Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

  “What’s the point of this argument?” I said to her. “We’re not at a clothing store. You don’t own a bikini. There is literally nothing that will get you into a bikini right now.”

  “I hate you,” Sasha said.

  Adam, tall and focused, stood in the kitchen packing the large boat bag. “Bet this is a familiar song to you,” he said to Toby.

  “Yeah,” Toby answered.

  I watched Toby watch me shoot Adam a look. He looked back, like wha? I shook my head and sprayed sunscreen onto our six-year-old, Miles. Then I watched Toby watch me at my pool club. Every family was just like mine: chubby, domineering mother; clueless, servile dad; disgusted child; happy-go-lucky child who just wants to know if the slide is open; sometimes there was a third child if the chubby, domineering mother and the clueless, servile dad had started early enough.

  Through Toby’s eyes, it was unsettling just how much all the other women really did look like me. It was what I resented about where I lived, that after a lifetime of feeling lesser than the skinny blondes with straight hair and noses in Manhattan, I most hated that everyone here looked exactly like me. Or did I hate looking exactly like everyone else? Or did seeing them en masse like this allow me to finally see myself clearly and the view was no bueno? Our navy tankinis were reinforced with steel paneling so that our bodies were all mashed and wrung into hourglass figures, while our limbs told the true stories of our discipline and metabolic limitations.

  I wasn’t self-conscious in front of the dads. This was how they knew me. But in front of Toby? Look at the withered thing I’d become. I’d seen his phone. Bodies were like produce to him now. He only looked at them for the ways they tempted and the ways they were blemished or unblemished. Legs, uncanny breast valleys, butts butts butts butts. I know what I looked like to him. Trust me, I had no sexual or romantic wish for Toby. I just didn’t like the record he was holding. I didn’t like being this way now with someone who still remembered me back at the beginning, back when I was all potential and kinetic energy. Everyone else here knew me as a carpool partner and a walking playdate calendar. By those metrics, I was a star. By Toby’s, I was nothing.

  I took Miles over for his lesson. Miles was scared of the water, so I stayed sitting on the side of the pool with my legs in the water, thinking of how my stomach folded over on itself. I crossed my arms in front of my chest. Bathing suits for women are unfair. Toby and Adam sat on chaises next to each other. They looked ridiculous together, Toby so short and Adam so long. Adam with his soft brown eyes and gray streaks in the hair that had the decency to thin evenly all around. They were having some kind of conversation that looked involved.

  I caught Adam staring at me. He stared at me a lot lately, but he never asked questions. I had begun to go outside at night and lie on our hammock. Adam resented it. He’s linear and infers rules from onetime behaviors, which drives me crazy. “But you hate going outside,” he’d say. And yet, there I was, outside, busting open the contract he held on me. He’d go back in and put the kids to bed and I would look up at the sky. You could see some stars where I lived. You could never see them in Manhattan. That was one advantage of this place, I guess.

  I’d been spending time on the phone with Toby like I was a teenager, leaving the room to talk even when the kids were asleep like Adam was my father, which sometimes he was. When he talked, I pressed the mute button on my phone so that he wouldn’t hear the long drag I was taking from the pot vape that Seth had had delivered to my home, via his company messenger service. Seth had sent it over after that lunch we had, when I had told him that I’d all but stopped smoking. He was sad to hear it. “It was your thing,” he’d said. “You were a champion at it.” A few hours later my doorbell rang. With the vape was a note that said, “This stuff comes from Humboldt County and contains a new, genetically engineered strain that literally has a three-thousand-person waitlist but my guy gets me stuff.”

  I hadn’t smoked pot in years, with one exception. About a year ago, Adam and I had gone to the backyard fortieth birthday party of one of the dads from our kids’ school and someone had passed around a joint. I settled into my high, listening to the dad’s brother’s Tom Petty karaoke (it was always Tom Petty karaoke in New Jersey, even more than Springsteen), and I listened to a conversation among some of the other moms. In general, we only ever spoke about our children with each other. I didn’t know if they were having better conversations and I was just excluded, or if this was all there was to talk about. At the party, I watched them take hits off a vape that someone had brought and then listened as their stoned conversations turned into every other conversation they had, but louder and more intense: Hunter was not outgoing enough for drama but he still wanted to do it and Raleigh is really just a sensory kid, you know? and I did not think the school handled that well but Oscar really doesn’t have a sense of maturity beyond his years, which…and no it’s called a specific learning disability in math but the math part is the specific part it’s not specific within math—

  The conversation got louder and the women began talking over each other as they grew more and more stoned, but the subject matter never changed. Even high, that was all they talked about. There was no other layer. There was no yearning. There was nothing beyond it. “It’s not New Jersey,” Adam said. “It’s life. It’s being in your forties. We’re parents now. We’ve said all we needed to say.” I began to cry. He patted my head and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay. It’s the order of things. Now we focus on the kids. We mellow with age. It’s how it goes. It’s not our turn anymore.” I tried to respond but instead sob-hiccuped. He said, “Why don’t we get you home?”

