The Middlesteins

by Jami Attenberg

  “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 passion, 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 breasts (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 breasts into bra, and then, only then, feel slightly embarrassed 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 glass 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 glass 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.

  “We haven’t seen you in so long,” she said. “We missed you.”

  “I haven’t been feeling well,” said Edie.

  Was that true? Robin didn’t even know if Edie felt worse one day to the next.

  “Oh no,” said the girl, young, slim, punkish, with a purple streak in the front of her hair, and thick black, high-laced boots over the bottoms of her tight black jeans. “We can’t have you getting sick. I’ll get you some tea. You sit down, and I’ll get you some right away.”

  Robin stood there lamely, watching the two women engaging so brightly with each other, her mother with this stranger.

  Edie finally introduced Robin to the woman—Anna was her name—who broke into a broad smile and then shook Robin’s hand with gusto, her slender palm disappearing into Robin’s hand. “The schoolteacher! What an honor to have you here. Your mother talks about you all the time. We love your mother. Just love her. She’s our hero.”

  Robin was stunned, and a little stung, too, that she had no idea what was going on at that moment. Why is my mother the hero of a Chinese restaurant?

  Anna pointed to a table near the window. “Go on, sit, and I’ll get you some tea and let Dad know you’re here.”

  They sat together at the table, her mother shifting herself in uncomfortably. Fresh pink tea roses floating in a small glass jar on the table. Robin picked up the menu, but Edie told her to put it down. “Just let them take care of it,” she said. “They’ll bring whatever’s good tonight.”

  Robin looked around, at the framed black-and-white photographs of faraway cities that hung on the walls, the raw wood tabletops; it felt like a place she would go to in the city, and definitely not like a restaurant next door to a place called the Billy Goat Tavern.

  “It’s kind of cool in here,” said Robin.

  “It’s all Anna,” said her mother. “If her father had his way, it would look like every other Chinese restaurant in town. But Anna thinks she can get the yuppies in here.”

  “Is it working?” said Robin.

  “It’s not not working,” said her mother. “We’ll see.”

  Not so long before, her mother had worked for the companies that opened these strip malls all over the suburbs. She knew the businesses well, had seen them come and go. Robin’s father, too, with his one pharmacy left after having three through the eighties and nineties, had his opinions on what made a business work. Robin would put her money on her mother’s opinion over her father’s any day of the week.

  “He needs to advertise more. Spend a little more time on the Internet,” Edie said. “I’ve been helping them out. I did some paperwork for them. It was no big deal. I have too much time on my hands anyway.”

  Suddenly Robin felt relief: Her mother had a life outside her home, outside of sitting there at that kitchen table, stewing in her own flesh, in the layers of hate and frustration and anger and heartbreak that she had been building up for so long. If she came here regularly, and she was helping people, then maybe she could be saved after all. Edie had always lived to help people, volunteering with the elderly, the synagogue, feeding the homeless every Christmas without fail. All those female political candidates she canvassed for. All those family members who needed pro bono work, and she did it without thinking, staying up late after Robin and her brother had gone to bed. God, where was that passionate, connected, committed woman? Robin missed her so. Was she right here? Sitting right in front of her? Was she still there under all that weight? Robin allowed herself to plant that tiny seed of hope within herself; she watered it with green tea, the bright lights of the Chinese restaurant sunning it.

  A Chinese man in a chef’s jacket sidled out of the kitchen, long lines on his face, in his forehead, on his cheeks, arched eyebrows, a tender little mustache on his upper lip; wiping his hands on a towel he then tucked neatly under his arm.

  “Edith,” he said.

  Sure, thought Robin. It’s Edith on her driver’s license and her birth certificate and her voter’s registration card and then absolutely nowhere else in the world, so why not in this Chinese restaurant?

  He stood before the table and then waited calmly until Edie invited him to join them, and then he slid in next to her, patted her hand just once, and crossed his on the table in front of him.

  Robin wondered if her mother knew that this man was in love with her.

