She looked at me and squinted. She shook her head to try to focus. “Don’t call Toby. You can’t call Toby.”
“Why not? Someone else? A friend?”
“I don’t have any friends.”
“Of course you have friends.” But maybe she didn’t. What did I know?
Rachel stared at her bagel. Every now and again, she’d react to a small noise by jumping and looking around to see what it was, then looking at me as if for confirmation that things were out of order if so many loud noises were in play.
“Are the kids doing okay?” she asked. “I keep meaning to call them.”
“You keep meaning to call them? You were supposed to pick them up three weeks ago. They think you’ve abandoned them.”
She looked off over my shoulder again, but this time I didn’t turn around. I just stared at her face. She was so gaunt. I should call someone.
“Toby knows why I’m not there. He can pretend all he wants, but he knows.”
“He doesn’t. I’m certain he doesn’t.”
She stared off at the other people in the bagel place. Every time she blinked she’d keep her eyes closed for a full two seconds.
And then she told me what happened to her.
* * *
—
SAM ROTHBERG HAD a nephew who wanted to be a Broadway actor, so he asked Rachel if she would go to dinner one night with them—this was when she was still with Toby, maybe two years ago. Of course, she said. She always said yes. She was in perpetual service to the Sam Rothbergs of the world and everyone at the school for whom she could do a favor. Miriam Rothberg was the closest the kids’ school had to royalty. Miriam didn’t even have to serve on the Parents Association. She and her money funded just about every single school initiative, which put her in this constant kind of advisor role for all the committees. She had so much power that she’d actually gotten homework eliminated completely—completely! homework!—in the lower school after “urging” the nervous, anemic principal to read through a three-hundred-page document she’d hired an education PhD from Barnard to assemble about the cost-benefit of after-school homework.
By the time Hannah was enrolled in pre-K, Rachel had achieved a lot in her life. She’d survived a literally parentsless upbringing, thrived despite the apathy of her grandmother, given birth twice (once under the diciest of conditions), married a nice man at a reasonable age so that she wouldn’t encounter bad fertility odds, and gutted the oldest and largest full-service medium-sized creative agency in New York and created her own version of it, but better. She was the subject of trade paper profiles, then an actual profile in the “Go Get ’Em, Badass!” column of a women’s magazine that she’d read when she was young. She was a high-level source for major journalists; she was the recipient of awards for woman-owned businesses. She’d discovered Alejandra Lopez—Alejandra Lopez. She’d helped usher Presidentrix into a not-one-woman musical and instead a full Broadway show not dependent on the health and stability of just one woman. She represented her after she’d dragged no less than Matt Klein himself out to the projects to see the show, and he’d called Alejandra a “no-talent windbag.” She represented a carefully cultivated group of talents that you’ve definitely heard of. But by the end of Hannah’s first year of school, Rachel would honestly say that her greatest achievement in life was getting Miriam Rothberg interested enough in Pilates to try it out with her at the studio near Rachel’s office, and committing to a weekly class.
“It’s such an efficient workout, too,” Rachel said to her when they went to get smoothies after.
Miriam blithely agreed and then had her house manager—her house manager—schedule the private weekly with Rachel’s assistant. Rachel attended like it was her job. All the playdates flowed through Miriam Rothberg. All the fundraisers and chances for socializing and acceptance for her children were contained in Miriam’s seat of power. She and Sam Rothberg had twin boys in Hannah’s grade and a boy Solly’s age, Jack, who wasn’t half as smart or curious as her Solly and whose eyes were too close together and would still have a better life because of who his parents were. They had a fourth child, a girl, whom they’d gotten by paying a bazillion dollars to spin Sam Rothberg’s sperm down into only the girl molecules. They’d bought a girl! They controlled gender!
