The Middlesteins

by Jami Attenberg

  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.

  Exodus

  After 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.

&nb
sp; “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.

  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.