by Elizabeth Ohga

(image c/o lifegatedotcom)

The hardest part about a very public meltdown is the day after the very public meltdown. It’s always the after that wrecks you, even though it’s the before that, had it been properly tended, could have prevented it. The day after her very public meltdown, Penny still had to wake up, pack her children’s lunches, cobble together some sort of breakfast for them and get them out of bed and ready for school. She still had to walk them to school, in full view of all of the other parents who, if they hadn’t personally witnessed her very public meltdown the day prior, would almost certainly have heard about it by now, and who were now carefully avoiding eye contact. Which was nothing new, but she could smell the palpable fervor of their still trying to observe her and see if she might, who knows, spontaneously combust again. 

The fog of shame that enwreathed Penny had yet to dissipate. Her actions from the day before played in a continuous loop in her head, each time causing her to grimace, or squeeze her eyes shut, or bring her forehead into her palms. Who cares, she kept telling herself. People do stupid shit every day. But the shame stuck to her like a cheap cellophane poncho. She must allow the shame to move with her, like body odor that seeps out past the thick layer of deodorant coating her armpits.

It’s like the train wreck they warned us about, the one we cannot look away from. We freeze, transfixed. One of our neighbors, she’s here at school pickup and she is having…an incident. We are in awe. We are terrified. We are trying to be supportive. But also: We are in a hurry to get home.

We all know about mental health. We are all so very supportive of mental health. The problem is, we don’t know what to do when mental health happens in front of us, like in real life. Our degrees in marketing, government relations, graphic design are useless; our JDs and MDs and PhDs, none of these have equipped us to know what to do when a neighbor is in distress. 

Penny knows she should tell her husband. She wants to tell him. Maybe if she tells him, he’ll say, “That doesn’t sound terrible, and who cares? I love you and the kids love you and we know you’re a great mom and that’s all that matters.”

What he actually says is a couple minutes of nothing, which Penny feels compelled to fill in with an apology. Then he says, “Listen, Penny, I know it’s been hard for you lately. Why don’t you try to find a babysitter to help you out, maybe you can go to the spa or something and treat yourself?”

Penny loved her husband. Really, she did. You can love someone, know they are your soulmate, and still hate them every once in a while. Love was a choice, and Penny and Gabe chose to love each other every time the choice presented itself. The thing Penny was trying to figure out was at what point did the choice present itself too often? At what point did the moments of searing contempt arise with a frequency as to inform her, this is probably not the right choice. She is sick of explaining parenting to him. She is sick of explaining being poor to him. She is sick of explaining that they are pretend rich people, which is the same thing as being poor. They live in a big house in a rich zip code, but only because the house belongs to her parents. They lived with her parents for a short time during the pandemic, but Takeshi and Yasuko moved back to Japan at the tail end of lockdown. Her parents feel no remorse about moving away from their grandchildren. They have a cordless fealty to self-reliance and self-preservation. Their duty was to pass on these traits to their fledgling adult daughters. Daijoubuyo, Yasuko told Penny, your kids are tough. Leo and Lulu will be fine. She was conspicuously silent about Penny’s prospects.

So Penny and Gabe lived rent-free in her parents’ house, her childhood home. Gabe was thrilled; the money they saved on rent, he told her, can finance the fintech company he’s building with his buddy Rich.  

Despite having grown up in the same town, Penny did not meet Gabe until the real world. They met in New York City when Penny, freshly graduated with a communications degree, was working her way up the PR ladder and Gabe was “in finance.” They both felt like successes just by being in New York, just by escaping the cookie cutter suburb they would never admit to being from. Penny had gone to the overpopulated public school, and Gabe was a scholarship kid at the private school on account of his mother being a teacher there. He had seen the depths of private wealth and inequality and came out thinking, I want in. She had been drawn to his positivity, how he had not been disillusioned. She was too young, ambitious days still ahead of her, to see it for the delusion it was. When Penny lost her job shortly after Gabe quit his to focus on his “new venture,” he seemed, to her surprise, elated with the prospect of moving back to their hometown. Even if he had to live with his in-laws (“your parents love me,” was his reply). Penny had seen his mind churning: the proximity to his friends’ parents, the golf courses, the country clubs; sponsoring events at his alma mater. 