Miriam was small-boned and short and daffy and disorganized, and she was one of the only women Rachel had ever met who was truly free. She had no burdens. She thought she did—her wealth, her sense of social responsibility, her kids who were raised by an army of other people—but being born rich, you never really know about burden, or survival, no matter how much you think you feel it. Becoming rich, however, you never forget what it’s like to know how close the bottom is, how easily you could be back there. Miriam didn’t know about survival; she didn’t know about burdens. She didn’t even have the burden of supervising the many people who worked for her. Her house manager and chief of staff—her chief of staff—oversaw the dozens of people on her and Sam’s payroll: the housekeepers and personal assistants and nannies who would travel with them, the housekeepers and groundskeepers for their supplementary four houses—I’m sorry, excuse me, three houses and a villa.
All this help freed Miriam up to have a life of input: what the school should be doing for the winter fundraiser (aside from asking her for a check), what the kids should be doing after school (and would Hannah like to join in on a Mandarin tutor because it would be so much more effective if they could practice with each other during lunch at school), who should be running for office in New York City. Yes, she ran actual candidates for office. Her money allowed her to have a feminist streak despite having never experienced the pitfalls of the male-dominated world the way it existed: the Matt Kleins, the low expectations, the way people either were baffled or professed to be baffled by your existence, the patronizing you-go girls, the “she’s the boss” from the husband who can only say that because they both absolutely knew who the boss was and it was certainly not her. Miriam had only heard of gender imbalance; how could she have experienced it? She didn’t work. She didn’t do anything but donate and exercise, donate and exercise, donate and exercise. When she put her money toward feminist causes, she was actually just addressing rumors she’d heard of a patriarchy.
But she could do that. She could pick and choose her interests. Miriam Rothberg was able to think straight and read books and think about who she would vote for and be sexually available to her husband because that was what money did. It bought you an additional life that ran parallel to your regular life, and between those two lives your goals were somehow achieved and everyone around you was satisfied. Must be nice, Rachel thought.
“I don’t know how you do it, Rachel,” Miriam would say as they ingested a superfood after class. Roxanne and Cyndi would make mmm noises. “Running around like this. Just the kids alone!” As if Miriam were watching her own kids. Rachel was, was the thing. Not all the time; she had Mona. And she had Toby, thank God, who was actually interested in participating in his children’s lives. But Rachel was involved in a way that Miriam couldn’t be. Rachel and Mona were in touch ten times a day. Rachel made every decision. She knew where her kids were every minute.
One day, early on, when Solly and Jack were three, Rachel took off work when Miriam texted to see if they wanted to let the nannies have an hour off and go to the Music n Me class with the boys. Rachel canceled an interview for it—she was meeting with a potential new assistant—and said, “Okay!” like giving the nanny an hour off was a thing she had ever done. Now she needed a new assistant. But she saw that to stay in Miriam’s orbit, you had to be available to her, and she felt like she was paying a large investment forward if she could be somewhat socially available and also not rely on these women for pathetic favors that would make them dread her. (“Can you pick Hannah up? My meeting’s gone late.”) So she went to the class and she and Miriam met on the street walk
ing in. They entered the music place together and both Solly and Jack rushed toward them. Equally. Equally, as if their mothers were both invested exactly the same amount in motherhood. Equally, as if the depth of devotion Miriam displayed were even a reasonable percentage of what Rachel displayed. As if Rachel hadn’t been up all night researching after-school programs and as if she didn’t check Mona’s receipts for what she was feeding the kids and what neighborhoods she was taking them to. As if Rachel didn’t have to make choices, like only exercising when it forwarded her children’s social agenda and never doing the actual exercise (running) that she liked. But look at them here: There was no difference, no lesser bond. It infuriated her. She clapped her hands and tapped the drums and shook the rattles according to the goofy leader’s instructions and all she could wonder was what the hell was she doing this all for if Jack Rothberg was going to love Miriam Rothberg as much as Solly loved her. She didn’t yet realize that children’s love was like parents’ love: It was understanding and enduring and destined to be a little fucked up.
