by Laura Hankin
Finally, Daniel raced into the restaurant, his suit jacket over his arm, his expression worried as he scanned the room for her. When he saw her, he waved and began to scoot in between the tightly packed tables to get to her. He stumbled over a middle-aged woman’s chair leg and caught himself by bracing himself on her shoulder. “Sorry! Sorry!” he said, pushing his glasses up while the woman frowned at him.
Not exactly the smoothest man in the world, her husband.
He slid into the chair across from her and wiped his forehead. “Oh, yes, I need some of that,” he said, plucking the bottle of wine from the center of the table and filling his glass with a hearty pour. “Code-red-level frustrating day today.” He threw his hands up in the air. “Sometimes, it becomes crystal clear that the only reason we have a philanthropy department is so that the bosses can make themselves look good while they’re screwing over the world. Apparently, I’m a sucker for pushing for meaningful forms of charitable outreach.”
“You’re not a sucker,” Amara said.
The waitress approached, pad and pencil in hand. “Bonne nuit,” she said. “Are you ready to place your order yet?”
“I’m sorry,” Daniel said. “I haven’t even opened the menu.”
“Fine,” the waitress said, exhaling sharply through her nose. “I will come back.” She stalked off toward the rear of the restaurant.
Daniel really looked at Amara for the first time, over the flickering candle on their table. “You’re mad,” he said. “Because I’m late. I really tried to leave on time, but . . .” He shook his head. “Yet another reason why it was a frustrating day.”
“Yes, I’m a little pissy, but I’m going to try not to be,” Amara said. “You’re here now—that’s what matters.”
“I’m sorry,” Daniel said. “Thank you.”
“You know you’re still helping people,” Amara said, resting her hand on his. “You might as well grab as much of the money from Satan’s fat wallet as you can and use it for good.”
“Yeah, I just have to sell my own soul to do it. After a while, Faustian bargains really get you down.”
“Well, we’ve got a night away from Charlie, so let’s try to relax for the moment, all right?” Amara asked.
“Yeah,” Daniel said. “Yeah, you’re right. I’m going to look at the menu so our waitress doesn’t hate us any more than she already does.”
“Good idea,” Amara said, picking hers back up. “Oh, and at some point after we order, I want to talk with you about something.”
“What?” he asked, looking up in concern. “Something bad? Is everything okay with Charlie?”
“Charlie’s fine,” Amara said. “Nothing too serious, really.”
“Okay,” Daniel said, and went back to his menu, scanning the list of entrées for a few seconds before snapping it shut. “Well, now I can’t concentrate on ordering. Tell me what it is.”
She shook her head. “Just a financial question.”
“Ah, yes,” Daniel joked, “you’re going to beg me for a wife bonus, aren’t you?”
“Ha-ha,” Amara said, and then stared at her menu in silence, an ugly panic taking root in her stomach.
“Wait,” Daniel said, leaning forward and staring at her in disbelief. “You’re not, right?”
“No!” She paused. “Not exactly.”
“Mari, just a week ago you were ripping the concept apart!”
“I know!” she said, a defensive edge to her voice. “But I think I was thrown off by the absurd ‘wife bonus’ term, rather than what it actually means. Because when you really think about it, it’s not fair that you’re putting aside money for yourself if I can’t, when I’m working really hard too. That’s all!”
“Hey,” he said, rubbing his temples. “I’m not opposed to us reconfiguring what we do with my income so that you feel like it’s more fair.”
“All right,” Amara said. “Thank you.”
He nodded, then stared at his menu in silence, biting his lip like he always did when something else was bothering him.
“What?” Amara asked.
“Nothing.”
“What?”
He snapped his menu shut. “I feel like you’re implying that I’m making all these unfair financial decisions that hurt you, when I never wanted it to be this way. I’ve always wanted us to be equal partners in this. You’re the one who made a really big financial decision that affected our family without consulting me at all.”
“I know,” Amara said quietly.
“Sometimes I hate my job so much, it feels like a hundred paper cuts on my soul. But I would never quit without talking it through with you first.”
“I’m sorry,” Amara said. “I shouldn’t have done that like I did. But unfortunately I can’t invent a time machine and go back and change it, so I’m not really sure what to do.” She sighed. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m not exactly having a grand old time in my new situation either.”
“Of course it doesn’t make me feel better, Mari. I want you to be thrilled about our life. I just don’t . . . I know being a stay-at-home mom isn’t always a picnic, but from the outside, it looks like you’ve got it pretty good, okay? So maybe I’m a little jealous that you get to hang out with Charlie all day. I’d love to do that and have some time to think about how to start my own business and go to fun playgroups.”
“Oh,” Amara said, her ears getting hot like she’d just rubbed jalapeño juice all over them. “I’m sorry. You think that’s what being a stay-at-home parent is like? That you just ‘hang out’ and Charlie takes long naps and you have plenty of brain space to get a new business off the ground? No, no. I never get a break. That beautiful demon we made needs constant attention, plus I’m always worrying that I’m doing something to screw him up for life. Did you know how much conflicting information is out there, once you go down the parenting-advice rabbit hole? ‘Oh! Co-sleeping is a nice way to bond!’ says one reputable source, while another tells you, ‘Oh, co-sleeping means you’ll smother your baby in the night, murderer.’ At my job, at least I could see if something I was doing worked or if it made the show shit. With Charlie, I’m producing a new twenty-four-hour entertainment episode every day, but who the hell knows the consequences of everything I put into it? We probably won’t see the consequences until ten years from now, and then we’ll realize, Oh fuck! Actually, I should have been teaching him Mandarin!”
