The Middlesteins(41)
“Me neither,” said Emily.
“I’m hungry. Are you hungry?” said her grandmother.
“Starving,” said Emily.
“You must be famished after all that exercise,” said her grandmother.
“Let’s eat,” said Emily.
“How do you feel about Chinese food?” said her grandmother.
How Emily felt about Chinese food was that it was mostly greasy but that she liked shrimp dumplings and that anything was better than what was being served in her house as of late, which was mainly (really, only) vegetables, sometimes raw, sometimes steamed, sometimes, if they were really lucky, stir-fried with just a hint of oil, and all this gross tofu that felt like cottage cheese in her mouth (cottage cheese for breakfast: also gross), all these meals designed to keep them trim and fit and elevate their levels of health, and to keep the diabetes bug away as if it were something you could catch rather than earn by eating gallons and gallons of junk food for years and years, which was clearly what her grandmother had done. But the way she felt that day was that one egg roll wouldn’t hurt, and there was part of her that was embarrassed to be at the high-school track, like she was some poser pretending she was already a student there.
So she and her grandmother sped home—suddenly they could both move extremely quickly—and hopped into the car and drove for a while, back past the high school, the giant digital marquee alluringly blinking in front of it about prom, baseball playoffs, the math club’s bake sale, the future, Emily’s future, taller, older, wiser, bigger, smarter, brighter, you are almost here, down roads she had never been down without her mother and father, except for school trips downtown, past the Chuck E. Cheese where she and her brother had a birthday party one year, past stores where she shopped with her mother sometimes (the Jewel grocery store where her mother shopped in a pinch when she didn’t have time to make the trek to Whole Foods, a greeting-card shop because It’s always important to send thank-you notes, a beauty-supply store where her mother bought expensive shampoos and face creams for cheap, the sporting-goods store where they stocked up on soccer shoes and shorts every spring, that mega-Target for school supplies but never clothes, her mother wouldn’t let her be caught dead in Target clothes), past roads that went to nowhere in particular as far as Emily was concerned, though she supposed people lived this way and that, even if she didn’t know who exactly, until her grandmother pulled in to a dirty little strip mall and up to a Chinese restaurant.
Through the window Emily could see that her Aunt Robin was already there, a pinched expression on her face, several manila folders in front of her on the table, and a glass of wine (Aunt Robin did like her wine, that was known in the family) in front of those. Her aunt was her favorite person in the world, behind her father (the most reasonable man on the planet) and her brother (wimpy or not, he was one half of the whole) and occasionally a friend at school who had proved herself to not be a total waste of time. Her aunt would probably be number one on the list if Emily saw her more often, but Robin made herself scarce most of the time, off in the city, which lent her a certain appeal as well, an air of mystery and cool, even if deep down Emily knew there were much technically cooler people in the universe. But still, Robin spoke to her as if she were an equal or at least not a child, and always had for as long as Emily could remember, and Emily had appreciated it (now more than ever) even though she had never said it out loud to her aunt.
Inside the restaurant Robin gave her a genuine smile, which then turned to a sour glance at Emily’s grandmother.
“Got yourself your very own human shield, huh, old lady?” said Robin. Then she stood up from the table and hugged her niece, and they kissed on each cheek like ladies did in the movies, French ladies, or fashionable older ladies who lived in New York City.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Emily’s grandmother, who lowered herself into a seat, Robin gently assisting her. “What’s wrong with me spending time with my two favorite girls?”
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” said Robin. “I just thought we were going to discuss a few things here.” She ran her hands over the manila folders sitting in front of her.
“You can talk about whatever you want to talk about,” said Emily boldly. “I probably already know what you’re going to talk about.” She actually had little idea of what was going on, but she could only imagine that it was about her grandmother being sick, because everything was always about her grandmother being sick; it had been for months. Longer? Longer.
Robin exchanged a dark look with Edie, and then said, “You want to be the one explaining this to her mother?”
“Why don’t you go wash your hands before dinner?” said Edie.
Emily made a bitchy little noise, a noise she had only recently started practicing and one that would get much, much better with age, but she got up resignedly and wandered through the empty restaurant, which she finally noticed was sort of cute, with its weathered wooden tables and sweet little glass bowls of pink flowers, and back toward the bathroom, passing the kitchen doors, from which wild notes of jazz emanated, and she wondered where she was exactly, because it did not feel quite like anywhere she had been before.
In the bathroom, red, dimly lit, lavender-drenched, she used her one good arm to wash herself, her palms and her fingers, with hot water, and then her forehead, her cheeks, her chin, her neck, behind her ears, little drops dripping down onto her shirt. More soap and water, this time lifting her shirt up and splashing and scrubbing under her arms. Sometimes she felt like she could never get clean enough, but she didn’t know why.