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Toby remembered Rachel telling him that parents who sub out y’s for i’s in the middle of their girls’ names, and vice versa at the end, are not giving their daughters much of a chance in the world.
He looked across the room to her at that party, and she looked back at him and smiled. So much time had passed since then, and yet that was Rachel for him. He had spent so many years in the service of trying to relocate that Rachel within the Rachel that she kept proving herself to be. But even now, it was that version of Rachel that was the first that ever came to mind when he thought of her. He felt he would be doing worlds better if it weren’t.
He wasn’t an idiot. He just wanted regular, silly things in life, like stability and emotional support and a low-grade contentedness. Why couldn’t he just have regular, silly things?
As if the prospect of combing through New Yorkers looking for love weren’t its own existential nightmare. He had done this when he was younger, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he resolved it? Hadn’t he ended this bullshit by getting married?
It was that he couldn’t bear to be with anyone who didn’t yet truly understand consequences, how the world would have its way with you despite all your careful life planning. There was no way to learn that until you lived it. There was no way for any of us to learn that until we lived it.
The lesson? Fill out the form, even when it fills you with dread. The other lesson? Go with what you want instead of what you are supposed to want.
was now what was called a stay-at-home mother, a temporary occupation with no prospect of promotion that worked so hard to differentiate itself from job-working that it confined me to semantic house arrest, though certainly I was allowed to carpool and go to the store.
When I told people what I did, they’d say, “Being a mother is the hardest job there is.” But it wasn’t. The hardest job there was was being a mother and having an actual job, with pants and a commuter train pass and pens and lipstick.
No one had to tell me it was harder to have a job and be a mother. It was obvious. It was two full-time occupations. It’s just math. Because having a job made you no less of a mother; you still had to do all that shit, too.
(There were no dads’ nights out for my husband, because the supposition was that the men got to live life all the time, whereas we were caged animals who were sometimes allowed to prowl our local town bar and drink the blood of the free people.)
Sexual awakenings were not supposed to extend beyond what was merely an upgrade in enjoyment for men.
We should all be like the liver, he thought. We should all regenerate like this when we’re injured.
She liked working. It made sense to her. It bent to her will and her sense of logic. Motherhood was too hard.
It’s crazy that the friends you’re fondest of from your youth sometimes resemble people you would cross the street to avoid as an adult.
Or because his biggest fear was to be known and rejected, and the only way he could face the rejection that comes along with being human was to never let himself be known—that way, what was rejected wasn’t him at all, but a projection of him.
Dead was a diagnosis, and it was definitive. People knew about it. Its reputation preceded it. But illness—illness was a vast chasm of maybe. The patient and anyone who loved and needed the patient felt desperate, and there was a temptation to use your power as a doctor to make everything okay, or to allude to a future okayness of everything (in a malpractice-insurance-clad way) that would be totally acceptable and get you off the hook from a true confrontation of emotion until further down the line when things got too bad to ignore.
It was because I felt like the hotel, the city, the aloneness, these were times where I could feel my skin again; I could feel my body again. I existed again without context—without a stroller, without a man holding my hand.
Like every other woman in the world who has ever been told to calm down, Rachel had no idea how to behave.
Weekends were endless. If you needed to know the most disparate thing about Adam and me, it was that he loved them and I did not. I liked order and routine. Weekends were an abyss that was exactly long enough to stare back at me.
Whatever kind of woman you are, even when you’re a lot of kinds of women, you’re still always just a woman, which is to say you’re always a little bit less than a man.
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.
I realized that all humans are essentially the same, but only some of us, the men, were truly allowed to be that without apology.
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.
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
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
It hit her slowly, then all at once: Having a child was signing up for enduring her entire childhood all over again. How could no one tell her?
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.
