The Middlesteins(29)
Edie stared at her blankly.
“Being fat? Come on, Mom. You and me. We’re fat.”
“I don’t like that word,” whispered Edie.
“You should hear what the kids say to me at school,” said Robin, suddenly motivated by something other than sadness, something new and cruel, a taste that was better than all the processed sugar in the world: bitterness. “They’d say it to you, too, but like ten times worse.” She put another cookie into her mouth, barely chewed it, and then it was gone. “Because you’re fatter than I am. So there’s more to say about you.”
“I’m sorry I disappoint you,” said Edie, crushed and crumpled, letting herself feel that way, letting herself sink down low.
“You don’t disappoint me,” said Robin. “You disappoint yourself.” And then she opened her mouth as if she were about to say something even worse, as if she were about to roar, but all that came out was a pile of dark, chocolate vomit, which landed in a thick puddle on the kitchen table. Robin stared at it, and then vomited again, and Edie began to gag, too, but somehow restrained herself from letting loose entirely, from freeing whatever was trapped inside her gut.
After that day, Robin grew thin quickly. She went to the boy’s funeral a week later, and the next morning she got up early and went for a jog around the block. A few weeks more, and she joined the track team. It seemed like it was only a matter of months before she looked just like all the other children in the neighborhood, while Edie remained exactly the same, alone at the kitchen table, surrounded by all her worldly pleasures.
The Golden Unicorn
Let me tell you a story about your father, said Edie to her daughter, Robin, who did not want to hear the story, but could not figure out how to say no.
They were in the house where Robin had grown up and hated returning, where Edie still lived, all by herself, newly abandoned by her husband with, as far as Robin could tell, nowhere else to go. Was her mother’s life now spent at this kitchen table, alternating between eating and grinding all the joy out of her memories?
As a child, Robin had loved her mother’s stories. Edie was an eavesdropper and a gossip, but she was also the kind of person to whom even strangers would tell their secrets. She seemed wise. She seemed warm. If she didn’t know how to help, she would at least know how to make you feel better. It was only when you really got to know her that she could be kind of terrifying.
And then something shifted in Robin’s adolescence, and the stories stopped. There was that one thing that happened with those two boys, of which they did not speak as a family anymore but about which Robin had been thinking for so long that it had become seamless with her self. They were her first real boy friends, Aaron and Ethan, and they had all been in love, Aaron in love with Ethan, Robin in love with Ethan, Ethan in love with his record collection and with pills and with the two of them loving him. They had all felt so deeply for one another; for months they had sat huddled in Ethan’s bedroom listening to records, actual vinyl, vinyl being better and more important than CDs for many reasons, all of which Ethan enumerated excitedly in his recently deepened voice. Yes, yes, said Aaron and Robin, fascinated with his passion, his knowledge of actual pieces of information unrelated to what they learned in high school. Once they had made out in the backseat of Aaron’s car, parked in a dimly lit cul-de-sac a block away from Robin’s house, the three of them taking turns kissing and touching each other, plump Robin with her gigantic breasts (the boys seemed astonished when they were finally released from her bra), little Aaron with his shaved head and squat torso, Ethan’s hand squished between Robin’s legs, Aaron jerking off Ethan, all of them moaning, all of them the most satisfied they had ever been in their young lives—none of them would ever feel that satisfied again—until there was nothing to do but stop, zipper, buckle, awkwardly replace breasts into bra, and then, only then, feel slightly embarrassed by their audible expressions of joy. Cigarettes lit, pills popped. Robin wrote love letters to them both a week later. Mailed them, and if they got them and read them, no one said a word. Only a few days later, Ethan was dead. It had nothing to do with them. It was his family. Issues beyond anyone’s control. Aaron got too sad and was sent away. Now he lived in Seattle, and every year, around the anniversary of Ethan’s death—still, after all this time!—he sent her a mix CD of their favorite bands they used to listen to when they were growing up. He ran out of favorite songs a long time ago, and now they were just on repeat. She wished she could tell him to stop sending them to her, but she didn’t know how to not feel that pain. She was waiting for a new, worse pain in her life to take its place.
But after that terrible time with the boys when she was fifteen, Robin had shut down to her mother. Had it been that long? Robin was thirty-one years old. Had she really been so far away from everyone even though she was just a forty-five-minute drive into Chicago? She never said anything of substance about her life, maybe a story here and there about her work as a history teacher at a high-priced private school. The kids made her laugh. Her mother had to drag out the tiniest detail. Edie never knew when she was going to get a new piece of information, and when she did, she savored it for weeks, fleshing out her daughter’s life in her head.
But what reason would Robin have to trust her with her heart? Even if Edie was sharing her own heart with her now. No, not sharing. That was too casual a word. She was digging her fingertips into her breastbone and clawing her way inside through her skin, excavating through blood and bones, mining her flesh for that precious beating object, and then laying it in front of her daughter for her judgment. And with each story she told, each howling, moaning tale, it was as if she were striking her own heart again and again with a closed fist. Either she was resuscitating it or she was destroying it. Either she was going to live or die. Robin did not know yet which it would be.