Thank You for Sharing by Shreya Fadia

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The first time Anjali loses her temper, she’s at the grocery store with Jay. He’d legged it from checkout straight to produce, where he’d thrown himself prostrate on the floor. Breathless, she finds him near the apples, bin upon bin of the season’s bounty. A moment’s relief, her panic ebbs, but then, without warning, she feels something inside her shift. 

Later, Anjali would remember only the barest of details, the whole incident a blur: His pudgy brown hands clenched in pudgy fists. His screams of fury, banshee-like, or were those her own? The heat, the chill, the gathering crowd, a glimmer around the edges. And the apples—so many apples—she’ll remember the apples most of all. The Ginger Golds and Honeycrisps and blushing Pink Ladies, freshly restocked in every imaginable variety, in every possible hue, all shining there beneath the bright-white fluorescence. The sound they’d made when she’d swept them from their shelves, sent every last one of them tumbling down.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she tells her husband that night when he comes home from work. “I’m not cut out for motherhood. I’m not cut out to spend all day with a toddler.”

“We talked about this. This is just what—” 

“—makes the most sense, financially. Yes, I know. But I can’t do it. I just can’t.”

“It’s only for a little while longer, until he’s old enough for school. Just hang in there.”

“I know, but—”

Andrew tilts his head, sympathetic, eyes softening, his voice, too. “You’re doing a great job, Ange. And just think, a few years from now, you’ll look back on this time and have so many fond memories of him, and he’ll have so many memories of you. I wish I could have the same. It’s special, this time together. You’re so lucky to be able to do this.”

“No, of course.” She turns back to the stove, where a pot of water is bubbling over. “You’re right.” She reduces the heat, then stirs in the pasta, a palmful of salt. “Absolutely. What was I thinking?”

“That’s my girl,” Andrew says, giving her arm a squeeze, a quick peck on the cheek. “Enjoy this while it lasts.” 

He disappears into the den, where he turns on the 8 o’clock news. The TV drones, while in the kitchen, Anjali watches the water churn.

#

After the incident at Thanksgiving, when she flings a pie at the wall, staining the eggshell-white paint with pumpkin goop, at Andrew’s insistence, she starts therapy. 

“It’s either therapy or you’re leaving,” he says when he finds her scrubbing the wall, the aluminum pie tin face down beside her. “This is a bridge too far.”

In a closet in their bedroom the next week, during Jay’s afternoon nap, she sets her laptop on top of a stack of sweaters and perches awkwardly on the kitchen step stool, the little plastic nubs of its surface pressing through her pajamas into her thighs. As she waits for her therapist to start the call, the wheel on her screen turns and turns and turns, spinning in an endless loop.

“Can you describe what you were feeling when you threw the pie?” he asks near the end of the session. “What was happening to you, in that moment?”

“I don’t know,” Anjali says. “I just felt the urge to throw it. And the next thing I know, it was on the wall, and then the floor.”

He presses the pads of his fingers together, concertinas his hands, pulls them apart. “Did you consider not throwing the pie? What might that have looked like?”

Anjali picks at a loose thread near the cuff of her sleeve. She shrugs. “It wasn’t a considered choice. It just happened.”

With a sigh, her therapist jots something down. “I’m afraid that’s all the time we have for today,” he says without looking up, and then the screen goes dark.

#

At anger management, which Anjali attends at her therapist’s and Andrew’s behest, she sits in a circle of fifteen in the basement rec room of an old Lutheran church.

Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life, says a pamphlet she’d found on her chair. Say hello to a brand new you. Beneath the text, a stock image of a generic white man against a backdrop of sky blue, his chin resting on his hand, his gaze fixed on some faraway point. Tomorrow starts now, reads the final page in dark-blue serif script.

“I’m Anjali,” she says when it’s her turn to speak. “And I’m here because I threw a pie at the wall.”

“Hi, Anjali,” the others chant in practiced unison before moving on. 

“Did you try the juice?” the group facilitator, an older white woman named Janet, asks during their break. She hands Anjali a plastic cup. “It’s divine.” 

The juice is a pale, ghostly pink; effervescent. Anjali sniffs, takes a tentative sip, and coughs as the bubbles tickle her throat. 

“What’s in this?” 

“A hint of cayenne, a touch of lime. It’s my very own recipe.” 

