The Floating Feldmans

by Elyssa Friedland

  He bent down to hug her, hoping the warmth would set the right tone for the trip. He didn’t want to give his family the cold shoulder, which could make them think he was still the insecure guy who as a child would flee the dinner table if he thought he was being teased. Besides, he was a pot peddler, and stoners were nothing if not friendly.

  “You look great,” he said to Elise after releasing her from the hug. His sister waved off the compliment.

  “I’m old,” she said. She raised her eyebrows and her forehead indeed had more lanes than a superhighway.

  “How are you guys doing?” he asked his niece and nephew. He couldn’t believe how tall Darius had become. The last time they’d all been together as a family was at Rachel’s bat mitzvah—a ridiculous party where she’d been bounced around on a chair in a sequined dress. That would have been about six years ago. Freddy looked again at Darius and couldn’t remember for the life of him attending or even being invited to his bar mitzvah. Could Elise and Mitch have cut him from the guest list? He hadn’t behaved badly at Rachel’s. He didn’t toke the whole day and he’d put on the yarmulke in temple, which was the perfect size for his bald spot anyway. He’d have to ask Rachel if Darius had had a party when he was alone with her. He needed face time with his niece anyway, to ask about the “complicated” boyfriend and to make sure she was staying out of trouble.

  “Great,” Rachel said, a sly smile spreading across her face. When she leaned in to give him a kiss on the cheek, Freddy noticed she was wearing her tiny diamond stud earrings. They were the same pair she’d asked him to hold on to when she’d spent the night in jail, worried some thug in the county pen would rip them from her ears. He’d highly doubted it, seeing that the other inmates were mostly sorority girls in short skirts who’d done one too many vodka shots before committing some Class D misdemeanor. He blinked twice as the earrings twinkled in the sunlight.

  “You look so grown-up,” Freddy said to Rachel, making a big show of looking her up and down and giving his sister a look that said, “Has it been this long?” Was he overdoing it? Probably. In actuality Rachel looked much younger than the last time he’d seen her in the holding pen, wearing black leather ankle boots and gobs of dark eye makeup.

  “It’s been a while,” Elise said.

  “Where’d Mitch go?” Freddy asked.

  “Let me see,” Elise said, turning around.

  “What the—?” Freddy asked, his jaw dropping at the sight of his sister’s back. His mother’s face, blown up, was airbrushed onto the bright yellow sweatshirt. Underneath her picture, written in jumbo font, it said: Happy Birthday, Annette . . . 70 Years Young! He quickly glanced back at Rachel and Darius. His nephew was closest. Freddy spun him around and saw the identical image on the back of his sweatshirt. Rachel turned herself around to save him the trouble.

  “Elise!” he exclaimed.

  “Mom’s going to hate them, huh? I have one for you too, by the way. I didn’t know about her,” Elise said, shifting her gaze to Natasha.

  Shit. Freddy realized that he had actually forgotten his girlfriend was even standing there.

  “I was just about to introduce you to my girlfriend,” Freddy said, putting a gallant arm around her waist. “This is Natasha Kuznetsov.” He thought perhaps her multisyllabic, Slavic surname might add a bit of gravitas, summoning Dostoyevsky.

  Natasha extended her hand toward Elise, who seemed to take it rather reluctantly.

  “It’s so great to meet you,” Natasha peeped. “Freddy has told me so much about you.”

  Freddy shuddered. His girlfriend’s favorite word was “so” and she liked to drag it out unnecessarily.

  Elise raised her right eyebrow dramatically, a talent she’d had since childhood that Freddy had always envied. He could form his tongue into a clover, but there was so much more practical use for a well-timed single eyebrow raise. It immediately put the other person on the defensive, questioning what the quizzical look meant. Though this time Freddy knew immediately. She’s. So. Young. That’s what his sister was thinking when she floated up her eyebrow. And though it wasn’t her habit, he was sure Elise was dragging out the “so” in her mind.

  “Has he, now?” Elise said, looking back at Freddy. She knew it couldn’t be true. He and Elise were more like second cousins at this point than siblings. His girlfriend’s comment made it obvious she was trying to ingratiate herself with his family. She’d promised to make him look good, but this wasn’t the way he’d expected. He’d rather she dangle her bracelet in their faces and gush about how Freddy couldn’t resist buying it for her.

