And then the woman rose from her table, the last customer, this late-night goddess, heaving, licking the last of his food from her fingertips, and came to their side. She said, “Maybe I can help.” She had been a lawyer once, a long time ago, but not so long that she had forgotten what she knew. “I was very good at what I did,” said Edie Middlestein. She said it like it was a promise.
She sat down next to Kenneth and Anna and smoothed the papers with her hands. She squinted, and then she was appalled on their behalf, and then she laughed at all the little loopholes that danced before her on the page. “This,” she said, “can be fixed.” It would take a bit of work, but she could make it all better for them. “I’ve got nothing but time these days,” she said.
* * *
He wiped the flour from his hand and onto a towel. The finished noodles rested nearby. Kenneth threw the cumin seeds into a skillet. He thought about adding cinnamon to the dish. If cumin would be good for Edie’s health—he knew she was sick, even if she wouldn’t tell him the truth; her skin was too pale, her breath too slow—the cinnamon would be good for her passion.
It took only two minutes to roast the seeds. The chilies were chopped, the garlic, too. The crunch of the cumin would be a nice contrast to the tenderness of the lamb, and he knew that Edie would enjoy it, the texture, the depth, the surprise of the pop. He mused on the cinnamon some more. How would Edie feel if she knew he was adding an aphrodisiac to her food? He decided all he would be doing was adding a little flame to an already burning fire.
His cell phone rang, and he answered it, knowing that it could only be Edie, because she was the only person who ever called him at night besides his daughter. In fact, she was the only friend he had.
“Darling,” he said. “Did you behave yourself?”
He emptied the roasted cumin into a small bowl.
“I did not,” she said. “I might have thrown something at my ex-husband’s head.”
Kenneth chuckled. “What did you throw?”
“I don’t know. It was all a blur. A roll, I think.”
“Did you hit him?”
“No, it bounced off the top of his chair, and then it landed on the table in front of him.”
Kenneth laughed harder.
“Why do I do these things?” She sighed into the phone. “I don’t even care about him. I care about you.”
“Someday you will stop being angry with him,” said Kenneth.
“But why should I care what he’s doing if I’m crazy about you?”
“We are allowed to have more than one feeling at once,” said Kenneth. “We are human beings, not ants.” Sometimes he ached for Marie, but he would never tell Edie that. He was glad she was nothing like Marie, in physique or personality, or he might have ended up comparing the two of them. The only thing they shared was their head for business. All he knew about was cumin and cinnamon.
“I have a thousand feelings at once,” she said.
“That’s a lot of feelings,” he said. “You must be a strong woman, then.”
“Or crazy,” she said.
“Fine line,” he said.
“Razor thin,” she said.
“I am making you something special,” he said. “But I must ask you something first.”
“Ask me anything,” she said, and he knew she was not lying.
“I was going to put some cinnamon in your food, and sometimes it works to . . .” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “It’s supposed to turn you on.”
“Oh,” said Edie.
“Do you think that’s cheating?” he said. “Maybe I shouldn’t need the cinnamon. Maybe I should be enough.”
“The more cinnamon the better,” she said. And then, urgently, she said, “Use a lot of it.”
“I’ll be over within the hour,” he said.
“Hurry,” she said.
What was left to do? He put on a pot of water for the noodles. He tossed the lamb with the cumin and chili and garlic. A teaspoon of cinnamon. Soy sauce. Some salt and black pepper. There was a grind in his groin; more cinnamon. He poured some oil into a pan, and heated it, then added the lamb. A pinch of salt on top of that. The noodles in the boiling water. He hadn’t had any fun in so long. He hadn’t cared about anything. A minute later the lamb had gone from cherry red to brown. A few cumin seeds popped. He pictured a small butter roll flying across that hotel ballroom and landing on the table in front of her ex-husband, and all his earlier regrets merged into just one: that he had not been there to see that happen.
His daughter, his beautiful daughter with her vibrant clothes and her sticklike legs and her boots that made her look as if she were heading off to war, stomped into the kitchen with the last of the dirty dishes from the night. How had such an original human being come from the likes of him? And she was faithful to him. His faithful child.
“You hungry?” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think I’m mostly tired.”
He was relieved. He did not feel that it was appropriate to give the food he had made for his lover to his daughter. No cinnamon for his baby girl. His heart swelled suddenly toward Anna, as if someone had struck him in the chest. He was bruised with love. He came out from behind the stove, and then embraced his daughter. Her small bones beneath him. She was not Marie. She was something else.
“Did I say thank you?” he said. “Did I say thank you for saving my life?”
She started to cry. “Not out loud,” she said.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he said.
When they finally pulled apart, her face was lightly smudged with purple streaks. She ran the tips of her index fingers underneath her eyes.
“You’re killing me, Dad,” she said.
He rubbed her shoulder, kissed her forehead.
“No more then,” he said.
