The Middlesteins(46)

How would that feel? To be the last one standing? Who was going to make it to the end? Would it be Albert Weinman, who swam every morning and golfed every weekend and ate egg-white everything? Or Lauren Franken, who’d already had a double mastectomy, and joked that she’d gotten the hard part out of the way early and it was all smooth sailing ahead? Surely it wouldn’t be Bobby Grodstein, the way he smoked those cigars after dinner.

He allowed himself to consider his practically-ex-wife, her supersized existence, the secret eating late at night (every night he could hear her opening cupboards and packages and crunching crunching crunching, echoing through the quietude of their home, their street, their town, their world, but he had given up on trying to stop her), the twice-weekly trips to Costco (even though he knew where all the food had gone, he couldn’t help but wonder out loud to her every single time she went, “What do you need?”), the flesh stacked upon flesh stacked upon flesh. No, she would not outlive him.

Would it be Richard himself? He worked out a few times a week, not as hard as he could, sure, but those knees of his . . . His blood pressure was good, his cholesterol was a little high, but nothing he couldn’t manage with Lipitor. He took vitamins. He ate his RDA of fruits and vegetables, sometimes even much, much more than the RDA. During his last checkup, his doctor had given him a friendly swat on the arm before he left the room, clipboard in hand, and promised he would live a long life. “There’s no reason you couldn’t live till one hundred,” is what he said.

Would he want to make it that long? Would he want everyone he knew to be gone? Except for his family, they’d probably outlive him: Benny, who he knew would forgive him eventually even if he had lost respect for him, and his sullen daughter, Robin, who was already too busy to visit him while he was still a fully functioning human being—what about when he was old and decrepit in a nursing home? He’d off himself before that happened. He’d off himself before he was wearing diapers. He knew it. He could prescribe himself the exact mixture he would need to send himself to a faraway dreamland, never to wake up again. For decades he had been facing the adult-diaper section in his pharmacy, studying the people who purchased them, their slow, miserable shuffle, imagining he could see right through their clothes to what was underneath. Your needs at the beginning of your life and at the end of your life were exactly the same. But Richard Middlestein was no baby; he was a man. (He felt like pounding his chest right there in the middle of the temple. Beverly!) He’d live until the day he was ready to die.

If his grandkids didn’t kill him first.

Because there were Josh and Emily, all three of them now seated in a prominent position close to the aisle and near the front of the room, just four rows from the bimah, and even though they were huddled over slightly, it was clear that they had their cell phones out and they were texting. (Middlestein thought texting was the same as Morse code, and the more people texted, the closer America came to being a nation at war. “Think about it,” he’d told Beverly, poking his index finger on his temple.) He leaned across Josh and squeezed one of Emily’s hands—the hand that was tap-tapping—and rested his arm across Josh’s lap, and then, with as much restraint as possible, because he did not want to alert the Cohns and the Grodsteins and the Weinmans and the Frankens, all of whom were seated two rows behind him, that his grandchildren had apparently been raised by wolves, he said, “Put those away.” Josh, simple, scrawny, sweet-faced, looked instantly terrified and shoved his phone into his back pocket, but Emily was another story. Emily was so much like her grandmother and her aunt—at least in appearance, but Middlestein suspected it went much further than that—she was practically marked by the devil. She gave him a mean look, and was precariously close to opening her mouth, and what she might say, and at what volume she might say it, he could only imagine. If she were truly like her grandmother, it would be just loud enough so that everyone around them could hear but not so loud that it could be considered inappropriate. Nothing to ruin anyone’s reputation over anyway. Not like everyone hadn’t lost it on their spouse at one time or another.

But young Emily did not yell. She merely whispered, “I’m not done yet,” and then, in perhaps her most offensive act of the evening (and there were a few yet to come), shook his hand off hers with vigor. Middlestein pulled his hand back, stunned by her aggression. Josh turned to her openmouthed but did not say a thing, closed his mouth, turned away, faced forward, opened his mouth again, and turned toward her, and the two of them stared at each other, and then—this was the part that crushed Middlestein, that made him realize that it was possible there was no one left in this family he had a decent relationship with (And was it his fault? He had nearly convinced himself it wasn’t.)—Josh let off a short, staccato laugh, as if he were trying to control it but could not.

Once he had bathed these little babies. Once he had bounced them on his knee and ran his fingers through their soft curls. These were going to be the children he would never argue with, never punish, whose curfew he would never have to worry about. He would never have to spank them. He would never have to disappoint them. All he had to do was spoil them rotten, overspend on every birthday and Hanukkah just to see their eager smiles. Now they revered their iPhones above religious decorum and thought he was a schmuck because he’d left his wife. Now they didn’t give a shit what he thought.

Middlestein was devastated throughout the entire service. He could barely bring himself to sing the Shema, which had always been such a soothing prayer for him, a proclamation of his faith. It had always been so good to believe in something. Now he was distracted by the little miss down the row, with her eye rolling and sighing and the loudest page flipping this side of the Mississippi, her brother choking in his laughter, the Cohns and the Grodsteins and the Weinmans and the Frankens giving him rueful glances. It wasn’t enough that he had abandoned his wife, now he had ill-behaved grandchildren too? Shameful. He was shamed.