The Middlesteins

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H
ow could she
not feed their daughter?

Little Edie Herzen, age five: not so little. Her mother had noticed this, how could
she miss it? Her arms and legs, once peachy and soft, had blossomed into something
that surpassed luscious. They were disarmingly solid. A child should be squeezable.
She was a cement block of flesh. She breathed too heavy, like someone’s gassy old
uncle after a meal. She hated taking the stairs; she begged to be carried up the four
flights to their apartment, her mother
uchhing
, her back, the groceries, a bag of books from the library.

“I’m tired,” said Edie.

“We’re all tired,” said her mother. “Come on, help me out here.” She handed Edie the
bag of books. “You picked these out, you carry them.”

Her mother, not so thin herself. Nearly six feet tall, with a powerhouse of a body,
she was a lioness who had a shimmer and a roar to her thick, majestic self. She believed
she was a queen among women. Still, she was damp, and she had a headache, and the
stairs weren’t fun, she agreed.

Her husband, Edie’s father, always took the stairs two at once, in a hurry to get
to the next place. He was tall, with a thick head of dark, spongy hair, and had long,
lanky, pale limbs, and his chest was so thin it was practically translucent, his ribs
protruding, watery blue veins threaded throughout. After they made love, she would
lazily watch the skin that covered his heart bob up and down, fast, slower, slow.

At meals, he ate and ate; he was carnal, primal, about food. He staked out territory,
leaning forward on the table, one arm resting around his plate, the other dishing
the food into his mouth, not stopping to chew or breathe. But he never gained a pound.
He had starved on his long journey from Ukraine to Chicago eight years before, and
had never been able to fill himself up since.

When you looked at all the things in the world there were to agree upon, they had
so little in common, this husband and wife. He was not a patriot; America had always
been her home. She was more frivolous than he with money, because to her, living in
this vast, rich country, in the healthy city of Chicago, it always felt as if more
money could be made. They went to separate synagogues, he to the one favored by the
Russian immigrants, she to the one founded by Germans two generations earlier, where
her parents had gone before they had died, the synagogue in which she had grown up,
and she could not let that go, not even in this new union. He had more secrets, had
seen more hardships. She had only watched it on the news. And he would always carry
his daughter, Edie, wherever she wanted to go, on his shoulders, high up in the sky,
as close to God as he could get her. And she was absolutely certain that Edie should
be walking everywhere by now.

But they agreed about how to have sex with each other (any way they wanted, no judgment
allowed) and how often (nightly, at least), and they agreed that food was made of
love, and was what made love, and they could never deny themselves a bite of anything
they desired.

And if Edie, their beloved, big-eyed, already sharp-witted daughter, was big for her
age, it did not matter.

Because how could they not feed her?

Little Edie Herzen, having a bad day, was making the slowest walk up a flight of stairs
in the collective history of walking and stairs, until she decided she could not take
another step. It was hot in the stairwell, the dusty air overheated by a skylight
above, and when Edie finally sat, throwing the bag of books on the floor next to her,
the sweat squished down the backs of her thighs onto the stairs.

“Edie,
bubbeleh
, don’t start.”

“It’s too hot,” she said. “Hot, tired. Carry me.”

“With what hands?”

“Where’s Daddy? He could carry me.”

“What is wrong with you today?”

Edie didn’t mean to be a baby about it. She was not a whiner. She just wanted to be
carried. She wanted to be carried and cuddled and fed salty liverwurst and red onion
on warm rye bread. She wanted to read and talk and laugh and watch television and
listen to the radio, and at the end of the day she wanted to be tucked into bed, and
kissed good night by one or both of her parents, it did not matter which, for she
loved them both equally. She wanted to watch the world around her go by, and make
up stories in her head about everything she saw, and sing all the little songs they
taught her in Sunday school, and count as high as she could possibly count, which
was currently over one thousand. There was so much to be observed and considered,
why did she need to walk? She missed her buggy and sometimes would pull it out of
the storage closet and study it wistfully. She would have loved to be pushed around
forever, like a princess in a carriage, surveying her kingdom, preferably one with
a magical forest, with tiny dancing elves in it. Elves who had their own deli where
they only sold liverwurst.

Her mother shifted the groceries in her damp arms. She could smell something sour
and realized it was herself, and then a massive rivulet of sweat shot from her armpit
down her arm, and she tried to wipe her arm against the bag, and then the bag began
to turn, and she reached out for it with the other arm, and then the other bag began
to fall, and she hunched over and held them close, trying to rest the bags on the
tops of her thighs, but it did not matter, the groceries at the top of both bags spilled
out: first the loaf of bread, the greens, the tomatoes, landing on Edie’s head, and
then two large cans of beans on Edie’s fingertips.

