“We’re out of yogurt.”
It was less a statement than an accusation, which Dan delivered in a tone of wounded sorrow as he stared into the open refrigerator. Its top shelf, where the big tubs of Greek yogurt usually sat, was desolate except for some leftover olives in a plastic Whole Foods tub and that two-year-old jar of pineapple salsa he’d bought by accident and couldn’t bring himself to throw out even though nobody in the house wanted anything to do with a salsa defiled by fruit.
The target of his accusation wasn’t listening. Jen sat at the kitchen table in front of a mug of coffee, wearing the Michigan T-shirt she’d slept in and staring dead-eyed at her phone. On its screen was a chunk of text from an article in the Nutrition and Fitness section of the New York Times app titled “How to Stop Yourself from Crying.”
Upon seeing the headline as she scrolled, Jen’s initial reaction had been amused contempt: When did the Times start running articles that Woman’s Day rejected?
But that had quickly given way to a second, much less cynical thought: Maybe this could help.
Unfortunately, three paragraphs in, she’d realized the article was pitched exclusively to readers who didn’t want to quit crying so much as they just wanted to quit doing it in front of other people. Jen did her crying alone, usually in the upstairs bathroom on school days when nobody was home, and the Times apparently felt this was either not a problem at all or so grave as to be beyond its capacity to fix. It was hard to tell which.
Either way, by the time Dan issued his yogurt indictment, she’d stopped even trying to read the article. Her eyes were still fixed on the screen, but her mind had wandered off to wrestle with the binary choice that had come to dominate her weekdays: Will I or won’t I?
No. Not today.
Well, maybe—
No! Jesus.
But—
“Didn’t you go shopping yesterday?”
Having failed to engage his wife’s attention through passive aggression, Dan was trying again, without the passive part this time.
“I thought you were going to—Jen . . . ? Jen!”
Finally, she turned her head from the phone. “What?”
“Why didn’t you go shopping yesterday?”
“I did! I got dinner.” Dinner had been lasagna and sautéed spinach carried out from Delectables, an overpriced gourmet place on Hawthorne Avenue that only sold prepared foods. She’d chosen it late Monday afternoon over more versatile shopping alternatives for a simple reason she didn’t dare articulate to Dan: it was possible to drive to Delectables and back by executing only right turns.
“Why didn’t you get breakfast stuff?”
“I was working! I put in a Fresh Direct order. I don’t know why it hasn’t come yet.” Jen’s laptop was on the table, halfway between her and Max. She moved her coffee mug to clear a path and dragged over the laptop. Before she opened the screen, she reached out and smacked her fourteen-year-old son’s free hand.
Max was wearing a pair of massive blue headphones that dwarfed his skull, making him look like some kind of cyborg monkey as he shoveled cereal into his mouth while watching a martial arts video on his phone. Its cracked screen lay flat beside the cereal bowl, little pinpoints of splashed milk speckling the image of a shirtless, steroid-swollen man in a Mohawk who was conducting a tutorial on the mechanics of an elbow smash to the face.
“What?” Max snapped.
“Quit staring at your screen,” Jen scolded him as she clicked on the Fresh Direct link in her browser bar.
“You’re staring at yours!”
“I’m staring with a purpose.”
“So am I!”
What his mother didn’t know, because Max would’ve sooner cut off a finger than explain it to her, was that the elbow-to-the-face video was no idle entertainment. It was source material in a research project with serious implications for his future.
“I think we should all stop staring at our screens,” Dan declared.
Jen’s irritation at this—as if her husband wasn’t about to spend the entire commute into Manhattan staring at his screen—was compounded by her simultaneous realization that $137.54 worth of food was still sitting in her Fresh Direct cart. Somehow, she’d failed to complete the order.
“Shit.”
“What?”
“I forg—” Bad idea, don’t admit that. “It takes forever to schedule this stuff.” She clicked on the next available delivery window and quickly finished the transaction as the headache she’d woken up with reasserted itself in a stab of pain just behind her left eyeball. “Eight to ten tomorrow night.”
