They used to crack themselves up by asking Harry deep, dark, existential questions. Am I self-sabotaging at work because I had no mother, Harry? And Matt would say, Absolutely, in Harry’s voice—she had no idea how to describe it other than it was the voice they both knew to be Harry’s.

“Harry thinks we should go to the Ozarks,” Matt said, and she softened for a moment. She always felt deeply connected to Matt when they were talking to each other like this, through Harry. It made her feel like maybe the three of them really could be a family. “Harry wants to hike the canyon again.”

“Fine, but you can tell Harry that if we wind up staying in that really shitty motel one more time, I will kill myself,” Phoebe said.

They both laughed a little because Harry opened his eyes and looked at Phoebe like he had understood, but also because they knew that Phoebe was not the type to kill herself. Phoebe had taken a multivitamin every day since she was a child. Phoebe brushed her hair before bed. Phoebe was very normal, and her husband liked that. Being normal was his big dream—something her husband confessed on their very first date.

“Ever since I was a kid, I just knew I wanted to grow up and be normal,” he had joked. “But seriously. It’s true.” And Phoebe understood. Her childhood had been exceptionally lonely—with a dead mother and a depressed father and no siblings to talk to at night, which is why she started reading books. Fairy tales at first, because they were about girls just like her, girls whose mothers were killed off in one quick sentence. “Your mother was a wonderful woman who died giving birth to you,” was how her father put it one morning and she felt awful. She felt like she had ruined something just by existing, and she had. Her mother! That beautiful woman who was always hiking in all their photographs. And her father—he was in the picture, too. He was smiling and hiking through the Ozarks with his pregnant wife, and Phoebe had ached for that normal man she never got to know. The normal girl she never got to be.

“But why does being normal feel like a crime here?” Phoebe had asked Matt.

In graduate school, it had been embarrassing to be normal. Everyone Phoebe had met was on a mission to be spectacularly, deliciously weird, and she was impressed and confused by how her colleagues looked so good in socks and high heels. Phoebe could not wear things like that, could not push fashion boundaries, and she didn’t know why exactly, except for the reason that she never wanted anyone to know she was strange.

So, she wore jean shorts and Tevas as soon as the temperatures rose above fifty. She never dyed her hair and had no idea what to say when a poet brought her to a noise concert on a date except, This is a little noisy. The poet kissed her at the end of the night, laughed in her mouth a little as he said, You’re so, like, normal, and it felt like a compliment at the time, but days of his silence later, she saw her collection of cardigans from Banana Republic lined up neatly in the same direction and knew it wasn’t.

“Well, good, because I’m very normal,” she had said to Matt. It was a relief not to feel like she had to buy a whole new wardrobe just to go to a pub with him.

“It’s settled then,” he said. “Where’s the preacher?”

And that’s how everything had felt for years—so wonderfully normal. They got married in a public park, invited only their closest friends and family, because they were suspicious of money, of grand gesture. The bigger the gesture, the emptier the feeling. The more wedding you need, the less happy you must be.

Phoebe truly believed this then. But now the utter simplicity of their lives felt crushing. When Matt reached over to touch her, Phoebe could see and feel the whole experience even before it started.

“I wish I saw your text earlier,” Matt said. “I really wish I did.”

When he leaned over to kiss her, she flinched at his tenderness. She hated his softness. She had been fantasizing, lately, about him doing terrible things to her. Things so awful she couldn’t ever tell him, because she knew it meant something was changing inside of her, some darkness was hardening into sludge. So, she just said, “I love you.”

THEY BOOKED A hotel in the Ozarks for March. And every day after, Matt was up early in a tie and then off to work. But Phoebe moved a little slower. Some mornings, she felt wildly emotional, and some mornings impenetrably numb. She didn’t know how to explain the contradiction to her new therapist when he asked. She kept saying, I feel … disconnected. No, I feel sad. No, I feel … and she would trail off and hope the therapist would fill in the blank, but he never did.

“I feel fucking crazy,” she said to Harry the night before her husband’s awards ceremony. Harry was the only one who knew how often she said fuck while grading papers. “I mean, seriously, what the fuck?”

When she proposed the Fairy Tale course, she thought it would be fun. But she was increasingly disturbed by each student paper that compared Rapunzel’s mother’s infertility to “a kind of poison.” She had forgotten about all the barren women in these stories or maybe she just never noticed them before. She had been too distracted by all the dead mothers.

“And why are all the mothers in fairy tales always dead?” Phoebe asked Matt, who was grading on the couch next to her.

“Because they were premodern. The mothers were often … dead.”

But it had to be about more than that. It seemed like the story wouldn’t even work if the mother wasn’t dead—the dead mother was an important plot point, a necessary precondition for the girl’s story. Because Cinderella never would have been at the center of the novel if her mother had lived. (Neither would Jane Eyre, she thought). The mother had to die so that the girl started in a place of desperation, because that’s what the story was always about. That’s why she had liked them. Watch the good girl grow up, watch the girl try very hard to get everything she wants, then watch how happy she becomes.

The end.

And that had been Phoebe’s story, too—she had been so good. So quiet. So studious. Valedictorian of her high school, then college, and then went off to graduate school to make a life for herself, which she did. She fell in love, got a PhD, got married. Bought a house with her husband. And then, after five grueling cycles of IVF, when all seemed lost, she finally got pregnant using their last embryo. For ten weeks, she rubbed lotion on her belly, and she could feel it, how she was hurtling toward the happy ending that would make everything, even her mother’s death, seem like a necessary part of the story.

