I'm Fine and Neither Are You

SEVEN

After Matt left, I drank my second glass of wine in two gulps. Then I told Sanjay what Matt had said and fled to the bathroom, where I cried with the faucet running for fear I would wake the kids or somehow suggest to Sanjay that he should come in and comfort me. Comfort would have its place. For the time being I didn’t want to be touched or talked to. I wanted to be what I was: alone.

When I had dehydrated and depleted myself, I trudged to the bedroom, left my dress in a pile on the floor, and crawled into bed in my bra and underwear. Sanjay, who had already moved the kids back to their rooms, was lying there stiffly with his arms at his sides.

“I really had no idea,” he said.

“Yeah, me neither.” I was just trying to be matter-of-fact, but the words shot out like spears, punctuating the air with my anger.

Wasn’t it early to start cycling through the stages of grief? Not to mention completely inappropriate to feel angry, given how tragic this situation was?

But I was angry. I was so angry that I wanted to scream. How could Jenny have kept so much from me? I could have helped her.

Suddenly I understood why Matt said what he’d said earlier, because I was having the exact same thought: I could have prevented this.

“I’m really sorry, Penny,” said Sanjay.

He slipped his left hand beneath the duvet and reached out for me. I let his fingers rest on my wrist for a few seconds before flipping onto my stomach. “Thanks,” I said into the pillow. “Good night.”

“Pen . . . ,” he said softly.

I did not respond.

There had been a time when I would have clung to him like the mast of a boat in a squall, and he would have pulled me even closer and kept me safe.

But something between us had shifted over the course of our marriage, particularly the last two to three years. We had gone from being lovers to best friends to . . . roommates who routinely irritated each other. If I was honest with myself, that was what it felt like most of the time.

Stress was part of the reason we were slowly self-imploding; that I knew. Simply figuring out the logistics of any given week was enough to send my blood pressure soaring—and that was before I tore open the quarterly statement for our retirement account and was reminded we had saved roughly one-tenth of the recommended amount for a couple on the cusp of forty who didn’t want to work until they were both a hundred and three. As such, I wasn’t always a peach to live with. In response, he wielded his sarcasm like a weapon.

There was a bigger issue, though: most days I had the sense that, while I was frantically dog-paddling to keep our family afloat, Sanjay was sailing by. Our short-term agreement had morphed into an indefinite arrangement: after Miles began preschool, Sanjay had applied for a few jobs at local publications and an arts organization but hadn’t received a single callback. He hadn’t minded, though, because after years of dabbling, he had decided to pursue a freelance writing career in earnest.

That was nearly three years earlier, and while he had just a handful of bylined stories, things were looking up in terms of the number of assignments he received.

But as he’d gotten increasingly engrossed in his writing, my husband had become markedly less involved in our household. I had waited so long for him to find something to replace what would have been his medical career that I didn’t want to dissuade him from sticking to his Official Career Plan—even if I wished I, too, could stay home to write all day. I didn’t want a sink full of dishes to be the reason he didn’t land a feature in, say, the New York Times .

I loved Sanjay. I felt fortunate to have a husband who was happy to be home with his wife and kids. And maybe that’s why, while I was happy to complain and yes, occasionally nitpick, I never said the truth outright, even to Jenny: Sometimes I deeply resented him. Sometimes I wondered if I had it in me to maintain our status quo for even one more year, say nothing of a lifetime.

But even more than I wanted my husband to chip in, both financially and around the house, I wanted a peaceful home for my family. (And let’s face it—for myself.) So instead of yelling, I rolled up my sleeves and finished the pots and pans and then ran to the market to buy eggs and milk. I kept my lips zipped about just how heavily life had been weighing on me lately.

I had told Jenny almost everything. But maybe if I had skipped the almost part of that statement and said, “My marriage is drowning me,” she would have opened up fully and completely to me, too.

Then maybe I could have saved her.

A few minutes later, the rhythm of Sanjay’s breathing slowed and his leg began to twitch.

I stared at our lumpy ceiling, half wishing to be crushed by falling plaster. Sometime later I was still alive and awake, so I got out of bed, went downstairs, and poured myself another glass of wine.

Then I sat on the counter in my bra and underwear, drinking in the dark and thinking about the last time I had seen Jenny.

It had been a Sunday afternoon, just four days earlier, and I was there to pick Miles up from his playdate with Cecily. I had knocked, and Jenny, as usual, had hollered for me to come in.

