The Middlesteins(55)

“Ladies,” she said. “And gentlemen.”

Carly.

“We need to talk.”

Do we?

“Are we not concerned about Edie? You see her all the time. Can you please fill me in on what is going on here.”

With what?

“With her health! With her weight! You’re her closest friends. How did she get to this point? And more important, what are we going to do about it?”

How did we tell Carly the truth? That watching Edie eat terrified us, so we had stopped dining with her. That her temper and will were impossible to fight. And that we had our own battles, cancer among us, one pacemaker, not to mention the usual trivialities: high cholesterol, high blood pressure, too-low blood pressure, iron deficiencies, calcium deficiencies, slipped disks, bad knees, gallstones, hormone-replacement therapy, on and on. There was nothing we could do for Edie that we did not already need to do for ourselves.

Talk to that husband of hers, we started to say, and then we stopped ourselves. Talk to Rachelle, we said. Talk to Benny. We’re not in charge of Edie.

We finished our wine. Who did Carly think she was anyway? We raised our eyes to her one last time, her glittering anger.

But, we said. It is terrible, isn’t it?

The candles were lit, various family members and friends traipsing up to the front of the room, but by then we had stopped paying attention. Dessert was served: cream puffs and éclairs on a tray. A chocolate fountain appeared in the distance. We were certain we couldn’t take another bite of anything, but it would be rude not to sample the wares of the hardworking Hilton pastry chef. And those chocolate fountains didn’t come cheap either. We ate and ate, and we looked at no one but ourselves until we were done.

Rachelle, who was lovely in a red silk dress with a sweetheart neckline and diamonds everywhere, clinging to her wrist, dangling from her neck, two big, bright studs planted firmly in her ears—Nice try, we thought, but have you seen Carly?—made her way to our table with a bright smile. No one had anything bad to say about Rachelle; she was just the kind of girl we would want our own son to marry, chatty, attractive, so slender, and put together. Mazel tov, we said. Mazel, mazel.

“It has been a wonderful day,” she said. “Didn’t the kids do a great job?”

They were perfection. But how are you?

She collapsed in an instant, leaning in close to us. “It’s been a little bit hectic, as I’m sure you all understand. Some last-minute table changes. I was up until midnight redoing the place cards.”

Things change before you know it. Don’t blink twice.

“I did the best I could with where everyone sat. You’re fine here, right?”

This is a lovely table, a lovely party. We couldn’t have been more honored to be here.

She studied the table, doing some sort of math in her head.

“There were supposed to be some shoes here on the table. Were there shoes here when you sat down?”

We smiled steadily at her. We drained our glasses. We could not bring ourselves to answer her.

“There weren’t any shoes?”

It’s getting late, we said. The men helped the women up.

“There’s going to be dancing in a minute,” said Rachelle. “Stay for one dance.”

We stayed for one dance. We box-stepped. We spun ourselves around. We were sweaty and drunk and we needed to go to bed. We clapped at the end of the song, and then we walked out the door brazenly and, we supposed, rudely. But if we didn’t say good night, no one would even know we were gone. No one would ask, Where did the Cohns and the Grodsteins and the Weinmans and the Frankens go? And if anyone did, the reply would be simple: I think they went home.

We stood in the front of the Hilton and waited for the valet to bring our cars around. We held hands with our significant others. We stared straight ahead and ignored Edie and Richard, who had snuck out of the party and were standing nearby screaming at each other. We did not listen to what they were saying. We did not hear Edie say to him, “You do not get to apologize to me. You do not get that pleasure in your life. You do not get that reward. You are not absolved of one goddamn thing.” And if we did hear her say that, we would not remember it the next time we saw her.

In the car, we were silent but for small belches and sighs and tears. We thought about our lives together, how we had risen and fallen and then risen together again, and then we went to our homes, and took our spouses in our arms, and we made love. And there was comfort in that, we were not cold, we were not alone, we had someone to hold on to in the night, our bodies were still warm, we were not them, and we were not dead yet.





Sprawl



Kenneth had regrets about the day. He had not wanted to leave his lady friend, Edie, behind at the party with her family; in particular, her estranged husband, Richard, about whom he had heard not one good thing. But Kenneth had a restaurant to run, and there was no one to take his place in the kitchen. Saturday nights were his best nights, second only to Sundays, when many people were lazy and without ambition and wanted someone else to cook their food for them. He had bills to pay. He had been behind on them for months. He had no choice but to go to work.

But first he had driven Edie from the synagogue to the Hilton in his twenty-year-old Lincoln Continental, walked her into the ballroom decorated with pictures of her grandchildren, the twins, Emily and Josh, who were celebrating their bar mitzvahs that day, and deposited her at her table, which was decorated with ballet shoes, a nod to a popular reality show about a dancing competition, which he had never seen because he had not owned a television set since 1989. He felt, briefly, as if he were checking her into a mental institution. When he kissed her good-bye, once on her cheek, and once on her lips, her son, Benny, who was seated next to her, threw himself into a noisy coughing fit. Kenneth squeezed Edie’s hand tight and kissed the top of it. She was wearing a beautiful plum-colored dress that glittered. She smelled fantastic. She was overweight, and her breasts were tremendous. The night before, he had buried his hands and face and tongue in them, and was reborn in pleasure. Cough away, son. I can kiss her all day.