Now, as she lay in bed, vaguely wondering where Dan was but also not really caring, she thought back to this conversation. Truth be told, she hadn’t been able to shake what had happened at Andrew’s party. Not just the texts from Mack to Isabel—which she had yet to confront Isabel about—but also the way all the guests had seemed so convinced of their own importance. The party had dislodged something in her, reignited some long-dormant spark. She remembered that she used to think that if she wasn’t exactly destined for greatness, she was definitely at least destined for significance. And there was little, if anything, that felt important about what she was doing now. If she stopped tweeting for the TakeOff account, no one would miss her. No one would likely even notice. She just wouldn’t be getting a paycheck anymore.
Somewhere along the way, she’d lost her ambition. Somewhere along the way, it had just seemed easier to fade into the background, to become unmemorable. It was probably when she had stopped being Sabrina Choe and started being Sabrina Blum. At the time, she had just turned thirty, and changing her last name didn’t seem like such a big deal, even if, when you looked at her, she was clearly more of a Choe than a Blum. Maybe if she’d been able to get her book published, she would have felt different—if she’d actually made a name for herself as herself, then perhaps the stakes of becoming someone else would have felt higher.
She patted the bed next to her, looking for her phone, and finally found it under her pillow. There was a notification from Chase, alerting her that the payment on her Visa card was over thirty days late. She frowned as the words swam in front of her briefly, then squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and reopened them. Better. Now if she could only remember which Visa that was…For a while she’d managed to keep track of everything, opening store cards to get the 10 percent discount and keeping the balances on their other cards low enough that Dan wouldn’t notice—she was the one who paid the bills anyway—but lately, she was starting to think that maybe things had gotten a wee bit out of control. First the Barneys card had been suspended because she’d forgotten to make the minimum payment, and then she’d been turned down for a J. Crew card—a J. Crew card!—when she’d applied, and she knew she needed to make a minimum payment on the Delta SkyMiles AmEx by the fifteenth or that card was going to get shut off too. It was at the point where she preemptively cringed when her monthly statements arrived in her inbox, because she knew the money in their actual checking account was dangerously low and she had to make sure their mortgage payment would clear. Somehow, miraculously, Dan hadn’t caught on yet. But she needed to figure out a way to make more money, and quickly. Soon she would just swallow her pride and give that woman she knew from grad school who had a big job at InStyle a call and see if she had anything—anything—to assign her. Because soon the only thing she was going to be able to write was a personal essay called “I Made My Family Go into Debt Because I Resented My Husband and Couldn’t Resist That Really Cute Isabel Marant Dress (Hey, It Was on Sale!),” which she’d probably have to publish on the Huffington Post for free.
When she was Katya’s age, the parameters of “success” seemed much more clearly defined. Or maybe there were just fewer options. When she first got to New York, all she wanted was to make enough money to be able to pay rent without overdrawing her account or taking a cash advance from a credit card or asking her parents for money. But with each stage she reached, it seemed like there was something else on the horizon, just one raise or one new job away—that soon, she could be someone who owned clothes that required dry cleaning and got weekly mani-pedis and shopped at Alexander Wang sample sales and took Pilates classes and had an apartment that allowed pets that was also big enough to have people over for dinner or throw a party, and she could afford to hire someone to come clean the apartment every two weeks and rent a share house in the summer and go on yoga retreats in Tulum. Then when she had kids, it was like a whole new edition of the New York Olympics, one that she felt she was definitely not medaling in.
She had a few Facebook notifications, so she opened the app and saw that there were new posts in a private group she’d joined a few weeks ago called YUNG MILFS NYC. It was a group of a couple thousand women, most of whom seemed to be five to ten years younger than she was, who all had kids in New York. Her friend Penelope, who she had secretly categorized as her prettiest and coolest mom friend, had added her. And they really were MILFs—lots of them seemed to be actresses or models or just extremely attractive women who had married young. They weren’t boring Upper East Side women either; most of them lived in Williamsburg or Bushwick or Greenpoint, and there was a lot of talk about how judgmental the older moms were. (Sabrina felt dangerously close to being put into this category.) The first couple of new posts were standard YUNG MILF fare—crafternoon playdates, a humblebrag disguised as a question about a four-year-old who was reading already—but then there was one that made Sabrina sit up in bed so quickly that her head started spinning. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes again and then opened them after a few seconds and read the post:
Ladies, so I’m in a bit of a spot at the moment. The hubs lost his job a few months ago and I’ve been looking for some ways to pick up extra cash from home. Anyone have any suggestions that aren’t illegal? Or at least, not so illegal that I could get in actual trouble. ;)
She scrolled through the first few comments, all of which said something to the effect of “Sooo sorry to hear that! Thinking of u!” but a post a few lines down caught her eye.
Hey girl, was totally in the same boat last year. Sucks. But let me tell you, you’ll get through it!!! Don’t be grossed out, but I started selling my dirty underwear on Craigslist. It’s super easy and you can probably make $400 to $600 a week depending how much time you want to put into it. Message me if you want more details! ?