The Comedown

by Rebekah Frumkin

Why this staring? Wasn’t something like 60 percent of America obese? Likely every self-satisfied shopper in this Woodward’s had seen—or been related to—someone of girth. Maybe they themselves had been guests of honor at some Weight Watchers 100 Pounds or More Party, holding their size-twenty-four pants up over their size-twelve frames. These assholes are so quick to forget the fat they’ve lost. He assured himself that if he were some size-twenty-four who’d somehow whittled himself down to his current twenty-nine-inch waist, he would’ve felt sympathy for those who continued to suffer as he had. He would’ve felt a sense of kinship with them, and he would’ve had no problem stepping out into the middle of the aisle in Woodward’s—in any grocery store, not just Woodward’s—to help them move their carts or retrieve items from the topmost shelves.

  The phone reregistered Jocelyn’s text. He unlocked the screen so he wouldn’t have to keep on receiving the reminders. His mom had found her grocery list and was checking it using the lowermost subsection of her trifocals.

  “Why do you still live here?” he asked. “Why don’t you ever seriously consider living in Chicago closer to me and Jocelyn?”

  She looked at him with an uncharacteristic quickness. “That’s a long conversation, honey. Not the kind we’d start while grocery shopping.”

  “I’m just asking.”

  “A move like that right now wouldn’t be practical, exactly.”

  He sighed. They had this down to a catechism. “Yes it would! You’re retired.”

  She shook her head. “The next thing on here is arugula.”

  “I don’t understand why you don’t make the move, Mom. What is there for you out here?”

  “You know,” she said.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Memories.”

  No other widow-divorcée thought this way, he was pretty sure: sitting in her ex-husband’s mental dreck, keeping herself single for no apparent reason beyond a physiognomic flaw that could easily be fixed if she wanted it enough.

  And who’d taught her to hate herself like this? Who’d taught her to think this way? She’d grown up with privilege, no siblings but a younger brother, ostensibly supported by her parents. She’d done well both socially and academically at Kent State. She was smart, capable. She had been at one point very beautiful.

  Leland Jr. regarded her as she shook some arugula into a bag, her face hanging forward in heavy folds. According to pictures, she’d been short and curvy when she was young, the majority of her weight in her butt and hips, almond-eyed, her hair dirty blond. She had had a habit of smiling pursed-mouthed so it looked as if she thought the photo was a joke. In the Kent State yearbook, there’s a photo titled “High Ambitions!” where Leland Sr. is playing the electric bass with a jay between his lips—somehow the yearbook adviser didn’t care about this?—and she’s golden and innocent standing next to him, banging on a tambourine. And then a twelve-year codependent joke of a marriage, no official divorce, his suicide, and here she was, the poster child for diabetes and hypertension. Leland Jr. could pinpoint the exact moment the transformation had begun: he’d been thirteen and she’d been thirty-four and Leland Sr. had exited their lives without warning. She’d started eating. One morning before school instead of eggs and oatmeal Leland Jr. had come downstairs to buttered white toast and bananas and peanut butter; she’d eaten half the jar before he’d gotten up. Then there were thick lasagnas, frequent ice cream sundaes with chocolate syrup, bags of chips hidden behind the toilet. Leland Jr.’s new method of intervention was stocking her house with vegetables and gluten-free bread so she’d have no option but to binge on health food. But she was wily—during his last visit, he’d found a bag of Lay’s under the sofa.

  Jocelyn sent another text: Can you please just call before I take two hydrocodone and go to sleep? Her back pain must be raging again. She’d been stressed for the past two months: a client at Lefébvre was giving her trouble. But he also suspected that she was reporting her pain as more severe than it actually was and the real problem was just that she couldn’t sleep.

  “Mom?”

  She’d moved on from bagging the arugula and was scanning the produce aisle. “Honestly, honey, I’ve been shopping here like you told me and it doesn’t get any easier to find anything.”

  “Mom, I have to make a phone call. It’s Jocelyn.”

  She nodded.

  He went up to the checkout aisles and called Jocelyn. Despite her obvious annoyance, her voice sounded thick and relaxed. She’d taken the hydrocodone.