  “You must be Freddy’s niece,” Natasha said, looking at Rachel.

  His niece looked at Natasha with fresh, appraising eyes even though they’d already spent nearly a week together giggling on the couch and watching Real Housewives. Why did it look to Freddy as if she was taken aback by her age for the first time? Maybe he was just being paranoid, though he wasn’t even stoned.

  “I’m Rachel,” she said, pointing to the place on her sweatshirt where her name had been embroidered in red thread. What the hell was wrong with his sister? Elise had to have lost her mind ordering this cheesy swag. Plastering their mother’s face on the back of a sweatshirt and expecting them to wear them at the same time like they were hillbillies at a family reunion?

  “And you must be Darius,” Natasha said, touching his nephew on the arm gently.

  Freddy’s nephew looked like someone had cut out his tongue. His eyes darted from here to there, unable to settle comfortably anywhere on Natasha. At least somebody was impressed, even if it was only a hormonally inflated teenage boy.

  “I— I— Yes, I am,” he finally stammered.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Rachel said, elbowing her brother in the ribs. “You didn’t shut up on the car ride over here and now you’re mute.”

  Freddy seized up, feeling Darius’s discomfort and embarrassment so acutely his heart actually skipped a beat. He liked to think that his niece was nothing like her mother, but seeing the meanness cross between the siblings made Freddy question his instincts.

  “Rachel—stop that,” he said, despite knowing it wasn’t his business to intervene.

  Natasha offered Darius her warm honey smile, the one where her doe eyes crinkled, seeming unfazed by the kid’s inability to utter a coherent sentence in her presence.

  “Elise, seriously, what’s the deal with the sweatshirts?” Freddy asked.

  “Mitch has yours in his bag,” she said by way of explanation. “Look, there he is.”

  Freddy’s brother-in-law was stationed at one of the dozen or so information booths. He appeared to be deep in conversation with a group of tourists. People, Freddy corrected himself. They were all tourists now.

  “I wasn’t asking where mine was. I was asking why in the world you made them. We aren’t those kind of people.”

  “Well, maybe we should be,” Elise snapped at him. “I suppose you don’t even want your tote bag. Mitch! Come back. Freddy is here!”

  Freddy watched Mitch’s head snap around and break into a smile when he saw him. A potential ally, Freddy thought, making a mental note to be extremely nice to his brother-in-law from the get-go. He would definitely need a friend if he were going to stay afloat.

  NINE

  I’m. So. Old.

  It was the first thought that went through Elise’s head when she saw the tall, bronzed, wrinkle-free woman—no, girl—beside her brother. Not that this Natasha person wasn’t age-appropriate for Freddy. Not that she looked like someone who could be a companion for Rachel on the trip. No. The first thing to run through Elise’s mind was a high-speed movie of everything about her that was deteriorating with age: her skin, her body, her sex drive, her patience. What a soul-crushing thing it was to stand next to a sexy young thing with genetic blessings to spare.

  Elise hadn’t been feeling particular
ly bad about herself when she woke up that morning and stared at her reflection in the medicine cabinet. Instead of slogging through her face care routine half-asleep, she had rubbed the cream into her temples for an extra beat and bothered to slick on primer before her foundation. When she headed to the kitchen for coffee, she noticed a spring in her gait that she hadn’t felt in ages, like the tile floor was a rubber gymnastics mat. She was a step closer to solving her major financial crisis, which, if she was successful, would be like barreling over a pommel horse. Not far behind that victory would be Darius returning to shore with a fully written essay and a complete list of colleges where he would apply.

