The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg
FOR MY FAMILY
Edie, 62 Pounds
How 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.