The Middlesteins

by Jami Attenberg

  With her eyes shut, she could walk the path from her bed, down the hallway past Benny’s and Robin’s old bedrooms, their high-school graduation photos hanging on the wall outside each, their bathroom that had become hers, a place for her to hide her naked self, down the stairs, all of which creaked, but by then she was home free in her own home—Richard would never hear a thing; then through the living room, where the carpeting was newer though not new, a sky-gray plush frieze purchased when the grandchildren were younger, somewhere soft for them to play, and it had always felt nice under her feet when she made this nightly journey to the kitchen, the last stop before the linoleum, washed-out orange daisies on scuffed yellow-and-brown tile. Thirty-five years ago that tile had cheered her up every morning, and now, like everything else, it was just another surface to cross until she reached the food she desired.

  She pushed through the swinging doorway to the kitchen and choked out a cry: There sat Benny, a book in front of him, a cup of coffee, a chocolate chip cookie on a plate, a stale, pained look on his face. He had been waiting awhile for her. He could not rest until she did.

  “What’s up, Mom?” he said. “You thirsty?”

  “I was… yes, thirsty.” Dazed, she went to a cabinet and pulled out a glass, walked to the refrigerator and pressed the glass up into the built-in ice dispenser, then leaned against the refrigerator. “Should I go back to bed?”

  “It’s your house, you can do whatever you want,” he said. He closed the book in front of him. It was a Harry Potter book. He pointed to it, a little embarrassed. “The kids like them, I wanted to see what it was all about.”

  “Any good?” she said. She poured some water into the glass from a Brita on the counter, and then sat down at the table with him.

  Benny, not as tall as his father, but better looking, smoother skin, tamer eyebrows, a warmer heart, he had turned out so well, considered the book with a back-and-forth of his head. “Goes quick,” he said. “They like things that move fast, those two.”

  “They’re both so bright,” said Edie. “And good-looking. And funny.”

  “All right, all right, Grandma, we know you’re crazy about them. Don’t go giving them a big head.” He had been a jokey, sweet kid, and he had grown into a jokey, sweet man.

  She took a big gulp of her water, and restrained herself from pushing her lie too far and letting out a satisfied Ahhh. She tapped her fingers on the table, her paltry wedding ring barely giving off a shimmer. “So why are you up? Are you having trouble sleeping?”

  “One hundred percent I don’t want to be sitting down here,” he said. “But the doctor told me that it was important for a number of reasons you have an empty stomach before the surgery.” Your weight, he didn’t say. Your heart, he didn’t say. Your health, your life, your death. “I just wanted to remind you about that. In case you had forgotten.”

  “I’m just getting some water,” she said.

  “And I’m just reading a book,” he said.

  Six months later, he sat in the kitchen the night before another surgery. And again she rose from her bed in hopes he would not be there, and again he stopped her from eating. It was something good he could do for this person even though it was hard because it made him feel powerful in a way he never wanted. He respected his mother, because she had raised him with love, and because she was a smart woman, even though she was also so incredibly stupid. Also, he respected humanity in general. He respected a person’s right to weakness. For all these reasons, he never told anyone he stayed up late waiting for his mother, not even his wife. What happened in that kitchen was between Benny and Edie. With grace he offered her his love and protection, and she accepted it, tepidly, warily. It did not bring them closer together, but it did not tear them apart.

  The Walking Wounded

  Emily and her grandmother, Edie, walked around the track of the high school she would attend the next fall so slowly, so grudgingly, that it was possible it did not even count as exercise at all. Could one walk with loathing? They were doing it.

  Emily, sharp-eyed, a ripe plum of a girl, with golden brown hair like her mother, was still tender from falling from the second story of her house one week before, her arm in a cast, a few stitches on her temple. Her grandmother, obese, sweating, limping, had had two surgeries in the past year. There could be another one at any minute, that’s what Emily’s parents were saying. A bigger one, way worse than the other two. A bypass.

  “Look at you two, the walking wounded,” her father had joked an hour earlier, leaning delicately on his Lexus, watching them shuffle off in the direction of the high school.

  “Pah,” her grandmother had said, and slung her hand behind her dismissively, not even bothering to look at him.

  “Exactly,” Emily had said. “What she said.”

  “I can’t help it if you two are adorable,” he yelled. “Grandmother and granddaughter. Two generations!”

  “What a sap,” said Edie.

  They barely made it to the track, and now they were barely making it around the track, the required mile, required by Emily’s mother, who had lately been determined to save Edie’s life.

  “Have you noticed your father is going bald?” said Edie.

  “It’s weird, right?” said Emily.

  It had happened suddenly, her father’s hair loss; one day he was good-looking, with a full head of hair, younger than all the other dads at his school, sprightly and in love with her mother, and Emily had felt safe in her own home and in the world around her.

  And then all these things happened at once: Her grandmother was diagnosed with diabetes and a whole bunch of other little things that went along with it, then her grandfather left her grandmother so that he could date weird women he met on the Internet (she had heard her father tell her mother), and her mother freaked the eff out. Holy crap, she had never seen her so crazy in her entire life, and her mom was already definitely an obsessive type, her hair, the house, the furniture, the carpeting, the lawn, Emily’s hair, Josh’s hair, their grades, their b’nai mitzvah, everyone else’s hair, and on and on, everything had to be perfect. She swore if her mother could adjust the color of the sky to match her own eyes, she would, just so it could be just right.

