Clare Sestanovich on Routine and Rupture

In “Our Time Is Up,” your story in this week’s issue, a woman named Angela faces the wrenching topic of whether her aging parents should leave their house and move into a retirement community. Angela is both close and not close to her mother—but she has a habit, encouraged by her mother, of comparing them at similar ages. The narrator likens this to trying on a dress that’s been forgotten at the back of the closet. How does this shape Angela’s thoughts about her life?

Maybe we should think of this as a coming-of-middle-age story. Angela is almost forty—statistically, the halfway point of her (expected) life—and she’s preoccupied by big, existential questions. Who is she? Whom does she want to become? If these sound like adolescent questions, that’s sort of the point: you don’t need to be an actual teen-ager to experience the angst of developmental transitions. (Angela’s mother, surveying life from the precipice of old age, has her own moody-teen thing going on.) Answering these questions is hard—judging by their cyclical recurrence, perhaps even impossible—and comparison offers a tempting shortcut: far easier to size up the dimensions of your own life if it’s lined up next to someone else’s.

You’re right to note that this is a “habit” of Angela’s, something she does almost reflexively. She measures herself against her mother, but also against total strangers. Stuck in traffic, she asks herself if the driver in the next lane is more or less attractive than she is. For better and for worse, habits can become substitutes for choices; if you always do the same thing, you aren’t exactly deciding to do it, or thinking about whether you really want to do it. In Angela’s case, wondering whether she’s as worthy as her mother is more palatable than wondering about her own intrinsic worth—and certainly more manageable than actually trying to become worthier.

All this makes me think about the many mirrors in this story. Angela isn’t the only character who tries to avoid them. I wonder now if one reason might be that mirrors make comparison a much starker, much more uncomfortable task: you have no one to look at but yourself, nothing to compare except your idea of yourself and the image of yourself.

Angela and her husband, Will, are in couples therapy, where they spend a lot of time talking about attraction and satisfaction, and the nature of desire. (They’re ostensibly there to talk about whether to have kids.) Is this the fate of a couple that’s been together for a long time, or is Angela searching for something specific?

Couples therapy is another comparative framework, come to think of it. I’m sure most therapists would urge their clients to think otherwise—it’s not a competition!—but, unlike on the solitary couch, where no one can call you on your bullshit, things inevitably change when there are two narratives in the room. I think Angela both fears and craves this adversarial arrangement. In the face of her husband’s agreeable, constructive approach to therapy—if it were a competition, he’d be winning the most points with their therapist—she often winds up feeling like the bad guy. Maybe even the loser. But, toward the end of the story, she finds herself fantasizing about even more overt confrontation, the kind of clash that might definitively settle the score. So I, too, wonder what Angela is really after. Does she want to vindicate herself—to be the winner at last? Or would she be happy with any outcome, so long as it puts an end to the game? In her ambivalent relationships with her mother and her husband, defeat might have a certain clarity: at least she’d finally understand what it is she stands to lose.

I’m really indulging the extended sports metaphor here, but it’s relevant to the story. Visiting her childhood home, Angela finds herself sorting through old trophies that testify to her athletic past. Angela doesn’t remember very much about her heyday on the softball field, and that’s arguably part of a much bigger problem for her. Amid the ongoing tally of “W”s and “L”s in life, she not only doubts her own talents; she seems to sometimes wonder if she’s even a player at all. One of the trophies she finds in her mother’s extensive collection is the least impressive sort, awarded simply for participation.

But this is where the therapist would beg to interrupt: on any given team—a softball roster, a family, a marriage—does anything else matter if you don’t show up?

After Angela’s father breaks his wrist, Angela and Will travel from California to Phoenix, to help clean up her parents’ house and to take them on a tour of a retirement community. At the house, there are plastic bags stored in shirtsleeves, and towers of dishwashered takeout containers, with an underlying layer of mold. There are also mementos of Angela’s childhood, which her mother has saved and tells her are her “history.” How does Angela feel about this kind of history?