The Floating Feldmans

by Elyssa Friedland

  Julian’s assistant, Lindsay, approached him from behind and whispered something in his ear. He smiled, knowing the immediate crisis had been solved.

  “Attention, all passengers,” Julian said, clearing his throat for emphasis and raising his megaphone once again. “A free drink will be provided to all guests who relocate to the Mariposa Ballroom on the Discovery Deck.”

  It was like shouting “fire” in a crowded room. The adults grabbed their children by the wrists, gave their elder counterparts a firm push at the back of their wheelchairs, and set out dutifully to secure their complimentary cocktail. The Ocean Queen was an all-inclusive ship when it came to food and most onboard activities, but alcohol was strictly pay-to-play.

  Once the room was cleared of everyone except himself, the Feldmans, and a few overzealous paramedics, it was terribly quiet.

  “Is there anything I can do?” Julian asked. He approached the family cautiously, stationing himself directly in between the two stretchers. His role in these situations could vary greatly. He could be anything from therapist to ice pack bearer, arbitrator, or bouncer. Sometimes all he needed was to present a voucher for a complimentary land excursion, and the entire family was able to put aside their squabbling in deference to the freebie.

  It was hard to read the Feldmans, though. The older woman was tough. He could tell from her rant. The daughter, Elise, was just as voluble but far less confident—she fell a little more on the hysterical side of the spectrum. The rest of the family? Julian couldn’t make heads or tails of the dynamic there.

  “We’re sorry for the trouble,” the elder Mrs. Feldman said to Julian, looking mortified as she tended to her husband’s busted nose.

  “You and Dad started it,” Elise snapped.

  “Let’s not worry about blame now,” Julian said. “I just want to make sure everyone is feeling well enough to enjoy the remainder of the trip.” And that I don’t need to throw anyone in the brig, he thought to himself.

  The teenage girl bent over Mitch on stretcher #2, and Julian was relieved to see signs of life in her vacant face.

  “Sweetie,” Mitch said, rolling with great effort onto his side to access the wallet in his pocket. “Take a few twenties and go with your brother to the arcade.”

  The girl started combing through a wad of bills.

  “No! No money!” Elise roared, grabbing the wallet away from her. “We have no money to spare. Zero. And honestly, Rachel, your father probably dislocated his shoulder and is clearly in agony. Your grandfather is also in serious pain. How can you be so selfish?”

  Man-Bun stepped forward gallantly.

  “Rachel, here’s two hundred. Take Darius and go.” The blonde on stilts looked at him like he was Jesus and Mother Teresa rolled into one.

  “Take it, Rachel,” the grandfather said firmly from stretcher #1. “You kids need to clear out of here.”

  “Over my dead body!” said Elise. “No one wants your drug money, Freddy!”

  Drug money? Julian stared at Freddy, imagining bags of cocaine hidden all over the ship. He felt a prickle of nervous sweat beginning to form at his hairline and debated asking one of the paramedics to take his blood pressure. But no, he needed to stay in command.

  Who was this family? The Ocean Queen regularly attracted a motley crew, but its passengers’ foibles were, for the most part, the extremely visible kind. Like with the BDSMers—everyone basically knew who they were, especially Housekeeping, who had to step over the gags and harnesses on the cabin floor every morning. The Feldmans, on the other hand, were outfitted like schoolteachers chaperoning the prom. All except Freddy, but that didn’t make him any less of an enigma. He had an aging Jimmy Buffett sort of vibe; he looked far more like a goofy beer snob with a trophy girlfriend than a drug dealer.

  “Let’s not get excited again,” Julian said, slipping into the therapist role. “Why don’t we let the paramedics finish their job, and then I’m sure you can all calmly discuss everything in a more intimate setting. I’d be happy to offer you one of our private dining rooms—we can set up a cheese plate and a few bottles of good burgundy, absolutely free of charge.” Julian couldn’t have these crazy people airing their (potentially criminal) dirty laundry all over the Ocean Queen. He’d get crushed on TripAdvisor.

