The Middlesteins

by Jami Attenberg

  The Willow Tree

  Rachelle’s mother-in-law was not well. Rachelle wouldn’t have described her as sickly, though, because there was nothing frail about her. Edie was six feet tall, and shaped like a massive egg under a rotating array of silky, shimmering housedresses that seemed to make her glow. But Edie had had stent surgery six months before on her rotting thigh—a side effect of diabetes—with another surgery scheduled in a few weeks, and also lately Rachelle had noticed that two of Edie’s teeth had gone black. Concern stabbed her directly in the heart. Also, she was disgusted. Yet she could not bring herself to mention it.

  It wasn’t her job, anyway, to talk to her mother-in-law about dental care. She had a household to run, two children to take care of, a b’nai mitzvah to plan. (Everyone, everywhere, knew she had a b’nai mitzvah to plan, her hairstylist, her Pilates instructor, the kids’ dance teacher, her girlfriends who had all waited to have children till their late twenties and were always one step behind her in the parenting department. “You think you have your hands full now,” she would tell her old college roommates. “Just you wait.”)

  She was willing to support her mother-in-law in many ways. She happily sat by her side at the hospital for hours on end with her father-in-law, Richard, and her husband, Benny. When Richard was too busy at the pharmacy to tend to his own wife’s needs, Rachelle would chauffeur Edie to check ups, to the Jewel and Costco for groceries. And she had cooked them meals in their home before heading home to feed her own family, sitting patiently through Edie and Richard’s awful back-and-forth bickering about little nitpicky things, the fabric softener, lawn care, their finances, these arguments that always ended with Richard throwing up his hands and walking away and Edie turning to Rachelle and crooning gently, “Marriage is for the birds,” and then making a chirping noise and smiling.

  This, for her family, for her husband, she would do. She could do it, easily.

  But nowhere was it in her job description as wife and mother and homemaker to be the one to let her mother-in-law know that her teeth were turning to shit.

  “Why isn’t your father saying anything?” she asked Benny. “Do you think he noticed?”

  It was after dinner, and the kids were in bed, their last text messages sent for the night. Benny and Rachelle were out back. Benny was taking long puffs from the last remaining bit of a tiny pin joint. Rachelle was shivering like a small, precious, expensive dog. January in Chicago, they must be insane. The pool was covered with a tarp. They both wore large, insulated, puffy coats.

  “You know as much as I do,” said Benny.

  It was the incisor on the bottom left, and the tooth next to it. They were both black at the root. Rachelle could see them only when Edie smiled, and she smiled a lot when the twins were around.

  “Do we have to talk about this now?” he said. The chill of the air and the smoke from the joint united into one giant cloud. He ground out the rest of the joint under his shoe.

  “When would you like to talk about it?” she said.

  He put his hand at her neck lightly and then circled his hand around her hair into a ponytail. At any given moment, she could never be sure who was in control of their relationship.

  “Never?” he said.

  “She’s your mother,” she said. “You’re not worried?”

  “All I ever am is worried about her,” he said sadly. His eyes widened, he made a tiny choking sound, and then he was crying. She threw her arms up and around him, and the two of them stood there in the cold embracing for a while, two puffy coats in the night. Between them hovered a shared thought: that they were in this together. And when one of them failed, the other must succeed.

  “Maybe you could talk to her tomorrow?” he said finally. The prickle of his beard against her face as he spoke stimulated her.

  “I could,” she said. “I could do it while the kids are at dance class.”

  “There you go,” he said softly.

  * * *

  For three weeks, the twins had been taking hip-hop dance lessons in preparation for their b’nai mitzvah, and they had made some progress, but Rachelle was worried they wouldn’t be ready in time for the party, or worse, that they would embarrass themselves. The plan was for them to do a routine after dinner, followed by a video montage of the twins through the years. Then a dessert bar would be wheeled out, including a make-your-own sundae station and a bubbling chocolate fountain, surrounded by cookies, pound cake, and strawberries. Rachelle had seen those fountains before at other bar mitzvahs and once at a wedding, and she thought they were more trouble than they were worth—what a mess! Chocolate everywhere, but everybody had one at their parties now, and she would not disappoint her children, her babies, her miracles.

