230 PM Sasha
When Sasha walked into the kitchen, she found Adam standing near the sink, cutting tomatoes into cubes.
Farther down along the counter, shucked corn was heaped on a cutting board, along with chopped cilantro and a block of feta cheese.
Sunlight turned the tile floor a brassy gold.
She smelled a briny, stale odor and thought, Ugh, fish.
“What are you doing with all that?” she asked.
Adam set down his knife and looked up from the tomatoes.
Sasha brought one arm across her stomach, holding it there like a shield.
She hadn’t planned to have a C-section, but Ethan was big, almost eleven pounds; the doctor who was there to deliver him had insisted on it.
He’d told Sasha that her hips weren’t exactly built for childbearing, and once the fog of the epidural had lifted and they had stitched her back up, she remembered spending an inordinate amount of time rehashing that comment, trying to decide if she was insulted or flattered by it.
The scar was mostly below her bikini line, and had faded from the angry red that it was at the beginning—she could barely see it now.
Still, she had started to feel self-conscious about it, especially around her friends who’d known her before she had it.
She thought of when she was a kid and went to the swimming pool with her parents.
All those other mothers, with tiny paunches and sagging breasts.
She wondered if that was what she had become to someone like Adam.
“I’m going to grill the corn, then shave it into a salad with the tomatoes, cilantro, feta, and maybe some green onions. What do you think?”
“Um…”
“Yes?”
“I don’t really like cilantro.”
“Since when?”
“Since I got pregnant with Ethan.”
“Really?”
“It happens sometimes. Your taste changes. Something to do with hormones, I guess.”
Adam scratched his wrist. “Okay. I can make some of it without the cilantro, if you want.”
“If it’s not too much trouble.”
“It’s not.”
“Then that would be great.”
She was thirty-four years old. It was annoying and high-maintenance, asking him to leave out the cilantro, and she knew that the adult thing to do would be to ask Adam if he needed any help.
For the last hour he had been in the kitchen.
She was reminded of when they all lived together in the apartment on Fifty-Seventh Street, and how she and Mia both would occasionally leave their dirty dishes in the sink, knowing full well that when they came into the kitchen the next morning, Adam would have cleaned them and put them away.
She always told herself that so much had changed since then, but maybe that wasn’t true at all—maybe it was the details that were different, while the fundamentals had stayed exactly the same.
She thought again of asking him what he needed, but in the end decided against it.
The truth was that Sasha was sick of doing things for other people.
So instead of dicing onions, she found an open bottle of Sancerre in the refrigerator and poured a glass of it.
Adam asked, “How’s Theo doing?”
“The same, more or less.”
“It seems like he’s in a better mood than the last time I saw him.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
Adam paused, the knife plunged halfway into a tomato.
“I don’t really know.”
Six months ago, the real estate development firm where Theo worked had gone bankrupt.
At the time he was managing a project on East Eighty-Eighth Street, a sixty-six-floor luxury condominium tower designed by a famously reclusive Dutch architect.
Already it had shot past its budget by millions of dollars and was a year behind schedule; the units also weren’t selling well.
Goldman Sachs had provided the construction loan, and once it became clear that the project was headed in the wrong direction, they recouped the money by cashing in on the personal guarantee the firm’s principals had made on the funds. The company was wiped out.
“I lost my job,” he’d said on the phone the day that it happened.
He was laughing, as if he had just understood a joke that he’d heard earlier in the day.
Ethan was three months old. Sasha was sitting on the floor, her long legs crossed, the baby in her lap.
“I mean, can you believe that? I just lost my job.”
At first he was relatively clearheaded about everything.
The company’s principals had overleveraged themselves on a handful of projects, and he had always thought the units were overpriced: if it wasn’t the Eighty-Eighth Street project that did it, then something else would have ended them.
He would take a few weeks off to regroup, then spruce up his LinkedIn profile and begin making phone calls.
There were things he wanted to get done around the apartment—paint Ethan’s bedroom, and regrout the primary bath.
They could put off hiring a nanny for a few months.
They’d save money while he interviewed for jobs.