  “I think it’s probably best if you just leave us alone now,” said Freddy’s too-young girlfriend. As the words left the girl’s pillow lips, Elise’s face contorted in rage.

  “And I think that you don’t get to have an opinion,” Elise shouted at the younger woman. “You aren’t even a member of this family!”

  Julian could tell that, for Mrs. Feldman, this exchange was the last straw. She stepped in between Freddy and Elise, who were obviously about to go a few rounds themselves, and said, “Everyone: Cut it out. This is my birthday celebration. We will all get along for the next twenty-four hours or else.”

  Mrs. Feldman hadn’t actually raised her voice during this little speech, but the intensity of feeling behind her words was clear. A seam in her blue gown had ripped from the sheer force of her heaving bosom.

  Julian took a sudden step back. Shouting, blood, threats, raised fists. It wasn’t what he’d call a successful night aboard ship. And he’d done all he could to simmer things down. If free food and alcohol couldn’t help the Feldman clan, they were perhaps beyond repair. He quietly slipped out of the room and headed toward his own cabin on the staff floor, which was below sea level, leaving the warring family members on deck to berate each other until sunrise.

  Boat life was a matter of simple rinse and repeat. Eat, argue, bingo. Eat, argue, show. Eat, argue, excursion. And then eat some more. If he didn’t see the Feldmans at breakfast the next morning—if the feud was enough to overtake their appetites—he’d know they were in real trouble.

  PART I

  THE CALL

  ONE

  When the call came for Elise Feldman Connelly, she was in Costco.

  Elise—mother, wife, friend, shopper—eyed the checkout lines from her spot in the outdoor furniture aisle, which were growing even longer as she studied them. She hated queuing in stores, all that extra time to ponder the contents of her cart with the twin forces of desire and guilt. She should know better than to go to Costco on a Sunday, when the lines were always eternal. Maybe she’d put her cart aside, ask her favorite store manager, Jeff, to watch her stuff, and then return tomorrow when she could swipe and dash. But no, then the thrill would be gone.

  How Elise craved that soaring spike in adrenaline that shot pins and needles to her extremities and sent butterflies to her stomach. She sighed and looked back at her cart, fighting off the urge to calculate. The total couldn’t be much. She had tossed in maybe eight or nine hardcovers at most, three frozen cakes, a few packages of T-shirts for Darius, and a bunch of sports bras she’d need now that she’d signed up for ClassPass. Underneath, reading glasses, an electric screwdriver, a terry cloth robe, rubber flip-flops for the whole family (they appeared to run small so she’d chosen two sizes for everyone), new cutting boards, a set of knives, a Magic Bullet, a yoga mat, a George Foreman that looked more advanced than her current George Foreman, and a delicate fourteen-karat gold necklace for Rachel. Plus the faux ficus tree that was being held for her at the register.

  “Elise,” came a familiar voice barreling toward her. She felt her pulse quicken, that brief pleasant feeling of being recognized in a crowded place. She turned around to find Jeff, her Costco bestie, driving a flatbed down the wide aisle.

  “You look like you found some good stuff today,” he said, throwing an approving nod toward her cart.

  “Not sure I’m going to take it all,” she responded, watching Jeff’s smile slide into a droop. “I probably will, though.” And like that, his expression lit up again. He didn’t work on commission. No Costco employees did—she’d once looked it up. Perhaps she and Jeff just shared something, a sp
ecial satisfaction from knowing items were going to be purchased, bagged, put into a trunk, and taken to a new home. It was like a form of adoption—making things into possessions.

  She was probably the first person to wax poetic in a discount big-box store. But she had a million dizzying thoughts tunneling through her mind that needed expression or she’d have a stroke. And these thoughts, they were like dough going through a pasta maker (she owned three), coming out in ribbons. There. She’d managed two euphemisms in one breath, putting a pretty face on both her crippling addiction and her runaway mind.

  “Elise.” Jeff’s voice again. While she was lost in her reverie, he’d come off his perch and was standing rather close to her. She wanted to ask him to let her sit in the truck so she could see the aisles from a different vantage point, but she hadn’t worked up the nerve yet. “I’m not supposed to tell anybody, but the mesh shorts you buy for your son are going ninety-seven cents this afternoon.”

