The Middlesteins(7)

It wasn’t her job, anyway, to talk to her mother-in-law about dental care. She had a household to run, two children to take care of, a b’nai mitzvah to plan. (Everyone, everywhere, knew she had a b’nai mitzvah to plan, her hairstylist, her Pilates instructor, the kids’ dance teacher, her girlfriends who had all waited to have children till their late twenties and were always one step behind her in the parenting department. “You think you have your hands full now,” she would tell her old college roommates. “Just you wait.”)

She was willing to support her mother-in-law in many ways. She happily sat by her side at the hospital for hours on end with her father-in-law, Richard, and her husband, Benny. When Richard was too busy at the pharmacy to tend to his own wife’s needs, Rachelle would chauffeur Edie to check ups, to the Jewel and Costco for groceries. And she had cooked them meals in their home before heading home to feed her own family, sitting patiently through Edie and Richard’s awful back-and-forth bickering about little nitpicky things, the fabric softener, lawn care, their finances, these arguments that always ended with Richard throwing up his hands and walking away and Edie turning to Rachelle and crooning gently, “Marriage is for the birds,” and then making a chirping noise and smiling.

This, for her family, for her husband, she would do. She could do it, easily.

But nowhere was it in her job description as wife and mother and homemaker to be the one to let her mother-in-law know that her teeth were turning to shit.

“Why isn’t your father saying anything?” she asked Benny. “Do you think he noticed?”

It was after dinner, and the kids were in bed, their last text messages sent for the night. Benny and Rachelle were out back. Benny was taking long puffs from the last remaining bit of a tiny pin joint. Rachelle was shivering like a small, precious, expensive dog. January in Chicago, they must be insane. The pool was covered with a tarp. They both wore large, insulated, puffy coats.

“You know as much as I do,” said Benny.

It was the incisor on the bottom left, and the tooth next to it. They were both black at the root. Rachelle could see them only when Edie smiled, and she smiled a lot when the twins were around.

“Do we have to talk about this now?” he said. The chill of the air and the smoke from the joint united into one giant cloud. He ground out the rest of the joint under his shoe.

“When would you like to talk about it?” she said.

He put his hand at her neck lightly and then circled his hand around her hair into a ponytail. At any given moment, she could never be sure who was in control of their relationship.

“Never?” he said.

“She’s your mother,” she said. “You’re not worried?”

“All I ever am is worried about her,” he said sadly. His eyes widened, he made a tiny choking sound, and then he was crying. She threw her arms up and around him, and the two of them stood there in the cold embracing for a while, two puffy coats in the night. Between them hovered a shared thought: that they were in this together. And when one of them failed, the other must succeed.

“Maybe you could talk to her tomorrow?” he said finally. The prickle of his beard against her face as he spoke stimulated her.

“I could,” she said. “I could do it while the kids are at dance class.”

“There you go,” he said softly.



*

For three weeks, the twins had been taking hip-hop dance lessons in preparation for their b’nai mitzvah, and they had made some progress, but Rachelle was worried they wouldn’t be ready in time for the party, or worse, that they would embarrass themselves. The plan was for them to do a routine after dinner, followed by a video montage of the twins through the years. Then a dessert bar would be wheeled out, including a make-your-own sundae station and a bubbling chocolate fountain, surrounded by cookies, pound cake, and strawberries. Rachelle had seen those fountains before at other bar mitzvahs and once at a wedding, and she thought they were more trouble than they were worth—what a mess! Chocolate everywhere, but everybody had one at their parties now, and she would not disappoint her children, her babies, her miracles.

They had insisted on the dance lessons as well. They had no shot at singing, which some of their peers did for the performance portion of the party. Even Josh and Emily recognized that they would be setting themselves up for failure; Josh’s voice was in the midst of some serious and dramatic changes, and Emily—brassy, deep-voiced Emily—had been rejected from the school chorus three years running. But they were diligent kids, and had both played soccer since grade school, and were fit and athletic, and they understood what it meant to show up and practice. They had promised to take it seriously. They had promised results.

And she trusted their instructor, Pierre, who had toured nationally and, in one instance, internationally, with a number of productions of Broadway musicals—this she had learned from scouring the Internet ruthlessly, because in a former life she had been a good student, a solid researcher, and also because she was not going to leave her kids for one hour a day, three times a week, with just any old person with tap shoes and a three-year lease on some office space.

She need not have worried, though, for Pierre was the real deal. He had moved to the area a few years earlier because his mother lived nearby and was sick with something terrible—Rachelle couldn’t remember what, she wanted to say leukemia, who were all these people with all these awful diseases?—and then he had never left. “You’ve got to take care of your family,” he had explained to her. “I mean, in the end that’s all you’ve got, you know what I mean?” Rachelle had nodded furiously. He was speaking directly to her soul.