The Floating Feldmans Read online

  “I’m fine. Just doing some errands. I think Darius grew three—”

  “Anyway.” Annette cut her off in midsentence. “I’m calling because I have exciting news to tell you. As you know, I’ve got something big coming up next month.”

  Shit, thought Elise, feeling the kick of the pepperoni rise in the back of her throat. What had she forgotten? A medical procedure, possibly, though she couldn’t recall hearing anything of the sort. It was probably another award getting bestowed upon her parents. The Feldmans’ synagogue was often feting its long-standing members with vaguely named honorariums, like the leadership, charity, and fellowship awards. These types of events, whether at the temple, the hospital, or the Rotary Club, always involved a crash diet for her mother, a frantic search for the perfect dress, and then, after the fact, complaints about the seating. One year it was being placed too close to the booming speakers, then, after letting her dissatisfaction be known, it was being put too far away from these very same offending instruments of amplification.

  Sometimes, if the occasion warranted, it meant Elise and Mitch had to fly across the country to be there, as they had done when her father had received a lifetime achievement award from the hospital upon his retirement two years ago. Mitch had a smile on his face the whole evening, legitimately happy to see his father-in-law presented with a bronze plaque and a crystal paperweight in the shape of a baby (which Darius and Rachel found exceptionally creepy). And why shouldn’t he be? Mitch, with his inquisitive mind and endless questions, was always eager to learn the workings of another profession or partake in the rituals of other cultures. He was a born journalist, a student of human nature, gifted with an open mind. And, more to the point, he didn’t have to endure having David whisper in his ear, as Elise had after she’d wished her father hearty congratulations, “This could have been you.”

  “Dad, you, or both this time?” Elise didn’t mean to sound so callous, but a horde of people was crowding around the shorts and Elise recognized one of them as the father of a tall, lanky boy in Darius’s class. Which meant he might be competing for the same size. It would be nearly impossible to maneuver the cell phone and her cart and to rifle through the pile at the same time. Elise had fancy footwork in retail outlets, but she wasn’t an acrobat.

  “What are you talking about?” Annette asked, already exasperated. “I’m referring to my seventieth birthday.” And here she dropped her voice to a stage whisper, Norma Desmond announcing she was back at last. Elise would bet the entire stack of size larges in front of her that her mother was alone, the theatrics simply because she couldn’t help herself. Annette conducted herself as though there was an audience around at all times, her performance carefully crafted to please adoring fans who, as far as Elise could tell, lived inside her own mind.

  “You know how I detest birthdays, of course,” Annette added without a trace of irony.

  Her mother was the epitome of etiquette when it came to discussing age in public. Growing up, Elise and Freddy were strictly forbidden from telling any of their friends how old she was. It was another miscalculation of Annette’s, wasting her parenting capital to impress this upon her children. To anyone eighteen years of age and under, anyone forty-plus falls into the unspecific category of ancient. Any age differences between Annette and other mothers in their neighborhood were indistinguishable to the students at their high school, who saw all they needed to know in the mom jeans and dorky pocketbooks. Freddy and his friends would have been too stoned to even remember, had they actually learned the closely guarded secret that was Annette Feldman’s age. And she, Elise, had more important things on her mind in high school than her mother’s vintage. At the time, Ivy League acceptance loomed ahead of her, and it seemed every A she garnered was as necessary as a vital organ.

  “Ah, yes,” Elise said, realizing that in fact August did mean another birthday in the Feldman family. The four nuclear Feldmans had their birthdays dispersed across the seasons, as though God had spread it out that way to ensure they communicated at least once a quarter. She hadn’t given the matter of her mother’s milestone birthday much thought, other than considering it was a legitimate occasion for her to be shopping. Once Rachel’s college layette was fulfilled and Darius was chock-full of boxers and deodorant, Elise would get a little desperate to find things she or her family “needed.” Thankfully need was a subjective conceit, though she wouldn’t relish having to defend some of her purchases in front of a jury.

  For Elise the upcoming month meant a serious return to dealing with Darius and his college applications. So little had gotten done over the summer. Every time she went to nag him to write his personal essay, or even start the far less daunting task of filling out the basic information on the common application, she stopped herself, unable to force her son to work on something that she might have rendered moot.

  The irony was that Darius’s leaving for college had triggered all the turmoil, the shot heard round the world. Dr. Margaret had helped her see that, though she was unwilling to let the matter of Elise’s problems freeze at the proximate cause, hence the sessions devoted to the senior Feldmans. Together, in the safe space of their private internet chat, they revisited that fateful day when all the parents of high school juniors had gathered in the cafeteria, reduced to sitting on those backless benches and sipping bitter coffee, to learn about . . . the college admission process, dun dun dun. She’d attended the very same meeting when Rachel was a junior, quite calmly, but the finality of her youngest leaving the nest had affected her in ways she couldn’t have foreseen. Mitch’s face, which she kept stealing glances at, was mostly blank during the talk. He took some notes in the reporter pad he always carried in his back pocket, but generally looked glazed over, clearly not experiencing the combustion of emotions that was making her heart feel like an egg cracked into a sizzling pan. Mitch had gone back to work afterward, taking his own car, but she’d gotten behind the wheel of her minivan and sobbed for nearly an hour.

