The Middlesteins: A Novel(24)

But instead they had fought over everything, every detail. Or rather, she had fought with him, derided every suggestion he made. What did he know about Rome? She was the one who had studied Italian in college and spent two weeks in Italy after graduation. She was the one who had once been basically fluent in the language and would surely be again after a day or two there. Why would they go on a tour when they could walk the streets just fine on their own? Why would they stay at a hotel near the Vatican when it was so far away from everything else? Why, when they finally arrived there, had it not occurred to him to bring better shoes? (This was when his knees were just starting to go, he remembered, and that mile-long walk through the Vatican crushed him, and the minute he complained just once, she had snapped, so by the time they got to the Sistine Chapel, she was practically shrieking, and only the repeated shushing of the security guards had quieted her.) Why was he still jet-lagged? Why was he being so weird about taking the bus if he was complaining about walking? Why did he order the same thing every night? Why didn’t he have an open mind? Why couldn’t he just enjoy himself? That might have been the vacation that killed them, or it might have been the beginning of the end. It was hard to pinpoint it. He wondered if he was having a delayed reaction, by a decade. Here he was thinking it was everything, but instead maybe it was just that one moment in time.

When they got to the Trevi Fountain that day, he was limping, his hips, his ankles, his back, everything was shattered. Edie had already consumed five espressos and two gelatos, and he had wondered if she would ever sleep again. Some pleasant-enough American girl, a little older than Robin, a tourist like them, innocent to the doom she was witnessing, offered to take their picture with the fountain as the backdrop. The result was a photo of two people standing far apart, and he knew he was unsmiling in the other half of it, the half, he noticed, that Edie had cut out of the picture. What he saw online was just her, her handbag looped over her arm, that pretty silk dress that fell nicely around her wide, sexy hips, her hair a majestic throng of curls (it had rained that morning, and the air was still humid), still a reasonably good-looking woman with an intense, hopped-up-on-caffeine smile on her face. She looked like she was clever. She looked a little dangerous. Slightly past her prime, but still she seemed ripe. If he didn’t know her, he would have thought she was fascinating. If he didn’t know her, he would have thought she was just his type. I want that woman back, he thought. I want that woman, but I want her to still love me. And he knew now—he had known this for a long time, but he had sealed it with every decision he had made in the last two months—that she was never going to love him again.





Edie, 210 Pounds



Here is what was on the tray: one Big Mac, one large fries, two Happy Meals, one McRib sandwich (because it was a new sandwich, and how often did a new sandwich come along?), one Diet Coke, two orange juices, one chocolate shake, one apple pie for everyone to share, and three chocolate chip cookies, one for Edie, one for little Robin, and one for Benny, who was getting to be such a big boy now. Edie would definitely eat the Big Mac and the McRib sandwich all on her own, although she had asked Benny if he had wanted to try it, pointing to the cardboard advertisement dangling from the ceiling like a mobile over a baby’s crib, and he had nodded yes. She had also asked him if he wanted a chocolate chip cookie, sitting there looking so moist and chewy in its plastic display case, or an apple pie, he could have either, and he said, “Neither,” and she had said, “Well, maybe we should get both just in case,” and he had shrugged. It was all the same to him; around his house nothing ever went to waste (which meant everything got eaten by someone in the end), and also he was only just six years old and didn’t have strong opinions one way or another about much of anything, or at least not about food, because, after all, it was just food.

What was food to a six-year-old? Sometimes Benny would eat only the same thing for weeks at a time (macaroni and cheese for most of the winter; turkey sandwiches, sometimes minus the turkey and sometimes minus the bread, for all of March), and Edie didn’t have the energy to argue with him. It was not about taste. It was about some sort of affection or association with a memory, she suspected. Like, maybe she had given him macaroni and cheese on the first cold day of the year and it had warmed him up so beautifully that he craved that same sensation on repeat. Perhaps there was a favorite cartoon character of his who loved turkey sandwiches. Or a Muppet? It had nothing to do with his innocent young palate. He could not be expected to be excited about the new McRib sandwich. It was meaningless to him.