“Mmm,” Anjali says, pretending to take a second sip under Janet’s eager, watchful gaze. “You’re right. So good.” She feigns another. “Delicious.” 

#

“How are the group sessions going?” her therapist asks a few weeks later. “Are they helping?” 

“Not really,” she says. “I mean, I guess.” The computer clock reads ten to three. Around her finger, she winds and unwinds a curl of her hair. “I don’t know.” 

“What I’m hearing is that you’re feeling uncertain, maybe even afraid. Is that a fair assessment?”

A slant of light shifts behind him, casting his face into shadow.

“I’m not sure group therapy is for me. I’m not really a group person.”

Frowning, he writes something down.

“I’m not a person person.”

“Keep trying,” Andrew tells her later over a dinner of homemade Moroccan chickpea stew, a new recipe she’d found on her favorite vegan blog. “Just hang in there. It’ll get better. I’m sure it will help. You just need to give it some more time. You know what they say, nothing in life worth having comes easy.”

“Yes, I guess you’re right,” Anjali says as she spoons chickpea purée into Jay’s waiting mouth. Jay gums the spoon as if lost in deep thought, then he screws up his face and spits the whole bite out. 

Andrew’s phone buzzes. He pushes his chair back from the table with a screech. He’s left most of his dinner untouched. “I’ve got to get back to work,” he says.

From the den, the sound of the TV. The Cavs are playing, or maybe it’s the Knicks. Jay starts to wail. Anjali ignores him as she carries Andrew’s leftovers back to the kitchen and dumps what remains of the stew—plate and all—into the trash.

#

Janet pulls her aside after the next group session. 

“You haven’t said much these past few weeks, Angela.”

“I’m—”

“It’s okay,” Janet says, holding up a hand, palm out, displaying the mudra of fearlessness, of reassurance and safety. “There’s no judgment here. It’ll happen in due time. But I just want you to know that we’re here to hold space for you, and we’re here, holding space for you, whenever you’re ready.” 

“Thanks,” Anjali says. 

“It’s just that I know sometimes people can think the group setting isn’t for them. But this is a safe space. It’s for everyone,” Janet says, significantly. “You’re free to talk here.”

“Sure, yeah.” Anjali looks past Janet toward the door just behind her, the hallway beyond it dark. “Of course.” 

Janet peers searchingly at Anjali, searing blue eyes meeting Anjali’s brown ones. She tilts her head to one side, then to the other, frowns. “You look quite ill, dear. Could I get you something to drink?”

“Oh, no, I’m okay. I should get going. I don’t want to be late. You know how it is. Mother-in-law. Baby,” Anjali says, cradling her arms. “Traffic.” She mimes a wheel, turning, turning.

“I’m sorry, dear, but I really must insist. Here”—Janet, taking Anjali by both shoulders, guides her to a chair near the folding card table on which the heavy-duty beverage cooler and the last of the donut holes still sit—“let someone take care of you for once, mama.” She fills a plastic cup from the cooler and presses it into Anjali’s hands.

Anjali looks at the drink, the same pink fizzy concoction she’d tasted before and which Janet brought to every meeting. “The elixir,” she’d heard someone jokingly call it. Giver of life. Giver of sustenance. Ambrosial Kool-Aid.

“Is anything the matter? Do you not like it?”

“Oh, no, not at all. It’s perfect. Just the thing,” Anjali says. “Thank you so much.” She brings the cup to her mouth, tilts it up enough to let the cold fluid lap over her lips, like the tide rolling in then receding, rolling in then receding.

“Phew,” Janet says, taking the seat beside Anjali. “What a relief. Really had me going there for a minute.” She smiles at Anjali, blue eyes piercing. “Drink up,” she says. 

Anjali takes a sip, and then another, a third, still more, until she’s gulped the whole glass down.

#

“I’m just angry,” she finds herself admitting at the next group session. It’s only the second time she’s spoken to the group since she started attending—the first, her name. “All the time. I don’t know why.”

A few nods; the susurrus of assent sweeps through the room.

“Sometimes, I wish I hadn’t ever had him,” she says. “That I’d never been a mother. I had a career, a life, ambition, purpose. I was going to be someone. I was going to do so many things. But I threw it all away. And what do I fill my time with now? Playgroup and sitting in the park with those insipid women and their nannies, all of them gushing incessantly about their horrible kids, Asher this and Madison that.” She is aware, vaguely, of the heat within building, the bitterness rising too. “Ivy League, law review, federal clerkship, the whole shebang—and this is what my life amounts to?” She shakes her head. “Sometimes, I just want to scream. Sometimes.” she says, half to herself, “when he’s in the bath, I’ve thought, what if I step away and leave him there on his own, or even just close my eyes, for a moment, a minute. At most two. Would that be so wrong?”