  Once her tears ceased, but with her cheeks bearing the telltale stains, she’d driven to the mall—anything to avoid returning home, where life would be all but silent before she knew it. She found herself in the dressing room of a midpriced dress shop and tried on a black sheath just for the hell of it. When Elise emerged from the dressing room, the salespeople predictably gushed, but even she had to admit the cut was very flattering and the hemline hit in the perfect spot (generous thighs hidden and slender calves on display, such that she felt like she was carrying a secret beneath her dress). She’d swiped her credit card and left with the weight of the folded garment bag over her arm, but paradoxically feeling lighter. Then she’d gone next door and chosen a pair of matching heels.

  By the time she was done, closing time at the mall (she’d never been there when a voice came on the loudspeaker to tell shoppers it was time to wrap it up—how depressing that sound was), she had five bags divided between two hands and a spring in her step. If Darius’s leaving for college was the catalyst for her addiction, then the purchase of that black dress was her first taste. What difference was there really between white powder and black thread when the end result was that the buyer couldn’t get enough of it?

  Unable to look herself in the mirror anymore without crippling guilt, which was especially difficult given how often she was in a dressing room, last week she did what she should have done back in June. She called the school guidance counselor, a smug little thing named Janice who talked to her in code about “reach schools” and “safety schools.” Darius was a solid B-minus/C-plus student, with a B or B plus sprinkled in here and there, typically in his English classes. And his SATs were in line with his grades, even though she and Mitch held out hope that his natural ability would shine through on a standardized test. Fortunately he was doing a retest this fall.

  Privately, they thought Darius might even be smarter than the self-motivated Rachel, but what difference did it make if he never applied himself?
The guidance counselor and she cobbled together a list of places where Darius stood a fighting chance and agreed to meet again in late September, with Mitch and Darius as well.

  Elise knew it was fruitless to ask herself the age-old question that parents with disparate children ask themselves. Elise and her own brother were diametrical opposites, so why should she be surprised that Darius was unmotivated and Rachel the golden child in spite of receiving the same love and nurturing, both of them seeds tended to with equal diligence and care? Her children’s dissimilarity was the slap in the face she deserved for ever questioning why her own parents couldn’t get it right with Freddy. Still, she held firm to an optimism that Darius would not turn into her brother.

  “Anyway, you know me, I don’t like to be the center of attention,” Annette went on, snapping Elise back to the present. She had to smile, even as she noticed the dwindling pile of mesh shorts left for the taking. I know you, Elise thought. It seems you don’t know you. “But, well, given the circumstances, I thought it would be really nice if we all got together to celebrate.”

  Elise felt her face grow hot. How did her mother know about her circumstances? And why would getting together help? Unless . . . unless Mitch had in fact found out what was going on with her and reached out to her parents. And this birthday celebration was just a ruse to do some kind of intervention, like on reality TV where everyone sits on a couch looking very serious and the unsuspecting target walks into the room to find their loved ones terribly disappointed in them. But no, it couldn’t be. Mitch may have been onto her, but he’d never tell her parents without confronting her first. Even if she’d squandered so much of what they’d built together, treating their bank account like it was a toy funnel, he owed her at least that much. Not to make her a fool in front of her parents, especially her father, the esteemed David Feldman, M.D.

  “What did you have in mind?” Elise said, tallying a list of ready excuses why the trip home to celebrate the milestone birthday couldn’t be longer than a day or two. Moving Rachel back into the dorms. An appendectomy. A crisis at work for Mitch. She’d let her husband, the writer, select the final story line and together they’d flesh out the details.

  “A five-day, four-night cruise to the Caribbean. We leave in three weeks.”

  Elise felt a hole in her stomach so cavernous a thousand shopping bags couldn’t fill it.

  “And Freddy agreed to this?”

  “He’s my next call. So I’ve got to go.”

  She pictured her brother, cell phone tucked in the back pocket of tattered jeans slung low around his hips, so unprepared for what was coming. Nobody ever does see the Mack truck before impact, do they?

  TWO

  When the call came for Freddy Feldman, he was lighting a joint, thinking (as he was prone to do whenever he lit up) that if his family could picture him at this very moment, they’d have the entirely wrong impression. He was forty-eight years old, hadn’t lived under the same roof as his parents or sister since he was a teenager, and yet their exasperated faces, distorted like Picasso portraits, appeared to him way more often than he’d like. Sometimes even during sex, when the nubile Natasha with her deer-like eyes and musky scent lay panting beneath him.

  He exhaled that familiar cloud into which he’d disappeared many times over since his first puff at age fourteen, and—as though she’d read his mind—his mother’s phone number appeared as an incoming call on his cell phone. It showed up as Annette, not Mom, because he thought the formality more fitting for the woman who’d lost faith in him when he was barely a college sophomore, though admittedly a Deadhead decimating his brain cells at least twice a day.