Like Penny, Gabe was raised to believe that if you worked hard and had a good attitude, made smart decisions about money, you could have a good and comfortable life. Unlike her, he still believed his due would come, that he was still in the game, that he was ever in the game at all. It had been a few years, and neither the big sale to big tech nor the unicorn-worthy valuation had materialized, a fact that seemed to confound Gabe as much as it irritated him. What Penny had once seen as ambition was scratched off and revealed to be merely a sense of entitlement.

When Penny first arrived back in her hometown, her next-door neighbor invited her to a ladies’ night. 

“We try to do this about once a month,” her neighbor had said. The hostess is a pediatrician turned mommy blogger turned influencer (“I really prefer the term content creator,” she had said, nodding earnestly), a self-described extroverted-introvert who posts snippets of her life interspersed with videos about gentle parenting. 

“She’s built such an amazing online community,” one of the ladies tells Penny, to which the hostess responds by saying “that is literally the best part of my job, the DMs from people who tell me how my videos have helped them.” 

Penny’s mind churns for a response. She knows the correct response is a gushing “that’s amazing,” but she nonetheless considers whether she should disclose that actually, she quit social media, for mental health reasons. She doesn’t, because she knows this makes her look like a sanctimonious asshole. She pauses before arriving at a noncommittal “is that right?” The pause, and Penny’s incorrect answer, does not go unnoticed by the ladies. Don’t worry, she wants to tell them, no one hates me more than I do. She used to communicate for a living, and now she can barely eke out two words.

“Speaking of community,” Penny says, trying to change the topic but primarily wondering why she’s still talking. “Anyone know any HOA board members? I sent an email about speeding delivery vans in the neighborhood but never heard back. I’ve been nearly run down so many times. My kids too.” Blank faces stare back at her. Minutes pass in silence until a mousy looking neighbor squeaks, “But I mean, no one likes speed bumps,” followed by a nervous trill of a laugh, to which others join. It dawns on Penny that these delivery drivers speeding through the neighborhood are messengers of the gods, the contents of the packages irrelevant when the consumption is the point. The dopamine hit of “add to cart,” the euphoria of “proceed to checkout.” In the totem pole of esteem, the people delivering daily reminders of these ladies’ purchase power occupy several rungs above non-equity neighbors like Penny.

The ladies spend the rest of the evening cutting up edibles into micro-portions and talking about people who are not there and whom Penny does not know. Penny declines the offer of edibles and mostly sits and smiles and laughs when it feels appropriate to do so. By the end of the evening, she knows she won’t be invited back.

The neighborhood, a series of cul-de-sacs branching off a singular main road, abuts the public elementary school to the east. A handful of neighbors can take ten steps past their backyards and find themselves on the school’s jungle gym, but most other neighbors are expected to walk their under-tens down their cul-de-sacs and up the slight hill that is the main road, then down a narrow tree-lined pathway to the school’s rear entrance. 

(image c/o ecarstrade)

At the end of the school day, the main road is lined with SUVs, mostly black, parked along the street in blatant disregard of the county’s no parking signs. It brings to mind a presidential motorcade, but for the bumper stickers. The stickers run the gamut of soccer leagues and swim clubs and honor rolls, multi-sized flip flops and paw prints and babies with sunglasses on surfboards. The SUVs are parked here because there is no time to waste. The kids won’t be walking home for after-school snacks and cartoons. Instead, they will be ushered into this youth motorcade where they’ll have snacks on their way to travel league, coding, intro to venture capital. Gone are the days of minivans, those beacons of Little League and carpooling, because the kids these days are specializing, and carpooling is only for the losers euphemistically deemed well-rounded but unfortunately destined for middle management. 

