The Middlesteins

by Jami Attenberg

  There was an intermission between the video and the candle-lighting ceremony, and we took the opportunity to drink. We skipped the ice, we drank straight from the bottle. We checked our watches, and thought about the errands we needed to run the next day, the walk we would take in the sunshine, the phone calls we would make to our children, some of whom lived in other states, with grandchildren we missed terribly. We had only been there for two hours, but it was already starting to feel late.

  In our dreamlike state, we were unprepared for Carly’s arrival at our table, famous Carly, who now worked in the White House and was friendly with Michelle Obama. (There was not a person in this room who was unaware of their relationship, thanks to a front-page picture in the Tribune months before the election, the two of them at a luncheon, tipping their glasses toward each other, a knowing grin shared between them; we had all stared at it on a Sunday morning, wondering what Carly had done so right and we had done so wrong.) Her skin was glowing and tight (too tight? tighter than our faces anyway), her blowout was impeccable, golden, tidy, and there was no question that her jewelry trumped all other jewels we had seen that night. We could barely look at her. We couldn’t ignore her. She hovered over us and paused, waiting for a seat to be offered, a lifetime of offered seats trailing behind her.

  “Ladies,” she said. “And gentlemen.”

  Carly.

  “We need to talk.”

  Do we?

  “Are we not concerned about Edie? You see her all the time. Can you please fill me in on what is going on here.”

  With what?

  “With her health! With her weight! You’re her closest friends. How did she get to this point? And more important, what are we going to do about it?”

  How did we tell Carly the truth? That watching Edie eat terrified us, so we had stopped dining with her. That her temper and will were impossible to fight. And that we had our own battles, cancer among us, one pacemaker, not to mention the usual trivialities: high cholesterol, high blood pressure, too-low blood pressure, iron deficiencies, calcium deficiencies, slipped disks, bad knees, gallstones, hormone-replacement therapy, on and on. There was nothing we could do for Edie that we did not already need to do for ourselves.

  Talk to that husband of hers, we started to say, and then we stopped ourselves. Talk to Rachelle, we said. Talk to Benny. We’re not in charge of Edie.

  We finished our wine. Who did Carly think she was anyway? We raised our eyes to her one last time, her glittering anger.

  But, we said. It is terrible, isn’t it?

  The candles were lit, various family members and friends traipsing up to the front of the room, but by then we had stopped paying attention. Dessert was served: cream puffs and éclairs on a tray. A chocolate fountain appeared in the distance. We were certain we couldn’t take another bite of anything, but it would be rude not to sample the wares of the hardworking Hilton pastry chef. And those chocolate fountains didn’t come cheap either. We ate and ate, and we looked at no one but ourselves until we were done.

  Rachelle, who was lovely in a red silk dress with a sweetheart neckline and diamonds everywhere, clinging to her wrist, dangling from her neck, two big, bright studs planted firmly in her ears—Nice try, we thought, but have you seen Carly?—made her way to our table with a bright smile. No one had anything bad to say about Rachelle; she was just the kind of girl we would want our own son to marry, chatty, attractive, so slender, and put together. Mazel tov, we said. Mazel, mazel.

  “It has been a wonderful day,” she said. “Didn’t the kids do a great job?”

  They were perfection. But how are you?

  She collapsed in an instant, leaning in close to us. “It’s been a little bit hectic, as I’m sure you all understand. Some last-minute table changes. I was up until midnight redoing the place cards.”

  Things change before you know it. Don’t blink twice.

  “I did the best I could with where everyone sat. You’re fine here, right?”

  This is a lovely table, a lovely party. We couldn’t have been more honored to be here.

  She studied the table, doing some sort of math in her head.

  “There were supposed to be some shoes here on the table. Were there shoes here when you sat down?”

  We smiled steadily at her. We drained our glasses. We could not bring ourselves to answer her.

  “There weren’t any shoes?”

  It’s getting late, we said. The men helped the women up.

  “There’s going to be dancing in a minute,” said Rachelle. “Stay for one dance.”

