The Middlesteins (2 page)

Robin examined her mottled arm and said, “Screw this. I’m moving home.”

“Me too,” said Julie.

“Me too,” said Jennifer.

“Me too,” said Jordan.

“Not me,” said Teresa. “I’m moving in with my girlfriend. New York is awesome.”

Now Robin lived with just two roommates (one who was never there because she stayed
with her boyfriend most of the time in some sort of undercover, “let’s not offend
our Catholic parents even though we’re in our late twenties and are clearly not virgins
any longer” gesture, and the other who was always there because she had nowhere better
to be, much like Robin) in a spacious apartment in Andersonville, just three train
stops away from the private school where she had taught history for the last seven
years. Her life in Chicago was better in all the ways she had wanted it to be at the
time she moved, although she wondered sometimes if she had left too soon, because
she knew that she would never go back. This was it, Chicago. The end of the line.

Because she had a heartsick mother to take care of now.

And where would she have gone anyway, these past few years? No matter where, she would
be living the same life as she had in Chicago. Robin would get up in the morning,
sip coffee, do a few stretches, run five miles, shower, moisturize, pluck a stray
hair from her chin, put on too much eyeliner, and then, before she left, water some
plants she cared little for but kept alive out of habit. Then she would take a train
or a bus to a school near enough where she wouldn’t spend her whole life commuting,
but far enough that she felt grown up—real adults left their homes and went somewhere
to work; this was a problem she had with Daniel and his life and taking him seriously—and
while she traveled, she would read whatever post-seventies novel she had secured from
the library, and she would smirk at the funny parts but never laugh out loud. At school
she would teach a class about the Vietnam War and she would get a little political
but nothing too outrageous (she was clearly sympathetic with the protesters, but still,
We should always support our troops
), then have lunch with the one good friend she had made there—whoever the other caustic
young single woman was—and they would sit alone together in the cafeteria and make
fun of everyone else, students and teachers alike, while always finding something
nice to say about them all in the end. Later she would take the train home, perhaps
go grocery shopping, buying environmentally sound and mostly vegetarian food items,
which she would cook for herself, eat peacefully, reading her book as she ate, using
her index finger to follow along, then greet her roommate with a bright smile as she
came into the room but then look down again quickly as if she could not be distracted
from that exact emotional moment in the book, which was not really a lie, but was
also an excuse to be quiet a little longer, to enjoy one more moment in the day that
was hers alone. Because later she would go to a bar, with a man or maybe she would
meet a man there, and she would practice being a woman, feel some sort of power, suck
just enough energy from the man sitting across from her that she would still feel
whole and relevant and sexual, without actually having to do anything, simply show
up and be there. No one got hurt. She had no interest in getting hurt ever again,
or hurting anyone else ever again. It was only a little conversation. Innocent flirtation.
Then she would drink what she needed to knock herself out for the night.

Robin could live in Denver or San Francisco or Atlanta or Austin, and it wouldn’t
matter. She would be doing the same thing wherever she lived. She would never set
furniture on fire in an alley again.

She thought about what it felt like right at the end of her morning run. She always
sprinted, and by the time she made it home she was out of breath, and she would hunch
over, her hands on her knees, her skin stung with heat. That was her favorite part
of the day. That minute she sprinted.

She bent over on her barstool. Her hair hung down the sides of her face. She waited
for the blood to rush to her head. Daniel put his hand on the back of her neck. He
did not ask her if she was okay. She liked Daniel. He knew when to keep quiet.

Finally she raised her head. It wasn’t the same feeling as when she sprinted. There
was no faking that feeling.

Daniel and Robin toasted once again, this time to her parents’ marriage.

“Truly an inspiration to us all,” said Daniel.

“That’s mean,” she said.

“Oh, the surgeries are fine, but the divorce is off-limits? I see you for who you
really are now, Robin. A sentimental old fool.”

She was not sentimental. But she had excess love in her heart now; she knew that was
true. She had taken it back from her father. It had not disappeared. But it needed
redirection. Robin looked at Daniel and had the meanest thought of her entire life.
He’ll do.

