The Middlesteins (10 page)

But she had been spending enough time with her family lately, or at least with her
newly single mother. Her sister-in-law, Rachelle, had devised all these plans to help
her mother, her obese, diabetes-stricken, heartbroken mother, lose weight and get
in shape, and had sent Robin an e-mail detailing how if they were all on the same
team and worked together and abided by this schedule, Monday to Saturday, then there
would be hope, there was still hope, and could Robin please take Saturdays, if she
would just take Saturdays, Rachelle would do the rest. And so Robin had been coming
into the suburbs once a week, and she and her mother had been doing as instructed,
taking a mile-long walk together around the high-school track, Edie huffing and limping,
though suffering silently otherwise, unwilling to admit that this was totally abnormal,
that she and her daughter had never in their lives gone for a mile-long walk together,
let alone on the high-school track, but if they admitted how weird it was, then they
would have to admit everything else about her health, and neither one of them wanted
to talk about that, because they were both completely terrified for different reasons,
and for the same reasons also.

Afterward they would get drunk together in Edie’s kitchen, in a really aggressive
and committed fashion. Their drinking was no joke: a bottle each in two hours. They
poured and drank, and Edie spoke.
Let me tell you a little something about your father
, she would say.
Oh, I’ve got a story for you.
She would stumble over her words.
You want to know the real truth?

If you only knew.

Now Robin knew everything.

Then she would take the train back to the city drunk, but instead of going home, up
just one more flight of stairs, she’d go to Daniel’s apartment, with all his computer
monitors and his photographs and his cookbooks that he never even needed to open anymore
because he had his favorite recipes memorized. And sometimes they would talk, or sometimes
she would put her hand on his mouth and she would say
please
and he would say
okay
and they would just go to sleep, and when they woke up, he would just rest himself
in her, slightly hard, and not move at all, except for every so often just to keep
himself hard, and he would whisper, “We don’t have to do anything at all but just
be.” Sometimes she would just lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling, a corpse,
and he would sit in the corner and strum his guitar, old indie-rock songs she kind
of knew the words to. Sometimes they would go across to the dive bar—their bar now—and
get even drunker and come back to his place and have sometimes painful but emotionally
necessary sex, and she could barely look at him afterward, even though he never took
his eyes off her for a second.

I always feel like you’re waiting for me to say something
, she told him once in her head, where it was safe for sentences like that.

Daniel was still waiting for her to give him another reason she couldn’t go to dinner,
and she had run out of reasons. “Can I bring anything?” she asked, because her mother
had raised her right.

After the Four Questions (asked, with great sincerity, by Daniel’s youngest cousin,
Ashley, a nine-year-old girl with a booming voice), after the Plagues (Daniel’s father,
earnest, blocky, bushy-browed, dipping his finger dramatically into his wineglass),
after a noisy rendition of “Dayenu” (to which Robin found herself quickly remembering
the words), after the gefilte fish and the matzo-ball soup and the brisket and the
chicken and the chocolate-covered matzo and the caramel-covered matzo and the honey
nut cake (all of which Robin ate too much of, which made her feel guilty and bad and
then sad), there was the slow exit, everyone jamming themselves into coats, negotiations,
good-byes, promises, wishes, dreams. A crowd of Jews trying to get home.

Who would drive Danny and his girlfriend to the train station? What a pleasure you
are. How nice to see your face around here.

I’m not his girlfriend
, she wanted to say.

When Robin saw two stray dishes on the dining-room table, an escape plan quickly formed,
and she slid into the kitchen. Dishes, she could do dishes until it was time to leave.
Daniel’s mother was in there, yelling at his father.

“All night I had to listen to her complain,” she snapped. “I cannot tolerate another
second. Just fucking drive her home. She’s your aunt, not mine.”

They both looked up, reflexive smiles skimming momentarily across their faces, ripples
across a pond. They were too tired to pretend that it had been anything less than
an extremely long night.

“Dishes,” said Robin, and she lamely held up the cake-stained plates. Daniel’s mother
took them from her. “It was a very nice night,” Robin said.

“You are welcome in our home anytime,” said his mother.

“I’ll give you a ride to the train station,” said his father.

Somehow, he had conned her into this night with his family even though she was certain
she had been trying to keep an emotional distance between herself and Daniel for months,
since that first night they were together when she had whispered in his ear, “This
doesn’t mean anything.” He had said nothing in return, which she took as an agreement,
or at least an admission of acceptance. He was her neighbor, he was her friend, and
she did care about him, but she never wanted to be in a relationship ever again. Because
relationships were the worst. So many obligations. So many compromises. So many arguments.
Someone always got destroyed in the end. Sometimes everyone got destroyed in the end.

