If there’s one thing Fleishman Is in Trouble loves, it’s risk — voice-over narration, frisky, attention-seeking camera work, protagonists who are loveable one minute and revolting the next, emotional and sexual mess as far as the eye can see, and now, taking a hairpin turn into the point of view of the story’s apparent nemesis, Rachel Fleishman herself! In the penultimate episode, no less. All of them are gambles. The last, though: a flex!
In the final minutes of “Me Time,†Libby Slater Epstein, she of the thwarted ambition, the teller of this tale, the successor to and improver upon Archer Sylvan’s (ultimately rather hollow, sorry, not sorry) storytelling style, tells us she’s made a huge mistake. Until now, she’s only seen Toby’s story through his eyes, so she’s also been failing to adhere to the first rule of reporting, that “you should always wonder, when you’re hearing someone’s version of things, what the other person in the story, the one who wasn’t there, would say if he were.†It’s not a classic blunder as disastrous as getting involved in a land war in Asia, but it is a cardinal sin of journalism, and it flows into the next, forgetting that “there are no real villains in life, not really. There are no real heroes, either — everyone is great, everyone is terrible, and everyone is flawed, and there are no exceptions to that.†That’s the real thesis of Fleishman, in both its forms as a novel and as a TV adaptation. Still, we couldn’t have started there — this is a story that demands we pick our way through the fetid marshes of emotional discomfort and disorientation so that when we finally realize that, everyone is doing their best. Everyone is getting tangled up in their own stuff; we don’t feel superior to Toby, Rachel, or Libby. We realize instead that they’re just as good as we are, and we’re just as dreadful as they are.
We know the beats of Rachel’s story already, but watching them unfold, enhanced by Libby’s sympathetic narration, we see them in new lights and at new angles. For Rachel, the story of her life as a woman and as a mother is a quest for safety — what she calls acceptability, a dream so small and self-underestimating that it actually makes me angry on her behalf — for herself and her children. Everything she does is rooted in her determination to move past the social deficiencies of her youth and to spare Hannah and Solly the anguish and shame she was able to diagnose but never cure herself of.
We’ve heard several times that Rachel was raised by her rather remote and frosty grandmother. What we learn now is that this grandmother did what she could, investing what money she had in Rachel’s education so she could attend a prestigious Catholic school that would presumably ensure her ascent to the upper-middle class. With all of her grandmother’s disposable income earmarked for tuition, there was nothing left over for Rachel to participate in the activities that were de rigueur at her school. No golf, no tennis, no summer camp, no horseback riding, nothing that would smooth Rachel’s way toward fitting in and making friends with the other girls, all of whom did all of those things as a matter of course.
Rachel’s immediate comprehension of her total lack of social capital didn’t help; it just made her desperate. Not participating in the leisure activities her classmates took for granted meant she wasn’t present at the mall or sleepovers or wherever shared experiences and small intimacies were blossoming into deeper rapports than what she could develop during school hours. Just being a reliable lab partner to one of the shiny-haired Katherines was never going to be enough, never going to be acceptable.
Having made it to parenthood without actual friends, she’s determined that Solly and Hannah will never have the same friendship-stymieing whiff of desperation about them that she can’t shed, never speak sophistication with an accent the way she does. What flows from that resolve is nearly everything Toby refuses to understand and dislikes about her: the drive to make the bucks big enough to buy an apartment that even Miriam Rothberg would find impressive; to build an agency of her own so that even if she is abandoned, she’ll always own and be in charge of something; to smooth the kids’ paths to effortless-seeming affluence. Viewed through this lens, Rachel’s idea to sign up Solly for golf lessons and her sympathy for Hannah’s frantic need to have an Instagram account are both perfectly logical.
Toby is appalled at how she tries to engineer friendships for Solly and Hannah, scoffing at the very idea of friendship as a networking tool, but as we know from â€The Year of the Nepo Baby,†favors among friends and family really do make the world go round. Are we supposed to believe that Toby achieved all his career milestones on merit alone? Princeton graduate, NYU-medical-school-trained Toby? We learn from Rachel’s version of what happened that Sam Rothberg offered Toby the super-lucrative anti-cannabis job at his pharmaceutical company as a thank-you to Rachel for introducing his nephew to some of her industry contacts. For all his little lectures on privilege to Hannah and Solly, Toby cannot (will not?) see how he has benefited from the social and professional connections he thinks Rachel is so gauche for pursuing. It’s different for him! He’s not like his well-heeled, well-educated forebears and peers! He uses his carefree social currency for good! He doesn’t, really, but he thinks he’s the sort of person who would!
