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He went to Karen Cooper’s room. His fellows were there. He kept his eyes on his patient to avoid looking at Joanie or, more specifically, seeing how she was looking at him. He didn’t know if he should apologize, or just wait for a call from HR. David Cooper was holding Karen’s hand, staring at her lifeless face. He was never going to see his wife open her eyes again. Toby watched him, unable to reconcile any of this. Was he a piece of shit or did he love his wife? Was he having an affair with her friend, who helped break up the marriage? Were we all everything?
[...] This was fair? That he would smile and take it up the ass during mediation so that they could present their children with a peaceful and amicable thing, and then the minute it was almost done, she would do the worst thing she could possibly do—a thing so bad that it wasn’t even close on a list of horrible things she had done prior to this? That was fair? If it were fair, and you weighed Toby’s sins against his punishments, you would find that he’d gotten some real kind of raw deal. What did he do so wrong but be devoted? What did he do so wrong but try? But love? But come home on time? But figure that his wife would be a partner to him the way he was to her? But maybe throw a few glasses and maybe say the wrong things?
God, he was so tired of trying to figure out how it had been wrong, what the micromaneuver that set Rachel free from him was. She had abandoned him. She’d been cruel to him. She had denied him love and respect and self-esteem. She had diminished him to become someone who nearly disintegrated into suspicion and then sorrow at the mere affectionate touch of someone. She’d been cruel to their children—their children! She’d left them! She knew what it was to be without parents and still she’d left them!
"abandoned" really gets me. also "denied"
But Rachel was miserable. She lived in Mount Washington, where all the middle-class Jews lived, but all her classmates were rich Gentiles and lived in Ruxton or Green Spring Valley or on no-kidding a private island near Annapolis. They were picked up in black and dark silver cars driven by chauffeurs who’d been working for them since they were babies. There were layers of wealth she overheard that unlocked for her new dimensions of possibility of privilege and access and what was possible. The girls in her class had first names like Clancy and Devon and Atterleigh and Westerleigh and Bonneleigh and Plum and Poppy and Catherine. And Catherine and Catherine and Catherine and Catherine. They went skiing in Aspen a week before Christmas break started. They went on safari to Africa. They visited a private island in Fiji or boarded a private cruise down the Nile or attended a private tour of the Galápagos or stayed at a private hotel in Venice or a private forest in Brazil. They went to concerts and the opera and took French lessons outside of school and then went to actual France and they became sophisticated in a way that she wasn’t—in a way she’d never be because sophistication is either your first language or you always have an accent in it.
The other women in her prenatal yoga class had kept up an email chain, and in their messages, she tried to discern that they, too, were terrified and violated and sad and broken, but they weren’t. Trust her, they just weren’t. They made jokes about how they were tired and it was a tragedy that one of them had had an epidural and it was a tragedy that one of them couldn’t produce enough milk for her baby and had to supplement with formula. She wanted to write back to tell them she couldn’t look in the mirror at herself. She wanted someone to understand how small she was now. She wanted to ask one of them if this was the real her—if the real her had been revealed to her suddenly that day in the hospital, or if she would somehow bounce back. Bouncing back was a language they understood: their vaginas needed to bounce back, their breasts needed to bounce back, would their abdomens ever bounce back. With a few small adjustments, these women would acclimate to life. They would recognize themselves. But would Rachel? Would Rachel bounce back? The entire phrase “bouncing back” seemed to her like it existed to make fun of her. There was no bouncing. There was no back.
And there was also a small tinge of this other thing, which was that she couldn’t ever quite think about these women without wondering what else she had in common with them. They also didn’t know if they’d been born targets, or if this just happened to them because they existed. There were so many ways of being a woman in the world, but all of them still rendered her just a woman, which is to say: a target. What had made Romalino think she was the kind of person who would stand for this? Was it the same thing that had made her not punch Matt Klein in the face when he’d put his hands on her? (“Wait, he put his hands on you? I thought it was just a verbal thing?” “I’m not talking about that now.”)
She had to figure out what that thing was and eliminate it from herself, and spending more time with these women would make her more like them, not less. Because she wasn’t a victim like all these women. She was the power. She was the thing that traumatized. She wouldn’t ever be mistaken for the other again.
