The Middlesteins

by Jami Attenberg

  “Stress, probably,” said Benny.

  “That’s a lot of stress.” He motioned to Benny’s hair and made a whoosh sound.

  “Yeah, well, I am under a lot of stress, Dad, what with my parents getting divorced and my mother practically on her deathbed. How about you?” Benny was pissed. Were they going to be coy suddenly? Were they going to pretend that the last few months hadn’t happened?

  His father turned from him and shuffled off between the shelving units, and didn’t say anything, it turned icy quiet, spiders froze in their webs, and Benny could hear Scotty singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” through the door. Finally Richard returned, red-faced, with a pill bottle in hand. Benny waited for him to explode. Benny felt a delicious anticipation take hold of him; he craved some sort of show of emotion from his grunting, withdrawn, disappointed father.

  But Richard kept himself calm, handing his son the bottle, and then taking two steps back and rubbing his hands together, some imaginary dust flicking off onto the floor.

  He said, “We make the decisions we make, Benny. We cannot take them back. I am not a perfect person.” Benny watched as his father chose his words, plucked them from deep within his heart. “I can only tell you this: Your mother was making me crazy. Not normal crazy. Crazy crazy. Like it was going to kill me.”

  “How bad could it have been to spend the rest of your life with the mother of your children?” said Benny, surprised at his own calm. “She was loyal to you. And that should mean something.”

  “There was nothing left inside,” said Richard. He took a few more steps back and leaned against the wall for support. “I was a bag of bones. There was nothing else in there. Whatever kept me standing, that was it, that was all that was left.”

  “You didn’t put up a fight,” said Benny.

  “I’m trying to be respectful here, but have you not met your mother?” said Richard. “You can’t fight her. You should know that by now.”

  That didn’t sound right to Benny. Even if you can’t fight, you should at least try to fight. He didn’t know if he could fight his wife and win. They’d always gotten along so well; only recently had he begun to understand what kind of whirlwinds of power and aggression had lain dormant within her. He wondered briefly if he’d married someone like his mother, who, he had to admit, his father was right about; she was one tough cookie. But then he remembered that Rachelle was his petite princess, and how she was usually so calm, almost regal, most of the time, unlike his mother, who was boisterous and overflowing, and yes, Rachelle knew how to get what she wanted, just like his mother, but the similarities began and ended there.

  He was relieved. It was not like he hadn’t had this conversation with himself before, but every once in a while it was nice to remind yourself you had not turned into your worst nightmare, this man standing before him, who had just handed him a bottle full of pills intended to save his hair. He hadn’t realized until that moment that being his father would be his worst nightmare, because his father had never been that person before, until he decided to be single and sixty and lonely, just him and Scotty hanging out in the fluorescent-lit pharmacy all day long, Scotty singing patriotic songs to Richard, the two of them waiting for the next old Jew to walk through the front door in search of Cardizem or hand cream or an enema. Benny and his father had hit the end of the line together; it was up to Benny to figure it, love, marriage, life, the universe, all of it out, by himself.

  The two of them wandered uselessly out to the pharmacy; Benny would never step foot into that back room again until after his father had died a decade later, and there was no question that the business would be closed (it probably should have been closed five years before, but Richard had refused, saying that he offered a service to the community, though Benny knew that it was just because he needed a place to go all day), that the dusty shelves needed to be emptied and then tossed out the back door, a painful, clanking, depressing act that Benny, entirely bald by then, accomplished quietly, sadly, on his own.

  But for now, the Propecia was on the house, and Richard walked Benny to the front door.

  “So maybe I can come by sometime?” said Richard.

  “I don’t think so,” said Benny. “Not yet. I’ll work on it.”

  They stopped and stared at each other, and there were a million things of a confrontational nature that still hovered between them, but Benny wondered if they were worth the battle, and then decided they were not, or that his father wasn’t worth it anyway, and he would deal with how sad that made him feel some other time.