But then it was over, in under a sentence. One day she had been pregnant, and then the next day, she was not. She had felt the blood between her legs, and every time she remembered the blood, she thought, No, no, no, this can’t be how it ends. Because this ending made a mockery of her mother’s death. This ending was just tragic. More like a Russian novel, where all the characters go on a great wild adventure just to be killed off in the end.

“The Russians got it right,” Phoebe said the morning of the awards ceremony, and she loved that she could say things like this to Matt. “Maybe I just need to accept that my life is a Russian novel.”

“You forget I haven’t read the Russian novels,” Matt said, pouring coffee in his to-go mug.

“I just mean, a story can be beautiful not because of the way it ends. But because of the way it’s written.”

“That’s true,” Matt said. “But you’re not at the end.”

Matt clearly wasn’t ready to be a character in a Russian novel. He wasn’t ready for his life to be a tragedy, albeit a beautiful one. He was off to work, where he was going to write his speech and pitch a new book to his editor about the philosophy of doing things, while Phoebe stayed at home to write. “Why are all the mothers dead?” she typed, but then felt too depressed to continue. So she got up and made an elaborate breakfast. She touched herself in bed and thought of her husband holding her against a wall by her neck, calling her terrible things. Then, she went for a walk and admired novelty door knockers. She stopped at Joe’s wine shop on the way home. They bought wine exclusively from Joe, a bald man with big thick muscles who asked a lot of questions about the English language every time she purchased something.

“Hey, Professor. Is conversate a word?” Joe asked. “Never heard of it. But girlie over here says it’s a word.”

He pointed to the young girlie, who was always sitting on the stool next to the register, all eyeliner and purple nails. There was always a young girlie—sometimes they worked in the store, and sometimes they just came to visit Joe and sit on a stool for hours because that’s what girlies seemed to like.

“Everything’s a word,” the girlie said. “If you say it enough. Isn’t that right, Dr. Stone?”

This girlie was a student at the university, dark brown hair, dark eyes. Studying psychology. She had never had Phoebe as a professor, but said she had “heard about” her.

“That’s true,” Phoebe said. “Say it for ten years, and it ends up in the dictionary.”

“Ten years,” Joe said. “That’s all it takes?”

Joe wanted Phoebe to like him because Joe wanted all women to like him. Liking him seemed to be the first step to fucking him. And sometimes, she liked Joe. When Joe was railing against the authoritarian undertones of popular politicians or watching a Disney movie on his computer and laughing at all the slapstick. But then she saw the girlie on his stool and the cup in front of the register that said PUSSY FUND.

Right then, it was half-full.

“That’s right,” Phoebe said.

Her husband never commented on the Pussy Fund after they left, as if it were not right to call out another man on his Pussy Fund, or like, if they actually called him out on it, they’d have to find another place to buy wine, and this one was really the most convenient with the best selection. So, she paid for the bottles, and she said, “See ya, Joe,” and she tried not to wonder if her husband ever dropped his spare change in the Pussy Fund when she was not there.

EVERY FEBRUARY, THE awards ceremony, and every year they went, and every time, Phoebe wore the same dress. A black Calvin Klein that she bought years ago for her job orientation. A dress that nobody ever complimented but nobody ever insulted. A dress designed not to be noticed.

She was surprised that it still fit, still made her look the way she always looked, and this depressed her. Tonight, she wanted to feel different. She wanted to walk into the awards ceremony and be noticed. Because if she wasn’t going to have children, she should at least have magnificent dresses. So she drove to the mall and didn’t stop shopping until the emerald dress caught her eye. The silk felt amazing, like cool water dripping down her body—why had she always been afraid to wear silk? To wear color? She looked good in emerald. It highlighted the red tones of her brown hair. The green specks of her eyes. Her olive skin.

She bought it without thinking, without wondering what her husband might think, what Bob might think, what Mia might think. That’s how much she loved it.

But before the dinner, when she put it on again, she felt ridiculous standing on her beige carpet next to her flannel sheets. The silk dress was too much. Five hundred dollars. And the dinner was going to be in the gymnasium. What was she thinking? It was floor-length, a dress meant for a wedding, not for an awards ceremony at a cash-strapped university in Missouri.

She put the black dress on again. She didn’t want to embarrass her husband. She knew she had been embarrassing her husband lately. She knew she had been a little sloppy, sometimes too drunk when he came home.

“Did you write today?” he asked her when he returned to pick her up. He suggested they take one car.

“Yes,” she lied.

She looked at herself in the mirror. There she was again, she thought, and yet, she felt like she was somewhere far away, still in the fertility clinic, watching Matt shake hands with the doctor. Or maybe she was at the River Ouse, watching Virginia Woolf fill her pockets with stones. She wondered how many stones Woolf used. How cold was the water?

“You look beautiful,” he said, and when he said it, she felt it.

She combed her hair and off they went to dinner.

THE DINNER WAS an elaborate affair for a gymnasium. The university paid five grand a year to bring in a guest speaker, some celebrity scholar who could talk both about the crisis in the Middle East and the value of a liberal arts education or the labor conditions in China and the value of a liberal arts education or the recession and the value of a liberal arts education.

“You really look so beautiful,” her husband said again before they entered the gym. He seemed to be telling both of them. He put his arm around her and just like that, they were husband and wife again.