Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

How much did you invest in a rental, though? You wanted to feel at home, but it really wasn’t your home. And yet you’d only feel at home if you made it your home.

He wasn’t the most handsome guy in our office, but he was the one who telegraphed a kind of stability that I was boring enough to find sexy.

“She still doesn’t have a phone?” Roxanne asked. “Toby, the girl needs a phone!” She said that last thing in some kind of mockery or imitation of something, like a Groucho Marx voice. He remembered that Rachel had once said about Roxanne that she could only confront people or ask for something if she was doing a weird voice.

Toby’s mother had always told him, “There’s only room for one star in every relationship.”

At work, he was able to sit with his patients, knowing that this was not a stepping-stone for his life but life itself.

He would never marry again. Marriage was for idiots. It was a bygone solution to a property problem he didn’t have. It was a social construct invented by religious people (whose other values he mostly rejected) whose participants lived not past age thirty at the time it was implemented.

He knew on an animal level the sounds and feelings of that place, both when it was occupied and when it wasn’t.

That was what I knew for sure, that this was the only way to get someone to listen to a woman—to tell her story through a man;

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

Even our crises had to be small and polite.

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.

And also in that moment he thought about the fact that things crept along incrementally, which was why change was hard to see.