The Middlesteins (9 page)

This happened a lot in the future, in their family, in their lives, going out to dinner
with Edie sitting at a separate table. For years this went on, until they all stopped
eating together entirely, Benny and Robin growing up thinking it was something everyone
did, and not realizing that it wasn’t until it didn’t matter anymore anyway. As an
adult, Robin found herself behaving exactly the same as her mother without even knowing
it, always alone at meals, eating, reading, alone, while Benny married young and his
doting wife, at home with the kids, had a hot, non-fast-food-related meal on the table
every night. In the end it was not the worst thing that had happened to them in their
lives. “It could have been much, much worse,” Benny said to his sister at their mother’s
funeral, and she could not argue. “They could have starved us,” said Robin. “They
could have beat us,” said Benny. It was a game they could play for hours.

The day Edie dined alone with her McRib sandwich was the one-year anniversary of the
Mount St. Helens eruption. It had made the front page, even though it happened in
another state. Tragedy ripens in memory. Fifty-seven people had died. They believed
that the mountain was their friend. They didn’t want to leave their homes behind.
Who would they be without their homes?

What fools
, thought Edie.
I’d run like hell if I could.

A
fter thirteen successful
years of rejecting Judaism—this included no High Holidays with her parents, no bar
mitzvahs of distant relations, no hanging out at the Hillel House in college, no Purim,
no Passover, no Shabbat, no nothing except for Hanukkah at her brother’s house, which
got a pass because gifts were exchanged, and also because her niece and nephew, both
of whom she was fond of, had always enjoyed that holiday so much—Robin wasn’t exactly
sure how she had ended up at this crowded seder, but there she was, in her trim blue
dress, holding her I-guess-he’s-my-boyfriend’s hand in his parents’ living room in
Northbrook, Illinois. She had instinctively grabbed it, because otherwise she thought
she might have been swept away in the crowd of people. She wasn’t trying to be cute
or affectionate; she was just trying to save her life.

“I don’t get why you hate it so much,” he had said.

This was a few weeks before Passover, when he had first asked her to come with him,
to eat a good meal, to relax, to meet his family. It was important to him. She could
tell this because he wasn’t letting it drop, and, up until recently, he had been letting
everything drop all the time with her. They drank when she wanted to drink; they had
sex when she wanted to have sex. The sex, by the way, was the best both had had in
their lives, the true notion of coupling finally revealed to the two of them at least
physically, the way they curled up into each other, sweaty, salty, lustful messes,
alternating their dialogue between dirty and dizzyingly sweet talk. But out of the
bed they didn’t talk about their future together; they spoke mainly about her sick
mother, her asshole dad, how her day had been, sometimes how his day had been, and
that was it. Occasionally she said something like, “My parents are so crazy I swear
they’re going to drive me to therapy,” and he would say, “Do you feel like you want
to go to therapy?” and she would say, “Are you saying I need therapy?” and he would
raise his hands in the air and walk away rather than answer
that
question, no fool was he. She was completely running the show. But when she said
no to the dinner, that it wasn’t her scene, he jerked back his head, his soft, blond,
fuzzy, gentle head, and gave her a fixed look.

“Me and Judaism, we don’t get along,” she said.

“It’s a family dinner,” he said. “With just a touch of Jew.”

“Please,” she said. “Don’t make me.”

“I’m the one saying please,” he said. “You’re the one saying no.”

She crushed herself into a ball on his couch, knees up, arms around her legs, head
against her knees.

“Why is this so hard for you, to just say yes? It’s a dinner, a really good dinner,
with some nice people. It’s not a big deal.”

“If it’s not a big deal, then why do I have to go?” she said.

Daniel sat next to her on the couch, and, in a shocking display of spine, put his
face next to hers and said, “What is this really about?”

Robin weaved through Daniel’s parents’ home warily, attached to his fingertips. It
was his home, too, she supposed; he had grown up there, after all. Even though he
had gone to college, lived in San Francisco for five years, six months in New York
on a freelance project, Austin, San Francisco, and then finally in Chicago, where
he lived happily, quietly, contentedly (why was he so content? what was his secret?),
in the apartment beneath hers. Of all those places, all those different apartments,
all those different
homes
, this was the place he talked about the most fondly, the most easily, so when he
said, “I’m going home for the weekend,” she knew exactly where he meant.