  Prices at Costco ending in ninety-seven cents. It was the holy grail of shopping at the big-box retailer. It meant a product was getting discontinued and therefore going on sale. Elise felt an actual shiver running down her spine, forcing her to twitch with nervous energy. Had they just cranked the air? Or was that simply her body’s visceral reaction to commerce, her raison d’être of the past year? She glanced at her watch, an irresistible Apple with a white band for which she’d waited in line for nearly six hours like a teenager staking out concert tickets.

  “It’s only another two hours,” Jeff said, sensing her hesitation. “We’re about to set up a frozen pizza station. You could eat lunch here while you wait.” It was thoughtful of Jeff to consider that it was lunchtime. When was the last time her husband had checked to see if she’d eaten? She was so used to being the caretaker that the very suggestion from another human that she do something for herself made her eyes sting with tears.

  Elise considered what waited for her at home. Her son, Darius, was out with friends, so she couldn’t harass him about the college stuff, and Mitch was at work, like he was every Sunday. Rachel, though. Smart, social, and oh-so-distant Rachel. She was home for another month before going back to school, but her daughter was acting like she’d rather hang out with a rotting jellyfish than her mother. Supposedly that was how all kids were on their college breaks. Or so her friends assured her to make her feel better. But they all told white lies sometimes to spare each other’s feelings. Hadn’t she recently assured Kate Willing, the bake sale coordinator, that her monkey bread was outstanding and promised her neighbor Susan Shifter that the sleeveless dress she wore to the July Fourth barbecue was quite à la mode?

  Who could be sure of anything? Life in the suburbs was so mottled with artifice and carefully concocted stories, so busy with get-togethers and fund-raisers and board meetings, that actually knowing what went on behind the picket fences was impossible. Nobody she’d ever met in the flesh, not her husband, her best friend, or her rabbi, knew her dirty secret. Only an anonymous “doctor” (air quotes necessary since she hadn’t been able to validate Dr. Margaret’s credentials) in an unknown location knew the depths of her current plight, and even with Dr. Margaret (the use of first name being the primary reason Elise questioned whether an actual advanced degree had been obtained) she wasn’t totally honest. Not about how she’d gone and ruined everything for her son. Not about how she’d maybe even capsized her marriage as well. Elise headed in the direction of the frozen food aisle, following the scent of the pepperoni warming on a hot plate.

  * * *

  —

  Twenty minutes after Elise had settled herself into a vinyl chair with a half dozen pizza bites arranged in muffin tin liners on her lap, her mother’s face appeared on her watch along with an appropriately shrill ring. Last time the Feldman clan was together, Yom Kippur nearly a year ago, Darius had taken pictures of everyone and uploaded them to her phone so that when her family members called, their faces announced themselves before their voices. It was a warning, their mug shots reminding you why you might be better off letting the call go to voice mail.

  Her mother was all done up in the picture, reddish bob hair-sprayed to withstand a tornado, face lacquered like an expensive piece of furniture. Annette Feldman was a decidedly attractive woman. Even now, with the deep ravines around her eyes and the gentle curve of sagging flesh under her chin, she still fit into the category of women deemed pretty, which meant an inordinate amount to her. Elise had her mother’s broad cheekbones, the same auburn hair that looked vaguely on fire in certain lighting, even the slanted nose, a combination that for whatever strange reason worked. Perhaps it was the favorable ratio of eyebrow to forehead or the color wheel compatibility of skin and hair tone. Scientists were forever trying to explain what makes someone appealing to look at. Elise couldn’t figure it out, but she and her mother both had it, a possession that couldn’t be bought, unlike everything else around her.

  It had to be said that Annette did much more to enhance her natural beauty than Elise, with weekly hair appointments maintained with Velcro rollers nightly and consultations with makeup artists who swore they could erase a decade with the sweep of a contouring brush. Elise’s father, David Feldman, a respected Long Island obstetrician who had delivered several thousand babies over the course of his four-decade career, strongly opposed plastic surgery, so Annette was forced to make do within the limits of powders, dyes, and creams.

