Chapter 34 1230 PM Sasha
On the other side of the Hudson, approximately thirty-seven miles to the northeast, Sasha was staring at a goldfish.
Its name was Tuna, and Theo had won it for Ethan at the Montclair Golf Club’s Fourth of July party by throwing a Ping-Pong ball into a small glass bowl.
When Sasha saw it happen, her heart sank.
She added feed the fucking goldfish to her list of morning chores, then watched as Theo lifted Ethan to his shoulders.
But now the fish was dead. At least, Sasha thought it was dead.
It was floating belly-up near the top of its glass bowl, and seemed fatally disinterested in the thin colored flakes of food that Sasha was sprinkling across the water’s surface.
Neither of those things could be a good sign.
Crouching down so the bowl was at eye level, Sasha tapped on the glass with her fingernail.
“Shit,” she said, and ran a hand over her hair.
She left the fish for a moment and walked over to Ethan’s bed, which was fitted with linens printed with cartoon racetracks.
She smoothed out some wrinkles from the sheets and plumped up the pillows, arranging them behind a corduroy sham embroidered with Ethan’s name.
Then she went back to the fish to give Tuna a final look.
There was no question about it—the son of a bitch was dead.
Sasha rubbed her hand against her cheek.
She brushed some dust from Ethan’s dresser and walked downstairs.
In the kitchen, Theo sat on a barstool with his guitar balanced on his knee, his face shadowed with intense concentration.
Prudence bobbed up and down in her Jumperoo, and Ethan was picking at his lunch at the table in the breakfast nook.
On the plate in front of him were peeled apple slices, along with a sandwich made of peasant bread, turkey, the white parts of romaine lettuce, and provolone cheese.
There was also a glass of two-percent milk.
About six months ago, Ethan had decided he would only eat foods that were white or off-white.
At first Sasha thought he was joking around, but then Ethan threw an apoplectic fit at a diner on Valley Road when his pancakes arrived covered in blueberry syrup, and she thought, Well, fuck.
Her kids were never going to be picky eaters—that was what she said before she had them.
She was going to be like one of those French mothers she read about in parenting books: patient but firm.
But now here was Ethan, refusing to eat a quesadilla made with American cheese, and losing his shit over scrambled eggs.
Here was Sasha, cutting crusts from sandwiches, and making sure turkey slices weren’t too pink, and peeling the thin skins off apples, and googling whether only eating white foods was a sign of sociopathy or latent racism.
“Hey,” she said, and Theo looked up from his guitar.
“What’s up?”
“Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Sure.” He set down his pick and smiled.
“I meant, like, not here.”
Ethan swung his legs. With his mouth full of peeled apple, he sang, “Secrets, secrets are no fun. Secrets, secrets hurt someone.”
Sasha raised both of her eyebrows. Resting his guitar against the counter, Theo followed her out of the kitchen and into the foyer.
Fake cobwebs hung from the stair banister, and near the front door was a giant black cauldron that Sasha planned to fill with dry ice as soon as the party started.
Around the backyard were piles of pumpkins and gourds; the living room was strung with tiny white ghosts hanging from strings; on the front porch were stacks of hay that she’d found at the Home Depot in Paramus.
For a moment Sasha felt a sense of pride in the work she had done and the life she had built.
Then she remembered why she’d summoned her husband to the foyer and said, “Tuna’s dead. ”
“Remind me who Tuna is?”
“Ethan’s goldfish. The goldfish you won for him.”
“Right. Shit.”
“What do you think we should do?”
“I don’t know. What do you think we should do?”
“I asked you first.”
Theo glanced back toward the kitchen. The hair around his ears was flecked with gray, and two deep creases lined his forehead. Sasha had one of those moments—rare, but not as rare as they used to be—where she could see with perfect clarity what he would look like when he was eighty.
“I think we should tell him. It feels bad not to.”
“You’re probably right.”
“He’s going to find out at some point.”
A wisp of fake cobweb fell from the banister. Theo began to walk back toward the kitchen but Sasha stopped him, taking hold of his wrist.
“I can get another one,” she said. “If you can still go to Whole Foods, then I can go to Petco and get one.”
“I’m not going to be able to make it to Whole Foods.”
“What? Why not?”
“Because the guys are coming over for a sound check in an hour.”
“Okay.” Sasha probed her molars with her tongue. She took a slow breath. “Then I guess I can go to Whole Foods and then to Petco.”