“Tomorrow night? What are we going to do until then?”
“Go to the store like normal people?” The words came out in a snarl. Jen knew counterattacking was a poor choice, but it was tough to act strategically with an invisible icepick digging into her skull.
“Who’s going to go to the store?” Dan felt secure enough in his occupation of the moral high ground to ratchet up his tone from aggrieved to indignant.
“Do you want to?”
Dan sucked in his breath. For Jen to suggest that he buy weekday groceries, five minutes before he left for work with no chance of getting home prior to dinner, wasn’t just logistically absurd. It was a violation of their marriage contract. According to the unwritten rules governing their relationship, Jen maintained the shopping list and bought all the groceries except on special occasions. Even then, they both knew it was a bad idea to let Dan shop alone. The pineapple salsa was proof of that.
And assuming he did have both the time to shop and the mental bandwidth to make a list (which he didn’t, given that he was facing a highly stressful workday of creative demands he hadn’t yet figured out how to meet), if Dan accepted such a major off-loading of his wife’s household responsibilities onto his own plate, what would he get in return? If Dan bought groceries on a Tuesday, would Jen blow the leaves on Saturday? Would she file the insurance claim for Chloe’s out-of-network therapist appointment? Would she—what the hell, let’s put all our cards on the table here—quit chasing the financial crumbs of short-term consulting gigs and actually commit to going back full-time so he didn’t have to keep shouldering ninety percent of their income burden?
This was some nonsense.
“When would I go to the store? We have to break two new stories today! The room could go till midnight!”
Jen slammed her laptop shut, conceding defeat. “Settle down! I’m going to the store! Jesus.”
“I mean, is that a problem?”
“No. I’m on a deadline, but—whatever. It’s fine.” She got up from the table and gritted her teeth against the headache as she retrieved a pad of Post-its and a pen from the countertop.
“A deadline for what? The Rutgers thing?”
“Yeah. That’s why I didn’t get to the store yesterday.” The Rutgers thing had been over for a week—did I submit the last invoice? need to check on that—but Dan didn’t know this, so Jen figured it was safe to reanimate its corpse in the service of clawing back a little moral advantage. “What do we need besides yogurt?”
“Granola, fruit, milk . . .” Dan had reopened the fridge and was scanning its contents with mounting concern. “OJ . . . cold cuts . . . every kind of cheese . . . Jesus, what am I going to eat for breakfast?”
“There’s eggs.”
“I don’t have time for eggs! I’ll miss the eight eleven.”
“You don’t start until ten.”
“I don’t have anything to pitch yet! I need to get in early and do some thinking. Shit . . . I’ll just eat at Barnaby’s.”
“You have time for Barnaby’s, but not eggs?”
“It’s quiet in the mornings—I can work there awhile and take the eight fifty-two. Do you have cash?”
“I did, until Chloe’s ACT tutor took it all.” Jen looked up from her list. “Max, what food do you need?”
Engrossed in a step-by-step walkthrough of an open palm strike to the chin, Max failed to hear the question.
“Max!”
No response. Dan added his voice to Jen’s. “Max!”
Still nothing.
“MAX!”
The yelling finally reached a volume loud enough to penetrate Max’s headphones. He pulled the muff off one ear. “What?”
“What do you need from the grocery store?”
“I dunno. Cheese sticks? More cereal.” He let the muff drop back against his ear, shutting out his parents again.
“Don’t get him more of that cereal,” Dan warned Jen. “It’s terrible for him.”
“It’s the only thing he’ll eat for breakfast.”
“If you don’t buy it, he won’t eat it.”
“Then he won’t eat anything! Look how skinny he is.”
Chloe entered the kitchen, her still-damp hair carrying the strawberry scent of shampoo. She’d paired a bright blue halter top that showcased her toned upper arms with a simmering scowl so hostile that Dan instantly stepped back to give her a clear path to the fridge.
