Edie richter is not alon.., p.1
Edie Richter is Not Alone, page 1
Edie Richter is Not Alone
a novel
Rebecca Handler
AN UNNAMED PRESS BOOK
Copyright © 2021 Rebecca Handler
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to info@unnamedpress.com. Published in North America by the Unnamed Press.
www.unnamedpress.com
Unnamed Press, and the colophon, are registered trademarks of Unnamed Media LLC.
ISBN: 978-1-951213-17-6
eISBN: 978-1-951213-19-0
Line from “Dirge Without Music” by Edna St. Vincent Millay courtesy of Holly Peppe, Literary Executor, Millay Society (millay.org).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Handler, Rebecca, 1973- author.
Title: Edie Richter is not alone : a novel / Rebecca Handler.
Description: First edition. | Los Angeles, CA: The Unnamed Press, [2021] Identifiers: LCCN 2020051730 (print) | LCCN 2020051731 (ebook) | ISBN 9781951213176 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781951213190 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3608.A7126 E35 2021 (print) | LCC PS3608.A7126 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051730
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051731
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Designed and Typeset by Jaya Nicely
Manufactured in the United States of America by Versa Press, Inc. Distributed by Publishers Group West
First Edition
For Dave
Edie Richter is Not Alone
Prologue
The possum is dead. It may have been the one running back and forth across the roof at night, making a guttural purring sound, but there is no way to know for sure. It is lying in the dirt, at the foot of a thorny bush. The body strikes an unnatural pose, twisted so the head and upper limbs face the night sky. The paws look alert, mid-scratch, the fingers outstretched and the black claws like arrowheads. The dead open mouth contains sharp tawny teeth and the ears are small, round, and pink. The nose is shriveled. Its fur looks like the secondhand rabbit coat your mother kept in her closet but never wore. But this fur of this possum is not soft like a rabbit’s. It is coarser, and still warm, and you discover this when you approach the lifeless animal and rest your hand on it.
You may have expected a heartbeat or a hiss, but of course you get neither. The body is quiet. You inhale.
Grab it by the tail.
You grab it by the tail and lift it from the dirt. Shaking it slightly, you see the dry soil fall off its back like brown snow. Before you can change your mind and toss it back on the ground, before you become disgusted and run inside to scrub your hands, before all of this, before all the small moments of regret become a colossal darkness, you clutch that dead possum’s tail, its tendons and bone, like it is a matter of life and death and begin to run.
You are wearing the black linen sundress with the note in the pocket and you are barefoot. Strands of your limp brown hair stick to your sweaty cheeks. You position yourself behind a row of bushes and pull back your arm like a slingshot. Before you know what you are doing—
No.
It is not before you know what you are doing. It is after you know what you are doing, but before you stop it.
Now you are on the ground. Your hands are filthy. Your arm aches and your right hand, now empty, closes into a fist. You begin to shiver. You can feel your bare knees settling into the dirt and wish your whole body could get sucked into the dense darkness. An airplane roars overhead. You clench your eyes shut and force yourself to see the people inside the plane, staring at screens and drinking out of plastic cups. A man with reading glasses hanging on a string around his neck. A teenage girl traveling alone. A tired mother with a cranky toddler. A flight attendant trying to squeeze past. All of them floating in the sky.
Think about what’s beyond the sky. About things that go on forever.
One October, close to Halloween, when you were young, your skin became unbearably itchy and you scratched your thighs until your sheets were streaked with blood. Your parents searched the room for bedbugs and mosquitos but came up with nothing. Your mother decided it was anxiety and your father didn’t agree but said, like everything, it would pass. You took cold showers and ice baths. Your father taped your fingers with cotton balls, which only resulted in you rubbing your bare skin on the synthetic rug. Finally, they delivered you to the doctor with the hairy ears who took one look at your scarred body and announced it was scabies. The reason you can’t see the bugs, he said dramatically, peering over his reading glasses, is because they are eating you from the inside. Your mother thought scabies only existed in orphanages and army barracks, so she hired professional cleaners, bought you new sheets, and swore the family to secrecy. A prescription lotion was applied, and you quickly healed.
Curled up in the dirt now, moaning, feeling your heart pounding against your rib cage, realization dawns. The secret you stuffed down is seeping out of your pores. You think this secret will kill you, that it will burst out of you and shatter your body into a million pieces. But of course you won’t die, not now anyway. You will do something braver.
You will surrender.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
1
My dad was acting strange long before he was diagnosed. He would leave me phone messages. Edie, it’s your father, he’d say. I can’t find the top to the plastic thing. I need it for the batteries. I opened all the little walls and it’s nowhere. You know, Edie, it’s the top to the plastic thing. It’s for the batteries.
I was living in Boston, newly married, and working in marketing for an antihunger nonprofit. My parents and younger sister, Abby, were back home in San Francisco. Abby discovered thousands of black plastic coffee stirrers in Dad’s bedside drawer. He bought five pairs of the same brown loafers and lined them up next to the fireplace. He was sixty-three.
