The Floating Feldmans

by Elyssa Friedland

  “Need more towels?” Abeba asked.

  Elise’s mind wandered to the place where she thought Papua New Guinea lay on a map. Far, far away from whatever radar blip their boat was now on the Atlantic Ocean, and far from any of the boat’s likely destinations.

  “Do you have children?” Elise nonsensically answered the housekeeper.

  “Excuse me?” Abeba asked, handing Elise a stack of fresh-from-the-industrial-dryer towels.

  “Do you have kids? Like me. I have a girl and a boy. They are on the boat too,” Elise said, expanding on her question.

  “I do. I have three,” the housekeeper said quietly, and Elise regretted asking. Abeba’s face shadowed as undoubtedly the faces of her babies came in front of her eyes. Elise saw a pink string tied around her wrist, worn and nubby, but strong enough that it could withstand a thousand showers without falling off. “I have three daughters. They are eight, six, and four. I haven’t seen them in almost two years.” Abeba’s eyes brightened. “But I get break in four months and I see them.”

  “In time for Christmas,” Elise said, smiling warmly.

  “Oh, no, the holiday time is the most busy on the boat. I see them after. In the new year.”

  Elise blushed. That teacher of hers in medical school had been right. She never knew the right thing to say to people.

  “Where is your family now?” Abeba asked. “This boat have everything for the lucky children.”

  Elise shook her head wanly and looked around her parents’ empty room.

  “I have no idea where my children or my parents are. Thank you for the towels.”

  Abeba nodded and walked off with her cart toward a neighboring cabin and Elise stood alone in her parents’ room. She suspected Abeba was thinking that if she could have her family so close to her, she wouldn’t let them out of her sight. But it’s not that easy, Elise would have protested.

  She opened the closet doors and saw the neat row of her mother’s sundresses pressed against her father’s khakis. The colors of her father’s button-downs coordinated with her mother’s wardrobe, every sundress having a corresponding men’s dress shirt. Elise wondered if that could possibly have been intentional, or if her parents were just that uniquely in sync. She cringed thinking how much she was keeping from Mitch. They were metaphorically light-years away from matching sweaters.

  Hanging at the end of the rod under a protective layer of plastic, Elise saw a silver dress of her mother’s that triggered an irritating memory. It was from the time Elise flew home for her cousin Sonia’s wedding. It had been especially difficult for Elise to find something for the occasion. In order to spy on her children, Elise had signed up to serve hot lunch at their school, which had led to an unfortunate weight gain. This was back in the days before gluten was a thing and the PTA micromanaged the nutritional content of every dish served. Her children would float through the school kitchen, looking down at their trays or deep in conversation with their friends, and she’d be lucky if either of them even mustered a sign of recognition as she slopped mac and cheese onto their plates. After the lunch rush, Elise would fix herself a plate, tending to the comfort foods whose high salt and fat content elevated her dampened spirits, and she gained ten pounds before the school year was done.

  Cousin Sonia’s June wedding was a black-tie affair at the Pierre Hotel (Can you believe how much your uncle Harvey is spending? asked Annette about twenty times), and Mitch and Elise decamped to her parents’ house, where it was an easy commute to the festivities. After days of searching, Elise finally found a gray satin dress at Ann Taylor that minimized her billboard of an ass and had enough beading on the torso to distract from her bulbous stomach. Mitch more than made up for what she was lacking, looking especially dapper in his getup (her ink-fingered husband wasn’t one for tuxes normally). Moments before they were set to leave for the wedding, Elise, in search of lipstick, went downstairs and found Annette struggling with a bracelet clasp at the kitchen counter.

  “Elise, I need help with this,” she sputtered. “I can’t find your father anywhere.”

  David, with his nimble surgeon’s hands, used to be expert at things like threading needles for detached buttons and fastening intricate locks.

  “Sure,” Elise said, moving closer to her mother, who smelled of hair spray and perfume, an Annette cocktail that she suspected she’d be able to summon long after her mother was gone.

  “Thanks, honey,” Annette said, looking up at her daughter with gratitude crinkled in the corners of her eyes, which lasted all of two seconds. Quickly her face morphed into a menacing squint. “You’ve got to change,” she said urgently, eyeballing Elise’s gray dress with utter dismay. “We are twins.”

