The Floating Feldmans

by Elyssa Friedland

  “It’s Freddy,” he said. “This is my office phone.”

  “Ahh, Freddy!” she said, sounding positively giddy to hear from him. Now he really wondered what was up, feeling his insides roiling. It had to be one of his vital organs she was after or else she’d never sound so damn excited to hear his voice. “I have some good news.”

  It was a sign of how little he knew them anymore, a metaphorical ocean between them, that he could barely imagine what it was. His best guess was that it was something related to Elise and Mitch and his little sister couldn’t be bothered to tell him herself. Perhaps they’d bought a new house because Mitch got promoted. Or maybe his nephew, whom he barely knew, had gotten into college. Yes—it was something Connelly related for sure.

  He felt agitated at Rachel for not mentioning anything to him. She’d emailed him just yesterday and mentioned nothing of the sort, just said something about having a new boyfriend and the relationship being “complicated.” She didn’t bold the word, but he sensed the complication wasn’t of the “he’s too into beer pong” variety and that he ought to give her a call to probe. Other than that, her email contained the usual complaints about her mother’s hawk-eyed vigilance and her father’s didactic rules—the way he raised her like a dad on a TV show, with his “young lady” this and “back in my day” that. Freddy bet that she couldn’t wait to return to college in a few weeks, to break free of the shackles created by the four walls and roof of a family home. He knew the feeling well, how you could be in the place you supposedly belonged most in the world and yet feel like an interloper.

  “What is it?” he asked, relaxing his grip on the phone when he felt his hand cramping.

  “You know what next month is, right?” He heard his mother’s voice take on an unexpected lilt, which made her sound less resolute than normal.

  The coming month was a lot of things for Freddy. It signified a year of being with Natasha. It was when he was set to close on another eight hundred thousand square feet of grow houses. It was his best buddy Nick’s bachelor party in Tahoe. None of these things had the slightest bearing on his mother, unless Natasha had gone and done some crazy girl shit and introduced herself to his mother over email. She’d pestered him only once or twice about meeting his family, so that was unlikely. Still, he could never be certain. He didn’t think his previous girlfriend would burn all his underwear on the front porch either and post the video on Facebook. He was in the midst of hazarding a guess when his mother continued.

  “My seventieth, of course. And I really want to celebrate with you and Elise and Rachel and Darius.”

  He couldn’t help noticing that his mother didn’t mention Mitch, which doused him with the slightest feeling of satisfaction. His righteous sister had nearly fallen out of their parents’ good graces when she’d chosen to marry an Irish Catholic, and not the Kennedy type either. Freddy’s brother-in-law was from a blue-collar family in Pittsburgh and his mother wore a big fat cross around her neck at all times, the kind with Jesus splayed across it. The message of forgiveness went right over Annette’s head. Elise’s mother-in-law did take it off for the wedding after Annette pleaded for days that it would insult their rabbi. He was proud of his sister for having the balls to do something unexpected, to risk pissing off Annette, and by extension David, who was willing to take up any cause of his wife’s rather than disagree.

  Shortly after the wedding, defeated by Annette’s and David’s outrage at his lack of being born Jewish, Mitch had briefly flirted with conversion. “So long as they don’t need to do anything to me down there, I figure why not,” his brother-in-law had said to him after a few beers once, gesturing toward his fly. In that moment, Freddy kind of liked Mitch, even if he was a bit spineless. Though, to Mitch’s credit, when he found out they would in fact have to do something to him “down there,” the conversion issue was off the table.

  “And Mitch too, of course,” Annette added, before Freddy could do the pedantic thing and remind her of his existence. In the end, Mitch had proven to be the most malleable man on earth, and after only a few years of marriage to Elise, he was participating in the family seder and professing his love for matzo ball soup, even with his foreskin intact. There was little for his parents to do but accept him into the fold.

  Freddy took a moment to process what Annette had said, squeezing the stress ball on his desk, which was shaped like a marijuana leaf. Hard to believe his mother was seventy. Seeing her as rarely as he did, she was frozen in time, stuck somewhere in the abyss of middle age. Now that was where he was and his parents had moved firmly into the next phase of aging: the golden years. He imagined their days passed with eighteen holes at the club, doctor checkups, and stereotypical kvetching. It didn’t sound golden to him, not that he really had a clue what they were up to.