  In the middle of all this, Emily found herself surprisingly full of this really intense but deeply satisfying hate. She was a hater all of a sudden. She had negative things to say about her twin brother Josh (dopey, a pushover, sometimes even wimpy), her girlfriends at school (talked about boys so much, too much, weren’t there other things to talk about? Like music or television or movies or books or crazy grandparents, anything but boys), and her homework (a waste of time, boring, repetitive, and fifty other words that all equaled one big snooze).

  And don’t even get her started on her mother, the intensity of Emily’s emotions in opposition to her mother’s very being were so strong that it had propelled her, late at night, out her window one week before, across the roof, and over to the tall, Colonial-style pillars that guarded the front porch, which she attempted to cling to and slide down, immediately flopping out onto the front driveway, slamming her head on the ground, and breaking her left arm neatly, in fact, so neatly that it inspired her doctor to say, “You got lucky,” which made her laugh, and also her parents, too, because of course no one in that room felt lucky.

  It was not even that surprising when her father started to go bald, entire chunks of hair disappearing every day, as if an evil hair troll snuck into his bedroom every night while he slept and whisked it off his head and into the night. Here was another thing that was happening to someone she knew and loved. Here was another thing that was wrong with the world. Add it to the list of Things That Suck, an actual, brand-new list that existed in a journal that she kept in her locker at school, seemingly the only place safe in the universe from her mother or the cleaning woman, Galenka, who had been tending to their house for so long that she felt perfectly entitled to invade every part of Emily’s room, which was fine when she’d been f
ive, but not when she was nearly thirteen.

  “Mortality”—that was a word she had learned recently, something that had been discussed in Hebrew school. She had heard it before, she knew what it meant, but it had never applied before. Life in the biblical world was so fragile. Everyone was afraid of death at any moment. Everything was so epic, there was so much potential for disaster, storms, floods, pestilence. Diabetes (now also on the Things That Suck list) felt biblical. So did baldness. Never before had Emily realized that the world was so heavy, as heavy as her grandmother’s flesh heaving next to her on the high-school track, so heavy that she could feel it balancing on her neck and back. She believed that her brother did not feel the same weight as her. She pitied him for his blindness, and she envied him for his freedom, and if she had known just a few months before, during more innocent times, that she would feel that way for the rest of her life, not just about Josh but about a lot of people in the world, which is to say (in a polite way) conflicted, she would have treasured those unaware, nonjudgmental, preadolescent moments more thoroughly. (Oh, to be eleven again!) Because once you know, once you really know how the world works, you can’t unknow it.

  And now Emily was starting to know.

  “No one in our family is bald,” huffed her grandmother. “The whole thing is ridiculous. We come from strong stock.”

  On the far side of the high school’s parking lot, there was a baseball field; a visiting team warmed up, a coach cracking pop-ups to the outfield. Even from a distance, the baseball players looked tall to her. The idea of being older and bigger made her tingle. She could not wait to get to high school. She was absolutely certain that things would be better in high school: the classes, the people, the quality of life.

  “I don’t think people even understand how strong our gene pool is,” said her grandmother. “You’ve got a lot of Russian blood in you. Russians are built to withstand winter.”

  Emily could admit that her life wasn’t so bad now, and that getting older and bigger meant that there were more risks involved. She just wanted more out of it. Couldn’t she do better? Couldn’t everyone just do a little bit better?

  “Your great-grandfather fled Ukraine to come here. He walked through snow and ice and over mountains just to catch a train to Germany, and then he had to sit on that train for weeks. And he had nothing. Crusts of old bread and cheese. He had one potato he would peel every other day, and he would let the skin sit in his mouth for hours just so he could suck in every last vitamin. Could you imagine that?”

  Emily was almost certain her grandmother was lying to her, but she loved the way she was telling the story, the way her voice giddily rose and fell, almost drunkenly, and yet her voice was crisp, and she articulated her words beautifully.

  “Would you like that, kiddo? An uncooked potato skin for dinner?” Her grandmother poked her in her delicate belly, and Emily pulled away and laughed.

  “No potato skins for me, thanks,” said Emily.

  “And after all that, he made his way to Germany, took one look at all the mishegas there, and got on a boat and spent four more weeks crowded together with a bunch of other Jews trying to get the hell out of there, and the whole time he was still peeling that one potato.”

  “Was it a big potato to start?” said Emily, stifling laughter.

  “It was a pretty big potato, I have to admit,” said her grandmother. “But still! To only eat potato for such a long time, that’s not that much fun, right?”

  Emily nodded somberly.

  “So by the time he got to America, he was just skin and bones. He barely made it alive.” Her grandmother’s voice started to quiver. “And he lost a lot of his friends and family along the way. You should have heard him talk about it. I’m sorry you didn’t get to know him like I did. He was a really nice man. He wrote beautiful letters.”

