Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

They said all the things I wasn’t allowed to say aloud without fear of appearing grandiose or self-centered or conceited or narcissistic. I imposed my narrative onto theirs, like in one of those biology textbooks where you can place the musculature picture over the bone picture of the human body. I wrote about my problems through them. 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; Trojan horse yourself into a man, and people would give a shit about you. So I wrote heartfelt stories about their lives, extrapolating from what they gave me and running with what I already knew from being human. They sent me texts and flowers that told me I really understood them in a way that no one had before, and I realized that all humans are essentially the same, but only some of us, the men, were truly allowed to be that without apology. The mens’ humanity was sexy and complicated; ours (mine) was to be kept in the dark at the bottom of the story and was only interesting in the service of the man’s humanity.

Had he ever really taken a moment to appreciate the dusk? He loved it. He loved everything right then. He looked out onto the world and was so excited about the number of dusks that lay ahead of him. He wanted to use every single one of them well. He wanted to spend each one of them with only people he loved. He wanted to run to the camp upstate right this instant and take his children outside their bunks and apologize for all the wasted twilights. He wanted to pick each child up and spin them around. He wanted to tell them that if they miss a twilight, not to worry, it will always come again. He wanted to show them that this was how he was naturally, not the mopey jerk they’d seen lately, not the person who stopped believing in potential and excitement and surprise. He would remember this moment and he would become himself again. Poor Toby in all those other block universes. Poor Toby who was still just figuring it out. This Toby knew. This Toby couldn’t believe his incredible fortune, to have this many twilights lying in front of him, and all the bad ones behind him.

He never stopped wondering what she was getting out of it. He did not know if there had ever been a time when someone had done something just to make him feel good, so when it happened, when it was finally happening, he could barely understand what was going on.

He brought Bubbles upstairs, and he opened the apartment and said, “Here it is, little guy. This is your home now.” He could not have told you why, but he spent the next ten minutes hugging the dog and crying into his fur.

anyone who has ever been to just one session of couples therapy could tell you that beyond your point of view lies an abyss with a bubbling cauldron of fire, and that just beyond that abyss lies your spouse’s point of view.

He never would be comforted by the adage “God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle” after that. Because what is the metric of handling something? Not killing yourself?

“He should have gotten kicked out, not me.”

SETH WAS WEARING a suit. He’d been interviewing for a new job, but the job was a start-up and it was owned by women, and by the time he got to lunch, he was going on about all the PC crap he couldn’t bear. “They wanted to know how I could help make the company intersectional,” he said when Toby sat down. “What does that even mean? Intersection of what? Money and money? That I can do.”

This is what happened when an entire field of medicine was as disrespected as psychologists. They made their own rules, and one of them was that nobody was allowed to have a breakdown during August, and the other was that this was fucking Europe and they got to take a whole month off from work.

“And what do you have to show for it? Look at them. They climb onto their boards, and they fall right down. It’s so sad. Even the ones that make it a few feet, where does it get them?” “They’re doing it for the pleasure of doing it.” “I can’t imagine ever doing something just for the pleasure of doing it.” “Uh, last night seemed to be an exception to this rule.” “Even that. Even that, you’re having sex with your husband to solidify something. Even sex isn’t something you do just to do. You do it to prove something, or to build closeness.” “I don’t. I do it because I love you.” She thought about this, her fingers lightly brushing his leg hair back and forth. “You have really great calves,” she’d said. “Don’t objectify me,” he’d said. “They’re really, I don’t know, manly. They turn me on.” “Think you might find a purpose to reenter the bed chamber over there with me?” “I’ll come up with something.”

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.

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.”

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.

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

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

But they had shared values that they’d agreed upon. Rachel told Toby one night, whispering under the covers in her tiny dorm bed, all about her school and Catherine H. and tennis and that phone call. She said she never wanted to put children through that. He said, “I won’t ever let it happen.” He was talking about emotional support. She was talking about financial support. Maybe they hadn’t agreed after all.

“I never misrepresented myself,” he’d say. That was a favorite, as if people weren’t supposed to evolve and change and make requests of each other to bend and grow and expand.

Toby adjusted his schedule to be home a little early to relieve Mona, the babysitter. He stood back and allowed her to try for this big thing she wanted to do. She did it, not out of bravery, but out of two parts no choice and three parts because to see Matt Klein again would have been to commit a failure she couldn’t have come back from.

he didn’t adjust his expectations of her, or leave room for how tired she could get or how harried or busy. He loved taking those long walks. No matter how late they were, he wanted to walk. Across the park, across the city. She kept trying to explain to him that time functioned in units. For all his love of physics, he never quite grasped that one: If you use this time to walk to dinner that is thirty-five blocks away instead of letting me finish this email in a cab on the way there, I will be finishing the email at the table. The email isn’t optional. The email is the entire thing. “Some people would say that it all could wait,” he’d say.