They weren’t the only people returning to the city from suburban seders that night,
but they ignored them and slunk down in their seats. Daniel reached into his pocket
and pulled out two of the rubber frog finger puppets, took Robin’s hand, and put one
on her pinkie, then put one on his own. He banged the head of one frog against the
other.

“I walked in on your parents arguing in the kitchen,” she said.

He shrugged and said, “Sometimes they don’t agree.”

“It was shocking.”

“Not all fighting leads to divorce,” he said. He pulled the frog off his finger and
looked out the window.

“You’re an expert now?” she said. Suddenly everything about her was out of control:
She wasn’t saying what she meant, her heart felt hot, her limbs were loose.

“Have you considered the possibility that your parents are better off without each
other?”

Only every day since her mother had told her that her father was gone.

“Never,” she said, red-faced, sweaty, bloated with untruths. She had eaten too much
of his mother’s brisket. She had a Tupperware container of it sitting in her lap that
she planned on dumping out the moment she got home. Maybe she would dump him out along
with it.

“Look, everything was fine up until then. It wasn’t an all-bad night, right?” He poked
her. “Being Jewish for a night isn’t completely terrible.”

“I tuned a lot of it out,” she said.

“What is wrong with you?” he said. “How can you possibly hate it?”

“I don’t hate it,” she said. “It just seems to me like if you’re going to utter those
words, be devoted and present and worshipful, be committed, then you should really
believe in it. Really love it. And I don’t get why I should love it. Why it’s the
right way and everything else is the wrong way. I never understood.”

“It doesn’t have to be that complicated,” he said. “You could just participate in
order to feel connected to something bigger than yourself. It makes me feel safe.
Not alone.”

“That’s what your friends are for,” she said.

“Sometimes friends aren’t enough,” he said.

“I remain unconvinced,” she said.
We are going to argue about this for eternity
, she thought.

“Can you just stop being so tough for a minute?” he said.

“No,” she said.

And would you hate her if she started to cry? Did she have you convinced that she
really was that tough? Would you find her weak, a weak, pathetic girl, crying because
she was losing an argument, losing herself, losing herself into him, and she hadn’t
let herself feel that way in so long? Would you still want to know her, could you
still respect her, if she was the kind of girl who cried when she realized she was
falling in love?

T
he letter went
out on a Friday, but Edie already knew what it was going to say. Her daughter, Robin,
flipped it miserably in front of her at the kitchen table, where Edie had collapsed
after arriving home from work, her hand resting on an unopened package of fat-free
(top ingredient: sugar) cookies. She messily ripped the edge of the delicate plastic
wrapping with her fingertips, leaving a jagged opening down the middle of the package,
so instead of just one row of dark, spongy, devil’s-food-cake cookies, there were
two, and, with the slightest tug of her index finger and thumb, all three were revealed.
There they all were. Waiting. The cookies smelled like nothing, like air, and that’s
how they felt inside her, too. They never filled her up, no matter how many she ate.
Once, at night, when she was certain everyone was in bed, she had eaten two boxes
of the cookies, just to see what would happen, and it had done nothing to her. Edie
couldn’t feel a thing.

She pushed the package toward her daughter, who got up from the end of the table and
took half of one row of cookies into her hands, then returned to face her mother down
at the end of the long table. Six cookies. Fat-free.

“This looks important,” said her mother.

Her daughter looked up at her, eyes stark and serious and red-rimmed, half a cookie
sticking from her mouth like a helpless mouse captured by a sharp house cat. She looked
just as her mother had at her age, plump, fresh-faced, though she carried the weight
differently because she was shorter than her mother, so perhaps she was a little wider
around the hips. She took the rest of the cookie into her mouth with just her tongue.
She hadn’t spoken to her mother in two days, because her mother hadn’t allowed her
to go to the hospital when she had wanted to, and then it was too late, and now all
that was left was this letter.

It was from the high school; Robin had already opened it, read it, and shoved it back
into the envelope, so Edie just shook out the paper with one hand while holding a
cookie with the other. Her daughter had already eaten all her cookies and was reaching
for more.

A boy had killed himself, that’s what the letter said. Another one was in a mental
hospital. (That part wasn’t mentioned in the letter, but Edie had heard this from
the school guidance counselor when he had called her at work that afternoon.) The
weekend before, the two boys and her daughter had driven downtown to see the Smashing
Pumpkins play at a festival, and Robin had returned home drunk and Edie had let it
slide because Robin was actually a good little drunk: she did not have much of a hangover,
no moaning the next day, and Edie hadn’t had to hold her hair back over the toilet
like she did for several roommates of hers in college. She was simply giggly, and
she raved about the show, and she didn’t appear to have been molested in any way.
Maybe Edie should have imparted some parental wisdom about alcohol at that moment,
but she was in no position to be giving anyone advice about what they should or shouldn’t
consume.

