Today Will Be Different

Today Will Be Different

Maria Semple

Little, Brown (2016)

Rating: ★★★★☆

Tags: Fiction, Contemporary Women, Family Life, Humorous, General, Literary, Fiction / Contemporary Women, Fiction / Family Life, Fiction / Humorous, Fiction / Literary

Fictionttt Contemporary Womenttt Family Lifettt Humorousttt Generalttt Literaryttt Fiction / Contemporary Womenttt Fiction / Family Lifettt Fiction / Humorousttt Fiction / Literaryttt

A brilliant novel from the author of
Where'd You Go, Bernadette, about a day in the life of Eleanor Flood, forced to abandon her small ambitions and awake to a strange, new future.

**Eleanor knows she's a mess. But today, she will tackle the little things. She will shower and get dressed. She will have her poetry and yoga lessons after dropping off her son, Timby. She won't swear. She will initiate sex with her husband, Joe. But before she can put her modest plan into action-life happens. Today, it turns out, is the day Timby has decided to fake sick to weasel his way into his mother's company. It's also the day Joe has chosen to tell his office-but not Eleanor-that he's on vacation. Just when it seems like things can't go more awry, an encounter with a former colleague produces a graphic memoir whose dramatic tale threatens to reveal a buried family secret.

TODAY WILL BE DIFFERENT is a hilarious, heart-filled story about reinvention, sisterhood, and how sometimes it takes facing up to our former selves to truly begin living.

**

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For George and Poppy and, to a lesser extent, Ralphy

Today will be different. Today I will be present. Today, anyone I speak to, I will look them in the eye and listen deeply. Today I’ll play a board game with Timby. I’ll initiate sex with Joe. Today I will take pride in my appearance. I’ll shower, get dressed in proper clothes, and change into yoga clothes only for yoga, which today I will actually attend. Today I won’t swear. I won’t talk about money. Today there will be an ease about me. My face will be relaxed, its resting place a smile. Today I will radiate calm. Kindness and self-control will abound. Today I will buy local. Today I will be my best self, the person I’m capable of being. Today will be different.

The Trick

Because the other way wasn’t working. The waking up just to get the day over with until it was time for bed. The grinding it out was a disgrace, an affront to the honor and long shot of being alive at all. The ghost-walking, the short-tempered distraction, the hurried fog. (All of this I’m just assuming, because I have no idea how I come across, my consciousness is that underground, like a toad in winter.) The leaving the world a worse place just by being in it. The blindness to the destruction in my wake. The Mr. Magoo.

If I’m forced to be honest, here’s an account of how I left the world last week: worse, worse, better, worse, same, worse, same. Not an inventory to make one swell with pride. I don’t necessarily need to make the world a better place, mind you. Today, I will live by the Hippocratic oath: first do no harm.

How hard can it be? Dropping off Timby, having my poetry lesson (my favorite part of life!), taking a yoga class, eating lunch with Sydney Madsen, whom I can’t stand but at least I can check her off the list (more on that later), picking up Timby, and giving back to Joe, the underwriter of all this mad abundance.

You’re trying to figure out, why the
agita
surrounding one normal day of white-people problems? Because there’s me and there’s the beast in me. It would be kind of brilliant if the beast in me played out on a giant canvas, shocking and awe-ing, causing fabulous destruction, talked about forever. If I could swing that, I just might: self-immolate gloriously for the performance-art spectacle. The sad truth? The beast in me plays out on a painfully small scale: regrettable micro-transactions usually involving Timby, my friends, or Joe. I’m irritable and consumed by anxiety when I’m with them; maudlin and shit-talking when I’m not. Ha! Aren’t you glad you’re at a safe distance, doors locked, windows rolled up? Aw, come on. I’m nice. I’m exaggerating for effect. It’s not really like that.

And so the day began, the minute I whipped off my sheets. The
click-click-click
of Yo-Yo’s nails across the hardwood, stopping outside the bedroom. Why, when Joe whips off his sheets, doesn’t Yo-Yo
trot-trot-trot
and wait in abject hope? How can Yo-Yo, on the other side of a closed door, tell it’s me and not Joe? It was once depressingly explained by a dog trainer: it’s my smell Yo-Yo’s caught whiff of. That his idea of nirvana is a dead seal washed up on the beach leaves me asking, Is it time for bed yet? Nope, I’m not doing that. Not today.

I didn’t mean to be coy about Sydney Madsen.

When Joe and I arrived in Seattle from New York ten years ago, we were ready to start a family. I’d just wrapped five wearying years at
Looper Wash
. Everywhere you looked it was
Looper Wash
T-shirts, bumper stickers, mouse pads.
I’m a Vivian. I’m a Dot.
You remember. If not, check your nearest dollar store, the two-for-one bin, it’s been a while.

