The Middlesteins

by Jami Attenberg

  But it had been luxurious to be reminded of the pleasures of a woman’s touch, the delicate thrill of its softness, the tension of trusting her to touch him the right way, the tiny death and rebirth that came with an orgasm. It wasn’t soulful, necessarily, but it felt deep to Middlestein. He would renew his search for a woman.

  He sat at his desk, white, long, clean, with a slight chip where he had banged the IKEA package against the wall of the lobby on his way in the door, turned on his computer, and selected the bookmark for the dating site for Jews. Forty was too young, he knew that now, he had known it all along, but now it had been confirmed. He wanted to take his clothes off with someone, but he needed to feel like the two of them were closer to equal. He changed his search parameters; now he was looking for women from fifty to sixty years of age.

  And suddenly there were two hundred new results in the queue; a whole new world had opened up because Middlestein had decided to date age-appropriately. He clicked through a dozen of them until he found a picture of a dark, curly-haired woman, ample, smiling, appearing much younger than sixty, so familiar-looking that he was immediately attracted to her simply because he found familiarity, rare these days, so comforting. He opened her ad and realized he was staring at a picture of his wife, Edie, from ten years earlier, before they had fallen out of love with each other, before they had drifted so far apart it was as if they were on opposite ends of the world.

  He knew when that photo was taken: It was on their trip to Italy. It was their first vacation together after Robin had gone away to college and then there was nothing left but the two of them. They were fifty years old. They had been raising children for the past twenty-five years. They should have been ready for their Part Two. He read about Part Two in magazines, he had heard about it from his friends. He wanted his Part Two.

  But instead they had fought over everything, every detail. Or rather, she had fought with him, derided every suggestion he made. What did he know about Rome? She was the one who had studied Italian in college and spent two weeks in Italy after graduation. She was the one who had once been basically fluent in the language and would surely be again after a day or two there. Why would they go on a tour when they could walk the streets just fine on their own? Why would they stay at a hotel near the Vatican when it was so far away from everything else? Why, when they finally arrived there, had it not occurred to him to bring better shoes? (This was when his knees were just starting to go, he remembered, and that mile-long walk through the Vatican crushed him, and the minute he complained just once, she had snapped, so by the time they got to the Sistine Chapel, she was practically shrieking, and only the repeated shushing of the security guards had quieted her.) Why was he still jet-lagged? Why was he being so weird about taking the bus if he was complaining about walking? Why did he order the same thing every night? Why didn’t he have an open mind? Why couldn’t he just enjoy himself? That might have been the vacation that killed them, or it might have been the beginning of the end. It was hard to pinpoint it. He wondered if he was having a delayed reaction, by a decade. Here he was thinking it was everything, but instead maybe it was just that one moment in time.

  When they got to the Trevi Fountain that day, he was limping, his hips, his ankles, his back, everything was shattered. Edie had already consumed five espressos and two gelatos, and he had wondered if she would ever sleep again. Some pleasant-enough American girl, a little older than Robin, a tourist like them, innocent to the doom she was witnessing, offered to take their picture with the fountain as the backdrop. The result was a photo of two people standing far apart, and he knew he was unsmiling in the other half of it, the half, he noticed, that Edie had cut out of the picture. What he saw online was just her, her handbag looped over her arm, that pretty silk dress that fell nicely around her wide, sexy hips, her hair a majestic throng of curls (it had rained that morning, and the air was still humid), still a reasonably good-looking woman with an intense, hopped-up-on-caffeine smile on her face. She looked like she was clever. She looked a little dangerous. Slightly past her prime, but still she seemed ripe. If he didn’t know her, he would have thought she was fascinating. If he didn’t know her, he would have thought she was just his type. I want that woman back, he thought. I want that woman, but I want her to still love me. And he knew now—he had known this for a long time, but he had sealed it with every decision he had made in the last two months—that she was never going to love him again.

