410 PM Mia #2
He left her standing at the table, where she ate a few more chips and finished what was left of her wine.
She felt sick again, and couldn’t decide if she wanted to scream or cry.
She worked for the New York Times. She had an article that had been optioned by Warner Bros.
, and had been given a book deal, and she owned an apartment in Brooklyn.
After Sasha had humiliated her upstairs in the bathroom, she had somehow assumed that all of those things would give her the upper hand.
She had assumed that, for the rest of the evening, she would be able to look down on a bunch of women who had given up, who had become worse versions of their mothers.
Women who had memberships to country clubs and car insurance policies, and who spent their Sunday afternoons cleaning out the garage.
Women who pretended to be excited when a new Sweetgreen opened up six miles away, and who, when they poured themselves glasses of wine, winked at one another and said something like, “Momma needs her juice.” Except none of that was true—or if it was true, it didn’t actually matter, because Claire Matthews had done all the publicity for Yoshino and was friends with Suzie Chen at Knopf.
The only significant difference between her life and Mia’s was that Mia was alone and had fewer square feet.
Richie danced around with the toddler’s tiara, and after watching him for a minute, Mia looked into her empty wineglass.
At forty, she’d thought she would be more grown-up.
She moved to adjust the mouse ears, then remembered that she’d taken them off and left them on the patio table.
This, too, now struck her as embarrassing: it had been such a performative rejection of Sasha’s party.
She resolved to be better behaved for the rest of the evening, and to find a time to apologize to Sasha.
The first step was to walk back to the patio table, and put on those fucking mouse ears, and say something pleasant to insert herself back into the conversation.
She tried to think of what it could be; mostly she tried to think of how she might reframe the entire experience as a learning moment when she told her therapist about it, something that would make him say, “This sounds like a real breakthrough.” She ate one chip, and then another one.
She was dipping a third into the watery salsa when a woman approached her, setting a hand on her wrist.
“I’m sorry, but you’re Mia, right?” she said.
The woman was dressed as Morticia Addams: long black dress, a straight wig, painted red fingernails.
There was something familiar about her, and for a moment Mia struggled to remember how she knew her.
Then it hit her: she had seen her all over Sasha’s Instagram.
They had gone to Italy together in August. For an entire week Mia had scrutinized pictures of lakes, plates of glistening pasta, small children eating gelato, and Theo looking handsome in an unbuttoned linen shirt.
The caption that Sasha gave all of it was Livin’ La Vita Dolce!
When Mia first read it, she’d performatively cringed, and said to no one in particular, “Jesus fucking Christ.” Then, as she’d wandered around alone, she felt herself having two very distinct and separate thoughts: the first one was, I don’t want anything that looks like this; the second one was, Why don’t have I something that looks like this?
The woman’s name was Anoushka. She had high cheekbones and wide, quick eyes.
She also had a husband named Jivan, two sons named Arjun and Ishaan, and a Bernedoodle she liked to dress up in a green bandana—Mia had scrutinized her Instagram too.
The dog looked like a Muppet, and Anoushka often captioned pictures of it with things like lol he hates me so much for this.
Mia had spent hours scrolling through her grid—probably about as much time as she had spent scrolling through Sasha’s.
She was from Michigan and had gone to business school at Columbia and had a thing for pretty sunsets.
Last Christmas she had taken a family trip to Aruba.
“Yeah,” Mia said. “Have we met?”
Anoushka tightened her grip on Mia’s wrist. With her other hand she touched her own chest. “Oh my God, you must think I’m such a freak. I’m sorry, Sasha talks about you all the time, and I’ve been dying to meet you. I’m Anoushka.”
Mia squinted for a moment.
“Oh, right, I think she’s mentioned you too,” she said. And then: “Hi.”
Anoushka brushed the wig away from her forehead.
“I’m sorry, I should have come to save you when I saw you talking to Claire, but that would have required me talking to Claire, and I made myself a promise that I’d do less of that.”
“Oh, she doesn’t seem so bad.”
“You don’t know her—she’s the fucking worst.”
To her own surprise, Mia laughed. On the other side of the backyard, Claire picked a leaf off Sasha’s shoulder and dropped it to the ground.