  “Mom, what are you talking about? Your dress is silver. Mine is gray. And who cares? They look nothing alike.” Elise ran through the differences in her head: different hemline, sleeves versus strapless, lace instead of satin. Three major elements, she thought triumphantly, since Mitch always said it was important to put descriptions in triplicate. His rhetoric would often spawn a discussion over whether there should be a comma in front of the “and” between the second and third item in a list (the Bee was a no-comma place, whereas the Language Arts Department at Sacramento High was adamant about the comma, much to Mitch’s chagrin).

  “What else did you pack?” Annette asked, the unlatched diamond tennis bracelet now resting on a cellophane-wrapped plate of noodle kugel from dinner the night before.

  “I flew across the country for this wedding with a carry-on and one garment bag. You have an entire closet full of gowns and cocktail dresses. Which one of us do you think should change? Assuming anyone needs to change at all, which of course we don’t,” Elise said. She remembered meeting Mitch’s gaze. He’d come into the kitchen holding his bow tie, the last piece of his ensemble, hoping, like Annette had been, for someone to help finish his dressing. Life would be so much easier if people could be totally self-sufficient, Elise had thought. A world with eight billion uncomplicated tiny islands, each wholly self-sustaining. In the end, Elise had changed, into a dress of her mother’s—a black silk column dress that was admittedly nicer and more expensive than anything Elise owned at the time, but which didn’t do her hips any favors.

  Elise moved to quickly shut the closet doors, when a wall-mounted safe inside the closet caught her eye. Without thinking, she entered the code her family used for everything from the home alarm system to the petty cash box at her father’s medical office. As a child she had loved to look at her mother’s jewelry. It wasn’t an extravagant collection, but to a young Elise the gems had seemed as big as rocks, their colors more vibrant than anything inside a Crayola box. In particular, she loved trying on Annette’s sparkling engagement ring, shaped like a pear, which made it look even bigger than it was. “Spready,” Annette had told her once when she was playing dress-up with it. “Pears are very spready,” which apparently meant the cut showed its size mainly on the surface instead of in depth. Elise now wondered if people too could be described as “spready.” It was a rather apt adjective for the vacuous mothers Elise contended with back home.

  Elise looked down at her own ring from Mitch, a half-karat round that had cost her husband a quarter of what his internship paid him the year he proposed, and thought about Annette’s reaction when she first showed it to her. “Well, I suppose it’s a nice starter ring,” she had said, appraising the color and clarity of the diamond by the light of their living room window. Elise had never upgraded or thought to change it. Even with shopping as her modus operandi, the ring had sentimental value and she’d only taken it off twice in her life—before checking in to the hospital to give birth to Rachel and Darius. Besides, her fingers were squat, shaped like baby carrots, and a larger ring wouldn’t be flattering.

  She had now entered the familiar code onto the safe’s keypad, but the lock didn’t click open. Strange, thought Elise. If she were to nee
d to enter her parents’ house, would the alarm code she grew up with also no longer work? The notion was surprisingly off-putting.

  She shut the cabinet doors, annoyed that her parents weren’t in their cabin. How many chances would she have to get them alone on the trip? She noticed the boat’s daily schedule, the Deep Blue Digest, on one of the nightstands and saw that “Makeup Techniques with Mary” was circled. So that was where her mother was. And her father had trotted along to hold Annette’s pocketbook while she climbed into the tall cosmetics chair to get a new face. As Elise turned to leave, a glowing light from the bathroom caught her eye. She peeked inside and saw a line of pill bottles on the countertop, big ones slapped with overlapping labels that clearly held more important things than prescription-strength Dramamine. There had to be at least ten of them lined up neatly next to twin toothbrushes and a bottle of saline solution. Elise felt the inside of her stomach turn to sludge. So that was what this trip was about. Her mother was sick. It had been so out of character for Annette to want to celebrate her birthday in a big way that Elise should have known something was up.

