“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.
The Meanest Act