The Middlesteins: A Novel(45)

Edie, 332 Pounds



As part of her early-retirement package, the law firm where she had worked for thirty-three years had extended her the opportunity to keep her health care at an extremely low rate until death or something better came along. She also received her pension plan in full, and on top of that, a not-unfair amount of money to keep her mouth shut about the fact that they were letting her go mainly because her weight distressed the three new partner-owners of the firm, who were all children of the people who had originally hired Edie straight out of law school, freshly married, not yet pregnant, a much slimmer version of herself. She had, at various times in her life, been a more righteous person, more prone to moral outrage, a scrapper, and that person would have considered this not nearly enough money in exchange for being discriminated against, that there was not enough money in the world to allow someone to say to you—without actually saying it, mind you—You’re fat, now will you please go away?

But Edie was exhausted, the whole world tired her, and in a humiliated moment she accepted their offer, even smiled while she shook their hands. Maybe this was a chance to reboot. She wanted more time to spend with her grandchildren. A month later her doctor told Edie her diabetes had worsened, and that he would have to have a stent inserted into her leg, to make that awful, cramping pain she (mostly) refused to admit she was in go away. She might even need a bypass someday. She could get sicker, he told her. She could die. Then she was suddenly grateful for the health care and the money in the bank, and also the time to recover from all her wounds.

The first surgery was tomorrow morning. Down the hall her son, Benny, slept in his old bedroom; he would be driving her to Evanston at 6:00 A.M., so that her husband could go to the pharmacy he owned later in the morning and sign for some deliveries, which apparently no one else on the entire planet could sign for except him. She wouldn’t even think of asking her daughter, Robin, who lived downtown, to spend the night in her home. It was hard enough to get her to come to dinner.

She lay awake now, her brain, like always, running a million miles a minute even if she herself moved so slowly it sometimes was like she was not even in motion at all. She was thinking about food, specifically a value-size package of kettle-baked sea salt potato chips and a plastic tub of deli onion dip she had purchased from the Jewel that afternoon, which were sitting downstairs in her kitchen, waiting for her like two friends who had come over for coffee and a little chitchat.

But it was after midnight, and she had been instructed not to eat anything eight to twelve hours before her surgery, and she was scheduled to have her leg cut into at 8:00 A.M. So here she was, on the tail end of acceptable timing, wondering how much damage she would really do to herself if she had a few potato chips, we’re talking just a handful, and some of that cool, salty dip, and that dip was not even like solid food, it was like drinking a glass of milk, and those potato chips were so airy, one bite and they were over. Poof. What she was thinking about eating wouldn’t even fill up one of her pinkies. All she had to do was get up out of bed, and go downstairs, and then she would be reunited with her two new best friends.

Her husband snored next to her seemingly innocently, uselessly. The most he had done for her lately was bring home her prescriptions, but he was a pharmacist! He had been bringing home her prescriptions their entire life together. Sorry, Middlestein. No points. He did not turn in his sleep; he picked a position and stuck with it all night. Not one tussle with the universe for that one, she thought.

What she didn’t know was that he had been plotting all day the right way and time to leave her, and that in six more months, a few weeks before she had a second surgery, on a Friday afternoon, he would announce that he did not love her anymore and that he had not for a long time and he believed she felt the same, and for both of their sakes, for both of their lives, he was going to take the step of walking out that door and never coming back. There was also the not-so-subtle subtext of his wanting to have sex again with somebody in this lifetime, though obviously not with Edie herself. He had left so quickly, like the goddamn coward he was—he had taken nothing with him except for his clothes, which, while she was at Costco, he had packed in the luggage they got for that terrible trip to Italy—that she hadn’t had a chance to argue with him, and what would she have said? He was probably right.

Still, she will be sad when the split finally happens. She will weep to her son and daughter, although at least a small portion of those outbursts will be calculated to make them hate their father. After a while she will stop being sad that he’s gone because she’ll realize she doesn’t miss him, and then she will be sad because she’s spent so long with someone she doesn’t even miss, and then after that she’ll be more sad because she realizes she does miss him, or at least having someone around, even if they didn’t speak to each other that much. In the end, it had just been nice to know that someone was in the room, she will tell Benny, even though that is kind of a f*cked-up thing to say to a son about his father. (But Edie was never one for self-control.) And now the room was empty. Just her. Just Edie. She knew that there were even more things to be sad about, so many layers of sadness yet to be unfolded. She had lived an entire life already, and now here was another one she had to start living fresh from the beginning.