The Middlesteins(9)
The front door to the house opened; it was Edie, wrapped in her enormous mink coat and matching hat, an inheritance from her own oversized mother. (“I am morally opposed to fur,” Edie had told Rachelle once. “But since it’s already here, what am I going to do? Throw it away?” Rachelle had fingered the coat delicately with her fine, manicured hand, and imagined having it taken in—dramatically—someday for herself. “You can’t waste mink,” agreed Rachelle.) Edie got into her car, and before Rachelle could get out of her own car to stop her, drove off.
Rachelle didn’t hesitate. She followed her mother-in-law, past the high school—a digital marquee in front of the school flashing GO TEAM! again and again—until she pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot. She made it through the drive-thru swiftly and then pulled out onto the road back to the subdivisions, but instead of heading home she went in the other direction, and Rachelle still followed her—she was morbidly curious at this point—this time into a Burger King, again through the drive-thru window, pausing before she exited back onto the main road in front of a garbage can in the parking lot, into which she tossed her now-empty, crumpled McDonald’s bag through her window. A half beat later, she hurled an empty plastic cup. Perfect aim.
Edie continued driving farther from her house, and now Rachelle had transitioned into a pure sadness, her lips downturned gently, her mouth given in to the grief, a series of sighs floating delicately, resignedly through her nose. She turned off the heat in the car, and now the air was simply still. Edie turned in to a strip mall about a mile up the road and pulled up in front of a Chinese restaurant, dimly lit, barely open, and walked purposefully inside, stopping again briefly by a garbage can, where she deposited her Burger King bag. Rachelle watched as a young waitress greeted Edie with an excited hug.
She’s going to die, thought Rachelle. And I don’t know if we can stop her.
She thought about walking inside the Chinese restaurant, reaching up the half-foot distance between them, grabbing Edie by the collar of her beautiful coat, and demanding she stop—stop what? Stop eating? Stop eating everything? But to do that would be to admit that Rachelle had been following her for the last twenty minutes, and she would never do that.
Instead she turned her car back out onto the street and headed toward Pierre’s studio, subdivision, subdivision, left, right, parked, and then watched the last twenty minutes of the twins’ practice. They were so young and healthy and beautiful. They were thin. Emily looked a little like her Aunt Robin in the mouth, those sad, pursed, vaguely sexy lips. Josh was all Benny, dark, thick, bristly hair, surprisingly well-shaped eyebrows, a small but determined smile. She could see nothing in them physically that indicated that they would grow up someday and turn out like their grandmother, even if Emily did seem sullen sometimes, which was not necessarily a correlative to a negative relationship to food, but it was something that she, Rachelle, as a mother, could keep an eye on nonetheless.
While the kids packed up their gym bags at the end of class, she leaned on one side of the doorway, while Pierre leaned on the other. In her own quiet way, she began to beg for his approval.
“There’s hope for them yet, right?” she said.
“They’re just diamonds in the rough,” he said, and he winked. “Waiting to emerge like beautiful little rainbows.” He raised his hands to the sky and shimmered them down, and Rachelle followed the path of his fingertips down to his sides. She swore he had left little trails of pixie dust in the air behind them.
“And how about you, Miss Rachelle? How are you doing? That’s a big party you’ve been planning.”
She had bemoaned the chocolate fountain to him in the past. The chocolate fountain felt excessive to Rachelle, and the thought of gallons upon gallons of chocolate hitting the air and then bubbling up in a pool made her nauseous. A gateway to cavities, at the least. But it wasn’t about her, this party. It was about her kids, and about their family. “A little chocolate never hurt anyone,” Pierre had told her, and he had laughed outrageously, and she had laughed too, even though she wasn’t totally sure she had gotten the joke.
“The save-the-date cards go out next week,” she said. “Well, they’re actually little magnets.” She pulled one out of her purse—JOSH AND EMILY B’NAI MITZVAH JUNE 5, 2010—TONIGHT’S GONNA BE A GOOD NIGHT!—and handed it to him. “You’re invited, of course.” She said this without thinking. Was he invited? She would love to see him on the dance floor.
“That’s so sweet,” he said evenly.
Rachelle blushed. “I’m sure you’ve got a busy schedule,” she said. “And you probably get invited to lots of bar mitzvahs.”
“Not too many,” he said. “I think people are always worried about who I’m going to bring as a date.” He laughed, his own private joke that wasn’t so private.
“You can bring whomever you like,” Rachelle said, and she meant it. She could not help but steal a glance at his gleaming wall of celebrity photos.
“I’ll check my schedule,” he said, and she felt deeply—she knew!—that he meant it, too.
*
Benny was already at home when she returned with the kids, setting the table, an Edwardo’s box on the kitchen counter. He was still wearing his suit, an old one, the crease nearly faded in the pants. (She would donate it to the Goodwill tomorrow, she decided.) He must have just beaten them home. It was his one night to cook, and he had cheated and gotten a pizza.