The Middlesteins: A Novel(25)

Edie was saving the McRib for last, because it was a treat, almost like a dessert sandwich. She had already finished her fries, decimated them moments after the three of them had sat down, and was working on Benny’s bag, while Benny, in a thoughtful and organized manner, plucked apart the free plastic toy that had come with his meal. Robin was happily banging the hell out of her own toy until Edie finally retrieved it from her just to stop all the noise.

Big Mac-wise, she had this new habit of picking out the middle layer of bun from her sandwich, because she had heard the one time she went to Weight Watchers that half the battle was the bread. She would even have eaten the McRib minus the roll entirely, only obviously that would have made a huge mess. Best to eat it as intended. She took a bite of the Big Mac and considered it without the extra slice of bun, which lay nearby covered in flecks of lettuce and salmon-pink special sauce. There was literally no impact on the taste, and yet there was something missing in the experience, an extra layer of spongy pleasure.

Holy cow, she was thinking a lot about food.

She was so tired from her day, and so happy to not have to think about work (although she did not mind her job; she had never minded putting in a hard day’s work, it was, in her opinion, as she had been raised to believe, both an extremely Jewish and American way to behave, being a good worker was), and in theory, she should be happy to spend time with her children, but sometimes she found them a little dull. Playing with them was boring, and it wasn’t even their fault. It was just the notion of playing itself. She had never gotten the hang of it, even when she was a child. You needed to be able to adopt a personality other than your own in order to fully immerse yourself in the world of play, and it was burden enough carrying her own self around.

“Don’t you guys have anything of interest to say?” she said in the direction of her children. It didn’t matter which one answered. “What did you do today?”

Benny looked up from the pile of plastic parts. Minutes ago it had been an airplane. Now it was waste.

“I went to school,” he said.

“Did you learn anything?” she said. One-two-three bites, and the Big Mac was finished.

“We counted a lot today,” he said. “There was a lot of counting, and I played catch during recess with three different boys and one girl. Craig, Eric, Russell, and Lea, and then Lea got hit in the head and we had to stop playing. And I made this.” He pulled from his pocket a string of orange and pink beads on a long, narrow rubber thread and held it up in the air. “It’s for you.” He smiled—oh, he beamed! The beam that could break your heart.

I’m a shit, thought Edie.

“It is the most beautiful necklace I have ever seen in my entire life,” she said. She took it from his tiny hand and then tied it around her neck.

“You look pretty,” he said.

She did not look pretty, she thought. She did not believe she had looked pretty in a long time. Her business clothes no longer fit her right, not her jackets, not her shirts, not her skirts, not her pants, not her pantyhose, not even her shoes—or rather, she no longer fit them right—but she could not bring herself to buy a new wardrobe. Maybe if she gave Weight Watchers a shot this time. There was always the vague promise of that lingering in her future.

“What about you?” she said to Robin.

Robin spent her mornings in a day-care center at the JCC and her afternoons in the backyard of a young woman who lived one town over, along with two other toddlers, the parents of whom worked as lawyers with Edie at the firm. The baby-sitter, barely twenty years old if that, was supposedly the widow of a cousin of a senior partner, but Edie was almost certain she was his mistress. She was an Italian girl, this Tracy, from Elmwood Park originally, and had no real explanation for why she was now suddenly living in the suburbs. And there were no pictures up in her home, no past, no history, just fresh-bought furniture and a small, fancy, yapping dog. “A bichon frisé,” Tracy had slurred proudly, as if she were fluent in French. Edie had no complaints about the woman; she seemed to genuinely like the children, even enjoyed playing with them, liked to get down on her hands and knees and crawl around in the dirt with them, her plump yet still somehow tiny behind in the air. Wagging it like a dog. The dog barking next to her. The kids barking. Everyone pretending to be a dog. All the working mothers standing there in the suburbs laughing at the too-loud, thick-Chicago-accented but still extremely hot Italian tomato rolling around in the dirt with their three brilliant babies.