I used to come here almost every day while I wrote my dissertation and to grade papers after. Even a year ago, I came once or twice a week. I know the name of the girl behind the counter because it’s the same as my name, different spelling, and we used to joke about this when she asked my name so she could call it when my coffee was ready. But this time when she asks my name and I tell her and I start to smile, thinking she remembers, she just nods and inputs it into the computer and counts out my change.
I tip her, too much, still smiling, hoping she’ll remember. I find a window seat. I have the same book I never read on the train and I open it and read it: Patrick Modiano, Paris Nocturne. It’s strange and magic; there’s a car crash and then almost nothing happens. I sip my coffee and break off tiny pieces of the cookie that I’ve ordered. My husband texts me, How’s your day?
Okay, I say.
An hour after work ends I pack up my bag. There’s a new group of people on either side of me since I started reading. My coffee’s empty. The cookie’s gone.
* * *
Honey, I hear, as I get in the elevator.
I turn to see our neighbor. Josslyn, I say. She’s my favorite person in the building. She stands close to me and holds my elbow as she asks me questions. She’s in her sixties, could pass for forty. She wears large wool cardigans in bright colors and keeps her tight-curled hair cut close. She has large eyes and I look forward, always, to the next time her rough, warm hands grab hold of me.
How are you? she says.
Shitty, I say.
It is our game, has been for the six years we’ve lived here, to never answer one another’s how are yous with fine, good, okay, you know.
She laughs at me. Me too, she says, as we get off the elevator.
Kiss the girls, she says, as she lets herself into her apartment.
I will, I say, letting myself into mine.
* * *
How was your day? my husband asks as I walk through the door and take off my shoes and he makes dinner. The whole place smells of onions, garlic, a poblano pepper. I hug the children, hold them, kiss them, give them extra from Josslyn. The two-year-old crawls onto my lap to nurse.
Fine, I say.
We give them a bath and eat and put them to bed and watch TV—seldom anything so engaging that we can’t also both do two or three things on our phones or our computers. We climb up to bed.
I read Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight. I would feel as if I were drugged, sitting there, watching those damned dolls, says the main character, of the porcelain dolls at a shop where she once worked, thinking what a success they would have made of their lives if they had been women.
My husband falls asleep.
* * *
At 4:45 I run along the water and it’s freezing and it starts to rain but I keep running. Rats sit out in the open, on top of benches, on the concrete. One runs overtop my foot and I scream and jump and no one sees.
* * *
On the subway, I see a new picture of Sasha’s sister: she got a dog with her newly live-in boyfriend and there is some pithy caption about this being baby number one.
* * *
I teach my morning class and at the after-lunch staff meeting our principal, who is thirty-one, posts a large yellow box on the smartboard with the number twenty-five inside. Twenty-five of us missed the weekend deliverable of inserting our lesson plans into the task grid established by the CEO the week before. The email we got from our principal as a result of this missed deliverable was long and scolding, bullet pointed. It was written in the tone one might reserve for a small child. All but one of us, our principal tells us, have since turned in the task grid. He posts a second square, this one red, with the number nineteen. And this, he says, his small eyes sharpening, is the number of you who did not reply to my email alerting you to this missed weekend deliverable with contrition and gratitude.
* * *
After the meeting, I go into the classroom where I keep my coat and bag and get them. I’ve already taught my classes. I’m meant to be somewhere, planning, but we have no set office. I go down the escalator and no one sees me leaving. I think if they see me I’ll say I’m going for a late lunch, have to get the children. Now that I’m out here, I have no idea why I’ve stayed in the building all this time.
The subway’s much less crowded in the middle of the day. I have a seat plus room to set both my bags beside me. I read Gayl Jones, Corregidora: generations carrying and passing violences to one another, how hard it is to learn what we don’t know to learn, the specific ways that we might try to cast ourselves anew.
On the bench across from me a woman has laid down a large plastic bag and is asleep.
I get a coffee and a cookie at the coffee shop and read my book for all the other hours that I’m meant to be at work and then I go home on the train.
How was your day? says my husband when I get home as he makes dinner. I hug and kiss our children, nurse the baby. I bathe them and we eat together. Family read? asks the two-year-old when I go to read them books, put them to sleep. I call my husband and we all lie on the baby’s bed together. I read and she sits on me. The four-year-old sits on her dad’s lap and it’s warmer in here than any other place in our apartment, and halfway through the second book I fall asleep. An hour later, I’m still in there, and my husband comes to get me. He helps me free my arm from the two-year-old’s small hands and stands behind me as I climb the ladder up to bed and follows up right after; he wraps his arm around my waist.
* * *
At 4:50 the next morning I pass a man, fully dressed in a too-thin coat, while I run underneath the highway. He smells, up close, like liquor, and as I run by, he screams a high-pitched scream and I sprint until I’ve covered another mile and know for sure he’s far away.
* * *
Sasha’s liked her little sister’s Facebook picture of her dog.