  We stayed for one dance. We box-stepped. We spun ourselves around. We were sweaty and drunk and we needed to go to bed. We clapped at the end of the song, and then we walked out the door brazenly and, we supposed, rudely. But if we didn’t say good night, no one would even know we were gone. No one would ask, Where did the Cohns and the Grodsteins and the Weinmans and the Frankens go? And if anyone did, the reply would be simple: I think they went home.

  We stood in the front of the Hilton and waited for the valet to bring our cars around. We held hands with our significant others. We stared straight ahead and ignored Edie and Richard, who had snuck out of the party and were standing nearby screaming at each other. We did not listen to what they were saying. We did not hear Edie say to him, “You do not get to apologize to me. You do not get that pleasure in your life. You do not get that reward. You are not absolved of one goddamn thing.” And if we did hear her say that, we would not remember it the next time we saw her.

  In the car, we were silent but for small belches and sighs and tears. We thought about our lives together, how we had risen and fallen and then risen together again, and then we went to our homes, and took our spouses in our arms, and we made love. And there was comfort in that, we were not cold, we were not alone, we had someone to hold on to in the night, our bodies were still warm, we were not them, and we were not dead yet.

  Sprawl

  Kenneth had regrets about the day. He had not wanted to leave his lady friend, Edie, behind at the party with her family; in particular, her estranged husband, Richard, about whom he had heard not one good thing. But Kenneth had a restaurant to run, and there was no one to take his place in the kitchen. Saturday nights were his best nights, second only to Sundays, when many people were lazy and without ambition and wanted someone else to cook their food for them. He had bills to pay. He had been behind on them for months. He had no choice but to go to work.

  But first he had driven Edie from the synagogue to the Hilton in his twenty-year-old Lincoln Continental, walked her into the ballroom decorated with pictures of her grandchildren, the twins, Emily and Josh, who were celebrating their bar mitzvahs that day, and deposited her at her table, which was decorated with ballet shoes, a nod to a popular reality show about a dancing competition, which he had never seen because he had not owned a television set since 1989. He felt, briefly, as if he were checking her into a mental institution. When he kissed her good-bye, once on her cheek, and once on her lips, her son, Benny, who was seated next to her, threw himself into a noisy coughing fit. Kenneth squeezed Edie’s hand tight and kissed the top of it. She was wearing a beautiful plum-colored dress that glittered. She smelled fantastic. She was overweight, and her breasts were tremendous. The night before, he had buried his hands and face and tongue in them, and was reborn in pleasure. Cough away, son. I can kiss her all day.

  But that was a regret, too. He wanted her son to like him. He knew that Edie would still care for him even if her son didn’t, but if Kenneth’s own family was so important to him, how could it not be the same for this dear woman?

  A final regret: that he hadn’t walked up to Richard Middlestein and looked him straight in the eye and let him know what was what. A finger jab to the neck, he remembered that move from a long time ago. But it was not his battle to fight, it was Edie’s, and he wouldn’t think of getting in her way.

  The minute he released her hand, he resolved to make it up to her.r />
  Six hours later, after twenty tables had come and gone, Kenneth stood in the kitchen pulling noodles quietly, holding the dough high in the air and then twisting it, folding the dough in half, then stretching it again. The action was mindless, yet infused with love. He rolled the dough in flour. Long, thick noodles emerged, and as he twisted and halved and stretched, they quickly became shorter and thinner. Nearby sat cumin seeds, lamb, garlic, and chilies. These foods would warm her up. He had never met anyone with so much fire in her mind and heart as Edie, but with such a cold stomach.

  She had allowed him to examine her tongue the night before, and it was pale and swollen. Her pulse was slow. He had put his hand underneath her shirt, and on her belly.

  “Too cold,��� he had said.

  “Come here, then,” she had replied, her arms outstretched, her tongue lighting up the edges of her lips. “Warm me up.”

  His daughter, Anna, pushed her way through the double doors with the last of the dirty dishes. She blew back her purple-streaked bangs from her face and, as she bustled past, glanced at her father and at the food spread before him on the counter.

