Chapter 34 1230 PM Sasha #2
“We’ll hold down the fort.”
“Thanks.”
Theo kissed her cheek. “Oh, wait—you’re going to pick those guys up at the train station, right? Or did you want me to?”
“The train station?”
“I thought you said Mia was getting in with Adam and Richie around two o’clock.”
Sasha closed her eyes, curling her lips against her teeth.
“Right.”
“Do you want me to—”
“No, I can get them. I just forgot they were coming.”
Sasha buckled Prudence into her car seat, then backed the Volvo out of the driveway and onto Inwood Avenue.
On the way to Whole Foods, she put on an old episode of The Daily that featured interviews with workers from four abortion clinics on the day that Roe v.
Wade was overturned. She listened to it for ten minutes before becoming overcome by a familiar mix of rage and powerlessness, at which point she switched to a Top 40 station on Sirius.
Eventually she turned the radio off, and for a few blocks drove in total silence.
Then she started feeling guilty for not engaging enough with the crises around her, and for retreating behind a shield of privilege and relative safety, so she turned The Daily on again and made herself listen all the way to the end.
In the Whole Foods parking lot she moved Prudence from the car seat to her BabyBjorn.
With her daughter strapped against her chest she walked down each of the store’s aisles, filling her cart with bags of Smartfood popcorn and organic blue corn chips and plastic tubs of fresh salsa.
As she entered the produce section, she texted Theo to ask if they had enough vegetables for a crudité platter, and stood next to a giant display of pumpkins as she waited for him to text her back, absently stroking the top of Prudence’s head.
A minute later her phone buzzed. The message wasn’t an answer from Theo, but rather from Anoushka Banik.
It contained a picture of a tray of forty black and orange Jell-O shots, along with a line of text: Eat your fucking heart out, Ina.
Sasha liked the photo with a heart, and then typed lolol.
She tapped send, and a second later Anoushka called her.
“What flavor is black Jell-O?” Sasha asked.
“Vodka.” There was a child screaming in the background. Anoushka said, “Arjun, I’m going to give you until the count of three, young man,” and then, “Sorry—it’s black cherry, but mostly vodka.”
“Sounds delicious.”
“It is. I’ve had two already.”
She’d met Anoushka a year and a half ago, in March of 2021, two months after she and Theo had moved to Montclair.
Claire Matthews, another woman from the country club, had invited Sasha to a book club at her house, where they discussed The Warmth of Other Suns; when she first spoke with Anoushka, it was next to a plate of gougères that Claire Matthews had made.
They were stacked on a beautiful clay plate, and as Sasha considered the best way to take one without destroying the whole display, Anoushka leaned over and whispered, “I keep praying that I choke on one of those things—it’s the only polite way to leave.
” Sasha laughed, raising a hand to cover her mouth.
Since then, they had had lunch together in the city nearly every Wednesday.
This past summer, they’d gone on a trip to Italy with their families, spending two weeks in Tuscany and then the lake region up north, and often at night, when the kids were in bed and they were a little too drunk, the two woman would find different ways of saying how it felt like they’d known each other all their lives.
Anoushka and her husband had relocated to Montclair six months before Sasha and Theo had—before that, they had lived in Park Slope.
Sasha liked her the moment that she met her.
Anoushka treated her move to New Jersey like an ironic wink or a joke that she was privy to, and in doing so made Sasha feel better about her own decision to leave the city.
Prior to that she had thought of it with a crippling self-consciousness.
She’d made sure to read about new restaurants that were opening in NoMad and East Williamsburg, and refused to post any pictures to her Instagram that were taken west of the Hudson.
Meeting Anoushka had changed all that. Together they laughed about joining a country club, and getting coffee from drive-through Starbucks, and in general doing what they had sworn they would never do when they were twenty-five.
But eventually, and in a shorter period of time than she initially anticipated, the joking had subsided on its own, and one day about a year ago Sasha had woken up to discover that what she was doing in Montclair wasn’t some hilarious plot twist or a drawn-out bit, but rather—simply—her life.
The drive-through Starbucks wasn’t embarrassing but convenient, and when she looked around her home she felt genuinely thankful for all the added space.
For years and years she had told herself that she was going to be different.
But now she saw that what she had really meant was that she was never going to get old, which was funny in retrospect, because getting old was what she had been doing all along.
