I'm Fine and Neither Are You

And now, of course, I wished to God I had not blown off her comments about Matt’s high expectations for their home and life.

As Sanjay pulled away from the curb and the Sweets’ picturesque house disappeared behind me, I wondered for the first time if Jenny had believed that I, too, expected her to be perfect.

Then I had an even more alarming thought.

What if that were true?

ELEVEN

Sanjay groaned. “Penny, you’re hurting me.”

I loosened my grip on his shoulder. “I need to talk to you.”

“Now?” He squinted and glanced at the alarm clock. “It’s two a.m.”

“It’s important.”

“Can it wait? I can’t have a conversation in the middle of the night.”

The fact that his eyes were open and he was speaking indicated that in fact he could. If only I had tried violently shaking him awake years earlier, I could have spared myself dozens, maybe even hundreds, of linen changes after Miles wet the bed.

“You could have dislocated my shoulder, you know,” he said, still lying there. “Is this about Jenny?”

“No. Well, sort of.”

It was three days after Jenny’s memorial service. As with the previous two nights, the few hours of sleep I had gotten had been fretful; I had tossed and turned, unable to staunch my thoughts. Had I given Jenny the impression she couldn’t be real with me?

She had turned to me when she was overwhelmed with terrible, unfounded worries about something bad happening to Cecily. She had flung open her door and invited me in when she wasn’t wearing a bra and hadn’t covered up the bags under her eyes or the pimple on her chin. She confessed that she sometimes bought expensive items just for the rush, even though it lasted mere minutes and she knew it was a stupid financial move. These were not the habits of a woman posing as perfect.

Yet if she complained about Matt, I sometimes teased her and said most wives would give their left foot for a difficult spouse like him. Maybe that had kept her from opening up to me about their struggles. Or maybe she felt I was invested in the idea of him as a model husband—which was at least a little true, I had to admit—and didn’t want to shatter that illusion.

I tried to think of other things I may have done. When she had discussed her endometriosis, which had sometimes left her incapacitated for days, perhaps I had made a disparaging remark about pain relievers. I couldn’t remember having said anything of the sort, but I couldn’t say with certainty that I hadn’t, either.

And that was driving me nuts.

But even as I fretted over what I might have said or done, I kept coming back to the question of what I could still do—specifically within my own marriage. I had no doubt it was time to start being more honest with Sanjay. But what did that mean ? Go to couples’ counseling and talk it out? I knew he would cringe at that suggestion. Many of his parents’ friends were psychologists or psychiatrists, and Sanjay said dinner parties at his house often felt like eating on Freud’s couch. He would probably relent if I pushed hard enough, but I wasn’t willing to do that. Not for something I didn’t particularly want to do, either.

What, then? Make him sit through a litany of complaints and demands? Start spouting off the way I had in the car on the way to Jenny’s service? Maybe, I thought, I should just let it go.

Not ten minutes before I woke Sanjay, I had gotten out of bed and gone to the kitchen for some water. I stood at the sink as I drained my glass. Through the small windows over the sink, the night sky was blinking at me spectacularly. I blinked back, and within seconds the stars were blurred and my face was wet.

Jenny and I had talked about the afterlife once or twice. We agreed it was more important to be a good person for the present moment than as a means of building up some sort of karmic credit. Neither of us believed in ghosts or spirits. Back then, though, it was all theoretical. The last person I knew who had died was a seventy-eight-year-old office clerk who worked down the hall.

But there Jenny was again, whispering in my ear: Make a change.

I wiped my eyes. Then I said aloud, “Okay.” Because that, at least, I knew how to do.

When I was distressed about the extra twenty pounds I’d gained during college, I started walking three miles a day. The weight was gone in a couple of months. After realizing I was doing most of my old supervisor’s job at Hudson , I wrote up a summary of my tasks and accomplishments and requested what should have been an outrageous promotion. I got it. And though it probably seemed to most people that I emerged from the womb as a type A, I had once been a tornado of a child who left a trail of mess in her wake. It was only after my mother left that I had, by necessity, learned to clean and cook and keep track of what had to be done and how that would happen.

It was simple: You set a goal. You devised a plan. Then—this was the kicker—you followed that plan. To steal a line from Yolanda, couldn’t I apply that “skill set” to my marriage?

I had run back to the bedroom to share my revelation with Sanjay. Now he was propped on his elbows and squinting at me in the dim lamplight.

