WASN’T THAT JUST THE AMERICAN DREAM?
If Reagan didn’t wash her hair, she could shower in ninety-five seconds and dress in two-and-a-half minutes. As she tore off her plaid pajama pants and beat-up Georgetown sweatshirt, two identical wailing cries pierced the air, their pitches perfectly matched as only twins—or exceptionally gifted, though grating, a cappella singers—could. The girls shouldn’t expect to see Reagan for another eight minutes; they were just trying their luck. (She nuzzled Natasha’s and Daisy’s matching halos of raven curls and whispered, “Good morning, lovelies!” at precisely 6:37 a.m. every day.) Ted’s flight didn’t leave until noon, probably later with the weather: just a confectioner’s-sugar dusting of snow, nothing so remarkable for January, but enough to cripple Washington. He had plenty of time. He could greet the girls this morning.
Reagan bounded into the telephone-booth-sized shower stall, fast, fast, yanking the glass door shut with enough force to shake its frame, and pulled on the faucet. Old pipes squealing, no time to let the hot water crank, it felt like walking into an ice storm naked. “Motherfucker!” she shouted. As though in response, her phone began blasting that new Rocky Haze song, the one in which she rapped the Constitution. Reagan had forgotten to turn off her alarm. Why did she still set her alarm when the twins woke her daily at 6:24 anyway? As she pushed the door to step out, the cries crescendoing once more, the glass wouldn’t budge. She shook it, again, again, and it was as though she had been vacuum-packed in there: the seal around the door’s frame, which had been peeling for months—and which Ted kept promising to repair and she kept refusing to do herself on principle, one of the many things falling apart in their home—had gobbed up and gotten lodged. If she pushed too hard, the whole thing would likely shatter, it was that old.
“Fuck this motherfucking house!” she said to herself, not expecting to be heard. She couldn’t even bang her fists against the glass, so she started to shout, “TED! TED! I’m trapped! In the shower! Trapped!” She imagined him singularly focused, returning emails over breakfast, reading headlines, making calls and finally whistling as he packed his bag and hopped in the cab that would pull up to the house right on time, no matter the snow, to whisk him to the airport and possibly to his place in history helping to elect the next president—well, now, wasn’t that just the American Dream?—all while the children cried and she stood imprisoned in their shower. If all else failed, she told herself, she had been a black belt in high school for God’s sake and could sidekick the hell out of that door if she wanted. But then she would just have to clean up all that damn glass. She just didn’t have time today. They had a My Gym class to get to and it was the girls’ favorite—“Music and Motion”—and she was not going to let them miss it. “TED!” she yelled again.
She didn’t have the energy or patience for this. She’d stayed up all night writing a column and had sent it in minutes ago without bothering to reread. “Ugh,” she grunted, then chanted to herself, head against the glass door, “Perfect is the enemy of the good, perfect is the enemy of the good.” And who had said that? Besides Voltaire? Bill Clinton, right? Why couldn’t she come up with lines that good? Work, parenting, she was doing everything wrong. The only part of motherhood she was completely acing was the constant guilt. Even her own mother had no patience for her self-flagellation. At least three times a week, her mother, a nurse, would FaceTime her at the end of her shift and tell her, always in Korean because she knew Reagan never spoke it otherwise, “You need some mom friends! You need a group of women supporting you!” To which Reagan would reply some variation of, “Ugggghhh, enough with you,” in Korean and then usually tune out yet another of her mom’s diatribes about the power of sisterhood.
Actually, now that she thought about it, kicking the door down could be kind of fun. Her heart revved up considering, the slightest adrenaline surge—or was that nausea? (She couldn’t pull all-nighters like she used to.) Ted had clearly forgotten she could do stuff like that. She would show him what happened when home repairs weren’t made in a timely manner. She was warming up to the idea when the bathroom door flew open. Ted strutted in like a chipper kangaroo, a grinning Natasha snuggled against his chest in one baby carrier and a giggling Daisy loaded onto his back in the other. He still wore his black track pants and hoodie from his early jog in the bracing cold, Bluetooth in ear, ice-blue eyes bright: the image of work-life balanced bliss.
“Daddy to the rescue!” he called out, galloping like a horse. “What do we have here? Well, you’ve gone and got yourself into quite a pickle, haven’t you?” He laughed. “Look at Mommy!”
She waved. “Good morning, lovelies.”
The girls squealed and cheered, contentedly attached to Ted, as he fiddled with the door, inspecting the seal, picking at it, and jiggling the whole thing in its frame. (Somehow, observing this effort felt worse than just kicking the thing down.) The non-sleep-deprived Reagan would’ve already been laughing at the whole episode, but this one—the cold, tired, wet, naked one—put her hands on her hips and sighed. “Give me your cold, your tired, your naked. Give me a towel.” With a pop, the door unstuck and Ted opened it proudly, the girls clapping as he tossed a towel at her.
“So I’m gonna need that ride to the airport, after all.”
* * *
The mailman arrived at the same time as the sitter, Stacy, their favorite My Gym teacher, fresh out of college but seemingly even younger. Reagan kissed Natasha’s and Daisy’s soft curls, snuggled their necks in that way that always made them both giggle, then left them playing with Stacy in their bubblegum-pink bedroom.
She stole away to her room and tossed the much-anticipated package on the unmade bed. She lived a mile from the shops at Friendship Heights, two miles from Bethesda Row, and four miles from Georgetown, but damned if she knew when she was supposed to have time for shopping. She hoped one of these rented cocktail dresses fit. At least she hadn’t eaten in the twenty-four hours since being freed from the shower—too busy—though it wasn’t like her. She feared she might be on the verge of another bout of the Norovirus. She barely slept, and her immune system had been shot since having the twins.
Reagan sat at her desk, fired up her laptop and began reading—today was as much an indulgence as it was a necessity. She had until about 6:00 p.m. to get through the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Politico, The Queue, the Washington Post, the Economist, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, and then for extra color, Us Weekly, People, Vogue, Vanity Fair. Everything she no longer had time to read on a regular basis; everything she needed to feel prepared for a Birdie Brandywine cocktail party.
She flipped on the TV to CNN and poured a 5-Hour Energy shot into her hot coffee, stirred it with her finger—“Ow! Fuck!”—and took a big swig before shooting off a quick text to Jay, her best friend, who was currently in the throes of a romantic upheaval: It isn’t chickening out, if you DON’T do something that would’ve been a mistake. You’re suffering from a case of good judgment. Kudos. xo. With a deep breath, she began speed-reading. As she consumed the words, and the caffeine, she felt herself metamorphosing into her alter ego: a sociable person capable of discussing an array of topics beyond just the eating and sleeping habits of tiny humans. Politics, news, government had once been her lifeblood. She was reminded again—as she had been with the karate—that she had all sorts of skill sets that weren’t being utilized on a regular basis.