  They had insisted on the dance lessons as well. They had no shot at singing, which some of their peers did for the performance portion of the party. Even Josh and Emily recognized that they would be setting themselves up for failure; Josh’s voice was in the midst of some serious and dramatic changes, and Emily—brassy, deep-voiced Emily—had been rejected from the school chorus three years running. But they were diligent kids, and had both played soccer since grade school, and were fit and athletic, and they understood what it meant to show up and practice. They had promised to take it seriously. They had promised results.

  And she trusted their instructor, Pierre, who had toured nationally and, in one instance, internationally, with a number of productions of Broadway musicals—this she had learned from scouring the Internet ruthlessly, because in a former life she had been a good student, a solid researcher, and also because she was not going to leave her kids for one hour a day, three times a week, with just any old person with tap shoes and a three-year lease on some office space.

  She need not have worried, though, for Pierre was the real deal. He had moved to the area a few years earlier because his mother lived nearby and was sick with something terrible—Rachelle couldn’t remember what, she wanted to say leukemia, who were all these people with all these awful diseases?—and then he had never left. “You’ve got to take care of your family,” he had explained to her. “I mean, in the end that’s all you’ve got, you know what I mean?” Rachelle had nodded furiously. He was speaking directly to her soul.

  And though his dance studio was located in a dark corner of a sprawling business complex one block from the new Walmart on Route 83, once she entered it for the first time, she knew that this man was authentic and talented. It was just a simple space, with a small office in the front and a white-walled practice area. But the walls of the front room were covered with dozens of pictures of Pierre with celebrities, Broadway stars and pop idols and a handful of television actors. And these weren’t staged photos either: There was Pierre on a beach, shirtless and smiling, his arms slender like firm, flat noodles, wrapped around another shirtless and smiling man; Pierre crammed in at a dinner table surrounded by fabulous people, his big, gentle eyes glittering; a sweaty Pierre post-performance with the rest of the cast, his smooth, cocoa-colored face caked with makeup, his smile exuberant. Rachelle could almost hear his heavy breathing through the picture, the rapid thump of his heart. He was the most exhilarating and thrilling person she had met in a long time.

  But as she watched Josh and Emily at the end of each class through the window between the office and the practice space, she saw how awkward they still were. Josh seemed the better of the two; he could keep a rhythm, even if his motions were stiff. But Emily was off on every count, and sometimes she stopped and stared, silently mouthing the count, her eyes glassy, as Pierre repeated the same moves over and over. He never lost his cool, though; his voice was warm and encouraging, and when Josh had a minor triumph, he hooted, “Oooh, boy, you got it going on now.”

  Pierre promised her, “I’ll turn them into solid gold,” and she believed him. He knew Ricky Martin, after all.

  The kids walked past their mother, their eyes glued to their iPhones—Hanukkah gifts from the previous month, against her better j
udgment, all those studies with the tumors and the cancer, she wouldn’t even let them talk on them, only text—giving a quick good-bye to Pierre. “Don’t forget to vote tonight,” he said. “We won’t,” said Emily.

  “You can vote, too,” said Pierre. He pointed to a new picture on the wall, of him and a skinny young Asian man with pale blue eyes and a Mohawk. The two of them both had ice-cream cones, the tips of which were touching. Pierre explained the man was a former student of his who was now appearing on So You Think You Can Dance. He was in the finals, and he needed people to vote for him. “You can call or text,” said Pierre. “If you’re the texting type.”

  She wasn’t, but she could learn to be.