  Instead he said, “I always wondered something. Why do you carry so many kinds of enemas? Wouldn’t just one kind do the trick?”

  “You’d be surprised,” said his father.

  * * *

  Dinner was something related to kale and beets. If he could have gotten back on the expressway and returned to his office and spent the night working, he would have. There was something so intensely satisfying about number crunching; he could almost feel the delicate little digits crumbling in his fist, piles forming and then towering on his desk, magically disappearing overnight so that each day there was the challenge to create a higher pile of numbers than the day before. He didn’t see it as a pointless task; he saw it as a game he got to play every single day, and no matter what, he always won.

  But he would not abandon his children to contend with this madness alone. They were in it together, Benny and the kids. Josh had surreptitiously eaten six pieces of tasteless multigrain bread slathered in soy butter. He would never complain, he would just adapt, until it was too late: the curse of the Middlestein men. Emily, dark-eyed and dangerous and glowering from the other end of the table, insistently made eye contact with her father, at one point openly staring at him while simultaneously stabbing her fork vengefully and noisily into the food on her plate. Rachelle ignored her, instead focusing on cutting her food into the tiniest of squares, which she would then chew thoughtfully and slowly, as if she were savoring every vitamin, as if she could feel each bite extending her life span. Rachelle, alone, finished all the food on her plate.

  It must be so nice to feel so right all the time, he thought. He would ask her that later. What that felt like.

  After dinner, after Benny had done the dishes (defiantly dumping the remaining purplish mess into the garbage, because no he would not be taking the leftovers to work the next day), after the kids watched whatever crappy reality television show they were emotionally invested in that week, after they practiced their haftorah readings for their upcoming b’nai mitzvah, their voices reverberating sweetly from the living room, and after Rachelle forced Josh to try on his new suit for his father, Josh executing a glamorous turn as if he were on a runway—that kid had moves—before suddenly turning, embarrassed, and then running back upstairs again, and after the kids went to bed early, which is something that had not occurred ever in their house, Benny and Rachelle stood out in the backyard, near the tarp-covered swimming pool, and shared a joint, Rachelle taking just one hit before proclaiming, “That is the last time I am ever smoking this stuff ever again.” (This was not a lie, she meant it as fact, but it was untrue nevertheless.)

  “Whatever,” said Benny.

  “Don’t whatever me,” said Rachelle.

  Benny took a walk around the pool, stopping on the far side, then taking a step back and peering up at the house he had paid off nearly all on his own, only the down payment coming from Rachelle’s parents, a dowry of sorts, he supposed, or at least some sort of panicked gesture toward the then-young couple who had gotten pregnant before they had even graduated from college. It was a simple mistake in the bathroom of his fraternity house, his intention being merely to hoist her up onto the sink and get her off with his tongue, but it tasted so good, too good, and then he stood and plunged inside of her without protection, their eyes locked together, it was just supposed to be for a minute, just one more minute, and then he would return to his duties downstairs, but neither of them could stop the
mselves, they were making nonsensical noises, they were having nonsensical thoughts, and he, deft, mathematical, precise Benny, made a serious miscalculation.

  “Uh-oh,” he had said.

  “Uh-oh?” she had said.

  And now look at this house, brick, Colonial style with two sturdy pillars in the front that made Benny feel safe, like his family would be protected, two stories, three bedrooms, two and a half baths, a sunny kitchen, a shaded living room, a wet bar in the basement, a backyard with room enough for a swimming pool, a luxurious deck, and a badminton net in the summertime. (There was talk of building a gazebo, but not until after he saw what this year’s bonus was like.) A garage, with two sumptuous Lexuses in it. A shed with one of those lawn mowers you can ride. Not that he ever mowed his lawn. There was a guy who did that. He didn’t know who the guy was; his wife took care of all of that kind of stuff. Rachelle took care of him, that’s right, he reminded himself. He had trusted her to do so for so long. But he needed to eat. His kids needed to eat.

