The Middlesteins(27)

Edie, 241 Pounds



The letter went out on a Friday, but Edie already knew what it was going to say. Her daughter, Robin, flipped it miserably in front of her at the kitchen table, where Edie had collapsed after arriving home from work, her hand resting on an unopened package of fat-free (top ingredient: sugar) cookies. She messily ripped the edge of the delicate plastic wrapping with her fingertips, leaving a jagged opening down the middle of the package, so instead of just one row of dark, spongy, devil’s-food-cake cookies, there were two, and, with the slightest tug of her index finger and thumb, all three were revealed. There they all were. Waiting. The cookies smelled like nothing, like air, and that’s how they felt inside her, too. They never filled her up, no matter how many she ate. Once, at night, when she was certain everyone was in bed, she had eaten two boxes of the cookies, just to see what would happen, and it had done nothing to her. Edie couldn’t feel a thing.

She pushed the package toward her daughter, who got up from the end of the table and took half of one row of cookies into her hands, then returned to face her mother down at the end of the long table. Six cookies. Fat-free.

“This looks important,” said her mother.

Her daughter looked up at her, eyes stark and serious and red-rimmed, half a cookie sticking from her mouth like a helpless mouse captured by a sharp house cat. She looked just as her mother had at her age, plump, fresh-faced, though she carried the weight differently because she was shorter than her mother, so perhaps she was a little wider around the hips. She took the rest of the cookie into her mouth with just her tongue. She hadn’t spoken to her mother in two days, because her mother hadn’t allowed her to go to the hospital when she had wanted to, and then it was too late, and now all that was left was this letter.

It was from the high school; Robin had already opened it, read it, and shoved it back into the envelope, so Edie just shook out the paper with one hand while holding a cookie with the other. Her daughter had already eaten all her cookies and was reaching for more.

A boy had killed himself, that’s what the letter said. Another one was in a mental hospital. (That part wasn’t mentioned in the letter, but Edie had heard this from the school guidance counselor when he had called her at work that afternoon.) The weekend before, the two boys and her daughter had driven downtown to see the Smashing Pumpkins play at a festival, and Robin had returned home drunk and Edie had let it slide because Robin was actually a good little drunk: she did not have much of a hangover, no moaning the next day, and Edie hadn’t had to hold her hair back over the toilet like she did for several roommates of hers in college. She was simply giggly, and she raved about the show, and she didn’t appear to have been molested in any way. Maybe Edie should have imparted some parental wisdom about alcohol at that moment, but she was in no position to be giving anyone advice about what they should or shouldn’t consume.

They felt close, which they had been for Robin’s entire life, especially in that period after her brother, Benny, went away to Champaign for college and the house had become extremely empty, her husband, Richard, always struggling to keep his three pharmacies afloat, engaging in some sort of pyramid scheme among businesses, driving back and forth between them, always hustling (she had to give him credit for that), even as he was failing. Edie and Robin were left behind with each other, and they joined forces at the kitchen table, Edie sharing (sometimes age-inappropriate) stories about her day, like the ones about her co-workers at the law firm, who were always more interesting than their job descriptions would suggest; they were office-supply thieves and part-time jazz musicians and heavy drinkers and cancer survivors. Or about the woman in line at the grocery store who had too many babies and a low-cut blouse and what seemed like a hundred coupons, and why were they all for cat food? And there was always something to say about family members, distant cousins who were getting divorces, because she had known all along it was never going to last, or wistful stories about family members who came over from Russia before the war, or directly after, because it’s important to know where you came from. Together they sat, a haul of groceries in front of them, the prepackaged snacks one of their shared great delights in life.

Then Edie would send her daughter off to do her homework while she prepared their official dinner, something of real substance, steak or chicken or pasta. The pretense of all-together time at dinner had long faded, of course, with Richard showing up late for dinner or not at all. Edie never bothered to set a place for him. Sometimes Robin ate in her room, and that was fine with Edie. It felt good to be alone with your food, she understood. Even if the rhythm in their lives was a strange one, it was a rhythm nonetheless.

Then Robin started high school six months ago and became friends with these two boys, the dead one, and the one who was now locked away, and she had begun to disappear from Edie. Home late sometimes, or leaving after dinner. Phone calls late at night. The music coming from her bedroom grew louder for weeks, and then quieter, and it was almost as if there were no music at all. Edie stood in the hallway, holding in her breath, her ear pressed against the door to her daughter’s bedroom. There was definitely something playing on her stereo. What kind of music was her daughter listening to these days? Edie used to know everything about her, and now she couldn’t answer that question. She was embarrassed as much as worried.

And now she realized she knew nothing about her daughter at all. This boy had overdosed on pills. The letter didn’t say that, but she had read about it in the newspaper, and the guidance counselor had confirmed it again that day. He had held on for two days, and her daughter had begged to go to the hospital, and she had said no because if it were Robin lying there (God forbid. Oy. God forbid.), Edie wouldn’t want anyone else but family with her. And also she didn’t want Robin anywhere near that kind of sickness. This wasn’t like keeping her away from Benny for a week when he had the chicken pox in sixth grade. This was like Edie was two steps away from marching into that bedroom and rummaging through all her daughter’s possessions to see what she was hiding, and hell no, her daughter was not going to hang out in the ICU of a hospital with the family of a boy who had just overdosed on pills.