“I realized at Jenny’s memorial service that things between you and me aren’t right,” I said, still a little breathless from dashing up the stairs. “They haven’t been for some time now.”

He was suddenly wide awake. “What?”

“We need to save our marriage,” I said.

From the look on his face, you’d think I’d just suggested polygamy. “I wasn’t aware that our marriage was in need of preservation.”

“Don’t attempt to redirect the conversation with your verbal gymnastics.”

A smile formed on his lips.

“Sanjay,” I said, “I’m being serious here.”

Chastened, he pushed himself into a sitting position. The ice cream he had dripped on his T-shirt before bed was now a Rorschach stain. To me, it resembled a middle-aged man succumbing to his inner slob. “Oh, Penny,” he said. “I know what Matt said to you about their marriage is probably eating at you. But they’re not us. We’re not them. You know that, right?”

I shook my head. “We have the same problem they did.”

He regarded me warily. “And what’s that?”

“We’ve been pretending everything’s fine in our marriage. At the very least, I have been.”

“Hey,” he said. “I know things between us have been a little tense lately—”

“If by lately you mean at least the past three years, then yes.”

“Jesus. I’m sorry I haven’t been as attentive as I could be, but are you sure this isn’t your grief talking?”

Then I wasn’t the only one who was aware he found his phone at least 70 percent more interesting than me. Instead of relief, I felt even more irritated—because if he knew this, why didn’t he do something about it? Or had I gone the way of many a wife before me, fading into the scenery while other more riveting pursuits moved to the foreground?

“I don’t think it’s a good time to be making big decisions,” he said. “And for the record, our problems are ripples compared to the tidal wave that wiped out Jenny and Matt’s marriage.”

“I don’t agree at all,” I said firmly. “I think this is the exact right time to be addressing our issues. Things aren’t great between us, and we need to be honest about it instead of sweeping it under the rug. We need to get real with each other. Jenny’s death was the wake-up call I never wanted, but now it’s happened and I can’t pretend otherwise.”

He glanced at the alarm clock. “Speaking of wake-up calls, you have to be up in less than five hours. Can’t we discuss this in the morning?”

“See, that’s what I’m talking about!”

He pulled his head back with surprise. “What did I do?”

“I have to be up in less than five hours? What about you?”

“Sheesh! I wasn’t saying I didn’t plan to get up! I was trying to be helpful. You’re always worried about being late to work.” His voice trailed off, and his eyes had moved south.

“What?” I glanced down and realized one of my nipples had decided to flee the confines of my tank top, which had been stretched beyond its limits by our decrepit washing machine. “You’re such a child,” I said, tugging my top back in place. I would go shopping for new sleepwear this week. Maybe next week. Soon.

“I didn’t want to say anything,” he said with a shrug. Then he put his hand on my knee, and I immediately felt myself soften. “Hey, same team, remember?” he said. It was something he’d picked up from Stevie’s preschool soccer coach, who had hollered it at the girls when they stole the ball from each other.

“I know,” I said quietly. “It’s just . . . I want our marriage to be healthier. I know we’re not Jenny and Matt, but we’re not ourselves anymore, either.”

“People change, Penny,” he said. “We’re not young and childless anymore. Are you really unhappy?”

Unhappy? Yes—at least more often than I wanted to be.

The bigger issue was that I was afraid. Because I had been spending way too much time thinking about how nice it would be to escape the ever-mounting pressures of our life. Before Jenny’s death I told myself this was a normal fantasy for a woman under duress. But now the stakes had been revealed, and they were much higher than I had ever imagined. I could no longer pretend I was a normal woman. I was one whose mother had taken a permanent leave of absence from her family. And I didn’t want to follow her lead—or Jenny’s, for that matter.

If my father were to be believed, my mother had not suffered from mental illness. “She was selfish,” he said by way of an explanation when I had been old enough to press him for a real answer about why she left. “End of story.”

In truth, it was just a fraction of the story. In one of my clearest childhood memories, I am standing in our small kitchen shortly after my mother left, deeply unnerved by the silence. Where are my parents’ yelling voices? Where are the sounds of slamming doors, stomping on stairs, screeching tires? As long as I had been conscious, I had been aware my parents disliked each other. I wasn’t even sure they had ever loved each other—though at some point her wild-child soul must have been attracted to his workaholic ways, as they had chosen to marry and have two children.