  “Dinner for two?” she said.

  He blushed. He was still thinking of all the ways he could heat Edie up. He had not felt this filled with desire since he was a young man and had first met Marie, his wife, now gone, hovering up in the sky somewhere. It had been eight years since she’d died, eight years since he’d had sex, and that time alone had felt cursed. Now here was Edie, reversing the curse.

  “I could make some for you, too,” he offered to Anna. He worried briefly that he had not been paying enough attention to his daughter while he’d been so busy becoming invested in this relationship with Edie. He saw her every day at the restaurant, though. They spoke all day long, even when they did not exchange a word.

  Surely she was sick of this old man anyway. She had watched over him after their beloved Marie had passed away and he’d moved back to Chicago six years earlier, after failing at restaurant after restaurant across the Midwest. Once Marie and he had been ringers: Plant the two of them in a strip mall in any town and they could transform an empty restaurant into a successful enterprise, usually called the Golden Dragon, sometimes the Lotus Inn, and every once in a while New China Cuisine, which Kenneth disliked because he thought it had less character but Marie appreciated because of its efficiency.

  They didn’t pick the names; Marie’s father did. He funded their start-up costs with his partners, and when they had built a solid base, he replaced them with less experienced chefs and sent them to the next location. They had left a trail of cities behind them: Cincinnati, Kansas City, Bloomington, Milwaukee, on and on, until Anna hit adolescence and begged them to pick a city and stay there. And so they picked Madison, where Kenneth was charmed by the pleasant academics who became their regulars and Marie admired the community’s strong sense of responsibility to the environment. Kenneth did not like the cold winters or the drunken buffoons at the fraternities who harassed his deliverymen, but he had to admit that it was a pretty city, green and serene during the summers, and a nice place to raise a child. They lived there for five years, and then Anna went to art school in Chicago, and then Kenneth got the itch to move; he had enjoyed their life on the road. But Marie wanted to stay.

  Kenneth said, “Is this it? Will we just live and die in Madison?”

  Marie, fine-boned, clearheaded, not a fighter, said quietly, “There are worse places to spend the rest of your life.”

  “What about Cincinnati again?” he said. “Six months in Cincy. You liked it there.”

  She had not minded Cincinnati, it was true. There was a good bookstore there, and it was clean and safe, and they had enjoyed getting ice cream from Graeter’s on Sunday nights, the three of them, Kenneth, Marie, and little Anna, the ice-cream cone almost as big as her head, it seemed. That had been fifteen years before, though.

  “Why go back to where we have already been?” she said.

  They moved to Louisville, where they had convinced Marie’s father to open a restaurant in the Highlands neighborhood, on Baxter, where all the foot traffic was. They liked having a lively clientele. They bumped up their prices. They named it Song Cuisine, and they knocked down a wall and cleaned out a back room, and on the weekends local musicians came and played their guitars and sang. They were forty-five years old, and it was like they were twenty-two again, only they had never been twenty-two in the first place because they had always been working, and then they were parents and were already old. They had never had so much fun before. Anna came and stayed with them during winter break and said she didn’t recognize them. “Who are you, and what have you done with my parents?” she said. Anna stayed out late one night drinking with a singer from Nashville passing through on his way to a show in New York City, and Kenneth found himself trusting his daughter like he had not before. He merely laughed when he heard her stumbling in late, cursing, and then shushing herself. The next morning he teased her about it. They were all growing into something new together. Madison was not it, but maybe Louisville was.

  In a year Marie was dead from a cancer so rare there weren’t even any experimental drugs to use, not that Kenneth would have wanted her to try them anyway. It was enough that she was going through chemotherapy. Marie had been born and raised in America. She believed in Western medicine because that was what she had always known. He thought otherwise, but he could not talk her out of it, so instead he tried to heal her with food. He cooked every meal for her day and night, using the herbs he had been raised to believe could heal her. Turmeric and red clover and ginger. When she no longer had an appetite, he brewed her tea with barbed skullcap. Anna took a semester off from art school and came to Kentucky to watch her mother die. They sat on either side of Marie and held her hands when she passed away. They were silent, and then they were sobbing. There was nothing left of Marie but a faded white shell of flesh.

