The Middlesteins(33)

“Can’t you just relax?” he said. He rubbed her shoulders, narrow, fragile, wrenched up with worry. “Take another hit.”

“This stuff will kill you,” she said.

“We’ve been smoking this for twenty years,” he said.

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” she said.

She was not wearing her mortality well, a real shame for such a pretty girl.

And there were e-mails during the day. Sometimes there were texts, and she hated texting, the squinting and the poking. But Rachelle had been following his mother around like some undercover cop, tracking her eating, and it was not enough that she contain this knowledge within herself.

She’s at the Superdawg on Milwaukee. 3 hot dogs!!!

He had tried to tell his wife to stop following her, but even saying the words made him feel like he was falling from the sky, a loose and lurching sensation in his gut. He searched for the right thing to say, because it all just seemed so preposterous, that they were even having this conversation. You’re freaking me out, was he allowed to say that? Please don’t stalk my mother anymore.

“I know you’re just trying to help,” he said. “But I’m not sure how she would feel about it.” This was over lunch, a small, sunny diner near the synagogue, where they had just dropped off the kids for their haftorah lesson with the cantor. They were both eating salads covered in raw vegetables; that was all they ever ate lately. Rachelle had ordered for them both without asking him what he wanted. Oil and vinegar on the side.

He salted and peppered his salad when she went to the bathroom.

“I think she has a right to privacy,” he said, head bowed, one fleck of red, raw onion trapped on a back molar, stubbornly resisting his tongue’s ministrations.

“That’s like saying someone who is about to jump off the roof of a building should be allowed to enjoy the view first,” she said. She pushed the salad away from her, half eaten, and gave it a disgusted glance. “I specifically told her no croutons,” she said. “You heard me, right?”

“I heard you,” he said, cowed, covering his mouth with his hand and reaching one finger quickly inside to free the onion from his tooth.

“Just give her a break,” he said.

“You won’t be telling me to give her a break when she’s dead,” said Rachelle, and he suddenly missed that fleck of onion, a simple problem he could solve with a small gesture.

He was worried about his mother, even if Rachelle didn’t believe it. He was worried about his mother, two surgeries down, maybe another on the way, and he was worried about his daughter and his wife, who had both forgotten how to smile, and he was, on a smaller scale, worried about his father, who seemed adrift and sad now that he had left Benny’s mother and was playing the field, the sixty-year-old suburbanite field, which he couldn’t imagine was a particularly fun field, and, for the first time in his life, he was least worried about his sister, who, he was pretty sure, even as closed off as she was, as unrelentingly cranky, might actually have met someone and fallen in love.

But his hair! He’d always had his hair, his crown of glory: thick, jet-black, with jaunty waves that set it slightly on its end. He wore it a half inch longer than his conservative co-workers did, and he liked to believe that it gave him a youthful edge over them. In college, he’d worn it even longer and had busy sideburns as well, which gave him a grubby bad-boy look, as bad as a ZBT at the University of Illinois could be. His hair was one of the things that had drawn Rachelle to him; he wasn’t as boisterous as his brothers, he didn’t push for the easy joke, not because he was shy—he was plenty funny, he thought—but because he was usually extremely stoned. Still, in the corner by the stereo, at an off-campus party thrown by one of the brothers, a purple-green-swirled glass bong someone had brought back from his summer travels in Amsterdam seated before him, strong, silent, fit, slightly pie-eyed, with a tight T-shirt, tight Levi’s, and I-don’t-give-a-shit flip-flops, and with a head of hair so thick there was no way he didn’t have a kick-ass gene pool, Benny got the hottest girl in the room without lifting much more than that bong to his lips.

Forever he’d had that hair. That was the one thing he should not have had to worry about, and yet there it was, sliding off his head every morning in the shower like sunburned skin after a weekend at the beach. There was now a significant bald spot on the back of his head, and the hair at his temples had started to recede. He could only wonder what would happen next: Would his body shrink, too, into the shape of a frail old man, and would his wife eventually reject him? Was he dying? Or was he merely getting old?

Even as the answers sat right before him, that perhaps all this worry about his wife, his mother, his daughter, and on and on, had manifested itself so obviously in a physical way, he refused to believe that it was as simple (although, of course, it was not simple at all) as that, and so he went to see Dr. Harris, a good guy, a straight shooter, and also the owner of a nice head of hair himself, his graying and cut short but still thick and attractive.

“It could be a number of things,” said Dr. Harris. “Genetics, that’s first on the list.”

“It’s not genetic,” said Benny, his legs swinging slightly from the exam table, 8:00 A.M. on a Monday, an urgent appointment after a weekend of hair loss. “Not on my mother’s side, not on my father’s side. No one’s bald.”