  “We’re hungry,” he said to Rachelle.

  “There was plenty of food on that table tonight,” she said.

  “The kids are still growing. They need more than just vegetables,” he said. “And I’m suddenly going bald if you hadn’t noticed.”

  “There is no scientific evidence linking hair loss to eating more vegetables,” she said.

  He threw his hands up in the air, gestured toward the sky, and then toward his head, and then back again.

  “It’s true,” she said. “I looked it up on the Internet.”

  He took another hit from his joint and then realized he was high, and hungrier than ever, and there was not a goddamn thing in the house worth eating. He wondered if she would notice if he went for a walk and hit up the closest fast-food place, a McDonald’s about a half mile away. Maybe he would sneak back some fries for the kids. She’d probably smell it on him, though. He’d never make it past the first floor.

  And then a scream rang out in the cool spring air, and Benny tossed his joint without thinking (this would eventually be found by the guy who mowed the lawn, in this case an Illinois State student on summer vacation, who would pocket it in one slippery motion and then later smoke it blissfully in his pickup truck during his lunch break) and ran toward the front of the house, two steps behind Rachelle, the scream sending shivers up his arms and the back of his neck. It was a child’s scream, he was certain. Don’t stop for nothing, Middlestein. He rounded the corner and saw Emily, lying on the ground, her head cracked open, her arm pointed in a strange direction, as if it were trying to flee her body. Benny glanced up at the house: Her second-floor window was open, and Josh peered out of it, his mouth shaped like an O. Then Rachelle was by her side, and so was he; both of them were bent over her, both of them terrified as they had never been before, their fear only receding after the stitches, after the twenty-four-hour watch-for-a-concussion period was over, and after the cast was put on. (“It was a clean break,” the doctor assured them, and they repeated this phrase over and over to anyone who would listen, as if focusing on this one positive thing would spin the entire incident into the plus category.) And when their heart rates returned to normal, and Rachelle stopped with her crying jags, and Emily was no longer in the worst pain of her life, and her grandparents had come and gone (separately, of course) with books and balloons and chocolates, and Benny finally said to his daughter, “What were you doing?” and Emily replied, “I just had to get out of there,” Benny did not even turn and look at his wife to see her expression, because he already knew what she was thinking, what she had to be thinking or she was not the woman he had married and she had been fooling him all this time, which was, “Enough is enough already.”

  Edie, 332 Pounds

  As part of her early-retirement package, the law firm where she had worked for thirty-three years had extended her the opportunity to keep her health care at an extremely low rate until death or something better came along. She also received her pension plan in full, and on top of that, a not-unfair amount of money to keep her mouth shut about the fact that they were letting her go mainly because her weight distressed the three new partner-owners of the firm, who were all children of the people who had originally hired Edie straight out of law school, freshly married, not yet pregnant, a much slimmer version of herself. She had, at various times in her life, been a more righteous person, more prone to moral outrage, a scrapper, and that person would have considered this not nearly enough money in exchange for being discriminated against, that there was not enough money in the world to allow someone to say to you—without actually saying it, mind you—You’re fat, now will you please go away?

  But Edie was exhausted, the whole world tired her, and in a humiliated moment she accepted their offer, even smiled while she shook their hands. Maybe this was a chance to reboot. She wanted more time to spend with her grandchildren. A month later her doctor told Edie her diabetes had worsened, and that he would have to have a stent inserted into her leg, to make that awful, cramping pain she (mostly) refused to admit she was in go away. She might even need a bypass someday. She could get sicker, he told her. She could die. Then she was suddenly grateful for the health care and the money in the bank, and also the time to recover from all her wounds.

  The first surgery was tomorrow morning. Down the hall her son, Benny, slept in his old bedroom; he would be driving her to Evanston at 6:00 A.M., so that her husband could go to the pharmacy he owned later in the morning and sign for some deliveries, which apparently no one else on the entire planet could sign for except him. She wouldn’t even think of asking her daughter, Robin, who lived downtown, to spend the night in her home. It was hard enough to get her to come to dinner.