  * * *

  The class lasted ninety minutes, and her in-laws’ home—the same house where Benny had grown up with his sister, Robin—was ten minutes away from the studio. That meant Rachelle had at least an hour to spend with Edie, which seemed more than enough time to approach the matter of her teeth and perhaps even the larger looming issue of her health, which she had not attempted to change one bit even though her doctors, everyone around her, had issued serious warnings about it. Legs, teeth, heart, blood. Everything about her was collapsing. She weighed well over three hundred pounds. If she did not alter her diet and begin to exercise, she might die: the doctor had said as much to all of them. A bypass might soon be an inevitability rather than just a possibility. How many more surgeries would she have to have before she would change her life? Did she value her life so little? To Rachelle, to Benny, to everyone they knew, it was unimaginable. One surgery would have been enough for them.

  Benny’s father had said, uselessly, more than once, “You know your mother, I can’t get her to do anything she doesn’t want to do.” And that was all he was willing to say on the matter. He simply was not willing to take on his wife. While Edie was wonderful to her own children, the grandchildren, and Rachelle herself, she pecked at Richard constantly, as if she were a sparrow and he was some crumb just out of reach; it made Rachelle like her less.

  Still, Rachelle was certain it was Richard’s responsibility to help his wife get healthy, and yet here she was, driving through one long subdivision of new homes, and then another, until she arrived at a tiny side street still full of homes that were built in the 1960s, the owners of which had never sold out to developers, or had sold directly to younger families. Every third house looked exactly alike. Many were ranch style, and they all had fenced-in backyards. In the warmer months, robust American elms bloomed in the front yards. It was a fine, quiet block. Rachelle had seen pictures of the house from thirty years ago, in family photo albums, Benny and Robin standing in front of a massive willow tree in soft petal bloom, Robin chubby, poky little breasts in a polo shirt, half smiling, squinting from the sun, and Benny with a Cubs hat and a baseball glove, a big grin, a brace face, sparkling next to his sister. How had Benny turned out so cheerful and Robin so sad? Nobody knew. It was in their genes; that’s all anyone could guess. That willow tree was gone, and now there was just a low row of unevenly manicured bushes in front of the two-car garage, poorly maintained by Edie, who, in the spring, occasionally hacked at them with a giant set of clippers. “I do love the fresh air,” she would say.

  Rachelle parked across the street from the house, but did not get out of the car; her legs would simply not move, and she could not even bring herself to turn off the engine. Unfair, she thought, the word hotly blinking in her head, branding her with each throb. Why had she said yes? Because they were all in it together. Because her mission in life was to keep her family happy and healthy. Because where she failed, her husband would pick her up, and she would do the same for him. Just as she was doing now.

  The front door to the house opened; it was Edie, wrapped in her enormous mink coat and matching hat, an inheritance from her own oversized mother. (“I am morally opposed to fur,” Edie had told Rachelle once. “But since it’s already here, what am I going to do? Throw it away?” Rachelle had fingered the coat delicately with her fine, manicured hand, and imagined having it taken in—dramatically—someday for herself. “You can’t waste mink,” agreed Rachelle.) Edie got into her car, and before Rachelle could get out of her own car to stop her, drove off.

  Rachelle didn’t hesitate. She followed her mother-in-law, past the high school—a digital marquee in front of the school flashing GO TEAM! again and again—until she pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot. She made it through the drive-thru swiftly and then pulled out onto the road back to the subdivisions, but instead of heading home she went in the other direction, and Rachelle still followed her—she was morbidly curious at this point—this time into a Burger King, again through the drive-thru window, pausing before she exited back onto the main road in front of a garbage can in the parking lot, into which she tossed her now-empty, crumpled McDonald’s bag through her window. A half beat later, she hurled an empty plastic cup. Perfect aim.

  Edie continued driving farther from her house, and now Rachelle had transitioned into a pure sadness, her lips downturned gently, her mouth given in to the grief, a series of sighs floating delicately, resignedly through her nose. She turned off the heat in the car, and now the air was simply still. Edie turned in to a strip mall about a mile up the road and pulled up in front of a Chinese restaurant, dimly lit, barely open, and walked purposefully inside, stopping again briefly by a garbage can, where she deposited her Burger King bag. Rachelle watched as a young waitress greeted Edie with an excited hug.

