The Middlesteins(5)

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.





Edie, 202 Pounds



Everybody 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.