  She lay awake now, her brain, like always, running a million miles a minute even if she herself moved so slowly it sometimes was like she was not even in motion at all. She was thinking about food, specifically a value-size package of kettle-baked sea salt potato chips and a plastic tub of deli onion dip she had purchased from the Jewel that afternoon, which were sitting downstairs in her kitchen, waiting for her like two friends who had come over for coffee and a little chitchat.

  But it was after midnight, and she had been instructed not to eat anything eight to twelve hours before her surgery, and she was scheduled to have her leg cut into at 8:00 A.M. So here she was, on the tail end of acceptable timing, wondering how much damage she would really do to herself if she had a few potato chips, we’re talking just a handful, and some of that cool, salty dip, and that dip was not even like solid food, it was like drinking a glass of milk, and those potato chips were so airy, one bite and they were over. Poof. What she was thinking about eating wouldn’t even fill up one of her pinkies. All she had to do was get up out of bed, and go downstairs, and then she would be reunited with her two new best friends.

  Her husband snored next to her seemingly innocently, uselessly. The most he had done for her lately was bring home her prescriptions, but he was a pharmacist! He had been bringing home her prescriptions their entire life together. Sorry, Middlestein. No points. He did not turn in his sleep; he picked a position and stuck with it all night. Not one tussle with the universe for that one, she thought.

  What she didn’t know was that he had been plotting all day the right way and time to leave her, and that in six more months, a few weeks before she had a second surgery, on a Friday afternoon, he would announce that he did not love her anymore and that he had not for a long time and he believed she felt the same, and for both of their sakes, for both of their lives, he was going to take the step of walking out that door and never coming back. There was also the not-so-subtle subtext of his wanting to have sex again with somebody in this lifetime, though obviously not with Edie herself. He had left so quickly, like the goddamn coward he was—he had taken nothing with him except for his clothes, which, while she was at Costco, he had packed in the luggage they got for that terrible trip to Italy—that she hadn’t had a chance to argue with
him, and what would she have said? He was probably right.

  Still, she will be sad when the split finally happens. She will weep to her son and daughter, although at least a small portion of those outbursts will be calculated to make them hate their father. After a while she will stop being sad that he’s gone because she’ll realize she doesn’t miss him, and then she will be sad because she’s spent so long with someone she doesn’t even miss, and then after that she’ll be more sad because she realizes she does miss him, or at least having someone around, even if they didn’t speak to each other that much. In the end, it had just been nice to know that someone was in the room, she will tell Benny, even though that is kind of a fucked-up thing to say to a son about his father. (But Edie was never one for self-control.) And now the room was empty. Just her. Just Edie. She knew that there were even more things to be sad about, so many layers of sadness yet to be unfolded. She had lived an entire life already, and now here was another one she had to start living fresh from the beginning.

  Right now, though, the night before her first surgery, her only consideration was the potato chips and the onion dip, party food, a mere appetizer, but this was no party. Tomorrow a tiny metal tube would be inserted into her leg. It was not a big deal as far as surgeries went, although no one was happy with the idea of her being cut open in the first place. But she would be able to walk the same as always, even the same day. There would be some pain and some painkillers. She was going to be okay, though. She came from sturdy Russian stock, she kept telling herself, even though her father had died before he turned sixty. If only he hadn’t smoked, if only he hadn’t drank. If only she didn’t eat.

  She rose from her bed, and traveled along the same floorboards she had been traveling on for thirty-five years, the only ones that didn’t creak beneath her, the only ones that would not wake her husband. She had worn a slight path in the carpeting above the floor, but they had never bothered to replace it. It was a room they spent little time in, lights out, good night, that’s it. The carpeting was blue and nubby and stained with who-knows-what. The diamond-checked wallpaper curling at the ends. The curtains hadn’t been opened in decades. The room was sealed from the outside world.