Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

  I opened my eyes. “May God condemn the children of their enemies to digestive nuisances and larger-than-average pores.”

  “Yes,” he said. “May God fill the hearts of those who have blessed them with amounts of cash in denominations of $18 but that do not exceed $360 with pus and bile.”

  He stood up and he extended his hands and I took them. He hoisted me up, and I continued rising long after I surpassed him, just like all those years ago.

  I asked him, “Do you think you’ll ever get married again?”

  He looked at Seth and Vanessa dancing. “I hope so.” He said this quickly, without thinking. He blinked in surprise at himself.

  Toby told me that he’d meet me outside; he wanted to use the bathroom. We’d walk across the bridge and uptown together, like old times. I went outside to wait and I found the last of a pack of Camels at the bottom of my purse and I leaned against the façade of Seth’s building and lit one.

  I watched a couple go by, burrowing into each other so that they were nearly facing each other but still walking forward, like on the cover of that Bob Dylan album. I pitied them. I saw the girl in the couple, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-four, and I knew now that in a few years, that girl would be just some guy’s wife. She would be someone her husband referred to as angry—as angry and dour and a nag. He would wonder where her worship went; he would wonder where her smiles were. He would wonder why she never broke out in laughter; why she never wore lingerie; why her underwear, once lacy and dangerous, was now cotton and white; why she didn’t like it from behind anymore; why she never got on top. The sacred organism of the marriage—the thing that prevented him from opening up to his friends about his marital woes—would be the last thing to go. The fortress where they kept their secrets would begin to crack, and he would push water through those cracks when he would begin to confide in his friends. He would get enough empathy and nods of understanding so that he would begin to wonder exactly what he had to gain from remaining with someone so bitter, someone who no longer appreciated him for who he was, and life’s too short, man, life’s too short. He would divorce her and what these divorces were all about was a lack of forgiveness: She would not forgive him for not being more impressed by her achievements than inhibited by his own sensitivities; he would not forgive her for being a star that shone so brightly that he couldn’t see his own reflection in the mirror anymore. But also, divorce is about forgetfulness—a decision to stop remembering the moment before all the chaos—the moment they fell in love, the moment they knew they were more special together than apart. Marriages live in service to the memory of those moments. Their marriage would not forgive them for getting older, and they would not forgive their marriage for witnessing it. This guy would sit with his friends and he would not be able to figure out how all this went so wrong. But she would know; I would know.

  When Rachel and I were little girls, we had been promised by a liberated society that had almost ratified the Equal Rights Amendment that we could do anything we wanted. We were told that we could be successful, that there was something particular and unique about us and that we could achieve anything—the last vestiges of girls being taught they were special mingled with the first ripples of second-wave feminism. All that time, even as a sixth-grader, I remembered thinking that it seemed weird that teachers and parents were just allowed to say that, and that they’d say it in front of the boys and the boys didn’t seem to mind. Even back then I knew that the boys tolerated it because it was so clear that it wasn’t true. It was like those T-shirts all my daughter’s friends were wearing to school now, the ones that said THE FUTURE IS FEMALE in big block letters. How they march around in broad daylight in shirts like that. But the only reason it’s tolerated is that everyone knows it’s just a lie we tell to girls to make their marginalization bearable. They know that eventually the girls will be punished for their futures, so they let them wear their dumb message shirts now.

  Rachel and I, we’d been raised to do what we wanted to do, and we had; we’d been successful, and we’d shown everyone. We didn’t need to wear apocryphal T-shirts because we already knew the secret, which was this: that when you did succeed, when you did outearn and outpace, when you did exceed all expectations, nothing around you really shifted. You still had to tiptoe around the fragility of a man, which was okay for the women who got to shop and drink martinis all day—this was their compensation; they had done their own negotiations—but was absolutely intolerable for anyone who was out there working and getting respect and becoming the person that others had to tiptoe around. That these men could be so delicate, that they could lack any inkling of self-examination when it came time to try to figure out why their women didn’t seem to be batshit enthusiastic over another night of bolstering and patting and fellating every insecurity out of them—this was the thing we’d find intolerable.