An actor’s deal got done in a week or two and that was that. She wouldn’t know if this whole Hannah and Solly thing worked out until she died and nothing bad had happened yet.

Hannah wanted to talk about why she didn’t have a phone and Solly wanted to play Uno and Toby wanted her to stare at him adoringly and listen to endless, endless stories about liver diagnoses. She knew so much about that disgusting organ, she could have diagnosed at least four or five major and rare diseases.

Here’s how it would go every night: HER: I’m home! HIM: You’ll never believe what happened today and how screwed/ignored/underestimated I was. HER: Let’s talk about it! Let me just say hi to the kids and answer these texts, because I have a premiere tonight…. HIM: You never care about me. HER: What? How can you say that? HIM: Listen to you. You’re barely here. You’re barely a mother. HER: Did you hear the part where I have a premiere? Did you not hear the part where I want to say hi to the kids? HIM: I can’t bear your anger anymore.

She would wake up in the morning and walk out the door with Toby and the kids and before she headed in the direction away from school, she would hear the doorman talk about what a hero Toby was for taking his own children to school. She would bump into one of the teachers from school and the teacher would say, “It’s so amazing the way your husband drops them off every morning.” She wanted to say, “Isn’t it amazing how I pay the fucking mortgage? Isn’t it amazing how my children have schedules that are more complex than the president’s and that they’ll graduate from elementary school prepared for three or four careers that you need a graduate degree for? Isn’t it amazing the role model I am for my children?” The teachers would call her a working mom, and somehow that was insulting even as it was true. Maybe because it was such a rarity in the school. Maybe because it applied an asterisk to her name and seemed to be an explanation for why she was falling short.

Toby liked his work so much. At least he said he did. But at some point, he forgot that what she did allowed him to do what he wanted to do. He forgot that their careers were symbiotic and he instead made their misery symbiotic: Her success was the reason for his failure. Not that he was an actual failure, but he certainly hadn’t gotten as far in life as he could have. Somewhere, deep down, he had chosen her because he knew that meant he could do what he wanted with his life and not be obligated to do anything exclusively for money. And somewhere deep down, maybe she chose him because she knew that absent the hunger he clearly didn’t have, she would be permitted to be the animal she always was.

Toby never wondered why she was angry. He just hated her for being so.

Now all he wanted was to go to therapy. But she’d been to therapy with him. He wanted to scream and throw things outside of therapy, and then he wanted to go to therapy and sit and be reasonable. She wanted to know, if you could be reasonable in the first place, why wouldn’t you always be reasonable so you didn’t have to go to couples therapy?

it was Hannah she saw as she considered a full-scale evaluation of her life. Hannah used to beg her to be a class mom or a lunchtime volunteer server, and how could she do things like that? Even for a day? She couldn’t chaperone the overnight trip to Washington. Even for a night? She couldn’t even pack a lunch for trip days. “I don’t do it,” she would tell Hannah. “But I make sure it gets done.” “I wish you did it,” Hannah would say. Rachel didn’t ask what the difference was because she knew what it was. You have to remember that Rachel didn’t have a mother.

Sweatpants! Now these were something. She had always been so dismissive of sweatpants, but had she ever really allowed herself to try them? The way they formed warm hugs around your legs while you walked. The way their friction slowed you. All the leggings ever did was enable movement. Had anyone considered that this feeling—of moving through clay—was much preferred?

dark matter, which is a substance they know nothing about but that seems to bind objects in space into some kind of rhythm with each other. You can see the objects, but you can’t see the dark matter. The dark matter is the mystery, and yet everything depends on it—you can’t see it, but it drives everything into motion. “What was your favorite part, Dad?” Solly asked as they left. “I liked how he said that wherever you were in space, it felt like you were the center. I really related to that.” “Like as a planet?” Toby laughed. “I liked the fact that you can’t even see the thing that’s most important,” Solly said. “That’s just crazy.” “What did you like, Hannah?” “I liked that it was over.” “Come on,” Toby said. “I didn’t like the dark matter part. I feel like you can’t just decide something must exist because everything’s reacting to it. You can’t just give it a name and hope it’s true.” “But maybe the objects are just behaving in a way we don’t understand. Maybe nothing is making them act that way but themselves.”

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.