* * *
I teach a night class uptown on Thursdays—I keep the night class even though I mostly know by now I’ll never get a real job from the institution where I teach this night class; I mostly know that real jobs at institutions like this don’t exist anymore. I keep the job because I spent all those years in school and mostly I’ve forgotten what I thought they might be worth. Because it feels good sometimes, pretending, that I got what I set out to get.
I often stay late at work these days to meet with students, help with papers, but my coteacher comes to say he wants to meet with me to talk about relational concerns, and I say I can’t because my kids’ school just called and then I leave and go to a dark bar uptown and sip a raspberry-flavored gin drink and read my book before I have to teach.
In my night class, we read Imre Kertész, Kaddish for an Unborn Child. A student who sits off to the side of the table we all sit at, though there’s still room, and who has strangely dyed red hair, raises her hand and says, The main character is mansplaining Auschwitz to his wife, and I say, But she wasn’t there and is actively refusing to try to understand, and she says, Typical, and we move on.
* * *
On Thursdays the children go to sleep without me and it’s late and the subway’s mostly empty for the hour that I ride it. We filed, my husband says about the bankruptcy, and I’m still drunk, or maybe I’m hungover, from the drink before I taught and I do not want to talk so I kiss him and reach my hand underneath his shirt and we have sex on our loft bed. I hit my head and he says, Sorry, and then he comes and falls asleep and I stay up and read.
* * *
When we met I was in graduate school and he was still, for that first year, a person who wore suits. I had a small apartment uptown and he’d sneak out of work and I’d get out of class and we would fuck standing up against the hall wall by the entrance, me sometimes up on the kitchen counter, hands grasping the cheap vinyl. I would come and he would too and we’d both pull our pants back up and he’d go back to work and I’d go to the comp class I taught in the afternoon still smelling of him.
He’d last a ful
l year at that job before he left to do custom carpentry for the sorts of people that he used to work with, hoping it’d be more one day, a store of handmade furniture from reclaimed wood. I was so proud then. We were eighties babies, born of plenty, cloistered by our whiteness and the places we were raised in—his parents didn’t have much money, neither had a college education, but we were both brought up to think that if we checked off certain boxes we’d be fine.
9/11 happened my second week of college; the financial crisis came the year after we met. It would be years before we understood the implications of these chasms; we weren’t formed enough to see them, were too safe to feel their first round of hits. We made so many choices based on what we thought the world was, what it wasn’t any longer, what we’d been told it was but what we finally understand that it had never been.
He worked for Lehman Brothers when the markets crashed and they went under—the sky was falling everywhere, except, of course, that he could just have found another job like that. He had this idea, we both did, that he did not want to be implicated any longer in the abstract mess of numbers on a screen and people’s lives all made or broken. We had principles or something, made up almost wholly out of things we knew we didn’t want to be or have a part in more than any concrete plans for what we’d be instead. I vaguely thought books were the answer, because they’d saved me and that seemed like something: to give them to other people, to expose them to them. He thought working with his hands. We were galvanized in this way, smug and stupid. It felt athletic and exciting, this misguided, blind self-righteousness.
Now, I think mostly he still likes what he does, except, of course, when work is slow or bills are due.
* * *
It’s 5:20 and I’m running late. I’ve stayed up late rereading Marguerite Duras, The Lover: Very early in my life it was too late. A man in his sixties gives himself a quiet, thoughtful pep talk as he climbs the steepest hill on the south side of the park at a jog as I sprint by.
* * *
You’re not doing enough “I” speak, says my supervisor as we sit with the twenty-four-year-old to talk about his relational concerns. He says I am condescending to him. Which is not wrong. I tried to talk to him about the fact that the kids hate him without telling him that the kids hate him, and now I hate him too.
I try to explain this. I try to say as carefully, as diplomatically, as I can that I have absolutely said the wrong things in trying to talk to him, that I should have never put him on the spot and asked him his age in front of other colleagues, but that the kids are turning on him, he treats them like they’re preschoolers, and that’s not good for anyone.
You need to focus on how you’re responsible, what you’ve done in each of these situations, says my supervisor. She is twenty-seven. I hear you talking too much about what he has done.
She calls us both by our names often, because it was in a book she read about how to interact with people and mediate conflict between colleagues. I know this because she has it with her and it’s covered in yellow and pink Post-its.
* * *
I teach another class and then I get my bag and coat and walk downtown until I hit a CVS, where I buy a large box of the sour neon gummy worms that I stopped eating when I was pregnant the first time and afraid of anything that might be processed or chemically enhanced getting through to the baby, and then I kept not eating them because I was nursing, and then pregnant again, and then never outside the house without our children when I was not at work. I’m still nursing, but I buy them and open the bag on the sidewalk as I walk to a movie theater I remember from when I used to be a waitress seven blocks away. There are so many streets like this, where I have been so many different people. If anyone were to ask me why I can’t leave even as this city is too hard for not-rich people, I would say it’s because I’m too afraid of what would happen to all these different people somewhere else. This is the place where I was formed, long after forming should have happened; it’s the place where no one was looking and I felt allowed.
