Once she’d finally dropped Owen and Amelia off—Owen at the elementary school and Amelia at the Montessori preschool she went to in the mornings—she realized that it was actually one of those October days that made everyone forget, for at least twenty-four hours, that living in New York City could be a real slog. The sun was shining, the leaves were starting to turn, the air was crisp. And as much as Park Slope sometimes felt claustrophobic, its familiarity was also comforting. She didn’t feel on display in the same way she did when she went into Manhattan, where suddenly her uniform of clogs and jeans and boatneck tees seemed woefully boring. When she got to the F train, she put her headphones on—she wasn’t actually listening to anything, but this ensured that no one would talk to her—and closed her eyes. Even though she was surrounded by people, her commute was the only time when she felt blissfully alone.
They finally reached her stop, Twenty-Third Street, and Sabrina got off the train and emerged in front of the Best Buy. At 9:05 in the morning, standing at the corner of Twenty-Third and Sixth, she felt like everyone around her looked like a vaguely younger version of herself. Not that she looked old, of course—she credited her Korean genes and her mother’s fanaticism about night cream with keeping her skin smooth—but lately she’d been watching the stay-at-home moms in leggings and Warby Parker sunglasses in her neighborhood, the ones who had nannies so they could go to Pilates and have “me” time, with increasing amounts of envy. But she had been one of those moms and hated it. After four years, she had turned into the worst kind of stay-at-home mom, one who thought she was too smart to be a stay-at-home mom and secretly judged all other stay-at-home moms for not working. (A couple of years in, her therapist had told her, “But you know you’re really only judging yourself, Sabrina.” She stopped going to therapy a few weeks later.) When she stayed home, there were days where she completely missed everything that was going on in the world because she was schlepping from playdate to playdate.
In her MFA program, Sabrina had been something of a golden child, winning scholarships and awards. It had not been hard to picture a fabulous literary future for herself. But everything changed after graduation, when Sabrina failed to sell her thesis, a novel about three generations of a wacky but endearing Korean American family living in Princeton, New Jersey, even though one of her professors, who had won a National Book Award, called it brilliant and masterful and a host of other adjectives that failed to move editors at every major publishing house in New York. (The feedback she got most consistently was that the family didn’t seem “realistic,” which she took to mean that they didn’t think a Korean family could be funny and weird. Of course, exactly zero of the editors who’d read it were even Asian.)
So she’d abandoned fiction to take a string of increasingly grim magazine jobs for which she was both over- (she had a graduate degree!) and underqualified (she had no magazine experience!) and eventually quit altogether, after she had Owen, when the eco-crafting magazine where she’d been working suddenly folded with no notice and she didn’t even get her last paycheck. Because Dan still had a job, it had just made sense for them to ride out the still-not-great economy, especially since child care was so expensive, and then she’d had Amelia. She wrote the occasional freelance essay about parenthood, but finally it was all just too much. When she started looking at job listings, Dan had laughed (not nicely) when she asked what a social media manager did, but she began applying for jobs nonetheless.
When she went in for the TakeOff interview, even though she had a pathetic seventy-six followers on Instagram and she didn’t even have an active Twitter account, she was able to show them the viral article she’d just written for Scary Mommy—it was one of the bigger parenting sites, but they’d never heard of it—about what she wished she’d known before having a second kid. Maybe it was the article, maybe it was some kind of sincere yet misguided attempt at affirmative action for older people, but she was hired.
Sabrina was an Engagement Ninja—when she first applied, she’d thought this was a euphemism, not an actual job title—at TakeOff, whose offices were in a lofty Flatiron District building that a million years ago had been a garment factory and now housed, at any one time, approximately seventeen startups. They were mostly tech-related, but there was a smattering of other companies, like the bespoke-baby-clothing designer on the second floor. (She’d wandered in one day, thinking about maybe having something made for Amelia’s third birthday party, and had to pretend to be unfazed when the woman at the desk told her that their dresses started at two hundred and fifty dollars.) The entire building was run by ShareWork, a company that leased empty buildings around the city and then subdivided them into cool work spaces. Every office came with a customizable “employee-perks” package; standard was an iced-coffee kegerator, a Ping-Pong table, weekly chair massages, and building-wide lunchtime yoga classes in one of the shared conference rooms. When Sabrina had worked for the eco-crafting magazine, the break room was essentially a closet with a microwave, a dorm-size fridge, and a coffeemaker that you had to bring in your own coffee to use. At TakeOff, the employees had successfully rallied to get Stumptown back after the office manager had, out of nowhere, tried switching them over to Starbucks. After Stumptown returned, there had been an hour-long celebratory coffee break in the canteen, where a hired barista made espresso drinks for everyone.