The Middlesteins

by Jami Attenberg

  “Just drive,” said Edie. “You’re embarrassing me in front of them.”

  “You can’t do this anymore,” said Robin. “You can’t eat like this.”

  “You’re the one who wanted to eat,” she said, and she started to cry quietly and to herself.

  “I don’t want you to die,” said Robin.

  “I didn’t know you cared,” said Edie.

  “Stop it,” said Robin. “Don’t pull that on me. Don’t try to make me feel bad for being me.”

  They didn’t say anything for a while, watching everything shift in the strip mall, the two girls crushing their smokes under their heels then sharing a stick of gum, the UPS driver exiting the lot, one hot dog already half eaten before he pulled out onto the road, the girl in the cell-phone store showing a text to a co-worker, cursing loudly, sending a customer scuttling out the front door. They watched a party of seven, a birthday party, walk into the restaurant. They were good tippers, even if you couldn’t tell it by looking at them.

  “I’m here now, aren’t I?” said Robin, but neither one of them knew if it was already too late.

  Male Pattern

  Benny Middlestein woke up one day and realized he was going bald, and he thought: “This is the end, beautiful friend.” He’d always had a perfectly thick head of hair—he had even come out of the womb with his rosy pink head covered in dark fuzz—and there had been no indication that he would ever have had anything to worry about for the rest of his life, at least when it came to his hair. Other things, they were maybe more of a problem.

  His daughter’s newfound adolescent moodiness, those dark, twisted, frustrated glances she shot him whenever he opened his mouth, as if an Oh, my God, Dad were just hovering in the air between them, waiting to be splattered up against him, a condescending pie in the face. He remembered when his little sister had gone sour in her teens. Once the milk turned, there was no turning it back. Yes, his daughter was something to worry about.

  There was also his wife’s full-blown obsession with his mother’s weight and her diabetes, it was all she talked about, first thing in the morning, staring straight up at the ceiling in bed. Not that it didn’t need talking about, so he couldn’t argue with her necessarily, only sometimes maybe, just for a day, he wished they could take a break.

  But there she was, squirreled up next to him under the comforter, frowning, making all kinds of new lines in her forehead.

  “I’m worried,” she said.

  “I know you’re worried,” he said. If you keep making that face, it’ll stay that way, is what he wanted to say.

  “Aren’t you worried? Why aren’t you worried more?”

  “I’m worried plenty.”

  He put a pillow over his face and inhaled the fabric softener, chemical approximation of a mountain breeze.

  At night, too, she was fixated on this life and death situation, after the kids went to bed, during what was supposed to be their quiet time together, out back, sharing a joint.

  “Can’t you just relax?” he said. He rubbed her shoulders, narrow, fragile, wrenched up with worry. “Take another hit.”

  “This stuff will kill you,” she said.

  “We’ve been smoking this for twenty years,” he said.

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” she said.

  She was not wearing her mortality well, a real shame for such a pretty girl.

  And there were e-mails during the day. Sometimes there were texts, and she hated texting, the squinting and the poking. But Rachelle had been following his mother around like some undercover cop, tracking her eating, and it was not enough that she contain this knowledge within herself.

  She’s at the Superdawg on Milwaukee. 3 hot dogs!!!

  He had tried to tell his wife to stop following her, but even saying the words made him feel like he was falling from the sky, a loose and lurching sensation in his gut. He searched for the right thing to say, because it all just seemed so preposterous, that they were even having this conversation. You’re freaking me out, was he allowed to say that? Please don’t stalk my mother anymore.

  “I know you’re just trying to help,” he said. “But I’m not sure how she would feel about it.” This was over lunch, a small, sunny diner near the synagogue, where they had just dropped off the kids for their haftorah lesson with the cantor. They were both eating salads covered in raw vegetables; that was all they ever ate lately. Rachelle had ordered for them both without asking him what he wanted. Oil and vinegar on the side.