He sent her home. He emptied the pot of noodles into the strainer. He tossed the noodles and the lamb together and spooned the finished dish into a carryout container. He loaded the dishwasher. He took off his chef’s coat. He washed his hands and face and lifted his shirt and washed under his arms, too. He was tired. He slapped his cheeks. Edie Middlestein awaited.
He drove through one town to the next to the next. Every mall looked the same from a distance, but he had spent enough time in them—his whole adult life—to know that they were all unique, even if it just came down to the people who worked there. Busy little American ants.
Every house on Edie’s street was dark except for hers. Was it that late? He checked his watch. It was after eleven, and he was meeting his lover. He was a young man again. Once, before they were married, Marie and he had driven to Atlantic City on a whim, and they had arrived after midnight and stayed up till dawn gambling and kissing. They got dizzy from cigarettes. That evening, he had a second wind and a third wind and a fourth wind. But tonight he would settle for a second wind.
The front door was unlocked, and he entered, calling her name, but she did not respond. The light was on in the living room, where they had first kissed, lavishly, luxuriously, for hours. They had embraced each other on the couch in front of the window that faced the street. Anyone walking by the house could have seen them. It did not feel dangerous to do it, but it did feel prideful, which had its own kind of danger. Before destruction, he remembered. He had memorized parts of that book, too, just to see why so many people were interested in it.
There were framed pictures of her family everywhere, but not a one of her husband. She had taken them down. There were empty squares on the wall. Which was worse? To leave them up, or to have the gaps left behind as reminders of what once was?
He went to the kitchen because he knew that was where she would be. Already eating before he even arrived with dinner. Eating all that junk food she craved, the cookies and chips and crackers, giant tins and boxes and bags of crap. That was what was making her sick. Eating things made by machines rather than by hand. He was going to change that, if he had to cook her every meal himself.
In the kitchen the freezer door was open. Inside it sat an open pint of ice cream, a spoon still sticking out of the top. He looked down, and there was Edie, sprawled on the floor in her shimmering purple dress, one hand outstretched, the other frozen near her chest, as if she had clutched at it, and then given up on it. Her lips were blue. This was not right. This was the wrong information. He knelt beside her and put a hand on her face, and the cool skin rippled beneath his fingers.
He grasped desperately for another poem he had memorized once, the exact lines of which eluded him. It had something to do with an icebox and plums and being sorry for eating them, even though the person speaking in the poem was clearly not sorry at all. It had always felt like a joke to him. The funny poems were usually the ones he remembered. It still felt like a joke now. It read like a note you would leave someone on the kitchen table when you were walking out the door and never coming back.
His eyes blurred with tears, and then there was only a haze of Edie. He was a fool to think he could have love twice in this life. Arrogance. He held her hand to his chest with both of his hands. No one was entitled to anything in this life, not the least of all love.
Middlestein in Mourning
Richard Middlestein was uncomfortable in his suit. It had been five years since he had worn it, five years since he had been to a funeral. There had been a string of them in 2005: his mother’s, his father’s, his Aunt Ellie’s, a second cousin named Boris he didn’t know particularly well but who lived nearby in Highland Park so he went as a representative of his side of the family (by then he was the only one left), one of his estranged wife Edie’s co-workers’ (a suicide, terrible), Rabbi Schumann (they had to rent some tents for that one, so many people came), and at least three more that he couldn’t recall at that exact moment because he could barely breathe. He hadn’t gained more than a few pounds since then, but his flesh lay differently on his body now. Gravity had struck, and skin gathered around his waist, creating a small buttress of fat between his ailing chest and still-youthful legs. He hadn’t noticed it till he pulled up the zipper on the pants. He’d had to suck in his gut. He’d been holding it in for hours now.
To make matters worse, he couldn’t stop eating. There was food on every surface of his son’s house, the living-room table, the kitchen table, the dining room table, a few card tables that had been dragged inside from their garage, the glass end tables on either side of the living-room couch. And the food kept coming, friends of Edie’s—friends of theirs, he supposed, when they had once been together—streaming through the front door, all holding different offerings, kugels and casseroles covered in aluminum foil, fruit salads in vast Tupperware containers, pastries in elegant cardboard boxes tied with thin, curled ribbons. His oldest friends from the synagogue, the Cohns and the Grodsteins and the Weinmans and the Frankens, had all gone in together on the elaborate smoked-fish trays. He had heard them mention it more than once that day, but only when someone wondered out loud where the delicious fish had been purchased, and one of them offered up the information. “We went this morning right when they opened,” they said. “It’s the least we could do.”
Middlestein would have thrown in a few bills, too, if they had only called him, but they had not. No one had called him about anything at all, not even to extend condolences, except for his son to give him the details about the funeral. But why would they? Why had he thought anyone would care how he felt? He had left her, and they had been weeks away from signing divorce papers. He put his plate down on the floor and lowered his head between his legs and let it hang there. He had brought two boxes of rugelach, and he realized when he walked through the door that it was not enough. Nine months before, he would not have been allowed to bring a thing. Nine months before, shiva would have been held at the house they shared together. Why didn’t he bring more rugelach? How much rugelach would he have had to buy to not feel this way? How much rugelach would he have to eat?
