The Middlesteins Part 12

There were framed pictures of her family everywhere, but not a one of her husband. She had taken them down. There were empty squares on the wall. Which was worse? To leave them up, or to have the gaps left behind as reminders of what once was?

He went to the kitchen because he knew that was where she would be. Already eating before he even arrived with dinner. Eating all that junk food she craved, the cookies and chips and crackers, giant tins and boxes and bags of c.r.a.p. That was what was making her sick. Eating things made by machines rather than by hand. He was going to change that, if he had to cook her every meal himself.

In the kitchen the freezer door was open. Inside it sat an open pint of ice cream, a spoon still sticking out of the top. He looked down, and there was Edie, sprawled on the floor in her shimmering purple dress, one hand outstretched, the other frozen near her chest, as if she had clutched at it, and then given up on it. Her lips were blue. This was not right. This was the wrong information. He knelt beside her and put a hand on her face, and the cool skin rippled beneath his fingers.

He grasped desperately for another poem he had memorized once, the exact lines of which eluded him. It had something to do with an icebox and plums and being sorry for eating them, even though the person speaking in the poem was clearly not sorry at all. It had always felt like a joke to him. The funny poems were usually the ones he remembered. It still felt like a joke now. It read like a note you would leave someone on the kitchen table when you were walking out the door and never coming back.

His eyes blurred with tears, and then there was only a haze of Edie. He was a fool to think he could have love twice in this life. Arrogance. He held her hand to his chest with both of his hands. No one was ent.i.tled to anything in this life, not the least of all love.

Middlestein in Mourning.

Richard Middlestein was uncomfortable in his suit. It had been five years since he had worn it, five years since he had been to a funeral. There had been a string of them in 2005: his mother's, his father's, his Aunt Ellie's, a second cousin named Boris he didn't know particularly well but who lived nearby in Highland Park so he went as a representative of his side of the family (by then he was the only one left), one of his estranged wife Edie's co-workers' (a suicide, terrible), Rabbi Schumann (they had to rent some tents for that one, so many people came), and at least three more that he couldn't recall at that exact moment because he could barely breathe. He hadn't gained more than a few pounds since then, but his flesh lay differently on his body now. Gravity had struck, and skin gathered around his waist, creating a small b.u.t.tress of fat between his ailing chest and still-youthful legs. He hadn't noticed it till he pulled up the zipper on the pants. He'd had to suck in his gut. He'd been holding it in for hours now.

To make matters worse, he couldn't stop eating. There was food on every surface of his son's house, the living-room table, the kitchen table, the dining room table, a few card tables that had been dragged inside from their garage, the gla.s.s end tables on either side of the living-room couch. And the food kept coming, friends of Edie's-friends of theirs, he supposed, when they had once been together-streaming through the front door, all holding different offerings, kugels and ca.s.seroles covered in aluminum foil, fruit salads in vast Tupperware containers, pastries in elegant cardboard boxes tied with thin, curled ribbons. His oldest friends from the synagogue, the Cohns and the Grodsteins and the Weinmans and the Frankens, had all gone in together on the elaborate smoked-fish trays. He had heard them mention it more than once that day, but only when someone wondered out loud where the delicious fish had been purchased, and one of them offered up the information. "We went this morning right when they opened," they said. "It's the least we could do."

Middlestein would have thrown in a few bills, too, if they had only called him, but they had not. No one had called him about anything at all, not even to extend condolences, except for his son to give him the details about the funeral. But why would they? Why had he thought anyone would care how he felt? He had left her, and they had been weeks away from signing divorce papers. He put his plate down on the floor and lowered his head between his legs and let it hang there. He had brought two boxes of rugelach, and he realized when he walked through the door that it was not enough. Nine months before, he would not have been allowed to bring a thing. Nine months before, shiva would have been held at the house they shared together. Why didn't he bring more rugelach? How much rugelach would he have had to buy to not feel this way? How much rugelach would he have to eat?

He jerked his head up. He wasn't certain he was feeling rational. He was so full, but still he wanted more. All around him, people sat politely with plastic plates in their laps. His son, Benny, sat on a low chair, his granddaughter, Emily, leaning against her father, staring off into the distance, her lips downturned. She was thirteen; it was her first funeral. Middlestein's daughter, Robin, sat next to Benny on a normal-size chair; she was working hard at actively not looking at Richard. Her boyfriend, Danny, sat next to her. He held her hand. He was stroking it. He had these fancy-framed gla.s.ses, but he wore his tie loosely, like he'd never learned how to tie it on his own. He looked like a real pushover, is what he looked like to Richard. That's about Robin's speed, he thought. She'd need someone to mow right over.

