The Middlesteins: A Novel(32)

“I walked in on your parents arguing in the kitchen,” she said.

He shrugged and said, “Sometimes they don’t agree.”

“It was shocking.”

“Not all fighting leads to divorce,” he said. He pulled the frog off his finger and looked out the window.

“You’re an expert now?” she said. Suddenly everything about her was out of control: She wasn’t saying what she meant, her heart felt hot, her limbs were loose.

“Have you considered the possibility that your parents are better off without each other?”

Only every day since her mother had told her that her father was gone.

“Never,” she said, red-faced, sweaty, bloated with untruths. She had eaten too much of his mother’s brisket. She had a Tupperware container of it sitting in her lap that she planned on dumping out the moment she got home. Maybe she would dump him out along with it.

“Look, everything was fine up until then. It wasn’t an all-bad night, right?” He poked her. “Being Jewish for a night isn’t completely terrible.”

“I tuned a lot of it out,” she said.

“What is wrong with you?” he said. “How can you possibly hate it?”

“I don’t hate it,” she said. “It just seems to me like if you’re going to utter those words, be devoted and present and worshipful, be committed, then you should really believe in it. Really love it. And I don’t get why I should love it. Why it’s the right way and everything else is the wrong way. I never understood.”

“It doesn’t have to be that complicated,” he said. “You could just participate in order to feel connected to something bigger than yourself. It makes me feel safe. Not alone.”

“That’s what your friends are for,” she said.

“Sometimes friends aren’t enough,” he said.

“I remain unconvinced,” she said. We are going to argue about this for eternity, she thought.

“Can you just stop being so tough for a minute?” he said.

“No,” she said.

And would you hate her if she started to cry? Did she have you convinced that she really was that tough? Would you find her weak, a weak, pathetic girl, crying because she was losing an argument, losing herself, losing herself into him, and she hadn’t let herself feel that way in so long? Would you still want to know her, could you still respect her, if she was the kind of girl who cried when she realized she was falling in love?





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.