945 AM Sasha
“Oh, how sad,” Roz said. “I’m very sorry to hear that, Sasha.”
Theo sat on the other end of the couch from her, dressed in his black suit.
When she looked over at him he was twisting his watch on his wrist. Sasha crossed her feet at the ankles, uncrossed them, pressed her lips together.
In her right hand she held a tissue. She curled it around her fingers and pain radiated through her knuckles.
She said, “It’s okay. I mean, it’s not, of course, but that’s also not why we’re here, and there’s nothing we can really do about it, so I’m fine talking about something else.”
Slowly Roz nodded, allowing Sasha to believe for a moment that she had said something profound.
She was sitting in an expensive-looking chair with a complicated ergonomic design.
It had no back—only a gray cushion where Roz sat, and then two tilted slabs where she placed her knees, and which allowed her to keep her spine perfectly erect, Sphynx-like.
The sight made Sasha self-conscious of her own posture, of the way her shoulders were slouching forward, and now she took a moment to straighten them.
Sensing Theo staring at her, she twisted the tissue tighter.
In her purse was a small foam ball, a tool that her physical therapist had given her to help strengthen the muscles in her hand. She resisted the urge to reach for it.
“And this was a close friend?”
“Yes. Or, sort of. We hadn’t spoken in a while.”
“Still, I can understand how that’s very hard.” Roz shifted, repositioning her knees on the slats. “You could have canceled, you know. I think that would have been perfectly appropriate.”
Sasha smiled weakly. She said, “Oh no. That’s okay.”
The truth was she had wanted to cancel the appointment, but had forgotten to, and by the time she remembered they were well past Roz’s seventy-two-hour cancellation window.
She was going to a funeral, and there were presently five titanium screws holding together the metacarpals in her right hand, and now she would have to pay someone for time spent not listening to her problems. It made her resent Roz, along with every other member of the psychotherapeutic-industrial complex, a business model that suddenly seemed to Sasha to have been built on the last-minute scheduling conflicts of grieving, anxious people.
It also made her want to sit in Roz’s office and cry on Roz’s couch and silently wonder if the plants on Roz’s windowsill were getting the water they needed.
It made her sad in a peculiar and unsettling way that, after forty-two years of living, she had never experienced before.
She said, “It’s actually pretty convenient—the church is right down the street.”
Roz nodded again, and as before, Sasha felt as though her observation carried more weight than she anticipated.
She reached down and scratched her heel.
“And the two of you?” A pair of glasses hung from a chain around Roz’s neck, and now she lifted them to her nose. “How are you two doing?”
Theo looked at Sasha.
He said, “Do you want to go?” at the same time she said, “Why don’t you go ahead and start?”
An uncomfortable silence followed. Sasha could hear the voices of two men fighting in the park outside, along with the whine of a siren. Theo took a deep breath, then held it in his chest as he rubbed a hand against his cheek.
“We’ve had some ups and downs,” he said.
He began to tell a story about Sasha preparing Ethan’s lunch last week.
Sasha didn’t know where he was going with it, and she felt her shoulders tense, as if preparing for an attack.
This had become a common feeling—the anticipation of waiting to hear how Theo would characterize what had happened between them during the past week, and the surprise of discovering that his interpretations conflicted so violently with her own.
But now she heard Theo telling Roz that making Ethan’s lunch was the sort of thing he had seen her do countless times, often without really noticing, but on this particular day he stood at the entrance to the kitchen and observed as Sasha set out a sandwich, a plate of Goldfish, and thin slices of a red apple.
She heard him say, “What I noticed was how much love she was putting into our family by doing all these little things.”
Roz said, “That’s wonderful, Theo. And how did that make you feel?”
The men continued fighting in the park outside. One of them said, “Suck my cock,” and Theo looked up at the ceiling.
“Warm, I think?”
“Where in the body?”
“Behind my sternum.” He squinted. “No, actually it’s a little lower than that, like more in my stomach. And honestly, kind of horny. Can I say that?”
Roz removed her glasses.
She said, “You can say that, and that’s excellent.”
