The Middlesteins: A Novel(29)

“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.”



*

“Well, if you really want to know,” Robin said, flustered, miserable. There were issues being forced all over the place lately, and it had been his fault, he knew it. He was pushing the two of them forward, as a couple, an entity. He had decided she was the one for him. He had never met anyone before who needed him like she did, even if she couldn’t admit it.

“I really want to know,” he said. He leaned back and put his arm around her, she unfolded herself into him, and then she began to speak.

“I hated Hebrew school,” she said.

“Was there someone who liked Hebrew school?” he said.

“All the other kids went to the same grammar school and junior high school and summer camp, and they saw each other every day, all day long, and were all best friends with each other. And I was this interloper. Plus, I was fat, did I ever tell you I was a fat kid?”

Yes, she had told him she was fat.

“Everyone made fun of me. The girls were the worst, those bitchy little princesses,” she said. “It was two hours of hell, three times a week, for years. How many years? Like five years.”

Robin’s eyes narrowed and her cheeks grew pinched, and it made Daniel love her less in that moment. Those faces she made never did her any favors, but there was no way to actually tell her that. You had to take the good with the bad: that was how Daniel felt. Later on, when her arms were wrapped around his back and her fingers were in his hair, the way she stroked his face, the kisses she laid on his neck, he wouldn’t be thinking about that weird squint she had when she was pissed off.

“I’m sympathetic to your pain, but that’s not enough of a reason to reject religion outright,” he said. “We all had a lot of pain growing up.”

Daniel had been a boy genius, and then a teen genius. (Though now as an adult, after a dozen years of drinking and a long-standing romance with Adderall that had ended only in the last year, he was probably just pretty smart.) He wasn’t sure why being smart necessitated being tortured by his classmates. He remembered in particular a football player who sat behind him in Spanish class sophomore year, who at least once a day stabbed him in the back of the head with a pencil until one day his barber discovered a dripping green hole there and he was rushed to the emergency room, and there were shots, the whole nine, and when he returned to school the next week, he found that the seating chart had been reorganized and he had been moved to a corner by himself, which, as he looked back now, should have bothered him, but at the time it just gave him a giant sense of relief.

Still, he never complained about it, because he now made a living off the thing that was once a source of his pain. He also knew that the football player, husky, yellowing, was now a waiter at the McCormick & Schmick’s at Old Orchard—Daniel had seen him last year while holiday shopping with his mother—and even though he had never thought that he needed any resolution in his life of those dark years, that did not make the moment any less sweet. In fact, it might have been the air-conditioning in the mall, but he was pretty sure he had tingled.

Robin started to say something that seemed like it was going to be important: the deep inhale, the bunched-up fists, the grim set to her mouth. But instead she simply said, “I just felt like it got shoved down my throat.”

His girlfriend was making excuses. Maybe he’d hear the real story later, and maybe he wouldn’t, though he suspected he would. There was so much dramatic tension built up all over her, in every tight cell of her body, and he loved watching it unfold. Whatever emotions she was experiencing—and they were not entirely bad; in fact, they were sometimes so delicate and passionate that it was as if he could see right through to her soul—she made it count. On a daily basis, she took great big gulps of feelings, and whatever was left over she would pass on to him. All that Adderall had taken its toll on Daniel: It was simply harder to feel things now, so he would grab sensations when he could get them. Being with Robin was like being stabbed with a million pinpricks at once. He was shocked by how good that felt.