The Middlesteins(61)
Josh had opened the last pastry box and was arranging a small assortment of chocolate-dipped cookies around the edge of the dish. When he finished, he moved the dish directly into the center of the table, and then took a step away, examined the table, and smiled. Middlestein glanced over, and then looked back: Josh had arranged the cookies on the plate in the shape of a smiley face.
“Josh!” he said.
“What?” said Josh.
“You can’t do that.” He pointed at the plate. “That’s not appropriate,” he said. Thirteen years old, and no common sense. Had he had common sense at that age? Can that even be taught?
“I thought it would cheer people up,” said Josh. “Everyone’s so sad.”
“Aren’t you sad?” said Middlestein.
“I don’t know what I am,” said Josh.
“Well, you should be sad,” he said. “It’s a terrible thing that happened, your grandmother dying.”
“You think I don’t know that?” said Josh. 5-4-3-2-1, and he was in tears. Then he ran out of the living room, and upstairs, and everyone in the room stared at Middlestein, and if he wasn’t already the most horrible person in the room, this sealed the deal.
In the kitchen, Robin was confirming it with that mouth she had inherited from her mother: loud, big, bossy, and self-righteous. He walked to the swinging door and leaned against the wall next to it, listening to her yell.
“You don’t know anything,” she was saying to Rachelle.
“They were married for nearly forty years,” said Rachelle. “You don’t know what that’s like.”
“I see. So you’re superior to me because you’re married and I’m not.”
“That’s not what I’m saying, Robin.”
“She hated him. Don’t you understand that?”
They were arguing about the rights of the living versus the dead. It was true, his wife had hated him, not just after he had left her but before then, too. Yet he had hoped in this small way that eventually, after they had divorced and everything had settled down, he with his new girlfriend Beverly, her with that Chinese man she had been dating recently (who had just arrived, and was now standing in the corner of the living room with his purple-haired daughter, the both of them stunned and silent), after they all had rearranged themselves into new formations, that he and Edie would be able to come back together as friends.
He had told no one this wish before, and he wasn’t even sure if he deserved her friendship, but they had created these people, Benny and Robin, and they, in turn, had created lives for themselves, and he and Edie shared those two beautiful grandchildren (even if Josh was oversensitive and Emily a little mean), and he had imagined that one day they would watch them graduate from high school, and college, and dance together at one or both of their weddings, that they would be able to sit next to each other, share the same air, laugh about things that had happened a long time ago that only they knew about, secrets just for the two of them and no one else. He had left her because she was killing herself and killing him, too. And now he was saved: He had fallen in love with a woman named Beverly, and she had fallen in love with him, too. Now he was more alive than ever, and he had wanted Edie to have the same experience, but it had been too late for her. Too late for love. And now he was the only one who knew their past. He was the only one who knew that eventually, one day, Edie would have forgiven him. He had been there with her the day her father died and held her hand and stroked her hair and taken her into his family and life when she had no one left, when she felt she was an orphan. One day he would have reminded her of this. One day she would have been in his life again.
“He didn’t kill her,” said Rachelle.
“He might as well have,” said Robin.
Upstairs, loud music began to play, a song that was played at Josh and Emily’s b’nai mitzvah just a few days before. The mourners looked even more stricken, their skin colorless, their lips grim. Music was incorrect. Benny left the room casually, but as soon as he hit the stairs, he raced up them.
“I’m an orphan now!” screeched Robin, but her words blurred within the bass of the dance music.
She’s going to regret saying that, thought Middlestein. Someday she’ll want her father again.
But she does not regret it, at least not while he’s still alive. (At his funeral, however, she is devastated. She heaves tears, Daniel’s arms locked around her shoulders, the other family members distant from her, battling their own grief.) She barely speaks to him for the next decade, and then only briefly, at family functions. Sometimes they only lock eyes across the room, and then she’ll look away, her lips crumbling with hurt, but still he treasures those moments. She ignores him at Edie’s unveiling ceremony, and at Emily’s and Josh’s birthday parties and graduation ceremonies, and even at Benny and Rachelle’s twentieth-anniversary party. She doesn’t invite him to her wedding. He only hears about it a few months after the fact, and it is an accident that it is even revealed to him. At Benny’s house he sees a picture of Robin in her wedding dress standing with bridesmaid Emily. Beverly is there with him—by then she is his wife—and she looks so devastated on his behalf that he can’t help but sob for a moment, and he has to excuse himself to the restroom, and he stays in there too long, his hands clutched to the sink counter, leaning forward, missing Edie, missing his daughter, wondering if what he had done wrong was really that terrible, and wasn’t life full of layers and nuances, colored all kinds of shades of gray, and the way you felt about something when you were twenty or thirty or forty was not how you would feel about something when you were fifty or sixty or seventy—he was nearly seventy!—and if only he could explain to her that regret can come at any time in your life, when you least expect it, and then you are stuck with it forever. If he could do it all over, if he could have that one shot, he would have fought harder for his life with Edie, he would have fought harder for her life. No, that wasn’t true either, because there was a knock at the bathroom door: Beverly, checking up on him, gently holding his hand, his second chance, his late-in-life angel, her skin still smooth everywhere but around her eyes, her figure, her smile, her hold on him, on his heart, on his flesh. There she was. This was why he had traded one life for another.