Roz was big on bodily sensations. She was also big on Mindful Noticing, a process that, when she first suggested it a few months ago, she’d enunciated with such a slow and careful deliberateness that Sasha immediately knew they were dealing with a proper noun.
Theo had mentioned that he was still having trouble trusting Sasha—that even though he had been married to her for ten years and had watched her give birth to two children, he was still seeing her not as his wife or as a mother but rather as a woman who had fucked Mitch Reynolds.
After drawing them a chart that involved a series of interlocking triangles and crossing, zigzagging lines, Roz had said that the solution to this problem was to start seeing each other from new perspectives and in new contexts.
How one of them set the table for dinner, for example, or talked excitedly about a new episode of a podcast—she said it would help them learn how to be together again.
Theo reached across the couch and linked his hand with Sasha’s.
He said, “I think so too.”
Sasha smiled. Then she looked down so he didn’t see her wince.
He was pressing against one of the screws.
They had been drilled into her last year, during an operation at the Hospital for Special Surgery.
Coming back from Costco on a rainy Saturday, she’d skidded out and hit a traffic sign on the Garden State Parkway.
When she was sure she hadn’t died, she stepped out of the car and onto the wet grass of the shoulder, where she frowned at the airbag, mushrooming from the steering wheel, along with a raccoon-sized dent in the driver’s-side door.
By this point other cars had stopped, their headlights slicing through the gray drizzle.
A truck sped by, roaring in her ears. Shaking the stars from her eyes, she drew her phone from her pocket and called Theo.
She said, “Don’t panic, but I crashed the Volvo and my phone’s almost out of battery.”
“Oh my God,” he said. “Oh my God.”
He’d started crying, which made her feel a mixture of deep love and profound irritation: she was the one who had crashed.
Once he calmed down, he said, “Where are you, exactly?” and asked if she was okay.
She told him she was, then hung up the phone and realized that a small bone was poking through the skin on the back of her hand.
A week later, a colleague of Theo’s in the city gave them Roz’s name.
Sasha had started sleeping in the bedroom again, instead of on the pullout couch next to the Peloton bike in the guest room.
A surgery involving orthopedic screwdrivers was performed on her hand, and afterward she began seeing a physical therapist named Claudia who had a practice in a strip mall in Paramus.
Spooked by the specter of vehicular death, Theo started talking to her about Fixing Things.
“I feel like we’re making some real progress here,” Roz said.
Theo crossed his legs, setting his ankle on top of his thigh.
He said, “Yeah, you know, right now it feels like that too.”
Sasha looked down at his fingers again: they were rubbing the red ridge of her scars.
Two nights ago they had gone to dinner in Maplewood.
Roz had said that, in addition to Mindful Noticing, they needed to be spending quality time with each other, taking themselves on little date nights where topics like the size of Mitch Reynolds’s penis (“big”), and whether it was bigger than Theo’s (“I don’t think you want to actually know that”), along with the general state of their marriage, were off-limits.
Two nights ago Sasha had picked the restaurant, a new Italian place Anoushka had suggested that featured a thirty-two-dollar lasagna on its menu; it arrived at the table in a deep terra-cotta dish, and the waiter warned Sasha it would burn her if she touched it.
They ordered a bottle of red wine from a thick green binder, and took small, responsible sips from their glasses while they searched for something appropriate to discuss.
Theo said, “Sometimes I worry that Ethan didn’t inherit my rhythm,” and then, after neatly dividing a plate of caprese into two equal-sized portions, moved on to Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
On the other side of the restaurant a couple a few decades older than they were sat a small square table, and occasionally Sasha glanced over at them as she listened to Theo talk.
Their eyes were focused on their food, and over the course of an hour they scarcely acknowledged each other.
Pouring them both more wine, Theo said, “I feel like I don’t know if I’m actually allowed to have an opinion on it, you know?
” Sasha nodded and glanced back to the couple.
Roz asked, “And Sasha, where are you in all this?”
Blinking, Sasha sat up straighter.
“Oh yeah, hi, I’m right here.”
Roz smiled. “I guess what I’m asking is if you’re having any feelings you’d like to share.”