  I got something else—I got to live in a constant fog of regret and ambivalence. The fog made me directionless, until one day, I found myself scrolling through stupid Facebook, whose passive stream gave me room to wonder, and I thought: How could I find my way back to a moment where my life wasn’t a flood of obligations but an endless series of choices, each one designed to teach me something about existence and the world as opposed to marring me for life? At some point, I didn’t remember when, I had taken all my freedom and independence, and pushed them across the poker table at Adam and said, “Here, take my jackpot. Take it all. I don’t need it anymore. I won’t miss it ever.”

  I was about to sign off. It was too depressing to no longer be able to fantasize about what became of people and instead know they ended up just like you—fat and typical and suburban and boring. I was about to delete my whole fucking account, when suddenly a notification popped up over my friend request icon, and I saw it was from Larry Feldman, my first boyfriend (my first a lot of things) from eighth grade.

  He was my first obsession, too: spin the bottle, seven minutes in heaven, then the lights just went out permanently and he fumbled for me everywhere. I was driven crazy by lust that day and for the weeks that followed. During the week I saw him pass outside my classroom on the way to the bathroom and I’d get a pass and track him like a wolf, but I could never find him. On weekends, he’d show up at the same party or same movie theater and my eyelids would lower halfway and my breathing would become shallow. It all happened so fast. Larry FastPassed me to adulthood in a way that made me ashamed and afraid. Before I got used to the kissing, his hand was on my shirt. Before I got used to that, it went underneath it onto my bra. Then under my bra. Then outside my pants. Then he tried to put his hands down my pants, but it was that year that girls wore loose pants and leggings underneath them. He couldn’t navigate through. He couldn’t figure out in the tiny spurts of time we had before a parent came in what was pant and what was underwear, and so I went home and drowned in my own hormones.

  Sitting at my computer, the new friend request icon alive on my navigation bar, I felt something alive in me that hadn’t been there moments ago—unsettledness, itchiness. Anything was better than this fucking suburb, with its ample space and a bathroom for every member of the family. I clicked Accept, and almost immediately there was a new private message for me. There was excitement in my tissue. I thought of my high school friend who’d recently left her husband—completely blindsided him, to hear him tell it—for her college boyfriend, whom she’d reconnected with on Facebook. “I feel like I’m me again,” she told me. I thought about what it might feel like to feel like me again.

  I clicked on the message.

  LARRY: I don’t know if you remember me, but we were in school together? Like 8th grade?

  So it was going to be like this. You touched my virgin body until you owned it and you don’t know if I remember.

  ME: Of course I remember you.

  LARRY: I think about you a lot.

  Whoa. I had been hoping fo
r some subtext, a polite conversation with the stinky air of teenage shenanigans about it. He was going right for it.

  ME: You do? That’s weird.

  LARRY: I think about how warm your vajayjay was.

  I slammed down my laptop and tried to swallow a dry heave.

  Later that afternoon, before the kids came home, I opened my laptop up again with a finger, like it had a disease. I poked around Larry Feldman’s page. He had a daughter, it looked like. He still lived in the same Long Island suburb that my father had lived in. It didn’t appear that he’d ever been married, but it was hard to tell. Most of his pictures were car selfies, taken with him slack-mouthed and dazed like he was figuring out the technology on his phone and had somehow programmed it to immediately post to Facebook without any human quality control measures. I unfriended him, and I felt immediately repulsed by all of it—by men, by aging, by humanity, by my disgusting needs.

  And that was how I felt when my kids came home and then Adam came home, and that was how I felt when the phone rang later that night, and I saw Toby Fleishman’s name on the screen, and I picked up the phone and listened. He told me he was sorry it had been so long. He told me he was divorcing Rachel. He told me he missed me. Yes, I thought. Yes, this is my youth, not that dipshit Larry. I wasn’t who I am in eighth grade. I was who I am later, in college.

