On the bench across from me a woman has laid down a large plastic bag and is asleep.
I get a coffee and a cookie at the coffee shop and read my book for all the other hours that I’m meant to be at work and then I go home on the train.
How was your day? says my husband when I get home as he makes dinner. I hug and kiss our children, nurse the baby. I bathe them and we eat together. Family read? asks the two-year-old when I go to read them books, put them to sleep. I call my husband and we all lie on the baby’s bed together. I read and she sits on me. The four-year-old sits on her dad’s lap and it’s warmer in here than any other place in our apartment, and halfway through the second book I fall asleep. An hour later, I’m still in there, and my husband comes to get me. He helps me free my arm from the two-year-old’s small hands and stands behind me as I climb the ladder up to bed and follows up right after; he wraps his arm around my waist.
At 4:50 the next morning I pass a man, fully dressed in a too-thin coat, while I run underneath the highway. He smells, up close, like liquor, and as I run by, he screams a high-pitched scream and I sprint until I’ve covered another mile and know for sure he’s far away.
Sasha’s liked her little sister’s Facebook picture of her dog.
I teach a night class uptown on Thursdays—I keep the night class even though I mostly know by now I’ll never get a real job from the institution where I teach this night class; I mostly know that real jobs at institutions like this don’t exist anymore. I keep the job because I spent all those years in school and mostly I’ve forgotten what I thought they might be worth. Because it feels good sometimes, pretending, that I got what I set out to get.
I often stay late at work these days to meet with students, help with papers, but my coteacher comes to say he wants to meet with me to talk about relational concerns, and I say I can’t because my kids’ school just called and then I leave and go to a dark bar uptown and sip a raspberry-flavored gin drink and read my book before I have to teach.
In my night class, we read Imre Kertész, Kaddish for an Unborn Child. A student who sits off to the side of the table we all sit at, though there’s still room, and who has strangely dyed red hair, raises her hand and says, The main character is mansplaining Auschwitz to his wife, and I say, But she wasn’t there and is actively refusing to try to understand, and she says, Typical, and we move on.
On Thursdays the children go to sleep without me and it’s late and the subway’s mostly empty for the hour that I ride it. We filed, my husband says about the bankruptcy, and I’m still drunk, or maybe I’m hungover, from the drink before I taught and I do not want to talk so I kiss him and reach my hand underneath his shirt and we have sex on our loft bed. I hit my head and he says, Sorry, and then he comes and falls asleep and I stay up and read.
When we met I was in graduate school and he was still, for that first year, a person who wore suits. I had a small apartment uptown and he’d sneak out of work and I’d get out of class and we would fuck standing up against the hall wall by the entrance, me sometimes up on the kitchen counter, hands grasping the cheap vinyl. I would come and he would too and we’d both pull our pants back up and he’d go back to work and I’d go to the comp class I taught in the afternoon still smelling of him.
He’d last a full year at that job before he left to do custom carpentry for the sorts of people that he used to work with, hoping it’d be more one day, a store of handmade furniture from reclaimed wood. I was so proud then. We were eighties babies, born of plenty, cloistered by our whiteness and the places we were raised in—his parents didn’t have much money, neither had a college education, but we were both brought up to think that if we checked off certain boxes we’d be fine.
9/11 happened my second week of college; the financial crisis came the year after we met. It would be years before we understood the implications of these chasms; we weren’t formed enough to see them, were too safe to feel their first round of hits. We made so many choices based on what we thought the world was, what it wasn’t any longer, what we’d been told it was but what we finally understand that it had never been.
He worked for Lehman Brothers when the markets crashed and they went under—the sky was falling everywhere, except, of course, that he could just have found another job like that. He had this idea, we both did, that he did not want to be implicated any longer in the abstract mess of numbers on a screen and people’s lives all made or broken. We had principles or something, made up almost wholly out of things we knew we didn’t want to be or have a part in more than any concrete plans for what we’d be instead. I vaguely thought books were the answer, because they’d saved me and that seemed like something: to give them to other people, to expose them to them. He thought working with his hands. We were galvanized in this way, smug and stupid. It felt athletic and exciting, this misguided, blind self-righteousness.
Now, I think mostly