  She’s going to die, thought Rachelle. And I don’t know if we can stop her.

  She thought about walking inside the Chinese restaurant, reaching up the half-foot distance between them, grabbing Edie by the collar of her beautiful coat, and demanding she stop—stop what? Stop eating? Stop eating everything? But to do that would be to admit that Rachelle had been following her for the last twenty minutes, and she would never do that.

  Instead she turned her car back out onto the street and headed toward Pierre’s studio, subdivision, subdivision, left, right, parked, and then watched the last twenty minutes of the twins’ practice. They were so young and healthy and beautiful. They were thin. Emily looked a little like her Aunt Robin in the mouth, those sad, pursed, vaguely sexy lips. Josh was all Benny, dark, thick, bristly hair, surprisingly well-shaped eyebrows, a small but determined smile. She could see nothing in them physically that indicated that they would grow up someday and turn out like their grandmother, even if Emily did seem sullen sometimes, which was not necessarily a correlative to a negative relationship to food, but it was something that she, Rachelle, as a mother, could keep an eye on nonetheless.

  While the kids packed up their gym bags at the end of class, she leaned on one side of the doorway, while Pierre leaned on the other. In her own quiet way, she began to beg for his approval.

  “There’s hope for them yet, right?” she said.

  “They’re just diamonds in the rough,” he said, and he winked. “Waiting to emerge like beautiful little rainbows.” He raised his hands to the sky and shimmered them down, and Rachelle followed the path of his fingertips down to his sides. She swore he had left little trails of pixie dust in the air behind them.

  “And how about you, Miss Rachelle? How are you doing? That’s a big party you’ve been planning.”

  She had bemoaned the chocolate fountain to him in the past. The chocolate fountain felt excessive to Rachelle, and the thought of gallons upon gallons of chocolate hitting the air and then bubbling up in a pool made her nauseous. A gateway to cavities, at the least. But it wasn’t about her, this party. It was about her kids, and about their family. “A little chocolate never hurt anyone,” Pierre had told her, and he had laughed outrageously, and she had laughed too, even though she wasn’t totally sure she had gotten the joke.

  “The save-the-date cards go out next week,” she said. “Well, they’re actually little magnets.” She pulled one out of her purse—JOSH AND EMILY B’NAI MITZVAH JUNE 5, 2010—TONIGHT’S GONNA BE A
GOOD NIGHT!—and handed it to him. “You’re invited, of course.” She said this without thinking. Was he invited? She would love to see him on the dance floor.

  “That’s so sweet,” he said evenly.

  Rachelle blushed. “I’m sure you’ve got a busy schedule,” she said. “And you probably get invited to lots of bar mitzvahs.”

  “Not too many,” he said. “I think people are always worried about who I’m going to bring as a date.” He laughed, his own private joke that wasn’t so private.

  “You can bring whomever you like,” Rachelle said, and she meant it. She could not help but steal a glance at his gleaming wall of celebrity photos.

  “I’ll check my schedule,” he said, and she felt deeply—she knew!—that he meant it, too.

  * * *

  Benny was already at home when she returned with the kids, setting the table, an Edwardo’s box on the kitchen counter. He was still wearing his suit, an old one, the crease nearly faded in the pants. (She would donate it to the Goodwill tomorrow, she decided.) He must have just beaten them home. It was his one night to cook, and he had cheated and gotten a pizza.

  “Tell me you at least got a salad,” she said. “Something with nutritional value.”

  Benny pulled a large plastic container of salad out of a bag and waved it at Rachelle.

  “What am I, crazy?” he said. “I don’t want to spend the night in the doghouse.”

  “We don’t have a doghouse,” said Josh. “Or a dog.”

  “It’s an expression,” said Benny. “A joke. You’re no fun. When did this kid turn into no fun?”