  After draining her caffeine without rinsing the mug (might as well practice the feeling of being waited on in anticipation of the boat), Elise even returned to her makeup vanity to add mascara and eyebrow pencil, noticing that taking the time to brush on powder and roll out the liner really did make a difference, not that she’d ever admit it to her mother. But then she came face-to-face with Natasha (more like face-to-shoulder, actually) and felt immediately like a fossil, a relic from the species Elderatius motherenza. This was a classic Feldman failing: They were all guilty of constantly measuring themselves against other people, too often each other. All the Feldmans lived in a comparative world. Even her father, with his numerous awards and accolades from the hospital—his shelves had sterling silver stethoscopes and wooden plaques to spare—wouldn’t consider his year a success if he didn’t deliver more babies than his partner, even if just by one. So no matter how content Elise was feeling earlier that day as she pulled together the last-minute contents of her beach bag (a new one because her old one really was on its last leg), learning that she’d have to keep company with a woman at least two decades her junior, essentially a fetus in jean shorts, was quite the pin in her balloon. A little warning from Annette would have been nice.

  Worse, though, was the audacity of this barely legal, nubile girl to pluck the sweatshirt Mitch handed to Freddy right out of his hands and throw it on over her shrunken tank top. Elise had not worked so hard to create this personalized swag to celebrate her mother’s birthday to have it fall into the hands of a non-family-member she’d never met before. She’d spent hours trolling Etsy to find the right vendor who could airbrush Annette’s photo on the back and embroider everyone’s names on the front. Elise shivered thinking about how much it had cost. Seven sweatshirts, which once she added on the bells and whistles—the personalization, the fleece lining, the organic cotton—had come to over a thousand dollars. And then the vendor had sweet-talked her into matching tote bags. Over text, Elise had told DezinedwLuv about the upcoming cruise and was all too easily talked into adding convenient bags they could lug around the boat to hold their sunscreen, motion sickness tablets, and hand sanitizer. Elise consoled herself into thinking it would be her last hurrah, although those were fast becoming famous last words. At least this was a selfless act. Instead of ending Shopapalooza by running to Bloomingdale’s for cashmere sweaters, she’d decided to make her last spending binge about her mother. And not just Annette, but the entire family.

  Now this complete stranger—the same one giving her son impure thoughts, no less—was wearing one of the sweatshirts she’d labored over. It had ruined everything. Elise would need to seek a different final shopping binge. She prayed the boat had some decent stores. It would be tragic if her last go-to-town splurge was on travel-size Advil packets and flip-flop magnets in the sundries shop.

  As much as Elise wanted to be fuming at her brother for toting along an interloper, a part of her was grateful to have Natasha on board. In the presence of a stranger, the Feldmans would undoubtedly be better behaved. During her childhood, her parents had never fought when she had a friend over—a foreign body forced an automatic détente. Of course, it would have been preferable if said stranger in their midst now was a college friend of Rachel’s or, even better, a sycophantic boat staffer assigned to attend to the Feldmans from sunrise to sundown.

  As a rule the Feldmans, even Freddy (anyone could see that the trendy man-bun and his platinum arm candy were an obvious bid for approval), cared what other people thought about them. They wouldn’t cause a scene on the boat. They wouldn’t “make waves.” Nautical puns were invading her brain and she wanted to repeat them to Mitch, who appreciated good wordplay in an adorably nerdy fashion. But this particular pun made her think of the store where she’d gotten a bunch of new bathing suits for the trip, a boutique called Wave Maker at their local mall, and she worried her face would betray guilt if she even said the words out loud.

  “So, Natasha, how did you and my brother meet?” Elise asked, waiting for Mitch to finally make his way back over. She’d sent him to find out what time their luggage would get to their rooms and he’d gotten himself entangled in a conversation with a lively group of Japanese travelers measuring selfie sticks.

  “It’s a great story,” she said, giggling as only a person under forty was wont to do. “We met on the massage table. I’m a masseuse at the St. Regis Hotel in Aspen.”

  Freddy looked embarrassed. “Natasha has amazing hands,” he stammered.

  Natasha lifted her hands and rotated her wrists as if to prove their worth. They were rather lovely, Elise had to admit. Like, nail polish advertisement nice.

  “Thanks, babe,” she said, standing on tiptoe to kiss Freddy. Elise noticed she was wearing one of those iconic Cartier Love bracelets. They were a staple among the wealthier housewives in her community, usually received as a birthday present or for an anniversary. Obviously Natasha’s was a fake. So tacky. Still, Elise wondered where she got it. It was a rather good copy.

