The Middlesteins

by Jami Attenberg

  Now her father was entrenched in a bed at Northwestern Memorial; strings had been pulled to get him closer to his daughter, who attended the law school a few blocks away, one Russian calling another, a private room arranged for a good man. So in addition to her everyday back-and-forth between law school and library, there was also travel between her dorm and the hospital, up the elevators, down the hallways, through the doors. Edie just spent all day (when she was not sitting in class or studying in the library) walking, sometimes running. She could barely remember to eat, let alone that she should try and find a husband at some point, something her next-door neighbor, Carly, thought was extremely important. (Weren’t they supposed to be feminists? Edie did not even have the energy to argue with her.)

  She wasn’t living any kind of life at all, but she was still more alive than her father, whose skin in the last few weeks had simply turned gray, his nose and ears becoming more pronounced against his shrinking head, even though none of his doctors knew exactly what was wrong with him. And this guy, her date, so leisurely, so cavalier, he had all the time in the world to try out new restaurants, didn’t he?

  “Can you just meet me at my dorm at six and let’s not argue about it?” she said. “I’ll be in front of the building.”

  “How will I recognize you?” he said.

  “I’ll be the one who doesn’t care where we eat dinner,” she said.

  She did care. She missed eating. (Men, she didn’t miss. You can’t miss something you never had in the first place.) Food had been something that had made her happy, and now she was so sad and tired all the time that she could not even remember the connection between the two, between food and joy, and when she looked in the mirror, she saw drawn skin on her face, and unfamiliar bones across the top of her chest, delicately poking against her skin like shells beneath sand. Now food was merely something she used to power her body so that she could walk: dorm, class, dorm, hospital, dorm. Thirty years later she will lose track of distinct emotions, everything will be blurred together, and there will only just be feeling and eating. But for now food, along with joy, had slipped away from her.

  And here was a man she didn’t know—a fix-up; Carly had met him at shul, this Richard Middlestein, and he had boldly asked her out, not noticing the glittering engagement ring on her finger, and when she had waved it at him, he had ducked his head, covered with thick, curly hair, awkwardly but charmingly, and he was tall and wearing a suit (no hippie, this one, thank God; hippies were over), and he was going to be a pharmacist in a year, and did he want to meet another smart Jewish girl? Of course he did!—taking the time to ask her what she wanted to eat. Maybe, Edie, you could slow down for a minute and answer the man?

  “We could go to Gino’s,” she said.

  “I love Gino’s,” he said. “I think Chicago pizza is better than New York pizza, and I say that as a lifelong New Yorker. But don’t tell anyone I said that.”

  “Who would I tell?” she said.

  Three hours later she leaned against the limestone walls of Abbott Hall, in a cool green summer dress that hung around her waist. A year ago it had fit her snugly across her gut and around her hips. She had been six feet tall for a few years, and had had a lovely plush body, and now she felt like a scarecrow. Where had her breasts gone? Those were mostly missing. Where were her parts? They had been disappeared by some unknown force. She turned her head right and noticed the lake, a handful of pristine sailboats gliding in the wind. Usually she never looked past the traffic speeding by on Lake Shore Drive. Carly had gone sailing with her rich, cerebral fiancé two weeks ago and had invited her along, and Edie had declined the offer before Carly had even finished her sentence. She was going to be an orphan soon: her father was dying, she was sure of it. His first test had been inconclusive, but deep in her heart she knew that all those Pall Malls had taken their toll, and it was not nickels or dimes her father would pay. Do orphans even go sailing?

  Other law students exited the building, books in hand. They were all going to do better than her in class, in life. She had so much work to do, and she couldn’t catch up; she was, for the first time ever, only a merely adequate student. She didn’t even know what kind of lawyer she wanted to become. She should know by now what she was going to be someday. Why was she going to eat pizza with a stranger?