  Technically, he was leaving college at the time, packing up his dorm room midsemester after the disciplinary board had said there could be no more chances. He’d even been forced to watch as his mother gussied herself up and flirted with the dean, a neatly mustachioed academic who was more than likely gay, to plead his case. It was pointless. The school, a third-tier liberal arts college in Vermont, had had enough of Freddy Feldman. As they walked out of the dean’s office, Freddy could sense it was the defining moment when his mother believed he wasn’t worth the trouble any longer. He saw it in the way she threw his clothes into a duffel without folding them. The fact that she never once asked him if he was hungry, though he’d not had a bite since they’d started gathering his belongings early that morning. She even came back from the commissary with a frozen yogurt for herself, nothing for him. Years later, stoned on the couch watching Dr. Phil, he remembered some head shrink saying that “food didn’t equal love,” addressing a couch overflowing with obese talk show guests. Well, for his family, it was a pretty close approximation, the offer of a piece of cake the equivalent of a kiss on the forehead.

  Worst of all that day—way beyond the offense of the fro yo—was the way his mother avoided eye contact with him. She looked more carefully at his mix tapes, dirty boxers, and unopened textbooks, even the garbage that overflowed from his wastebasket, than she looked at him the entire day. The downcast eyes said it all. Like her lids, his stock was going down.

  Now his mother only called him on his cell, though he’d provided her with his office number several times. It was as though she simply couldn’t accept that he was now a businessman making an honest day’s living. Though to be fair, he’d been scant with the details, telling his parents that he was involved in a local farming venture and offering nothing more. What he really did wasn’t the kind of thing his parents could ever understand or respect, even if it was legitimate and damn lucrative. Because all of his ventures were obscured by ambiguously named LLCs, he was unsearchable to them.

  He pressed decline on the call because he had a roomful of men waiting for his reaction. Because he wasn’t ready. Not then, with a lit joint in his hand and all its attendant feelings.

  “I like it,” he said finally, and he observed that the crowd gathered around his desk let out a collective sigh of relief. He’d been running his own company for nearly six years, and still he couldn’t believe that he had the power to make someone nervous, let alone have an effect on anyone’s livelihood. “It’s very smooth. Not much aftertaste.”

  “So glad you like it. The soil was very cooperative this season,” said Mike Green Hand. He was a genius of the earth, a Native American who worked some of the best acres of marijuana lands in the region. Like Freddy, he didn’t have a college degree. He might not have finished high school—or if he did, it was a nonaccredited one on the reservation, but he had more knowledge of chemistry and biology in his thumb than any science teacher Freddy ever had.

  A lawyer produced paperwork and all the gathered men, dressed in T-shirts and ripped jeans that took business casual to a new low, put their signatures on documents that would govern a deal worth four million dollars. Freddy thought about doing the thing that seemed appropriate for the moment. To take the bottle of Macallan off the shelf and pass out glasses for everyone to toast the closing. But he was antsy to phone his mother back and find out what she wanted. It wasn’t exactly every day she called.

  If he had a normal relationship with his sister, he’d call her first for intelligence. But she’d never once come to his rescue, always happy to play the foil. Freddy the fuckup, Elise the excellent. His sister’s stock went up whenever his went down, as though they were competing companies and there was limited market share. It was a rather cold way of looking at his family, thinking of his parents’ love as a scarce resource, but he’d always had a hard time believing anyone who said parents couldn’t have a favorite after what he’d endured. Though if anyone would be sensitive to treating children fairly, it would be him, after feeling the nefarious effects of ranking.

  It was hard to know if children were on the horizon for him and Natasha. She was so young, a kid herself in many ways, all squeaky laughs and skinny limbs. Even his niece, Rachel, the only Feldman with whom he felt any real kinship, had awkwardly aske
d him how old Natasha was when she’d visited last spring with her college friends. He could tell Rachel was embarrassed by the situation, worried her stuck-up pals from Stanford would think he was some kind of pervert. He’d rounded up Natasha’s age, only to be outed when his girlfriend announced after a few glasses of wine that she was twenty-nine and “one-quarter.” At least he knew Rachel wasn’t going to report anything back to his sister and brother-in-law, considering she was visiting him when they thought she was in Guatemala building huts with Habitat for Humanity.

  “Gentlemen, I’ve got to make some calls,” he announced. Once alone, he reached for his office phone, tugging at his leather rope necklace nervously with his other hand. His mother may not call him on his work number, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t use it to call her back. She’d recognize the Colorado exchange. They weren’t that estranged.

  “Annette Feldman,” his mother’s voice sounded in a haughty purr after three long rings. Annette had mastered the art of the professional greeting after thirty years managing his father’s medical office. “Dr. Feldman’s office,” she’d practice at home when they were younger, sometimes coming dangerously close to a British accent—Annette Feldman (née Schwartz), the insurance salesman’s daughter from the Bronx, sounding like the chair umpire at Wimbledon. He shook his head at the memory, remembering how he and Elise used to imitate their mother, sometimes going Cockney, other times Scottish.