What happened was this: It was an ordinary day, which is to say it was a sort of shitty day, but Penny was more tired than usual because this was the second consecutive week of single parenting while Gabe was “on a roadshow.” Penny was waiting for her children along the pathway just as her own mother did when Penny was in elementary school.

As the children approach, Lulu yells “whoever’s last is a rotten egg!” A dozen little legs begin racing down the path. A backpack comes flying off a child’s back and hits Penny on the nose. She can taste the iron on her upper lip. On impact, her phone flies out of her palm, and when she picks it up, she can see that the screen, which previously had just one solid crack along the top right corner – dignified, like a single streak of grey hair – is now a kaleidoscope of shattered glass. Glancing up, she sees both of her kids running straight toward the youth motorcade and she yells their names to stop. Leo stops; Lulu keeps running, just as a black Suburban with a Grogu bumper sticker slams on its brakes, barely missing her. The driver, concealed behind tinted windows, leans on the horn, stupefying Lulu into a sort of paralysis in front of the car, until Penny finally catches up and carries her daughter back to the curb. The Suburban speeds off without so much as a hiccup. 

“Jesus, Lulu, what the hell were you thinking!” Penny screams, the adrenaline making it impossible for her to control the volume of her voice. 

A voice nearby says, “Whoa, calm down, and watch the language in front of the kids.” 

Penny spins around. It’s the neighborhood hostess, because of course. The hostess hasn’t made eye contact with Penny since that ladies’ night, but she’s talking to her now?

“Oh you’d like me to watch my language? Watch my fucking language? Why don’t you mind your own goddamn business?” Penny yells. And then she screams. It feels good. She screams again. She can feel it, the overturn-a-car energy. And then she laughs, looks around at the absurdity all around her: the youth motorcade full of kids who will spend hours on extracurriculars and then “opt out” of homework; the landscapers blowing leaves, nonstop since dawn because they’re just blowing the same pile of leaves from one corner of the lawn to the next; the fact that she is a middle-aged Asian woman with a bloody nose screaming expletives in the middle of the street. Because an Asian woman with a grievance is just a crazy Asian lady, ignore her, it’s just some weird generational trauma shit. She keeps screaming anyway. She screams at the landscapers, tells them where she thinks they can shove their goddamn leaf blowers. She screams at the kid whose backpack hit her. She screams at the youth motorcade, yells at all the moms and dads that they all should be ashamed. The profanity was probably unnecessary. But the vibrations inside of her, the persistent hum of anxiety and isolation and inadequacy, all began to vibrate faster, stronger, louder, louder, louder until the fragile glass that held her soul in place exploded into a thousand little pieces.

We think about Penny later that evening, throughout the next day. On the one hand, we feel for her. On the other, it was vulgar. We can’t really make heads or tails of it, so we don’t try. There are judgment-free spaces and there are unforgivable actions, and we aren’t the experts in drawing that line.

“Between you and me,” Jen whispers to her husband, who is pretending to listen but is actually trying to determine what bets to place on the SEC playoffs, “I always knew there was something off about her.”

Natalie thinks a good mental breakdown every now and then is probably good for everyone.

Carolyn is pissed that she wasn’t at pickup today to see it for herself.

Emily is just glad it wasn’t her, it totally could have been her, she feels like she’s on the brink all the time too. 

“I’m going to pray for her,” Mary Jo tells her husband. 

None of us says anything to Penny.

Penny knows she’s a yeller. It’s in her bones, or more accurately, her blood. Within the confines of her childhood home, at least, she had been the recipient of her mother’s yelling. Perhaps Yasuko thought that since she was yelling in Japanese, unintelligible to their neighbors, it might go unnoticed. 

