The Middlesteins(59)
“You’re killing me, Dad,” she said.
He rubbed her shoulder, kissed her forehead.
“No more then,” he said.
He sent her home. He emptied the pot of noodles into the strainer. He tossed the noodles and the lamb together and spooned the finished dish into a carryout container. He loaded the dishwasher. He took off his chef’s coat. He washed his hands and face and lifted his shirt and washed under his arms, too. He was tired. He slapped his cheeks. Edie Middlestein awaited.
He drove through one town to the next to the next. Every mall looked the same from a distance, but he had spent enough time in them—his whole adult life—to know that they were all unique, even if it just came down to the people who worked there. Busy little American ants.
Every house on Edie’s street was dark except for hers. Was it that late? He checked his watch. It was after eleven, and he was meeting his lover. He was a young man again. Once, before they were married, Marie and he had driven to Atlantic City on a whim, and they had arrived after midnight and stayed up till dawn gambling and kissing. They got dizzy from cigarettes. That evening, he had a second wind and a third wind and a fourth wind. But tonight he would settle for a second wind.
The front door was unlocked, and he entered, calling her name, but she did not respond. The light was on in the living room, where they had first kissed, lavishly, luxuriously, for hours. They had embraced each other on the couch in front of the window that faced the street. Anyone walking by the house could have seen them. It did not feel dangerous to do it, but it did feel prideful, which had its own kind of danger. Before destruction, he remembered. He had memorized parts of that book, too, just to see why so many people were interested in it.
There were framed pictures of her family everywhere, but not a one of her husband. She had taken them down. There were empty squares on the wall. Which was worse? To leave them up, or to have the gaps left behind as reminders of what once was?
He went to the kitchen because he knew that was where she would be. Already eating before he even arrived with dinner. Eating all that junk food she craved, the cookies and chips and crackers, giant tins and boxes and bags of crap. That was what was making her sick. Eating things made by machines rather than by hand. He was going to change that, if he had to cook her every meal himself.
In the kitchen the freezer door was open. Inside it sat an open pint of ice cream, a spoon still sticking out of the top. He looked down, and there was Edie, sprawled on the floor in her shimmering purple dress, one hand outstretched, the other frozen near her chest, as if she had clutched at it, and then given up on it. Her lips were blue. This was not right. This was the wrong information. He knelt beside her and put a hand on her face, and the cool skin rippled beneath his fingers.
He grasped desperately for another poem he had memorized once, the exact lines of which eluded him. It had something to do with an icebox and plums and being sorry for eating them, even though the person speaking in the poem was clearly not sorry at all. It had always felt like a joke to him. The funny poems were usually the ones he remembered. It still felt like a joke now. It read like a note you would leave someone on the kitchen table when you were walking out the door and never coming back.
His eyes blurred with tears, and then there was only a haze of Edie. He was a fool to think he could have love twice in this life. Arrogance. He held her hand to his chest with both of his hands. No one was entitled to anything in this life, not the least of all love.
Middlestein in Mourning
Richard Middlestein was uncomfortable in his suit. It had been five years since he had worn it, five years since he had been to a funeral. There had been a string of them in 2005: his mother’s, his father’s, his Aunt Ellie’s, a second cousin named Boris he didn’t know particularly well but who lived nearby in Highland Park so he went as a representative of his side of the family (by then he was the only one left), one of his estranged wife Edie’s co-workers’ (a suicide, terrible), Rabbi Schumann (they had to rent some tents for that one, so many people came), and at least three more that he couldn’t recall at that exact moment because he could barely breathe. He hadn’t gained more than a few pounds since then, but his flesh lay differently on his body now. Gravity had struck, and skin gathered around his waist, creating a small buttress of fat between his ailing chest and still-youthful legs. He hadn’t noticed it till he pulled up the zipper on the pants. He’d had to suck in his gut. He’d been holding it in for hours now.
To make matters worse, he couldn’t stop eating. There was food on every surface of his son’s house, the living-room table, the kitchen table, the dining room table, a few card tables that had been dragged inside from their garage, the glass end tables on either side of the living-room couch. And the food kept coming, friends of Edie’s—friends of theirs, he supposed, when they had once been together—streaming through the front door, all holding different offerings, kugels and casseroles covered in aluminum foil, fruit salads in vast Tupperware containers, pastries in elegant cardboard boxes tied with thin, curled ribbons. His oldest friends from the synagogue, the Cohns and the Grodsteins and the Weinmans and the Frankens, had all gone in together on the elaborate smoked-fish trays. He had heard them mention it more than once that day, but only when someone wondered out loud where the delicious fish had been purchased, and one of them offered up the information. “We went this morning right when they opened,” they said. “It’s the least we could do.”