Keep Me Posted (8 page)

Meanwhile, Monica and I took to strolling past the Pig on our way to Chelsea Piers each week. That was actually Monica’s idea. She was hoping for more free meat.

All these things—which amounted to vague stalking—soon became part of my routine.

My routine had become precious to me this year. When I found
something that worked, I created a little ritual around it and we’d do it every day or every week. The experts say that regimens are important for kids, but I think I benefited more than the boys did. Before I got it all figured out, I would look into the abyss of a fourteen-hour day with them and despair at the bleakness of it all. There is nothing more dismal than waking up to a cold and rainy day with two toddlers in a small apartment and nothing planned for the day. The key, I’ve found, is to have something slated every morning, to force you out of the house early, and to stay out as long as you can. Our Friday mornings from spring through September met those requirements handily, for it was when we walked across town to the Lower East Side, where my friend Mandy was in charge of the community garden’s chickens in the Sara D. Roosevelt Park.

Mandy is one of the few single friends with whom I’ve been able to maintain a friendship since having the twins. She is great with the boys, and they adore her, so the Friday mornings we spend with her are a real treat. She holds a lease on a dozen apartments on the Lower East Side and in SoHo and is able to make a living renting them out by the week to European tourists. (It’s not altogether legal.) She’s always got this big set of keys with her, and she spends her days zipping around downtown on her red Vespa.

Mandy has a Chihuahua named Chato. Chato is a rescue dog with some emotional issues and has bitten Quinn no less than four times (just nips, he’s never broken the skin) yet the boys remain undeterred and lavish him with affection. The chickens arrived in March on loan from a farm upstate. We bring them Greek yogurt
and worms, which we buy at the bait shop around the corner from the Chinatown fish market.

Occasionally one of the chickens—who were supposedly menopausal—would lay an egg. Discovering one was pure magic for the boys, and we’d always get to keep it. I’d wrap it in a T-shirt and put it in my bag, and we’d have scrambled eggs from Regina or Hattie or Daisy for lunch.

After chicken duty, we’d visit Mandy’s vegetable plot. The boys had planted tomato seeds with her, and while I’m 80 percent sure what they dutifully watered every week was a weed, they loved checking its progress and seeing the chickens and being the only kids ever allowed in the coop. Other children would watch with envy as Mandy invited them in to check for eggs. Mandy called Joey the chicken whisperer because the birds always went right up to him. He spoke to them low and soft. “Hi, girls. Good girls. Good chickens.” Quinn was a bit jumpier and was known to scream at their approach, causing them to flap their wings and cluck in reaction, but Joey would set them right in a matter of seconds while Quinn hovered nervously behind Mandy’s leg.

On those mornings, if we managed to get to the garden without incident, if we bought the worms without anyone having a tantrum for a candy bar in the bait store, if I hadn’t yelled, if they were both in the coop and no one was crying, I would stand there holding Chato by the leash, watching my boys with Mandy and the chickens and feel genuinely satisfied. I was proud that those were my adorable boys in there with the chickens and that I was able to give my city-dwelling kids this experience. At these moments, I loved my life.

New York

June 1

Sid,

You are the coolest. A backroom bank—I love it. But is it legal? Just be careful—don’t they cane people for less over there?

Remember our “office” in the garage attic? We had that box of index cards where we’d keep files on the neighborhood boys? God, I’d love to have a look at those cards now.

I’ve come around to your sex challenge idea, by the way. Leo doesn’t know it, but I’m aiming for three times this week. Boy, is he in for a shock. I’ll report back with results. In fact, do you know what’s really depressing? We had a new mattress delivered last week, and neither of us made the inevitable jokey-but-not-really comment about “christening it.” (Nor have we “christened it,” I probably don’t need to tell you.) And you know what’s even weirder? We literally (and I do mean literally) have not spoken one word about the mattress, despite the fact that it was a heavily researched decision. Over
months, we e-mailed and texted links to articles on mattresses and went separately to Sleepy’s and reported to the other on our preferences via e-mail. When it arrived, I texted him, and when he came home that night, the boys and I were already asleep on it.

Anyway, I’m off to my first yoga class. I hope it will make me a calmer, nicer, sexier version of myself—which would make me you, I guess! Wish me luck.

—Cassie

PS—In case you were wondering, the mattress is amazing—a long-overdue upgrade from the pile of coat hangers and cotton balls that I was sure comprised our old mattress. I haven’t slept better in years! If only my restless legs would cease and my kids would stop climbing on top of me in the middle of the night . . .

W
hen Leo arrived home at six forty, I had the boys in the tub. Ten minutes later, I walked the four blocks to Up-Dog Studio above the juice bar on Hudson Street (which Monica and I are convinced is a cover for a major drug trade). The narrow stairway was lined with votive candles, and soft music played while incense burned from above. I paid my thirty dollars, removed my shoes, and grabbed a towel from the pile atop the shoe shelf. A bit nervous, I pulled my phone out of my bag and pretended to be busy on it while entering the studio. Had I been paying attention, I might have made a quick retreat, but by the time I silenced my phone and dropped it back into my bag, it was too late.

“Hey, neighbor!” My heart sank. It was Jenna, who lived across
the hall from me. And as if that weren’t bad enough,
Jake
was there, too.

