The Middlesteins Part 5

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 f.u.c.king 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 partic.i.p.ate 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?

Edie, 241 Pounds.

The 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 embarra.s.sed 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 (G.o.d forbid. Oy. G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l 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 macrame 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 ba.n.a.lities 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing through him and then out again, like a small wave at low tide teasing a sh.o.r.eline. 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 a.s.sholes," 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.

The Golden Unicorn.

Let me tell you a story about your father, said Edie to her daughter, Robin, who did not want to hear the story, but could not figure out how to say no.

They were in the house where Robin had grown up and hated returning, where Edie still lived, all by herself, newly abandoned by her husband with, as far as Robin could tell, nowhere else to go. Was her mother's life now spent at this kitchen table, alternating between eating and grinding all the joy out of her memories?

As a child, Robin had loved her mother's stories. Edie was an eavesdropper and a gossip, but she was also the kind of person to whom even strangers would tell their secrets. She seemed wise. She seemed warm. If she didn't know how to help, she would at least know how to make you feel better. It was only when you really got to know her that she could be kind of terrifying.

And then something shifted in Robin's adolescence, and the stories stopped. There was that one thing that happened with those two boys, of which they did not speak as a family anymore but about which Robin had been thinking for so long that it had become seamless with her self. They were her first real boy friends, Aaron and Ethan, and they had all been in love, Aaron in love with Ethan, Robin in love with Ethan, Ethan in love with his record collection and with pills and with the two of them loving him. They had all felt so deeply for one another; for months they had sat huddled in Ethan's bedroom listening to records, actual vinyl, vinyl being better and more important than CDs for many reasons, all of which Ethan enumerated excitedly in his recently deepened voice. Yes, yes, said Aaron and Robin, fascinated with his pa.s.sion, his knowledge of actual pieces of information unrelated to what they learned in high school. Once they had made out in the backseat of Aaron's car, parked in a dimly lit cul-de-sac a block away from Robin's house, the three of them taking turns kissing and touching each other, plump Robin with her gigantic b.r.e.a.s.t.s (the boys seemed astonished when they were finally released from her bra), little Aaron with his shaved head and squat torso, Ethan's hand squished between Robin's legs, Aaron jerking off Ethan, all of them moaning, all of them the most satisfied they had ever been in their young lives-none of them would ever feel that satisfied again-until there was nothing to do but stop, zipper, buckle, awkwardly replace b.r.e.a.s.t.s into bra, and then, only then, feel slightly embarra.s.sed by their audible expressions of joy. Cigarettes lit, pills popped. Robin wrote love letters to them both a week later. Mailed them, and if they got them and read them, no one said a word. Only a few days later, Ethan was dead. It had nothing to do with them. It was his family. Issues beyond anyone's control. Aaron got too sad and was sent away. Now he lived in Seattle, and every year, around the anniversary of Ethan's death-still, after all this time!-he sent her a mix CD of their favorite bands they used to listen to when they were growing up. He ran out of favorite songs a long time ago, and now they were just on repeat. She wished she could tell him to stop sending them to her, but she didn't know how to not feel that pain. She was waiting for a new, worse pain in her life to take its place.

But after that terrible time with the boys when she was fifteen, Robin had shut down to her mother. Had it been that long? Robin was thirty-one years old. Had she really been so far away from everyone even though she was just a forty-five-minute drive into Chicago? She never said anything of substance about her life, maybe a story here and there about her work as a history teacher at a high-priced private school. The kids made her laugh. Her mother had to drag out the tiniest detail. Edie never knew when she was going to get a new piece of information, and when she did, she savored it for weeks, fleshing out her daughter's life in her head.

But what reason would Robin have to trust her with her heart? Even if Edie was sharing her own heart with her now. No, not sharing. That was too casual a word. She was digging her fingertips into her breastbone and clawing her way inside through her skin, excavating through blood and bones, mining her flesh for that precious beating object, and then laying it in front of her daughter for her judgment. And with each story she told, each howling, moaning tale, it was as if she were striking her own heart again and again with a closed fist. Either she was resuscitating it or she was destroying it. Either she was going to live or die. Robin did not know yet which it would be.

Let me tell you a story about your father, she said.

Out back, through the screen door, an empty bird feeder, old, forgotten, spotted with mold, swung from a white oak tree in the spring wind.

But Robin had heard enough of her stories over the past two months.

She had heard about how Edie had married too young, married the first man who came along who asked, and how on their wedding night, after they'd already exchanged the "I do's" and smashed the gla.s.s and danced the hora and shoved cake into each other's face ("He really got in there," mused Edie. "I had frosting in my ears."), after they had posed for pictures with their arms around each other and danced a slow box step to "When a Man Loves a Woman" and had kissed good night Edie's friends from law school and Richard's friends from pharmacy school and cousins and aunts and a few high-school friends and neighbors and Edie's parents and Richard's parents, every last one of them drunk, after all that sealing-of-the-deal, he had whispered to her in the honeymoon suite of the Drake Hotel in downtown Chicago, "Are you sure about this?" Which of course made her unsure. Great start to a life together, Richard. Nice work.

And today there was more: that terrible trip to Rome, which was supposed to be a fresh start for the two of them after the kids were out of the house, and then he ended up complaining the whole time, from the cab to O'Hare to the Vatican and back again.

"Why did he bring the wrong shoes? Did I have to do everything for him?" said Edie.

"Why didn't you just buy new shoes? You were in Italy. That's where they make the best shoes in the world," said Robin.

"Well, eventually we did, but that's not the point."

Robin put her left cheek down on the kitchen table and let out a sigh. The light had turned outside, and dusty yellow dusk approached. Dinnertime.

"Can we just eat?" said Robin. "Let's go get some food."

"What kind of food?" said Edie.

"Wherever you go to eat, Mom. I don't care."

Edie's hands, puffed up, ghostly white, twitched on the table. Robin could tell she did not want to eat in front of her. She would rather reveal the inconsistencies of her husband's lovemaking abilities. She would rather discuss his merely adequate financial planning over the last three decades. Wouldn't Robin rather hear about how her father had always loved his own mother more than his wife?

"Why don't you want to eat with me, Mom?" said Robin.

"Fine, you want to eat? Let's eat."

"I'll drive," said Robin, who'd had one gla.s.s of wine.

"I can drive," said her mother, who'd had three.

"I can't believe I'm having this discussion with you," said Robin, and while she was probably talking about how weird it was to argue with her mother, who, up until the last three months of her life, had been the kind of woman who put ice cubes in her wine, about whether or not she was sober enough to drive, she was also talking big picture here, about the life they were having together, mother and daughter swapping authority, her mother ripping open her insides and tossing whatever she felt at her daughter to see what stuck. This new life that was not much fun at all.

Robin won-"Okay, you win." "What do I win?"-and drove the two of them one town over, and then another, past the highway that went to Woodfield Mall and then farther, to Chicago, until her mother directed her into a tiny, tidy strip mall that housed a windowless sports bar, a 7-Eleven, and a cell-phone store. Robin parked in front of a Chinese restaurant-the Golden Unicorn-which was lit so brightly that the sidewalk outside the front window was a sunny yellow, and some of the light caught on her mother as they walked in through the front door, and Robin saw she was smiling, a genuine, giddy smile.

It was early, not even 5:00 P.M., and the restaurant was empty, except for a young Chinese woman sitting before a giant pile of green beans spread on a table. She stood when the two women entered and rushed toward Edie with open arms, and they quickly embraced.