It’s what I imagine home would feel like if the home that I was born into had felt safe.
We have one credit card that somehow inexplicably still works, though all the others have been canceled, and I buy a ticket to a movie on it and I sit and watch a story about other people’s lives in the dark in the middle of the day.
* * *
On my train ride home, I get an email from a former student at the university where I teach my night class. She’s twenty-something, young and anxious. I remember she wore crop tops in winter and wide-legged pants; she had long blond hair. In class, she used to work her hair into tiny braids, then chew on them, letting them fall out of her mouth wet when she raised her hand to speak. She spooned one large tub of yogurt into her mouth with a white plastic spoon in the first hour of every class, and the bright white skin of her bare arms and shoulders would splotch red when she talked.
hey! says her email, no capital letters and hardly any punctuation. wondering if i could pop by your office hours sometime next week. The way she piles phrase on top of phrase without saying why she wants to meet makes me worry for her.
I’m up there Thursdays, I type, though I’m an adjunct and do not have an office. Let’s find a time, I say.
* * *
It’s Sasha’s birthday, I say to my husband on the weekend. We have one day a week together, since he works on Sundays, and we pack snacks and a change of underwear for both the children and we go into the city, to the Whitney, also on the magic credit card. The kids make paintings that look like the paintings that are hanging and then we walk around until the two-year-old starts crying on the floor because we won’t let her touch the painted birds even though they are her favorite color, purple, and we go home.
You should call her, says my husband.
He used to make a face every time I said her name. But now he starts to cook dinner, gets a beer out of the refrigerator, tells the children they have to clean up their Legos before they can use the iPad, makes me a second drink.
Why not? he says now.
I guess, I say.
Did she call you on your birthday? he says.
Mommy, says our four-year-old, who’s Sasha?
I text her and she says thanks right away and sends me an emoji.
I hate emojis. As if, all of a sudden, we have agreed that words don’t work.
Sorry I missed yours, she says.
* * *
I wait a week. On the day that I watch the kids alone and my husband works, I let them watch TV in the back room, even though we try mostly not to let them watch TV, and they eat granola bars and chips for lunch. I only vaguely, in the background, imagine my husband asking what protein they’ve had so far today. I read my book most of the morning: The Time of the Doves, Mercè Rodoreda—the Spanish Civil War and a young and battered housewife; her husband forces her to care for the doves he keeps; he beats her, refuses to call her by her name; he leaves to fight in the war and she and the children nearly starve until the kind grocer asks her to marry him, feeds them, saves the day.
We spend the afternoon together on the front stoop with Josslyn. They chalk the sidewalk and she brings out coffee, touching me three times, the elbow twice and then the shoulder, and she yells at the twenty-something boy who lets his dog pee in the planter that she’s set out front.
How were they? my husband asks when he gets home and I’ve managed to give them food and get them bathed and read to them until they fell asleep.
Great, I say.
He kisses me and we order Thai food on the magic credit card—I sit on the phone as the man on the other end goes to run it. I wait for him to tell me that it doesn’t work, but he comes back twenty seconds later; Twenty minutes, he says, although it always takes over an hour.
Congrats on the wedding, I text Sasha, after we’ve gone to bed and I’m reading again but also scrolling through Twitter. Sad we missed it, I say. Which is as aggressive as I can be, which is still couched in the
passive, which is usually more artful, but it’s a text message, and also, I’m not sure I care if my aggression is not pacified.
I spend an hour as my husband sleeps, rescrolling through the Facebook pictures of her California destination wedding. I reclick through the profiles of the four women who stood next to her as she smiled in her lace strapless dress and held the hand of a tall, dashing man. One of these women is her sister, who landed just shy of Sasha and her mother’s perfect features. She holds her shoulders back, though, and grins straight at the camera, willing it, it seems, to find her just right as she is.
I WAS THIRTEEN and she was fourteen and we were high school freshmen. A boy I thought I loved loved her, and I stayed on the phone with him sometimes late at night discussing her. I think I thought that if I listened hard or well or long enough that he’d love me instead. Instead, they broke up, and he stopped calling. And then there she was. I knew everything about her that any breathing person would love, the way she felt and talked as if she were a grown-up; the way she was smart but also pretty but also didn’t care enough about being cool to use the power that she should have had to have more friends. Whether I wanted to love or have or just to be her never felt as easily discernible as this or that, one or the other—more like all of it, and then more, at once.
We had a class together and our teacher was sick for half the year and the sub sat at the desk reading a book and we sat in the back of the room and talked. “Talked” does not begin to hold inside it what we did together. We sat in the school-issue chairs attached to desks, my knees up to my chest. She wore her hair down, curly, with product in it that made her smell grown-up. I don’t remember the words we said but that sometimes they felt so alive they had to be whispered; we had to lean close to each other, bottoms of our desk-chairs screeching. Sometimes one of us got so loud that other kids, or whatever sub we had that week, would turn from their desks and look.
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