  Adam and I left the party, and we got into bed and tried to get through another episode of the drug cartel show we were watching that everyone said got really good at the end of the third season, but we were only up to the second, and we had existential angst about whether we should be watching something that only promised to be good but wasn’t yet. We agreed the answer was yes, that hope was good, and in those moments—the ones when we endured, the ones where we agreed, the ones where we disagreed and found the other person’s point dumb enough to laugh out loud, the ones where he still agreed to do our fully choreographed wedding dance in the kitchen for no reason at all and to no music, the ones where he showed me a window into how much smarter he was than I was and how even though he was that smart he never needed to flaunt it, the ones where we rolled our eyes at how dumb everyone else was, the ones where he evacuated me from my misery and made me a cheese omelet because I was stoned and wanted something warm and milky, that was when I remembered the most essential thing about Adam and me, which was that I never once doubted if I should be with him.

  So then why did I need my secrets? In the last few days, I’d been smoking the vape in the morning. I’d hide it in time for Adam to arrive home. I didn’t want to know what he’d think of my stoned parenting while I was stoned, but also, I liked the secret. (Mostly. At one point, he had to open up his computer because someone at work needed him to read over a document, and he was so annoyed and grumbling. My reaction was to keep saying, “Are you mad at me? Did I do something?” until he finally said, “What is your problem?” I left the room to give the kids their baths.)

  After the kids were in bed, I’d call Toby. Adam would come outside while I was on the phone. “What are you doing out here?” he would ask. I’d put my vape under my leg and close my eyes. I’d stopped doing that when we got married. But when we turned forty he stopped eating red meat and yet, there he was, out in the open, eating it maybe twice a week with no apology.

  “I’m on the phone with Toby,” I’d say.

  He’d wait a long second and turn around and go inside.

  “I have to go,” I’d whisper into the phone.

  I’d go inside and sit at the top of my stairs and look at him on the couch in the living room, still so sharp at the end of the day, recon
ciling papers and laws. Saying, “Aha! I knew it!” like a cartoon character and then shimmying from side to side as he sent a triumphant email assuring everyone that as usual, he had the answers—that as usual, he had come through.

  Back at my house that Saturday, Adam grilled lamb. At three, Toby began to say his goodbyes. I asked him what his plans were for the rest of the weekend.

  “I’m going to see Seth tonight. For dinner. I’m meeting Vanessa. I’m hoping they don’t take me to a club. They seem to go to a lot of clubs.”

  “Well, young people have a lot of energy,” I said.

  “Be nice. You guys are invited, if you want.”

  “We don’t have a babysitter,” Adam said. “Can I drive you to the train?”

  “If you don’t mind.” Toby went to use the bathroom.

  “Do you mind if I go?” I asked Adam. “He’s having a hard time.” Weekends were endless. If you needed to know the most disparate thing about Adam and me, it was that he loved them and I did not. I liked order and routine. Weekends were an abyss that was exactly long enough to stare back at me.

  “I thought we were all going to watch Ratatouille.” Adam looked at me hard. I looked at him, too, but I made my eyes unseeing.

  “We can. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

  “The kids will be asleep in a few hours.”

  “Then we’ll watch it tomorrow. I mean, we watched it yesterday.”

  Adam looked down at the grill plate, then up again at me. “Sure. Have fun.”

  “You don’t mind?” I kissed Adam on the cheek and ran out the door like a teenager who had just gotten permission to use the car.

  * * *

  —

  TOBY AND I sat on the train across from each other in a four-seat pod. A minute passed by and Toby said, “I hope you’re treating Adam well. He’s one of the good ones.”

  I told him I knew that.

  “I’m serious. You should treat him well. He’s a good man.”

  “Why? Because he hasn’t left me? How do you know I’m not the advantage in the relationship?” I reached into my pocket for my vaping pen. I offered it to Toby.

  “Uh, no thanks,” he said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because we’re on New Jersey Transit?”

  But no one was watching. People didn’t look at me anymore. I’m allowed to go into bathrooms that are only for customers now anywhere in the city. I could shoplift if I wanted to, is how ignored I am. The week I turned forty I’d been sent to profile one of the New York Giants. I wasn’t given access to the locker room, and my lanyard said RESTRICTED PRESS: NO LOCKER ACCESS in bright yellow and it covered half my torso. I walked into the locker room anyway and stood right there among all their penises, and the very people who had issued me the lanyard walked by me as if I were there to set up for the bake sale.

  Toby didn’t pay any attention to me on the train. He was texting with the new woman he was fucking, and so steeped in his own crisis and couldn’t bear a conversation that didn’t revolve around him. He didn’t want to talk about Rachel anymore. He didn’t want to think about her. But he didn’t want to talk about me, either.

  “Do you realize that you never react to anything I say unless it’s about you?” I asked him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I’m a real person with a soul and I could use a friend, too?”

  “What possible need could you have?”

  Was Toby always like this? I sat there, watching him look at his phone and stifle his erection, and I couldn’t remember a time when he’d sat and listened to me. Even back then, our conversations were only ever about him and his insecurities. I always felt privileged for being told them, and I felt the role I played was someone who he recognized was equally lost. But now I was considering that maybe I was just a warm body.

