The Middlesteins(2)
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.
The Meanest Act
Robin’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.