Everyone else felt right at home there, too. There were bodies stretched everywhere,
on couches, on chairs, small children splayed on the floor with coloring books and
boxes of crayons. (This last part Robin approved of as a teacher, none of those bleeping-blooping
toys that were destroying America and contributing to noise pollution. She loved her
iPhone as much as the next thirty-year-old with a small disposable income, but for
children she felt strongly that imagination should still be enough, and it never was
anymore.) She met Daniel’s two brothers and one sister, a few nieces and nephews,
six cousins of various ages, two sets of aunts and uncles, his lone living grandfather,
two former next-door neighbors who had moved to Florida but came back a few times
a year, who were
like family
, his mother, his father, and a great-aunt Faye and her friend Naomi, who both sat
the entire night in a small alcove in the kitchen barking orders at Daniel’s mother.

“You better check the brisket,” Faye was saying as Daniel and Robin walked into the
kitchen. Daniel’s mother, a bustling, tender-eyed woman Robin’s mother’s age, sighed
not quite imperceptibly, then unscrewed a bottle of Manischewitz and placed it next
to several other open bottles. She had everything under control, even if Faye didn’t
think so; foil-covered dishes of food were organized neatly on countertops.

“Why don’t you check the brisket if you know so much?” said Naomi.

“All right, I’ll check the brisket,” said Faye.

“It’s fine,” said Daniel’s mother.

“You don’t know anything about anything,” said Faye. She shuffled across the kitchen
to the oven, opened it, and peered inside. “It needs a little more time,” she concluded.

“I know it needs a little more time,” said Daniel’s mother. “I know when I’m supposed
to take it out of the oven.”

“I’m starving,” Faye said to Naomi. “Are you starving?”

“Starving,” said Naomi.

“You could have started sooner,” said Faye. Robin noticed she had the hint of an Eastern
European accent. She sat back down, then spotted Daniel and Robin. “Daniel, come here
and give me a kiss. This one, too.” She pointed at Robin. “Come here.” Daniel hugged
his great-aunt, and then Robin leaned in and hugged her also. She was a tiny collection
of bones, almost childlike in her frame, and she smelled strongly of Chanel No. 5.
She wore diamonds in her ears and around her neck and on several of her fingers, and
her hair glittered white. “Look at this,” she said. She patted Robin on the face,
her hands gentle. “Look what Daniel found.”

“Well, if you really want to know,” Robin said, flustered, miserable. There were issues
being forced all over the place lately, and it had been his fault, he knew it. He
was pushing the two of them forward, as a couple, an entity. He had decided she was
the one for him. He had never met anyone before who needed him like she did, even
if she couldn’t admit it.

“I really want to know,” he said. He leaned back and put his arm around her, she unfolded
herself into him, and then she began to speak.

“I hated Hebrew school,” she said.

“Was there someone who liked Hebrew school?” he said.

“All the other kids went to the same grammar school and junior high school and summer
camp, and they saw each other every day, all day long, and were all best friends with
each other. And I was this interloper. Plus, I was fat, did I ever tell you I was
a fat kid?”

Yes, she had told him she was fat.

“Everyone made fun of me. The girls were the worst, those bitchy little princesses,”
she said. “It was two hours of hell, three times a week, for years. How many years?
Like five years.”

Robin’s eyes narrowed and her cheeks grew pinched, and it made Daniel love her less
in that moment. Those faces she made never did her any favors, but there was no way
to actually tell her that. You had to take the good with the bad: that was how Daniel
felt. Later on, when her arms were wrapped around his back and her fingers were in
his hair, the way she stroked his face, the kisses she laid on his neck, he wouldn’t
be thinking about that weird squint she had when she was pissed off.

“I’m sympathetic to your pain, but that’s not enough of a reason to reject religion
outright,” he said. “We all had a lot of pain growing up.”

Daniel had been a boy genius, and then a teen genius. (Though now as an adult, after
a dozen years of drinking and a long-standing romance with Adderall that had ended
only in the last year, he was probably just pretty smart.) He wasn’t sure why being
smart necessitated being tortured by his classmates. He remembered in particular a
football player who sat behind him in Spanish class sophomore year, who at least once
a day stabbed him in the back of the head with a pencil until one day his barber discovered
a dripping green hole there and he was rushed to the emergency room, and there were
shots, the whole nine, and when he returned to school the next week, he found that
the seating chart had been reorganized and he had been moved to a corner by himself,
which, as he looked back now, should have bothered him, but at the time it just gave
him a giant sense of relief.