Joe, a hand surgeon, had become a legend of sorts for reconstructing the hand of that quarterback whose thumb bent back and nobody thought he’d ever play again but the next year he went on to win the Super Bowl. (I can’t remember his name, but even if I did, I couldn’t say, due to doctor/patient/nosy-wife confidentiality.)

Joe had job offers everywhere. Why pick Seattle? Joe, a nice Catholic boy from outside Buffalo, couldn’t see raising kids in Manhattan, my first choice. We struck a deal. We’d move anywhere he wanted for ten years, and back to New York for ten; his city for ten, my city for ten, back and forth, unto death. (A deal he’s conveniently forgotten his end of, I might add, seeing as we’re coming up on year ten and not a peep on packing up.)

As everybody knows, being raised Catholic with half a brain means becoming an atheist. At one of our skeptics’ conventions (yes, our early years were actually spent doing things like driving to Philadelphia to watch Penn Jillette debate a rabbi! Oh, to be childless again… or not), Joe heard that Seattle was the least religious city in America. Seattle it was.

A Doctors Without Borders board member threw Joe and me a welcome-to-town party. I swanned into her Lake Washington mansion filled with modern art and future friends, mine for the taking. My whole life, I’ve been liked. Okay, I’ll say it: I’ve been adored. I don’t understand why, on account of my disgraceful personality, but somehow it works. Joe says it’s because I’m the most guy-like woman he’s ever met, but sexy and with no emotional membrane. (A compliment!) I went from room to room, being introduced to a series of women, interchangeable in their decency and warmth. It was that thing where you meet somebody who tells you they like camping and you say, “Oh! I was just talking to someone who’s going on a ten-day rafting trip down the Snake River, you should totally meet them,” and the person says, “That was me.”

What can I say? I’m terrible with faces. And names. And numbers. And times. And dates.

The whole party was a blur, with one woman eager to show me funky shops, another hidden hikes, another Mario Batali’s father’s Italian restaurant in Pioneer Square, another the best dentist in town who has a glitter painting on his ceiling of a parachuting tiger, yet another willing to share her housekeeper. One of them, Sydney Madsen, invited me to lunch the next day at the Tamarind Tree in the International District.

(Joe has a thing he calls the magazine test. It’s the reaction you have when you open the mailbox and pull out a magazine. Instantly, you know if you’re happy to see this magazine or bummed. Which is why I don’t subscribe to
The
New Yorker
and do subscribe to
Us Weekly
. Put to the magazine test, Sydney Madsen is the human equivalent of
Tinnitus Today
.)

That first lunch: She was so careful with her words, so sincere in her gaze, noticed a small spot on her fork and was overly solicitous toward the waiter when asking for a new one, brought her own tea bag and asked for hot water, said she wasn’t very hungry so how about we split my green papaya salad, told me she’d never seen
Looper Wash
but would put a hold on the DVDs at the library.

Am I painting a clear enough picture of the tight-assed dreariness, the selfish cluelessness, the cheap creepiness? A water-stained fork never killed anybody!
Buy
the DVDs, how about? Eat the food at the restaurant, that’s how they stay in business! Worst of all, Sydney Madsen was steady, earnest, without a speck of humor, and talked… very… slowly… as… if… her… platitudes… were… little… gold… coins.

I was in shock. Living too long in New York does that to a girl, gives her the false sense that the world is full of interesting people. Or at least people who are crazy in an interesting way.

At one point I writhed so violently in my chair that Sydney actually asked, “Do you need to use the powder room?” (Powder room?
Powder room?
Kill her!) The worst part? All those women with whom I’d gladly agreed to go hiking and shopping? They weren’t a bunch of women. They were all Sydney Madsen! Damn that blur! It took everything I had to kink her fire hose of new invitations: a weekend at her beach house on Vashon Island, introducing me to the wife of someone for this, the playwright of something for that.

I ran home screaming to Joe.

Joe: You should have been suspicious of someone so eager to make friends, because it probably means she doesn’t have any.

Me: This is why I love you, Joe. You just boil it all down. (Joe the boiler. Don’t we just love him?)

Forgive me for long-hauling you on Sydney Madsen. My point is: for ten years I haven’t been able to shake her. She’s the friend I don’t like, the friend I don’t know what she does for a living because I was too stultified to ask the first time and it would be rude to ask now (because I’m not rude), the friend I can’t be mean enough to so she gets the message (because I’m not mean), the friend to whom I keep saying no, no, no, yet she still chases me. She’s like Parkinson’s, you can’t cure her, you can just manage the symptoms.

For today, the lunch bell tolls.

Please know I’m aware that lunch with a boring person
is
a boutique problem. When I say I have problems, I’m not talking about Sydney Madsen.