Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

  “I complain too much,” I told him. I sat down on one of the couches with my legs splayed, leaning back in what would have been mock exhaustion if there were anything mock about it. The kids ate my heart out the whole time. I’d read those stupid blogs about Disney, and they all warned me that the character lunch at the Crystal Palace would fill up fast, so I should book at eleven A.M., but they did not warn me about the existential dread of being there. It was like I could finally see what I’d become, made clear through my presence among yet another entire set of women who looked just like me. I couldn’t bear being this suburban mom who was alternating between screaming at her kids and being the heartfelt, privileged witness to their joy. But the people around us—the haranguing mothers and the sexless fathers—I kept trying to find ways that I was better than these people, but all I kept landing on was the fact that the common denominator was me.

  Adam returned with two beers.

  “It’s loud in here!” Adam shouted.

  “It’s a bar!” I shouted back. “It’s a bar in Manhattan on a Saturday night! Remember those?!”

  Someone passed me a glass of champagne. I took a long glug. It was so loud I had to shout, so I shouted about Disney and how I couldn’t enjoy any of it. We’d had such good accommodations. We had the club level, the concierge level. A lounge with endless food and entertainment, a hotel that was themed like the Atlantic City boardwalk, except without the criminals and prostitutes. Magicians and card players on the boardwalk. Freedom from the very thing that makes vacation interesting—which is people different from you and places that are unfamiliar—but also makes it extremely relaxing. I couldn’t enjoy any of it.

  “We had these FastPasses,” I said. “We got into every ride within, like, six minutes. But you’d go on this empty line past the people who had been waiting in a different line, and you realized that you weren’t transcending a line, you were cutting one. You had subverted the system of fairness for the people who happened to not be on the club level.”

  “A thing about my wife is that she can be unhappy both standing on a line and cutting a line,” Adam said. “She’s pretty amazing, isn’t she?”

  “You can also get a FastPass for coming to the park early in the morning, though,” Toby said. “Arriving early isn’t elitism.”

  “Sure it is. But you’re missing my point. It’s that even when it’s not fair in my favor, I can’t get over how it’s not fair. I am a miserable person, and I don’t know if that was always true, or if I became this way.”

  “I can’t wait to take my kids to Disney World,” Seth said. “I loved it when I was a kid.”

  “I hear the senior discount is sweet,” Toby said.

  But I couldn’t stop. “No. Seth. It’s not like when we were young. You go and you think of how horrible all the people are, how same-shaped the women are, how stupid everyone is. The women wear these yoga pants instead of regular pants and they yell at their children, and then you realize you’re wearing yoga pants.”

  “I don’t understand,” Seth said. “Why couldn’t you just wear regular pants?”

  We drank and drank, and finally a core of us who remembered everything about particular nights in college sank into a circle on the couches and reminisced and laughed. Who knew how much time went by before Adam came over to the couches and waved to get my attention and pointed at his watch? “We’ve got soccer in the morning, and a babysitter who still needs to be driven home.”

  “Whoops! I told her she’d be home by twelve.”

  “We’d better get going.”

  “I’m pretty wired,” I told him. “Do you mind if I stay?”

  “Stay.” He looked weary.

  “Just a little while. I never get to see these people. I’m reliving the glory of my youth.”

  “She had a glorious youth,” Sonia, who was very drunk, called into the air.

  He stared at me.

  “I’ll get a car home,” I said. “It’ll be fine.”

  “Can we just discuss this for a minute?”

  “Come on, Dad!” I laughed, then seeing he wasn’t laughing, too, made an elaborate show of standing up. We talked in the corner.

  “When is this going to stop?” he asked.

  I looked past what he was actually asking. “It’s going to be fine,” I said. “I’ll just take a car home.” I kissed him hard on the mouth and walked back to my friends. I waited long enough so that when I finally looked up to where he’d been standing, he was gone.

