The Middlesteins(35)

Benny pushed through the front door, an ancient bell jingling above his head, and barreled past the aisles, the snack aisle, the makeup and skin-care aisle, feminine hygiene, dental care, shampoo, vitamins, over-the-counter medications, breast pumps and crutches, enemas, an aisle and a half of them, why were there so many enemas? The place needed a good dusting. One of his father’s delivery boys, a mentally challenged man named Scotty who had worked there since Benny was in college, was intensely mopping the same few squares of linoleum. He wasn’t allowed to drive a car, but he had a bright blue bike with a basket, which he would ride with deliveries to the homes of all the elderly shut-ins nearly year-round, even in the cold. The only thing that would stop him was the snow, and then he would simply trudge miles each way. “It gives me something to do,” Scotty had told Benny once. “Otherwise I’d just be getting into trouble.” Was this his father being a positive part of the community by hiring someone who might have otherwise had trouble finding a job, or a cheap bastard? Benny could never decide.

His father, his thick gray hair almost entirely intact, was seated at a stool behind the counter, hunched over, a sturdy tree bent with the wind, poking at his cell phone with a pen. He looked up as Benny approached, and a smile rolled across his face. Benny! And then, squinting, he noticed his son’s hair, and then his forehead folded in on itself, and his smile withered slightly.

“This is a surprise,” he said. He reached his hand out across the counter to his son, and Benny grasped it faintly, which was not how he had been taught to shake hands at all. Richard was still staring at Benny’s head. They hadn’t seen each other in a month. One month was all it took for a man to lose half his hair. Richard reflexively reached for his own hair, as if to confirm it was still all there, and Benny winced.

“Are you sick?” said Richard. “What’s going on here?”

Benny, suddenly trembling, handed Richard the prescription.

“I don’t know, Dad. I don’t know what’s going on.”

Richard motioned his head toward the door to the back room. It had never been painted, even after all these years, and a fake brass handle drooped half out of its socket. “Let’s go in back and talk,” he said. “Come on, kiddo.”


Benny looked down, that loose, out-of-control feeling ranging around his gut again. Had he come here for advice? He was still angry with his father for leaving his mother when she was so sick, and he didn’t understand how Richard had let her get that way in the first place. Rachelle had banned his father from their house months before. “He has nothing good to teach our children,” is what she had said. Everything was falling apart because of this man. And yet, here he was, standing in front of him, about to spill his guts, looking for a little wisdom. Maybe, just maybe, he knew something Benny didn’t.

Richard called Scotty to him—Scotty dragging his mop and bucket slowly down the aisle—and asked him to keep watch over the counter, and Scotty replied with a long and meaningful salute, as if he were a soldier in the delivery-boy army, followed by a quiet giggle to himself.

Benny followed his father into the back room, a dark, cobweb-ridden space lined with rusted-out shelving units.

“What did the doctor say?” Richard peered at the prescription. “Dr. Harris, he’s all right. You could do worse.”

“Stress, probably,” said Benny.

“That’s a lot of stress.” He motioned to Benny’s hair and made a whoosh sound.

“Yeah, well, I am under a lot of stress, Dad, what with my parents getting divorced and my mother practically on her deathbed. How about you?” Benny was pissed. Were they going to be coy suddenly? Were they going to pretend that the last few months hadn’t happened?

His father turned from him and shuffled off between the shelving units, and didn’t say anything, it turned icy quiet, spiders froze in their webs, and Benny could hear Scotty singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” through the door. Finally Richard returned, red-faced, with a pill bottle in hand. Benny waited for him to explode. Benny felt a delicious anticipation take hold of him; he craved some sort of show of emotion from his grunting, withdrawn, disappointed father.

But Richard kept himself calm, handing his son the bottle, and then taking two steps back and rubbing his hands together, some imaginary dust flicking off onto the floor.

He said, “We make the decisions we make, Benny. We cannot take them back. I am not a perfect person.” Benny watched as his father chose his words, plucked them from deep within his heart. “I can only tell you this: Your mother was making me crazy. Not normal crazy. Crazy crazy. Like it was going to kill me.”

“How bad could it have been to spend the rest of your life with the mother of your children?” said Benny, surprised at his own calm. “She was loyal to you. And that should mean something.”

“There was nothing left inside,” said Richard. He took a few more steps back and leaned against the wall for support. “I was a bag of bones. There was nothing else in there. Whatever kept me standing, that was it, that was all that was left.”

“You didn’t put up a fight,” said Benny.

“I’m trying to be respectful here, but have you not met your mother?” said Richard. “You can’t fight her. You should know that by now.”

That didn’t sound right to Benny. Even if you can’t fight, you should at least try to fight. He didn’t know if he could fight his wife and win. They’d always gotten along so well; only recently had he begun to understand what kind of whirlwinds of power and aggression had lain dormant within her. He wondered briefly if he’d married someone like his mother, who, he had to admit, his father was right about; she was one tough cookie. But then he remembered that Rachelle was his petite princess, and how she was usually so calm, almost regal, most of the time, unlike his mother, who was boisterous and overflowing, and yes, Rachelle knew how to get what she wanted, just like his mother, but the similarities began and ended there.