Rachel had been raised on a bread-and-water diet of silence and resignation and resentment. Her grandmother didn’t love her, but it was okay because her grandmother didn’t love. She was cold but she was dutiful, and at least there was that. Her grandmother thought duty was the same thing as love, but it couldn’t be because duty and love are two different verticals. They’re two different movies. Duty couldn’t be interpreted as love or as admiration or as comfort. Duty was only the lowest denominator of what you had to do, and nuns in an orphanage would have done the same. Rachel understood that it wasn’t quite fair that her grandmother had raised her mother and now had to raise her mother’s daughter. It wasn’t fair that her own daughter was dead.
Her grandmother’s chill infiltrated every aspect of their lives. The house was sparsely decorated and drafty. She fed Rachel in front of the television, lest Rachel dare talk about her day. She wore the same practical clothing for years, one “blouse” and one pair of “slacks” that were nearly identical to yesterday’s. She didn’t wear jewelry or laugh. To spend a lot of money was to indulge in an emotion, and her grandmother avoided emotion wherever possible. The most she ever got was angry: angry at Rachel’s laziness or her questions or her giddiness or her childishness or her neediness or her humanness—her need to be fed three times a day. She was angry that Rachel wanted to play basketball or join the cheerleaders or try out for the school play. She was so angry and the anger was so scary that Rachel stopped asking for approximations of normal childhood and instead settled for what would have to pass for love, which was the absence of outward displays of animosity and rage.
Had Rachel ever complained, her grandmother wouldn’t have understood what she was talking about. She was home every day when Rachel arrived. She cooked every meal. “You never went barefoot,” her grandmother liked to say. She sent her to private school, a great tax on her savings and Social Security, even after the financial aid: a fancy Catholic school, even though they were Jewish, attended by the children of diplomats in D.C. and other fancy people. Her grandmother thought that she could have a good education and that would somewhat make up for all the ways Rachel had been let down so far in life. See, she wasn’t totally a monster. More like she didn’t know how to be a person.
But Rachel was miserable. She lived in Mount Washington, where all the middle-class Jews lived, but all her classmates were rich Gentiles and lived in Ruxton or Green Spring Valley or on no-kidding a private island near Annapolis. They were picked up in black and dark silver cars driven by chauffeurs who’d been working for them since they were babies. There were layers of wealth she overheard that unlocked for her new dimensions of possibility of privilege and access and what was possible. The girls in her class had first names like Clancy and Devon and Atterleigh and Westerleigh and Bonneleigh and Plum and Poppy and Catherine. And Catherine and Catherine and Catherine and Catherine. They went skiing in Aspen a week before Christmas break started. They went on safari to Africa. They visited a private island in Fiji or boarded a private cruise down the Nile or attended a private tour of the Galápagos or stayed at a private hotel in Venice or a private forest in Brazil. They went to concerts and the opera and took French lessons outside of school and then went to actual France and they became sophisticated in a way that she wasn’t—in a way she’d never be because sophistication is either your first language or you always have an accent in it.
In seventh grade, a shy girl named Catherine H. who didn’t have many friends asked Rachel if she wanted to take tennis lessons. Rachel knew better than to ask her grandmother. Because it wouldn’t just be tennis. It would be the outfits and the dropping off and picking up. It would be the tournaments and practices and the chaos of something new on the schedule. Rachel told Catherine she couldn’t do it, but Catherine couldn’t understand why.
“Don’t you want to?” she asked.
“Honestly?” Rachel said. “It looks kind of boring.”
Even though it didn’t. It looked fun and exactly like the kind of thing that would allow her to have a group of friends she liked and could call and whose houses she could go over to and whose secrets she could know. She watched TV all the time at home so that she would one day know how to approximate normal personhood when she finally got the chance, and there was a show on cable where two best friends would sometimes talk while they brushed each other’s hair, or while one was on a toilet. She used to think about that all the time, the hair brushing and the peeing. What it must feel like for someone to be touching your hair. What it must be like to feel free in front of someone. The girls who played tennis looked like they would brush each other’s hair and urinate in front of one another. Catherine H. did end up taking the tennis lessons and became close with the tennis girls. Then she went to tennis camp, which was sleepaway, where they probably brushed each other’s hair every night and maybe there wasn’t even a door on the bathroom. One day, while she was there, she called Rachel. They weren’t close, but Rachel had been too lonely that summer to be skeptical about the phone call. Catherine H. told her she had a new boyfriend named Trey, and would Rachel like to speak to the boyfriend? Rachel said that of course she would. Rachel stayed on the phone and the boyfriend spoke to her for five minutes before he said, “We hear you like to suck cock….” and then there were squeals of laughter in the background. It took Rachel a minute to realize what was happening, but by then they had hung up on her, and she was left holding the phone, looking at it.