  Anna went back to art school, and Kenneth started moving again, but every restaurant he opened failed within months. Everything tasted funny to him. His father-in-law sent him a check and told him to retire. Kenneth moved to Chicago, where he found a basement apartment ten blocks from Anna in Wicker Park, with a small backyard. Stray cats used it as a thoroughfare, and he sat outside most days and watched them casually scuttle through fences and ivy. Even during the winter months, he sat there on a small stool he found in a scrap heap behind a Lutheran church down the block. Bundled up but secretly praying he might freeze to death. This is where I will live and die, he thought. The cats rarely acknowledged him. He often smoked long, thin foreign cigarettes. The tips of his fingers were cracked and yellow. He aged ten years in two. Gray hair, suddenly. Drawn cheeks, suddenly. Creaking bones in the morning, and no one there to moan to about it all.

  At night he read poetry. That was how he had learned English years before: he had memorized American poems, so by the time he arrived from Xi’an to his uncle’s home in Baltimore at the age of sixteen, he could speak the language and was both enamored and wary of his new homeland. He liked the Beats the best, the spunky revolutionaries, those who roamed their country in search of adventure. Ginsberg’s “America” cracked him up.

  He had recited the poem to Marie soon after they first met. His uncle was working for her father, an ambitious man who had immigrated from their same province as a teenager, and had built up his restaurant business with brutal efficiency. Kenneth was to work for him also; he came from a well-respected family of chefs. Marie was already working in the office after school. She was the one to hand him cash under the table. He asked her out for New Year’s Eve, and they drank the terrible local beer, National Bohemian, at a party thrown by her cousin who was in nursing school. He whispered the poem in her ear, laughing when he said the line When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid. They were young, but she was not naïve, even if he was. Her slim hand resting on his arm, her eyes concerned, her lips amused. Or was it the other way around? America th
is is quite serious.

  But thirty years later, in the basement in Chicago, he was memorizing poems for no one but himself. “America” suddenly felt dangerous to him. Your machinery is too much for me. He switched his attention to Robert Frost, wholesome and rural. But even he had a layer of darkness underneath his simple charms. He read a poem about an ant dying. No one stands round to stare. It is nobody else’s affair. Lonely years sprawled out before Kenneth. He could have gone either way then. He could have died.

  But Anna would not let him. Anna was watching over him, and she missed his cooking. Anna, who would not be denied a thing by her grandfather who could produce a truckload of cash in an instant, or at least enough to start up a new restaurant in a strip mall in the suburbs of Chicago. There was a bunch of paperwork, and in her eagerness to launch her father from his basement and out into the world, Anna might not have read everything she signed. The lawyer they hired was inexperienced, a friend of a friend who had just graduated from some law school Kenneth had never heard of in Indiana. They opened the restaurant, but the business side was a mess. Then it was just the two of them, father and daughter, sitting at a corner table with a stack of file folders in front of them at the end of a slow Tuesday dinner service, wondering what they had gotten themselves into.

  The last customer of the night, a woman, a lush, vibrant, large woman, still remained, consuming the meal Kenneth had prepared for her with a fierce pleasure. She sucked on her fork and spoon and chopsticks, sipped in the flavors, his flavors, until all the food was gone. She had been there every night for the last two weeks. Kenneth liked her eyes; they were dark, and welling with anger. Her anger didn’t scare him. He got it. He was pissed off too. His wife was dead. It had been a long time since it had happened, but the fact remained: His wife was dead. What was she pissed off about? Anna said something to him, demanding he return his attention to her. Her voice was husky, and her eyes were red, and while she had not cried yet, he feared her collapse. She was not to be blamed; she’d gone to art school, not business school. Marie had always handled the paperwork; she had grown up working the books for her father. What did either of them know? How could Marie have left them behind like that?