  She wore her hair down, a good idea, the dark curls a tantalizing contrast with her green dress, and she had dug out a small bottle of lip gloss from the bottom of her underwear drawer, where it had fallen six months before and where she had not so accidentally forgotten about it, as if even the slightest lick of makeup would slow her down.

  And then there he was, in a suit (it was his only suit, but she didn’t know that yet), and he was smiling (his happiest days were behind him the minute he met her, but he didn’t know that yet), and tall, much taller than Edie, so that she felt even smaller, and he walked confidently, like he liked what he had swinging between his legs. And the curly hair she had been told about was indeed thick and dark, just like her own hair, and so he instantly felt familiar to her. A different kind of woman might not have wanted the familiar. Five years down the line, who knows? Maybe Edie would have become that kind of woman, who wanted nothing to do with someone who came from the same place. He might have been from New York City, but he was just the same as she was. As her father hovered on the edge of something terrible, as he dwindled down into a pale, bony version of his former self, as he threatened to disappear entirely, here was a man who was tall and healthy and full of something Edie found herself wanting to devour.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  But how far did they make it? One block, two blocks, and then they were approaching the hospital. And then how many steps past the hospital until she felt her gut pull her back toward her father? Even though he had encouraged her to go meet this young, single, Jewish man. “The test results will be the same no matter what time of day,” he told her. But she stiffened like stone on the corner of St. Clair Street, the wind pushing back at her dress and her hair, frozen and alive at the same time.

  Here was what she wanted to say to this Richard, making his jokes, touching her elbow: Did you know that my father translated three books of Russian poetry into English? For fun, he did it. It wasn’t even his job. He just loved poetry. I have the books. I can show them to you. The titles are embossed in gold.

  Here is what she would have said to this Richard, looking at her lips: All he ever did was love my mother and help people.

  Here is what she would have said if she felt like herself, whatever that meant anymore: A life well spent, do you know anything about that?

  Instead she said, “My father is sick.” Still looking at him, she pointed her hand faintly in the direction of the hospital.

  And he said, “I heard.”

  “I can’t eat,” she said.

  “You gotta eat,” he said kindly, and now both of his hands were on her arms. “I’m going to take care of this,” he said.

  And that was how Edie and Richard’s first date ended in a hospital room, a mushroom pizza from Gino’s on the nightstand, Edie’s father coughing and laughing at every single one of Richard’s jokes, everyone in the room pretending that Edie did not twice excuse herself to the bathroom to cry. It was the story Edie told at their ten-year-anniversary party, when there was still a chance they were in love. “He did not abandon me in my time of need,” she said to their friends gathered before them in a private room at a suburban steak house. “It was the beginning of everything.” Everyone raised a glass. To love, they said. To love.

  Middlestein in Exile

  On the one hand,” said Richard Middlestein, Jew, local business owner, ex–New Yorker, “my wife and I were married for close to forty years, and we had built a life together, a home, a place in our community with our friends and family, a role in the synagogue.” He had to admit that his relationship with the synagogue had diminished in the last few years for a variety of reasons, not the least of which
was his wife’s health. “And there were the kids to consider, although I didn’t think Robin would care that much, and I thought, hey, Benny has his hands full keeping that wife of his happy. Isn’t he busy enough? Maybe it would impact the grandkids, but how much?

  “On the other hand,” said Richard Middlestein, newly single gentleman, not-quite senior citizen, respectable, dull but fighting it, “my wife, who is a very smart woman who has done a lot of good for a lot of people so I can’t totally knock her, my wife made me miserable, she picked at me till I bled on a daily basis, so much worse lately, more than you could ever imagine. And she got fat, so fat I could not love her in the same way anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I like a little meat on the bones. I knew what I was marrying. But she was hurting herself. Every day, more and more. That is hard on a person. To watch that happen.” He lowered his voice. “And it had been a long time since we’d had marital relations.”

