The Floating Feldmans

by Elyssa Friedland

  Elise had never questioned the choices she’d made in life, not until Rachel started talking nonstop about choosing a major at Stanford and Darius readied himself to move out of the house. When she was raising her young children, she felt exhausted and busy and important, like she was running a small country from her kitchen, her laptop and the driver’s seat of their minivan portals to a world as complex as an investment bank or an emergency room as far as she was concerned. Now that she wasn’t in the thick of it anymore, she was starting to see that coordinating Rachel’s ballet with Darius’s T-ball wasn’t the Herculean feat it had once seemed and that there was a very large, unused part of her brain gathering dust. And the hours, there were so many of them. As a lunch-making soccer mom, the day felt too short, the grips of daylight always slipping away from her. But with teenagers who needed her less and less, the day stretched into a vast continuum, so that after she finished her coffee, read the paper, and took a quick shower, the hour hand wasn’t even close to meeting the nine.

  “True,” Elise consented. “Community college is not our first choice.”

  “Do you have any family that can help out? At least to cover part of tuition?”

  Did she have family? Ha! Boy, did she. Family that she was about to be trapped with on a giant sea monster. A group of people for whom Mercury was permanently in retrograde when they were together. There was no way she would ask the senior Feldmans for money. Not when they pooh-poohed Mitch’s high-minded but low-paying career choice. Not when they depended on her to be their one responsible child so they wouldn’t feel like total failures. Two opposing reasons not to ask them for the money, one driven by resentment and the other driven by compassion. How Feldman was that? To be so utterly conflicted by feelings that you decide just not to engage.

  Unless . . .

  She could pretend she needed the money for something else. An idea was fomenting at rapid speed and her heart was racing faster than if she was first in line to enter Best Buy on Black Friday. She’d tell her parents that she was planning to start her own business. That she had decided, with Darius leaving for school, that she could use what she’d learned in medical school to go back to work even if it was too late to become a doctor. She was toying with starting a home nursing business. No, an app! Everyone was doing an app. She was working on an app for diabetics to monitor their daily food intake and blood sugar levels, which would automatically generate a report for their doctor that could be transmitted electronically. Eureka! She would call it Di-Count. No, Dia-Beat. What a double meaning! Her father, a Luddite who’d never quite mastered the hospital’s online prescription system, would be proud of her for doing something with her education but way too intimidated by the mere mention of the app store to offer any involvement.

  The only remaining glitch was explaining why it was a secret from Mitch. She needed to make sure her new “business” wasn’t going to be the main topic at mealtime aboard the Ocean Queen. The answer came to her quickly. Mitch was a respected newspaperman who oversaw the science and pharma beats at the Bee. He couldn’t risk accusations of conflict of interest, not when he was covering area hospitals and drug companies. So she’d tell her parents that she couldn’t involve Mitch or discuss the business in front of him. When her app never surfaced, she’d be three thousand miles from her parents. She’d explain to them, over the phone, that someone else beat her to it or that it was too difficult to secure a patent. By that point, she’d have nipped her addiction in the bud, used the loan to pay for Darius’s first year of college, and would be working her way toward paying back her parents.

  Doing what? Of that she wasn’t sure, but as a double Ivy Leaguer, how hard could it be to find gainful employment? She could always get a job in retail, be the oldest cashier at the Gap. On second thought, maybe retail wasn’t the best environment for her to work in, though didn’t they say anorexics often choose to work around food to prove they can restrain themselves? She’d tell Mitch she was bored without the kids at home and needed something to occupy her days. It wasn’t as though her parents were going to beat down her door to get the money back promptly. Decades of working as a doctor in private practice, back before the insurance companies cannibalized the profits, had to have netted her parents a hefty nest egg. If they could pay for the entire family to board this luxury liner, surely their coffers were flush.

  And Darius! Clever Michelle (clearly the apple didn’t fall far from the tree in that family) had planted the most magnificent seed when she’d brought up her son’s former glory. When Annette first talked about the boat, all Elise could think about was the feeling of being confined by her parents. What she hadn’t considered was that she could also do the trapping. For five days she would have Darius locked up, without his friends or his car. Without Wi-Fi! She’d make sure by the time the ship returned to port in Miami, that kid would have the best damn personal essay UC San Diego—wait . . . no . . . even better . . . UCLA had ever seen. Darius and Rachel were sharing a stateroom on the trip, square footage totaling two hundred and twenty. If that didn’t echo what he’d written about in third grade, Elise didn’t know what did. She couldn’t imagine his creative juices wouldn’t flow with the sensory overload on board.

  “That,” she said to Michelle, trying to smother her excitement, “is not a bad idea.”

  When she hung up the phone, a text message from Darius appeared saying he wasn’t going to make it home for dinner. It probably meant he was up to no good, but all Elise could take away was that she suddenly had an extra hour. She rose from the parking lot steps and made a hundred-eighty-degree turn. A green sweater dress had caught her eye on the way out of the mall and now she had the time to try it on. It would be her one last hurrah.

