The Middlesteins(25)

“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.

I always feel like you’re waiting for me to say something, she told him once in her head, where it was safe for sentences like that.

Daniel was still waiting for her to give him another reason she couldn’t go to dinner, and she had run out of reasons. “Can I bring anything?” she asked, because her mother had raised her right.