  “You know what I was thinking?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Maybe you could make up with Lee.”

  “Lee Bloom-Mittwoch?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Who else is named Lee?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “You’re in Shaker Heights.”

  “They live in an apartment somewhere. They don’t live here. We’re in your dad’s store getting groceries.”

  “Leland,” she said, her voice flat. “He’s eighteen years old. He’s hurt.”

  “He’s a fucking punk!” Leland Jr. said, and lowered his voice when he got stares. “This is what you wanted to call me about?”

  “I just thought it’d be a good idea.”

  “I’m not gonna do that. You read that e-mail he sent a year ago.”

  “It’d help you release some anger,” she said as if she hadn’t heard him.

  “Stop getting involved, babe,” he said, barking “babe.”

  “It was just an idea I had. Take it or leave it.”

  She sighed thickly, as if he were a slow but obedient child. “I’m trying to put you out of your misery.”

  “Okay. Put me out of my misery. You just compared visiting him to having me put down.”

  “You can’t even call him ‘Lee’!” she said, and hummed in exasperation. “It’s just ‘him’!”

  “I don’t want to talk about this. I’m with Mom.”

  “I bet she’d be pro this idea.”

  “Go to sleep,” he said. He hung up on her and regretted it but not enough to call her back. He found his way back to the produce aisle.

  “Who was that?” his mom asked.

  “Jocelyn, Mom. I told you.”

  She sighed. “Oh.”

  An angry shiver shot down the back of his neck. “You know what she was calling about?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “She was calling to suggest I go see Lee while I’m in town.”

  She nodded.

  “He sent us an e-mail a while ago. He was obviously fucked up when he sent it.”

  “Don’t swear in public, honey.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He held his phone in front of him with both hands. “He was asking for ‘assets.’ He thinks I owe him. I forwarded it to Jocelyn; I had no idea she’d respond to it.”

  “What did you say back?”

  “To the e-mail?”

  “To Jocelyn just now.”

  “I said of course I wouldn’t.”

  He felt increasingly justified in his decision to hang up on Jocelyn. At Leland Sr.’s funeral ten years ago she’d held Leland Jr.’s hand on the flight, but when they’d gotten there she’d spent an uncomfortable amount of time smiling at Lee, who was a grubby-faced nine-year-old in a child-sized magician’s suit holding the hand of the stepwitch he’d crawled out of. Grosser even, the stepwitch had wept off her pancaked-on makeup, and Jocelyn had offered her a tissue, and after that Jocelyn had gone back to the hotel, leaving him to deal with all the legal business. Leland Jr. hadn’t had the patience to explain to Jocelyn that, though appearances may be deceiving, these were not people who deserved her compassion: these were people who indulged in their habits of self-destruction with the same hedonistic joy Leland Sr. had. At least Jocelyn had the decency to reassure Leland Jr. that he was justified in doing what he’d done, rooting through their house to take back what was his: the jewelry, the paintings, the silverware and china, the car,
the old yellow briefcase that was locked shut.

  But now here they were back to square one, and it was Jocelyn who was e-mailing grubby little Lee, who was actually not so little anymore. She’d even offered him an internship or something with Lefébvre. What she didn’t understand was that the Bloom-Mittwochs’ disasters didn’t look like her family’s, couldn’t be solved with ex post facto acts of guilty charity. The lives of the Bloom-Mittwochs had been strange and wretched for decades. The best he could do was distance himself and his mother from the rabble.

  With the Town & Country’s ample behind packed with groceries, the car heaved home, favoring the passenger side. He bit his lip very hard. His mom was inflicting a lite rock station on them both.

  “I’ll make a vegetable roast for us,” she said. “And there’s going to be St. Elmo’s Fire on cable, with Emilio Estevez. So maybe we could watch that.”

  “What’s a vegetable roast?”

  “Something healthy.” She was lost, staring out the window. “Emilio Estevez always reminded me of you. I think you look like him.”

  “Mom, I don’t look like Emilio Estevez.”