  The tradition of the Feldman family getting together for the holidays had fallen by the wayside, at least for him, and he never felt he was all that much missed. One time, it had to be seven or eight years ago already, his mother told him—a fully grown adult—that he couldn’t go to synagogue with his long hair. The way she looked at him, it was as if she expected him to drive over to Supercuts that very moment. But he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction, even though he’d been planning on lopping off four inches anyway.

  “What’d you have in mind?” he asked, surprised that his mother would want to make any sort of occasion out of her birthday. She wasn’t one to shy away from the spotlight (the Feldman bookcase was lined with VHS videos of her yearly performances at the country club talent show), but an occasion where her age was the cause for celebration seemed incomprehensible. It was almost a reason to call Elise, so they could ponder it together. He often wondered if his sister ever thought back to their childhood the way he did . . . the times they would roll their eyes at each other in the back of their parents’ Volvo as they listened to their father complain about his medical partners—especially the dreaded Dr. Shoreham always trying to steal his patients—or how they used to hide in the pantry during dinner parties and gasp at the way their parents’ friends talked when they thought no children were in earshot. That camaraderie had all stopped by the time Freddy reached the end of middle school. He remembered hearing Elise whine to his mother one day after finding out she’d have the same math teacher he’d had in seventh grade. “I hope he knows I’m nothing like Freddy. He’ll probably hate me when he realizes I’m his sister.” “No, no,” his mother had gently soothed her favorite. “You two are nothing alike and Mr. Mackay will realize it immediately.”

  “A family trip, as a matter of fact,” his mother said now, tunneling him back to the present. “A cruise to the Caribbean.”

  Somewhere, the biggest mic he could picture dropped.

  Three months earlier, Natasha and the girls she worked with had gotten a hookup to tag along on some rich guy’s sailboat that was leaving from Big Sur for a four-night pleasure cruise. She’d begged him to come along and he thought it was a good idea, pretty sure he didn’t want his leggy girlfriend, who favored string bikinis, suntanning on the bow of a ship without him around. So he’d gone, totally unsure what to pack for the trip. He hadn’t been in a bathing suit since overnight camp, and even then his belly was softer and paler than the lean torsos on his friends. His legs were nearly hairless, a phenomenon he couldn’t understand, considering his chest had dense wiry patches and even his nose would be a thick brush if he didn’t trim regularly. Natasha never complained, goggling him with her adoring eyes, even though his body looked like a weathered newspaper next to her glossy magazine.

  From the moment he stepped on the boat, he instantly regretted it. Before they’d even left shore, the gentle rocking of the Pacific set his stomach into fits of rolls, cramps, and angry gurgles. By the first evening, even the admiring Natasha said he looked ghoulishly green. The boat was impressive, everything mahogany and stainless steel, with a crew-to-passenger ratio of three to one. And still the
ir cabin was a shoe box and he couldn’t dress or brush his teeth without bumping an elbow or a knee, so that his greenish face was complemented by black-and-blue marks on his appendages by the end of the trip. But worst of all was the feeling of captivity, harkening back to those few lone nights he’d spent in jail cells. And this was in the best of circumstances, where he had a girl in his bed every night and a French Culinary Institute–trained chef preparing his meals three times a day. Five days of lockup with his family? Inconceivable. Water torture would be more pleasurable, he thought not hyperbolically. Water torture. How perfectly fitting.

  “Are you there, Freddy? I think we got disconnected. Freddy? Freddy?” His mother always yelled into her cell phone, as though rising octaves could repair spotty service.

  “I’m here. Mom—that sounds really nice, but I just don’t think I can get away from work for a week. I have a lot going on here.”

  “I’m sure you do,” she said without any perceivable sarcasm or probes for specifics. Perhaps she’d just given up. Not surprising after he’d delivered nothing but one-word answers about his job in the past: farming, land, investing, fine, good. One time just for kicks (or a more deep-seated desire to come clean) he’d said that his business was “grass related” and his mother had actually said: I hope you are putting on sunscreen before sitting on that lawn mower all day. “But this means a lot to me. And your father.”