Little Edie Herzen, lioness in training, already knew how to roar.

Her mother dropped the bags to the floor. She grabbed her daughter, she held her against
her, she squeezed her (wondering again why Edie was already so solid, so
hard
), she shushed her baby girl, the guilt boiling in her stomach like an egg in hot
water, a lurching sensation between wanting her daughter to stop crying already—she
was going to be fine in five minutes, five years, fifty years, she would not even
remember this pain—and wanting to cry herself, because she knew she would never forget
the time she dropped two cans of beans on her daughter’s fingers.

 “Let me see them,” she said to Edie, who was howling and shaking her head at the
same time, holding her hands tight against her. “We won’t know if you’re all right
if I can’t look at them.”

The howling and the hiding of the hands went on for a while. Neighbors opened their
doors and stuck their heads into the hallway, then closed them when they saw it was
just that fat child from 6D, being a kid, crying like they do. Edie’s mother coddled
and begged. The ice cream was melting. One nail was going to turn blue and fall off
a week later, and if she thought Edie was hollering now, she hadn’t heard anything,
but no one knew that yet. There would be no scars, although there would be a lifetime
of scars ahead for Edie, in one way or another, but no one knew that yet either.

Her mother sat there with her arm around her daughter, until she did the only thing
left she could do. She reached behind them on the floor and grabbed the loaf of rye
bread, still warm in its wrapping paper, baked not an hour before at Schiller’s down
on Fifty-third Street, and pulled off a hunk of it and handed it to her daughter,
who ignored her, and continued to sob, unforgiving, a tiny mean bone having just been
formed.

“Good,” said her mother. “More for me.”

How long do you think it took before Edie turned her head and stuck her trembling
hand out for food? Her mouth hanging open expectantly, yet drowsily, like a newborn
bird. Rye to her mouth. Wishing there were liverwurst. Dreaming of elves. How long
until she revealed her other hand, pink, and purple, and blue, the edges of her index
finger’s nail bloodied, to her mother? Until her mother covered her hand with kisses?

Food was made of love, and love was made of food, and if it could stop a child from
crying, then there was nothing wrong with that either.

“Carry me,” Edie said, and this time her mother could no longer deny her. Up the stairs,
four flights, the bag of library books strapped around her neck, only slightly choking
her, while one arm held two bags of groceries, and the other held her beloved daughter,
Edie.

R
obin’s mother, Edie
, was having another surgery in a week. Same procedure, different leg. Everyone kept
saying,
At least we know what to expect
. Robin and her downstairs neighbor, Daniel, were toasting the leg at the bar across
the street from their apartment building. It was cold out. January in Chicago. Robin
had worn five layers just to walk across the street. Daniel was already drunk by the
time she got there. Her mother was getting cut open twice in one year. Cheers.

The bar was a no-name, no-shame, no-nothing kind of place. Robin had a hard time giving
directions to it. There was a fluorescent Old Style sign in the sole window, but no
number on the front door.
Between 242 and 246
is what she would say, although for some reason that confused people. But not Daniel.
He knew the way.

“Here’s to number two,” said Daniel. He raised his glass. He was drinking the brown
stuff. Usually he drank the yellow stuff or the amber stuff, but it was winter. “Is
it the right or the left leg?”

“You know, I can’t even remember. I think I’ve blocked it out. Isn’t that terrible?
Am I a terrible person?” All of it had been a surprise, though it shouldn’t have been.
Her mother refused to eat properly or exercise, and in the last decade she had grown
obese. Two years ago, she had been diagnosed with diabetes. It was an advanced case.
The diabetes, combined with a disastrous gene pool, had led to an arterial disease
in her legs. What had started out as tingling had turned to constant pain. Robin had
seen her mother’s legs in the hospital, after the first surgery, and had gagged at
their blue tinge. How had her mother not noticed? Or her father? How had this slipped
through the cracks? The doctor had inserted a small metal tube—a stent—into her leg,
so that the blood could flow properly. (Robin wondered: where did the blood go, if
it did not flow?) Originally the doctor had wanted to do a bypass, an idea that threatened
everyone. He still did, according to Robin’s brother, Benny. “This could get serious
fast,” he had told her. “We’ve been warned.” But Edie had negotiated with the doctor.
She promised to behave herself. She promised to do the work to get herself right.
Thirty-five years as a lawyer, she knew how to put up a fight. Six months later Edie
had changed nothing in her life, taken not one step to help herself, and here they
all were again.

“It’s not that I don’t care,” said Robin. “It’s just that I don’t want to know.” She
knew too much already. This was real life, kicking her in the face, and she wanted
nothing to do with it.

