Today Will Be Different

Eleanor says that she has unhealthy and destructive habits and a tendency to make things worse most of the time. However, she is hoping that today, she will be able to do things right by committing to her lunch date with her acquaintance Sydney Madsen, taking Timby to school and picking him up, and having sex with Joe. She gets up and goes into detail about her friendship with Sydney. Eleanor had worked as an animator for the Fox TV show Looper Wash for five years before moving with Joe, a hand surgeon, from New York City to Seattle 10 years ago. She met Sydney at a party and found her painfully boring, but she is too conflict avoidant to drive Sydney out of her life.

Eleanor walks the family dog, Yo-Yo, and greets her friend Dennis before coming home to her apartment. She sees Timby using the Sephora makeup he was given for Christmas and tells him not to wear it to school. She makes breakfast, and Joe notices that she is dressed nicely. Eleanor tells him that they might be alone that night. She somewhat dreads being alone with her husband because she knows that he will want to have sex, and she doesn’t feel as physically attractive as she used to be. However, Eleanor does not want Joe to cheat on her and agrees to have sex with him that night.

After she makes breakfast, Eleanor recites a poem by Robert Lowell and has Joe and Timby help her make sure she recites it well. She then drives Timby to Galer Street School and reminds him not to wear the makeup at school when she sees the bag. After he gets out of the car, she sees him wearing eyeshadow and calls after him angrily but then decides to have the school deal with it and leaves.

Eleanor successfully recites the Robert Lowell poem to her friend Alonzo Wrenn at a restaurant, who congratulates her. She laments the lapse in her memory and vocabulary skills since her pregnancy and motherhood and has been taking poetry lessons with Alonzo, a University of Washington professor, to improve these skills. They eat breakfast and analyze the poem and the story of Robert Lowell’s life together. Eleanor also orders a large gift basket to give to Sydney.

She then receives a call from Galer Street School: Timby is in the office with a stomachache. Frustrated, she says goodbye to Alonzo and leaves to pick Timby up. At the school, she is stopped by a group of young mothers and a young father playing a game. When their children come out of the classrooms, Eleanor steals the first young mother’s lanyard, which has baby blocks spelling out the name “Delphine” on it, and goes to the administration office. She picks up Timby and angrily tells him that she will take him to the doctor. At the doctor’s office, Eleanor thinks about her time working on the TV show Looper Wash as the animation director and her difficulty with deadlines, as well as calls she has been getting from book editor Joyce Primm. The doctor finds nothing physically wrong with Timby and suggests that his stomachache could be caused by overwhelming emotions. Timby reveals that a girl named Piper Veal bullied him for wearing an H&M shirt after she visited the sweatshops in Bangladesh with her family. Eleanor wonders if Timby might be gay or genderfluid due to his fascination with makeup, but she doubts it.

Eleanor goes to see Joe at his office and get his input, but he isn’t there. She realizes that he must have told the office that he was going on vacation. Confused and angry, she cancels her plans with Sydney and goes to The Gap with Timby.

Eleanor starts to wonder if Joe is cheating on her because she doesn’t want to have sex with him anymore. While Timby is trying on clothes at The Gap, she goes into the nearby Barnes & Noble and gets the Seattle newspaper to see if it contains anything about Joe and where he went, but she learns nothing. When she returns to The Gap, she sees Timby trying to buy more things than she had allowed him and angrily takes him out of the store without buying anything. She realizes that she has scheduled lunch with someone named Spencer Martell, who she does not remember. She looks at her phone and sees an email chain with Spencer setting up a lunch date at Mamnoon at noon. She drives over to Mamnoon.

At the restaurant, Spencer appears happy to see her and Timby, and Eleanor gives him the gift basket. Eleanor then recalls that Spencer worked at Looper Wash but was fired due to his lack of drawing skills. Spencer reveals that when he got the job at Loop Wash, he was able to leave his parents’ apartment and begin a better life. After his firing, however, he did not want to return to his prejudiced parents after coming out as gay. In recovery from drug addiction, he started working toward becoming an artist, pouring himself into his art. He studied at the Yale School of Art and won several prizes for his art, including the Minerva Prize, which Eleanor was also nominated for. Learning this stuns her. Spencer gives Timby and Eleanor the program from the award ceremony, which mentions her autobiographical graphic novel The Flood Girls about her and her sister.