  She felt the hurt even before the panic, a too-hot beverage sliding painfully down her esophagus. Why hadn’t anyone told her? Was it because her mother was married to a doctor, a retired one who had the time to monitor her care and take her to appointments? Perhaps. Elise would just be a nagging voice with nothing to add aside from the fragments she remembered from her medical textbooks that had zero practical application. Especially considering how geographically far away Elise had positioned herself from her parents. Nobody but she knew that Mitch had had an equally attractive offer all those years ago from the Hartford Courant. And that it was Elise who had made a point of talking about the California climate being so refreshing and had been the first to call a real estate broker on the West Coast. The guilt stung.

  “Anyway, I think we should see what the kids want to do tomorrow. I’d like to just walk around the little town and maybe have lunch off the boat. We don’t need to sign up for any of the excursions until later tonight. I doubt Freddy will join us.” Elise heard her mother’s voice coming from down the hall. She quickly jumped out of the bathroom before she had a chance to read the labels on any of the pill bottles.

  “Sounds fine. Maybe I’ll even do the nine-hole golf course if it’s not too h—” David started to respond.

  “Elise, what are you doing here?” Annette said, eyeing her suspiciously from the door frame.

  “Nothing. I just wanted to talk to you guys alone. And the housekeeping lady let me in. I thought you were resting. Can we talk?”

  Annette set down a large shopping bag on the bed, labeled—as Elise had predicted—Makeup by Mary. Elise felt a swirling urge to peek inside the bag and to check the Deep Blue Digest for Mary’s hours. Annette was radiant. Her skin looked practically airbrushed and the green in her eyes shone even brighter thanks to Mary’s use of copper eye shadow. Elise realized how much unused beauty knowledge she had squirreled away, all those years of storing tips from Annette. Green and orange were opposite each other on the color wheel, and therefore made an excellent eye color/shadow pairing. For a sick person, she was ravishing.

  “Of course,” her mother said and her father gestured toward their tiny balcony. Outside, they sat on chaises and stared for a moment at the water. It looked like an endless sheet of steel blue tinfoil, shiny and crinkly and reflective of the sun in the most miraculous ways. Elise wondered if there were people on board with minds uncluttered enough to appreciate the vast beauty around them. And, if so, Elise wondered what it would be like to be one of those people even for just a few precious moments.

  “What’s up?” her father asked, seeming to grow impatient. His face bore the same expression as when a woman’s cervix wouldn’t dilate past seven, no matter how much Misoprostol he administered.

  “So, Mom, Dad, I’ve got some exciting news that I want to talk to you both about.”

  And, just like that, the spigot was open. Elise detailed her business plans, finding her brain remarkably nimble. She was spewing statistics about the number of diabetics in the United States, how food manufacturers were going to want to get in on the action, the way apps and medicine were an inevitable marriage. She got so fired up herself that by the time she got to the only number that really mattered, how much she needed to borrow from her parents, Elise had convinced herself that Dia-Beat was actually happening.

  “Basically, what I need is fifty thousand dollars to get this off the ground. And with Darius starting college next year, we just don’t have it.”

  Annette and David exchanged uncomfortable looks. This wasn’t what Elise had expected. In her mind, broad smiles broke across their faces, and her father all but reached into his back pocket to hand over his wallet.

  “What does Mitch say about all this?” David asked, looking, if Elise was seeing correctly, extremely tired. The boat had rocked erratically all night, like the sea was in a terrible fight with itself, only to calm down into the still blanket it was at this moment. Based on the chatter around the boat, for some cruisers the motion had lulled them into a trance-like sleep, while for others it meant tossing and turning all night. Elise had hit the bed like a lead balloon, but that was more on account of the margaritas than the motion of the ocean. So perhaps her father was just in the didn’t-sleep-well camp. If only Elise had known, she might have waited to ask for the money. She and Freddy used to be afraid to ask David for anything if he’d pulled an all-nighter at the hospital.

  “He doesn’t know.” She watched surprise, then worry, spread across the senior Feldmans’ faces. They were probably thinking she and Mitch were getting a divorce. With all the disappointment Freddy had caused, her parents couldn’t really take another blow. It made her resent her brother even more, the fact that she always had to be yin when she wanted to go yang.

