The Middlesteins: A Novel(15)

They ate salmon, bright pink, flavorless, and Rachelle eyed everyone as they reached for a pinch of salt, anything to save this meal, and she whispered, “Not too much.” Brown rice. “Drink more water,” she commanded. Out-of-season strawberries and sugarless cookies that sucked the air out of their lives. There would be no fooling around with food on her watch.

They bundled together in the living room, for the last night of So You Think You Can Dance, Rachelle on the sectional next to Emily. Rachelle stroked the top of her daughter’s head. Emily had showered before dinner, and smelled good; Rachelle could tell she had used her shampoo. Her son was on the floor below them, his knees hunched up to his chest, rapt excitement at the upcoming revelation. Her husband was on the settee, stretched out like a dead man, his hands clasped across his belly. Rachelle looked at his gut. Was he getting a gut? Was everyone going to have to go on a diet around here?

During the final commercial break, Rachelle asked her husband, at last, how he was doing, and from across the room he let out a long, whiny, “Ehhh.”

In the last moments of the show, the host announced Victor as the winner. The kids jumped up and down and screamed, and even Rachelle found herself clapping, while Benny did nothing but move his hands from his chest to behind his head. Confetti fell all around Victor as he hugged the host tightly. He swiped his thumbs under his eyes. He took the mike from the host and said, “I just want to thank everyone for making this happen. The viewers for all their support and for voting for me, my parents for believing in me, Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior, and my first dance instructor, Pierre Gonzales, for making me into the man I am today.” And with that he gave a giant wink at the camera. A giant dirty wink? A giant wink. Rachelle didn’t know. “Huh,” she said. She looked over at her husband, who, for the first time that night, had cracked a smile.



*

Out back, under the stars, spring was so far away, months to go. Even longer till the kids had to get up in front of a roomful of people and pretend they were Victor Long for the night.

“What happened today?” she asked her husband. The joint was thicker than usual, and he had been outside long before she got there. He sat on a deck chair, his head on one hand, twirling the joint in the other.

“My father left my mother,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” she said. That didn’t even make any sense.

“He gave up on her,” he said. “He said he couldn’t take it anymore. He said he couldn’t watch her kill herself anymore. He said she’s a miserable woman and he couldn’t live with her another day. She’s having a meltdown.”

He looked at his wife for help. He couldn’t do this alone, and maybe he wouldn’t even be able to do it with her help.

“He can’t just leave,” she said. Who just leaves a sick person? Nobody.

“He left,” he said. “He seems pretty set on it. He rented an apartment near the pharmacy.”

Rachelle walked over to her husband and sat in his lap, she wrapped one arm around his chest, and another, loosely, around his neck. Then she told him that she didn’t want his father anywhere near her children. “Do you hear me?” she said. She said that any man who would abandon a sick woman was a filthy, horrible person and should not be allowed near a child. And he should be punished. And that is his punishment. He would have no access. He had gone insane, and he would have no access. Not her children. Not this man. Her husband argued briefly—who was in charge here anyway? was it him? did he even want to be?—but it was swift, and then it was over, because she raised her voice, she raised it loud enough that Josh heard it through his window. Josh, who had been thinking about Victor Long intently at that moment, wondering what would happen if he decided someday that he didn’t want to be a doctor and wanted to be a dancer instead, if his parents would believe in him the same way, heard his mother screaming at his father, “I will not have him in my home! I will not have him in my life!” over and over until his father had no choice but to give her what she wanted.





Edie, 160 Pounds



They were supposed to meet for a burger at a folk-music club called the Earl of Old Town at 7:00 P.M., but then her father’s test results were scheduled to come in sometime that evening, maybe the next day—the unpredictability of the timing, of everything, driving Edie into knotted bursts of tears in the bathroom attached to her father’s hospital room—so she called her blind date and asked, nicely, if they could dine earlier in the evening and also somewhere near the hospital instead.