  He salted and peppered his salad when she went to the bathroom.

  “I think she has a right to privacy,” he said, head bowed, one fleck of red, raw onion trapped on a back molar, stubbornly resisting his tongue’s ministrations.

  “That’s like saying someone who is about to jump off the roof of a building should be allowed to enjoy the view first,” she said. She pushed the salad away from her, half eaten, and gave it a disgusted glance. “I specifically told her no croutons,” she said. “You heard me, right?”

  “I heard you,” he said, cowed, covering his mouth with his hand and reaching one finger quickly inside to free the onion from his tooth.

  “Just give her a break,” he said.

  “You won’t be telling me to give her a break when she’s dead,” said Rachelle, and he suddenly missed that fleck of onion, a simple problem he could solve with a small gesture.

  He was worried about his mother, even if Rachelle didn’t believe it. He was worried about his mother, two surgeries down, maybe another on the way, and he was worried about his daughter and his wife, who had both forgotten how to smile, and he was, on a smaller scale, worried about his father, who seemed adrift and sad now that he had left Benny’s mother and was playing the field, the sixty-year-old suburbanite field, which he couldn’t imagine was a particularly fun field, and, for the first time in his life, he was least worried about his sister, who, he was pretty sure, even as closed off as she was, as unrelentingly cranky, might actually have met someone and fallen in love.

  But his hair! He’d always had his hair, his crown of glory: thick, jet-black, with jaunty waves that set it slightly on its end. He wore it a half inch longer than his conservative co-workers did, and he liked to believe that it gave him a youthful edge over them. In college, he’d worn it even longer and had busy sideburns as well, which gave him a grubby bad-boy look, as bad as a ZBT at the University of Illinois could be. His hair was one of the things that had drawn Rachelle to him; he wasn’t as boisterous as his brothers, he didn’t push for the easy joke, not because he was shy—he was plenty funny, he thought—but because he was usually extremely stoned. Still, in the corner by the stereo, at an off-campus party thrown by one of the brothers, a purple-green-swirled glass bong someone had brought back from his summer travels in Amsterdam seated before him, strong, silent, fit, slightly pie-eyed, with a tight T-shirt, tight Levi’s, and I-don’t-give-a-shit flip-flops, and with a head of hair so thick there was no way he didn’t have a kick-ass gene pool, Benny got the hottest girl in the room without lifting much more than that bong to his lips.

  Forever he’d had that hair. That was the one thing he should not have had to worry about, and yet there it was, sliding off his head every morning in the shower like sunburned skin after a weekend at the beach. There was now a significant bald spot on the back of his head, and the hair at his temples had started to recede. He could only wonder what would happen next: Would his body shrink, too, into the shape of a frail old man, and would his wife eventually reject him? Was he dying? Or was he merely getting old?

  Even as the answers sat right before him, that perhaps all this worry about his wife, his mother, his daughter, and on and on, had manifested itself so obviously in a physical way, he refused to believe that it was as simple (although, of course, it was not simple at all) as that, and so he went to see Dr. Harris, a good guy, a straight shooter, and also the owner of a nice head of hair himself, his graying and cut short but still thick and at
tractive.

  “It could be a number of things,” said Dr. Harris. “Genetics, that’s first on the list.”

  “It’s not genetic,” said Benny, his legs swinging slightly from the exam table, 8:00 A.M. on a Monday, an urgent appointment after a weekend of hair loss. “Not on my mother’s side, not on my father’s side. No one’s bald.”

  “Stress is another possibility,” the doctor said gently to Benny. They belonged to the same synagogue, and their wives were in a book club together, and he had heard all about Rachelle lately, how she had insisted the last time they had all met (they were discussing The Help) that pastries no longer be served at their meetings. No pastries, no cheese, no crackers. Just crudités, and don’t even try to sneak ranch dip in there, she wouldn’t hear of it; ranch dip was all sugar. There was nothing wrong with making a dietary request, but it was the way that she said it. She was violent in her articulation—“I swear to God, she almost sounded British,” said his wife—and she was righteous. No wine either. Empty calories. As a doctor, Roger Harris technically had to agree with Rachelle, but as a human being he wondered if she had gone off the deep end. (“What’s the point of having a book club if you don’t get to eat brownies and drink wine?” said his wife. “Otherwise I’ll just stay home.”)