Penny used to have it under control. She was breaking the cycle. Then 2020 happened. Everyone acknowledged it was a bad time for working mothers, though Penny’s boss saying “we see you, moms, and how hard you’re working,” did not add hours of sleep to her nights or dollars to her bank account. It didn’t put food on the table or change Lulu’s diapers. And then the people in charge decided they were sick and tired of Covid – just completely over it – and deemed the pandemic over. Nothing to see here, folks, let’s get back to work and make the good old American dollar. Get vaccinated, or don’t. Wear a mask, or don’t. But we are not going to let a stupid virus upend our lives. Except for people like Penny, it already had.

This was around the time the brain fog rolled in. Brain fog like if she walked into her bedroom to change her sweater she’d mindlessly remove her jeans then sit on her bed in her underwear for thirty minutes trying to remember why she walked into her bedroom to begin with. Then she’d pull her jeans back on and resume her day without having changed her sweater, remembering only after she logged into a video call later and seeing the pureed sweet potato stain on her collar, courtesy of Lulu. Brain fog like she’d stare at herself on the video call, at that sweet potato stain, wondering how long that stain had been there. Brain fog like trying to remember what day it was, what month. Brain fog like trying to remember what that video call that just ended was about. 

Her doctors needed her to quantify things: What is your BMI? How many hours of sleep do you get per night? How many grams of protein? Fog was hard to quantify. Some days it was early morning over the Golden Gate Bridge. Some days London before the rain. Other days rush hour traffic in Mumbai. It would have been easier to blame it on long Covid, a real, discrete thing. No one seemed to believe that “mothering during a global pandemic” could be the cause.

Penny asked if she might reduce her hours temporarily, at least until a vaccine became available, or her kids’ daycare reopened, or her new meds kicked in. They allowed her to reduce her hours to zero, indefinitely.

Back then Penny spent what felt like years staring at her laptop. The machine that could at once promise endless opportunity and unabated dismay. The hours she spent changing the font of her resume to see if a serif-free font would make her seem more hirable. Whether she should remove the line about her “other interests.” Crafting a story to explain the recent gap in her resume that didn’t make her sound like she completely failed at working motherhood. Mmhmm, the recruiter would murmur, looking over her glasses at Penny. Well, thank you for your time. 

Her mother would occasionally check in to see how her search to return to being a contributing member of society was going. With every rejection, Yasuko would suggest being nicer to the interviewers, smiling more. The rejections were in fact easier than the dead silence that followed most interviews. Penny could deal with rejections, but not the smoldering ash heap of hope left behind by the non-rejections. With every passing week, as the rejections and silences piled up, her anxiety deepened. Her hair loss became prominent. She managed to stop her knee from shaking uncontrollably during interviews, but the excess adrenaline, now displaced, found a new home in her left arm, where she developed an involuntary tick. You wouldn’t notice it on a zoom call if she sat on her left hand during the interview.

At some point, there were no new jobs to apply to. Penny found the end of the internet, and it was a vast nothingness. The recruiters, once so enthusiastic, became ghosts. Penny had no more web pages to scour, no more emails to return, no more old colleagues to reach out to. She wished to disappear, shrink into her self-loathing. It was a cocktail of exhaustion and supreme sadness. Once, Penny stopped midway through cutting cucumbers for a salad and lay down in the middle of her kitchen, sobbing with the slicer still in hand. The months of anguish and extinguished hope, of demoralization and humiliation, Penny swallowed it all down, for the kids. 

The pain sits in her belly, the nausea now a chronic condition. 

Nelle swears by her bullet journal. Melissa’s life changed when she downloaded that meditation app. Michelle devours romantasies. Liz is so glad she convinced her husband to install the sauna in their master bath. Amanda rolls her eyes and says all she needs to feel better is a good K-drama binge. Belinda started taking a ceramics class with her mom and sister. Rebecca recommends a personal trainer. Not hers, of course, there’s no way in hell she’s sharing Mateo. Ashley discovered knitting during the pandemic. Kate’s pandemic discovery was sourdough baking, and though she hasn’t baked a loaf since Christmas 2020, she tells anyone who’ll listen that it kept her sane through the pandemic. 

