She walked to the far corner of the restaurant, to the booth closest to the bathroom, where no one ever sat but the employees on break, looking back only once at her husband gathering up the children; he gave her a nod, and that was it. She sat down with her McRib sandwich and then started shivering, because it was suddenly cold in the restaurant, away from the mess, the heat of her family, the source of her frustration. She pulled out the newspaper from her purse. Edie took a bite of her McRib and flattened out the front page. Was this really happening to her? Because this was perfection.
This happened a lot in the future, in their family, in their lives, going out to dinner with Edie sitting at a separate table. For years this went on, until they all stopped eating together entirely, Benny and Robin growing up thinking it was something everyone did, and not realizing that it wasn’t until it didn’t matter anymore anyway. As an adult, Robin found herself behaving exactly the same as her mother without even knowing it, always alone at meals, eating, reading, alone, while Benny married young and his doting wife, at home with the kids, had a hot, non-fast-food-related meal on the table every night. In the end it was not the worst thing that had happened to them in their lives. “It could have been much, much worse,” Benny said to his sister at their mother’s funeral, and she could not argue. “They could have starved us,” said Robin. “They could have beat us,” said Benny. It was a game they could play for hours.
The day Edie dined alone with her McRib sandwich was the one-year anniversary of the Mount St. Helens eruption. It had made the front page, even though it happened in another state. Tragedy ripens in memory. Fifty-seven people had died. They believed that the mountain was their friend. They didn’t want to leave their homes behind. Who would they be without their homes?
What fools, thought Edie. I’d run like hell if I could.
Exodus
After thirteen successful years of rejecting Judaism—this included no High Holidays with her parents, no bar mitzvahs of distant relations, no hanging out at the Hillel House in college, no Purim, no Passover, no Shabbat, no nothing except for Hanukkah at her brother’s house, which got a pass because gifts were exchanged, and also because her niece and nephew, both of whom she was fond of, had always enjoyed that holiday so much—Robin wasn’t exactly sure how she had ended up at this crowded seder, but there she was, in her trim blue dress, holding her I-guess-he’s-my-boyfriend’s hand in his parents’ living room in Northbrook, Illinois. She had instinctively grabbed it, because otherwise she thought she might have been swept away in the crowd of people. She wasn’t trying to be cute or affectionate; she was just trying to save her life.
*
“I don’t get why you hate it so much,” he had said.
This was a few weeks before Passover, when he had first asked her to come with him, to eat a good meal, to relax, to meet his family. It was important to him. She could tell this because he wasn’t letting it drop, and, up until recently, he had been letting everything drop all the time with her. They drank when she wanted to drink; they had sex when she wanted to have sex. The sex, by the way, was the best both had had in their lives, the true notion of coupling finally revealed to the two of them at least physically, the way they curled up into each other, sweaty, salty, lustful messes, alternating their dialogue between dirty and dizzyingly sweet talk. But out of the bed they didn’t talk about their future together; they spoke mainly about her sick mother, her asshole dad, how her day had been, sometimes how his day had been, and that was it. Occasionally she said something like, “My parents are so crazy I swear they’re going to drive me to therapy,” and he would say, “Do you feel like you want to go to therapy?” and she would say, “Are you saying I need therapy?” and he would raise his hands in the air and walk away rather than answer that question, no fool was he. She was completely running the show. But when she said no to the dinner, that it wasn’t her scene, he jerked back his head, his soft, blond, fuzzy, gentle head, and gave her a fixed look.
“Me and Judaism, we don’t get along,” she said.
“It’s a family dinner,” he said. “With just a touch of Jew.”
“Please,” she said. “Don’t make me.”
“I’m the one saying please,” he said. “You’re the one saying no.”
She crushed herself into a ball on his couch, knees up, arms around her legs, head against her knees.
“Why is this so hard for you, to just say yes? It’s a dinner, a really good dinner, with some nice people. It’s not a big deal.”
“If it’s not a big deal, then why do I have to go?” she said.
Daniel sat next to her on the couch, and, in a shocking display of spine, put his face next to hers and said, “What is this really about?”
*