They felt close, which they had been for Robin’s entire life, especially in that period
after her brother, Benny, went away to Champaign for college and the house had become
extremely empty, her husband, Richard, always struggling to keep his three pharmacies
afloat, engaging in some sort of pyramid scheme among businesses, driving back and
forth between them, always hustling (she had to give him credit for that), even as
he was failing. Edie and Robin were left behind with each other, and they joined forces
at the kitchen table, Edie sharing (sometimes age-inappropriate) stories about her
day, like the ones about her co-workers at the law firm, who were always more interesting
than their job descriptions would suggest; they were office-supply thieves and part-time
jazz musicians and heavy drinkers and cancer survivors. Or about the woman in line
at the grocery store who had too many babies and a low-cut blouse and what seemed
like a hundred coupons, and
why were they all for cat food?
And there was always something to say about family members, distant cousins who were
getting divorces, because she had known all along
it was never going to last
, or wistful stories about family members who came over from Russia before the war,
or directly after, because
it’s important to know where you came from
. Together they sat, a haul of groceries in front of them, the prepackaged snacks
one of their shared great delights in life.

Then Edie would send her daughter off to do her homework while she prepared their
official dinner, something of real substance, steak or chicken or pasta. The pretense
of all-together time at dinner had long faded, of course, with Richard showing up
late for dinner or not at all. Edie never bothered to set a place for him. Sometimes
Robin ate in her room, and that was fine with Edie. It felt good to be alone with
your food, she understood. Even if the rhythm in their lives was a strange one, it
was a rhythm nonetheless.

Then Robin started high school six months ago and became friends with these two boys,
the dead one, and the one who was now locked away, and she had begun to disappear
from Edie. Home late sometimes, or leaving after dinner. Phone calls late at night.
The music coming from her bedroom grew louder for weeks, and then quieter, and it
was almost as if there were no music at all. Edie stood in the hallway, holding in
her breath, her ear pressed against the door to her daughter’s bedroom. There was
definitely something playing on her stereo. What kind of music was her daughter listening
to these days? Edie used to know everything about her, and now she couldn’t answer
that question. She was embarrassed as much as worried.

And now she realized she knew nothing about her daughter at all. This boy had overdosed
on pills. The letter didn’t say that, but she had read about it in the newspaper,
and the guidance counselor had confirmed it again that day. He had held on for two
days, and her daughter had begged to go to the hospital, and she had said no because
if it were Robin lying there (God forbid. Oy.
God forbid.
), Edie wouldn’t want anyone else but family with her. And also she didn’t want Robin
anywhere near that kind of sickness. This wasn’t like keeping her away from Benny
for a week when he had the chicken pox in sixth grade. This was like Edie was two
steps away from marching into that bedroom and rummaging through all her daughter’s
possessions to see what she was hiding, and hell no, her daughter was not going to
hang out in the ICU of a hospital with the family of a boy who had just overdosed
on pills.

“I’m sorry your friend died,” said Edie.

Robin took another handful of cookies and continued her methodical quest for the decimation
of all of fat-free-based-snack America.

On the wall across from the kitchen table hung a macramé owl with large brown agate
stones for eyes. Edie had put it there when they moved into the house in 1980, when
Robin was just a baby. The cleaning woman dusted it every week, but it still seemed
to be coated with some sort of old filth. A twig hung forlornly from its claws. For
ten years Edie had been meaning to take it down. No joke, an entire decade. But Edie
had been busy. First it had just been pro bono consultation, anything to take her
mind off the banalities of her suburban existence. But then the purpose of her volunteerism
came into sharp focus in 1988, when Dukakis—married to a Jewish girl!—ran for office,
and her old college roommate Carly, one of the top Democratic fund-raisers in Chicago,
called and asked for her help. Edie had sent in a check, and made some phone calls
to some of her friends, the Cohns and the Grodsteins and the Weinmans and the Frankens,
all lovely people, and before she knew it, she was making phone calls to people she
didn’t know, and she discovered she was good at it. Paperwork and phone calls. She
was most confident doing things where she could hide, where she didn’t notice people
noticing how heavy she had gotten. She could see it even in the eyes of her co-workers.
But here was a way she could help. Here was a way she could make a difference. Carly
didn’t realize it, and Edie didn’t know if she could ever properly communicate it
to her, but she was pretty sure Carly had saved her life. So who had time to worry
about wall hangings when there were Republicans to kick out of office?