Still, he never complained about it, because he now made a living off the thing that
was once a source of his pain. He also knew that the football player, husky, yellowing,
was now a waiter at the McCormick & Schmick’s at Old Orchard—Daniel had seen him last
year while holiday shopping with his mother—and even though he had never thought that
he needed any resolution in his life of those dark years, that did not make the moment
any less sweet. In fact, it might have been the air-conditioning in the mall, but
he was pretty sure he had tingled.

Robin started to say something that seemed like it was going to be important: the
deep inhale, the bunched-up fists, the grim set to her mouth. But instead she simply
said, “I just felt like it got shoved down my throat.”

His girlfriend was making excuses. Maybe he’d hear the real story later, and maybe
he wouldn’t, though he suspected he would. There was so much dramatic tension built
up all over her, in every tight cell of her body, and he loved watching it unfold.
Whatever emotions she was experiencing—and they were not entirely bad; in fact, they
were sometimes so delicate and passionate that it was as if he could see right through
to her soul—she made it count. On a daily basis, she took great big gulps of feelings,
and whatever was left over she would pass on to him. All that Adderall had taken its
toll on Daniel: It was simply harder to feel things now, so he would grab sensations
when he could get them. Being with Robin was like being stabbed with a million pinpricks
at once. He was shocked by how good that felt.

“I’m sure it was awful,” he said.

“You don’t even know the half of it,” she whimpered.

“It sounds like something you should talk about in therapy, if you ever decide to
go to therapy,” he said.

She began to protest, but he had already had this discussion with her. It was not
her
problem, of course. It was
theirs
. He already knew how to finish the sentence.

“Not that I’m telling you you need to go to therapy,” he continued. “Because I’m not.
But in the meantime, I think you can come have dinner with my family.”

There was a small card table set up in the living room and then a longer table next
to that and then another long table in the foyer between the living room and the dining
room, and then finally there was the long, gorgeous oak dining room table, and all
of Daniel’s family members were distributed among these tables, the children at one
table, the adult children at the next table, the parents of both groups of children
at the next. Both rooms smelled intensely of brisket. Except for the children, who
dined on plastic, everyone had matching silverware and plates and wineglasses, and
the tables were beautiful, they shimmered flawlessly in the candlelight. At every
place setting there was a printout of a Haggadah, and a green rubber frog finger puppet.
Robin put one on her pinkie and waved it at Daniel.

“They’re supposed to represent the plague,” he said to her. She stretched her memory,
and recalled that it was something to do with the Exodus; she had blocked it all out
so long ago.

“What happened to the fancy Haggadahs?” yelled a cousin from the living room. It was
the only way anyone could hear anyone else from one room to the other.

“Those were gorgeous,” said another.

“There was a flood in the basement,” said Daniel’s father.

“Why were they in the basement?” asked Faye, from the kitchen.

“I don’t even want to talk about it,” said his mother quietly.

Robin liked Daniel’s mother, whom she had met before, when Daniel was just the downstairs
neighbor she got drunk with during happy hour on Fridays (and also sometimes on Sundays
during brunch, and obviously on Thursdays, too, because she would never make it through
Friday without going out on Thursday night), and meeting his family was no big deal.
His mother had worked for many years in the public-school system as a librarian and
then had gone back to graduate school and had worked her way up at Northwestern, where
she now taught library science. Robin admired her ambition and envied her placidity.
It was one of the things she liked most in Daniel, too: his calm. If she were forced
to detail the things she liked about Daniel, that quality would have been on the list.

The Manischewitz was so sweet that even Robin couldn’t drink it, and so she left the
glass untouched except for those few sips required by Jewish law.

“Got anything else?” said Daniel. He was ready for any reason she threw at him as
to why she would not be attending his family’s seder. For once he had found a battle
worth fighting.

She couldn’t bring herself to mention that she felt like she would be cheating on
her family with his family if she spent the holiday with them. Her brother and his
wife had been inviting her to their house for Passover since she had moved back from
New York, and she had said no for eight years straight. From her parents—when they
were still together; they had split a few months before—she got the pre–High Holiday
invitation (“It would make your father so happy to see you there,” her mother would
say) as well as the post–High Holiday guilt trip (“Would it have killed you to do
something to make your mother happy?” her father would say). The one-two punch. Coming
and going. She wished she could have helped them all feel a little bit better about
their universe, but she was certain that the hours spent with them, head bowed in
prayer, would have been excruciating.