  I went to see Toby. Then again. Then again. Then Seth was there. And it was so nice to never have to explain who I was; it was so nice being a better-than-average manifestation of who they’d expected me to become. I spent more and more time with them, and every time, I would come home a little more unmoored, a little more adrift. Those nights, Adam, always so passive and compliant, would watch me undress and try to gauge who exactly was getting into bed with him—his wife, or the creature I’d been for the last few months.

  That summer, I treated poor Adam like a roommate. I came home late. I ordered Chinese food for dinner again and again. He mentioned once that I was ordering Chinese a lot and so I ordered Thai. I dared him in the mornings to ask me questions so that I could tell him about how I didn’t know how to live anymore. God, I wanted to say, how are you supposed to live like this, knowing you used to answer to no one? How is this the arc we set for ourselves as a successful life? But he’d never understand that. He had the life he wanted. So did I. And yet. And yet and yet and yet and yet and yet.

  What were you going to do? Were you not going to get married when your husband was the person who understood you and loved you and rooted for you forever, no matter what? Were you not going to have your children, whom you loved and who made all the collateral damage (your time, your body, your lightness, your darkness) worth it? Time was going to march on anyway. You were not ever going to be young again. You were only at risk for not remembering that this was as good as it would get, in every single moment—that you are right now as young as you’ll ever be again. And now. And now. And now and now and now.

  How could we not impugn marriage, then? It becomes so intertwined with your quality of life, as one of the only institutions operating constantly throughout every other moment of your existence, that the person you are married to doesn’t stand a chance. You hold hands while you’re walking down the street when you’re happy, you turn away icily to stare out the window as the car goes over the bridge when you’re not, and exactly none of this has anything to do with that person’s behavior. It has to do with how you feel about yourself, and the person closest to you gets mistaken for the circumstance and you think, Maybe if I excised this thing, I’d be me again. But you’re not you anymore. That hasn’t been you in a long time. It’s not his fault. It just happened. It was always going to just happen.

  But Toby was right. I was loved. I was loved by a man who had no questions about me. I saw that even if passivity was Adam’s first response, it was kindness that was his second. We were different that way. All Adam ever wanted was his independence taken away. All he wanted was to love me back. And what did I want instead? What was so much better than stability and the love of a good person who rooted for you? We fall in love and we decide to marry in this one incredible moment, and what if everything that happens after that is about trying to remember that moment? We watch ourselves and our spouses change, and the work is to constantly recall the reasons you did this in the first place. Why is that honorable, to live in service of a moment you have to constantly work so hard to remember?

  I did want it. Or I wanted it mostly. Or I wanted it in the background. Or I was bored. Or my personal hierarchy of need had advanced to the point where once you question the necessity of the stable marriage, the only way to go is down. Or I was just destined to be a miserable person, no matter what marital state I was in. Or New Jersey is a place that people choose very often over New York and I should just get over it. Or I just wanted some independence and some time alone to watch whatever I wanted on television without being judged. Or I wanted my abdomen to look less like a topographical map of Sarajevo. Or I wanted to understand how to live a life that I was not the star of, to learn to recede into the background and be what my children needed from me and every time I came close I felt a vast abyss and ran in the opposite direction. Or I wanted to feel relevant again, like I mattered. Or everyone else could hear a U2 song from her youth and smoke a cigarette and not lose her life to nostalgia for a time that probably sucked just as badly as now did. Or all I had was a brief midlife crisis, maybe not so different from Rachel, and even our midlife crises had to be confined—hers in search of one good night’s sleep and a man who wasn’t threatened by her existence, and mine having to outsource my own unhappiness in service of something that looked like helpfulness to an old friend but was actually neglect of the family I’d opted into voluntarily.

