The Middlesteins: A Novel(3)

“It’s not that I don’t care,” said Robin. “It’s just that I don’t want to know.” She knew too much already. This was real life, kicking her in the face, and she wanted nothing to do with it.

Last weekend she had gone home to check on the madness, back to the suburb where she had grown up and then evacuated thirteen years earlier, hoping never to return, but finding herself there all too much these days. Her mother had picked her up in front of the train station, and then driven around the corner and parked in front of a movie theater. It was late afternoon; there had been a half day at the school where Robin taught. (She’d had fantasies about what she would do with that free afternoon: a long run along the lake during the warmest part of the day, or an early bender with Daniel. But it was not to be.) Senior citizens walked out of the matinee as if in slow motion. A few stay-at-home moms dragged their toddlers toward the parking lot across the street. Robin almost hurled herself out of the car after them. Take me with you.

“There’s something I need to tell you before we go home,” her mother had said, heavy breath, hulking beneath her fur coat, no flesh visible except for her putty-colored face, her drooping chin, her thick-ringed neck. “Your father has left me. He’s had enough.”

“This is a joke,” said Robin.

“This is for real,” said her mother. “He’s flown the coop, and he’s not coming back.”

What a weird way to put it, Robin realized later. As if her father were being held like some house pet, trapped in a cage lined with shit-stained newspaper. Her feelings for her father swerved wildly in that moment. Her mother was tough. The situation was tough. He had taken the coward’s way out, but Robin had never begrudged people their cowardice; it was simply a choice to be made. Still, she hated herself for thinking like that. This was her mother, and she was sick, and she needed help. Thrown up against her admittedly fragile moral code, Robin knew that there was an obvious judgment to be made. His decision was despicable. Her train of thought would never be uttered out loud, only the final resolution: Her father would not be forgiven. She had not liked him much before this happened, though she had loved him, and it did not take much to push her over the edge toward something close to hatred, or at the least the dissolution of love.

Her mother was sobbing. She touched her mother’s hand. She put her hand on her mother’s shoulder. Edie was shaking, and her lips were blue. One step from death, thought Robin. But she was no doctor.

“I should have treated him better,” said her mother.

Robin could not argue with her, but still, all she could do was blame her father. Richard Middlestein had signed up for a life with Edie Herzen. And Edie was still alive.

And so the surgery had seemed irrelevant at the time. Robin hadn’t even bothered to ask her about her health. Her brother was taking care of all that most of the time anyway. Robin had gone to the first surgery, sat there for a few hours in the waiting room like everyone else—Boring; they all knew she was going to be fine, it was a simple procedure, and she’d be out of the hospital that night—and then had claimed she was too busy for the next one. Robin had thought she’d gotten off scot-free, even if it meant she was a horrible human being. Her reliable, solid, family-focused brother, Benny, who lived two towns away from her parents, would be there. Him, his wife with the nose job, her niece and nephew, Emily and Josh, all of them patiently waiting alongside her father for her mother to surface. How many worried children was it going to take to screw in that lightbulb anyway?

But this latest trauma was something new and unusual. This was heartbreak. And abandonment. And Benny was not even remotely prepared to deal with anything like that. Robin’s mind traveled to other people in her mother’s life who might be able to help her, like her longtime friends from the synagogue, the Cohns and the Grodsteins and the Weinmans and the Frankens. Forty years they’d known each other. But they were all still married, and they knew nothing of this business. No, this was Robin’s territory. Always single, probably for a reason. At last she had been called up to bat.

“You are definitely not a terrible person,” said Daniel. He scratched his soft-looking blond beard. Robin had been imagining for months that it was soft. Everything about him looked soft and comforting, but also mildly weak, as well. His beard and mustache and the hair on his head and the hair on his chest and belly—she had seen him sunning himself on his back porch on a number of occasions that past summer, sprawled out on a faded hammock—were all golden and feathery. She had even tried to pat him on the head once, just to see what his hair felt like, but he had taken the flight of her hand as the beginning of a high five and had raised his own hand to meet hers, and she had no choice but to respond.