The Middlesteins(38)
She lay awake now, her brain, like always, running a million miles a minute even if she herself moved so slowly it sometimes was like she was not even in motion at all. She was thinking about food, specifically a value-size package of kettle-baked sea salt potato chips and a plastic tub of deli onion dip she had purchased from the Jewel that afternoon, which were sitting downstairs in her kitchen, waiting for her like two friends who had come over for coffee and a little chitchat.
But it was after midnight, and she had been instructed not to eat anything eight to twelve hours before her surgery, and she was scheduled to have her leg cut into at 8:00 A.M. So here she was, on the tail end of acceptable timing, wondering how much damage she would really do to herself if she had a few potato chips, we’re talking just a handful, and some of that cool, salty dip, and that dip was not even like solid food, it was like drinking a glass of milk, and those potato chips were so airy, one bite and they were over. Poof. What she was thinking about eating wouldn’t even fill up one of her pinkies. All she had to do was get up out of bed, and go downstairs, and then she would be reunited with her two new best friends.
Her husband snored next to her seemingly innocently, uselessly. The most he had done for her lately was bring home her prescriptions, but he was a pharmacist! He had been bringing home her prescriptions their entire life together. Sorry, Middlestein. No points. He did not turn in his sleep; he picked a position and stuck with it all night. Not one tussle with the universe for that one, she thought.
What she didn’t know was that he had been plotting all day the right way and time to leave her, and that in six more months, a few weeks before she had a second surgery, on a Friday afternoon, he would announce that he did not love her anymore and that he had not for a long time and he believed she felt the same, and for both of their sakes, for both of their lives, he was going to take the step of walking out that door and never coming back. There was also the not-so-subtle subtext of his wanting to have sex again with somebody in this lifetime, though obviously not with Edie herself. He had left so quickly, like the goddamn coward he was—he had taken nothing with him except for his clothes, which, while she was at Costco, he had packed in the luggage they got for that terrible trip to Italy—that she hadn’t had a chance to argue with him, and what would she have said? He was probably right.
Still, she will be sad when the split finally happens. She will weep to her son and daughter, although at least a small portion of those outbursts will be calculated to make them hate their father. After a while she will stop being sad that he’s gone because she’ll realize she doesn’t miss him, and then she will be sad because she’s spent so long with someone she doesn’t even miss, and then after that she’ll be more sad because she realizes she does miss him, or at least having someone around, even if they didn’t speak to each other that much. In the end, it had just been nice to know that someone was in the room, she will tell Benny, even though that is kind of a f*cked-up thing to say to a son about his father. (But Edie was never one for self-control.) And now the room was empty. Just her. Just Edie. She knew that there were even more things to be sad about, so many layers of sadness yet to be unfolded. She had lived an entire life already, and now here was another one she had to start living fresh from the beginning.
Right now, though, the night before her first surgery, her only consideration was the potato chips and the onion dip, party food, a mere appetizer, but this was no party. Tomorrow a tiny metal tube would be inserted into her leg. It was not a big deal as far as surgeries went, although no one was happy with the idea of her being cut open in the first place. But she would be able to walk the same as always, even the same day. There would be some pain and some painkillers. She was going to be okay, though. She came from sturdy Russian stock, she kept telling herself, even though her father had died before he turned sixty. If only he hadn’t smoked, if only he hadn’t drank. If only she didn’t eat.
She rose from her bed, and traveled along the same floorboards she had been traveling on for thirty-five years, the only ones that didn’t creak beneath her, the only ones that would not wake her husband. She had worn a slight path in the carpeting above the floor, but they had never bothered to replace it. It was a room they spent little time in, lights out, good night, that’s it. The carpeting was blue and nubby and stained with who-knows-what. The diamond-checked wallpaper curling at the ends. The curtains hadn’t been opened in decades. The room was sealed from the outside world.
With her eyes shut, she could walk the path from her bed, down the hallway past Benny’s and Robin’s old bedrooms, their high-school graduation photos hanging on the wall outside each, their bathroom that had become hers, a place for her to hide her naked self, down the stairs, all of which creaked, but by then she was home free in her own home—Richard would never hear a thing; then through the living room, where the carpeting was newer though not new, a sky-gray plush frieze purchased when the grandchildren were younger, somewhere soft for them to play, and it had always felt nice under her feet when she made this nightly journey to the kitchen, the last stop before the linoleum, washed-out orange daisies on scuffed yellow-and-brown tile. Thirty-five years ago that tile had cheered her up every morning, and now, like everything else, it was just another surface to cross until she reached the food she desired.
She pushed through the swinging doorway to the kitchen and choked out a cry: There sat Benny, a book in front of him, a cup of coffee, a chocolate chip cookie on a plate, a stale, pained look on his face. He had been waiting awhile for her. He could not rest until she did.