“I can do some tests,” said the doctor. He rattled off a list, but Benny wasn’t listening, he was thinking of his mother’s health. Her diabetes was taking her down fast, and he felt so helpless; he didn’t think a raw-vegetable diet was going to make a difference. Benny jerked back just as the doctor handed him a prescription for Propecia.
“In the short term, if you can, take a couple of vacation days. Get a massage. You might consider finding someone to talk to about whatever it is you’re going through. There are some great therapists here in the building, and I’m pretty sure they’re on your insurance plan.” He leaned forward and tapped Benny on the knee with his clipboard. “Hey, there’s no shame in getting a little help.”
Benny looked down at the clipboard, not at the doctor. Clearly he didn’t know where he came from, how his family operated. Therapy was for people who had an interest in communication. This was not the Middlestein family, at least not anymore.
“So set up an appointment with Marnie at the front desk for those tests, and we’ll look at next steps from there,” Dr. Harris said. They shook hands, like men, firmly, seriously, with intent.
Benny did not set up an appointment with Marnie at the front desk. He did head to his father’s pharmacy, though, prescription in hand. He would be late for work, but he did not care. All this craziness had started because his father had left his mother after she got sick, and if he were still there to take care of her and nurse her back to health, none of this would be happening.
He drove quickly, occasionally catching a glimpse of his head in the rearview mirror. He was unable to resist adjusting the mirror at a stoplight, angling it at his head; was it so thin he could see the sunlight through it now?
There was nothing wrong with him, except for his family.
In the corner of the mini-mall, across from the Polish-owned hair and nail salon, sat his father’s last pharmacy, the final, fading jewel in his empire. Once there were three. Now there was just one, with cracked linoleum and an outdated greeting-card section. Walgreens was cheaper and had a far superior skin-care section.
But his father’s clientele persisted. He had been the first Jewish pharmacist to set up shop in the area, and he had collected his customers from all the other lonely Jews who had moved northwest of the city and the lake in the 1970s, looking for an affordable new home and an easy commute, not thinking far ahead enough as to how they would build a community for themselves. Well, you start small, as it turns out. Richard and nine other men—how had he managed to pull a minyan together?—regularly meeting in the back room of the pharmacy. Praying, and then plotting for a future: regular services, first at the local high-school auditorium, so many Jews crawling out of the woodwork to attend, happy to find a place where they didn’t have to explain why they put all their bread away once a year, or why there wasn’t a Christmas tree in their front window, or why they drove so far just to get some decent whitefish salad. Why the phrase “Jew down” wasn’t acceptable, under any circumstances. There was a cantor fresh from school, a rabbi who had left another synagogue in Ohio under veiled but ultimately innocuous circumstances and wanted to start over, investors, believers, narcissists—they all threw in, did whatever it took to build something out of nothing, a place to worship from an empty plot of unincorporated land surrounded by oak trees stretching far back to a tiny stream where deer gathered sometimes in the summer. A beautiful place to be yourself.