[...] Toby was the friend she wanted. Toby was the friend she had for life. Toby was who she could be alone with. When you are someone who is rejected her entire childhood for reasons that feel impossible to discern, there is little that could happen to you in your future that doesn’t feel like further rejection. Miriam likes you, but why weren’t you invited to massages on Great Jones Street with her? Roxanne wants to know if you want to come for dinner before the kids have their sleepover, but then she mentions that she and Cyndi had been shopping all day and it’s not that she wants to go shopping with those two, it’s just that she wants to be invited. She wants to think she is integral to their lives. She wants them to look at her and her children like they’re not optional. Toby didn’t understand why she cared or why it mattered. How could he? He had a sister that he totally took for granted. He had parents—a mother whom he blamed for his terrible self-image, never once taking into consideration that the person he was talking to about this would have killed to have a mother to blame for anything. He had all those friends who wanted to be in his life from his youth. He had Seth. He had me. He had all the people who had ever seen him needy and pathetic and never once did that make it so that they didn’t still love him.
“I never misrepresented myself,” he’d say.
That was a favorite, as if people weren’t supposed to evolve and change and make requests of each other to bend and grow and expand.
At some point, she accepted it. It was up to her to make the kind of living that would allow them to participate in the life they’d signed up for. He accepted it, too. He pretended to be apathetic to the money, but you should have seen how he liked the car. You should have seen how he liked the club—the pool on the rooftop, way above the city, both metaphorically and actually. So Toby adjusted his schedule to be home a little early to relieve Mona, the babysitter. He stood back and allowed her to try for this big thing she wanted to do. She did it, not out of bravery, but out of two parts no choice and three parts because to see Matt Klein again would have been to commit a failure she couldn’t have come back from.
So she did her work and Toby made the noises of someone who was stepping back, but he didn’t really do it. He came home on time, sure. He made dinner when Mona didn’t. But he didn’t adjust his expectations of her, or leave room for how tired she could get or how harried or busy. He loved taking those long walks. No matter how late they were, he wanted to walk. Across the park, across the city. She kept trying to explain to him that time functioned in units. For all his love of physics, he never quite grasped that one: If you use this time to walk to dinner that is thirty-five blocks away instead of letting me finish this email in a cab on the way there, I will be finishing the email at the table. The email isn’t optional. The email is the entire thing.
She came home each night—not at the same time, but mostly when the kids were awake—even though the work wasn’t done and she finished her work in the kitchen even though it was nearly impossible. Hannah wanted to talk about why she didn’t have a phone and Solly wanted to play Uno and Toby wanted her to stare at him adoringly and listen to endless, endless stories about liver diagnoses. She knew so much about that disgusting organ, she could have diagnosed at least four or five major and rare diseases. Here’s how it would go every night:
HER: I’m home!
HIM: You’ll never believe what happened today and how screwed/ignored/underestimated I was.
HER: Let’s talk about it! Let me just say hi to the kids and answer these texts, because I have a premiere tonight….
HIM: You never care about me.
HER: What? How can you say that?
HIM: Listen to you. You’re barely here. You’re barely a mother.
HER: Did you hear the part where I have a premiere? Did you not hear the part where I want to say hi to the kids?
HIM: I can’t bear your anger anymore.
aaahhh
[...] They tried therapy after, but he wouldn’t listen. There was nothing but his point of view—that all she did was work and neglect him and the children—that he could talk about. He couldn’t even hear what she was saying, which was that she loved her work. That yes, maybe she should slow down, but she didn’t quite know how. She didn’t know how to trust the people she hired. If he’d listen, he could hear her. She needed help figuring this out.
[...] Somewhere, deep down, he had chosen her because he knew that meant he could do what he wanted with his life and not be obligated to do anything exclusively for money. And somewhere deep down, maybe she chose him because she knew that absent the hunger he clearly didn’t have, she would be permitted to be the animal she always was.
And still: “You’re always angry,” he’d say to her. And then finally she could admit that she was, particularly after those therapy sessions where she saw just how disgusted both Toby and the therapist were by her annoyance at even having to be there. As if you had to celebrate going to couples therapy! As if you had to rejoice over the time and money you were spending not to make things better, but to get them back to bearable. It always struck her as ironic that the revelation of her anger would come not from the therapy itself but from the fact of it. Still, after all those accusations, Toby never wondered why she was angry. He just hated her for being so. The anger was a garden that she kept tending, and it was filled with a toxic weed whose growth she couldn’t control. He didn’t understand that he was a gardener to the thing, too. He didn’t understand that they’d both planted seeds there.
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