Rachel’s intense need for social [Don’t say social security, Sophie. Don’t do it! Okay, fine!] safety goes into overdrive during a harrowing labor and birthing experience and remains there for years. These scenes — especially the bookending moments where the awful substitute OB/GYN fails to even request Rachel’s consent to manually break her water and then, some weeks later, fails to recognize her in the elevator — unlock so much of Rachel’s singular focus on pursuing the safety she craves. Founding her agency is quite literally an act of reclaiming her own agency and autonomy, and as a bonus, it gives her a new way to feel and be perceived as ultracompetent. I strongly side with Toby here in wishing Rachel had gone to therapy, too, rather than attend a couple of meetings of a sexual-assault survivors’ group. The wracking sobs (and loving physical support) she experiences were no doubt cathartic and give Claire Danes one of several opportunities to unleash her unmatched on-camera crying abilities, but Rachel needed more.
Back in our story’s present in 2016, Toby’s major preoccupations that summer have been taking every opportunity to complain about Rachel and being praised as a true hero of parenting (and getting laid, obviously), while Rachel’s have largely been what they always were: continuing to be acceptable. It’s been going surprisingly well! She doesn’t miss Toby, she knows exactly when she’ll have the kids, the agency is so busy and successful that she’s considering opening a satellite office in Los Angeles, and, oh yeah, she’s having a little affair with Sam Rothberg. He’s so besotted with her that they’re even talking tentatively about pursuing their relationship out in L.A. It’s Rachel’s version of Toby rekindling his friendships with Libby and Seth; each of them needs to be swaddled in uncritical support and affection, and that’s what they get for a time.
Unfortunately, when she floats the idea of moving to California and possibly maybe taking the kids with her for some unspecified amount of time, Toby flips his lid, declaring that he’ll fight her tooth and nail, she’ll never have the kids with her again, and you know what? Fine! Go! “The kids wouldn’t even notice if you were gone!†Remember how in the first episode Rachel referred to Toby having said something awful to her the day before? This is the horrible thing he said, which he couldn’t even remember.
Setting aside Rachel and Toby’s specific relationship history, this is a particularly awful intra-family revisitation of the problem of being competent and driven in a culture suspicious of mothers, no matter what choices we make vis-à -vis work and parenting. Rachel cannot win. None of us can. There are scarcely any good choices available and what is available exists in a socio-economic minefield governed by unwritten rules that so many of us fiercely, cruelly whisper and hiss at ourselves and each other. There are exceptions, but it’s galling that exceptions even need to exist. It’s enough that, if you start examining and asking why things are the way they are, if you start screaming out all that pain and frustration and rage, you might find yourself spiraling and unable to see the floor of the chasm racing up at you until you find yourself on a park bench, being gently jostled out of a slightly catatonic state by your ex-husband’s best friend. At least, that’s what happens to Rachel Fleishman.
The romantic getaway at the yoga retreat with Sam becomes a fun-house mirror of itself, as Rachel does not relax at all. Her therapeutic screaming sessions lead to her losing her ability to sleep as she purges herself of decades’ worth of sadness and fury. Sam peaces out at the first sign of her being anything other than the perfectly coiffed go-getter he’s used to, and she goes entirely, horribly off the rails. After making her way back home, she still can’t sleep, and none of her potential solutions work. The beef lo mein Toby assumed was filling the fridge thanks to Sam turns out to have been the result of Rachel trying and trying and trying to get to sleep via comfort food and then forgetting that she hates the comfort food she keeps ordering. The usually hypercompetent and scheduled-within-an-inch-of-her-life woman we thought we knew is now an exhausted wreck who comes to realize she can’t account for several weeks of her life and has lost her first and best client in the process.
So many of the things that have happened in the last month — things Toby dismissed as falling under the category of “she does this†or to which he ascribed ill intent — turn out to be the result of Rachel’s extreme insomnia and an unbearable belief that she must be failing altogether in her modest goal of being acceptable. Libby is right; villainy and heroism are just garden-variety fuckery and decency magnified to cartoonishness.
Tchotchkes and Things
• Sam Rothberg wanted to hire Toby to head up the anti-cannabis propaganda team at his pharmaceutical company, but he also has medical-grade edibles on hand at the yoga retreat. Classic!
• The blazer Rachel dons like a coat of armor the day she asks Alejandra Lopez to join her at her new agency is the same one she’s wearing when Libby finds her sitting in the park, having just been professionally dumped by Alejandra Lopez.