  “You’re not doing yourself any favors when you deny it.” She smiled up at him. “You’re handsome in the same way.”

  “Mom?”

  She was silent.

  “Maybe let’s bring up the topic of moving to Chicago again.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Right now,” he tried, but stopped, and had to swallow hard before he started again. “Right now Cleveland and Shaker Heights are kind of like a toxic waste pool. They’re like a pool you have to wade around in. And the toxic waste is all the stuff you’ve dealt with in your life.”

  “Leland—”

  He ignored that. “And you have an opportunity—I’ve talked to Jocelyn and she thinks it’s right—that might allow you to be with us in Chicago.”

  She snorted, which she sometimes did when she was not in a good mood.

  “Sweetie, I’m sorry.” She turned to him; her face, deformed by age and weight, could only approximate the look of concern she used to give him when he couldn’t sleep without that damn Eagles song. Or when he was in high school and so throttled by his own perfectionism that he’d settled into a four-year-long bad mood. “Is it too hard for you to be here?”

  “Mom!” he found himself shouting, almost barking. “I just think you should move on.”

  “Move on from what? I have friends here. I have people who love me. There’s Alvin, for one.”

  “Ah good fucking lord, Mom! Is he worth it? Is he worth this?”

  He did a top-down gesture that encompassed the whole of her, and her face was pure horror before she turned to the window.

  They didn’t talk for a while until he said, “That’s not what I meant.” And then: “It’s like he has his hands on you from beyond the grave.” They ate dinner in silence (the “vegetable roast” turned out to be a casserole that was mostly cheese and noodles with a few green peppers, but he was too dogged to comment), watched St. Elmo’s Fire in silence. When he finally went to bed, he lay on his back across the covers, phone in hand, ready to spend the better part of the next hour composing an e-mail to Jocelyn. She didn’t know how to solve the problem, clearly. The solution was getting his mom to move to Chicago.

  His phone dinged. He checked it immediately, expecting it to be a text from Jocelyn, but it was from Scott, an analyst and sometime jogging buddy, and the content was just: NAV predicted +4 by end of week. Work. The mutual fund that employed Leland Jr. was planning to invest in the development of a bipolar I antipsychotic that could also be prescribed for depression/anxiety. Leland Jr. and two other team members had done most of the research: it was being synthesized at a lab in Mississippi called Cisco Drugs, the generic name was teraflin (no trade name yet, obviously), it had a chemical structure that looked like a child gymnast doing a backflip. So far it had tested well among female and male bipolars ages thirteen to twenty, and it was going to be branded as a “kids’ drug.” It had all the benefits of lithium with the side effects profile of Ritalin, and everyone on Scott’s end was very excited about it. Scott had just the other week referred to Leland Jr.’s team’s discovery of teraflin as “visionary” and “endlessly profitable.”

  Leland Jr. had never asked himself why the issue of his mom, and not the issue of assigning market value to intangibilities like “biotechnological growth,” was what seemed to be demanding so much from him. He on more than one occasion had lost himself in the shine of some senior partner’s calvity during an executive board meeting, wondering why his mother hadn’t remarried and whom she’d seen since Leland Sr. left her.

  She’d stayed single all Leland Jr.’s adolescence: her only thoughts seemed to be about his father, who would sometimes send her letters detailing how she’d failed in their marriage. Letters that compared her unfavorably to Diedre, the stepwitch, compared Leland Jr. unfavorably to the squirming baby boy also named Leland (Lee for short). Leland Jr. was in college by the time the Lee letters started rolling in and she’d saved them all. He had to believe she’d stayed single out of masochistic loyalty to Leland Sr. Or was that just the mind of the teenaged solipsist? Had she, he sometimes wondered as the project manager walked investors through ten screens of infographics, really gone ten years without sex? Twenty? He remembered when she’d just begun gaining weight and was looking ample and healthy in a way he could best describe as “rural,” she’d had a lot of very long conversations with the butcher during which he’d smiled wetly. Now there was this “friend” Alvin.

