The Middlesteins(20)
When they got to the Trevi Fountain that day, he was limping, his hips, his ankles, his back, everything was shattered. Edie had already consumed five espressos and two gelatos, and he had wondered if she would ever sleep again. Some pleasant-enough American girl, a little older than Robin, a tourist like them, innocent to the doom she was witnessing, offered to take their picture with the fountain as the backdrop. The result was a photo of two people standing far apart, and he knew he was unsmiling in the other half of it, the half, he noticed, that Edie had cut out of the picture. What he saw online was just her, her handbag looped over her arm, that pretty silk dress that fell nicely around her wide, sexy hips, her hair a majestic throng of curls (it had rained that morning, and the air was still humid), still a reasonably good-looking woman with an intense, hopped-up-on-caffeine smile on her face. She looked like she was clever. She looked a little dangerous. Slightly past her prime, but still she seemed ripe. If he didn’t know her, he would have thought she was fascinating. If he didn’t know her, he would have thought she was just his type. I want that woman back, he thought. I want that woman, but I want her to still love me. And he knew now—he had known this for a long time, but he had sealed it with every decision he had made in the last two months—that she was never going to love him again.
Edie, 210 Pounds
Here is what was on the tray: one Big Mac, one large fries, two Happy Meals, one McRib sandwich (because it was a new sandwich, and how often did a new sandwich come along?), one Diet Coke, two orange juices, one chocolate shake, one apple pie for everyone to share, and three chocolate chip cookies, one for Edie, one for little Robin, and one for Benny, who was getting to be such a big boy now. Edie would definitely eat the Big Mac and the McRib sandwich all on her own, although she had asked Benny if he had wanted to try it, pointing to the cardboard advertisement dangling from the ceiling like a mobile over a baby’s crib, and he had nodded yes. She had also asked him if he wanted a chocolate chip cookie, sitting there looking so moist and chewy in its plastic display case, or an apple pie, he could have either, and he said, “Neither,” and she had said, “Well, maybe we should get both just in case,” and he had shrugged. It was all the same to him; around his house nothing ever went to waste (which meant everything got eaten by someone in the end), and also he was only just six years old and didn’t have strong opinions one way or another about much of anything, or at least not about food, because, after all, it was just food.
What was food to a six-year-old? Sometimes Benny would eat only the same thing for weeks at a time (macaroni and cheese for most of the winter; turkey sandwiches, sometimes minus the turkey and sometimes minus the bread, for all of March), and Edie didn’t have the energy to argue with him. It was not about taste. It was about some sort of affection or association with a memory, she suspected. Like, maybe she had given him macaroni and cheese on the first cold day of the year and it had warmed him up so beautifully that he craved that same sensation on repeat. Perhaps there was a favorite cartoon character of his who loved turkey sandwiches. Or a Muppet? It had nothing to do with his innocent young palate. He could not be expected to be excited about the new McRib sandwich. It was meaningless to him.
Edie was saving the McRib for last, because it was a treat, almost like a dessert sandwich. She had already finished her fries, decimated them moments after the three of them had sat down, and was working on Benny’s bag, while Benny, in a thoughtful and organized manner, plucked apart the free plastic toy that had come with his meal. Robin was happily banging the hell out of her own toy until Edie finally retrieved it from her just to stop all the noise.
Big Mac-wise, she had this new habit of picking out the middle layer of bun from her sandwich, because she had heard the one time she went to Weight Watchers that half the battle was the bread. She would even have eaten the McRib minus the roll entirely, only obviously that would have made a huge mess. Best to eat it as intended. She took a bite of the Big Mac and considered it without the extra slice of bun, which lay nearby covered in flecks of lettuce and salmon-pink special sauce. There was literally no impact on the taste, and yet there was something missing in the experience, an extra layer of spongy pleasure.
Holy cow, she was thinking a lot about food.
She was so tired from her day, and so happy to not have to think about work (although she did not mind her job; she had never minded putting in a hard day’s work, it was, in her opinion, as she had been raised to believe, both an extremely Jewish and American way to behave, being a good worker was), and in theory, she should be happy to spend time with her children, but sometimes she found them a little dull. Playing with them was boring, and it wasn’t even their fault. It was just the notion of playing itself. She had never gotten the hang of it, even when she was a child. You needed to be able to adopt a personality other than your own in order to fully immerse yourself in the world of play, and it was burden enough carrying her own self around.
“Don’t you guys have anything of interest to say?” she said in the direction of her children. It didn’t matter which one answered. “What did you do today?”
Benny looked up from the pile of plastic parts. Minutes ago it had been an airplane. Now it was waste.
“I went to school,” he said.
“Did you learn anything?” she said. One-two-three bites, and the Big Mac was finished.
“We counted a lot today,” he said. “There was a lot of counting, and I played catch during recess with three different boys and one girl. Craig, Eric, Russell, and Lea, and then Lea got hit in the head and we had to stop playing. And I made this.” He pulled from his pocket a string of orange and pink beads on a long, narrow rubber thread and held it up in the air. “It’s for you.” He smiled—oh, he beamed! The beam that could break your heart.