The Middlesteins(36)
He was relieved. It was not like he hadn’t had this conversation with himself before, but every once in a while it was nice to remind yourself you had not turned into your worst nightmare, this man standing before him, who had just handed him a bottle full of pills intended to save his hair. He hadn’t realized until that moment that being his father would be his worst nightmare, because his father had never been that person before, until he decided to be single and sixty and lonely, just him and Scotty hanging out in the fluorescent-lit pharmacy all day long, Scotty singing patriotic songs to Richard, the two of them waiting for the next old Jew to walk through the front door in search of Cardizem or hand cream or an enema. Benny and his father had hit the end of the line together; it was up to Benny to figure it, love, marriage, life, the universe, all of it out, by himself.
The two of them wandered uselessly out to the pharmacy; Benny would never step foot into that back room again until after his father had died a decade later, and there was no question that the business would be closed (it probably should have been closed five years before, but Richard had refused, saying that he offered a service to the community, though Benny knew that it was just because he needed a place to go all day), that the dusty shelves needed to be emptied and then tossed out the back door, a painful, clanking, depressing act that Benny, entirely bald by then, accomplished quietly, sadly, on his own.
But for now, the Propecia was on the house, and Richard walked Benny to the front door.
“So maybe I can come by sometime?” said Richard.
“I don’t think so,” said Benny. “Not yet. I’ll work on it.”
They stopped and stared at each other, and there were a million things of a confrontational nature that still hovered between them, but Benny wondered if they were worth the battle, and then decided they were not, or that his father wasn’t worth it anyway, and he would deal with how sad that made him feel some other time.
Instead he said, “I always wondered something. Why do you carry so many kinds of enemas? Wouldn’t just one kind do the trick?”
“You’d be surprised,” said his father.
*
Dinner was something related to kale and beets. If he could have gotten back on the expressway and returned to his office and spent the night working, he would have. There was something so intensely satisfying about number crunching; he could almost feel the delicate little digits crumbling in his fist, piles forming and then towering on his desk, magically disappearing overnight so that each day there was the challenge to create a higher pile of numbers than the day before. He didn’t see it as a pointless task; he saw it as a game he got to play every single day, and no matter what, he always won.
But he would not abandon his children to contend with this madness alone. They were in it together, Benny and the kids. Josh had surreptitiously eaten six pieces of tasteless multigrain bread slathered in soy butter. He would never complain, he would just adapt, until it was too late: the curse of the Middlestein men. Emily, dark-eyed and dangerous and glowering from the other end of the table, insistently made eye contact with her father, at one point openly staring at him while simultaneously stabbing her fork vengefully and noisily into the food on her plate. Rachelle ignored her, instead focusing on cutting her food into the tiniest of squares, which she would then chew thoughtfully and slowly, as if she were savoring every vitamin, as if she could feel each bite extending her life span. Rachelle, alone, finished all the food on her plate.
It must be so nice to feel so right all the time, he thought. He would ask her that later. What that felt like.
After dinner, after Benny had done the dishes (defiantly dumping the remaining purplish mess into the garbage, because no he would not be taking the leftovers to work the next day), after the kids watched whatever crappy reality television show they were emotionally invested in that week, after they practiced their haftorah readings for their upcoming b’nai mitzvah, their voices reverberating sweetly from the living room, and after Rachelle forced Josh to try on his new suit for his father, Josh executing a glamorous turn as if he were on a runway—that kid had moves—before suddenly turning, embarrassed, and then running back upstairs again, and after the kids went to bed early, which is something that had not occurred ever in their house, Benny and Rachelle stood out in the backyard, near the tarp-covered swimming pool, and shared a joint, Rachelle taking just one hit before proclaiming, “That is the last time I am ever smoking this stuff ever again.” (This was not a lie, she meant it as fact, but it was untrue nevertheless.)
“Whatever,” said Benny.
“Don’t whatever me,” said Rachelle.
Benny took a walk around the pool, stopping on the far side, then taking a step back and peering up at the house he had paid off nearly all on his own, only the down payment coming from Rachelle’s parents, a dowry of sorts, he supposed, or at least some sort of panicked gesture toward the then-young couple who had gotten pregnant before they had even graduated from college. It was a simple mistake in the bathroom of his fraternity house, his intention being merely to hoist her up onto the sink and get her off with his tongue, but it tasted so good, too good, and then he stood and plunged inside of her without protection, their eyes locked together, it was just supposed to be for a minute, just one more minute, and then he would return to his duties downstairs, but neither of them could stop themselves, they were making nonsensical noises, they were having nonsensical thoughts, and he, deft, mathematical, precise Benny, made a serious miscalculation.