Last weekend she had gone home to check on the madness, back to the suburb where she
had grown up and then evacuated thirteen years earlier, hoping never to return, but
finding herself there all too much these days. Her mother had picked her up in front
of the train station, and then driven around the corner and parked in front of a movie
theater. It was late afternoon; there had been a half day at the school where Robin
taught. (She’d had fantasies about what she would do with that free afternoon: a long
run along the lake during the warmest part of the day, or an early bender with Daniel.
But it was not to be.) Senior citizens walked out of the matinee as if in slow motion.
A few stay-at-home moms dragged their toddlers toward the parking lot across the street.
Robin almost hurled herself out of the car after them.
Take me with you.

“There’s something I need to tell you before we go home,” her mother had said, heavy
breath, hulking beneath her fur coat, no flesh visible except for her putty-colored
face, her drooping chin, her thick-ringed neck. “Your father has left me. He’s had
enough.”

“This is a joke,” said Robin.

“This is for real,” said her mother. “He’s flown the coop, and he’s not coming back.”

What a weird way to put it, Robin realized later. As if her father were being held
like some house pet, trapped in a cage lined with shit-stained newspaper. Her feelings
for her father swerved wildly in that moment. Her mother was tough. The situation
was tough. He had taken the coward’s way out, but Robin had never begrudged people
their cowardice; it was simply a choice to be made. Still,  she hated herself for
thinking like that. This was her mother, and she was sick, and she needed help. Thrown
up against her admittedly fragile moral code, Robin knew that there was an obvious
judgment to be made. His decision was despicable. Her train of thought would never
be uttered out loud, only the final resolution: Her father would not be forgiven.
She had not liked him much before this happened, though she had loved him, and it
did not take much to push her over the edge toward something close to hatred, or at
the least the dissolution of love.

Her mother was sobbing. She touched her mother’s hand. She put her hand on her mother’s
shoulder. Edie was shaking, and her lips were blue. One step from death, thought Robin.
But she was no doctor.

“I should have treated him better,” said her mother.

Robin could not argue with her, but still, all she could do was blame her father.
Richard Middlestein had signed up for a life with Edie Herzen. And Edie was still
alive.

And so the surgery had seemed irrelevant at the time. Robin hadn’t even bothered to
ask her about her health. Her brother was taking care of all that most of the time
anyway. Robin had gone to the first surgery, sat there for a few hours in the waiting
room like everyone else—
Boring
; they all knew she was going to be fine, it was a simple procedure, and she’d be
out of the hospital that night—and then had claimed she was too busy for the next
one. Robin had thought she’d gotten off scot-free, even if it meant she was a horrible
human being. Her reliable, solid, family-focused brother, Benny, who lived two towns
away from her parents, would be there. Him, his wife with the nose job, her niece
and nephew, Emily and Josh, all of them patiently waiting alongside her father for
her mother to surface. How many worried children was it going to take to screw in
that lightbulb anyway?

But this latest trauma was something new and unusual. This was heartbreak. And abandonment.
And Benny was not even remotely prepared to deal with anything like that. Robin’s
mind traveled to other people in her mother’s life who might be able to help her,
like her longtime friends from the synagogue, the Cohns and the Grodsteins and the
Weinmans and the Frankens. Forty years they’d known each other. But they were all
still married, and they knew nothing of this business. No, this was Robin’s territory.
Always single, probably for a reason. At last she had been called up to bat.

“You are definitely not a terrible person,” said Daniel. He scratched his soft-looking
blond beard. Robin had been imagining for months that it was soft. Everything about
him looked soft and comforting, but also mildly weak, as well. His beard and mustache
and the hair on his head and the hair on his chest and belly—she had seen him sunning
himself on his back porch on a number of occasions that past summer, sprawled out
on a faded hammock—were all golden and feathery. She had even tried to pat him on
the head once, just to see what his hair felt like, but he had taken the flight of
her hand as the beginning of a high five and had raised his own hand to meet hers,
and she had no choice but to respond.

Whatever, it was just hair. She didn’t need to touch it. She had her own hair, which
was plenty soft on its own, black, curly, long, springy, wiry, but still soft.

And anyway, then there was the rest of him, the belly bloated by the yellow-amber-brown
stuff, slung low and wide over the belt of his pants, his own personal air bag; the
droopy, faded flannel shirts, with the holes in the cuffs and the pockets; the white-blue
jeans and corduroys with the frayed knees; the Converse high-tops with the tape around
the bottoms to keep the soles on. The bloodshot eyes. The torn cuticles. The amount
of time he spent online. (Sure, it was his job, but still it concerned her.) The only
time he left the house was to go to this bar, or when Robin dragged him on walks in
warmer weather.