Robin was h.e.l.l-bent on ignoring most of the traditions, but she at least wore a black ribbon pinned to her blazer. She wore one, Benny wore one, Rach.e.l.le wore one, Emily wore one, and so did her twin brother, Josh, who had wandered off somewhere toward the dessert table. Richard was not wearing one. Richard was not sitting on a low chair. He was on the couch, with the rest of the general population. He had sat in the third row at the synagogue during the services. He didn't know if that was too close or too far. He didn't know if he should have leaned against the back wall, like some of the other mourners. It was standing room only. Good for Edie, he thought. People still cared about her. People wanted to show their respect. When he died-oh G.o.d, he was going to die someday-he wasn't sure he'd get the same kind of crowd. Not anymore.

He was suddenly consumed with a desire for savory foods, the saltier the better. He wanted his tongue to be swollen with salt. He hefted himself up from the couch-What was that sharp crunch in his knee? And the other in his lower back. Had those always been there, or were they brand-new?-and maneuvered through the crowd made up of people he had once been able to pat on the back h.e.l.lo and who now pulled away from him, he was certain, in disgust. He made his way to the dining room table, to the herring. He was going to eat the h.e.l.l out of that creamed herring. He spooned some onto his plate. He grabbed a handful of baby rye crackers, and then he stood there and dipped one crisp cracker after another into the tangy, smoky whitefish. He could stand here all day, if necessary. At least he had something to do, a purpose for standing in that spot, at that moment. It was then he thought he understood Edie, and why she ate like she had; constantly, ceaselessly, with no regard for taste or content. As he stood there, alone, in a room full of people who would rather take the side of a woman who was dead than acknowledge his existence, he believed he at last had a glimmer of an understanding of why she had eaten herself into the grave. Because food was a wonderful place to hide.

In the living room, his daughter death-stared him. Her eyes were sloppy with anger. It was spilling out everywhere. What a mess. Danny stood behind her and gripped her shoulders, and Robin reached back and pried his hands away from her. Danny winced. I'd happily walk her down the aisle just to get rid of her, thought Richard. Hand her off to that guy in a heartbeat. Robin got up from her chair, and again the crowd cleared a path for her, and again people stared. She marched up to Richard and past him-leaving behind only the slightest trail of a sneer-and toward the kitchen, where she paused and then dramatically shoved open the swinging door that separated it from the living room. Richard could see his daughter-in-law, Rach.e.l.le, inside, a cup of coffee in her hands, leaning against the refrigerator. Rach.e.l.le was the captain of this ship, and Robin was a rebellious sailor. Mutiny was clearly afoot. "We have to talk," was the last thing he heard before the swinging door settled to a close.

Richard turned his attention to the circular dessert table, where Josh was opening boxes of pastries and shifting them onto a giant vaseline-gla.s.s dish that Richard recognized as one of his aunt's. She had brought it with her from Germany when she immigrated and left it to him when she died, along with a houseful of furniture, which he had since sold or donated to charity. But he had kept the dish. It was made of uranium, and it was light green and glowed faintly like kryptonite. It was a neat trick: The dish was made of a volatile substance, but had been turned into something useful. As a child in Queens, he had been mesmerized by it. He would fantasize about it exploding spontaneously. Poof! The Middlesteins would be gone forever.

A week earlier that dish had been sitting in Richard's former living-room cabinet, and now, suddenly, it was on his son's dining room table. He bet that his house had been ransacked. Rach.e.l.le had probably gone through every cabinet and drawer and taken whatever she liked, antiques, jewelry, those two fur coats. Now he was going to have to have a conversation with his son about it. That was his plate, everything in that house was his, lock, stock, and barrel. No papers had been signed, nothing had been filed. If Edie had lived a bit longer, it's possible he would have had no say on that plate whatsoever. But she hadn't. Edie was dead.

Josh had opened the last pastry box and was arranging a small a.s.sortment of chocolate-dipped cookies around the edge of the dish. When he finished, he moved the dish directly into the center of the table, and then took a step away, examined the table, and smiled. Middlestein glanced over, and then looked back: Josh had arranged the cookies on the plate in the shape of a smiley face.

"Josh!" he said.

"What?" said Josh.

"You can't do that." He pointed at the plate. "That's not appropriate," he said. Thirteen years old, and no common sense. Had he had common sense at that age? Can that even be taught?

"I thought it would cheer people up," said Josh. "Everyone's so sad."

"Aren't you sad?" said Middlestein.

"I don't know what I am," said Josh.

"Well, you should be sad," he said. "It's a terrible thing that happened, your grandmother dying."

"You think I don't know that?" said Josh. 5-4-3-2-1, and he was in tears. Then he ran out of the living room, and upstairs, and everyone in the room stared at Middlestein, and if he wasn't already the most horrible person in the room, this sealed the deal.