“What a skinny little loser. Right, Mom?” Chloe spat out each word through a clenched jaw as she yanked open the freezer door.
Dan and Jen exchanged a look. Their daughter was loaded for bear, and neither of them knew why.
“You okay, sweetheart?” Dan asked.
“Yeah. I’m fine! For a loser.”
Jen narrowed her eyes in an expression that was equal parts weariness and pain. “What point are you trying to—”
“Jesus!” Chloe exploded in fury as she stared into the open freezer, which was only slightly less empty than the fridge. Her head spun around to glare daggers at Jen. “You didn’t get more acai bowls? What am I going to eat for breakfast?”
“I have a job, Chloe!” Jen shot back. “I have more responsibilities than just—”
“I have an AP Gov test first period! What am I going to eat?” Chloe yelled so loudly that Max had to turn the volume on his phone up three more ticks.
“Why are you being so emotional?” Jen yelled back.
Chloe let out a noise that fell somewhere between a snort and a wail. “Huh! Yeah! I wonder why?”
It was clear to Dan that whatever massive mother-daughter fight was brewing, he wasn’t implicated in it—and past experience had taught him that any attempt to mediate was not just likely to fail, but would risk expanding the conflict beyond its current borders.
He decided to flee. Before he did, he offered Chloe a spot in the lifeboat.
“I’m going to Barnaby’s,” he told her. “You want to come? I’ll buy you breakfast.”
Having made the offer on impulse, Dan was just beginning to calculate the level of paternal self-sacrifice involved in eating breakfast with his daughter while being completely unprepared for the ten a.m. writers’ room when Chloe rendered the issue moot by rejecting his offer with a snarl. “I have a gov test! Emma’s picking me up.”
“Okay! All good.” He put a gentle, supportive hand on her tense upper back as he slipped past her to fetch his messenger bag from the counter.
“If you treat me like a human being, I’ll make you eggs,” Jen told her daughter in a voice too bitter to accomplish anything except further escalation.
“I hate eggs!”
“Gotta go—love you both—please don’t fight!” Dan called out over his shoulder as he escaped to the mudroom and the garage beyond.
“Thanks for your help, have a super day!” Jen told the back of her husband’s head. Then she returned to her daughter with a weary sigh. “Will you please tell me why you’re so pissed off?”
“You don’t know? You seriously don’t know?” Chloe’s voice quivered. Her volatile emotional state had multiple overlapping sources: yesterday’s sectional tennis final, Friday’s BC calculus quiz, this morning’s AP Government exam, last Sunday’s practice ACT test, this Saturday’s actual ACT test, record low acceptance rates at elite US colleges, the supplemental essays for her early decision application to Dartmouth, climate change, Josh Houser’s Instagram feed, the absence of enlightened global political leadership, the absence of acai bowls in the freezer, and above all her mother’s capacity for casual, apparently oblivious cruelty.
Jen winced as she watched Chloe’s upper lip tremble. Her daughter had just posed a single-question, pass-fail exam, and Jen knew she was about to flunk it.
“Is it about the sectional?”
“It’s about the essay!”
“What about it?”
“OH MY GOD!”
“Chloe! If you don’t tell me, I can’t help—”
“I can’t believe this!”
Over at the table, Max dialed his phone’s volume up to maximum and shifted his seat by thirty degrees to move the altercation out of his line of sight so he could finish watching “Top Five One-Punch Knockouts” in peace. He had his own battle to fight. And unlike his sister’s never-ending cold war with their mother, he planned to bring his to a swift and decisive conclusion.
Max had done his homework. He’d spent the past two weeks watching how-to martial arts videos on YouTube and doing push-ups in his bedroom after dinner. He was almost ready for the reckoning. All he had to do now was figure out how to goad Jordan Stankovic into taking another swing at him.
It was 7:54 a.m. on the last normal Tuesday morning in Lincolnwood, New Jersey.