I'm Fine and Neither Are You

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.)

Those decisions had paid off. Stevie was getting the reading intervention she needed. She and Miles had a yard that was not made of concrete. Our life was not so expensive that Sanjay’s being mostly unemployed had left us destitute. And I had met Jenny, which had made my suburban, child-centered existence infinitely more tolerable.

I loved my husband. I loved my kids. I mostly liked my life.

But I was so damn tired.

And maybe that was why on that June morning—as Sanjay lounged in his towel and checked his phone while I ran around like I was on uppers, curling my eyelashes while shoving vegetable straws into lunch boxes and zipping backpacks for two sloths in human clothing—I allowed myself a tiny, terrible indulgence.

Which was to admit that in that moment, I actually did want out.

TWO

Sanjay and I met sixteen years earlier at Hudson , a now-defunct glossy magazine that envisioned itself as the love child of Harper’s and Vanity Fair. I had been working as a junior editor for nearly a year when he was hired as an assistant to the music editor. The attraction had been instant—I could still recall the electricity that shot through me when our eyes locked as we were being introduced, and the flutter that stayed in my stomach long after he sauntered away, all long limbs and quiet confidence.

Within months we were a couple. We had seemed so perfect for each other that I remember wondering why we hadn’t come together even sooner. We both aspired to be writers—me, children’s books; him, music journalism—and wished to one day have families happier than the ones we had grown up with. We talked for hours before lapsing into the most comfortable silence, and traveled well together. Any arguments we had were swiftly resolved in bed.

But after two years of dating, I abruptly decided I wasn’t ready to settle down—which really meant “I’m only twenty-five and I’m scared of how serious this is.” I knew the minute I broke up with him that I shouldn’t have, but the wheel was in motion and I did not allow myself to consider that I might have made a mistake. We were too young to choose life partners—and besides, he probably would have broken up with me eventually. Wasn’t it smarter to preempt him and deal with the loss on my own terms?

That was the story I told myself for several years. At first, I proved just how not ready I was to settle down by dating a succession of jerks. Then I entered a semiserious relationship with a stoner who loved me even more than weed and wanted to know why I refused to say those three words to him. I finally told him it was because I didn’t, and spent the following year solo. It was then that I realized that living without Sanjay was far worse than living with the fear he might leave me. I’d made a terrible mistake—possibly the biggest of my life. But it was too late.

He had left Hudson several months before we broke up, and through our friends I learned he was still working as a research assistant for a historian at Columbia and dabbling in writing on the side. He had moved from Harlem to Greenpoint, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, and had a serious girlfriend—a woman of Indian descent I bet he loved, even if our friends were too nice to tell me as much.

Then one rainy September evening we bumped into each other outside his favorite bookstore in the East Village. I would call it a coincidence, but it was really the consequence of me indulging myself by walking past his old haunts, as I occasionally did on my way home from work or when I should have been doing something productive. I didn’t really think I would see Sanjay—not on a random Friday night. Yet just as I was approaching the shop, he emerged from it.

I remember thinking my eyes were playing tricks on me. How could the tall man in dark jeans and a corduroy blazer possibly be Sanjay? Surely this was another handsome if awfully thin Indian guy. Had I conjured him up? Maybe I would duck behind my umbrella and scurry past so I wouldn’t look like the stalker I sort of was.

Then he called out to me: “Penny.”

Our eyes met and I gave him a self-conscious smile.

“Hey,” we said at the same time. Then we both laughed.

He was holding a book wrapped in a paper bag in one hand, and he gestured with it. I folded my umbrella and joined him under the bookstore awning, which was sending water cascading down in front of us. We watched it for a while before speaking.

“How have you been?” he said.

“I’ve missed you,” I confessed.

“I’ve missed you, too.” Though he was sheepish, I thought I saw something else in his eyes. After three years, he probably didn’t love me anymore. Yet as I stared deeper into the black pools of his pupils, I allowed myself to consider that maybe he did.

“Do you want to get out of here? Go get a cup of tea, or whatever you’d like?” I said, and I meant it. This was nothing if not love at second sight. When I saw him striding out of the bookstore, I understood my life would never be the same—if only he would take me wherever he was going.