  FOUR

  When the call came for Mitch Connelly, he was in the midst of thinking that now would be the perfect time for a family vacation. Somewhere warm. Somewhere nice. Hell, he’d even thought of the word “pamper” before Elise read it to him from the brochure.

  His wife had sounded positively shaken when she first told him about the family trip. She had sent an urgent text message, while he was in the midst of an editorial meeting, that read: Feldman drama . . . CALL ME. He had slipped out of the meeting, worried about illness, a fight, an accident. The last thing he expected to hear was that his in-laws wanted to take them on an all-expenses-paid cruise to the Caribbean. He knew his wife got uptight around her parents, but a free vacation was hardly a catastrophe. Besides, those massive ships had so many activities and forms of entertainment—the commercials made cruising seem like Las Vegas at sea—that he could imagine not even seeing the other Feldmans except at mealtimes. It was hard to picture Annette and David at the craps table or at the late-night jazz bar, where he and Elise might retire after a family dinner.

  More to the point, the Feldmans weren’t nearly as bad as his wife made them out to be. His father-in-law, the standoffish sort, read medical journals and watched crime shows for his primary entertainment. He was one of those guys who lived to work instead of working to live. And he, Mitch, could appreciate that, though he tried to be a more modern and involved parent than David or his own father had been. He felt awful for David when a hand tremor abruptly cut his four-decade-long career short. For Mitch, he analogized it to sitting in front of his computer one day and being at a loss for words, his brain simply unable to recall the perfect turn of phrase or adjective, letters swimming in incomprehensible groupings in his mind. It would be a nightmare to not be able to do what he loved and he didn’t understand why his wife was so unsympathetic.

  His mother-in-law was in perpetual motion, spring-cleaning across seasons, planning charity dinners, and gossiping about the neighbors with a frenetic energy. But Annette was a loyal wife to David, even when he wasn’t the easiest to live with, and a devoted mother to Elise and Freddy. From the line of framed pictures in the hallway of their home on Long Island, Mitch could deduce those two never lacked for
anything. Piano lessons, ski instruction, overnight summer camp where they dressed in tennis whites. For all their griping, his wife and brother-in-law had had it pretty damn good. Mitch was similarly baffled by Elise’s lingering disdain for Freddy. He had his issues, but he was pleasant enough to spend time with and, to be honest, Freddy’s shortcomings only served to elevate Elise’s position in the family hierarchy. As one of eight children, six of them boys, Mitch would have gladly enjoyed the chance to stand out. Sometimes Mitch visualized his own sibling dynamics as Olympians standing on that three-level podium, except with everyone beating the crap out of each other. But not for Elise. All she had to do was not be a screwup and the gold medal was hers. But she acted put out and disappointed by Freddy, as though she were his third parent.

  “We either have to go or come up with some rock-solid excuse for why we can’t make it. It’s not like my mother gave us a lot of notice, so it shouldn’t be too difficult. What do you have going on at work that we can use?” Elise had asked. She was paranoid about being found out, so whenever they used his work as an excuse to avoid Feldman gatherings, it always had to have some origin in truth in case her parents did a little digging. The four-part series on Northern California’s transit system they used to dodge a cousin’s bar mitzvah did come out a month later, but it was already complete and logged for fact-checking when they said Mitch was working on it twenty-four/seven. Considering how irritating Elise found her parents, he couldn’t understand why she went to such great lengths not to upset them. That was another Feldman puzzle he couldn’t crack.

  His wife didn’t even realize the significance of the timing—how this trip was coming at exactly the perfect moment for him. How could she, when he’d kept his plans tightly under wrap for the past six months? He hadn’t wanted to tell Elise until he had firmly made up his mind and negotiated his departure package with the publisher. Perhaps that was manipulative and unfair, but he just couldn’t handle another voice interfering with what was already a difficult decision. Besides, he came from a family that didn’t “discuss” every last thing ad nauseam. Still, he knew there would be hell to pay once Elise found out how long he’d known about leaving the Bee before telling her.

  Now he was ready. At this point, he was just waiting for Darius to turn in his college applications to break the news, since Elise seemed too fixated on that endeavor to handle anything else at the moment that would portend a life change. The sight of a burned-out lightbulb was enough to send her over the edge lately. A minor domestic issue, like Darius and Rachel fighting over who finished the Cinnamon Life, and Elise was in the car within fifteen minutes claiming she needed some air. And he got it, having dodged so much of the child-rearing pains because he was always at work. After nearly twenty years grinding away at the thankless and unpaid job of motherhood, he could see why she needed a little “fresh air” lately. But with his excitement mounting and his last day at the Bee approaching, he couldn’t wait much longer to clue her in.

  “And if we do go, can you handle the passports?” Elise had continued. “I think the kids still have another year on theirs since we renewed right before we went to Israel for Darius’s bar mitzvah, but ours likely need renewing.”