But as time passed and as those jobs didn’t materialize, his focus became more singular.
If he had only done X, he would tell Sasha, then Y could have been avoided: in the end, maybe this was all his fault.
He started sleeping later and later into the morning.
He regarded Ethan with a blank, empty expression, and replied to every fourth question that Sasha asked.
One morning, when she left to take Ethan on a walk, Theo was lying on the living room floor.
While she was out, she saw a pigeon eating potato chips from a bag in an incredibly humanlike fashion, and texted Theo a picture of it, along with the caption be honest does this look like my mother.
He didn’t respond, and when she got back ninety minutes later he was still on the floor.
The only difference was that he had turned over onto his side.
“Maybe you should talk to someone,” Sasha said, by which she meant, No, yeah, Theo, I think you should absolutely, definitely talk to someone.
“You sell plastic mobiles, Sasha,” he said, rolling his head up to look at her. “You can’t understand what I’m going through.”
The viciousness of the comment had struck her for a number of reasons.
For starters, she was the vicious one—not him.
Also, they weren’t plastic mobiles. They were large-scale installations by a young Chilean artist who was being compared to Alexander Calder.
And on the subject of home finances, according to their taxes, which Sasha did each year, selling plastic mobiles at the rate that Sasha had been selling them was more profitable than developing condominiums on East Eighty-Eighth Street.
She pressed her nose against Ethan’s diaper, placed him in his crib, and went to the bathroom, where she turned on the shower to make some noise, then sat on the toilet and called Mia.
“What does he think you don’t understand?” she said.
“I’m not sure.”
“I understand it sucks to lose a job, but he just needs to sack up and go get another one. He’s a white man—there are plenty of options.
Also, not to be whatever about it, but implying that you don’t understand what he’s going through is pretty misogynistic.
Like, what, you don’t understand what it’s like to have the pressure to provide for your family?
You don’t understand what it’s like to have a blow to your ego?
It’s not like he was out there hunting bison or something. ”
“He just seems so miserable.”
“That’s called capitalism.”
Someone had put a roll of toilet paper the wrong way on its dispenser. Sasha flipped it around, fixing it.
She said, “I’ve never seen him like this before.
It’s like he’s lost confidence in everything.
With Ethan, he keeps asking me how to do things that I know he knows how to do.
Like, is this diaper on right? Is this bottle the right temperature?
And it is—it always is—but he keeps asking me anyway, and it’s sort of driving me nuts. But I also feel really bad for him.”
For a few seconds Mia was quiet.
Then she said, “Sorry, I thought you just wanted to bitch.”
“No, I get it. That’s okay.”
Sasha heard Mia take a deep breath. “It sounds like he’s depressed.”
“I think he might be.”
“Do you want the number of my therapist? She’s Canadian, but otherwise she’s great.”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ve also got this playlist that I listen to when I’m sad. It’s all these songs they play at the Avon Three-Day Breast Cancer Walk. Or, ohhhh, what about Lexapro? Lexapro is great.”
“Maybe let’s start with the name of the therapist?”
“Hold for a sec.” Sasha’s phone chimed. “Okay. Sent it.”
“Thank you. This has been very helpful.”
She set her phone on the sink. Then she dunked her hair into the shower to make it wet. She didn’t want Theo getting suspicious. She also wondered if he would even notice.
In large part Sasha agreed with Mia’s assessment that Theo’s comments were anachronistic and gendered.
And under normal circumstances, she would have reminded him of that, then probably slammed a few doors and said something twice as mean; but now, standing face-to-face with herself in the mirror as she dried her hair, she did her best not to get offended.
It was clear to her that her husband was going through something that she was struggling to understand—that the loss of his job had jarred his confidence in other parts of his life.
He wasn’t eating nearly as much as he usually did; it was not uncommon to hear him crying in the shower; she often had to coax him out of bed.
It seemed absurd to Sasha that losing a job could cause all this, but here they were.
She could blame any number of things—the New York real estate market, reclusive Dutch architects, late capitalism—but blaming things didn’t solve the problem.