This Time Tomorrow

by Emma Straub

It was just that many neighborhoods of Leonard’s body were falling apart in a great, unified chorus: his heart, his kidneys, his liver. Alice understood now, as she never truly had before, how the body was a Rube Goldberg machine, and every time one domino or lever got knocked sideways, the whole thing would stop.

There were so many kinds of rich people in New York City. Alice was an expert, but not because she wanted to be; it was like being raised bilingual, only one of the languages was money. One rule of thumb was that the harder it was to tell where someone’s money came from, the more of it they had.

The leaves of every tree in Central Park shimmered in the last gasp of sunlight. People who didn’t love New York could just fuck all the way off. Look at this place! Look at these benches, at these cobblestones, at these taxicabs and horses side by side! Whatever happened, she had this.

There were so many customs, so many codes, so many habits. Teenage girls’ skeletons were half bones and half secrets that only other teenage girls knew.

What a very long time one had to be an adult, after rushing through childhood and adolescence. There should be several more distinctions: the idiocy of the young twenties, when one was suddenly expected to know how to do adult things; the panicked coupling of the mid- and late twenties, when marriages happened as quickly as a game of tag; the sitcom mom period, when you finally had enough food in your freezer to survive for a month if necessary; the school principal period, when you were no longer seen as a woman at all but just a vague nagging authority figure. If you were lucky, there was the late-in-life sexy Mrs. Robinson period, or an accomplished and powerful Meryl Streep period, followed, of course, by approximately two decades of old-crone-hood, like the woman at the end of Titanic.

Central Park wasn’t made for exercise. It was made for this, for tucking away into a shady grove of trees and sitting on a bench. It was made for low voices and secret affairs. The size of the park—840 acres, she’d had to memorize it for a middle school project—sounded antithetical to intimacy, but that’s what it was, intimate. There were hidden pockets at every turn, as many corners of privacy and quiet as there were of Rollerblading showboats and people breakdancing for tourists. Alice loved the park—loved that there was something so glorious, so seemingly endless, that belonged to her as much as it belonged to anyone else.

The whole place smelled terrible, like the cumulative regret of a thousand strangers with a soupçon of vomit and Lysol.

Only place regret is mentioned

Maybe that was the trick to life: to notice all the tiny moments in the day when everything else fell away and, for a split second, or maybe even a few seconds, you had no worries, only pleasure, only appreciation of what was right in front of you. Transcendental meditation, maybe, but with hot dogs and the knowledge that everything would change, the good and the bad, and so you might as well appreciate the good.

People changed and they didn’t. People evolved and they didn’t. Alice imagined a graph that showed how much people’s personalities shifted after high school on one axis and on the other, how many miles away from home they had moved. It was easy to stay the same when you were looking at the same walls. Layered on top would be how easy your life was along the way, how many levels of privilege surrounded you like a tiny glass object in a sea of packing peanuts.

Alice just wanted to push her hands against the walls of her life and see if they would move. She wanted to hit the reset button over and over again until everyone was happy, forever.

Maybe that was the key—telling people exactly what you wanted, the actual truth, and then getting out of the way.

Marriage was clearly all about compromise, and parenthood so much about sacrifice, but like everything else that was difficult and unappealing, those conditions were much easier to stomach the sooner they were introduced.

The steadiness of the city was keeping her upright. New York City could handle any personal crisis—it had always seen worse.

Mothering seemed like downhill skiing, or cooking elaborate meals from scratch—sure, anyone could learn how to do it, but it was much easier for the people who had seen other people do it first, and well, from a very young age.

but that was New York, watching every place you’d kissed or cried, every place you loved, turn into something else.

“God, being pregnant is like always being hungover. I am always thirsty, and I always have to pee, and I never want to get up to go to the bathroom.”

Even when she hadn’t told her, the concept of it was still there, deep in their brains—no one who loved Keanu Reeves could avoid time travel for long.

But we’re also both humans, you know, with different baggage about different shit. The things that drive me crazy about him might not drive someone else crazy. But it’s a choice—still. We’ve been married for fifteen years. But I still have to choose it. That doesn’t stop.”

Once you had proof of the sudden cruelty of life, how could you ever relax? How could you just let things happen?

Happy endings were too much for some people, false and cheap, but hope—hope was honest. Hope was good.