“Wait until you see our family costume,” Anoushka said. “You’re going to die. It’s so fucking funny. Where are you, by the way? Is that the Cranberries?”
Sasha listened. “Good ear. It’s ‘Dreams.’ I’m in Whole Foods.”
“Ahh. That makes sense.”
“Why?”
“Because Whole Foods would definitely be playing the Cranberries. Whoever puts together the music for their playlists is an evil genius.”
“In what sense?”
A child screamed again. Anoushka said, “Arjun, you do that to your brother one more time, and no Paw Patrol for a week,” and then: “Sorry. What was I saying?”
“That the music curators at Whole Foods are evil geniuses.”
“Right. Because it’s always this stuff we listened to when we were, like, eighteen years old.”
Sasha thought about it for a moment. She said, “Oh my God, you’re right.”
The checkout line was long and wrapped all the way back to the freezer section. Sasha checked to see if Theo had responded about the vegetable situation, and when she saw that he hadn’t, she joined the line and inched her cart slowly toward the front.
Anoushka said, “You need anything for today, or are you good?”
“I think we’re good. Just get there on the early side, would you?”
“We’ll be there at three on the dot, Jell-O shots in hand.”
“Bless you.”
“What have you got going on between now and then?”
“I’ve got to pick up some people at the train station.”
“How mysterious. Who?”
“Some old friends from college. But before that I’ve got to swing by Petco.”
The Cranberries changed to Joan Osborne. Sasha rested her chin on the top of Prudence’s head.
“Dead goldfish?”
“Dead goldfish.”
Anoushka sighed.
“I hope you took a picture. I didn’t, and it made for some awkward conversations.”
Twenty minutes later, Sasha stood before a wall of glass tanks.
In them were tree frogs, salamanders, a single giant iguana.
The store smelled like beef jerky and dog biscuits.
With Prudence still strapped to her, she looked around for the fish.
Instead she found an employee in a red polo shirt and a pair of pleated khaki pants, arranging small aquarium ornaments on a steel shelf.
“Excuse me,” she said, “can you point me toward the fish?”
“They’re right over here,” he said, then smiled down at Prudence. “And who is this little angel?”
Sasha gave Prudence one of her fingers to grip on to.
“This is Prudence.”
“Well, hello, Prudence.” The employee adjusted his glasses. He walked past the iguana toward a corner of the store that Sasha had not visited yet. “What kind of fish are you looking for, exactly?”
“Oh, just your standard-issue goldfish.”
“I see.” He stopped and rubbed at the razor burn on his chin. “So, we’ve sort of moved on from goldfish.”
“Seriously?”
“Can I suggest a betta fighting fish?”
“A what?”
“We have them over here.”
He led her to a shelf filled with small plastic containers, the same size and shape as mason jars.
In each one swam a single fish, its tail and fins wispy in the water.
Sasha looked at them. They ranged in color from red to purple to deep indigo.
Prudence tightened her grip on her finger.
She thought of the picture of Tuna on her phone, and then of the awkward conversations Anoushka had to have with Arjun. Her mouth tilted to one side.
She said, “No offense, but none of these really look like goldfish. I mean, they’re not even gold.”
The man smiled again, as if what Sasha had observed posed not a single problem.
Then the smile turned into a small laugh, a chuckle that was tinged with a professorial condescension, and that suggested to Sasha that he had finally realized what she was there to do, and was prepared to use whatever modicum of power he had as a Petco employee to make her life difficult.
She looked at his red polo shirt. The ringed sleeves clung to his pale arms, and a patch of coarse brown hair sprouted from the collar. Sasha took a shallow breath.
“What about that one?” The man pointed to one of the plastic aquariums. “That one’s sort of gold.”
The fish was not gold, but rather a red that bordered on violet.
Its fins were fanlike, and its tail crescent-shaped.
In the water it performed a half-turn, its body flicking.
Watching it, Sasha had two thoughts. The first was, Maybe I can tell Ethan that Tuna’s wearing a Halloween costume.
The second was, Wow, I’m a really shitty mother.
“Okay,” she heard herself say. “Okay.”
“Great!” The employee’s cheeks turned the color of his polo. He set his hands on his hips. “And I’m assuming you’re all set with a tank?”
“Oh, yeah, we’ve got a bowl that works just fine.”
Now the man’s smile returned. Creases formed at the sides of his eyes.