The Middlesteins(45)
It was Beverly who suggested he write a letter to his daughter-in-law, Rachelle, asking for permission to once again be a participant in the lives of his grandchildren. “Your son can’t help you,” she said. “He can’t speak on your behalf. This decision came from her. You have to go directly to the source.” Dust sparkling all around her head. “And a phone call won’t do, nor will an e-mail. Don’t be a lazy man. Write her a proper letter.” She ran “lazy man” together as if it were one word, as if it were an actual thing, a term she had created herself, because Beverly had the power to create new words. “Pour your heart out on that paper, tell her how much you love and miss those children, put it in an envelope, stick a stamp on it, and then mail it.”
To spend time with Josh and Emily is my heart’s desire, he wrote. He was starting to sound like Beverly, which was not such a bad thing.
“Then what?”
“Give her a week.”
Sure enough, a week later, there was Rachelle standing in front of him at the pharmacy, a prescription in her hand, herself with a slight case of the stink eye.
“I’m not completely sure about any of this,” she said. She handed him the prescription; it was for Lopressor, a heart medication, and it was for his someday-ex-wife. If that action was meant to stab him slightly in the chest, it worked.
“About what?” he said.
Say your piece just the once and then let her do all the talking, Beverly had said. He had known that already; he had some understanding of what it meant to contend with an angry woman.
“I don’t want them thinking your behavior, your actions, are excused. Because they are not.”
“Of course not,” he said. He wouldn’t even begin to justify his actions to her, leaving his sick, emotionally unstable, diabetes-and heart-disease- and who-knows-what-else-ridden wife, because he knew she didn’t want to hear it. Even though in his head it made sense.
Beverly understood! Beverly was the first person he had met who got it perfectly, Beverly with her mean drunk of a father, a military man crushed by time as a prisoner of war during World War II. “I had my sympathies for the man,” she said. “We all did.” Richard nodded. Their generation, his and Beverly’s, they all had family, and they all had heard stories from the war growing up.
And then Beverly added—and was this the moment his heart skipped for her?—with a downtrodden yet dreamy voice: You never know what’s worse with the angry ones, watching them live, or watching them die.
“With the b’nai mitzvah approaching,” continued Rachelle, “and with all the family in town, Benny and I want you in attendance of course. And we still would like you to recite the kiddush, obviously.” His daughter-in-law had an insistent formality, spine as straight as a rod, every hair in place, her nails a pearly pink, ironed, pressed, tightly controlled. She reminded him of the average Zoloft or Prozac customer. (He was no doctor, so he would never say anything like that to his son, but she seemed like she might benefit.)
“I’ll be there,” said Richard. “With bells on.”
“Don’t wear bells,” said Rachelle.
“I would never wear bells,” said Richard. “It’s an expression.”
“I know it’s an expression,” she said, suddenly flushed and flustered, her neck delicately purpling. This is hard for her, he thought. Why? In that moment of weakness, he made a grab for the gold.
“I would like to see them before the b’nai mitzvah,” he said. “I could take them to services on Friday night? Or next week?”
It was Beverly who encouraged him to suggest taking the grandkids to Friday-night services. If these kids were so important to him—they were; Richard practically shouted this—then he needed to think outside the box, this last phrase she relished dramatically. Sure, it was more fun to go to the movies or shopping or get pizza, but he was probably not allowed to be having fun yet with his two gorgeous grandchildren, not in his daughter-in-law’s eyes anyway. Friday-night services weren’t about having fun; they were about being contemplative. The subtler point was (and she was right, Richard could not deny it) that he was not an out-of-the-box thinker. He was completely in the box. (What was so wrong with the box? He had felt this way his entire life.) But by leaving his wife at the age of sixty, he had hurtled himself out there, out into the universe, out of the goddamn box. And if he had not done so, he never would have met Beverly. So it was up to him to do whatever it took to stay there.
“Let me talk to Benny,” Rachelle said, and her skin returned to its normal (though possibly tanning-creamed) golden color. He had placed the power in her hands once again, given her something to decide upon. That’s where she likes to be, he thought. On top. And his mind briefly traveled to a sexual moment, not with his daughter-in-law, of course (although maybe she was nearby, down the hall or in a doorway watching), but with Beverly, vibrant-eyed, sensible yet magical, unavailable yet somehow still within reach, Beverly, his hands reaching up to her, and she waved her body back and forth on top of him, a greeting, an introduction of two bodies to each other, an explosive exchange of a specific kind of information. Beverly grinding on his dick, Beverly straddling his face, Beverly all over him all day and night long.
Beverly!
*
At shul the following week—of course Rachelle had said yes to Richard’s request; there was no way she could say no to a grandfather sincerely wanting to take his children to synagogue, there was certainly a rule about that somewhere in some daughter-in-law handbook—Richard meandered lightly down the main aisle of the sanctuary, his two grandchildren, their tongues struck by silence since the moment they'd gotten into the car, shuffling behind him. He waved to the Cohns and the Grodsteins and the Weinmans and the Frankens, all the couples he had come up together with for the last twenty, thirty, nearly forty years. They had all gone to each other’s children’s bar mitzvahs and weddings and anniversary parties and thank God no funerals yet, but he supposed they would be attending those, too, until there was no one left.