  Edie, 210 Pounds

  Here is what was on the tray: one Big Mac, one large fries, two Happy Meals, one McRib sandwich (because it was a new sandwich, and how often did a new sandwich come along?), one Diet Coke, two orange juices, one chocolate shake, one apple pie for everyone to share, and three chocolate chip cookies, one for Edie, one for little Robin, and one for Benny, who was getting to be such a big boy now. Edie would definitely eat the Big Mac and the McRib sandwich all on her own, although she had asked Benny if he had wanted to try it, pointing to the cardboard advertisement dangling from the ceiling like a mobile over a baby’s crib, and he had nodded yes. She had also asked him if he wanted a chocolate chip cookie, sitting there looking so moist and chewy in its plastic display case, or an apple pie, he could have either, and he said, “Neither,” and she had said, “Well, maybe we should get both just in case,” and he had shrugged. It was all the same to him; around his house nothing ever went to waste (which meant everything got eaten by someone in the end), and also he was only just six years old and didn’t have strong opinions one way or another about much of anything, or at least not about food, because, after all, it was just food.

  What was food to a six-year-old? Sometimes Benny would eat only the same thing for weeks at a time (macaroni and cheese for most of the winter; turkey sandwiches, sometimes minus the turkey and sometimes minus the bread, for all of March), and Edie didn’t have the energy to argue with him. It was not about taste. It was about some sort of affection or association with a memory, she suspected. Like, maybe she had given him macaroni and cheese on the first cold day of the year and it had warmed him up so beautifully that he craved that same sensation on repeat. Perhaps there was a favorite cartoon character of his who loved turkey sandwiches. Or a Muppet? It had nothing to do with his innocent young palate. He could not be expected to be excited about the new McRib sandwich. It was meaningless to him.

  Edie was saving the McRib for last, because it was a treat, almost like a dessert sandwich. She had already finished her fries, decimated them moments after the three of them had sat down, and was working on Benny’s bag, while Benny, in a thoughtful and organized manner, plucked apart the free plastic toy that had come with his meal. Robin was happily banging the hell out of her own toy until Edie finally retrieved it from her just to stop all the noise.

  Big Mac-wise, she had this new habit of picking out the middle layer of bun from her sandwich, because she had heard the one time she went to Weight Watchers that half the battle was the bread. She would even have eaten the McRib minus the roll entirely, only obviously that would have made a huge mess. Best to eat it as intended. She took a bite of the Big Mac and considered it without the extra slice of bun, which lay nearby covered in flecks of lettuce and salmon-pink special sauce. There was literally no impact on the taste, and yet there was something missing in the experience, an extra layer of spongy pleasure.

  Holy cow, she was thinking a lot about food.

  She was so tired from her day, and so happy to not have to think about work (although she did not mind her job; she had never minded putting in a hard day’s work, it was, in her opinion, as she had been raised to believe, both an extremely Jewish and American way to behave, being a good worker was), and in theory, she should be happy to spend time with her children, but sometimes she found them a little dull. Playing with them was boring, and it wasn’t even their fault. It was just the notion of playing itself. She had never gotten the hang of it, even when she was a child. You needed to be able to adopt a personality other than your
own in order to fully immerse yourself in the world of play, and it was burden enough carrying her own self around.

  “Don’t you guys have anything of interest to say?” she said in the direction of her children. It didn’t matter which one answered. “What did you do today?”

  Benny looked up from the pile of plastic parts. Minutes ago it had been an airplane. Now it was waste.

  “I went to school,” he said.

  “Did you learn anything?” she said. One-two-three bites, and the Big Mac was finished.

  “We counted a lot today,” he said. “There was a lot of counting, and I played catch during recess with three different boys and one girl. Craig, Eric, Russell, and Lea, and then Lea got hit in the head and we had to stop playing. And I made this.” He pulled from his pocket a string of orange and pink beads on a long, narrow rubber thread and held it up in the air. “It’s for you.” He smiled—oh, he beamed! The beam that could break your heart.

  I’m a shit, thought Edie.

  “It is the most beautiful necklace I have ever seen in my entire life,” she said. She took it from his tiny hand and then tied it around her neck.

  “You look pretty,” he said.