She leaned over the corner of the bar, the edge of it pressing against her gut, and
gave Daniel an awkward but not entirely terrible kiss. She sat back down in her seat.

Daniel said nothing for a minute. His eyes were glassy, and he rubbed his lips together.
“We should talk about this first,” said Daniel.

“This is absolutely the thing we should not talk about,” said Robin. “Do not talk,
and do not think. Just do.”

Together, silently, they left.

E
verybody was obsessed
with Golda Meir in Edie Herzen’s house. Her father, and all his buddies, some from
the synagogue, some from the university, a few fresh from Russia whom Edie’s father
had adopted into his life because he was always adopting people, spent weekends hunched
over the kitchen table talking about her, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee,
picking at the food in front of them, the plates of whitefish and herring, the bagels,
the lox, the various spreads of sometimes indeterminate meat. Bright green pickles
bursting with vinegar and salt. The cherry pastries covered with half-melted squiggles
of frosting.

Her mother would be slicing tomatoes and onions near the kitchen sink, a cigarette
in her mouth, too. She wore her hair high and fluffy and dyed black, and there was
always a new gold bracelet dangling around her wrist. She cared less than Edie’s father
did about all this, and she almost never went to the synagogue except on High Holidays.
When they moved to Skokie ten years before from Hyde Park, they left behind the synagogue
that Edie’s mother had grown up with, and suddenly practicing her faith became irrelevant
without a personal sense of history attached to it. But she supported her husband
and his friends—they could do all the praying on her behalf. She’d make sure they
got fed. No one would leave her house hungry. Those poor, wifeless, childless, lonely
men.

The men went from the table to the synagogue and back again, some of them sprawling
at night on their living-room couch. Israel was about to get bombed from all sides,
and everyone was convinced that if Golda were running the show, and not that weak,
stuttering excuse for a man, Eshkol, this would have been taken care of months ago.
Edie thought about that T. S. Eliot poem she had been studying in English class:
In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.
In her house, it was the men coming and going, and they were always talking about
Meir.

Sometimes her parents argued about how much money they were donating to Israel.

Edie ate everything the men ate, more than the men ate. They smoked, she ate. They
drank coffee, she drank Coca-Cola. At night she ate the leftovers. It didn’t matter,
there was always new food coming through the door. She ate on behalf of Golda, recovering
from cancer. She ate in tribute to Israel. She ate because she loved to eat. She knew
she loved to eat, that her heart and soul felt full when she felt full, and also because
she had heard one of her father’s older friends, Abraham, speaking about her to Naumann,
blue-eyed, watery-skinned, a drinker, only a few years older than she was, a young
man in her house to look at and talk to up close and personal if she chose, which
she had not.

“Big-boned, my ass. That girl just loves to eat,” is what Abraham said.

So what? That’s what she had to say about that. Even if it had hurt a little bit to
hear him say those words, it meant that they were still looking at her.

As a much younger man, Abraham had escaped serving in the Russian army during the
war with Japan by puncturing both of his eardrums. He had worn hearing aids since.
All her father’s friends respected him for his subversive behavior, because they all
hated Russia (and sometimes America) (but loved Israel) but Edie thought that was
the act of an insane man. For the rest of your life to be deaf? She could stop eating
(maybe), but he’d never get his hearing back.

Naumann’s father had known Edie’s father when they were children in Kiev. They had
not been close, but her father had a hard time saying no to any of the pleading letters
that came his way. Naumann had been staying on the living-room couch off and on for
a few months. It was covered in plastic, and she had no idea how he slept on it without
sliding off. Abraham would pass out upright on the recliner in the basement. Edie’s
mother would cover them both with blankets that were always neatly folded in the morning
when Edie would stumble downstairs on her way to school, both men gone to whatever
job Edie’s father had secured for them.

