“Very expensive.”
“Like remortgaging the house expensive?”
“Like, eight hundred a night.”
“That’s … too much, Phoebe.”
But wasn’t that the point? To be too much? To be reckless? To be extravagant? To do whatever the fuck they wanted because if they couldn’t have children, they could at least have fun spending the savings account that Phoebe had started ten years ago for their children?
Phoebe needed that. But she could feel that he no longer did. He had changed his mind today. He had won his award. He had his fun thing to look forward to, and he didn’t even have to buy it. He simply earned it, and how wonderful that must feel for him now—to have earned back his dignified place in the world.
“Why don’t we just go to the Ozarks?” Matt said. “We always like it there.”
Phoebe looked up at the dark ceiling. She felt a panicked feeling, like when she was a kid, lost in the supermarket looking around and realizing everybody in town sort of looked like her father. They all wore the same jeans.
“No,” Phoebe said.
They always went to the Ozarks. They honeymooned in the Ozarks and they took spring breaks in the Ozarks, and the hikes were long and beautiful things that made Phoebe feel proud enough to enjoy their evening happy hour. Phoebe had always felt her fun must be earned, her vacations must also be work, require a lot of gear.
But Phoebe was tired of work. Her whole life felt like work now. Even the parts that used to be the most fun, like reading over the summer or orgasming during sex or having conversations with her husband at dinner. They felt like things she had to be really good at now, in order to prove that everything was normal. That even without a baby, they would be happy. And even without a book, the ten years she had spent trying to write one had been worth it. Because it was getting harder to believe that. Most nights, she looked back at all of her research, all of her spreadsheets, all of her journals and her papers and her injections and thought, What the fuck?
“The Ozarks are for families,” Phoebe said to Matt.
They were full of kids flying kites. Parents that wore matching hats and walked through the woods eating American flag ice pops.
“We’re a family,” Matt said.
“But we don’t have a family.”
“We have Harry.”
Harry was their cat, always curled up between them just before bed. They bought him ten years ago when they really wanted a dog but then decided it was not the right time for a dog. Yet they went to the shelter “just to browse” only to learn that there was no browsing at a shelter. There was a little orange kitten with its nose pressed up to the cage, going, Meowmeowmeowmeow.
Harry, Matt read off the adoption file, and it sounded wrong to them, overly human, but they spent a decade loving Harry more than they thought normal. They gave Harry treats for doing nothing at all and then wondered whether it was wrong to give Harry a treat for doing nothing at all. For just being a cat? “Why do I expect you to be more than a cat when all I want is for you to just be a cat?” Phoebe asked Harry, like he was a psychiatrist sitting between them, and often that’s what Harry looked like—so dignified, with one little paw crossed over the other like he was patiently waiting his turn to say something wise.
“Harry is not our family,” Phoebe reminded him. “He’s our psychiatrist.”
“Oh right. It’s such a blurry line.”
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.