“Seriously, you have no idea—she thinks because she has this dumb PR agency she owns this town. It’s like, come on.
It’s PR, for God’s sake,” Anoushka said.
“On the first Wednesday of every month she hosts this book club, and at the last meeting she made everyone go around and rate their life using an A to F grade system.”
“What did she give herself?”
“An A minus. But the minus was only because she hates her husband. Sorry, I can really get going about her. She sucks, and I’m just waiting for Sasha to realize she sucks too.”
Mia nodded. She wondered what grade she would give her own life.
“That trip you took to Italy…” she said.
“What about it?”
“Oh, nothing. It looked really nice.”
For a second or two Anoushka looked off into the distance, her gaze settling above the top of the fence, as if she was trying to remember having gone to Italy at all. Finally she said, “It was fun. It would have been more fun without the kids, but it was fun.”
“Well, the pictures looked nice, at least.”
She turned to Mia, her eyes brightening. A strand of fake cobweb clung to her wig.
“But you,” she said, “Sasha said you’re going to Miami soon, right? That’s so smart. It’s so goddamned gray around here in the winter. If I don’t go somewhere with a little bit of sun, I go full-on insane.”
“No, yeah, same. But I actually don’t think that trip is going to work out anymore.”
“Because Sasha can’t go? Listen, Mia, if you want company, let me come with you. I’m fun, I promise.”
“Oh.” Mia let out a little laugh, her chin dipping. “To be honest, it was probably a bad idea. I have this book I need to write, and a trip would be a distraction.”
“Well, regardless, it was nice of you to be so understanding with Sasha. It sounds like your friend Emily could really use her help.”
The lead singer of Theo’s band announced that they would be taking another break; Sasha left Claire and Cassie and walked toward the house. Mia felt her face becoming warm.
“Sorry, what was that about Emily?”
“Sasha said that she was going through a rough time with her marriage, so she had to go to DC to help her out. I mean, what are you going to say, right? When my aunt and uncle separated when I was a kid, she turned into a literal shell of a person. Like, my mom had to fly to California and cook a month’s worth of food for her to make sure she wouldn’t starve.
And what’s insane is that my aunt was a chef. Like, an actual, working chef. She…”
Anoushka kept talking; Mia thought of the excuses that Sasha had given her in the bathroom—the babysitter with an infirm father, school pickup and drop-off, a business trip to Phoenix.
Each of them was overexplained, and filled with the sort of details you’d use to flesh out a lie.
Inevitably, she also thought of Marco, and of the difficulty he and Emily were having.
Sasha had been the one to tell Mia about it—she had been speaking to Emily—and when she described the situation, Marco was made out to be the villain.
She called him things like selfish and unsupportive, and talked about how he wasn’t understanding of Emily’s long hours at the hospital, as if Sasha was the one who was actually having marital problems. All of it angered Mia in a way that surprised her; she found herself rushing to defend Marco.
She said things like, “I always thought she was kind of a bitch,” and “He would be better off without her,” then set her phone on the table and walked away from it so she didn’t have to listen as Sasha berated her for not understanding how hard marriage was.
A few times she’d thought about calling Marco herself, or at least texting him to ask how he was doing, but she’d always stopped short of doing it.
She didn’t want to be seen as gloating or opportunistic or desperate.
She didn’t want to have to explain to him that she knew what it was like to suddenly find yourself alone.
But none of that was the point. The point was that Sasha had picked Emily over Mia and hadn’t had the courage to tell her so.
And this—the fact that she had lied—was a hundred times more painful than the truth itself.
It proved to Mia something she had suspected for a while: that she and Sasha weren’t the sort of friends that they used to be, and that she was the idiot for wanting to hang on.
“Anyway, my aunt lost something like twenty pounds and got a line from a Rumi poem tattooed on her wrist,” Anoushka said. “I’m serious about Miami, by the way.”
Sasha walked into the kitchen. Theo’s band played the final chord of “Glory Days” as the door closed slowly behind her.
Mia said, “Excuse me for a second, there’s something I forgot to do.”