“What you’re feeling is valid and real,” Janet says. “Can we all pause and take a minute to acknowledge how brave Angela just was? It was courageous of you to open up—thank you for sharing. Thank you for showing up, and for showing up,” Janet says. “Thank you for being willing to do this work.” 

“Thank you, Angela,” the others echo. “Thanks, Angela,” they say. Thank you. A million times over, thank you, thank you, thank you.

During their break, a twenty-something-year-old man—his hair shaved at the sides, his arms heavily inked, a tattoo of a skeleton hand wrapped around his neck—slumps into the empty seat beside her. He holds two plastic cups, one of which he offers to Anjali. “It’s water,” he says, but Anjali, who has already downed a whole glassful of Janet’s elixir, shakes her head.

“Take it from someone who’s been there…you might want to watch what you say around here,” he says. They are the only two left in the room, but he speaks quietly, almost in a whisper. “Wouldn’t want you getting tarred and feathered.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugs and, raising both cups in a mock cheers, takes a sip from one cup, then the other. “Nice weather we’re having,” he says at a normal volume. It is thirty-three degrees outside, the wind rattling the building from nave to steeple, rain turning to snow turning to ice. He glances toward the rec room door, in the threshold of which Janet stands with her back to them as she speaks to someone just outside in the hall. He takes another sip, fixes his gaze on the floor. “Nice, brisk day.”

#

Anjali later learns the tattooed man—really, a kid—is out on parole after serving only two years of a ten-year sentence. This, he explains, is how he got the name Finch.

“As in, free as a. As in, make like a. As in fly, fly away,” he says.

Rumors abound about what he’d done, both to get in and to get out. 

“Road rage turned nasty,” Finch says on one occasion. “Wrong place at the wrong time,” he says on another. “Then I kept my head down inside. Did what I was told. Didn’t make a fuss. Came out unscathed.”

But Anjali doesn’t believe a word. She’s seen the bird cage tattooed on the inside of his wrist, the door firmly shut.

#

How did your parents handle conflict when you were young?

It is the week of Christmas, and today her therapist sports a tie dotted with tiny skiers dressed in red or green who make their way down a vertical slope. The bookshelves behind him are garlanded with holly, peppered with sprigs of red berries, silvered with tinsel, strung with lights.

How do you cope with conflict now?

Anjali feels strange, restless, her nerves oddly sensitive, as though the edges of her are shifting, so that she doesn’t know where she begins, where she ends. Her therapist sounds far off, muffled through acres of water. 

How do you cope?

Do you cope?

“I don’t know,” she says. “I guess I don’t.” She puts a hand to her forehead, then sweeps it down over her eyes, her face. “I’m sorry, I have a headache. I’m feeling kind of faint.”

For a moment, she’s sure she sees her therapist nod, grimly satisfied, as if he’d expected it all along. But his expression is impassive, his head still, the lights behind him fuzzed softly.

Change is the thing with wings, Andrew says later when she tells him she’s not quite herself, can they order delivery instead? It’s always darkest before the dawn, he says.

“What?” 

“I said why don’t you go lie down. You look a little queasy.”

#

In the park the next day, Anjali sits on a bench with Jay, the sky clouded white with impending snow. Without warning, Jay grabs Anjali’s phone and throws it down onto the sidewalk. He scoots off the bench and picks the phone back up, raises his arm as he gets ready to throw it again, but Anjali grabs his coat sleeve and tries to wrest the phone away. Jay’s fingers tighten around the device, and he starts screaming, incessant, his voice soaring to new heights. An elderly couple passes by with a small, yappy dog; the white-haired woman stares at Anjali.

Anjali takes a deep, calming breath. She crouches down low so that she’s closer to Jay’s level. “No, sweetie, that’s Mommy’s phone. We don’t throw Mommy’s phone,” she says, her voice not her own, distant. 

She lets go of Jay’s arm. He promptly throws the phone down, shattering the screen. Anjali closes her eyes, leans back against the bench, the metal cold through her wool coat. She feels a swell of something unnameable, unfathomable, washing over her, submerging her.

