I'm Fine and Neither Are You(2)

I reached over to grab them, flashing Sanjay in the process. I recognized that my doing so was at odds with our having marital relations anytime soon. But he had seen me in the middle of giving birth, and we had still managed to conceive a second child. So.

“Not flushable,” I pointed out.

“But more sanitary than toilet paper,” he said. “That’s research proven.”

Sanjay Laghari Kar, patron saint of useless trivia. “Thanks,” I said.

He shrugged. Then he dropped his clothes in a pile and stepped into the shower.

I glowered at the shower curtain before looking down at my phone, which was at my feet. I had seventeen minutes to make lunches for the kids to take to camp, get dressed and ready, and run out the door . . . Forever, I thought for a brief, shameful second before banishing the idea from my mind.

I had planned to rinse off quickly, but now I would either have to accept that Sanjay would be in there until I left, or deal with the attitude he copped when I suggested he leave a bit of water in Lake Michigan.

I ran back to the bedroom and yanked a dress over my head. I had just pulled a muscle in my shoulder trying to zip it up when Sanjay, humming and wrapped in a towel, walked into the bedroom.

“How do I look?” I asked. I had a meeting with my supervisor, Yolanda, at nine, and it was either this dress or my bank-teller pantsuit.

He sat on the bed and glanced up at me. “You look great,” he said, but I was pretty sure his eyes hadn’t risen higher than my knees.

I sighed. My closest friend, Jenny, called Sanjay Thing 3. If it had been anyone other than her, I would have been offended. Of course, anyone else wouldn’t have known that I sometimes felt my husband was, in fact, my third and arguably least affectionate child. Now I called him Thing 3, too—though only to Jenny.

Anyway, her husband, Matt, wasn’t perfect. Since I had mostly grown up without a mother and had been raised by a father who spent more time at work than at home, I would never have been able to handle Matt’s being on the road all the time. But Jenny said she loved him so much she was willing to put up with it, even if she did occasionally feel neglected. That was one of the best things about having a friend you shared everything with: It gave you a bird’s-eye view of another person’s life. Which in turn reminded you that the bad you had was your choice, and better than the alternative.

In truth, I sometimes wondered about the better part. There was plenty about Jenny’s marriage that was covetable, including but not limited to the fact that she did not have to rush to work every morning, because Matt made oodles of cash. Jenny did, too—her “little website” had become a juggernaut—but she didn’t have to. And though she had never said as much, I was pretty sure she didn’t feel like the walls of her large and tastefully decorated home were closing in on her, or that Cecily, her one ridiculously well-behaved child, was trying to strangle all whimsy from her life. Jenny did not look across the table at Matt (who never masticated chicken nuggets with an open mouth as he scrolled his phone) and wonder what had happened to the clever, cultured man she had married.

Because she did not serve chicken nuggets for dinner.

(They had sex all the time.)

I didn’t really want out, I reassured myself as I dashed to the kitchen to finish the lunches. My childhood had been such that I knew how fortunate I was to be a part of a nuclear family and own a home in a good school district in one of the least generic parts of the Midwest—even if I did sometimes long for the bucolic, childless existence Sanjay and I had once enjoyed in Brooklyn. I recognized the windfall of two healthy, mostly manageable offspring. Our neighbor Lorrie, who let herself into our house more often than I cared to acknowledge (“Just saying hi!” she would announce as I wet myself from the shock of discovering I was not alone and in fact someone who I had once mistaken for a friend was lounging on my sofa), was a single parent. I understood how hard this was—my father had become one himself after my mother decided she wasn’t cut out for family life.

But my father knew I could be trusted to hold down the fort when he was working and my little brother, Nick, needed to be fed, bandaged, or otherwise tended to. Whereas Lorrie only had young Olive, who seemed perfectly average until you realized her supertight hug was the first step of an orchestrated plan to disembowel you with her teeth. As such, I made a conscious effort not to complain to Lorrie about Miles and Stevie cage-fighting in the netted trampoline in our backyard, nor to mutter to her about Sanjay’s fervent belief that plucking wrinkled clothes from the dryer to wear was the same thing as “doing the laundry.”

Still. I was well aware that the semicharmed life I led was one part luck to three parts effort. I had left Brooklyn and traded a beloved but barely paying editing job for a more lucrative position in development at a major Midwestern university—the same institution where Sanjay had spent nearly a year in medical school before admitting that he really didn’t want to be a doctor (never mind that I had pointed this out back when he began an expensive premed preparatory program years earlier).

When it became evident that we could not move back to New York with two children without selling an organ on the black market, I had researched the best neighborhoods and schools in our college town. I had located the only house we could afford in our desired district, and now spent 29 percent of my post-tax paycheck covering the mortgage. (Sanjay had finally started getting paid for a few of the music reviews and articles he wrote, though I had pushed him to bolster our anemic savings account with that cash instead of putting it toward the house.)