  The thought that really dogged him—that had prompted a handful of Winn Maxwell JägerThursdays and corresponding guilty 10Ks on the treadmill the day after—was that he was not a step ahead of Leland Sr. as he’d always believed, but two steps behind. That was Leland Sr.’s legacy: setting traps. And the trap of Leland Jr.’s life had been his masterpiece. Leland Sr. had let him believe he’d won, but that was only because the mysterious other shoe hadn’t dropped. He might have known from the moment he dared Leland Jr. to hit him that Leland Jr. would be his greatest adversary, would be the one fucking person in the world who begrudged him the codependent clemency he needed to stay alive. Now he thought it could have been because of Leland Jr.’s hatred of him that the warped old man had left. Leland Jr. had grown up, acquired cojones, and started slamming doors in Leland Sr.’s face and calling him (in both casual conversation with his mother and less casual conversation with the man himself) an idiot, a druggie, a burnout, and, when he acquired the vocabulary, a fuckup, a piece of shit, a woman-hater. And if it earned him the occasional brain boxing—so what? I’m keeping this name just to spite you, he often thought. I’m obliterating your legacy and making it my own.

  Still, Leland Sr. appeared to have lain down and taken Leland Jr.’s abuse, which Leland Jr. found eerie if he thought about it too much. Besides throwing him a very occasional punch or shove, the most he’d done was call him “ungrateful” in those letters, and “impossible son material” and “very unlike this new child, Lee, who does love me very much, and who I believe better deserves my name.” Which meant, of course, there had to be another shoe about to drop.

  What is it and when’s it gonna drop? Leland Jr. wondered, phone still in hand, staring at the gold stars either his mom or the previous owner had stenciled onto the guest bedroom ceiling. And is there any way I can possibly prevent it from dropping? If he was being rational, he’d just dispel the idea as superstition—it was a mental chore that could be carried out as quickly as the readjustment of a cuff link or the stirring of cream into coffee. But thinking about his family made him irrational. When thoughts like these dogged him, the go-to solution was to loudly “fuck” Jocelyn (who had to be gotten into the mood for this kind of thing, which was its own bureaucratic process), or bang his head once hardish against the wall if Jocelyn could not get in the “fucking” mood, or watch tasteless porn, his morning memories of it typically dim (he was once distu
rbed to discover his browsing history betrayed a fascination with breathplay bondage). If none of these were sufficient, then he’d do this comforting thing where he stripped to just his pants or underwear or sometimes got completely naked and folded himself up between the side of the toilet and the bathroom wall to meditate and possibly cry. He felt foolish when he did this but he knew it was (1) practical, because an occasion like this was usually concomitant with JägerThursdays, and it helped to have the toilet nearby, and (2) soothing, because since childhood he’d found fitting himself into small spaces (closet shelf, the space under his bed, the washing machine when he’d been very little) proved a huge relief to his nervous system.

  He stared at his phone’s screen and turned it off. He was accustomed to taming his insomnia with midnight runs, and he’d brought along his Nikes and mesh shorts. His mom’s house was a highly insomniac site for him. He breathed deeply, tensing and flexing his ab muscles, and sat up in the bed. Dressing for running carried for Leland Jr. the same duty-bound gravitas as dressing for work: lacing up his running shoes meant he was about to do something of equal import to what he usually did after double-Windsoring a tie. He cracked the window. It was a nice enough night.

  Outside, he ran spellbound, shirtless, low-frequency vibrations beginning in his ankles and ending in a forearm twitch. He’d set his watch to track his distance and was feeling sluggish for the first two miles—the route took him past the elementary school and Chagrin Boulevard—but then he hit his stride after mile three, at which point he’d arrived at the Highland Park Golf Course. Scanning the premises for insomniac retirees, he jogged up to hole one and then downhill to hole two, which was in a sand trap. Unwilling to stop running but wanting to think, he jogged the perimeter of the sand trap. Why did he even bother visiting this place? He flashed on the face of the strange young man at the funeral ten years ago, the supposed beneficiary of Leland Sr.’s generosity. Now Leland Jr. remembered, though he didn’t particularly want to, how the young man had driven Jocelyn back to the hotel while he had followed Diedre back to her musty bungalow.