She didn’t want to be different anymore. She began shoplifting very expensive clothing in seventh grade. Her grandmother only took her to White Marsh to Woodies, which was a shitty department store her schoolmates would never walk into. On her own she went to the Nordstrom in the Columbia Mall with the sixty dollars she’d collected from a summer job as a mother’s helper. Her school had a uniform: a plaid skirt issued by the school and a white button-down shirt. You could buy the shirt from the school, too, but most of the girls bought Ralph Lauren menswear shirts with little polo symbols on the breast. They kept the shirts open or one size too small so that you could see a very aggressive piece of lingerie right at the sternum. If she could only do that, she thought. If she could only look like the rest of them.
But the shirt cost ninety dollars. She went to try it on. It looked great on her. She looked like one of them. She couldn’t leave without it. She knew that other girls shoplifted. They talked about it. They had plenty of money, which made it strange and pathological. But Rachel—Rachel needed to do it. She did it because it was a practical means of survival for her. That day, she just walked out of the store with the shirt. At a very fancy store, expensive shirts didn’t have tags that would set off alarms because ninety dollars wasn’t expensive. She ripped off a black lace push-up bra with a demicup whose tag had a picture of a woman touching her own face in the throes of ecstasy, as if just wearing the bra would do it for you. She arrived at school the next
day with her shirt, the bra underneath, but it didn’t help. It was too late. It was all too late. Her sentence had been written. She just had to wait it out so that she could get to college and have a new start. And she did.
Then she met Toby. Finally, a man loved her and chose her. The way he looked at her, the way he made her feel settled and permanent in the world. She went to visit the home where he was raised and she saw the chaos and stability and she knew that this man contained all this within himself and she could, too. They married.
She started in the mailroom at Alfooz & Lichtenstein, the oldest and largest full-service medium-sized creative agency in the city, and found a place where she could channel the churning she felt into accomplishment. She was hit on by her boss, then lost a partnership because she was pregnant. This was only one of the awful parts of being pregnant. Right before you were pregnant, you were a person. The minute you became an incubator for another life, you got reduced to your parts. The insults were grand, but they were also subtle. Throughout her pregnancy, people called her cute. They said she was adorable.
Her subordinates threw her a baby shower and reduced her hard, cold glass-and-metal office to a gooey muck of pastel streamers whose evidence she still found for weeks afterward. This wasn’t a party, she thought when she was there. This was a glimpse into her future. She thought of her own regard for mothers and motherhood. She thought of how every mother she knew seemed neutered to her, like they were not serious people. How had she not realized that she was joining a club she could barely tolerate? Exactly who had ever overcome the way being a mother turns you into something soft and ridiculous? She was not considered perfect before, she knew that. But now she would have to fight to just be considered regular.
And then a man literally cut her open to get at the only reason she was alive.
Toby went back to work six weeks after Hannah was born, but Rachel didn’t. At six weeks, she’d wait for Mona to take Hannah on her walk and then would go into the living room, where at eleven A.M. a ray of sunlight streamed through the window, and she would sit in the warm spot, first on her knees, and then she would bend over like a Muslim in prayer and stay there and cry. How could it be, she wondered. How could it be that the simple act of having a child did this to you? Had every birth in the world ruined every woman in the world? Was this a secret they’d been keeping, or had she just not been listening? Underneath all the vacuous, cruel wisdom the women who saw her in her late stages of pregnancy imparted to her, most of which had to do with banking sleep or measuring every precious moment because it all goes so fast, were they really telling her to mark her personhood?
Fleishman Is in Trouble Page 33
