The Middlesteins(21)
I’m a shit, thought Edie.
“It is the most beautiful necklace I have ever seen in my entire life,” she said. She took it from his tiny hand and then tied it around her neck.
“You look pretty,” he said.
She did not look pretty, she thought. She did not believe she had looked pretty in a long time. Her business clothes no longer fit her right, not her jackets, not her shirts, not her skirts, not her pants, not her pantyhose, not even her shoes—or rather, she no longer fit them right—but she could not bring herself to buy a new wardrobe. Maybe if she gave Weight Watchers a shot this time. There was always the vague promise of that lingering in her future.
“What about you?” she said to Robin.
Robin spent her mornings in a day-care center at the JCC and her afternoons in the backyard of a young woman who lived one town over, along with two other toddlers, the parents of whom worked as lawyers with Edie at the firm. The baby-sitter, barely twenty years old if that, was supposedly the widow of a cousin of a senior partner, but Edie was almost certain she was his mistress. She was an Italian girl, this Tracy, from Elmwood Park originally, and had no real explanation for why she was now suddenly living in the suburbs. And there were no pictures up in her home, no past, no history, just fresh-bought furniture and a small, fancy, yapping dog. “A bichon frisé,” Tracy had slurred proudly, as if she were fluent in French. Edie had no complaints about the woman; she seemed to genuinely like the children, even enjoyed playing with them, liked to get down on her hands and knees and crawl around in the dirt with them, her plump yet still somehow tiny behind in the air. Wagging it like a dog. The dog barking next to her. The kids barking. Everyone pretending to be a dog. All the working mothers standing there in the suburbs laughing at the too-loud, thick-Chicago-accented but still extremely hot Italian tomato rolling around in the dirt with their three brilliant babies.
Edie didn’t even know whether she would ever be able to get back up again if she dropped down that low to the earth.
“Strawberry,” said Robin.
“You ate a strawberry,” said Edie. “You like strawberries.” She said this as if she were suddenly realizing this detail about her child for the first time.
Robin nodded.
“You like fries?” said Edie. She pushed the tiny white paper packet of fries that had been residing in her daughter’s Happy Meal box toward her. “If you’re not going to eat them, I will.”
“I like fries,” said Robin.
Edie took two of them from the packet, and then Robin pulled it back toward her, covering it with her hands. “Mine!” she said.
“Just give me a couple more,” said Edie.
“No. Mine,” Robin said.
Once Edie had been something close to an intellectual, and she took great joy in using her brain to its fullest, the first moments of the day in particular a blissful time to think big thoughts. Now she was arguing with a two-year-old about french fries. Around the dinner table, her parents, now deceased, her mother before her father, but he soon after—he should have lived longer, he could have, but he crumpled without his beloved, no matter how much Edie begged for him to try to live for her sake—spoke of ideas and ideals, wondering with hope what it would take to make all the citizens of the world fit together in their own unique ways. Once she’d lived in a home that had bookshelves filled with novels written in Russian; her parents’ collection was now trapped in taped-up boxes in Richard and Edie’s crawl space. She had lost her way. Her father had spent much of his spare time quietly helping immigrants set up new lives for themselves in the suburbs of Chicago. She worked for a law firm that worked almost exclusively for corporations developing shopping plazas all along Dundee Road, from I-94 to Route 53 to beyond, and when they were done with that road, they would probably find another one.
Thirty years old, and she had failed. Look at the rubble, the empty fast-food wrappers, the mashed-up plastic toy parts. She had no idea what her ass looked like anymore; it had been so long since she’d dared look in a mirror. Edie, Edie, Edie.
She had a husband. He existed. He had opened a pharmacy with the help of much of her inheritance, an impressive stash of Israeli bonds her father had purchased over the years, his fervid support of the country traded for another dream. (That the money was never to return to her was barely mentioned, then ignored, and finally actively forgotten to the point where the truth disappeared entirely.) He toiled at the pharmacy from before she woke up in the morning till long after she had picked up the children from day care. Often his appearances at dinner felt like something from an up-and-coming comedian on The Tonight Show. He would walk in at the end of the meal, grinning, his children dousing him with noisy attention, and then tell the best story from his day. Edie would stare at him, glazed, uncertain if what he was saying was truly entertaining or not. Sometimes she laughed. Sometimes it was just easier to laugh.
Richard had no problem playing with the children. He had to engage in real conversations with people all day long, and Edie suspected he was secretly a little misanthropic. He had, after all, chosen a profession where there was an entire counter between him and the people he served, a line that could never be crossed. But the kids, these miniature versions of themselves, especially Benny, his boy, for him, were exactly what he needed at the end of the day. They didn’t talk back or question him; they weren’t deliverymen, again with the wrong order, or batty old neighborhood women demanding a discount; they didn’t shoplift, nor did they ask for credit. They crawled all over him, whispering sweet nonsense in his ear. Neither Edie nor Robin knew yet that when the kids grew older and began having ideas and opinions at odds with Richard’s he would shut them out of his affections with such carelessness. (But this is when things get interesting, Edie would think as he stormed out of the room again, after an argument with fourteen-year-old Robin. Never mind him. Robin would just have to love her mother best.)