  What a mess that trip had been. Darius wasn’t the kind of kid that could get up on the temple stage and recite passages in front of a crowd, let alone ancient Hebrew prayers he didn’t understand, so they’d decided to take a trip to Israel, just the four of them. Mitch hadn’t converted when he married Elise, but he’d agreed to raise the kids Jewish without much argument. Anything had to be better than the nuns, so he hadn’t even done much research into the matter. Had he given thought to the absurdity of lavishly celebrating a punk thirteen-year-old, as they’d done with Rachel (who knew flowers could cost that much?), he might have objected. Annette had hit the roof when she found out the grandparents weren’t being included in the Israel trip (she wasn’t remotely mollified knowing his parents weren’t invited either) and had sent passive-aggressive emails the entire time they were away. The truth was that they couldn’t afford to take Elise’s parents with them and he felt uncomfortable asking them to pay their own way. He knew—even if he tried not to let it bother him—that the Feldmans (they of the pair of white BMWs in the garage and the perfect suburban house set on a bucolic two acres with a paid-off mortgage) were disappointed that he didn’t make more money. Notwithstanding that he was a Fulbright scholar when he met their daughter. The bottom line was that he didn’t provide their precious Elise with more of life’s luxuries, and his in-laws were old school in that way.

  What they didn’t get was that Elise wasn’t the materialistic type. The lasers radiating from the other suburban moms wearing designer clothing and flashy jewelry seemed to bounce off his wife like she was Teflon, though he had noticed more shopping bags around the house lately. But with Elise, he never had to worry. She was whip-smart and handled their family finances astutely, applying all that precision with which she’d once attacked her medical books to the management of their home. He could focus at work knowing that his wife could balance a checkbook with one eye closed, find the best value for internet and phone service, and know exactly how to invest what little they had remaining so that even if it didn’t grow exponentially, it modestly increased to the point where the idea of him and Elise putting their children through college, taking a trip around the world, and finally paying off their mortgage was actually feasible.

  And most important . . .

  The thought bubble into which Mitch had disappeared the last few months danced over his head again. All this living safely within their means and putting off trips and a golf club membership and a fancy car was going to allow him to take the leap he was about to take. Those coworkers of his, stretching their dollar beyond where it could go without tearing, couldn’t dream of doing what he planned next. It was all he could think about day and night, at the gym jogging off his protruding gut, at work while he slurped the cafeteria tomato soup, even at night when Elise stripped to her nightgown in front of him. All he could see were words, fonts, bylines, and typesets, those ingredients that would amount to his dream: an online literary journal with a focus on satire. Material was everywhere around him: the high-strung parents at the local high school chewing their nails from the football field sidelines; the suburban McMansions sprouting around them like weeds; the composting stations at every corner that people pretended not to notice. A fight in line at the bagel store on a Sunday morning could make him feel like he was living in a present-day Lord of the Flies. And he felt an urge to channel his observations and musings in a way that he couldn’t do in his current job. There was humor everywhere he looked if he remembered to step back an extra ten feet, to see the panorama; and his need to put it out in the world, repackaged as entertainment, felt almost suffocating. He just needed a good name, and that was where telling Elise would come in. Literary journals always had the oddest names, like Ploughshares or Salt Hill, and there was satire even in that. Elise would help him come up with a name that was equally highbrow and self-effacing.

  The financial implications of his career shift were not to be trifled about. The entire publishing industry was falling through quicksand and the chances of successfully launching a new journal online were slim. He just felt grateful that he and Elise were at a place where they could manage it: Both kids had college funds and Rachel’s four years at Stanford had been prepaid through a marvelous incentive plan that guaranteed a tuition lock. Elise successfully refinanced their mortgage a few years ago so the payments were even more manageable. And now, a free trip, coming at just the right time. He was planning to take a few weeks off after his last day at the Bee to help Rachel move back into the dorms and to breathe some life into Darius’s nonexistent college search. The office space he’d chosen in which to set up his new venture wasn’t going to be vacant for another month, so he’d enjoy the Caribbean with his family and then work a few weeks from home, spending time
with Elise in a way they hadn’t since before having children.

  The trip itinerary listed a black-tie dinner on the third night of the trip, with an elaborate nine-course tasting menu. He’d gotten the Feldmans into the habit of toasting before a meal and since then, they’d taken to toasting just about everything: Rachel’s soccer team, the installation of a new refrigerator, the birth of every baby his father-in-law delivered. Mitch decided he’d kick off the toasts at the cruise’s formal dinner with his big announcement. His in-laws might not be terribly impressed, but he really didn’t care. He was nearly fifty years old and he’d toast what he felt like toasting, even if it meant receiving only a few halfhearted clinks and a “hear! hear!” or two in return. The only reaction that mattered was Elise’s—especially after he’d waited so long to loop her in. He hoped and prayed the majestic setting and the lubrication of champagne would help.

  “I want to go,” he had said to Elise while the two of them sorted through the travel agent’s promotional materials together. He noticed a softness in his wife’s face while she ogled the pictures and he wanted more than anything to freeze her in that moment, where her worry lines blurred and her lower lip hung open in wonder. He’d never bought himself a fancy car or sat in first class. But for one week, he’d be the guy in the pool float with a drink in his hand, living like a boss, his wife splayed on a nearby chaise lounge sipping a piña colada.