  Vanessa texted Seth to say things had gotten out of hand in the best possible way at the bachelorette party she was at and would he mind if she skipped Sonia’s party. Seth texted her back, Oh come on. Vanessa carpeted the screen with heart emojis. I watched the exchange over his shoulder. “If I can send my husband home, you can have a night without your girlfriend.”

  “Have you considered that I like Vanessa more than you appear to like your husband?”

  “What?” I screamed over the music, like I hadn’t heard, but I’d heard.

  * * *

  —

  WE ALL TALKED for another hour despite the noise. We talked about Israel and college and grad school and how the real estate they had in the nineties was the best real estate we’d ever have and about wisdom teeth and tuition and Nirvana and tattoos and vitamin A. We looked up and I saw a beautiful young woman with shiny gold hair and big eyes walking toward us with a smile. Seth turned and leapt up. Vanessa glowed so bright that she seemed to take up an extra layer of attention, and suddenly the conversation shifted to her self-conscious-less twenties-ness. When she spoke, everything was a kind of self-reporting that centered on coincidence or magic. “That would only happen to me!” she ended at least two of her stories. Toby and Seth watched her like panting dogs. I watched them watching her and realized I was too drunk. I said, “We need a diner.”

  It was two A.M. when we finally found one. I was drunk enough to not pretend I wasn’t going to eat bread and Toby was drunk enough to not feel self-conscious that he was not going to eat at all.

  “Is there a bathroom here?” Vanessa asked.

  Someone pointed in the back, which was literally the only place a bathroom could be.

  “She seems very nice,” I said to Seth.

  “Elizabeth.” But Toby couldn’t stop this.

  “Are you really going to marry her?”

  Seth looked stricken. “You told her?” he asked Toby.

  “Of course he told me. I’m not against marriage, Seth. I love my husband. I think you don’t get that marriage isn’t really about your spouse.”

  He stared. But I couldn’t stop this.

  “Have you heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? You have an imperative to seek out food and shelter. But once you know food is widespread and available, once you really know it, you can wonder what you like to eat and how much you want to eat. Once you have access to shelter, you can begin to ask yourself where you want to live and how you want to decorate it. What if one of the imperatives we never understood was about love and therefore marriage? Meaning, what if we search to make sure we are lovable and worthy of someone who commits to us absolutely and exclusively, and the only way we can truly confirm we are worth these things is if someone wants to marry us; someone says, ‘Yes, you are the one I will love exclusively. You are worthy of this.’ And then, only when you’re actually married, once this need is fulfilled, you can for the first time wonder if you even wanted to be married or not. The only problem with that is that by the time you realize you have access to love, you’re already married, and it is an awful lot of cruelty and paperwork to undo that just because you didn’t know you wouldn’t want it once you had it.”

  “Only drunk people talk about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,” Seth said.

  I ignored him. This was who Seth was going to marry. But here’s what he didn’t know, I
told him, and what he would learn: A wife isn’t like an ultra-girlfriend or a permanent girlfriend. She’s an entirely new thing. She’s something you made together, with you as an ingredient. She couldn’t be the wife without you. So hating her or turning on her or talking to your friends about the troubles you have with her would be like hating your own finger. It’s like hating your own finger even after it becomes necrotic. You don’t separate yourself from it. You look at your wife and you’re not really looking at someone you hate. You’re looking at someone and seeing your own disabilities and your own disfigurement. You’re hating your creation. You’re hating yourself.

  “Look at Vanessa,” I said. “She’s so happy to be around you, so worshipful. She likes everything you wear and your friends. I was like that, too. Rachel was like that, too, wasn’t she, Toby?”

  “Maybe briefly. But maybe only outwardly? I think just eventually she couldn’t keep up the act.”

  Seth put his spoon down and sat back in the booth, never taking his eyes off me.

  “Easy, Elizabeth,” said Toby.

  “I’m not crazy,” I said. “I’m just weighed down.”