The waitress marched back up to the table. “Excusez-moi, what would you like to eat—?”
“We’re not ready to order yet, so sorry!” Amara said. The waitress glared and huffed away. “And sure,” Amara continued, leaning forward, “I go to playgroup and drink wine, and sometimes it’s quite nice, but sometimes I’m freaking out that the other perfect, beautiful moms are judging Charlie for being difficult and judging me for not controlling him well enough or for not being rich enough to buy thousand-dollar succulents for all my windowsills, and sometimes I’d love nothing more than to skip it, but if I do, then Charlie won’t get the socialization he needs, and he’ll never understand how to form healthy friendships or some bullshit like that. And on top of that, I feel like I can’t complain or can’t be unhappy, because I’m so fucking privileged to get to do all this. And my brain feels like it’s withering inside my skull.” She paused. “And sometimes I just want to crawl into an old bog and die.”
She and Daniel stared at each other in silence for a moment. Then he let out a long, low breath. “Wow,” he said. “I . . . Okay. I was not aware of how strongly you felt.”
“I wish we could do a Freaky Friday. You’d see it’s not a walk in the park. Even though often it does literally involve walking in the park.” She bit her lip as her eyes began to tear up. “And I’d probably have a better appreciation for how hard you’re working to sustain our situation. Because I know you are working very hard.”
Daniel reached across the table and grabbed onto her hand. “So neither one of us is particularly happy right now,” he said. “What can we do to fix that?”
“Well, I was looking forward to tonight, for starters,” Amara said. “But I think I ruined it now.”
“You didn’t ruin anything,” Daniel said. “We can start over and make it romantic.”
“Oh, yeah? How?”
“I can run out and buy you a dozen roses.”
Amara cleared her throat. “I could give you a hand job under the table.”
Daniel’s dark brown eyes lit up, and she laughed. “Oh,” he said. “Was that not a serious offer? Because it’s mean to play with my heart that way!”
Amara looked around the room and lowered her voice. “I think everyone in this restaurant hates us now. The tables are too close together, and that couple over there was definitely listening in on our conversation.”
Daniel raised his hand in the air and signaled the waitress, who rolled her eyes and came back, a long, drawn-out Fiiiiinally clearly reverberating in her mind. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “But could we get the check?”
They drained the bottle of wine and, hand in hand, ran to a dingy diner a few blocks away, one of the last remaining dingy diners in the neighborhood and maybe all of Manhattan. They ordered greasy hamburgers and Greek salads with big blocks of feta cheese, watery lettuce, and slightly too ripe tomatoes. They’d never been good at fancy date nights anyway, Amara thought, as the burger juice ran down Daniel’s chin. They’d never even really had a first date.
* * *
—
Amara met Daniel at business school. It had been a momentary life-path mistake that she’d made with heavy encouragement from her parents, and she’d realized within her first month that she was not interested. People partied like they were back in college, except with an even greater urgency, because they’d experienced the real world and knew what it was like. More than classes or grades, the important thing at business school was the schmoozing. The university gave its students endless opportunities to get drunk on free alcohol with the underlying understanding that you were supposed to Always! Be! Networking! So even if the person you were talking to was so drunk that he couldn’t touch his finger to his nose, he was still sizing you up: Was your uncle’s friend’s sister in charge of hiring at McKinsey? Did you have a trust fund and a desire to invest in an exciting new venture that would revolutionize the way people sent out their laundry? Amara was happy to use people, sure, but she wanted some pure things in her life.
One night, at a particularly raucous event, she sat at the bar, nursing a gin and tonic and planning her escape while a bunch of her classmates stained their button-downs with beer, roaring with laughter. These boys and occasional girls were paragons of good breeding, their pale foreheads glistening with sweat.
“So,” the guy sitting a couple of stools away asked, “which one of them do you think will be our generation’s Bernie Madoff?”
She turned, surprised. Daniel was one of the quieter, more bookwormy ones in the class who often seemed overwhelmed by the boisterous men around him and who, like Amara, tended to leave these sorts of things early. He’d never spoken to her directly before.
“Hmm,” she’d said, cocking her head to the side, swishing a sip of gin in her mouth and studying the crowd. Then she pointed at one of the red-faced men, his arm thrown around a buddy, beer belly beginning to strain his shirt. “Eric.”
“Really?” Daniel asked, squinting. “I would’ve gone with James.”
“James is too obviously a shifty ass. To be a successful Madoff, I think you’ve got to have a good facade. Eric, final answer.”
Daniel nodded, serious. “Okay. I can see it. I guess we’ll have to check back in with each other in forty years to see if you’re right.”
“Deal,” Amara said, and smiled, signaling the bartender for another drink.