  You can’t fix this, I realized. Even our crises had to be small and polite. What I did was forgivable; what Rachel did was unacceptable. But ultimately it was the same for us both: The world diminished a woman from the moment she stopped being sexually available to it, and there was nothing to do but accept that and grow older.

  The problem with Toby, I thought now, as I smoked my cigarette, was that he’d ended up with Rachel because all he wanted was someone not crazy. That was his mission statement. He said it all the time. All this time he was allergic to the girls he thought were crazy. Even me. Even me! I watched Toby in his young twenties reject everyone who seemed like anything outside of totally conventional, and that was how he’d ended up with Rachel, who he thought was normal. And yes, if you believe his version, she was a vile kind of ex-wife (all ex-wives are vile, to hear it), but she was also someone who had been driven crazy. Maybe it was the insult of childbirth. Maybe it was the overwhelming unfairness of what happens to a woman’s status and body and position in the culture once she’s a mother. All those things can drive you crazy if you’re a smart person. If you are a smart woman, you cannot stand by and remain sane once you fully understand, as a smart person does, the constraints of this world on a woman. I couldn’t bear it. I saw it too clearly and so I retreated from it. Rachel, she endured. She tried. And she got the punishment.

  But it didn’t matter. It wasn’t my problem. I realized that in one big exhale of delicious nicotine, leaning against Seth’s building. None of this was my problem. My family was my problem. My roiling—it would have to wait so that my family could feel safe and loved. They were loved. They were safe with me. What was I doing here? Leaning against the outside of the building, smoking, waiting for my friend? It was time to go home.

  I thought of Adam. His face. His hands. How he could spend hours down a rabbit hole of information about something dumb, like a certain kind of garden weed or a certain kind of aircraft. Adam who was the best-case scenario in an incredibly flawed system. Suddenly, my face warmed. I felt jealous for Adam’s summer. I wanted every minute with him. It wasn’t too late, was it? I’d chosen this. I’d stood under a chuppah and asked for this, I had! I
was loved, just like Toby had said I was. I was loved. I would still choose this. The crack that I had opened up in our fortress could be repaired before too much else got in.

  So I would go home and would wedge myself back into my life. I would wonder, globally, how you could be so desperately unhappy when you were so essentially happy. I would start to try again. I would sit next to my children while they watched inane television shows and I would smell their heads and allow the hormones inherent to motherhood to wash through me. I would try to find peace with my regular life. Or maybe I would one day see that the regularness was actually quite extraordinary. I would try. I would wonder what exactly it would take to make me something more like content. I would admit to finding small joys with the other women in my neighborhood who were in their forties and all felt like exiles of relevance, too. I would try to be a good wife to Adam, and I would try not to put too much weight on the moments that are the worst in marriage: when one of you is in a good mood and the other can’t recognize it or rise to its occasion and so leaves the other dangling in the loneliness of it; when one of you pretends to not really understand what the other person is saying and instead holds that person to a technicality they don’t deserve.

  I would maybe learn to cook. Or take a cake decorating class. I would allow myself to become a little more neutered. I would stop fighting it all so much. What would be so wrong with finally mellowing out? What was I clinging to? I would go to the exercise studio down the block, and I would take that dance class the other moms from school took, where we danced to songs that had once, many years ago, broken our hearts and set us on fire. The songs reminded us that we were once young—that once, we didn’t have to pay a twenty-dollar fee to dance—we didn’t even need to be led in it. Once upon a time, we just knew how to do it. Now we channel all the sex and all the hope and all that was left undone into a cha-cha-cha, or a figure eight of the hips that once didn’t have to be told to swivel. The teacher would play a jacked-up version of the cheez-whiz top 40 songs from high school and college and we would all laugh. But those songs would dig at a pathway to our youth, and so at the end, during the cooldown, when the teacher played the Eagle-Eye Cherry song or the Sade song, now our bodies were moving more slowly, lumpen, leaden, and we would see just exactly what they had become: people trying to remember something but not quite able to.