“Both, I guess.”
Sabrina wondered whether she should explain how, when she and Dan had bought their apartment right after they’d gotten engaged, she’d had visions of it being the perfect Brooklyn home—a washer/dryer, enough counter space to actually cook, a small patio off the kitchen where she planted herbs and where people could smoke when they had parties, and in a neighborhood where lots of their friends lived—but the herbs had died years ago, the counter was cluttered with toys and mail and stray pieces of fossilized organic fruit leather, and one of the reasons she’d taken this job was that she couldn’t stand to be in there for one extra second. Not to mention that most of their friends had moved to Montclair, and to top it off, they weren’t even in the really good Park Slope school district. And she hated having to think about things like being in the really good public school district. Another downside to working with people much younger than her was that Sabrina saw a vision of how her life might have turned out differently if she hadn’t met Dan when she did. This whole time, she’d smugly congratulated herself on skipping the horribleness of being a single woman in her thirties in New York, but what if the real trap was being married in your thirties in New York? Or maybe, and this was something she tried not to think about, the real trap was just being married to Dan.
“It’s good.” She tried to keep her voice bright. “You know, we have our hiccups, like every other couple, but overall it’s just nice.” Could Isabel hear the insincerity in her voice? She hoped not. Because what she really wanted to tell her was to enjoy these years for as long as she could, before she had to worry about things like nannies and school districts and husbands who didn’t do the laundry because you were “better” at it.
Not that her twenties had been so great, but Sabrina sometimes longed to go back to those first few dreamlike years in New York when everyone was young and attractive, and the rooftop parties and picnics in the park seemed like they would never end. She looked at Isabel and remembered those nights before grad school when she’d snort coke in the bathroom of a bar and then stumble home with whatever guy she’d been talking to all night and have exhausted sex on his mattress on the floor and then wake up in the morning and get Gatorade and bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches from the bodega. But then those nights started being fewer and farther between, and then she met Dan, and the joys of a quotidian, grown-up New York life became more apparent: An apartment that didn’t have mice or roaches but did have space for a kitchen table that sat more than two people. Taking cabs. Weekends upstate. She started to like the version of her life she’d graduated to; it was like she’d gotten a certificate that said she would now fuck only the kind of guy who had a nightstand and an actual bed, not a mattress on the floor or even one propped on the free metal frame. Dan, she had noted right away, not only had both items, but they were from West Elm. Even she hadn’t totally abandoned Ikea yet.
But that phase was fleeting. Now she’d graduated to the I-never-have-sex-so-who-even-cares-about-nightstands phase. They hardly used the patio anymore; the last party they’d had was her baby shower for Owen. Almost six years ago! Owen and Amelia shared a bedroom that had been a dining room, so they’d put the dining-room table in the living room, which was theoretically fine, except now there was barely anywhere for the kids to play. Plus, prices everywhere had skyrocketed in the past few years, so even if they sold their apartment for a big profit, they wouldn’t be able to afford anything bigger in the neighborhood, even in the still-good-but-not-PS-321-good school district.
Sabrina had been scrolling through TweetDeck for a couple minutes, trying to find a meme that people were talking about so she could retweet it from the TakeOff account, when she realized Isabel was talking to her again. “Sorry,” she said, taking out her earbuds. “What’s up?”
“Andrew’s having a dinner party tomorrow night,” Isabel said.
“Cool.” Sabrina glanced back at TweetDeck. She couldn’t remember exactly, but she thought the last dinner party she’d gone to was probably sometime in the last decade.
“You should come,” Isabel said.
Sabrina turned away from her monitor to face Isabel completely. “Um. What? Did you just say I should come to Andrew’s dinner party? You’re kidding, right?”
“Why is that so weird?” Isabel looked genuinely offended. “You never come out to work things, so I thought a dinner party might be more your speed.”
“I don’t come out to work things because I have to get home to my kids.” That said, Sabrina had never actually considered whether she wanted to go out after work with her colleagues. Also, her coworkers went out almost every night. Even if she were twenty-six, she highly doubted she’d go along on every single drinks excursion. It was shocking they weren’t all in AA by now.
“I know. Duh. But you’re, like, a cool mom.” Isabel giggled.
“I’m not, like, a regular mom.” Sabrina smiled.
“See!” Isabel said triumphantly. “You can quote Mean Girls. You’re not, like, old-old.”
“Um, well, thanks.”
“Seriously, though, you should come. Think about it?”