The Middlesteins(32)
But then came the food. Platter after platter of sizzling, decadent, rich, sodium-sugar-drenched food. Steaming, plush pork buns, and bright green broccoli in thick lobster sauce, sticky brown noodles paired with sweet shrimp and glazed chicken, briny, chewy clams swimming in a subtle black-bean gravy. Cilantro-infused scallion pancakes. A dozen dumplings stuffed with a curiously, addictively spicy seafood, the origin of which Robin could not determine, but it seemed irrelevant anyway.
Robin tried one bite of everything, and that was it. The patron saint of former fat girls. It was delicious, Robin would not deny Mr. Song his gift. But there was just so much food, too much food, and all of it was terrible for her mother. Couldn’t they see who her mother was? Didn’t they know that every bite her mother took was bringing her one step closer to death?
Edie seemed to be ignoring the fact that her daughter was across the table from her, or at least she did an excellent job of pretending she was alone. She ate everything on every plate, each bite accompanied with a thick forkful of white rice. Edie came and she conquered, laying waste to every morsel. Robin wondered what her mother felt like when she was done. Was it triumph? Eleven seafood dumplings, six scallion pancakes, five pork buns, the pounds of noodles and shrimp and clams and broccoli and chicken. Not that anyone was counting. Was there any guilt? Or did she hope to simply pass out and forget what had just happened?
You’re killing her, Robin wanted to say. But of course it was not their fault. Because her mother was killing herself.
Later, in the car, in the parking lot, outside the sports bar, where two women in their twenties leaned against a wall sharing one cigarette, outside the 7-Eleven, where a UPS man purchased a two-liter of Coca-Cola and two overcooked hot dogs drenched in cheese sauce, outside a cell-phone store, where a bored salesgirl working her way through community college slumped behind a counter texting a girl who had pissed her off at a party the night before, outside a Chinese restaurant where the food was made with love by a man who was once an unstoppable chef, in love with his work, in love with his life, until he lost his wife to cancer and he became sad for a long time, until his daughter said, “Stop it,” and now here he was, cooking again, outside of all this Edie and Robin sat, Edie staring out the window, Robin with her head against the steering wheel.
“Just drive,” said Edie. “You’re embarrassing me in front of them.”
“You can’t do this anymore,” said Robin. “You can’t eat like this.”
“You’re the one who wanted to eat,” she said, and she started to cry quietly and to herself.
“I don’t want you to die,” said Robin.
“I didn’t know you cared,” said Edie.
“Stop it,” said Robin. “Don’t pull that on me. Don’t try to make me feel bad for being me.”
They didn’t say anything for a while, watching everything shift in the strip mall, the two girls crushing their smokes under their heels then sharing a stick of gum, the UPS driver exiting the lot, one hot dog already half eaten before he pulled out onto the road, the girl in the cell-phone store showing a text to a co-worker, cursing loudly, sending a customer scuttling out the front door. They watched a party of seven, a birthday party, walk into the restaurant. They were good tippers, even if you couldn’t tell it by looking at them.
“I’m here now, aren’t I?” said Robin, but neither one of them knew if it was already too late.
Male Pattern
Benny Middlestein woke up one day and realized he was going bald, and he thought: “This is the end, beautiful friend.” He’d always had a perfectly thick head of hair—he had even come out of the womb with his rosy pink head covered in dark fuzz—and there had been no indication that he would ever have had anything to worry about for the rest of his life, at least when it came to his hair. Other things, they were maybe more of a problem.
His daughter’s newfound adolescent moodiness, those dark, twisted, frustrated glances she shot him whenever he opened his mouth, as if an Oh, my God, Dad were just hovering in the air between them, waiting to be splattered up against him, a condescending pie in the face. He remembered when his little sister had gone sour in her teens. Once the milk turned, there was no turning it back. Yes, his daughter was something to worry about.
There was also his wife’s full-blown obsession with his mother’s weight and her diabetes, it was all she talked about, first thing in the morning, staring straight up at the ceiling in bed. Not that it didn’t need talking about, so he couldn’t argue with her necessarily, only sometimes maybe, just for a day, he wished they could take a break.
But there she was, squirreled up next to him under the comforter, frowning, making all kinds of new lines in her forehead.
“I’m worried,” she said.
“I know you’re worried,” he said. If you keep making that face, it’ll stay that way, is what he wanted to say.
“Aren’t you worried? Why aren’t you worried more?”
“I’m worried plenty.”
He put a pillow over his face and inhaled the fabric softener, chemical approximation of a mountain breeze.
At night, too, she was fixated on this life and death situation, after the kids went to bed, during what was supposed to be their quiet time together, out back, sharing a joint.