  “Did Elise say she was going?”

  “Funny,” Annette said, sounding like she’d just figured out the answer to a riddle she’d been contemplating all morning. “She asked me the same question about you.”

  * * *

  —

  “How was your day, baby?”

  Natasha was sprawled on the couch in the living room when he got home from work, watching one of those ridiculous Bravo shows she couldn’t seem to get enough of. Even though she’d formally moved into his place two months earlier, each time he came home and found her there—whether she was cooking dinner or relaxing in the bath—he felt like she’d snuck in, having taken the key from his back pocket when he wasn’t looking. It wasn’t that she was particularly overbearing or trying to steer their relationship into the fast lane, it was more that Freddy, despite his age, felt like an imposter playing house.

  “Not bad,” he said, coming up behind her to kiss her earlobe, something he knew she loved. “We signed the papers.”

  “That’s great,” she said, popping up to give him a proper hug. “We should celebrate.”

  He followed Natasha as she ambled gracefully into the kitchen, going on tiptoe to reach two champagne glasses. Her T-shirt rose when she lifted her arm and he inhaled sharply at the sight of her smooth back, tawny and tight. He, the stoner weirdo that the popular girls used to thumb their noses at, had a hot girlfriend, a yellow-haired chick who smiled all the time and rubbed his shoulders after a long day. It almost made him want to attend his thirtieth high school reunion, to walk the hallways with his hand resting on that gorgeous back, displaying Natasha like a tempting tray of hors d’oeuvres.

  “Oh, shoot, we don’t have any champagne. Beer?” She turned around, two sweating Amstels in her hands. “What’s wrong? You don’t look like a guy who wants to celebrate.” She walked toward where he’d seated himself at the kitchen table and draped herself like a throw blanket on his lap.

  “No, I’m good,” he said.

  “Tell me,” she said, cupping his chin like he was a little boy. Natasha was young enough to believe that most problems had solutions; it was just a matter of devoting sufficient hours to talking it through. She watched a lot of Oprah.

  “I got a call from my mother today. She’s turning seventy next month and she wants all of us to go on a cruise together to celebrate.” He panicked the minute the words were out of his mouth. What if Natasha thought “all of us” meant her too? Freddy had been so overwhelmed with the prospect of a family reunion that he hadn’t even considered whether Natasha should come along.

  “That’s really fun,” she said. Natasha obviously didn’t share his same fears about being trapped on Gilligan’s Island with her family. He had never given much thought to her parents, as if Natasha had simply manifested without a family or a background. Now he was intrigued by her folks: people so well-meaning and without agendas that she desired a week at sea with them.

  “I guess,” he said, scratching his head. “It’s just weird of my mom to celebrate her birthday in such a big way. We used to be forbidden from even mentioning it. Me and Elise, that is—my sister.” He realized he never spoke about Elise to Natasha. He wondered if they would like each other. One of them had a stick up her ass and the other didn’t, but if he remembered correctly, Elise had a sharp sense of humor and Natasha was quick with a laugh, so there was a chance at compatibility.

  “Maybe she’s changing as she’s getting older,” Natasha ventured, swiveling her torso so she faced him squarely. She was much more than just a pretty face, but what a face it was. He really liked the glow of the dewy skin on her cheeks, even if it was a bit too smooth and radiant for someone his age to be stroking.

  A few weeks ago he’d seen Elise’s pictures on Facebook from some deadly suburban barbecue and was shocked by her wrinkles and sunspots, visible even in the grainy photo taken in weak afternoon light. That was his little sister looking positively haggard. Mitch, also in the frame of the photo, was similarly showing signs of his age—thinning hair, a paunch that would probably extend past Freddy’s own if they stood in profile, dad socks hiked to midcalf. Even if Natasha laughed at all of Elise’s jokes until she was hiccuping and her stomach hurt, his sister might still hate his girlfriend just because of her buoyant breasts and washboard abs.

