The Middlesteins(23)
*
“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 * 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.”