  Benny stared at his doctor, the wise man, the trusted source of knowledge. He wanted to be able to talk to him about his problem; he wanted to be able to talk to anyone. He used to be able to talk to his wife about everything. They had been on the same team since they were seniors in college. There was an accidental pregnancy, and there was no question they’d be getting married, keeping those babies, the twins, twice as much to love. They were in this life together. And now she was the problem, one of them anyway. He couldn’t bring himself to admit out loud to this relative stranger sitting before him that the best part of his life had suddenly become the worst. Still, he was no liar.

  “Who doesn’t have stress?” said Benny. “I think there’s something wrong with you if you don’t have it. But this much?” He pointed to his head with both index fingers.

  “I can do some tests,” said the doctor. He rattled off a list, but Benny wasn’t listening, he was thinking of his mother’s health. Her diabetes was taking her down fast, and he felt so helpless; he didn’t think a raw-vegetable diet was going to make a difference. Benny jerked back just as the doctor handed him a prescription for Propecia.

  “In the short term, if you can, take a couple of vacation days. Get a massage. You might consider finding someone to talk to about whatever it is you’re going through. There are some great therapists here in the building, and I’m pretty sure they’re on your insurance plan.” He leaned forward and tapped Benny on the knee with his clipboard. “Hey, there’s no shame in getting a little help.”

  Benny looked down at the clipboard, not at the doctor. Clearly he didn’t know where he came from, how his family operated. Therapy was for people who had an interest in communication. This was not the Middlestein family, at least not anymore.

  “So set up an appointment with Marnie at the front desk for those tests, and we’ll look at next steps from there,” Dr. Harris said. They shook hands, like men, firmly, seriously, with intent.

  Benny did not set up an appointment with Marnie at the front desk. He did head to his father’s pharmacy, though, prescription in hand. He would be late for work, but he did not care. All this craziness had started because his father had left his mother after she got sick, and if he were still there to take care of her and nurse her back to health, none of this would be happening.

  He drove quickly, occasionally catching a glimpse of his head in the rearview mirror. He was unable to resist adjusting the mirror at a stoplight, angling it at his head; was it so thin he could see the sunlight through it now?

  There was nothing wrong with him, except for his family.

  In the corner of the mini-mall, across from the Polish-owned hair and nail salon, sat his father’s last pharmacy, the final, fading jewel in his empire. Once there were three. Now there was just one, with cracked linoleum and an outdated greeting-card section. Walgreens was cheaper and had a far superior skin-care section.

  But his father’s clientele persisted. He had been the first Jewish pharmacist to set up shop in the area, and he had collected his customers from all the other lonely Jews who had moved northwest of the city and the lake in the 1970s, looking for an affordable new home and an easy commute, not thinking far ahead enough as to how they would build a community for themselves. Well, you start small, as it turns out. Richard and nine other men—how had he managed to pull a minyan together?—regularly meeting in the back room of the pharmacy. Praying, and then plotting for a future: regular services, first at the local high-school auditorium, so many Jews crawling out of the woodwork to attend, happy to find a place where they didn’t have to explain why they put all their bread away once a year, or why there wasn’t a Christmas tree in their front window, or why they drove so far just to get some decent whitefish salad. Why the phrase “Jew down” wasn’t acceptable, under any circumstances. There was a cantor fresh from school, a rabbi who had left another synagogue in Ohio under veiled but ultimately innocuous circumstances and wanted to start over, investors, believers, narcissists—they all threw in, did whatever it took to build something out of nothing, a place to worship from an empty plot of unincorporated land surrounded by oak trees stretching far back to a tiny stream where deer gathered sometimes in the summer. A beautiful place to be yourself.