  “Maybe,” he acknowledged, thinking how much he’d changed in his life. He should be the last person to go around accusing anyone of being static. “But it’s more than that. I just can’t really see myself on a family vacation at this point in my life. My parents still think of me as the same screwup they constantly had to fish out of the principal’s office. And my sister—though she’s done nothing more in her life than join the PTA—is treated like royalty. I’d come away feeling like shit about myself.”

  “I could go with you,” she said. “Talk you up.” Now she straddled him, kissed him firmly on the lips. “You’re no screwup to me.” When she ran her fingers through his hair, he noticed she was wearing the Cartier Love bracelet he’d given her for her birthday. He wasn’t a materialistic guy, but he had all this money suddenly and felt like he ought to use it. He didn’t derive much pleasure from shopping, but it seemed logical to do something with the cash in his bank account other than let it collect de minimis interest. Freddy didn’t know a whit about investing in the financial markets. He knew land, he knew pot, and he knew stoners. And, most important, he knew he was better off buying himself a few expensive treats than to risk losing it all in the Nasdaq.

  What he really ought to buy was a house, something ski-in, ski-out, but he was comfortable in his one-bedroom apartment. When Rachel and her friends had visited, they’d been perfectly happy sharing air mattresses that he’d arranged in the living room. He felt a kinship with the college kids, having never really reached that inevitable-for-most place where he desired a fancy kitchen with a Wolf range or a marble bathroom with a steam shower like other “adults.” How he wished he could just buy his mother an extravagant gift and dispense with his birthday responsibilities that way. Annette was more classically materialistic, a keeping-up-with-the-Goldmans type, but he could tell this time was different. His mother was thinking bigger than a store-bought good. She was thinking quality time.

  “I’m not sure that would be a good idea,” he said, but when he saw Natasha’s face fall he reconsidered, first for her benefit, then his own. “You know what, why not?” He figured the whole trip was going to be a shit show anyway, so why not bring along his jailbait girlfriend to throw another log on
the fire? Give his family something else for which to judge him. Especially Elise, who, for all her humor and propensity to defuse an uncomfortable situation with a joke, never cut him any slack. If only she knew what her own daughter was up to and the trouble he’d bailed her out of last year. He’d never rat out Rachel, though. No matter how many high-handed digs Elise threw his way.

  What was he thinking? There was no way he could leave his business now. Not with the big deal in Nevada so close to getting approved and the cover story in High Times coming out in a few weeks, which could set off a storm of business opportunities. If only he could use work to bow out gracefully. After all, his father had worked six days a week until the day he retired, never showing a trace of remorse about having to miss an obligation. For David Feldman, a vacation meant an extra day tacked on to an otherwise necessary trip—like when they stayed over another day to see Alcatraz after a cousin’s wedding in San Francisco or drove to Newport after Elise’s graduation from Dartmouth. But then again, delivering babies, performing hysterectomies, blasting ovarian cysts—these were indisputably more worthwhile endeavors than supplying Mary Jane to the blurry-eyed college kids on spring break or the hedge-funders looking to spice up après-ski. Though there was his palliative clientele, those cancer patients for whom what he was peddling was more comforting than anything made by GlaxoSmithKline. Or so the patients told him when he had occasion to meet them in one of his shops.

  His parents—especially his father, the sort of doctor who rolled his eyes at homeopathic remedies and simply humored women who credited their fertility to meditation—would doubt anything he was a part of could be of use to the sickly. He still remembered what his dad had said to him at the sixth-grade science fair after he’d proudly displayed his invention, a flavor contraption for kids to change the taste of their medicine at home to bubble gum, blue raspberry, or minty chocolate: “That would never work because pharmacists wouldn’t let children tamper with their medication.” As if Freddy had been planning to apply for a patent at age twelve. All Freddy had wanted was a big pat on the back and to see a look of pleasure in his father’s eyes. After all, the whole invention was clearly a nod to his father’s profession. Feeling crushed in the middle of the school auditorium and fighting back tears, Freddy wished he’d made a homework machine like so many of the other kids, all of whom were getting swallowed up by hugs and kisses.