Mom took Dad to a neurologist and called me. They never know for sure, she said, but it looks like Alzheimer’s. I was at work, writing about a fourth grader in Detroit whose only reliable meal was a subsidized school lunch. I snuck into an empty conference room and closed the door, as Abby continued wailing in the background like she had just run over a baby. Mom went in the other room to get away from the noise. Apparently, the doctor gave him all sorts of tests like pattern recognition and basic math. He failed every one of them. He couldn’t even draw a Christmas tree, Mom said.
He’s Jewish, I replied, rubbing a pencil mark off the table. I worked with slobs.
I didn’t think I was old enough to have a parent with Alzheimer’s. Had never even considered it. The only person I knew with Alzheimer’s was a former sociology professor at college. Years after he retired, he still called the department office to reserve meeting rooms. According to his former assistant, he was living in a nursing home and had bitten off most of his fingernails.
Dad got on the phone and tried to be funny. Guess what, Edie? I am crazy after all.
It’s official, I told him, trying to match his tone. You’re nuts.
That I am, he said.
We had nothing else to say, so I told him I loved him.
After we hung up, I returned to my desk and changed the gender of the fourth grader from a girl to a boy. Later, I went swimming at the community center near my office. Underwater, I repeated the word Alzheimer’s over and over. I tried it in a German accent. I tried it with a lisp. I swallowed a bunch of water.
My husband, Oren, and I had plans later that night, a farewell thing for one of his colleagues, a woman with a mom name who wore cashmere cardigans and covered her mouth when she laughed. After my swim, I headed to the bar near Downtown Crossing. The room was loud, and a baseball game was on. Oren was already tipsy. I tapped him on the shoulder as he was signaling for another drink and said, My dad has Alzheimer’s.
What? he said, shrugging his shoulders apologetically and pointing to the speakers in the ceiling.
Mom called, I said loudly. My dad has Alzheimer’s.
She got a Weimaraner?
I leaned closer to him and spoke slowly into his ear: Alzheimer’s.
Eyes bulging, he stared at me. I nodded. Oh god, Edie. Let’s get out of here.
He grabbed our coats from the barstool and a moment later we were outside on
Why are we here? Oren shouted, shoving a black beanie over his head. What is wrong with you? He was drunk and suddenly very sad.
I just told you my dad has Alzheimer’s.
Oren looked up at the dark sky, down at the sidewalk, and then said quietly, I know what you just told me, Edie. I just can’t believe you told me here, at a bar. He shook his head and pulled me close.
We got a taxi and went home.
I wonder who drank our beer, I said, pulling my nightgown over my head.
What? said Oren, in bed, already half asleep.
Never mind, I said, flipping over my pillow to the cold side and lying down.
Oren moved closer to me and draped his arm across my chest. I love your dad, he said, and kissed my shoulder. I’m so sorry.
I wished his body could swallow mine.
*
Oren once used the phrase meant to be to describe the two of us. We had just had sex and I was wiping my inner thighs with his undershirt.
Meant to be what? I asked him, as I handed him the soiled top.
Together, Edie, meant to be together. That is the only time anyone ever uses that phrase. Shaking his head in mock disbelief, he scrubbed at his lower belly.
Oren was always sure of everything and I was comfortable with him, which is not the most romantic description of our relationship but is the most accurate. We met in French class, my freshman year of college. He’s two years older than I am but we’re the same height. With our freckles and mouse-brown hair, people sometimes tell us we look alike, to which I respond, Yes, I suppose we do. What are my options, exactly, when someone hands me a pointless comment as if it were a gum wrapper?
The class met twice a week in the early morning. I’ve never minded getting up when the rest of the world is stretching its legs. My mother says it’s because I was born at 4:40 A.M. The first of many inconvenient decisions you’ve handed to your father and me, she said.
Oren’s French accent was awful. After our third or fourth class, he approached me as I was zipping up my bag and asked, in French, if I would like to go to a cafe with him. He had to repeat himself because I thought he was speaking Hebrew, which would not have been too much of a stretch.
Those were the days when Oren wore a yarmulke. He had eight altogether, three of which were branded—Star Wars, Boston Red Sox, Star of David—and five plain, in various shades of blue. He kept them on top of his dresser in two rows of four, and every morning he pinned one to his hair with a bobby pin, the kind a ballerina would wear to keep her bun in place. Once he needed new pins and asked me to pick him up a pack from the drugstore. Out of curiosity, I asked if he’d ever once bought his own pins and he admitted no, he’d take them from his mother’s bedside table. Years later, when his mother died, my job was to clear out that table. There must have been two hundred bobby pins in the top drawer, along with three small jars of half-used lip balm, a handful of highlighters, a photo of Oren with his brothers, a book of matches from a restaurant called Gregg’s, and a food diary. (The day before Oren’s mother died she had a bowl of oatmeal, a medium glass of orange juice, two cups of black coffee, a tuna fish sandwich with one tablespoon of mayonnaise on wheat bread, a handful of stick pretzels, one apple, a small candy bar, beef stew, steamed green beans, and two glasses of red wine.) She died swerving her car to avoid a cyclist, instead hitting a traffic light head-on.
