Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

  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.

  So she sat in a fucking rape group and people told her how they were held down at gunpoint and knifepoint or how a boyfriend had turned violent and terrifying one night or how they woke up and didn’t know where they were or how they’d gotten there but they were somehow pantyless and would later find out they were pregnant or suddenly had chlamydia. She sat there with her baby, and every time it was her turn to talk, she began to cry. She didn’t cry quietly. She howled and they just let her. They just let her do it for five whole minutes until the other women gathered around her and squatted down in front of her and patted her on her shoulders and her knees until she stopped.

  One day, at the hospital, she was leaving the group and she ended up in an elevator with Romalino, who didn’t recognize her. She had four floors with him alone. She had four floors to say to him, LOOK, LOOK WHAT YOU DID TO A PERFECTLY GOOD PERSON. YOU RUINED ME. But she couldn’t. Instead, she turned away from him so that she was facing the wall of the elevator like a freak, huddled over Hannah, and her heart pounded, and after it was over she still couldn’t look in the mirror because what kind of fucking coward was she anyway. She was not what she thought she was. She was exactly what Matt Klein thought she was. She was what this doctor thought she was. She was nothing. She was just a woman. This was her introduction to motherhood.

  She listened to the women talk about their rapes. One of them didn’t remember her rape. She had woken up one morning, evidence everywhere, but no memory of the thing. A policeman told her that not remembering the rape made it barely reportable. Rachel kept wondering if she’d be bothered by what Romalino did if she’d only been informed of it and didn’t experience it consciously. She didn’t know. This woman seemed just as upset as the others, but Rachel didn’t think she would be under the same circumstances. The memories were what bothered her, how she couldn’t lie on her back without remembering all of it and so didn’t sleep on her back. She slept on her side, or upright, or not at all.

  After her fourth visit to the rape group, one of the women asked her if she wanted to get coffee afterward, and Rachel was jerked awake to the fraud she was perpetuating. What if they found out? What if she revealed herself and they turned on her and screamed at her for mocking their pain? She said no, she was sorry, she couldn’t, she was expected somewhere, and she never returned. She hadn’t been raped. She had a healthy baby. She had had a rough delivery. Toby was right. She hadn’t been raped. Pull it together, Fleishman.

  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.

  The next week, instead of going to her rape group, she went to the park with Hannah and wandered over to the playground off Seventy-second Street. She sat down. Her eyes wandered over to the other benches. There was a group of nannies tending to kids and talking to one another on one bench. On the other bench was a group of moms, three of whom had been in her prenatal yoga group. She walked over, happy to see them, and happy to be seen doing something as normal as visiting a park with her baby in a stroller. But she saw one of them spot her as she walked over and whisper something to the others out of the side of her face before smiling big and saying, “Rachel.” She’d had no idea. They had all been in touch throughout. They continued to get together. Their kids would be friends with each other. She was excluded once again. It hit her slowly, then all at once: Having a child was signing up for enduring her entire childhood all over again. How could no one tell her?

  Well, if that was true, this time she was going to do it right. Her social climbing, as Toby called it, wasn’t about her and her childhood; it was about her kids. A thing about growing up the way Rachel did was that whether or not you liked being lonely, aloneness became your body’s resting condition—its set point. Which is to say that she didn’t want friends. She didn’t like Miriam and Roxanne and Cyndi, or they weren’t the friends she wanted. 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.

  The other problem was harder to put words to. Toby had a good job. He loved his good job. He was good at his good job. Fine. But the demands of the life that they both agreed they wanted required something that Toby’s good job couldn’t give them. Fine. She hadn’t had these thoughts back when they were dating. When they were dating, she thought it was lucky that she had fallen in love with someone who was altruistic and smart and wanted to make sick people better. But they had shared values that they’d agreed upon. Rachel told Toby one night, whispering under the covers in her tiny dorm bed, all about her school and Catherine H. and tennis and that phone call. She said she never wanted to put children through that. He said, “I won’t ever let it happen.” He was talking about emotional support. She was talking about financial support. Maybe they hadn’t agreed after all.

  She tried for years to get him to negotiate upward, to want more, but he just didn’t. More money would have been nice, he said,
but what she was asking of him was to do something completely different than what he did, which was “heal the sick” (the self-righteousness was not a small thing to negotiate in these conversations). Not really, she’d said. Anything different from what I do now feels corrupt and morally repugnant, he’d say. Yes, she’d say. She would like to do kind and wonderful things in the world, too. But what about doing those things for their children first?

  “We could move,” he’d say.

  But where else could she do what she did? Sure, they could live like kings on his salary in rural Pennsylvania, but he’d be signing her death sentence.

  “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.

  “Some people would say that it all could wait,” he’d say.