  “You are the famous Robin,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I am extremely famous.”

  “I’m Kenneth Song,” he said. He studied her briefly, his eyes focusing into recognition, and then he broke into a small smile. “You look just like your mother,” he said.

  It took a lot from Robin to keep her mouth shut right then, because she wanted to wrinkle her forehead and purse her lips and jerk her head back in disdain, the “Are you high?” look she’d been working on since she was in her teens, popular with no one but effective nonetheless. She wanted to say to him, How on earth do I look like a 350-pound woman?

  But maybe he knew something she didn’t. Their eyes were still the same, after all, dark, intense bullets—you can’t hide the eyes—and their hair the same color and texture, black kinks down to their shoulders, and maybe they had the same smile. When they smiled.

  Maybe he could see right through Edie, to what was underneath.

  “Same eyes,” said Robin faintly.

  “I have to go,” he said. “Big party coming in at seven.”

  “That’s great!” said Edie.

  He slid himself out of the booth, and, before he walked away, turned gracefully to Robin and said, “Your mother is a saint.”

  Edie Middlestein, patron saint of Chinese joints everywhere. Well, thought Robin, if my mother lives in this alternate universe in this strip mall, at least it’s nice that they think she’s so amazing.

  “He’s got quite a story,” said Edie, and she nodded approvingly at the value of such a thing. A story!

  Anna came out of the kitchen and squinted up at the ceiling. “Too bright,” she said, and wandered off. A moment later the lights dimmed, the final piece of the atmosphere in place, and Robin felt herself ease slightly into her seat. The restaurant was adorable. She couldn’t believe that her mother had never brought her here before. She imagined briefly her whole family—minus her father, of course—dining here together, Benny and his wife and the kids. This would make her weekly trip to the suburbs more than tolerable. If there were a place they could all call their own together, in this unfortunate new phase of their lives.

  But then came the food. Platter after platter of sizzling, decadent, rich, sodium-sugar-drenched food. Steaming, plush pork buns, and bright green broccoli in thick lobster sauce, sticky brown noodles paired with sweet s
hrimp and glazed chicken, briny, chewy clams swimming in a subtle black-bean gravy. Cilantro-infused scallion pancakes. A dozen dumplings stuffed with a curiously, addictively spicy seafood, the origin of which Robin could not determine, but it seemed irrelevant anyway.

  Robin tried one bite of everything, and that was it. The patron saint of former fat girls. It was delicious, Robin would not deny Mr. Song his gift. But there was just so much food, too much food, and all of it was terrible for her mother. Couldn’t they see who her mother was? Didn’t they know that every bite her mother took was bringing her one step closer to death?

  Edie seemed to be ignoring the fact that her daughter was across the table from her, or at least she did an excellent job of pretending she was alone. She ate everything on every plate, each bite accompanied with a thick forkful of white rice. Edie came and she conquered, laying waste to every morsel. Robin wondered what her mother felt like when she was done. Was it triumph? Eleven seafood dumplings, six scallion pancakes, five pork buns, the pounds of noodles and shrimp and clams and broccoli and chicken. Not that anyone was counting. Was there any guilt? Or did she hope to simply pass out and forget what had just happened?

  You’re killing her, Robin wanted to say. But of course it was not their fault. Because her mother was killing herself.

  Later, in the car, in the parking lot, outside the sports bar, where two women in their twenties leaned against a wall sharing one cigarette, outside the 7-Eleven, where a UPS man purchased a two-liter of Coca-Cola and two overcooked hot dogs drenched in cheese sauce, outside a cell-phone store, where a bored salesgirl working her way through community college slumped behind a counter texting a girl who had pissed her off at a party the night before, outside a Chinese restaurant where the food was made with love by a man who was once an unstoppable chef, in love with his work, in love with his life, until he lost his wife to cancer and he became sad for a long time, until his daughter said, “Stop it,” and now here he was, cooking again, outside of all this Edie and Robin sat, Edie staring out the window, Robin with her head against the steering wheel.