  He could not bring himself to explain further that he had imagined that his sex drive would fade away in his late fifties and he would just forget that they had been sleeping on opposite sides of the bed, clinging to their respective corners as if they were holding on to the edge of a cliff. But sixty came, and his sex drive still simmered insistently within him, unused but not expired, a fire in the hole. He had never cared before, but now suddenly he realized that he could not go the rest of his life without sex, that he refused to give up the fight. But he knew also he would never want to touch his wife’s pocked, veined, bloated flesh ever again. If not now, then when?

  “I felt I had no choice but to leave her. The divorce is going to be final in six months, more or less.” (More.) “I’m sure you understand.”

  The woman he had met on the Internet, a good-looking redhead named Jill, a legal secretary in her early fifties who had lost her husband, the love of her life, three years earlier—drunk-driving accident (not him, the other guy)—who was having a hard enough time with dating and would give anything to have her husband back even for a day, no, she did not understand. She clasped her hands together and looked down and thought about her wedding day in 1992, a small ceremony in Madison, where she was born and raised, and she pictured, as she had been doing far too much lately—it was not healthy, she could admit it—her husband bent down at her leg, sliding off her garter while everyone she loved in the world laughed and applauded.

  As with every previous failed Internet date, Middlestein picked up the check.

  * * *

  Middlestein had been meeting women online for three months, since the day he had left his wife, leaving practically everything behind, books, furniture, photo albums, any record of the past. He had moved into the new condo building across the street from the pharmacy he owned, an apartment which he had signed a lease on two months before he left her and had been quietly furnishing by making secret trips to the IKEA in Schaumburg. Three times he had steered his cart through the crush of traffic in the dizzyingly bright aisles, at first awkwardly, this new singular decision-making identity unfamiliar. (His wife had made all household decisions since the day they’d married, crushing him like a nut when he offered the slightest opinion—and had he really cared? No, probably not, but he would never know now.) But with each successive trip, he had a renewed confidence: The Swedish names were meant not to confuse but to guide; he was not required to make a buying decision until nearly just before he reached the cash register, and even then he had the power to walk out the door without a single item in his cart; and maybe he did want a color scheme after all. Maybe he was a color-scheme kind of guy.

  And what a bargain that place was! Sure, it was a lot of crap he didn’t need, and his father, who had owned a high-end furniture shop in Jackson Heights for decades, would probably roll over, coughing, grumbling, cursing, in his grave if he saw what Richard’s new bed frame was made of. But he was not a rich man—by some standards, maybe, to starving children in India, he probably lived like a king—since the market had wiped out half their retirement fund, so he had no choice in the matter.

  Now he had a slickly furnished condo (white and dark blue with this little crisscross patchy pattern on all his bedding and pillows) and his heart and his life up on a screen for anyone to see. He exploited his newfound freedom at first, dating daily, sometimes twice a day, meeting one woman for lunch and another for dinner. There were thousands of women between the ages of forty and fifty-five (he didn’t want to date a woman his own age, he wanted them young and vital and alive and ready to keep up with him—with how he was imagining he was going to be—once they finally hit the sack together) who were Jewish, divorced, widowed, never married, living within forty miles of his zip code (anything farther and he’d be dating a Wisconsin girl, and that didn’t feel right to him; he didn’t even know if there were Jews in Wisconsin anyway), though he was, if he had to be honest, more attracted to people within a twenty-mile range, because traffic was such a mess these days with so much construction going on. And all he had to do, apparently, was ask, and they would be willing to meet him. There were a lot of lonely ladies out there looking for love. Good, he thought, more for me.

  He had dated fifteen divorcées, some more bitter than others, even more bitter than his wife, but they were also the funniest out of all the women he met, their pain somehow strengthening them, the endless paperwork and court proceedings and therapy sessions forcing them to look inward and, if not good-naturedly then at least wryly, laugh at themselves and the situation they were in. These women were veteran first-daters. They were putting themselves out there. They were hustling to meet their new mate.

