Detail from Cultural Botany (The Big Continent), by Tina Berrier. Acrylic and mixed media on stretched canvas, 30″ by 40″, 2023.
Your Brain is Just Fine
My husband didn’t hear me the first time because our son had just asked Alexa what animal has the biggest butt.
“Due to their upright posture and two-legged gait, human beings have the biggest gluteus maximus-to-body ratio. The—”
“Alexa, stop,” I said. To my husband I repeated my offer. “I’ll give you $500 if I can leave right now and not come back until the kids are asleep.”
“Sure,” he said, “I’ll take it. Finally, I can buy those gold shoes. Solid—”
“Alexa,” Peter broke in, “how big is the biggest booger?”
It might not have been the most feminist thing to do. What kind of woman pays her husband to look after his own damn kids? All I know is, that day I’d stuffed earplugs in my ears just to hear myself think. Not long afterwards, I’d removed one of said earplugs from Hannah’s mouth, asking why the hell she would eat an earplug. “I thought it was a gumdrop,” she said. What’s worse, a kid knowingly eating an earplug or one who thinks her mother puts gumdrops in her ears?
That’s when I thought, I have money, why am I suffering? My husband agreed to the $500—I didn’t even stop to put my shoes on, just padded across the driveway in my socks and got in the car. It’s a good thing I didn’t stop for my wallet; it meant I needed to return before the gas ran out. The silence in the car was glorious. I drove to where the city gave way to flat empty fields and then turned and drove all the way home, and that’s when the magic happened. The gas light came on right as I was pulling in the driveway. So perfect it was like a wink from God.
I told my husband about the gas light as I crawled into bed. He said, “Cool, I accept cash and bank transfers. No checks please.” Our bank accounts were separate but linked so our balances appeared side by side when I logged in. There was almost nothing in his account, whereas mine had enough for a small yacht. This was the result of me working in advertising while he toiled away as a nursing assistant. “Our society doesn’t value the caring arts,” is what he said.
Our eyes followed the cursor as I clicked the $500 into his account. He said it was the sexiest thing, and I didn’t know if he meant the money or me or something else, but his hands moved to my breasts, down my sides and onto my ass. They were the hands of a mechanic, not a nursing assistant, the way I taught him. The sex was fun and rowdy, and at one point a drop of his sweat landed directly in my eye, but it was okay because afterwards it felt like a door had opened in my chest and several rotten logs were removed.
Sometimes he told me he’d only take cash because he wanted me to make it rain. That was a joke, like the gold shoes. Cash was for babysitters and that’s not what he was. We both knew that. A weekend could run me in the thousands. He wasn’t a stickler about exact hours. As long as I paid the exorbitant rates, I could do what I wanted. Mostly I went to the movie theater and watched horror movies and thrillers. When I’d seen them all, I rewatched or saw other movies, even if they were rom coms. If there were no movies, there was always a park bench or a bar. It didn’t matter what I did—the solitude was majestic. My husband didn’t ask questions. Maybe he thought I was having an affair, and maybe that was part of it. To the kids we said I had to work.
Every now and then I had a change of heart and turned the car around. But then at home, Hannah wrapped her entire body around my leg, so I had to lug her from room to room. Prying her off released a scream so horrible I thought my bones would crack. And then there was Peter, who was perpetually launching himself off furniture or running into doors or tripping on toys. So accident-prone, he spent a good part of his life crying in agony. “Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Mommy,” they screamed, and after just a few minutes I wondered why I had returned.
I looked for signs of resentment or unhappiness in my husband. Instead, as our bank accounts inched towards equality, the happier he got. He started buying special soaps for himself, creams, hair products. He began to smell like a different person. And there was the sex. Each time I got home, he watched me log into my account and transfer the money; we might as well have been perusing pornography, the way our bodies responded.
I was 31 and not thinking straight when we met. My boss had chartered a boat to celebrate my work on the Seagram’s account. Twenty minutes in, I opened my wallet to tip the bartender and coins poured from the change pocket. I crawled under the bar to collect them when someone called my name. They called, “Speech. Speech. Speech,” and I popped up in response, cracking my head against the lip of the bar. The next thing I knew Patty from HR was patting my cheek, saying, “Here she comes. She’s comin’ round.” The captain turned the boat around and an intern was assigned to drive me to the hospital. Music roared back to life on the boat as the intern pulled us out of the marina. My boss was not the type to let a pre-paid party go to waste.
At the hospital it was the nursing assistant who put the blood pressure cuff on me. He wasn’t my type, with his sandy hair and goofy mouth.
“Just a little concussion,” he said as he pumped air into the cuff.
“How do they look?” I asked after he’d noted something down.
“What?”
“The vitals.”
“Oh, they’re normal. You’re A-OK.”
“What about the brain?”
“Your brain is just fine.”
I’m not one to cry, but I burst into tears. He put his hand on my forearm and repeated what he’d said—like he knew exactly how much power he held over me in that moment: Your brain is just fine.