They talked for another two hours that night as, one by one, their other classmates straggled out. He was from Massachusetts, where he’d been one of only two black kids in his grade. He had a bit of a socialist streak and wanted to change the business world from the inside. His father was a local judge, and when Daniel and his two brothers were small, they’d all sit around the dinner table on Sunday nights and air their grievances for the week (for example, Daniel’s older brother had punched him but only because Daniel was being annoying) while their father very thoughtfully and seriously adjudicated the disputes. She had never heard anything more charming in her life.
At a certain point, she put down her drink, stood up, and said, “All right, then, let’s go.”
“What?” he asked.
“Well, do you want to fuck me or what?”
They’d carried on for a week before she decided to drop out of business school and move to New York to see if she could get a job, any job, at one of the late-night shows that had been keeping her sane recently. She wasn’t going to stay someplace she hated just because of a fling, even if Daniel was extremely kind and funny and pretty damn good in bed to boot.
And she didn’t believe in anything as sentimental as fate, but four years later, she ran into him in a coffee shop in the West Village. They were both casually dating other people, but they picked right back up where they’d left off.
* * *
—
As they strolled home from the diner, going out of their way to walk along the Central Park side of Fifth Avenue, Amara draped Daniel’s arm over her shoulder. “If you want to quit your job and start your own business, I support you,” she said. “Even if it means we have to sell the apartment and move the family to a place where the cost of living is lower, like—I don’t know—Cleveland.”
He smiled. The spring evening air smelled of budding trees, of damp grass. “I support you too, Mari,” he said. “Whether you want to work out some new kind of financial arrangement for staying at home or consider going back to work.” At the mention of going back to work, a lot of confusing feelings she couldn’t quite identify—panic or excitement?—began swirling around inside of her. He saw them on her face. “Or become a rodeo clown,” he added.
“How did you know that rodeo clowning was my secret dream?” she asked.
“I know you,” he said, kissing her cheek. “And here’s our cross street. Time to head home and release the babysitter?”
It struck her that bringing a kid into a marriage was like getting a huge promotion, but with no raise and still having to do all your old work of being a good partner too. Despite the promise of fairy-tale weddings, marriage was work. But she’d gotten very lucky with her coworker.
“First,” she said, pointing to a secluded spot in the park, “do you want to sneak into those bushes over there and have a quickie?”
“Yes, please,” he said.
* * *
—
In the elevator, zooming back up to their apartment, Daniel picked leaves and other various park detritus out of Amara’s hair. “Oh,” she said, giddy. “I can’t wait for you to meet Claire!” Introducing two people who were both grade A excellent was one of life’s great joys.
“Wait,” Daniel said, starting to put two and two together. “Claire from playgroup is babysitting tonight?”
“Yeah,” she said. “She’s not a mom—she’s our musician. I have a cool young friend with whom I’m a bit obsessed. Is that weird?”
He laughed as the doors slid open onto their floor. “No weirder than anything else about you.”
“She’s a delight and you’re a delight, and we should all hang out and have fun together,” Amara said, pulling out her keys.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Daniel said as they swung the door open.
Claire was sitting on their couch, her knee jiggling up and down, staring straight ahead. “Claire! Beautiful, sanity-saving Claire,” Amara said, running to her s
ide. “Meet Daniel!”
“Hi, Claire,” Daniel said, smiling and holding out his hand for a shake. “I’ve heard that you are a delight.”
“Oh,” Claire said as she stood, distracted. “What? No, I’m . . . Hi. Nice to meet you.”
“She’s a very talented singer and songwriter,” Amara said to Daniel, then turned back to Claire. “Thank you so much. We had a lovely time. Well, after a bit of a rough start. We had to switch restaurants. Daniel, you should tell her about—” Through her haze of happiness and wine buzz and post-sex endorphins, she noticed that Claire was avoiding her eyes. That wasn’t like her. “Oh, no,” she said. “Charlie was very difficult, wasn’t he?”
“Um,” Claire said. “He had a poop explosion, but after that, he was fine. I hope it’s okay, I rinsed off in your bathroom.”
“Oh, Lord,” Amara said. “Of course that’s fine. I’m sorry you had to deal with that.”
“He’s really got a special talent for pooping,” Daniel said. “We’re not sure which side of the family it comes from.” He put his hand up as if to block his mouth from Amara and pointed to her while whispering her name. Claire gave a half laugh that got stuck in her throat.
“Do you want to stay and have a drink?” Amara asked. “Oh, let’s all have a drink together!”
“No,” Claire said. “I mean, I should let the two of you continue your date night.” Amara started to protest, but Claire waved a trembling hand through the air. “My stomach’s feeling weird anyway.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” Amara said as Daniel reached for his wallet and pulled out three twenties. “Well, we’ll see you at Reagan’s birthday party on Sunday, right?”
“Yeah,” Claire said, gathering up all of her stuff.
Amara walked Claire to the door and stared after her as she disappeared into the elevator, an uneasy feeling starting to replace all her prior giddiness.
“She seemed . . . nice,” Daniel said, coming up behind her and putting a hand on her shoulder.
