Rocky 1: Sandwich
by Catherine Newman
Contents
Wednesday - 14
Overview
Summary
Rocky wakes from a nightmare in which her baby slips from her arms into the ocean. She turns to Nick and realizes, with a hangover and only fuzzy memory, that they are fighting. Willa, eavesdropping from below, fills her in: during last night's Catan game Rocky drank too many mojitos and got cruel, including telling Nick she's smarter than him and cursing at Jamie for blocking her shipping route.
Nick quietly tells Rocky he hates when she says he thinks he's smarter, and Rocky apologizes, admitting it's shorthand for a deeper anger she can't name. She reflects on a past couples therapy session where Nick said he was happy with how things were and she wasn't, exposing a fundamental disconnect. Despite her frustration with his flat emotional life, she drapes herself over him, asks forgiveness before her parents arrive, and he forgives her.
In the bathroom hunting for Advil, Rocky flashes back to a summer when Jamie was five and Willa nearly two, when she took a stranger's leftover Vicodin to escape into oblivion, handing the kids off to Nick and lying under a towel to muffle the baby's cries. Back in the present, Willa joins her brushing teeth, teases her about her ruined teeth and brittle menopausal hair, and discovers ancient maxi pads Rocky left at the cottage twenty years ago.
Leaving the bathroom in her underwear, Rocky accidentally waves at Jamie, only to realize he's on a work video call and she has just flashed his colleagues. Willa laughs, and Rocky imagines "Oh my god, Mom" as a fitting epitaph.
Who Appears
- RockyHungover narrator grappling with a forgotten drunken fight, undefined anger, aging body, and a haunting memory of past escape via Vicodin.
- NickRocky's husband, calmly reading in bed; hurt by her drunken jab about intelligence but quick to forgive her.
- WillaRocky's daughter, eavesdropping and recapping the previous night's fight, teasing her mother about teeth, hair, and ancient maxi pads.
- JamieRocky's son, on a work video call when she inadvertently waves at his screen in her underwear.