  He dated a dozen widows, most of whom had sopped up their tragedies like their hearts were sponges. They did not want to be on that date. They were there because someone had made them, their child, their mother, their sister, their co-worker. If they had their way they would stay home by themselves on a Friday night, but could they really stay home on every Friday night for the rest of their lives? In their ads they promised they were lively and active and engaged in the world around them, but in person they were only able to fake it for a half hour or so before their devastation became apparent to Middlestein. On three occasions his dates had cried. They had his sympathy. He acted the part anyway. But eventually he began to grumble to himself, If you’re not ready to date, then why are you here? He didn’t want to be anyone’s practice run. He hadn’t dated a widow in a month, crossed them off his list of potential mates, but that redhead looked so gorgeous in her photo, ooh, she had that gorgeous bosom and gigantic eyelashes, he could just see himself getting caught up in her, if only she hadn’t wanted to leave in such a hurry.

  The rest were these women who had never married. At first he thought of them as these poor women, because how their egos must have suffered as they careened through their free-flying youth and suddenly woke up one day to realize they had become old, Jewish maids. Also, they had never experienced what it was like to be committed thoroughly, which, for better or worse, had taught him a thing or two about life and shaped the man he had become. But sometimes after talking for a while, he thought maybe they were the lucky ones. They weren’t ruined like the rest of the women, at least not in the same way. Their losses were different, and what they had gained was different, too. Most of them were childless. Most of them could give or take marriage, and he suspected that when they left him, they never gave him another thought. His picture was blurry, but there was no denying it in person. Even if he had molded his interests in his profile to match the ads of the younger women, one look and they knew, this guy had never done yoga in his life, and most likely was not picnicking in Millennium Park either. He was somebody’s father, somebody’s grandfather; an old man.

  And then there was the hooker, or half a hooker, maybe; he wasn’t quite sure what she was. Tracy had contacted him on the site a few days after he joined it, and he should have suspected something, because she was far younger than him, thirty-nine years old—only four years older than his son! What would she want with h
im anyway? He should have known, but still he agreed to meet with her, suggesting coffee, then she suggesting a drink, and then a few hours before they were to meet, she e-mailing him and telling him she had just come from the gym and had had a tough workout and she was famished and did he mind meeting her for dinner instead? She named a pricey steak house, and how could he say no? He didn’t want to seem cheap or less than a class act.

  She turned out to be a real knockout—though perhaps a bit older than she claimed on her profile—with dark, shining eyes, plump lips, a lush behind, and slick, minklike hair that she kept pulled to one side over her bare shoulder. She was wearing a strapless dress made of a black stretchy material that ended above the knee. Middlestein hadn’t seen that much skin on a woman up close in a long time. She smelled fantastic, this combination of flowers and baby powder, and she was tan, and fit, and everything about her was perfect. As she slowly crossed and uncrossed her legs and ran her fingertips along the shiny enameled wood of the bar, possibilities unfolded in front of him.

  They sat first at the bar—she guzzled a martini, he sipped at a beer—until their names were called, and he couldn’t say exactly what was going on until after they had been seated and just before their steaks had already been delivered. He asked if she enjoyed her work as a receptionist at a massage-therapy institute, and she put her hand on his and said, “Well, what I’m really looking for is a daddy, so I never have to work again,” and then she giggled, and he stared at her for longer than he meant to, and she said, “If you know what I mean,” in a low voice, and he—he just couldn’t help himself—he did the briefest of calculations, he moved a zero around in his bank account, even though he already knew the answer, and this was not what he wanted anyway, but oh, he wouldn’t mind putting his hands on that tuchus of hers. But there was no way. A steak dinner, sure; not much more than that, though. And if he couldn’t bring her to his grandchildren’s b’nai mitzvah in June—he could just hear the whispers, he knew he’d be whispering himself if one of his buddies did the same, and his children, and especially that daughter-in-law of his, would never forgive him—then she wasn’t much of an investment at all. Then she said, “Do you think you would like to be my daddy?” and a massive pang of depression struck him, and he looked down into the bottom of his drink, searching deeply for his dignity. When he looked up, her smile had faded.