The Middlesteins: A Novel(48)

And now Emily was starting to know.

“No one in our family is bald,” huffed her grandmother. “The whole thing is ridiculous. We come from strong stock.”

On the far side of the high school’s parking lot, there was a baseball field; a visiting team warmed up, a coach cracking pop-ups to the outfield. Even from a distance, the baseball players looked tall to her. The idea of being older and bigger made her tingle. She could not wait to get to high school. She was absolutely certain that things would be better in high school: the classes, the people, the quality of life.

“I don’t think people even understand how strong our gene pool is,” said her grandmother. “You’ve got a lot of Russian blood in you. Russians are built to withstand winter.”

Emily could admit that her life wasn’t so bad now, and that getting older and bigger meant that there were more risks involved. She just wanted more out of it. Couldn’t she do better? Couldn’t everyone just do a little bit better?

“Your great-grandfather fled Ukraine to come here. He walked through snow and ice and over mountains just to catch a train to Germany, and then he had to sit on that train for weeks. And he had nothing. Crusts of old bread and cheese. He had one potato he would peel every other day, and he would let the skin sit in his mouth for hours just so he could suck in every last vitamin. Could you imagine that?”

Emily was almost certain her grandmother was lying to her, but she loved the way she was telling the story, the way her voice giddily rose and fell, almost drunkenly, and yet her voice was crisp, and she articulated her words beautifully.

“Would you like that, kiddo? An uncooked potato skin for dinner?” Her grandmother poked her in her delicate belly, and Emily pulled away and laughed.

“No potato skins for me, thanks,” said Emily.

“And after all that, he made his way to Germany, took one look at all the mishegas there, and got on a boat and spent four more weeks crowded together with a bunch of other Jews trying to get the hell out of there, and the whole time he was still peeling that one potato.”

“Was it a big potato to start?” said Emily, stifling laughter.

“It was a pretty big potato, I have to admit,” said her grandmother. “But still! To only eat potato for such a long time, that’s not that much fun, right?”

Emily nodded somberly.

“So by the time he got to America, he was just skin and bones. He barely made it alive.” Her grandmother’s voice started to quiver. “And he lost a lot of his friends and family along the way. You should have heard him talk about it. I’m sorry you didn’t get to know him like I did. He was a really nice man. He wrote beautiful letters.”

Emily took her grandmother’s arm with her one good arm. They had one more lap to walk.

“But here is the point, Emily. Are you ready for the point?”

“Yes,” said Emily.

“Even after traveling all that way, and even on a diet composed almost exclusively of potato skin, all that for months and months, your great-grandfather still showed up in America with a full head of hair,” she said triumphantly. “So I don’t know what the hell is wrong with your father.”

“Me neither,” said Emily.

“I’m hungry. Are you hungry?” said her grandmother.

“Starving,” said Emily.

“You must be famished after all that exercise,” said her grandmother.

“Let’s eat,” said Emily.

“How do you feel about Chinese food?” said her grandmother.

How Emily felt about Chinese food was that it was mostly greasy but that she liked shrimp dumplings and that anything was better than what was being served in her house as of late, which was mainly (really, only) vegetables, sometimes raw, sometimes steamed, sometimes, if they were really lucky, stir-fried with just a hint of oil, and all this gross tofu that felt like cottage cheese in her mouth (cottage cheese for breakfast: also gross), all these meals designed to keep them trim and fit and elevate their levels of health, and to keep the diabetes bug away as if it were something you could catch rather than earn by eating gallons and gallons of junk food for years and years, which was clearly what her grandmother had done. But the way she felt that day was that one egg roll wouldn’t hurt, and there was part of her that was embarrassed to be at the high-school track, like she was some poser pretending she was already a student there.

So she and her grandmother sped home—suddenly they could both move extremely quickly—and hopped into the car and drove for a while, back past the high school, the giant digital marquee alluringly blinking in front of it about prom, baseball playoffs, the math club’s bake sale, the future, Emily’s future, taller, older, wiser, bigger, smarter, brighter, you are almost here, down roads she had never been down without her mother and father, except for school trips downtown, past the Chuck E. Cheese where she and her brother had a birthday party one year, past stores where she shopped with her mother sometimes (the Jewel grocery store where her mother shopped in a pinch when she didn’t have time to make the trek to Whole Foods, a greeting-card shop because It’s always important to send thank-you notes, a beauty-supply store where her mother bought expensive shampoos and face creams for cheap, the sporting-goods store where they stocked up on soccer shoes and shorts every spring, that mega-Target for school supplies but never clothes, her mother wouldn’t let her be caught dead in Target clothes), past roads that went to nowhere in particular as far as Emily was concerned, though she supposed people lived this way and that, even if she didn’t know who exactly, until her grandmother pulled in to a dirty little strip mall and up to a Chinese restaurant.