it had snowed the
night her mother had her stroke. Edie had watched an old man shovel snow the next
morning, making small mountains around the edges of the lot. By the time her mother
died, the snow piles were covered in filth.

Now her father was entrenched in a bed at Northwestern Memorial; strings had been
pulled to get him closer to his daughter, who attended the law school a few blocks
away, one Russian calling another, a private room arranged for a good man. So in addition
to her everyday back-and-forth between law school and library, there was also travel
between her dorm and the hospital, up the elevators, down the hallways, through the
doors. Edie just spent all day (when she was not sitting in class or studying in the
library) walking, sometimes running. She could barely remember to eat, let alone that
she should try and find a husband at some point, something her next-door neighbor,
Carly, thought was extremely important. (Weren’t they supposed to be feminists? Edie
did not even have the energy to argue with her.)

She wasn’t living any kind of life at all, but she was still more alive than her father,
whose skin in the last few weeks had simply turned gray, his nose and ears becoming
more pronounced against his shrinking head, even though none of his doctors knew exactly
what was wrong with him. And this guy, her date, so leisurely, so cavalier, he had
all the time in the world to try out new restaurants, didn’t he?

“Can you just meet me at my dorm at six and let’s not argue about it?” she said. “I’ll
be in front of the building.”

“How will I recognize you?” he said.

“I’ll be the one who doesn’t care where we eat dinner,” she said.

She did care. She missed eating. (Men, she didn’t miss. You can’t miss something you
never had in the first place.) Food had been something that had made her happy, and
now she was so sad and tired all the time that she could not even remember the connection
between the two, between food and joy, and when she looked in the mirror, she saw
drawn skin on her face, and unfamiliar bones across the top of her chest, delicately
poking against her skin like shells beneath sand. Now food was merely something she
used to power her body so that she could walk: dorm, class, dorm, hospital, dorm.
Thirty years later she will lose track of distinct emotions, everything will be blurred
together, and there will only just be feeling and eating. But for now food, along
with joy, had slipped away from her.

And here was a man she didn’t know—a fix-up; Carly had met him at shul, this Richard
Middlestein, and he had boldly asked her out, not noticing the glittering engagement
ring on her finger, and when she had waved it at him, he had ducked his head, covered
with thick, curly hair, awkwardly but charmingly, and he was tall and wearing a suit
(no hippie, this one, thank God; hippies were over), and he was going to be a pharmacist
in a year, and did he want to meet another smart Jewish girl? Of course he did!—taking
the time to ask her what she wanted to eat. Maybe, Edie, you could slow down for a
minute and answer the man?

“We could go to Gino’s,” she said.

“I love Gino’s,” he said. “I think Chicago pizza is better than New York pizza, and
I say that as a lifelong New Yorker. But don’t tell anyone I said that.”

“Who would I tell?” she said.

Three hours later she leaned against the limestone walls of Abbott Hall, in a cool
green summer dress that hung around her waist. A year ago it had fit her snugly across
her gut and around her hips. She had been six feet tall for a few years, and had had
a lovely plush body, and now she felt like a scarecrow. Where had her breasts gone?
Those were mostly missing. Where were her parts? They had been disappeared by some
unknown force. She turned her head right and noticed the lake, a handful of pristine
sailboats gliding in the wind. Usually she never looked past the traffic speeding
by on Lake Shore Drive. Carly had gone sailing with her rich, cerebral fiancé two
weeks ago and had invited her along, and Edie had declined the offer before Carly
had even finished her sentence. She was going to be an orphan soon: her father was
dying, she was sure of it. His first test had been inconclusive, but deep in her heart
she knew that all those Pall Malls had taken their toll, and it was not nickels or
dimes her father would pay. Do orphans even go sailing?

Other law students exited the building, books in hand. They were all going to do better
than her in class, in life. She had so much work to do, and she couldn’t catch up;
she was, for the first time ever, only a merely adequate student. She didn’t even
know what kind of lawyer she wanted to become. She should know by now what she was
going to be someday. Why was she going to eat pizza with a stranger?

She wore her hair down, a good idea, the dark curls a tantalizing contrast with her
green dress, and she had dug out a small bottle of lip gloss from the bottom of her
underwear drawer, where it had fallen six months before and where she had not so accidentally
forgotten about it, as if even the slightest lick of makeup would slow her down.

And then there he was, in a suit (it was his only suit, but she didn’t know that yet),
and he was smiling (his happiest days were behind him the minute he met her, but he
didn’t know that yet), and tall, much taller than Edie, so that she felt even smaller,
and he walked confidently, like he liked what he had swinging between his legs. And
the curly hair she had been told about was indeed thick and dark, just like her own
hair, and so he instantly felt familiar to her. A different kind of woman might not
have wanted the familiar. Five years down the line, who knows? Maybe Edie would have
become that kind of woman, who wanted nothing to do with someone who came from the
same place. He might have been from New York City, but he was just the same as she
was. As her father hovered on the edge of something terrible, as he dwindled down
into a pale, bony version of his former self, as he threatened to disappear entirely,
here was a man who was tall and healthy and full of something Edie found herself wanting
to devour.

“Let’s go,” she said.

But how far did they make it? One block, two blocks, and then they were approaching
the hospital. And then how many steps past the hospital until she felt her gut pull
her back toward her father? Even though he had encouraged her to go meet this young,
single, Jewish man. “The test results will be the same no matter what time of day,”
he told her. But she stiffened like stone on the corner of St. Clair Street, the wind
pushing back at her dress and her hair, frozen and alive at the same time.

Here was what she wanted to say to this Richard, making his jokes, touching her elbow:
Did you know that my father translated three books of Russian poetry into English?
For fun, he did it. It wasn’t even his job. He just loved poetry. I have the books.
I can show them to you. The titles are embossed in gold.

Here is what she would have said to this Richard, looking at her lips:
All he ever did was love my mother and help people.

Here is what she would have said if she felt like herself, whatever that meant anymore:
A life well spent, do you know anything about that?

Instead she said, “My father is sick.” Still looking at him, she pointed her hand
faintly in the direction of the hospital.

And he said, “I heard.”

“I can’t eat,” she said.

“You gotta eat,” he said kindly, and now both of his hands were on her arms. “I’m
going to take care of this,” he said.

And that was how Edie and Richard’s first date ended in a hospital room, a mushroom
pizza from Gino’s on the nightstand, Edie’s father coughing and laughing at every
single one of Richard’s jokes, everyone in the room pretending that Edie did not twice
excuse herself to the bathroom to cry. It was the story Edie told at their ten-year-anniversary
party, when there was still a chance they were in love. “He did not abandon me in
my time of need,” she said to their friends gathered before them in a private room
at a suburban steak house. “It was the beginning of everything.”  Everyone raised
a glass. To love, they said. To love.