Soon after his mother’s death, Oren quit wearing yarmulkes. His mother wouldn’t have cared. He might have been trying to apply meaning where there was none. Anyway, he had been considering stopping for a while, as they attracted too much attention at work.
When he asked me to coffee, I said yes, mostly because I couldn’t think of a good reason to say no. I was dating a fullback on the soccer team who was allergic to garlic. Oren was on again, off again with his high school girlfriend, Shiva. I used to sing, Shiva stay or Shiva go, on his voice mail when I couldn’t reach him. It was nice—still is nice—to imagine him laughing.
I had never been to Rhode Island, where Oren grew up. He had been to San Francisco once, as part of a summer scholar program. He had eaten at the International House of Pancakes on Lombard, the one I went to after the prom. I asked him about his faith, because although I was raised Jewish, I was far from the world of yarmulkes and Israelis. He told me he believed in God but that was the extent of it. Apparently, his interest in yarmulkes was Shiva’s doing, because his family, the secular Isaacson clan, treated it as you might a child’s newfound vegetarianism, skeptically but without comment.
A few weeks later, after six more coffee dates and one dorm room make-out session, I broke up with Garlic and he told Shiva he had met someone else. He kept wearing the yarmulkes—they were just part of him at that point. It made no difference to me. At his graduation, I sat with his parents and his three older brothers. His mom held my hand during the ceremony. Shimon Peres was given an honorary degree. A perfect day as far as the Isaacson family was concerned.
Oren moved into an apartment in Cambridge and was promoted to senior analyst at his consulting firm. I finished up my two remaining years at college, majoring in sociology and working at the campus dry cleaners. So many disgusting comforters I had to stuff into plastic bags.
Those last two years, I lived on campus in a suite with two roommates—a math major with orange hair and his girlfriend, who smelled like calendula and was always sick. During the week, the three of us would get high and play board games. Sometimes Oren joined us but he rarely spent the night. He was an adult now with a real job. After I graduated, I did not return to California. Instead, I moved into Oren’s place. My parents and sister had flown out for my graduation and stayed to help me move in. In the middle of breaking down boxes in the living room, my father pulled me aside and handed me a check for two hundred dollars. I love you, Edie, he said. Be smart.
I got a job waitressing at a fish restaurant. The manager, a South African named Raife, expected the staff to know everything about seafood, not just how it may vary in taste, but also migration patterns and catch dates. He used to manage a vitamins store and would quiz his staff on the ingredients listed on the back of protein shakes. Raife held contests each shift inspired by whatever was currently overstocked. Ok, kids, he’d say, whoever sells the most chowder gets Section A next Saturday night. Once I won for selling the most bluefish and got free movie tickets that Oren and I used two nights later. Thank you, Raife, Oren whispered as the theater lights dimmed for a war romance.
After that movie, Oren broke up with me. Walking home, he said he wasn’t convinced I loved him. I called my friend Wendy, another waitress, and asked if I could stay with her for a while. Wendy was living in her parents’ house in Brookline while they were in Bali for six months volunteering at an orphanage. I knew she had plenty of space. She said that was fine as long as I didn’t mind her having someone over. Turns out it was Raife, and he kept me up most of the night rambling on about the restaurant owner, who was dissatisfied with the recent decline in bookings. Kid, you wouldn’t believe the kind of shit I have to deal with, he said to me. I glanced behind him and gave Wendy a look. She shrugged, like no big deal. I didn’t want to get into it with Wendy. It was none of my business and I was grateful she let me stay there.
The next morning, a Monday, I went back to the apartment when I knew Oren would be at work. He had left me a note:
Edie, thank you for understanding that I need this separation. Please don’t take all of your things because I’m hopeful we’ll be together again soon. Let me know if you’re staying at Wendy’s. Love, Oren.
I made myself a grilled cheese sandwich and ate it standing up next to the bookshelf. I put the pan and my plate in the sink and turned on the faucet to wash them. Then I changed my mind, turned off the water, and went into the bedroom to pack. Before leaving, I circled staying at Wendy’s on Oren’s note.
Three weeks later, Oren called. Wendy and I had just gotten home from a folk music festival. I can’t live without you, he said. I just need to know you love me. It’s not a lot, Edie. That’s all I need.
Wendy teared up and said I was lucky to have such a romantic boyfriend. I told him I’d come back in the morning. As I unpacked, hanging up my shirts in our closet, I discovered a kitten curled up on Oren’s slippers. Its name was Frisbee—something dogs catch in their mouths. In the brief time we were apart, Oren had acquired a pet. Also, Oren had decided he didn’t want to have children. We were making a beef stir-fry that same evening, when he said, Edie, I think kids would make our lives more complicated. What do you think?