I found her in the kitchen, dropping raw chicken thighs into a large ceramic glazed pot. Like the rest of her kitchen, the pot was white.

“Sorry. I’m a disaster,” she said, looking over her shoulder from the stove.

I laughed. “You look great.”

“I don’t. But can you do me the biggest favor?”

“Anything.”

“My phone is next to the bread bin. Will you grab it and get a few shots of me? I’m attempting a chicken and shallots dish that I want to run as a feature. But as Tiana reminded me this morning, she doesn’t do Sundays,” she said, referring to her assistant, who had a minor in photography and usually played paparazzi while Jenny went about the parts of her life that she chronicled on her website.

“Easy,” I said. Jenny was more cute than beautiful—she had glossy brown hair that she had recently cut just so at her shoulders, and a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her nose that made you look right at her bright-brown eyes—and if anything, this made her especially photogenic. (Approachable was the term people often used to describe her particular brand of pretty.) Though I was no photography wiz, she had taught me enough about composition that I knew one of the images I snapped would work.

“You’re the best,” she said. “Don’t zoom in on my face. Do we need to move anything?”

The kitchen island was a mess: shallot skins discarded at random, a splatter of tomato paste not yet wiped from the marble, sprigs of an herb I couldn’t identify strewn about. It was unlike Jenny to leave even a few grains of salt in her wake, but I didn’t think anything of it then. No one could be perfect all the time, and anyway, the other counters were pristine.

“We’re good,” I said as I unlocked her phone by pressing the number seven until the screen changed. I opened the camera and directed it at the pot; Jenny had taught me that pictures looked more authentic when the person being photographed was slightly off to one side. On Jenny’s site, only Cecily was allowed to serve as the visual center of photos because Jenny took those herself, and as she said, what mother would fail to home in on her own child?

“Smile with your eyes,” I said, and then she laughed because that was what she always said when she took pictures of me. I pressed the photo button again and again, moving from one end of the kitchen island to the other in an attempt to capture a deliberate moment in a whimsical and unscripted way.

“There’s a nice Sancerre in the fridge if you want some,” she said when I was done. She had left the stove and was washing her hands in the sink. “The recipe called for some white. I would hate to waste the rest of a decent bottle.”

“Like I can say no to that.” Sanjay had taken Stevie out grocery shopping. I still needed to get the kids ready for their first week of camp, check our bank account balance, go through my inbox, and get a head start on a memo for a midday meeting the following day. But it had been a while since I’d had a glass of good wine, and I wasn’t ready to deal with the fit Miles would probably throw when I tried to pull him away from Cecily and her Legos.

The scent of a meadow wafted up at me as I poured the straw-colored wine into a glass. “Mmm,” I said as I took a sip. “This is nice. Thank you.”

Jenny pulled a wooden spoon from a drawer and began pushing the chicken around in its sauce. “My pleasure.”

“What’s Matt up to?”

“Oh,” she said, peering into the pot. She sniffed at the chicken and then said, “He’s home this week.”

“That’s good.”

She put a lid on the pot. “Did I tell you Sonia asked me to sit on the board of the Children’s Literacy Society?”

“No. Huh.” Sonia had recently come into money—so much money that even Jenny’s eyes grew wide when we discussed it, and she had been raised to want for nothing. Sonia’s grandfather had accumulated a great fortune, and she and her brother were his only surviving heirs. Sonia claimed the inheritance wouldn’t change anything, but she had quietly stopped working and joined a tennis league as well as the boards of what seemed to be every other charity in town. I hadn’t seen much of her lately. “Will you do it?” I asked Jenny.

“It’s important work.”

“Kids do need to read,” I quipped, though Stevie’s struggles had been anything but funny.

Jenny had begun cleaning off the island. “They have a really lovely signature event in the fall—Matt and I attended a few years ago. So that would be nice. But Sonia warned that it’s a major time commitment. I need to find out how much time exactly.”

“Are there ways to get involved that don’t involve sitting on the board?” I asked, as much for myself as for Jenny. Dipping a toe into children’s literature—in some capacity, even if I couldn’t find the energy to actually write out my ideas—had been one of my New Year’s resolutions. The year was closing in fast and I had not taken a single step toward my goal. But maybe volunteering would be a good way to make progress, and reconnect with Sonia in the process.     PrevNextTip: You can use left and right keyboard keys to browse between pages.

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