The Middlesteins(13)

Edie, 160 Pounds



They 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?