Free The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

chronically plagued by it. But still, whenever the Christmas letter came each year, cataloging the specifics of the enormous life of Ethan and Ash beat by beat, Jules indulged in a few dark thoughts.
    By the time Dennis was done reading aloud now, Jules saw that somehow the bottle of wine had emptied. It wasn’t even anything good—they never bought good wine but grabbed whatever cost around nine dollars, a figure they’d arbitrarily settled on—but Jules had been drinking the whole time he’d been reading to her, her hand lifting and lowering, though she’d barely noticed what she was doing. Now she felt as if she were dully humming with an unpleasant, low-grade drunkenness. She made a variation on the same dumb, unkind joke she’d occasionally made over the years: “Why would they call it the Foundation
for
Poverty? Doesn’t that imply that they approve?”
    “Yes, someone should have done something about that by now,” Dennis murmured agreeably.
    “You know what, Dennis? I have gotten over most of my stupid thing about them, but it does rear its head very predictably when we do this. Remember last year? We read the letter, and we were drinking, and we went out walking in the snow on Riverside Drive. I joked about falling down in a snowbank and dying of a combination of hypothermia and envy. That was what we said it would say in the coroner’s report.”
    “Oh right,” Dennis said, smiling again. “Well, you didn’t die. You got through it, and you’ll get through it again.” Throughout their marriage, he often smiled at her with a kind of sympathetic affection. “Anyway,” he said, “everything gets bad around Christmas. There’s also seasonal affective disorder, right? I always worry about that.”
    “That’s not going to happen. You’re fine,” she said.
    “And so are you,” said Dennis, clearing away the glasses.
    Her tongue felt unmoored, and her whole mouth felt in danger of coming apart as she spoke. “This is just my usual relapse,” she said. “I’m sure it will pass.”
    “It’s not like you didn’t already know everything they wrote in the letter,” said Dennis. “You know all the details already.”
    “But just hearing it aloud or seeing it on the page reminds me of everything. I can’t help it. Despite my wisdom by now, I am small-minded and predictable.” She paused and said, “You know that I love them, right? I need to make sure you know this.”
    “God, of course. You don’t have to say that.”
    “Do you remember how much worse I used to be?”
    “I certainly do,” he said.
    She ate his five-spice chicken, and it was cooked perfectly, the flesh as tender as a change purse, she told him—“not that I’ve eaten a change purse, though I bet it would be exactly this tender if I did”—but Jules felt herself drop even lower. Ash and Ethan had a personal chef who knew all their likes and dislikes. Here, in this little kitchen, Dennis used the Chinese ingredients he found on Canal Street as he headed to the subway after a day at the clinic spent plowing a transducer through the warm gel spread across sections of people’s bodies. He had worked hard on his chicken, and she had worked hard on Janice Kling and the other clients who preceded her; while off in Cole Valley, Colorado, on the Figman and Wolf ranch, the whole place fibrillated with good work and industry. Ash and Ethan were never idle, never still. The work they did invariably became something wonderful. If they cooked a chicken, it would feed a subcontinent.
    Jules
ran a socked foot against the kitchen tiles that never entirely got clean. They were inexpensive tiles, and you could scrub and scrub them, but still they appeared the milky yellow that implied there wasn’t enough money in this household or enough attention being paid to detail. There wasn’t some woman with a curved back kneeling on the floor cleaning these tiles each week. This concentrated and renewed burst of ancient Ash-and-Ethan envy