  But he didn’t understand the volume. He didn’t understand that you had to return Roxanne’s stupid eye-roll emoji about something Cyndi said with an LOL, or that you had to let Cyndi know when the sleepover was or that you had to tell Miriam to STD May fifth for Solly’s birthday because she plans months in advance and not having Jack at Solly’s birthday would be a disaster and put both friendships on shaky ground. He could never really be aware of what he couldn’t actually see. If he didn’t see the exchange with Mona, it didn’t happen. If he didn’t see the totally degrading conversation with Miriam, he didn’t understand the sacrifice. If he didn’t see all the hours when he was asleep and she was up trying to figure out which preschool had the right philosophies, it didn’t happen. All her contributions fell magically from the sky, or were born of something inherent in her female body. He thought her wanting to spend an extra day in Paris on a work trip was a war crime. She had to go to the Tonys and he didn’t realize that his hospital gala was that night and she was a terrible person for choosing the Tonys, where she had three different clients getting nominated. He couldn’t see the way the volume was crushing her.

  Toby had appointments with patients. He had procedures. They were blocks of time and when they were done, they were done. He wasn’t expected to be in two places at once. Everything he had to do was performed within a Vegas casino of time, walls placed around moments with no clocks or windows or easy-to-discern ways to exit. He never had to mind his phone under a table because a screenplay was at auction and an actor you represented was about to come out and needed you to help figure out a crisis publicist who could help. Sure, he had emergencies, but there were ten people behind him waiting to rush in for him if he couldn’t show, groups of people he trained to be just like him for when he couldn’t be there.

  Fine. She worked day and night, but fine. She met deadlines and put out fires every day. She had ten, then twenty, then fifty, then a hundred people under her. She serviced more than two hundred actors and writers and producers and directors. Presidentrix was being optioned as a movie, and she, yes she, was no longer interested in passing it off to a film agent. She was perfectly capable herself. That was it. No more outsourcing. No more synergistic partnerships. Super Duper Creative was now full service. She grew and grew and there seemed to be no limit to her expansion. It was the opposite of parenthood, and, secretly, a necessary correction for it. It was accomplishment in a way that parenthood absolutely couldn’t be. Hannah and Solly grew and she fretted over questions of whether they were too programmed or not programmed enough. Whether they should also be taking German like the Leffers. At night, she would fall asleep and in the wild hallucinogenic minefield of her pre-REM sleep her dead mother came to her and said, “Why can’t Solly code yet?” This question rang in her ears for days. An actor’s deal got done in a week or two and that was that. She wouldn’t know if this whole Hannah and Solly thing worked out until she died and nothing bad had happened yet.

  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.

  There was no way for her to voice an opinion without being accused of anger. Everywhere she turned in her own home, there was a new insult. She would wake up in the morning and walk out the door with Toby and the kids and before she headed in the direction away from school, she would hear the doorman talk about what a hero Toby was for taking his own children to school. She would bump into one of the teachers from school and the teacher would say, “It’s so amazing the way your husband drops them off every morning.” She wanted to say, “Isn’t it amazing how I pay the fucking mortgage? Isn’t it amazing how my children have schedules that are more complex than the president’s and that they’ll graduate from elementary school prepared for three or four careers that you need a graduate degree for? Isn’t it amazing the role model I am for my children?” The teachers would call her a working mom, and somehow that was insulting even as it was true. Maybe because it was such a rarity in the school. Maybe because it applied an asterisk to her name and seemed to be an explanation for why she was falling short.

  They were invited by the Rothbergs to their home upstate for a New Year’s party, and while Sam Rothberg and Toby took the boys bowling, Miriam’s daughter crawled over to her and Miriam said, “I swear, it never ends.” And Rachel agreed wholeheartedly—yes, sure, it appears to never end—but then Rachel said, “You’re lucky to still have a baby. I’m sad I didn’t have a third one.” Miriam asked her why she didn’t have a third one, and Rachel said, “I guess I work too much,” just because she didn’t really want to get into it. She didn’t want to get into Toby not wanting a third child because he knew
the work would fall on him and she didn’t want to deal with constant blame for the way his life wasn’t perfect.

  But Miriam didn’t do the right thing. She didn’t nod and smile and try to understand, the way Rachel worked hard to nod and smile and try to understand Miriam’s problems in her utterly problem-free life. Instead, she said, “Well, we all work.”

  Rachel was confused.

  Miriam and Roxanne shared a look. They’d spoken about this before. “That doesn’t mean you work harder than us,” Miriam said.

  “Right, of course,” Rachel said, and then just hated herself wholesale for keeping her mouth shut. The only thing more offensive than Miriam not working was Miriam thinking she did work. But Miriam would never know true success. She would never know achievement. She would never know what it was like to build something and hold it in your hands. She would never solve a problem or watch a show where three of her clients all sang a song together and think: These are my children, too.

  The week before, she had had dinner with Sam Rothberg and his nephew and she gave advice and told him which acting coaches to talk to, to use her name, and then he should come back to her when the coach says so. After dinner, Sam thanked her and walked her to her apartment. He insisted on walking her to the door, which she thought was weird, but Sam Rothberg had always been nice to her. He told her that there was an opening at his company for a doctor, and the pay was extraordinary. He wanted to know if Toby would ever consider that kind of thing. Rachel didn’t know, she said. He should ask him!