What we all agree on is that Penny should be better about self-care. This is what we tell each other, but mainly ourselves. We bill this as the reason why we’re taking the morning off, getting a massage and a manicure. We have a 10 am with our team which we can take from the salon, so long as we stay off camera. We ask our mothers-in-law to watch the kids on Friday night so we can have a date night with our husbands. Our own mothers we task with taking our kids to their soccer game on Saturday so we can go to yoga, which occurs at the same time. We text our aesthetician for a last-minute Botox injection, so when we look in the mirror, we feel just that much younger and better. We are taking care of ourselves so that we are better equipped to take care of others. We are doing this for Penny.

We have all forgotten how Penny once sent around a group text asking if anyone was interested in a neighborhood book club. We can’t remember if any of us ever responded.

Penny had been doing the work. She had a prescription for antidepressants, which her doctors seemed pleased about, nodding their approval, muttering “excellent” as they stared at a tablet. The drugs gave her diarrhea, and a general gastrointestinal malaise, a fact she informed her doctors of. “That’s weird, it shouldn’t,” was her primary’s response, who had no follow-up. Her GI said that all her other tests were “unremarkable,” so the diarrhea-inducing antidepressant was “really the best option.” All her doctors stated that the side effects should go away after some time, though they also agreed that a year was a long time for these symptoms to last. What confused Penny was that if her anxiety caused her gastrointestinal issues, why would a drug that exacerbated them be the best option for her? Of course, she was not a doctor, so what did she know? Penny was nearing forty. She had thought that by this point in her life she would be enough of a grown-up that doctors might take her seriously.

The therapy was a work in progress. Her current therapist liked to suggest thought exercises, techniques to improve behavior. She had yet to find the type of therapist she saw on TV, the one where she could just lie on a couch and talk, and the therapist would grunt inscrutably and occasionally chime in with and how did that make you feel? What she got instead was a therapist who had her write out scenes from her six-year-old’s perspective. What does he see? What does he need? Well. He needs a mother who is not a monster, Penny writes. 

Thinking of the disastrous ladies’ night, Penny downloads one of the apps. She types in the hostess’s handle, taps on some of her videos. On one, the words “when someone cancels plans” is superimposed over a video of her dancing in celebration. Another video is captioned, “introverts be like.” Penny notices the hostess is liberal with phrases like “my crippling anxiety” or “my severe agoraphobia.” She scrolls a bit longer, taps around to other suggested videos. In one, a woman and child sit on a couch, captioned “this is how my six-year-old talked me through a panic attack.” Penny tries to imagine herself teaching Leo about anxiety. Several different videos captioned “this is me having a panic attack.” It is strange, Penny thinks, that people have the wherewithal to set up their cameras when a panic attack hits. 

Penny closes out of the app feeling even more unmoored. What is real, and what is performance? It was the same feeling she had during all her job interviews. “Just be yourself,” she had always been told, but clearly being herself failed to impress. Unlike Penny’s, influencer anxiety was low-key, marketable, and apparently, “extremely relatable,” going by the public comments. Their anxiety did not appear to involve bodily fluids or tremors, no pit stains or acid reflux or bald spots. It bypassed the real shitty stuff, the thoughts of suicide or the inability to work. Some things were still off-limits. You couldn’t be so depressed that someone might call child protective services. Penny’s issues weren’t the stuff of online communities. 

Within a few days we have all forgotten. We return to school drop-offs and pick-ups with pods in our ears, listening to podcasts that remind us that we’re outraged, horrified, terrified. We boycott the news. We celebrate the high holidays. We start a diet. We digital detox. We try to remember if we’ve noticed this mole on our neck before. We spend one last weekend in our lake house before boarding it up for winter. We lurk around the comments section of other people asking online for recommended family photographers, Mandarin tutors, piano teachers, professional organizers, plastic surgeons who are so good no one can even tell you had work done. We feel grateful to live in a neighborhood where everyone is so generous with their wisdom.

Penny’s new therapist asks her if she’s ever heard of kintsugi. Penny raises an eyebrow. 