In the kitchen, Robin was confirming it with that mouth she had inherited from her mother: loud, big, bossy, and self-righteous. He walked to the swinging door and leaned against the wall next to it, listening to her yell.

"You don't know anything," she was saying to Rach.e.l.le.

"They were married for nearly forty years," said Rach.e.l.le. "You don't know what that's like."

"I see. So you're superior to me because you're married and I'm not."

"That's not what I'm saying, Robin."

"She hated him. Don't you understand that?"

They were arguing about the rights of the living versus the dead. It was true, his wife had hated him, not just after he had left her but before then, too. Yet he had hoped in this small way that eventually, after they had divorced and everything had settled down, he with his new girlfriend Beverly, her with that Chinese man she had been dating recently (who had just arrived, and was now standing in the corner of the living room with his purple-haired daughter, the both of them stunned and silent), after they all had rearranged themselves into new formations, that he and Edie would be able to come back together as friends.

He had told no one this wish before, and he wasn't even sure if he deserved her friendship, but they had created these people, Benny and Robin, and they, in turn, had created lives for themselves, and he and Edie shared those two beautiful grandchildren (even if Josh was oversensitive and Emily a little mean), and he had imagined that one day they would watch them graduate from high school, and college, and dance together at one or both of their weddings, that they would be able to sit next to each other, share the same air, laugh about things that had happened a long time ago that only they knew about, secrets just for the two of them and no one else. He had left her because she was killing herself and killing him, too. And now he was saved: He had fallen in love with a woman named Beverly, and she had fallen in love with him, too. Now he was more alive than ever, and he had wanted Edie to have the same experience, but it had been too late for her. Too late for love. And now he was the only one who knew their past. He was the only one who knew that eventually, one day, Edie would have forgiven him. He had been there with her the day her father died and held her hand and stroked her hair and taken her into his family and life when she had no one left, when she felt she was an orphan. One day he would have reminded her of this. One day she would have been in his life again.

"He didn't kill her," said Rach.e.l.le.

"He might as well have," said Robin.

Upstairs, loud music began to play, a song that was played at Josh and Emily's b'nai mitzvah just a few days before. The mourners looked even more stricken, their skin colorless, their lips grim. Music was incorrect. Benny left the room casually, but as soon as he hit the stairs, he raced up them.

"I'm an orphan now!" screeched Robin, but her words blurred within the ba.s.s of the dance music.

She's going to regret saying that, thought Middlestein. Someday she'll want her father again.

But she does not regret it, at least not while he's still alive. (At his funeral, however, she is devastated. She heaves tears, Daniel's arms locked around her shoulders, the other family members distant from her, battling their own grief.) She barely speaks to him for the next decade, and then only briefly, at family functions. Sometimes they only lock eyes across the room, and then she'll look away, her lips crumbling with hurt, but still he treasures those moments. She ignores him at Edie's unveiling ceremony, and at Emily's and Josh's birthday parties and graduation ceremonies, and even at Benny and Rach.e.l.le's twentieth-anniversary party. She doesn't invite him to her wedding. He only hears about it a few months after the fact, and it is an accident that it is even revealed to him. At Benny's house he sees a picture of Robin in her wedding dress standing with bridesmaid Emily. Beverly is there with him-by then she is his wife-and she looks so devastated on his behalf that he can't help but sob for a moment, and he has to excuse himself to the restroom, and he stays in there too long, his hands clutched to the sink counter, leaning forward, missing Edie, missing his daughter, wondering if what he had done wrong was really that terrible, and wasn't life full of layers and nuances, colored all kinds of shades of gray, and the way you felt about something when you were twenty or thirty or forty was not how you would feel about something when you were fifty or sixty or seventy-he was nearly seventy!-and if only he could explain to her that regret can come at any time in your life, when you least expect it, and then you are stuck with it forever. If he could do it all over, if he could have that one shot, he would have fought harder for his life with Edie, he would have fought harder for her life. No, that wasn't true either, because there was a knock at the bathroom door: Beverly, checking up on him, gently holding his hand, his second chance, his late-in-life angel, her skin still smooth everywhere but around her eyes, her figure, her smile, her hold on him, on his heart, on his flesh. There she was. This was why he had traded one life for another.

But he was not there yet: He had only begun to regret; he had only begun to understand; he had only begun to mourn. Middlestein's daughter was fighting with his daughter-in-law, his son was walking downstairs and then into the living room, shaking his head angrily, and his dead wife's new boyfriend was now sobbing on his son's living-room couch, his hands clutching his kneecaps, his daughter's arms wrapped around his chest. The music upstairs stopped.