  “Anyway, Freddy always used the same masseuse at the hotel. My coworker Alexis, who is really awesome at hot stone and Swedish. But Alexis went to Coachella—she’s so lucky—so I took over her clients and got Freddy. We got to talking after the massage was over. His scapula was really tight, so I gave him some pointers. Over the next few months, Freddy must have gotten like a million massages before he finally asked me out. Now here we are, one year later,” she said, reaching her arm around Freddy’s waist.

  So many questions pulsed through Elise’s mind. One year with this girl?! What was her brother doing getting weekly massages at an expensive hotel? What did Natasha see in Freddy? Was Elise supposed to know what Coachella was? And, seriously, where did her brother’s girlfriend get that Cartier knockoff? It was nearly perfect!

  “That’s so nice,” Rachel said, smiling genuinely. Elise didn’t even realize she had been listening. Her children were permanently glued to their smartphones and Elise had long since given up competing with the tweets, posts, and texts. Just her luck that while Rachel and Darius tuned out everything she had said for the past five years, they perked up to listen to Natasha.

  “I really want to go to Coachella,” Darius chimed in. Now Elise was flabbergasted. Darius was actually making conversation with an adult (assuming Natasha could be considered one). She couldn’t remember the last time he’d mustered anything more than a grunt or a “Fine, Mom.” She supposed that was what having double D breasts and being utterly beautiful could do: get the attention of a lazy, distracted seventeen-year-old boy who otherwise preferred to play Fortnite.

  Finally Mitch appeared.

  “Freddy, good to see you!” he exclaimed, slapping Freddy on the back good-naturedly. What was up with Mitch? First, he was over the moon to go on this cruise and second, he hadn’t mentioned work since they left home, when he typically called his desk editors every twenty minutes. Now he was acting far too simpatico with Freddy—like her brother was an old college mate and not the source of her parents’ angina. Something was afoot with her husband, of that Elise was certain. The kids were leaving the nest, and he didn’t seem remotely concerned about all the extra square footage in their house and the cavernous spaces in which they would feel their emptiness. On the career front, even though there was credible chatter
that the Bee was going to be purchased by a media conglomerate from Chicago, Mitch was nonplussed about the changes that might portend. And, from what she could see now, he wasn’t even fazed by the perky, sky-high tits that were protruding into his personal space, shooting off Natasha’s body like twin rockets. If Elise wasn’t harboring such a big secret, she might have probed her husband to get to the root of his overwhelming complacency. But she didn’t dare. It was hardly the time to open up a chorus of “Anything you want to tell me?”

  Freddy returned the back slap with vigor. She wasn’t surprised that her brother liked Mitch. Everybody did. Even her tough-to-please parents could only complain about his religion, which they acknowledged was an accident of birth, and the fact that he didn’t take home a Silicon Valley salary.

  “So great to see you, buddy,” Freddy said to Mitch. “You’re looking good! I’d like to introduce you to my girlfriend, Natasha.”

  Mitch extended his hand but didn’t give her more than a one-second glance. Elise smiled to herself with satisfaction. If Freddy was hoping to show off Natasha to Mitch, well—Mitch wasn’t taking the bait. She wished her son would take a page from his father, but it was too much to expect a dopey teenager to realize that breasts eventually sag and looks fade and if you can’t make decent conversation with your partner, marriage will feel like the seventh circle of hell. Was it wrong to assume Natasha didn’t have much to say for herself? Probably, but Elise was lacking the patience not to judge a book by its cover at the moment. They would be trapped on a boat together for the better part of a week and they’d learn soon enough what Natasha was all about.

  Speaking of boarding, where in the world were her parents? Her mother and father were typically prompt and yet they hadn’t made their way over to the predetermined meeting point. She’d expected her mother to have arrived at least an hour before the rest of them in order to scope out the best of everything—the shortest lines, the best table in the dining room, the priority seating for the shows—dragging her father along as though he cared just as much as she did about outdoing everyone else on the boat. Both her parents were spineless when it came to handling the other. Maybe it was generational. She and Mitch helped form each other, two potters constantly switching wheels, while her parents left each other alone to pursue their idiosyncrasies unfettered.