  “But Adam loves you,” Toby said. “He doesn’t weigh you down.”

  “He does. He doesn’t mean to, but he does. It’s not him in particular. The kids do, too. All of it does. It’s hard to feel like this when you still remember what it felt like to be nimble and light again.”

  Vanessa returned to the table. “Sorry, I got a call from Tamara. She wanted to know if you guys wanted to meet up.” She looked around. “Why is everyone so serious?”

  I looked at her for a dangerous moment. I wanted to touch her all over her body and remember what it was like to feel like that. I would have eaten her heart or drunk her blood if I could have. But it would come for her, too.

  “I have to go,” Toby said quickly. “My cousin is waiting up for me to come home.”

  He stood up, and I stood up, too. I felt like if I let him leave right then he’d never talk to me again. It was just as hot as it was at noon. I walked him home, but at his apartment building, I continued in without a word. Inside, Cherry and her daughters were on the couch in front of a show about a sports agent on HBO. Cherry was asleep. “Wake up, Mom,” the older daughter said. Cherry looked around, bewildered, then saw Toby and me.

  “Libby! Is that you?”

  “Cherry!” We hugged.

  “You haven’t changed,” Cherry said. “I didn’t realize you were divorced.”

  “Oh, I’m not. We’re still in New Jersey, two kids. Husband who is still married to me.”

  Cherry gave me a funny look and turned to her daughters. “This is Libby, Toby’s friend,” she told them.

  Cherry lingered for a minute, not quite understanding what it was that I was doing there, but I didn’t care. She smiled something in the realm of warm and businesslike and said, “It’s really nice to see you. Are you okay to get home?” like she was the lady of the house.

  “I’m fine,” I answered.

  Cherry looked at Toby, but he was busying himself taking his wallet and phone out of his pockets. She said her goodbyes.

  * * *

  —

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, I was sitting at his bedroom window, smoking a joint that Seth had given me at the party, followed by a cigarette, a pack of which I’d bought from a bodega at some point in the night, I couldn’t remember. Toby was sitting up on his bed.

  “It’s like three A.M. Won’t you be wasted tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “But very little is expected of me. It’s so fucking hot in here, Toby. Why is it so hot in here? I swear I could see sound.”

  What the fuck was I doing there? I thought of a night from our year in Israel, on Purim, after I’d been dumped by a dickhead named Avi and Seth was still nursing wounds from Jennifer Alkon. We were all three drunk, just like every other student in Jerusalem. We made our way to the Beggar Woman and then made our way to the Wall, and at the Wall, Seth saw Jennifer Alkon’s dowdy, flatfooted best friend Betheny, who offered to buy him a drink, and he ended up going home with her. Toby and I kept walking, unable to find our way back to the area without passing the Beggar Woman. We were drunk and making an entire thing about wanting to avoid her, but we passed her anyway. We both wanted to be told something true about ourselves. She didn’t remember us—she never remembered us ever—and we passed her but we realized we were out of cash, and she called to us for charity, and Toby made the mistake of making eye contact and saying in Hebrew that he was sorry but he’d already given her his last shekel. She, of course, did not react to this reasonably. She unleashed on him a battalion of curses:

  “May your children never know the depth of your love. May your children never grow.” She indicated me here: “May your wife find that her love and desire for you rot like your testicles.”

  I screamed at the woman in Hebrew, “I’m not his wife!”

  Toby took me by the arm and dragged me away. We broke into a sprint and ended up hiding behind a wall, drunk and screaming with laughter, and we crouched down until it was just like the first night we met, our faces really close to each other, and suddenly Toby seemed perfect to me. He’d been under my nose the whole time. Literally under my nose, because he only came up to there. Why did I want something hard when I could have something easy? Why shouldn’t I just submit to the Tobys of the world—to Toby himself, who was right here? So far that year I’d had my heart broken by a boy who either did or didn’t know he was gay but certainly was and by meatheads that I’d only gone out with because I’d lost some weight and was now finally visible to meatheads. All I’d ever wanted was to be regular, but maybe regular wasn’t for me. Maybe Toby was for me. I leaned forward to kiss him. He pushed me away. “I’m not taking advantage of a drunk girl,” he said. The next day he said he was sorry about the night before, but I pretended I didn’t remember anything.