  The synagogue members all supported Middlestein Drugs for years, enabling Richard to open one more and then another across the northwest suburbs. The eighties were a good time for everyone. But then the family business began to slowly crumble, like a sick tree limb infested with a mysterious fungus. There were a few causes: More conservative members of the synagogue branched off to create their own competing temple a few towns over. People moved out of the area, or died. And a younger membership emerged at the synagogue he helped found, and they knew nothing of Richard’s past, and had no loyalties to him. All they knew was that he owned and operated these dusty pharmacies he never bothered to modernize or renovate. He had made a mistake, it seemed. He thought that being a contributing member of his community, being a Good Jew, would be enough to make his business thrive. But this was no small town; this was a suburb. An American suburb, no less. Keep up with the Walgreens and the Targets and the Kmarts and the Walmarts, or get out, Mr. Middlestein. Get out.

  Benny pushed through the front door, an ancient bell jingling above his head, and barreled past the aisles, the snack aisle, the makeup and skin-care aisle, feminine hygiene, dental care, shampoo, vitamins, over-the-counter medications, breast pumps and crutches, enemas, an aisle and a half of them, why were there so many enemas? The place needed a good dusting. One of his father’s delivery boys, a mentally challenged man named Scotty who had worked there since Benny was in college, was intensely mopping the same few squares of linoleum. He wasn’t allowed to drive a car, but he had a bright blue bike with a basket, which he would ride with deliveries to the homes of all the elderly shut-ins nearly year-round, even in the cold. The only thing that would stop him was the snow, and then he would simply trudge miles each way. “It gives me something to do,” Scotty had told Benny once. “Otherwise I’d just be getting into trouble.” Was this his father being a positive part of the community by hiring someone who might have otherwise had trouble finding a job, or a cheap bastard? Benny could never decide.

  His father, his thick gray hair almost entirely intact, was seated at a stool behind the counter, hunched over, a sturdy tree bent with the wind, poking at his cell phone with a pen. He looked up as Benny approached, and a smile rolled across his face. Benny! And then, squinting, he noticed his son’s hair, and then his forehead folded in on itself, and his smile withered slightly.

  “This is a surprise,” he said. He reached his hand out across the counter to his son, and Benny grasped it faintly, which was
not how he had been taught to shake hands at all. Richard was still staring at Benny’s head. They hadn’t seen each other in a month. One month was all it took for a man to lose half his hair. Richard reflexively reached for his own hair, as if to confirm it was still all there, and Benny winced.

  “Are you sick?” said Richard. “What’s going on here?”

  Benny, suddenly trembling, handed Richard the prescription.

  “I don’t know, Dad. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  Richard motioned his head toward the door to the back room. It had never been painted, even after all these years, and a fake brass handle drooped half out of its socket. “Let’s go in back and talk,” he said. “Come on, kiddo.”

  Benny looked down, that loose, out-of-control feeling ranging around his gut again. Had he come here for advice? He was still angry with his father for leaving his mother when she was so sick, and he didn’t understand how Richard had let her get that way in the first place. Rachelle had banned his father from their house months before. “He has nothing good to teach our children,” is what she had said. Everything was falling apart because of this man. And yet, here he was, standing in front of him, about to spill his guts, looking for a little wisdom. Maybe, just maybe, he knew something Benny didn’t.

  Richard called Scotty to him—Scotty dragging his mop and bucket slowly down the aisle—and asked him to keep watch over the counter, and Scotty replied with a long and meaningful salute, as if he were a soldier in the delivery-boy army, followed by a quiet giggle to himself.

  Benny followed his father into the back room, a dark, cobweb-ridden space lined with rusted-out shelving units.

  “What did the doctor say?” Richard peered at the prescription. “Dr. Harris, he’s all right. You could do worse.”