  She did not look pretty, she thought. She did not believe she had looked pretty in a long time. Her business clothes no longer fit her right, not her jackets, not her shirts, not her skirts, not her pants, not her pantyhose, not even her shoes—or rather, she no longer fit them right—but she could not bring herself to buy a new wardrobe. Maybe if she gave Weight Watchers a shot this time. There was always the vague promise of that lingering in her future.

  “What about you?” she said to Robin.

  Robin spent her mornings in a day-care center at the JCC and her afternoons in the backyard of a young woman who lived one town over, along with two other toddlers, the parents of whom worked as lawyers with Edie at the firm. The baby-sitter, barely twenty years old if that, was supposedly the widow of a cousin of a senior partner, but Edie was almost certain she was his mistress. She was an Italian girl, this Tracy, from Elmwood Park originally, and had no real explanation for why she was now suddenly living in the suburbs. And there were no pictures up in her home, no past, no history, just fresh-bought furniture and a small, fancy, yapping dog. “A bichon frisé,” Tracy had slurred proudly, as if she were fluent in French. Edie had no complaints about the woman; she seemed to genuinely like the children, even enjoyed playing with them, liked to get down on her hands and knees and crawl around in the dirt with them, her plump yet still somehow tiny behind in the air. Wagging it like a dog. The dog barking next to her. The kids barking. Everyone pretending to be a dog. All the working mothers standing there in the suburbs laughing at the too-loud, thick-Chicago-accented but still extremely hot Italian tomato rolling around in the dirt with their three brilliant babies.

  Edie didn’t even know whether she would ever be able to get back up again if she dropped down that low to the earth.

  “Strawberry,” said Robin.

  “You ate a strawberry,” said Edie. “You like strawberries.” She said this as if she were suddenly realizing this detail about her child for the first time.

  Robin nodded.

  “You like fries?” said Edie. She pushed the tiny white paper packet of fries that had been residing in her daughter’s Happy Meal box toward her. “If you’re not going to eat them, I will.”

  “I like fries,” said Robin.

  Edie took two of them from the packet, and then Robin pulled it back toward her, covering it with her hands. “Mine!” she said.

  “Just give me a couple more,” said Edie.

  “No. Mine,” Robin said.

  Once Edie had been something close to an intellectual, and she took great joy in using her brain to its fullest, the first moments of the day in particular a blissful time to think big thoughts. Now she was arguing with a two-year-old about french fries. Around the dinner table, her parents, now deceased, her mother before her father, but he soon after—he should have lived longer, he could have, but he crumpled without his beloved, no matter how much Edie begged for him to try to live for her sake—spoke of ideas and ideals, wondering with hope what it would take to make all the citizens of the world fit together in their own unique ways. Once she’d lived in a home that had bookshelves filled with novels written in Russian; her parents’ collection was now trapped in taped-up boxes in Richard and Edie’s crawl space. She had lost her way. Her father had spent much of his spare time quietly helping immigrants set up new lives for themselves in the suburbs of Chicago. She worked for a law firm that worked almost exclusively for corporations developing shopping plazas all along Dundee Road, from I-94 to Route 53 to beyond, and when they were done with that road, they would probably find another one.

  Thirty years old, and she had failed. Look at the rubble, the empty fast-food wrappers, the mashed-up plastic toy parts. She had no idea what her ass looked like anymore; it had been so long since she’d dared look in a mirror. Edie, Edie, Edie.

  She had a husband. He existed. He had opened a pharmacy with the help of much of her inheritance, an impressive stash of Israeli bonds her father had purchased over the years, his fervid support of the country traded for another dream. (That the money was never to return to her was barely mentioned, then ignored, and finally actively forgotten to the point where the truth disappeared entirely.) He toiled at the pharmacy from before she woke up in the morning till long after she had picked up the children from day care. Often his appearances at dinner felt like something from an up-and-coming comedian on The Tonight Show. He would walk in at the end of the meal, grinning, his children dousing him with noisy attention, and then tell the best story from his day. Edie would stare at him, glazed, uncertain if what he was saying was truly entertaining or not. Sometimes she laughed. Sometimes it was just easier to laugh.