But the boys? Who were these boys? She should have been worried. She had met them,
but she hadn’t paid enough attention. One was tall and thin and had longish (but seemingly
clean) hair, and the other was short and a little stocky and had a shaved head. Both
wore flannel shirts over white T-shirts and jeans with holes in the knees and Converse
high-tops. They didn’t smell like smoke, their pupils weren’t dilated. They spoke
little, and always smiled at her when she answered the door. They were always happy
to see Robin. They both gave her high fives. They looked Jewish. Ethan and Aaron,
Aaron and Ethan. How was she supposed to remember which was which?

Robin screamed at her the entire evening the boy went to the hospital, pleading, then
demanding, that Edie let her go visit him. On her knees in the living room, with Richard
sitting on the stairs, his presence pointless as usual, his elbows on his thighs,
his chin in his hands, contributing absolutely nothing to the conversation. “She never
listens to me anyway,” is all he said. Worst parent on the planet. All he knew how
to do was bark orders and walk away. He didn’t understand that his daughter was smarter
than that, that she wasn’t a dog. And Edie thought she knew how to handle Robin perfectly,
but this, this hysterical girl, all Edie could do was try to hold her. When Robin
was a toddler and she wasn’t getting what she wanted, she used to hold her breath
until she turned blue. Edie had always ignored those antics, until once she passed
out, and Edie never ignored her again, but Robin never held her breath again either.
Both of them had learned. But here she was, unleashed, uncontrolled. She was not blue,
though. She was bright red.

“It’s not our place,” said Edie. “He needs his family.”

“I’m one of his two best friends in the world,” said Robin.

Her hair had gotten so long this year, that’s what Edie was thinking while watching
her daughter, hunched over, bawling.
What a pretty girl she’s turned out to be.
She reached out to touch her daughter, and Robin, at last, accepted her mother’s
embrace.

That was two days ago, and now he was dead, and Robin had never gotten to say good-bye,
but what would she have been saying good-bye to anyway? Edie remembered sitting at
her father’s bedside before he died and wishing she hadn’t been there because he wasn’t
as she wanted to remember him. His skin went from gray to blue to white, as if something
were passing through him and then out again, like a small wave at low tide teasing
a shoreline. Mourning was an awful feeling, a relinquishment of the soul. She would
rather do anything but mourn.

Her daughter finished her cookies, got up from where she was sitting to take some
more, and Edie stopped her and said, “Just take the whole thing. I’ve got more.” Robin
gave her a dark look but took the entire package and returned to her seat.

“They were the only friends I had, Mom. Do you know that I don’t have any other friends?”

No, Edie didn’t know that.

“I have no one now.” Robin started to weep. She wept and ate.

“Hey, there are a lot of nice kids who live around here,” said Edie, not knowing if
it were true or not.

“They’re all huge assholes,” said Robin. “They don’t like any of the bands I like
and all they care about is what kind of jeans they’re wearing, which I can’t even
fit into anyway. And they’re completely mean to me. They used to pick on me all the
time until I met Aaron and Ethan.” She hiccuped. “And now they’re g-o-o-o-ne,” she
wailed.

Edie noticed that Robin had only one row of cookies left to consume and wished she
had three to five of them sitting on the table in front of her.

“I mean, don’t you get sick of it?” said Robin.

“Sick of what?”

“Sick of this,” said Robin, and she waved her hands in front of her body.

Edie stared at her blankly.

“Being fat? Come on, Mom. You and me. We’re fat.”

“I don’t like that word,” whispered Edie.

“You should hear what the kids say to me at school,” said Robin, suddenly motivated
by something other than sadness, something new and cruel, a taste that was better
than all the processed sugar in the world: bitterness. “They’d say it to you, too,
but like ten times worse.” She put another cookie into her mouth, barely chewed it,
and then it was gone. “Because you’re fatter than I am. So there’s more to say about
you.”

“I’m sorry I disappoint you,” said Edie, crushed and crumpled, letting herself feel
that way, letting herself sink down low.

“You don’t disappoint me,” said Robin. “You disappoint yourself.” And then she opened
her mouth as if she were about to say something even worse, as if she were about to
roar, but all that came out was a pile of dark, chocolate vomit, which landed in a
thick puddle on the kitchen table. Robin stared at it, and then vomited again, and
Edie began to gag, too, but somehow restrained herself from letting loose entirely,
from freeing whatever was trapped inside her gut.

After that day, Robin grew thin quickly. She went to the boy’s funeral a week later,
and the next morning she got up early and went for a jog around the block. A few weeks
more, and she joined the track team. It seemed like it was only a matter of months
before she looked just like all the other children in the neighborhood, while Edie
remained exactly the same, alone at the kitchen table, surrounded by all her worldly
pleasures.