The Middlesteins(37)
“Uh-oh,” he had said.
“Uh-oh?” she had said.
And now look at this house, brick, Colonial style with two sturdy pillars in the front that made Benny feel safe, like his family would be protected, two stories, three bedrooms, two and a half baths, a sunny kitchen, a shaded living room, a wet bar in the basement, a backyard with room enough for a swimming pool, a luxurious deck, and a badminton net in the summertime. (There was talk of building a gazebo, but not until after he saw what this year’s bonus was like.) A garage, with two sumptuous Lexuses in it. A shed with one of those lawn mowers you can ride. Not that he ever mowed his lawn. There was a guy who did that. He didn’t know who the guy was; his wife took care of all of that kind of stuff. Rachelle took care of him, that’s right, he reminded himself. He had trusted her to do so for so long. But he needed to eat. His kids needed to eat.
“We’re hungry,” he said to Rachelle.
“There was plenty of food on that table tonight,” she said.
“The kids are still growing. They need more than just vegetables,” he said. “And I’m suddenly going bald if you hadn’t noticed.”
“There is no scientific evidence linking hair loss to eating more vegetables,” she said.
He threw his hands up in the air, gestured toward the sky, and then toward his head, and then back again.
“It’s true,” she said. “I looked it up on the Internet.”
He took another hit from his joint and then realized he was high, and hungrier than ever, and there was not a goddamn thing in the house worth eating. He wondered if she would notice if he went for a walk and hit up the closest fast-food place, a McDonald’s about a half mile away. Maybe he would sneak back some fries for the kids. She’d probably smell it on him, though. He’d never make it past the first floor.
And then a scream rang out in the cool spring air, and Benny tossed his joint without thinking (this would eventually be found by the guy who mowed the lawn, in this case an Illinois State student on summer vacation, who would pocket it in one slippery motion and then later smoke it blissfully in his pickup truck during his lunch break) and ran toward the front of the house, two steps behind Rachelle, the scream sending shivers up his arms and the back of his neck. It was a child’s scream, he was certain. Don’t stop for nothing, Middlestein. He rounded the corner and saw Emily, lying on the ground, her head cracked open, her arm pointed in a strange direction, as if it were trying to flee her body. Benny glanced up at the house: Her second-floor window was open, and Josh peered out of it, his mouth shaped like an O. Then Rachelle was by her side, and so was he; both of them were bent over her, both of them terrified as they had never been before, their fear only receding after the stitches, after the twenty-four-hour watch-for-a-concussion period was over, and after the cast was put on. (“It was a clean break,” the doctor assured them, and they repeated this phrase over and over to anyone who would listen, as if focusing on this one positive thing would spin the entire incident into the plus category.) And when their heart rates returned to normal, and Rachelle stopped with her crying jags, and Emily was no longer in the worst pain of her life, and her grandparents had come and gone (separately, of course) with books and balloons and chocolates, and Benny finally said to his daughter, “What were you doing?” and Emily replied, “I just had to get out of there,” Benny did not even turn and look at his wife to see her expression, because he already knew what she was thinking, what she had to be thinking or she was not the woman he had married and she had been fooling him all this time, which was, “Enough is enough already.”
Edie, 332 Pounds
As part of her early-retirement package, the law firm where she had worked for thirty-three years had extended her the opportunity to keep her health care at an extremely low rate until death or something better came along. She also received her pension plan in full, and on top of that, a not-unfair amount of money to keep her mouth shut about the fact that they were letting her go mainly because her weight distressed the three new partner-owners of the firm, who were all children of the people who had originally hired Edie straight out of law school, freshly married, not yet pregnant, a much slimmer version of herself. She had, at various times in her life, been a more righteous person, more prone to moral outrage, a scrapper, and that person would have considered this not nearly enough money in exchange for being discriminated against, that there was not enough money in the world to allow someone to say to you—without actually saying it, mind you—You’re fat, now will you please go away?
But Edie was exhausted, the whole world tired her, and in a humiliated moment she accepted their offer, even smiled while she shook their hands. Maybe this was a chance to reboot. She wanted more time to spend with her grandchildren. A month later her doctor told Edie her diabetes had worsened, and that he would have to have a stent inserted into her leg, to make that awful, cramping pain she (mostly) refused to admit she was in go away. She might even need a bypass someday. She could get sicker, he told her. She could die. Then she was suddenly grateful for the health care and the money in the bank, and also the time to recover from all her wounds.
The first surgery was tomorrow morning. Down the hall her son, Benny, slept in his old bedroom; he would be driving her to Evanston at 6:00 A.M., so that her husband could go to the pharmacy he owned later in the morning and sign for some deliveries, which apparently no one else on the entire planet could sign for except him. She wouldn’t even think of asking her daughter, Robin, who lived downtown, to spend the night in her home. It was hard enough to get her to come to dinner.