  Richard had no problem playing with the children. He had to engage in real conversations with people all day long, and Edie suspected he was secretly a little misanthropic. He had, after all, chosen a profession where there was an entire counter between him and the people he served, a line that could never be crossed. But the kids, these miniature versions of themselves, especially Benny, his boy, for him, were exactly what he needed at the end of the day. They didn’t talk back or question him; they weren’t deliverymen, again with the wrong order, or batty old neighborhood women demanding a discount; they didn’t shoplift, nor did they ask for credit. They crawled all over him, whispering sweet nonsense in his ear. Neither Edie nor Robin knew yet that when the kids grew older and began having ideas and opinions at odds with Richard’s he would shut them out of his affections with such carelessness. (But this is when things get interesting, Edie would think as he stormed out of the room again, after an argument with fourteen-year-old Robin. Never mind him. Robin would just have to love her mother best.)

  “Fine, take the fries,” she said to her daughter.

  She cracked open the McRib box and eyed the dark red, sticky sandwich. Suddenly she felt like an animal; she wanted to drag the sandwich somewhere, not anywhere in this McDonald’s, not a booth, not Playland, but to a park, a shrouded corner of woods underneath shimmering tree branches, green, dark, and serene, and then, when she was certain she was completely alone, she wanted to tear that sandwich apart with her teeth. But she couldn’t just leave her children there, could she? You didn’t need to be a graduate of Northwestern Law to know that that was illegal.

  And then, finally, there was her husband coming through the door, wrinkling his nose at the assault of that particular McDonald’s smell (which Edie loved, so much hope in that grilled, salty, sweet, meaty air), striding over to the table with his last burst of energy for the day, which he had reserved solely for his children and only a little bit for his wife. He scanned quickly the detritus of the table, the damage that had been done by Edie, and then slid in next to Benny, who threw his arms around his waist. Richard picked up the McRib box—the sandwich still untouched—and pe
ered into it.

  “Can I have this?” he said.

  “I was going to eat it,” she said.

  He leaned over Robin in her high chair and kissed her curly-haired head, then took one of her fries. Robin said, “Mine,” and Richard said, “What’s mine is yours, kid.”

  “You’re twenty minutes late,” said Edie.

  “Traffic,” said Richard.

  “Give me a break with the traffic,” said Edie. “You work less than a mile away.”

  “Do you want to go look outside and see?” he said. “Bumper to bumper.”

  “I hate you,” Edie said in a peaceful-sounding voice. Did Benny know what that word meant yet? What it meant to hate?

  “Well then, it must be a Thursday,” said Richard cheerfully. “Benny, look at what you did here.” He fished through the detached plane parts. “I need to eat something, wife. I really can’t have that?”

  “No, you can’t have that,” said Edie, no longer peaceful, now spitting. “Twenty minutes ago is when we ordered our meal. An hour ago is when I picked them up from day care. Ninety minutes ago is when I got off work. Ten hours ago is when I dropped them off—”

  “Hey, I have an idea,” said Richard.

  “You have so many wonderful ideas,” said Edie.

  “Why don’t I take these kids over to the Playland and you sit here by yourself for five minutes and eat your sandwich?”

  “I don’t even want to sit here,” she said. She suddenly didn’t want to be reminded of what she had eaten, the wrappers, the garbage, the junk.

  “So sit somewhere else,” he said. “I don’t care where you sit. Anyone care where your mother sits?”

  No one cared where their mother sat.

  She walked to the far corner of the restaurant, to the booth closest to the bathroom, where no one ever sat but the employees on break, looking back only once at her husband gathering up the children; he gave her a nod, and that was it. She sat down with her McRib sandwich and then started shivering, because it was suddenly cold in the restaurant, away from the mess, the heat of her family, the source of her frustration. She pulled out the newspaper from her purse. Edie took a bite of her McRib and flattened out the front page. Was this really happening to her? Because this was perfection.