The Middlesteins(39)
“What’s up, Mom?” he said. “You thirsty?”
“I was… yes, thirsty.” Dazed, she went to a cabinet and pulled out a glass, walked to the refrigerator and pressed the glass up into the built-in ice dispenser, then leaned against the refrigerator. “Should I go back to bed?”
“It’s your house, you can do whatever you want,” he said. He closed the book in front of him. It was a Harry Potter book. He pointed to it, a little embarrassed. “The kids like them, I wanted to see what it was all about.”
“Any good?” she said. She poured some water into the glass from a Brita on the counter, and then sat down at the table with him.
Benny, not as tall as his father, but better looking, smoother skin, tamer eyebrows, a warmer heart, he had turned out so well, considered the book with a back-and-forth of his head. “Goes quick,” he said. “They like things that move fast, those two.”
“They’re both so bright,” said Edie. “And good-looking. And funny.”
“All right, all right, Grandma, we know you’re crazy about them. Don’t go giving them a big head.” He had been a jokey, sweet kid, and he had grown into a jokey, sweet man.
She took a big gulp of her water, and restrained herself from pushing her lie too far and letting out a satisfied Ahhh. She tapped her fingers on the table, her paltry wedding ring barely giving off a shimmer. “So why are you up? Are you having trouble sleeping?”
“One hundred percent I don’t want to be sitting down here,” he said. “But the doctor told me that it was important for a number of reasons you have an empty stomach before the surgery.” Your weight, he didn’t say. Your heart, he didn’t say. Your health, your life, your death. “I just wanted to remind you about that. In case you had forgotten.”
“I’m just getting some water,” she said.
“And I’m just reading a book,” he said.
Six months later, he sat in the kitchen the night before another surgery. And again she rose from her bed in hopes he would not be there, and again he stopped her from eating. It was something good he could do for this person even though it was hard because it made him feel powerful in a way he never wanted. He respected his mother, because she had raised him with love, and because she was a smart woman, even though she was also so incredibly stupid. Also, he respected humanity in general. He respected a person’s right to weakness. For all these reasons, he never told anyone he stayed up late waiting for his mother, not even his wife. What happened in that kitchen was between Benny and Edie. With grace he offered her his love and protection, and she accepted it, tepidly, warily. It did not bring them closer together, but it did not tear them apart.
The Walking Wounded
Emily and her grandmother, Edie, walked around the track of the high school she would attend the next fall so slowly, so grudgingly, that it was possible it did not even count as exercise at all. Could one walk with loathing? They were doing it.
Emily, sharp-eyed, a ripe plum of a girl, with golden brown hair like her mother, was still tender from falling from the second story of her house one week before, her arm in a cast, a few stitches on her temple. Her grandmother, obese, sweating, limping, had had two surgeries in the past year. There could be another one at any minute, that’s what Emily’s parents were saying. A bigger one, way worse than the other two. A bypass.
“Look at you two, the walking wounded,” her father had joked an hour earlier, leaning delicately on his Lexus, watching them shuffle off in the direction of the high school.
“Pah,” her grandmother had said, and slung her hand behind her dismissively, not even bothering to look at him.
“Exactly,” Emily had said. “What she said.”
“I can’t help it if you two are adorable,” he yelled. “Grandmother and granddaughter. Two generations!”
“What a sap,” said Edie.
They barely made it to the track, and now they were barely making it around the track, the required mile, required by Emily’s mother, who had lately been determined to save Edie’s life.
“Have you noticed your father is going bald?” said Edie.
“It’s weird, right?” said Emily.
It had happened suddenly, her father’s hair loss; one day he was good-looking, with a full head of hair, younger than all the other dads at his school, sprightly and in love with her mother, and Emily had felt safe in her own home and in the world around her.
And then all these things happened at once: Her grandmother was diagnosed with diabetes and a whole bunch of other little things that went along with it, then her grandfather left her grandmother so that he could date weird women he met on the Internet (she had heard her father tell her mother), and her mother freaked the eff out. Holy crap, she had never seen her so crazy in her entire life, and her mom was already definitely an obsessive type, her hair, the house, the furniture, the carpeting, the lawn, Emily’s hair, Josh’s hair, their grades, their b’nai mitzvah, everyone else’s hair, and on and on, everything had to be perfect. She swore if her mother could adjust the color of the sky to match her own eyes, she would, just so it could be just right.
In the middle of all this, Emily found herself surprisingly full of this really intense but deeply satisfying hate. She was a hater all of a sudden. She had negative things to say about her twin brother Josh (dopey, a pushover, sometimes even wimpy), her girlfriends at school (talked about boys so much, too much, weren’t there other things to talk about? Like music or television or movies or books or crazy grandparents, anything but boys), and her homework (a waste of time, boring, repetitive, and fifty other words that all equaled one big snooze).