“Everything okay?”

Anjali opens her eyes to find the white-haired woman, alone now, looming over them both, her hair blending into the sky behind her. Her eyes are blue, blue as Janet’s, blue as the plumbless sea, piercing.

“Yes, perfect,” Anjali says. “Everything’s going swimmingly. Thank you for asking.” 

#

The next week, Anjali is the first to show up at group therapy. When Janet arrives, she pauses for a moment in the door before coming in.

“Wowee! It’s chilly out there,” she says, pink-cheeked, wind-blown baby hairs haloing her head. “Doesn’t it just make you feel so alive?”

“Mmm,” Anjali says.

Janet sets the box of donut holes on the metal table before heading toward the door. “I’ll be back in a shake. Got to bring in the cooler.”

“Let me help,” Anjali says, rising from her seat.

“Oh, no you won’t,” Janet says. “I wouldn’t dream of asking you to do any such thing. Not in your condition. Not in this cold. You stay here. You take care of you and that little nugget growing inside of you, mama.”

Anjali folds her arms over her stomach. She hasn’t begun to show yet, hadn’t mentioned anything, hadn’t even decided if she would keep it.

“How did you…” she says. “But I didn’t…”

“Your husband called and shared the happy news. He’s worried about you, the poor thing. He said you’ve been feeling unwell, and he asked me to keep an eye on you,” Janet says. “So loving, so attentive—it just melts my heart. You lucky, lucky little duck.”

When she’s alone again, Anjali hugs her arms closer, holding herself, holding it all in.

“We’re a group of fourteen today,” Janet says at the hour, just before they get started. “I’m afraid Finch won’t be joining us anymore.”

Our jailbird’s flown the coop, Anjali swears she hears someone say, but when she scans the faces around her, everyone seems impassive, half asleep.

“Is he okay?” someone asks.

Janet turns to Anjali, fixing her eyes on her, as if Anjali had been the one who’d spoken. Had she spoken?

“Let’s remember to hold space for those who are present and with us,” Janet says, addressing the room. “Remember our boundaries. Our sacred group oath, which is what?” She waits, eyebrows raised.

“Our group ends at these walls. That is our boundary. We respect boundaries,” the room recites.

#

“You seem a little distant,” her therapist observes the next day. “We’d been making so much progress; you’d been opening up. Has something happened that you’d like to share?”

“No,” Anjali says. “Nothing.”

He sighs, leans in closer to the screen, so close that he could climb right through it. 

“Look, let me speak plainly. You’re hanging on by a thread. You have everything to lose. For this to work, I expect you to do the work, full stop. Now, I know your…ah, condition might be affecting your hormones. But when we give power to our hormones, we give them power over us. Is that what you want, to divest yourself of power?”

Anjali shakes her head.

“I didn’t think so.” He sits back, steeples his index fingers, resting them on his nose before pointing them at Anjali. “So let’s start this over. Is there something you’d like to share?”

#

In the church’s rec room months later, Anjali finds herself again in a group of fifteen.

“Everyone, let’s welcome Leah to our company,” Janet says.

“Welcome, Leah,” they all recite. “Hi, Leah.” Leah blushes, tucks and retucks a strand of box-dyed black hair behind her ear.

During break, Anjali fills two cups with Janet’s pink elixir, takes the seat beside Leah’s.

“Rough night?” Anjali asks. 

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“Here,” Anjali says, extending an arm to pass one of the cups to Leah, who takes it, cautious, suspicious.

“Don’t worry, it’s just juice. There’s nothing weird in it, I swear. I mean, would I be drinking it if there were?” Anjali says, looking pointedly down at her stomach. 

Leah laughs, the tension dispelled, takes a sip. “Yum,” she says. “This is good.”

Anjali turns from Leah, leans back in her chair, cupping her own glass against the rounded mound of her belly. She closes her eyes, raises the glass to her mouth, lets the cool liquid lap against her lips, recede. She breathes deep, then she takes a sip, tasting divinity, serenity, a hint, too, of lime.

###

 

 

 

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Shreya Fadia is a Gujarati American writer, editor, and former lawyer who lives in the mountains of North Carolina. She holds an MFA in fiction from Indiana University, and her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Booth, Cream City Review, Hobart, and The Margins, among other publications.

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30 August 2024