He jerked his head up. He wasn’t certain he was feeling rational. He was so full, but still he wanted more. All around him, people sat politely with plastic plates in their laps. His son, Benny, sat on a low chair, his granddaughter, Emily, leaning against her father, staring off into the distance, her lips downturned. She was thirteen; it was her first funeral. Middlestein’s daughter, Robin, sat next to Benny on a normal-size chair; she was working hard at actively not looking at Richard. Her boyfriend, Danny, sat next to her. He held her hand. He was stroking it. He had these fancy-framed glasses, but he wore his tie loosely, like he’d never learned how to tie it on his own. He looked like a real pushover, is what he looked like to Richard. That’s about Robin’s speed, he thought. She’d need someone to mow right over.
Robin was hell-bent on ignoring most of the traditions, but she at least wore a black ribbon pinned to her blazer. She wore one, Benny wore one, Rachelle wore one, Emily wore one, and so did her twin brother, Josh, who had wandered off somewhere toward the dessert table. Richard was not wearing one. Richard was not sitting on a low chair. He was on the couch, with the rest of the general population. He had sat in the third row at the synagogue during the services. He didn’t know if that was too close or too far. He didn’t know if he should have leaned against the back wall, like some of the other mourners. It was standing room only. Good for Edie, he thought. People still cared about her. People wanted to show their respect. When he died—oh God, he was going to die someday—he wasn’t sure he’d get the same kind of crowd. Not anymore.
He was suddenly consumed with a desire for savory foods, the saltier the better. He wanted his tongue to be swollen with salt. He hefted himself up from the couch—What was that sharp crunch in his knee? And the other in his lower back. Had those always been there, or were they brand-new?—and maneuvered through the crowd made up of people he had once been able to pat on the back hello and who now pulled away from him, he was certain, in disgust. He made his way to the dining room table, to the herring. He was going to eat the hell out of that creamed herring. He spooned some onto his plate. He grabbed a handful of baby rye crackers, and then he stood there and dipped one crisp cracker after another into the tangy, smoky whitefish. He could stand here all day, if necessary. At least he had something to do, a purpose for standing in that spot, at that moment. It was then he thought he understood Edie, and why she ate like she had; constantly, ceaselessly, with no regard for taste or content. As he stood there, alone, in a room full of people who would rather take the side of a woman who was dead than acknowledge his existence, he believed he at last had a glimmer of an understanding of why she had eaten herself into the grave. Because food was a wonderful place to hide.
In the living room, his daughter death-stared him. Her eyes were sloppy with anger. It was spilling out everywhere. What a mess. Danny stood behind her and gripped her shoulders, and Robin reached back and pried his hands away from her. Danny winced. I’d happily walk her down the aisle just to get rid of her, thought Richard. Hand her off to that guy in a heartbeat. Robin got up from her chair, and again the crowd cleared a path for her, and again people stared. She marched up to Richard and past him—leaving behind only the slightest trail of a sneer—and toward the kitchen, where she paused and then dramatically shoved open the swinging door that separated it from the living room. Richard could see his daughter-in-law, Rachelle, inside, a cup of coffee in her hands, leaning against the refrigerator. Rachelle was the captain of this ship, and Robin was a rebellious sailor. Mutiny was clearly afoot. “We have to talk,” was the last thing he heard before the swinging door settled to a close.
Richard turned his attention to the circular dessert table, where Josh was opening boxes of pastries and shifting them onto a giant vaseline-glass dish that Richard recognized as one of his aunt’s. She had brought it with her from Germany when she immigrated and left it to him when she died, along with a houseful of furniture, which he had since sold or donated to charity. But he had kept the dish. It was made of uranium, and it was light green and glow
ed faintly like kryptonite. It was a neat trick: The dish was made of a volatile substance, but had been turned into something useful. As a child in Queens, he had been mesmerized by it. He would fantasize about it exploding spontaneously. Poof! The Middlesteins would be gone forever.
A week earlier that dish had been sitting in Richard’s former living-room cabinet, and now, suddenly, it was on his son’s dining room table. He bet that his house had been ransacked. Rachelle had probably gone through every cabinet and drawer and taken whatever she liked, antiques, jewelry, those two fur coats. Now he was going to have to have a conversation with his son about it. That was his plate, everything in that house was his, lock, stock, and barrel. No papers had been signed, nothing had been filed. If Edie had lived a bit longer, it’s possible he would have had no say on that plate whatsoever. But she hadn’t. Edie was dead.
Josh had opened the last pastry box and was arranging a small assortment of chocolate-dipped cookies around the edge of the dish. When he finished, he moved the dish directly into the center of the table, and then took a step away, examined the table, and smiled. Middlestein glanced over, and then looked back: Josh had arranged the cookies on the plate in the shape of a smiley face.
The Middlesteins Page 19