  “The reason Mitch doesn’t know is that he can’t know. Because of his job at the Bee.” Elise expanded. “There are too many conflicts of interest. Which is why I can’t get a bank loan either. Our finances are totally commingled and he’d know right away.” She gave herself an imaginary pat on the back for adding in that spontaneous detail.

  “Elise, your father and I need to talk about this before we can commit. I’m sure you understand,” Annette said, smoothing out the linen of her capri pants, which had no wrinkles needing smoothing.

  Elise didn’t understand. Her parents could spend a bloody fortune to bring the entire family onto a cruise ship for a week of overeating and mediocre sightseeing, but they couldn’t seed her business? Something that could change the course of her life and help sick people! It was incredible how quickly she was growing indignant over a fictitious scenario. Because what if it had been true? All that really mattered was that her parents weren’t willing to help. They didn’t believe in her anymore. She forced herself to take a Dr. Margaret breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth. She simply couldn’t let her anger show. Not if she had a prayer of getting the money. No, Elise needed to play the long con.

  “Of course. I expected that. The only issue, though, is the patent. I know I’m ahead of the competition in terms of my software development, but others will catch up quickly. You know how this market is.” Naturally her parents had no idea how the app market was. They had AOL email addresses. Assholes Online, her kids called it.

  “Let’s discuss this later,” her father said firmly and Elise blanched at his tone.

  “Sure. I’m going to go get ready for the around-the-world party. Can’t wait to see that sushi ice sculpture.” Elise managed to deliver the last bit without a trace of sarcasm. She got up from the chaise and headed inside, hoping to peek into the bathroom for another glance at those pill bottles. But her father slipped in before she could.

  On the other side of the cabin door, Elise searched up and down for Abeba’s face. She needed someone to remind her how lucky she was to have
her family close, but the hallway was abandoned. Elise headed for the casino, where she thought Freddy and Natasha might be. She descended the grand, circular stairway, following the ding-a-ling-a-ling of three cherries lining up on slots and the swoosh of tokens collecting in plastic buckets. She said a silent prayer that of all the addictions that could have befallen her, it wasn’t this. The scene in the casino was dismal, like at one of the budget hotels on the Las Vegas Strip. There was nothing sadder than the sight of an oxygen tank parked next to a slot machine, and so far Elise had seen three.

  She scanned the psychedelic space, looking from the craps tables to the blackjack high-tops to the roulette wheels, but didn’t spot her brother. Disheartened, she bought a vodka martini off a waitress in a sequined cropped blazer and took an unladylike swig. She was really rattled by her parents’ hesitation about lending her the money. What a miscalculation to have assumed they would be thrilled. Instead they had hemmed and hawed, silently telegraphing each other not to commit to anything without a private discussion. Oh, yes, she had noticed the side-eye.

  She supposed it had been unrealistic to expect them to fork over an immense sum of money without thinking it over. There was parity to be considered. While it was only a loan, what would Freddy think if he caught wind of it? And even though it wasn’t likely he would ever find out, clearly it would take a toll on Annette and David’s collective conscience. She ought to tell Freddy about the pill bottles. There wasn’t much he or she could do, considering their mother was keeping her illness a secret, but Elise would certainly be upset if Freddy had been the one to find out and not told her. The problem was, she wasn’t even sure what there was to tell.

  It was possible things weren’t as bad as she first suspected. Annette had participated in Zumba twice since embarkation, joined the fiesta night conga line, and found three mah-jongg pickup games, where her concentration was so sharp she’d won more than fifty dollars off her competitors—ladies from the Scarsdale canasta league. Elise ran through the encyclopedia of possible diseases that could necessitate so many pills. Annette’s hair was fuller and glossier than ever, so Elise ruled out cancer. Her skin glowed like she’d just stepped out of the spa, so the liver wasn’t a likely trouble spot. The heart. It had to be something cardiovascular. Her mother was a rubber band ball of anxiety, who got worked up if she couldn’t find a parking spot or the brisket didn’t brown evenly. The heart was a muscle, and Annette had flexed and squeezed the hell out of it for too many decades. Those pill bottles must contain blood thinners, beta-blockers, statins, and whatever else was necessary to keep her ticker from giving out.