Afterwards, when we started dating, it became a joke between us. I only cried, I told him, because it was the nicest thing anyone ever said about my brain. “Well,” he said, “now that I know you better, I can tell your brain isn’t fine at all. It’s actually quite disturbed.”
“Ha ha,” we laughed—until we had kids and forgot all about my brain.
Peter’s night terrors came on suddenly. He began waking up screaming two or three times a night and my husband and I took turns trudging to his room to calm him down. The screams woke Hannah too, who found her way into our bed, pressing her sweaty body against mine, so I spent each night nudging her sticky limbs away. In the morning, holes were burned into my brain from exhaustion.
The terrors interrupted the transactions, and several weeks went by without an exchange of money or sex. I was resting my head on the kitchen table and both kids were in separate time outs when my husband said I looked like I needed a break.
“I’ll only charge $200 if you want to take the afternoon off,” he said.
“Ok,” I said, but I kept my head on the table and my eyes closed until the kids were out of their time-outs and poking me to see if I was still alive. Eventually, I got in the car, but didn’t go anywhere, just fell asleep behind the wheel still in the driveway.
It was hardest to conceal the exhaustion at work. My boss called me into her office after we landed the Little Caesars account. “We’re on an accelerated timeline and I need you to hit the ground running,” she said. I imagined myself hitting the ground, but it was from a great height with a splat. There was no running.
During the creative kick-off meeting with my team I was unable to come up with my own words, so I repeated what my boss had said. “Everyone will need to hit the brown running,” I said, “We’re on an accelerated timeline.”
“Did you say brown?”
“What?”
There was laughter, a general sense of good cheer. I clenched down against the tears rising and the sense of untethering. I’d read once that the ability to communicate effectively is what connects humans to the world around us. I imagined a buoy bobbing alone in an immense empty sea. “I will email everyone the brief,” I said, “We can move more quickly by email.” They stared at me as if they could see through my skull to the wormwood that had become of my brain.
My husband suggested a vacation. Our bedroom was dark except for the bright rectangles illuminated by the screens in our hands.
“What kind of a vacation would that be?” I nodded in the direction of the angels our children pretended to be when they were asleep.
“Kids go on vacation.”
“I’d rather jump off a building.”
“You’re depressed,” he said.
“Of course, I’m depressed.”
“You could get away,” he said, “alone.”
I put down my phone and rolled onto my side to face him.
“It’d be expensive,” he said, putting his phone down too, “but why not?”
“$10,000?”
He was silent for a moment, “70” he said, which was almost exactly what I had left in my account.
“$70,000?”
“$70,000.”
“I want you to fuck me,” I said to the dark shadow of his profile. He turned towards me. I couldn’t see his eyes, which was for the best. As we had sex, he repeated the dollar amount until I came.
In the pediatrician’s waiting room Peter stared blankly into the fish tank while I filled out the intake form with as many exclamation points as would fit.
What is the reason for your visit? Screaming EVERY NIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Any other concerns? See above!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I flipped through a magazine called Parent and then one called Parenting. Toddler Triumphs, Baby Yoga, Kid-Approved Menu Makeovers. I told Peter to stop knocking on the tank, that the fish didn’t like it. He told me fish don’t have ears and I was considering this when I came to an ad for Sandals Resort in Saint Lucia. The entire page was the aquamarine of Caribbean water. There was a woman in a seaside pool gazing out at the bright water and sky. The ad, positioned across from a list of storage ideas for tots, felt like a cruel joke. Carefully, I pulled the ad free and folded it twice, so it fit in my wallet.
The pediatrician was wearing a tie with a photo of a baby printed on it. The image of the baby was so big the eyes were cut off at the sides and the bottom half was taken up by an open mouth with two bottom teeth and a wet chin.
“Why is that baby on your tie?” Peter asked.
“My grandson, Carlos,” the pediatrician replied, “Isn’t he a cutie? You can print photos on anything these days. I have Carlos on a mug and a pillow too.”
“Cool,” Peter said. I imagined a house filled with Carlos’s face and worried I would never sleep again.
At the end of the appointment, the pediatrician said night terrors were a normal phase and they would pass. I couldn’t take him seriously though, because of the Carloses and because nothing had felt normal in a long time. Peter was strangely quiet during the appointment. As we left, he told me he’d done some thinking and he wanted to shave his head and print his face on the back of it. “Good news,” I told my husband when we were home, “our son is normal.” I gave him a recap of the appointment as Peter stuffed a pillow down the back of his pants and marched away singing, “Call me Mr. Big Butt. Call me Mr. Big Big Big Big Butt.”
Seventy thousand dollars will clean me out. The thought pulsed in me at regular intervals, like the stroke of a hand against my groin. It had been weeks since we’d spoken of it, but despite the lack of sleep, the sex resumed.
“$70,000 is a lot,” I said when the kids were in bed, and we were staring at the blank screen of our TV, too tired to search for a show we could both agree on.