  In his bedroom, the windows open, I extended my legs to the bed and then pulled myself over onto it. I put my head on the pillow next to his and I moved onto my side so that I was facing him. I closed my eyes to avoid his questions, and when I opened them, Toby was asleep. Look what a friendship could still be after all these years. It was a miracle, the pain that could be survived. It was a miracle what two people could move on from. It was a miracle what two people can see each other go through and still have love for each other. I looked at his face. I couldn’t see signs of aging on him the way I saw them on myself. To me, he was exactly as I’d left him all those years ago, and I was the one who’d been rotting. I touched his closed eyelids with my fingers.

  * * *

  —

  SOMETIME AFTER IT became light we were awoken by a sound. Solly was crying. Toby ran in and saw that he’d wet his bed again. “Don’t worry, we’ll just change the sheets.” But Solly couldn’t stop crying. “I’ll be right back. Let me get a towel.”

  Toby ran into his room and shook me awake. “You have to go now,” he said. I sat up, unsure of where I was for a minute, and put my shoes on and tiptoed out. It was eight A.M. There were joggers and dads wheeling strollers, giving mothers their weekly break. There were bagels and trays of coffee. There were shopkeepers opening up bodegas. Everyone seemed okay; everyone seemed satisfied enough or distracted enough. A man read the Times while he crossed the street. I shook my head at the wilderness of their complacency. Adam had texted at two in the morning, then not at all. I didn’t know what to tell him. I decided to walk for a few minutes, which turned into more than a few minutes, and then three hours had passed.

  Around then, Toby texted me that he was sorry, but I didn’t see the text because I was with Rachel.

  Vindication was coming. If you decided to look at Toby’s life from atypical metrics that did not account for Rachel’s existence or the three weeks she’d been gone or a history of their marriage or the way Solly
was falling apart under a mask of fake cheer and wetting his bed at night, or how Hannah was solemn and sleeping later and later, or how the trauma was cementing into a condition, it might just be that he was doing fine. His children were healthy. He was solvent. He was getting promoted today. He was fucking a beautiful woman. Vindication was here.

  This was it. This was the day it all changed. He took out a white shirt and a navy tie. He hadn’t worn a tie since God knows when. He watched himself knot it up in the bathroom mirror, and he thought about ambition.

  “Ambition can exist without eating your whole life, Rachel,” he said to the mirror. “People who are good don’t need ambition. Success comes and finds them. See? Competence and excellence are rewarded for those who are competent and excellent.”

  You could just be sincere and earnest and find yourself there—maybe not meteorically, but you could find yourself there. You don’t have to kneecap anyone else. You don’t have to eat your young. You can just quietly do good work. The system still favors good work. He felt so overwhelmed by pride and redemption that for a minute, he didn’t wish that anything in his life were different. Not even anything. Not even a little.

  He woke the children up, but Hannah wouldn’t get out of bed. “Please don’t make me go back there,” she said from beneath the covers.

  “I can’t be late today. It’s a big day for me.”

  “Why? Because your patient is dying?”

  “Because, well, I didn’t tell you this.” Hannah peeked out from beneath her covers. “Today is the day that I am being made head of my subdivision.”

  He watched as Hannah resisted but then finally her face broke. “You’re going to be the boss?”

  “I’m going to be a boss.”

  At breakfast she told Solly, “Daddy’s going to be the boss today. They’re making him the boss.”

  “A boss. Not the boss. But that’s good because the boss never gets to see patients anymore. I still get to see my patients.” Toby had never felt bigger in his life.