  Emily took her grandmother’s arm with her one good arm. They had one more lap to walk.

  “But here is the point, Emily. Are you ready for the point?”

  “Yes,” said Emily.

  “Even after traveling all that way, and even on a diet composed almost exclusively of potato skin, all that for months and months, your great-grandfather still showed up in America with a full head of hair,” she said triumphantly. “So I don’t know what the hell is wrong with your father.”

  “Me neither,” said Emily.

  “I’m hungry. Are you hungry?” said her grandmother.

  “Starving,” said Emily.

  “You must be famished after all that exercise,” said her grandmother.

  “Let’s eat,” said Emily.

  “How do you feel about Chinese food?” said her grandmother.

  How Emily felt about Chinese food was that it was mostly greasy but that she liked shrimp dumplings and that anything was better than what was being served in her house as of late, which was mainly (really, only) vegetables, sometimes raw, sometimes steamed, sometimes, if they were really lucky, stir-fried with just a hint of oil, and all this gross tofu that felt like cottage cheese in her mouth (cottage cheese for breakfast: also gross), all these meals designed to keep them trim and fit and elevate their levels of health, and to keep the diabetes bug away as if it were something you could catch rather than earn by eating gallons and gallons of junk food for years and years, which was clearly what her grandmother had done. But the way she felt that day was that one egg roll wouldn’t hurt, and there was part of her that was embarrassed to be at the high-school track, like she was some poser pretending she was already a student there.

  So she and her grandmother sped home—suddenly they could both move extremely quickly—and hopped into the car and drove for a while, back past the high school, the giant digital marquee alluringly blinking in front of it about prom, baseball playoffs, the math club’s bake sale, the future, Emily’s future, taller, older, wiser, bigger, smarter, brighter, you are almost here, down roads she had never been down without her mother and father, except for school trips downtown, past the Chuck E. Cheese where she and her brother had a birthday party one year, past stores where she shopped with her mother sometimes (the Jewel grocery store where her mother shopped in a pinch when she didn’t have time to make the trek to Whole Foods, a greeting-card shop because It’s always important to send thank-you notes, a beauty-supply store where her mother bought expensive shampoos and face creams for cheap, the sporting-goods store where they stocked up on soccer shoes and shorts every spring, that mega-Target for school supplies but never clothes, her mother wouldn’t let her be caught dead in Target clothes), past roads that went to nowhere in particular as far as Emily was concerned, though she supposed people lived this way and that, even if she didn’t know who exactly, until her grandmother pulled in to a dirty little strip mall and up to a Chinese restaurant.

  Through the window Emily could see that her Aunt Robin was already there, a pinched expression on her face, several manila folders in front of her on the table, and a glass of wine (Aunt Robin did like her wine, that was known in the family) in front of those. Her aunt was her favorite person in the world, behind her father (the most reasonable man on the planet) and her brother (wimpy or not, he was one half of the whole) and occasionally a friend at school who had proved herself to not be a total waste of time. Her aunt would probably be number one on the list if Emily saw her more often, but Robin made herself scarce most of the time, off in the city, which lent her a certain appeal as well, an air of mystery and cool, even if deep down Emily knew there were much technically cooler people in the universe. But still, Robin spoke to her as if she were an equal or at least not a child, and always had for as long as Emily could remember, and Emily had appreciated it (now more than ever) even though she had never said it out loud to her aunt.

  Inside the restaurant Robin gave her a genuine smile, which then turned to a sour glance at Emily’s grandmother.

  “Got yourself your very own human shield, huh, old lady?” said Robin. Then she stood up from the table and hugged her niece,
and they kissed on each cheek like ladies did in the movies, French ladies, or fashionable older ladies who lived in New York City.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Emily’s grandmother, who lowered herself into a seat, Robin gently assisting her. “What’s wrong with me spending time with my two favorite girls?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it,” said Robin. “I just thought we were going to discuss a few things here.” She ran her hands over the manila folders sitting in front of her.

  “You can talk about whatever you want to talk about,” said Emily boldly. “I probably already know what you’re going to talk about.” She actually had little idea of what was going on, but she could only imagine that it was about her grandmother being sick, because everything was always about her grandmother being sick; it had been for months. Longer? Longer.

  Robin exchanged a dark look with Edie, and then said, “You want to be the one explaining this to her mother?”

  “Why don’t you go wash your hands before dinner?” said Edie.

  Emily made a bitchy little noise, a noise she had only recently started practicing and one that would get much, much better with age, but she got up resignedly and wandered through the empty restaurant, which she finally noticed was sort of cute, with its weathered wooden tables and sweet little glass bowls of pink flowers, and back toward the bathroom, passing the kitchen doors, from which wild notes of jazz emanated, and she wondered where she was exactly, because it did not feel quite like anywhere she had been before.

  In the bathroom, red, dimly lit, lavender-drenched, she used her one good arm to wash herself, her palms and her fingers, with hot water, and then her forehead, her cheeks, her chin, her neck, behind her ears, little drops dripping down onto her shirt. More soap and water, this time lifting her shirt up and splashing and scrubbing under her arms. Sometimes she felt like she could never get clean enough, but she didn’t know why.