At high school Edie was significantly smarter than most of her classmates. She was
going to graduate a year early, and then she was going to graduate in three years
from Northwestern, which she would attend for free because her father worked there,
and she would do magnificently, and then she would go to law school there, and there
she would experience her first academic setback, and Edie would graduate merely in
the middle of her class, maybe because her class consisted of an exceptionally bright
group of people, maybe because the first year of law school her mother got sick, maybe
because the second year of law school her father got sick, maybe because somewhere
in the middle of that she met her someday-husband and fell in love, and maybe because
there is only so much a woman can handle before she simply collapses.

But right then she was at the top of her game, her skin plum-tinted, her eyes glittering
and dark, her hair soft and dark and curly and long enough to tie in a loose knot
at her neck, tiny sprays of it fluttering out around her cheeks and jaw. She felt
sharp and prestigious, and she had an understanding that she could do anything she
wanted in the world, and that no one truly had the power at that moment in time to
oppress her except for herself.

Big Edie Herzen.

“But there’s something about a big girl, it’s true. Even the really big ones,” said
Abraham.

“This is what I am trying to say,” said Naumann. Edie didn’t even know his first name.

Naumann, on the couch. Abraham in the basement. Her parents upstairs in bed.

Edie had only begun to engage in her flirtation with eating late at night. All day
long it was this and that about Meir and Israel. Her father had smoked an entire pack
of Pall Malls and had forgotten to eat. He was always so skinny. There were leftovers.
There was half a loaf of rye bread, and there were so many delicious things to put
between two slices of rye bread. Just sitting in the refrigerator, in the kitchen,
past the living room.

She tiptoed downstairs, carpeting to tile to linoleum. The stench of cigarettes did
not deter her from her goal. She would always think of cigarettes when she sat to
eat. A lifetime of hating and loving a smell.

She did not even have to look around to know that it was Naumann who had lit up behind
her and was now seated at the kitchen table. Edie had his number before he even opened
his mouth. She could have touched him months ago. She could have run her finger along
his swollen lips. Other girls did things like that all the time, and it was no big
deal. Half her class had turned into hippies overnight. Her parents still loved each
other, and held hands at the dinner table, and kissed each other good morning, good
evening, and good night. There was nothing wrong with wanting another person, if it
was the right person. But she had sized him up and given him a failing grade.

How could Naumann know this? He was too concerned with
her
size, what her ass would feel like if he squished each cheek between his hands, what
her breasts would feel like if he put his face between them and pushed them up against
his cheeks. What it would feel like to be with a girl he didn’t have to pay for. He
was also concerned with vodka. He was barely concerned with his job.

That spring, Edie’s mother had hired someone to cut the bushes on the front lawn in
unusual shapes, and through the side window Edie could see a dark green spiral in
the moonlight. Coleslaw and roast beef between two slices of rye bread. She sat down
at the table with Naumann and began to eat. He lit another cigarette. She felt fearless.

There was something about a big girl, after all.

“You are always so hungry,” said Naumann, bitter but hopeful, lost in America, sleeping
on a plastic-covered couch, waking up every night, without fail, on the living-room
floor, grateful that at least the fall was carpeted. “You always have to have some
food in your mouth.”

Don’t say it
, thought Edie.

Edie’s father had gotten Naumann a job cleaning the bathrooms at a high school in
Winnetka. That meant he was a high-school janitor.

She took another bite. The coleslaw was creamy and tart.

Naumann inhaled deeply and drunkenly and then blew the smoke out his nose.

She could tell that he had no self-control. Neither did she in a lot of ways. She
was sympathetic. But still. Don’t say it.

 “Maybe you need something else in your mouth,” he said.

 “Like I would screw someone who cleans toilets for a living,” she said.

 “You would be so lucky,” he said. “Whore.”

She finished her sandwich; she took her time, because she was hungry, and because
it filled her up, and because she was in her house, in her kitchen, and she was a
queen, and because women could rule the world with their iron fists. Then, when she
was done with her sandwich, she let out a loud scream that surprised even her with
its girlishness, and which woke her mother, and her father, and half the block, lights
flinging on in bedrooms and living rooms, everyone stirred, everyone worried, everyone
but Abraham, who slept through all the ruckus because he had taken his hearing aids
out for the night. She felt not an ounce of regret. As far as she could tell, no great
tragedy had occurred.