The Middlesteins(54)

We hid the shoes under the table, we whispered to her. Who wants to look at shoes while you eat?

Edie laughed even harder. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “My friends.”

A smile so wide, the most charming cackle. It was hard to believe she had been killing herself for years.

The lights flashed a few times, and the conversation level in the room rose briefly, and then there were shushes, and then it was silent. Edie lifted herself up from her chair, blew us all kisses, and wandered crookedly back to her seat. In the corner near the DJ booth, we saw a stand with fourteen candles waiting to be lit, except it wasn’t time for that yet, nor was it time for dessert, nor was it time for us to get our coats and head home, but the wine was hitting us, the Heineken, too. All we could do was sit and wait for Emily and Josh Middlestein to dance for their lives.

The lights went out for good, and then a bomp bomp bomp keyboard note started playing, and suddenly a spotlight kicked in on the dance floor—Christ, where did the spotlight come from? This Hilton had everything!—and out came Josh and Emily, both wearing little hooded sweatshirts, baggy jeans, and high-top shoes. The lyrics came on, that song we’d heard everywhere, those of us who watched television anyway and were still alive and kicking and trying to keep ourselves young. I gotta feeling that tonight’s gonna be a good night. And then Josh and Emily danced! They pumped their arms, and they marched their legs up high, and then they crisscrossed them, and then they pumped their pelvises, almost all of it close to being in unison, and then they held each other’s hands and did this jumping move, where their knees flew up in the air, and everyone burst into applause, Edie the loudest, whooping it up. And then when the singer sang “mazel tov”—followed by this strange electronic processed “l’chaim!”—the whole crowd shouted it at the same time, while Emily and Josh started this running-jumping action around the room, waving their arms to get the crowd up dancing with them, and everyone stood, the young people and the old people alike, and clapped along with Josh and Emily on their special day. We don’t want to give too much credit to the song, because obviously it was the energy and enthusiasm of those children that got the room moving to the music, but we had to admit it was pretty catchy.

And then three video screens dropped from the ceiling simultaneously—would wonders never cease here at the Hilton?—and the opening credits of So You Think You Can Dance began to play, except, through the magic of technology, the title read, So You Think You Can Hora. Everyone got a good laugh out of that, but the laughter gave way to coos and awws, as a montage of baby pictures of Emily and Josh began to play, the two of them in incubators, so tiny, and then a shot of a young Rachelle and Benny (we had all forgotten it was a shotgun wedding of sorts) who were just twenty-one when they became parents. There was a giddy Aunt Robin raising a glass in tribute while holding Emily, the baby girl who had turned out more than a little bit like her, at least in attitude. And then both sets of the proud grandparents flickered on the screen, the crowd briefly quieting when a shot of Edie and Richard holding the infant twins appeared. Edie was still heavy then, but easily a hundred pounds lighter than she was now. Her face was so different: There was a person there to connect with, a jawline, a smile, a clarity in the eyes. No flesh hung from her cheeks and chin as it did now. She was in focus, we could see her, we could see who she was—or who we thought she was anyway. Where had that Edie gone? And where had Edie and Richard, our friends, our fifth couple, gone? We could not bring ourselves to look at her seated next to us. We did not want to imagine that our spouses could ever turn out like Edie, who had stopped caring about herself, or Richard, who had stopped caring about Edie. The room was suddenly frigid with a sickening mixture of heartbreak and mortality.

We waved our arms at the waiter. We begged for another round immediately. The room recovered, and we were treated to Emily and Josh in the bathtub, Emily and Josh on their first day of school, Emily as a ballerina, Josh in a tennis uniform, thirteen years of Halloween costumes, thirteen years of goofy faces, braces, ice-cream sundaes, summer vacations, chicken pox, school plays, the chubby period, the scrawny period, short hair and long, growing, growing, grown; thirteen years and still so many more to go. Oy, those punims. When the montage was complete, we burst into applause, poked at the corners of our eyes with the ends of our napkins. They weren’t our grandchildren, but they might as well have been.

There was an intermission between the video and the candle-lighting ceremony, and we took the opportunity to drink. We skipped the ice, we drank straight from the bottle. We checked our watches, and thought about the errands we needed to run the next day, the walk we would take in the sunshine, the phone calls we would make to our children, some of whom lived in other states, with grandchildren we missed terribly. We had only been there for two hours, but it was already starting to feel late.

In our dreamlike state, we were unprepared for Carly’s arrival at our table, famous Carly, who now worked in the White House and was friendly with Michelle Obama. (There was not a person in this room who was unaware of their relationship, thanks to a front-page picture in the Tribune months before the election, the two of them at a luncheon, tipping their glasses toward each other, a knowing grin shared between them; we had all stared at it on a Sunday morning, wondering what Carly had done so right and we had done so wrong.) Her skin was glowing and tight (too tight? tighter than our faces anyway), her blowout was impeccable, golden, tidy, and there was no question that her jewelry trumped all other jewels we had seen that night. We could barely look at her. We couldn’t ignore her. She hovered over us and paused, waiting for a seat to be offered, a lifetime of offered seats trailing behind her.