He did not respond for several seconds, and my heart gave a little lurch as I prepared to hear him say no.

“Yes,” he said.

We were engaged two months later and married within the year. I had never been one for weddings, and the three hundred people Sanjay’s parents invited to our reception put me off of them for good. But we emerged from the experience as blissful newlyweds. Finding and furnishing an apartment; hosting dinner parties and our first Thanksgiving dinner; traveling to new places, whether it was a Puerto Rican restaurant in the Bronx that purported to have the best empanadillas in New York, or to Mumbai to be feted by his father’s family—it was all an adventure with Sanjay at my side. And though that giddy pace slowed when his premed classes began to eat up his nights and weekends, it remained a heady time, brimming with possibility and promise.

I had never wanted out back then.

I was thinking about this on my way to work as the driver behind me began honking like a maniac. As my eyes refocused, I realized I had drifted a teensy bit out of my lane. But it wasn’t as though I had swerved to the other side of the road while texting and driving. And at least I had not been fantasizing about making not-so-sweet love to a stranger, as I sometimes did during my commute or while I pretended to watch Stevie clod-hop her way through ballet practice.

The driver who had been tailing me skidded into the next lane and flashed me the finger. Always eager to demonstrate my black belt in passive aggression, I gave him my best pageant wave and zipped past him.

The drive from my house to the development office at the far end of the medical campus was just three miles, but it took twelve to twenty excruciating minutes to get there depending on what time I left and how many roads were closed. Sanjay was constantly telling me to bike—it would be faster and good for me, he argued. He was probably right, but I was afraid of navigating traffic on two wheels and did not want to give my husband an opportunity to sleep with other women after I was flattened by a truck.

I’m grateful to have a job, I reminded myself as I began a claustrophobic spiral through the employee parking garage. Even at 8:32 in the morning, the only spots left were for electric cars. I pulled my gas-guzzler into one of them and scribbled a note on a piece of paper explaining that I had circled the whole garage to no avail and had to get to a nine o’clock meeting.

I am grateful to have transportation, I thought as part of the windshield wiper came flying off when I lifted it to tuck the note beneath it. I sighed, picked the rubber strip up off the pavement, and tossed it on the hood so I could deal with it . . . Tomorrow! I thought, recalling the Frog and Toad book I’d read to Miles and Stevie the night before. I will do it tomorrow!

As a child, I had loved the way books transported me into another world. As an adult, that magic had not worn off, and Frog and Toad remained my favorite children’s book characters. Jenny adored them, too, and no surprise—she was so clearly Frog to my Toad. Reminding myself I was thankful for the very things that were irritating me was a move stolen straight from her website, Sweet Things.

Just the week before, she had posted about how she was anxious for Matt to get home from his latest business trip. She had paired the post with funny pictures of her staring at herself in the mirror, cursing the fact that she spent her teens coated in baby oil instead of sunscreen. She was prone to these kinds of corrosive thoughts when she was alone too long, she said.

It was only after she reminded herself she was grateful for Matt’s position at a small venture capital firm—which kept him on the road for at least half the month—that she had immediately realized that all of her best ideas were the result of, as she had written, “the mental space that comes from being by yourself for stretches of time.”

I wouldn’t know. Since Sanjay worked from home (and lately he was working more, I had to admit), the only alone time I had was in the car. Yet the point stood: gratitude was at least mildly effective. And on a day like this one, I needed to remind myself that there was a good reason a sane person would pull herself out of bed at the crack of dawn, spend all of her waking hours tending to the needs of other people, and then do it again and again and again.

It was a labor of love. Or something like that.

“Morning, Penny.”

I hadn’t yet turned my computer on when Russ came barging into my office. It was a luxury having an entire windowless, shoebox-sized office to myself. Especially since it was rumored that soon we would all be working side by side at long tables so we could collaborate—or however the university would fictionalize the latest cost-reduction initiative.

As long as I had a door, however, I expected Russ to knock before throwing it open.