“Your boyfriend Daniel,” is what her roommate, Felicia, called him.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” she would say back.

“You sure act like it,” Felicia would say. “What do you talk about on those walks
of yours?”

They talked about her mother. Just like they were doing now.

“I don’t know how to help her,” she said.

“I think you just have to be there for her,” he said.

She knew that was what she was supposed to do, but every time she took that train
home, and the view slowly transformed from the high, gleaming architecture of downtown
Chicago in the distance to the swirling mass of strip- and mini- and mall-malls that
defined the burbs—there was more to the suburbs, she knew that, but that was all she
could ever see anymore, her view obscured by a combination of prejudice and neurosis—a
deep depression began to constrict her.

If she had never moved back to Chicago from New York, none of this would be happening.
She knew it in her gut. She had lasted there only a year, one year with four other
girls in a tired old floor-through in Bushwick, with a creaky ceiling and neighbors
who seemed to be constantly cooking. (Clanking pans, nonstop sizzles; why were they
always frying something?) There were two windows in the apartment, one that faced
an empty lot next door, and the other, which faced the trash-infested alleyway in
the back. There were bars on the windows. Inside was prison, but outside was worse.
Men made nasty comments to her on the street. She got called “white girl” a lot, and
she hated it, even though she could not argue that point. She kept searching for the
charm in her neighborhood but was neither equipped nor informed. She spent much of
her time that year on a train to somewhere else in the city, anywhere else but there.

Her roommates were all the same as Robin, more or less. Their names were Jennifer
and Julie and Jordan; they were all Jewish, they all had gone to midwestern colleges,
and they had all individual secret joint bank accounts with their mothers, who would
put a little extra in there every once in a while, so that they could treat themselves
to something nice. There was a fifth roommate, who slept in the living room on the
couch when she wasn’t sleeping at her girlfriend’s house. She was a brisk girl from
Alaska, Teresa, who had grown up in a town of drunks, fighting her way to the middle
class while the rest of the roommates did nothing but hover there.

They all had been brought together by the Teach for America program, and then spread
out in terrible high schools across Brooklyn. Not quaint Park Slope Brooklyn, where
the pretty people with babies lived, but east of there, on the way to racetracks and
airports; on the way, it sometimes felt, to nowhere at all. Robin had not been prepared
for any of it. Not even after a lifetime of consuming mass culture that told her how
messed up schools in impoverished urban areas could be. Not a film or a song or an
episode of
Law & Order
or a class in college or an orientation program had prepared her for how much one
year teaching in a school full of at-risk kids was going to suck. If she was seeking
hope and inspiration, or if she was thinking she was going to provide it, she was
in the wrong place. She was way out of her league. Everyone knew it. She had no poker
face. All day long she
flinched
.

She would wake up every morning and wonder if she was doing more harm than good. She
spent money out of her own pocket on paper and markers. She tried to innovate: She
covered a large empty tin can (last night’s diced tomatoes for the pasta sauce) with
paper and named it the “Hear Me Can” and placed it in the front of the classroom.
“When you feel like yelling or you’re upset about something, just write it down and
put it in there,” she instructed the children. “And I promise you will be heard.”

After class, she would read the notes. Sometimes it was easy-to-take information.

But more often, the missives were hateful or sad.

But that wasn’t why she left town, at least not in her memory. There had been an actual,
concrete turning point, which had happened near the end of the school year. For a
week she and her roommates had woken up covered in bites, at first just a few, but
then days later, their bodies, their bellies, their legs, their arms, were covered
in red, stinging marks. There was no denying it. They had bedbugs. Teresa was the
one who had finally recognized what the bites were and what would have to be done
about it. They would have to wash all their clothes in hot water. An exterminator
would have to be called. “And you can’t do anything but trash those mattresses,” she
said. Who had suggested they burn them first? Was it Robin? Would her mind have gone
to destruction so quickly? If she wasn’t the one who said it, she was definitely the
one who agreed to it right away.

In an instant, they were all up. They could not live with the bug-infested objects
in their lives a moment longer. They kicked their mattresses down the steps. Teresa
single-handedly carried the couch herself. They dragged each item through the empty
lot, across the gravel, and then to the filthy alley behind their house. Robin ran
to the corner deli and bought some lighter fluid. One of the girls had some matches.
The other girls picked through the alley for more flammable items: old newspapers,
a lampshade, a half dozen dirty pizza-delivery boxes. They all stood there and watched
the flames burn the mattresses. Burn those fuckers right up. They all stood there,
scratching themselves. Was this what they deserved? They had
taught for America
.