  We got off the train and Toby said we should take the E downtown to meet Seth, but I was suddenly seized with a full-body annoyance for him. Why wasn’t I home, watching Ratatouille? What was I doing here?

  “You know what?” I said. “I’m going to the movies.” And I left Penn Station without waiting for a word from him.

  * * *

  —

  TOBY SAT ON the train headed downtown and saw a family with three children—two girls Hannah and Solly’s age, then the third one, a toddler boy. The toddler slept against the mother’s chest. Just three years ago, Toby thought he and Rachel might have another child. Solly was six and Toby had not begun to consider that the marriage, not the stressors to the marriage, might be the problem.

  They had both wanted three kids. Every story Rachel told from her lonely childhood had such emptiness to it. “I really liked watching Three’s Company while I did homework.” Stuff like that. “Yes,” she told Toby after they were engaged. “I want three children. Or four. I want them to never have to be alone in the house, no matter what happens to us.” But Solly turned five and then six and then seven. They couldn’t talk about anything without fighting. The discussion of a third child could only come up under the most prime conditions: when they were both briefly bathing in sentiment or satisfaction, when something happened that inspired them to want to keep this part of their lives going. Meaning: rarely.

  This past Passover, they’d gone to Los Angeles to see Toby’s family. They hadn’t yet told anyone they were getting divorced, and they were in the honeymoon period of their separation. Before the first seder, Toby’s mother, who was short and round with a puffy hairdo, and his sister, Ilana, who had started taking on the shape of their mother, were setting up the dinner table on the patio at his sister’s house, since her house was pristinely kosher and they could only have holiday meals there. The kids were playing with their too-many cousins, and Toby and Rachel had a moment on the couch, united in their disgust for the self-righteous traditionalism of his sister, and the way his parents yielded to it. His sister kept casting brief glances over at them on the couch, then whispering to her mother, probably something about how they should be helping. His sister thought of Rachel as lazy. Rachel—lazy! She didn’t understand that there were a lot of words for Rachel, but lazy was not one of them, and the thing that kept her from helping was far worse than sheer sloth.

  Rachel said to Toby, “So this is the last time we’re doing this, isn’t it?” Off Toby’s nod, her face flooded with sentiment. “Oh, Toby, who could have seen this coming?”

  He wasn’t used to this emotion on her. He couldn’t imagine why it was appearing now, as opposed to at any other moment in the last ten years, when a display of acknowledgment of their past and their once-real passion for each other would have been most welcome. This means nothing, he told himself. You do not have to react to this, he told himself.

  “We were meant to be best friends, I think,” she continued. “I think that’s what went wrong.”

  He nodded in what could be perceived as thoughtful agreement, but he truly didn’t understand. Wasn’t friendship the thing they never had? Wouldn’t friendship have made all the fighting bearable? She was not his friend. If there was one thing he knew, it was that. He had to proceed with caution here, lest this become a scene, so he kept silent, hoping that the conversation would end before he could no longer bear this new delusion.

  But she didn’t stop. She turned to face him. “I think what’s nice is that we’re young enough to still have another full life, you know? This entire thing”—she spread her hands in the air toward the entirety of their lives—“doesn’t have to define us.”

  “Like, our marriage and children? It doesn’t have to define us?”

  “Okay. I know you’re being snide right now, because anger is, like, your only mode ever, but just think about it. We could have another chance to do it right.”

  He hadn’t gotten as far as future plans yet. His only thoughts about the future were how he was g
oing to make it up to these children that they’d had to live among such grueling animosity and unhappiness, all the fighting they’d heard, the times he yelled at them when he was angry at her, the times they saw him throw things or punch walls. He was trying to figure out a way to redefine himself as a good parent to them, and as a role model of what a man should be like and what a household should be like. That was what he’d been thinking about lately, how much he’d taken out on the kids, how much bile they now knew their parents were capable of.

  “I keep thinking,” she continued. “What if you have more kids? What if I have more kids?”

  His response to this was so visceral and fast it even surprised him. What came out of his mouth was a sound, a yawp, a growl, a great guttural thing.

  “What?” she asked. “What did I say?”

  “Are you fucking kidding me with this?” he asked. “You want more children?”

  Her face returned to fighting stance like it never left. “Why can’t I want more children?”

  Was she kidding? He raised his arms and yelled at the ceiling, “Because you totally neglect the children you have!”

  He saw his mother turn on the patio to see what was going on. He lowered his voice. “Your current children need you. Your real, already born children need you. If you are interested in children, I have two perfectly good ones for you to parent.”

  On the E train, the parents of the three children stood up to leave at the next stop. He watched their faces as they negotiated who would carry the baby and who would get the stroller and arranged themselves thus. He wanted to see a hint of the hatred between them that their marriage and children bred in them. He wanted to see animosity and regret the way he wanted a glass of water. He couldn’t find any. They got off the train peaceably and Toby stared at the Hr ad that they’d been hiding, which was just a picture of the bottom part of a twenty-five-year-old woman’s face, lip bitten in either excitement or indecision or sexual anticipation, until his stop.