The Middlesteins: A Novel(8)

There was something about a big girl, after all.

“You are always so hungry,” said Naumann, bitter but hopeful, lost in America, sleeping on a plastic-covered couch, waking up every night, without fail, on the living-room floor, grateful that at least the fall was carpeted. “You always have to have some food in your mouth.”

Don’t say it, thought Edie.

Edie’s father had gotten Naumann a job cleaning the bathrooms at a high school in Winnetka. That meant he was a high-school janitor.

She took another bite. The coleslaw was creamy and tart.

Naumann inhaled deeply and drunkenly and then blew the smoke out his nose.

She could tell that he had no self-control. Neither did she in a lot of ways. She was sympathetic. But still. Don’t say it.

“Maybe you need something else in your mouth,” he said.

“Like I would screw someone who cleans toilets for a living,” she said.

“You would be so lucky,” he said. “Whore.”

She finished her sandwich; she took her time, because she was hungry, and because it filled her up, and because she was in her house, in her kitchen, and she was a queen, and because women could rule the world with their iron fists. Then, when she was done with her sandwich, she let out a loud scream that surprised even her with its girlishness, and which woke her mother, and her father, and half the block, lights flinging on in bedrooms and living rooms, everyone stirred, everyone worried, everyone but Abraham, who slept through all the ruckus because he had taken his hearing aids out for the night. She felt not an ounce of regret. As far as she could tell, no great tragedy had occurred.





The Willow Tree



Rachelle’s mother-in-law was not well. Rachelle wouldn’t have described her as sickly, though, because there was nothing frail about her. Edie was six feet tall, and shaped like a massive egg under a rotating array of silky, shimmering housedresses that seemed to make her glow. But Edie had had stent surgery six months before on her rotting thigh—a side effect of diabetes—with another surgery scheduled in a few weeks, and also lately Rachelle had noticed that two of Edie’s teeth had gone black. Concern stabbed her directly in the heart. Also, she was disgusted. Yet she could not bring herself to mention it.

It wasn’t her job, anyway, to talk to her mother-in-law about dental care. She had a household to run, two children to take care of, a b’nai mitzvah to plan. (Everyone, everywhere, knew she had a b’nai mitzvah to plan, her hairstylist, her Pilates instructor, the kids’ dance teacher, her girlfriends who had all waited to have children till their late twenties and were always one step behind her in the parenting department. “You think you have your hands full now,” she would tell her old college roommates. “Just you wait.”)

She was willing to support her mother-in-law in many ways. She happily sat by her side at the hospital for hours on end with her father-in-law, Richard, and her husband, Benny. When Richard was too busy at the pharmacy to tend to his own wife’s needs, Rachelle would chauffeur Edie to check ups, to the Jewel and Costco for groceries. And she had cooked them meals in their home before heading home to feed her own family, sitting patiently through Edie and Richard’s awful back-and-forth bickering about little nitpicky things, the fabric softener, lawn care, their finances, these arguments that always ended with Richard throwing up his hands and walking away and Edie turning to Rachelle and crooning gently, “Marriage is for the birds,” and then making a chirping noise and smiling.

This, for her family, for her husband, she would do. She could do it, easily.

But nowhere was it in her job description as wife and mother and homemaker to be the one to let her mother-in-law know that her teeth were turning to shit.

“Why isn’t your father saying anything?” she asked Benny. “Do you think he noticed?”

It was after dinner, and the kids were in bed, their last text messages sent for the night. Benny and Rachelle were out back. Benny was taking long puffs from the last remaining bit of a tiny pin joint. Rachelle was shivering like a small, precious, expensive dog. January in Chicago, they must be insane. The pool was covered with a tarp. They both wore large, insulated, puffy coats.

“You know as much as I do,” said Benny.

It was the incisor on the bottom left, and the tooth next to it. They were both black at the root. Rachelle could see them only when Edie smiled, and she smiled a lot when the twins were around.

“Do we have to talk about this now?” he said. The chill of the air and the smoke from the joint united into one giant cloud. He ground out the rest of the joint under his shoe.