  Annette always tried to share her beauty tips with Elise, who would humor her mother by listening, and then never try any of them at home. She’d yet to show up at her mother’s doorstep wearing that shade of lipstick Annette swore was flattering for their shared complexion or text a picture of herself wearing the denim blazer from the Gap that supposedly would do wonders to minimize the birthing hips that were the female Feldmans’ calling card. Poor Rachel already had them, and while she attacked the spin bike with ferocity, they didn’t whittle down even so much as a centimeter. And she didn’t yet have children upon whom she could blame their girth. It made Elise reflect on the curse of motherhood: to feel your children’s shortcomings so much more acutely than the children themselves felt them. A needle in the heart of a child is a dagger to the parent. Maybe that was why Annette was so relentless with her tips. If Elise gained five pounds, it was as though Annette had gained twenty.

  The Feldmans had been on their way to synagogue in Elise’s hometown of Great Neck, the Long Island setting of many a privileged rat race, when the photo appearing on her phone was taken. And they were all fasting, or at least Elise, Rachel, and the senior Feldmans were, so everyone was crankier than usual. On full stomachs, the Feldman family was known to clash over matters as small as whether the day’s weather was “mild” or “temperate,” but without even water to drink or a morsel of food since sundown the night before, all bets were off.

  Mitch, her Irish Catholic husband, had downed a granola bar, mercifully in the bathroom so nobody with an empty stomach would have to ogle him, but Darius—her thoughtless teenage son—had marched right into his grandparents’ kitchen that morning and filled his cereal bowl so high it might have reached heaven faster than their prayers. Such chutzpah, Elise had thought. Just like his uncle Freddy, who was, of course, a few thousand miles from Temple Beth-Am that day, not living up to a single family obligation.

  “Who chooses Yom Kippur to visit?” Annette had whined en route to services. “The entire holiday is only twenty-five hours long. And you’re not even staying for break-the-fast at the Goldfutters’.”

  “It’s the Day of Atonement, Grandma,” Darius said. “You can tell us what you think we need to atone for.”

  “Darius, keep quiet,” Elise said. “Mom, this was the best we could do this time around. Junior year is critical for Darius. And Rachel has midterms. Plus Mitch needs to work.” And me? Well, I just can’t bear to be back home for longer than a day, Elise continued in her head. Negotiating with your self-absorption and little
“suggestions.” Facing Dad’s disappointment head-on, which is not unlike staring directly into the barrel of a flashlight first thing in the morning. “Besides, we’re together. Not every holiday has to be about a meal.” But as with many families, the Feldmans’ currency was comestible, and being together without generous platters of gefilte fish, eggplant spreads, and deli meats arranged on the good china was like entering a mall without your wallet, the feeling of pointlessness rising to the absurd. Chewing kept the Feldmans’ mouths occupied, which saved them from myriad arguments, misunderstandings, and offenses. Perhaps Annette was right and Yom Kippur wasn’t the best time to visit.

  Elise swallowed her second pizza bite before answering the phone. Jeff hadn’t been wrong about the mesh shorts. The powers that be were walking down the aisle at that very moment with their omnipotent price guns, and Elise felt a flutter of excitement that nearly eclipsed her fear of answering her mother’s call.

  “Hi, Mom,” she said in a deliberate clip.

  “How are you, honey?” Annette asked in a purr, which immediately made Elise suspicious. Her mother wasn’t much of a question asker, unless it was self-referential, the most frequent being “Does this make me look fat?”

  If Annette was another kind of mother, the nonjudgmental, anything-goes type, Elise might have considered opening up to her, though not right then in the aisles of Costco. Dr. Margaret said there was no such thing as a nonjudgy, relaxed mother and Elise felt at once that she wasn’t conveying the essence of Annette convincingly through the written word. Their sessions were timed to exactly fifty minutes and since Elise wasn’t the fastest typist, she was essentially communicating her problems in Twitter-like shorthand. Their next session was going to be devoted to Elise’s father and she thought she ought to book a double. Dr. Margaret was undoubtedly a Freudian.