“Sasha, I really think this is a good opportunity to teach him about death.”
“No, totally, I understand that. The only thing is that if we explain death to him now, then that’s all he’ll be talking about for the entire afternoon. He’ll want to show everyone at the party his dead fish.”
“I don’t like the idea of lying to our children.”
Sasha replaced the cobweb, wrapping it loosely around the banister. Outside the wind rustled a few leaves from a sugar maple and they spiraled to the ground.
“Okay,” she said. “So go tell him.”
In the kitchen, Ethan began singing about fish penises. Theo puffed his cheeks.
“You should take a picture of it,” he whispered. “It’ll help you pick out one that matches.”
Sasha pointed a finger at him. “That’s a good idea. I can take Prudence with me. You mind keeping an eye on him while you’re doing your sound check?”
“That’s fine. He can watch us set up.”
As convincingly as she could, Sasha smiled. She said, “Lucky him.”
Theo’s band was called the Backstreets. They mostly played at a single bar on Bloomfield Avenue, though occasionally gigs would pop up at friends’ fortieth birthday parties and small charity events in West Orange.
Its members included Danny Ruiz (lead guitar and vocals), Pete Steinberger (bass), Ryan McCarthy (keyboard), and Steve Yang (drums and assorted percussion), all of whom also belonged to the Montclair Golf Club.
Theo had joined as the second guitar when the band’s fifth member moved to Trenton to take care of his dying mother.
He—Theo—was surprisingly good. He had a natural sense of rhythm, and while the last time he’d played guitar was in high school he picked it up again like no time had passed.
After getting to know Steve Yang on the golf course, he was invited to a few practice sessions that evolved into a permanent spot.
When that happened he went to the Guitar Center in Paramus and bought an amplifier, a collection of pedals and cords, and a brand-new Fireburst-colored Gibson Les Paul Supreme.
The trip cost him over six thousand dollars.
“That seems like quite a bit of money,” Sasha remembered having said when he returned.
“It’s worth it,” Theo told her. “You know Vampire Weekend?”
At this point she was pregnant with Prudence. Sasha felt a foot shifting against her ribs, then placed a hand on her stomach.
“What about them?”
“When he was at Columbia, Steve used to play with the guy who lived two doors down from Chris Tomson freshman year.”
“Who is Chris Tomson?”
“The drummer, Sasha.”
“Okay, so what?”
“So I can’t just show up to practice with a busted guitar.”
In the foyer, Sasha patted herself down, fruitlessly searching for the keys to the Volvo. Then she looked to her left, where she saw them in a shallow bowl on top of the credenza. She slipped one finger through the key chain and placed them in her pocket.
“We’ve got a good set for today,” Theo said. “Some new stuff that I think you’ll really like.”
“Great! Can’t wait.”
She hoped that her voice conveyed an adequate level of excitement.
Theo had a job again, this time working for a developer that built large, utilitarian warehouses in Staten Island and Queens.
He was happy, and had gotten in the habit of looking at Sasha for an uncomfortably long time before saying something like, “Babe, we’re just so lucky.
” Sasha figured that playing music with a bunch of other middle-aged men was a part of these positive developments, which was why she had devoted herself to becoming the band’s number-one fan.
She made T-shirts for all of their gigs, helped with sound check, and never complained when Theo said he had to practice instead of helping out with the kids.
Every time the band played “Born to Run,” there came a moment during the bridge when Theo unironically closed his eyes, and the earnestness of it all elicited within Sasha a deep, bowel-clenching embarrassment, but this she ignored too.
She hadn’t been the best wife—in fact, sometimes she wondered if she had even been a good one.
She felt guilty, both for what had happened with Mitch and for having never admitted to Theo that she had slept with someone else, and so she told herself that wearing a cheap T-shirt that said “#1 Groupie” was a form of absolution: if she could just be better now, then it would erase what happened then.
The problem was that it never actually worked that way.
Instead of erasing her sins, wearing a T-shirt that said “#1 Groupie” had the strange effect of reminding her that she had committed them.
These memories, in turn, only spurred inside of Sasha another bout of guilt, a low-grade ache that she tried again to alleviate by begging Theo to strum the chorus to “Born in the U.S.A.”
In the kitchen she heard Ethan singing, “My sister has a penis.” A second later Prudence laughed.
“Okay,” Sasha said, “I’m out of here.”