My husband laced his fingers behind his head and stretched. “Think about it,” he said, “I’ll be up with Peter and then up again with Hannah, the lunches, the tantrums, the drop-offs and pickups and—it’s actually worth even more. But you can’t afford more.”
Those last words. The thought of not being able to afford this man. Having to pay him for my freedom. I never wanted him more. He drew a line with the tip of his finger from my shoulder along my bicep down to the elbow, the inner arm, all the way to the place where the wrist gave way to palm. There he lingered on the pulse. We didn’t have locks on the bedroom door, so we created a barricade by pushing our bedside tables against the door.
My team presented ideas for Little Caesars first thing in the morning. I didn’t apologize for being late because that would not have been a good power move, and power was leaking from me like air from a punctured tire. Everyone stopped talking when I arrived in the boardroom, everyone except the new graphic designer who continued his flirtation with the copywriter. She had a great mane of brown hair she was pushing her fingers through. I stared at them until they looked down and were quiet. The art director started off the presentation; he was my age, mid-forties, but looked younger because he was a man—or, because he was awake. When the presentation ended, I was thinking about a talking pizza but was unsure if it was something that was presented or something I dreamed. I told the team they would all be awarded an increased bonus for their hard work; it was not something I had the authority to do. They cheered and I went to my office and unfolded the Sandals Resort ad. I stared at it for so long that when I closed my eyes some of the aquamarine lingered behind my lids.
That night Peter screamed awake three times in a row. The third time set Hannah off crying. My husband slept through all the noise. Even with earplugs I couldn’t sleep the way he did. My body was connected to the bodies of my children as if by a fine wire, and their slightest distress tripped it, shooting electric shocks straight to my core.
The next several nights were the same. I turned to the ad for Saint Lucia like a SAD lamp in the deep of winter. It provided the soft glow of an emergency exit—a stretch of Caribbean rippling on the other side of a $70,000 paywall. Twice during that time, my husband asked if I was going to take the vacation and I knew he wanted the money, but he also wanted the tease. We both wanted that—to test my power to give and withhold. I bought a red string bikini which I told him was for the trip. He removed it from my body several times, once using only his teeth. It held a lot of power, that bikini, signaling my ability to stay or leave, to bequeath or deprive.
Little Caesars loved the pitches. From all the options presented, they chose the corniest one, the one I was too tired to fight against, the one called “Our Little Caesars Family.” The script and briefs were moved to the LA offices for taping, and I told my team to take the afternoon off. I left the office too, hurrying to catch the last matinee screening of Zombie Psychopath. I didn’t make it to the theater though. Within 10 minutes of merging onto the highway, I drifted off and awoke to the crash of my car colliding with the guardrail. It didn’t take long for the ambulance to arrive and for the EMTs to get to work freeing me from the driver’s seat. The front end of the car was crumpled like an aluminum can. “You’re in a state of shock” an EMT said, loading me onto a stretcher. I told him I didn’t need a stretcher, but there were hands holding me down and another voice said it would be wise of me not to move.
At the hospital, a doctor asked, “Does this hurt? What about this?” I wanted to say it all hurt. Everything. But I told him it was only my neck. In response, a cervical collar was put on me that made it impossible to see anything except what was directly in front of my face. The collar was a fat hunk of beige foam that reminded me of the segment connecting two ends of a worm.
For days I had to rely on my husband to help me get dressed. To eat, I raised my plate to eye level. It took effort to drink without dribbling down my front. Only once I put on the bikini, but my image reflected back in the mirror caused me to burst into tears, and my husband suggested I put my clothes back on.
In an Uber to work on my first day back, the driver kept a nervous eye on me in the rearview mirror. I sucked coffee from one of Hannah’s plastic sippy cups, the only cup I trusted not to spill down my collar. I left it on the floor of his car when I got out. At the office I had the sense everyone was laughing at me in my periphery, where I couldn’t turn my head to see.
My cervical collar was as dingy and stained as an old bib by the time the LA offices sent over a rough cut of the Little Caesars commercial. It felt damp and I could smell it as I settled into the dark screening room with the rest of my team. The commercial started with an attractive family rock climbing together, followed by a shot of them at the summit, high-fiving. Cut to a different family laughing while playing video games. Cut to a teenager scoring a soccer goal while grandma cheered. Cut to shots of everyone eating pizza. A gravelly voiceover said, “Little Caesars. We’re part of the family.” Cut to logo on black.
“Ha!” I said into the darkness. There was a rustle of a response, a laugh that rose and fell. If the laughter was with me or at me, I couldn’t tell. It was in my periphery, where everyone and everything disappeared.
Zoe Pappenheimer is a designer and illustrator living in Western Massachusetts. She is the artist behind Fearless Fashion Magnetic Dolls (Chronicle Books, 2025) and her work has been featured in I.D. Magazine, Frankie Magazine and Uppercase Magazine. Her fiction has appeared in Georgia College’s Arts & Letters Journal, where she was named the winner of their prize for fiction. She was a finalist for the Missouri Review‘s Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize and longlisted for Ploughshares Emerging Writers Contest.
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