“It’s this Japanese technique of repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer.”

“I’m sorry. I have to take this.” Penny holds up her phone that is noticeably not ringing. She grabs her stuff, walks out of this new therapist’s office. If she wanted someone to tell her how she could use ancient Japanese philosophies to cure her, she’d go back on social media and infinitely scroll for free. She’s willing to give the therapist the benefit of the doubt. Not that she is going back to her, but perhaps her line of questioning had successfully broken through to her other female patients, women who loved throwing around Japanese words like wabi-sabi and ikigai and kintsugi, mainly because it was exotic, like having a pet tiger or riding a tandem bicycle.

Penny starts up her car. Technically, she’s in therapy for another forty-five minutes. There’s a missed text from Gabe: did you eat the last yogurt? 

There is a reservoir just outside of town, along the border between her suburb and the farmland across county lines. She hasn’t thought about that place in decades; the mere thought of it makes her feel old, every memory of that place connected to high school. It’s a nice drive, out that way. Gabe was home, so it’s not like she’d be leaving the kids alone. 

She turned up the volume of the music: J Balvin’s “Blanco,” from her secret reggaeton mix. Well, not really secret. It’s just no one’s ever asked. Bad Bunny, Karol G, Daddy Yankee, J Balvin: whenever she listened to them, she could imagine a different life, where she danced, as the saying went, like no one was watching. Unfortunately, people seem to find small Asian girls rapping in Spanish disorienting.

She remembered the last time she played this music in front of someone. With Gabe, in their Murray Hill apartment before they were married. She was cooking dinner, had just poured the wine and was playing Danza Kuduro through her laptop when Gabe walked in. He had stopped cold, a look of shock on his face as Penny thrust her hips and sang along to Don Omar. 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Gabe stuttered, “what is this?” 

“What?” she had chirped. 

Gabe turned off the music, grabbed one of the wine glasses. “How many of these have you had?” he asked, as he brought it over to the sink and poured it out. He took a sip from the other glass. 

Penny wonders now what could have been so horrifying to him about her joy. She takes a slight right off the main drag onto County Road 91, a quieter stretch that winds back around toward the reservoir while bypassing the commercial blocks. She turns the music up louder.

She wasn’t interested in being made whole with gold. The world would break you just to sell you gilded lacquer. And to what end? What was the meaning of her broken soul, broken sense of self? Her marriage, if it wasn’t broken, was breaking. What was the meaning behind the suffering if the only permissible place for it was in the invisible spaces? And why did she have to be the one to glue herself back together, like it was her fault she was broken to begin with? She wasn’t asking for much. Just that it would be nice to have someone hold the pieces together so she could use both hands to squeeze in the glue. The delusion that we are each beautiful, unique pieces of craftsmanship, when we’re all just sludge waiting to be poured into the mold. It’s no wonder we break. 

Penny is feeling better, tempered by the alchemy of rage into joy. Yes, her bottled-up rage was constantly on the verge of exploding, but Penny knew that was not what would make her whole, what would fill in the cracks of her broken being. The rage was the heat of the kiln, but it was this — the weird that was her joy, singing and dancing that was neither real nor performance, for no one’s benefit — that solidified her. She could be at once broken and unbroken.

The truck comes into view as it barrels around a curve. It straddles the yellow line, the winding lanes of CR-91 no match for the truck’s angles and axles. Penny barely registers the logo before everything goes black.

We are all beside ourselves. Gabe, that poor guy, basically a single dad now, what with his wife in a coma. And how he’s had to put his business on hold while he waits to see if she recovers. We’ve started a meal train for him, and a GoFundMe for medical expenses. We can’t imagine what he must be going through. Really, we truly feel for him.

Elizabeth Ohga lives in Maryland with her husband, kids, and 11-pound rescue mutt.  Her flash fiction has been published in Synkroniciti, BULL, and Pangyrus (forthcoming spring 2026), and humor published in McSweeney’s. “Portrait of a Lady in Gold” is her first published short story.