The Middlesteins(28)

“I’m sorry your friend died,” said Edie.

Robin took another handful of cookies and continued her methodical quest for the decimation of all of fat-free-based-snack America.

On the wall across from the kitchen table hung a macramé owl with large brown agate stones for eyes. Edie had put it there when they moved into the house in 1980, when Robin was just a baby. The cleaning woman dusted it every week, but it still seemed to be coated with some sort of old filth. A twig hung forlornly from its claws. For ten years Edie had been meaning to take it down. No joke, an entire decade. But Edie had been busy. First it had just been pro bono consultation, anything to take her mind off the banalities of her suburban existence. But then the purpose of her volunteerism came into sharp focus in 1988, when Dukakis—married to a Jewish girl!—ran for office, and her old college roommate Carly, one of the top Democratic fund-raisers in Chicago, called and asked for her help. Edie had sent in a check, and made some phone calls to some of her friends, the Cohns and the Grodsteins and the Weinmans and the Frankens, all lovely people, and before she knew it, she was making phone calls to people she didn’t know, and she discovered she was good at it. Paperwork and phone calls. She was most confident doing things where she could hide, where she didn’t notice people noticing how heavy she had gotten. She could see it even in the eyes of her co-workers. But here was a way she could help. Here was a way she could make a difference. Carly didn’t realize it, and Edie didn’t know if she could ever properly communicate it to her, but she was pretty sure Carly had saved her life. So who had time to worry about wall hangings when there were Republicans to kick out of office?

But the boys? Who were these boys? She should have been worried. She had met them, but she hadn’t paid enough attention. One was tall and thin and had longish (but seemingly clean) hair, and the other was short and a little stocky and had a shaved head. Both wore flannel shirts over white T-shirts and jeans with holes in the knees and Converse high-tops. They didn’t smell like smoke, their pupils weren’t dilated. They spoke little, and always smiled at her when she answered the door. They were always happy to see Robin. They both gave her high fives. They looked Jewish. Ethan and Aaron, Aaron and Ethan. How was she supposed to remember which was which?

Robin screamed at her the entire evening the boy went to the hospital, pleading, then demanding, that Edie let her go visit him. On her knees in the living room, with Richard sitting on the stairs, his presence pointless as usual, his elbows on his thighs, his chin in his hands, contributing absolutely nothing to the conversation. “She never listens to me anyway,” is all he said. Worst parent on the planet. All he knew how to do was bark orders and walk away. He didn’t understand that his daughter was smarter than that, that she wasn’t a dog. And Edie thought she knew how to handle Robin perfectly, but this, this hysterical girl, all Edie could do was try to hold her. When Robin was a toddler and she wasn’t getting what she wanted, she used to hold her breath until she turned blue. Edie had always ignored those antics, until once she passed out, and Edie never ignored her again, but Robin never held her breath again either. Both of them had learned. But here she was, unleashed, uncontrolled. She was not blue, though. She was bright red.

“It’s not our place,” said Edie. “He needs his family.”

“I’m one of his two best friends in the world,” said Robin.

Her hair had gotten so long this year, that’s what Edie was thinking while watching her daughter, hunched over, bawling. What a pretty girl she’s turned out to be. She reached out to touch her daughter, and Robin, at last, accepted her mother’s embrace.

That was two days ago, and now he was dead, and Robin had never gotten to say good-bye, but what would she have been saying good-bye to anyway? Edie remembered sitting at her father’s bedside before he died and wishing she hadn’t been there because he wasn’t as she wanted to remember him. His skin went from gray to blue to white, as if something were passing through him and then out again, like a small wave at low tide teasing a shoreline. Mourning was an awful feeling, a relinquishment of the soul. She would rather do anything but mourn.

Her daughter finished her cookies, got up from where she was sitting to take some more, and Edie stopped her and said, “Just take the whole thing. I’ve got more.” Robin gave her a dark look but took the entire package and returned to her seat.

“They were the only friends I had, Mom. Do you know that I don’t have any other friends?”

No, Edie didn’t know that.

“I have no one now.” Robin started to weep. She wept and ate.

“Hey, there are a lot of nice kids who live around here,” said Edie, not knowing if it were true or not.

“They’re all huge *s,” said Robin. “They don’t like any of the bands I like and all they care about is what kind of jeans they’re wearing, which I can’t even fit into anyway. And they’re completely mean to me. They used to pick on me all the time until I met Aaron and Ethan.” She hiccuped. “And now they’re g-o-o-o-ne,” she wailed.

Edie noticed that Robin had only one row of cookies left to consume and wished she had three to five of them sitting on the table in front of her.

“I mean, don’t you get sick of it?” said Robin.

“Sick of what?”

“Sick of this,” said Robin, and she waved her hands in front of her body.