"She wouldn't have wanted him here," said Robin. "I can speak for her. I am totally correct in speaking for my mother."

"He has every right to be here," said Rach.e.l.le, and he could tell then that she was done discussing the matter. It was her home, after all. No one could argue with that. It was the woman's home. It was her show.

Robin slammed the kitchen door open and burst into the room. The mourners turned their heads away. Don't look at the poor girl. She's lost her mother. Robin left through the front door, but moments later appeared in the backyard. Everyone could see her through the window, sitting on a deck chair near the pool. Benny appeared next to her. He pulled a joint out of his pocket and lit it. The two of them got up and turned their deck chairs facing away from the house, and pa.s.sed the joint back and forth.

Middlestein was still leaning against the wall near the kitchen, unable to move. Rach.e.l.le pushed open the swinging door and poked her head into the dining room, holding her gaze on Middlestein.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"What do you have to be sorry about?" he said. "You didn't do anything."

"The yelling," she said. She shrugged her tiny shoulders. She did not seem tough enough to take on his daughter, but he understood she would do anything to keep things under control in her universe. Other days she would not consider Robin and her tantrums and her ego. Rach.e.l.le might have been a princess, but Robin was the little sister. Today, though, Rach.e.l.le had restored order, at least in small part on Middlestein's behalf. He would never forget that she did that.

She looked, bleary-eyed, at the tables of food before her. "What are we going to do with all this food?" she said.

"It'll get eaten," said Middlestein. He tried to muster up a joke about Jews and food, Jews and funerals, Jews and Jews, but nothing was funny.

Rach.e.l.le wandered past all the tables and then did a double take in front of the dessert tray that Josh had decorated to look like a smiley face. She turned back to Middlestein with a sour look on her face, cheeks pinched, forehead wrinkled.

"Wasn't me," said Middlestein.

She began to push all the cookies together in a big pile in the middle of the plate, and then she knocked some off, then finally she picked up the plate, weaving her way through the crowd, out the front door, until there she was, standing near the pool, handing cookies to her husband and her sister-in-law. She took one for herself and picked at it with her fingertips, one tiny bit at a time. She paused and licked her lips. In another minute Robin's boyfriend, Danny, showed up by her side. He dragged up a seat for himself and Rach.e.l.le. Together, they all hid.

What was left for Middlestein in this house? Everyone he cared about had run away from him and all the other mourners. He should leave. He had paid his respects. Whatever was left for him to feel was for him to experience alone. And he wanted to take his suit off. He wanted to burn this suit. He pushed his way through the crowd, nodding at anyone willing to give him eye contact. He paused at the front door and considered following his children to the backyard to say good-bye. He decided against it. Out front, outside, it was sunny, and he felt warm and tight in his skin. He couldn't breathe. Middlestein unb.u.t.toned his pants and hunched over. He heard a small choking sound and lifted his head up. By the oak tree, near the mailbox, there was his granddaughter, Emily, crying. He pulled himself up and walked toward her. Sometimes she got this calm look on her face, and that's when she looked like Benny. When she was dressed up, she looked like her mother. When she was angry, she was Robin, she was Edie. When she was clever and funny, she was like them, too. When does she look like me? There she was, alone by a tree, weeping for her grandmother. He wanted to weep, too. He went to his granddaughter and he hugged her and held her against him, and just like that, they were close. Until the day he died, they were close. Wasn't that strange? No one would have put the two of them together like that. No one would have figured they had much in common except being family. But they were close to the end.

Acknowledgments.

Irving Cutler's thorough and fascinating book, The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb, was tremendously helpful during my research. I am grateful to Dr. Benjamin Lerner, who was always so thoughtful and generous in his explanations of vascular surgery, as well as the health issues of overweight Americans. Lisa Ng gave me a spirited education on Chinese cooking; if not for her, I would never have known about the magical powers of c.u.min and cinnamon.

Kate Christensen is the best first reader a girl could have. Deep talks with Wendy McClure were invaluable to the development of this book. Rosie Schaap, Stefan Block, and Maura Johnston have all provided love, support, and couches on which to crash. My agent, Doug Stewart, has probably achieved saint status by now. And my editor, Helen Atsma, is a powerhouse, as well as a very nice woman. Finally, I would like to extend a big thank-you to WORD Brooklyn, my favorite bookstore in the world.

About the Author.

Jami Attenberg is the author of Instant Love, The Kept Man, and The Melting Season. She has written for the New York Times, Salon, and numerous other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is originally from Buffalo Grove, Illinois. Visit her online at jamiattenberg.com.

Also by Jami Attenberg.

The Melting Season.

The Kept Man.

Instant Love.

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