“Cass,” he said with a nod of his head and what might have been a wink, but I wasn’t sure

“Hey, guys,” I said softly, looking around, and then accepting my predicament and taking the last open spot, right between them.

Jenna Newman and I had a complicated relationship best summed up by the term “frenemy.” She’s just the kind of person Sid would have had no complaint with and might have even befriended, but whom I couldn’t stand. Her daughter, Valentina, was six months older than the twins and light-years ahead of them developmentally. Jenna was, naturally, a mommy blogger and seemed to think that this made her a sought-after parenting expert. We’ve been neighbors for years and were always sort of friends, but motherhood changed everything about our relationship. When she found out I was pregnant, it was the beginning of the end, only I didn’t know it at the time. With her placid and perfect newborn daughter, whom she had delivered in her bathtub, Jenna was quick to offer advice. Advice that I gladly accepted at first. I was so busy at work that I didn’t have time to read the stack of books she loaned me:
So That’s What They’re For, Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth,
and
Birthing from Within
. Luckily, she was ready with a CliffsNotes version each time I passed her in the hall. And I ate it up. In fact, between her and Sid, I didn’t
need
any books or childbirth classes. I felt fortunate to have them both.

Jenna is a single mom, and I’ve got a real soft spot—and a lot of respect—for single moms, which made me hate myself for hating her.

When the twins were first born, I was still grateful for her counsel and neighborly hot meals. It was kind of her to check on
me and sit with the babies while I showered, and she does make a delicious cauliflower quinoa pilaf. Technically speaking, she may be a better person than I am, and if Grandma Margie’s version of heaven exists, there’s a good chance she’s in and I’m out. But at a certain point, her offers of help and handy tips seemed mere excuses for her to show off. With great annoyance, I came to realize that Jenna had appointed herself my mentor when I’d only wanted a friend. I started to resent her pride in her skills and felt I deserved a little credit—a handicap—for having two babies at once. By the time the twins were eating solids and I was three months back at work, I’d reached my limit with her.

It was the BÉABA baby-food maker that did it. She’d bullied me into buying it in the first place, telling me all about it no less than seven times. I would nod and say, “Yes, sounds fab. I should get one.” And then she just picked one up for me at Babies “R” Us and told me I owed her $120. And what could I do? Refusing it was as good as signing my kids up for cancer. Baby food out of a jar, with its chemicals and preservatives (and ease and convenience) was so vilified that to even buy it in my neighborhood was a secretive, shameful act, and one that I engaged in every week while that cheerful green-and-orange machine sat occupying more counter space than I could afford.

The thing was, I did love my kids and I didn’t make them food. So as it turns out, it is possible. Because I’m still insecure about it, let me present my case. I’d get home from work at six fifteen on the dot, send my nanny home, and immediately nurse the boys, feed the boys (from a jar), bathe the boys, cuddle and coo with the boys, read
Is Your Momma a Llama?
with the boys, nurse them again, read
Goodnight Moon
with them, and then attempt to put them to
sleep. All the while, the pristine appliance loomed like a judgmental beacon, its very presence actually lessening the quality of my time with my babies. Leo usually came in around seven thirty with takeout and we’d pass Joey and Quinn around until they fell asleep, scarf down the Thai or Chinese or Mexican, and then one of the boys would be up. I’d crawl into bed at some point, where I would sleep for an hour or two at a time, awakened intermittently by my restless legs or my restless babies, until I woke for the day at five or six a.m.

The organic kale and cauliflower and sweet potatoes turned browner by the day, and each night before I slinked off to bed, I’d think,
I’ve got to make that baby food before the veggies go bad
. To this day, the sight of a CSA box tugs at a dark little part of me that wonders whether my difficulties at getting pregnant in the first place were a sign that I wasn’t meant to be a mother.

Once the boys entered toddlerhood, Jenna would see me, wild-eyed, coming up the stairs with the boys, who were often covered in sand or ice cream or both and crying, refusing to budge from the landing, roaring like T. rexes, barking like dogs, fighting like ninjas—anything other than calmly and quietly walking beside me, in the style of Valentina. In these moments, she would cock her head to the side and say, “Oh dear, let me help you.” Sometimes she would take my bags, but other times she would go all Supernanny, and in a treacly voice, say something like, “Hey, kiddos, do you know how to play the quiet game?”

When we had playdates on rainy days, Jenna was known to say things like, “Don’t worry, Valentina; I’m sure Joey’s mom is going to have a talk with him about sharing,” and then look at me expectantly. When she put out a tray of crudités for snack time and
Quinn asked, “What’s that?” referring, I assume, to the jumbo white asparagus nestled among the carrots, celery, and cucumbers, she said, “Oh, honey, these are organic vegetables with pesto Greek yogurt dip,” her voice dripping with pity, as if the boys had never before seen a vegetable. “This is Valentina’s favorite snack.”

Then, in a fake effort to alleviate what she assumed was my great mortification, she stage-whispered to me, “Actually, she doesn’t have a choice.”

I felt like she was trying to lure me into some mommy competition. But instead of giving her that pleasure, I retreated further into my slacker-mom persona. If anyone was keeping score, Jenna was surely crushing me, so why not just accept my booby prize? But acknowledging this only further aggravated me: I felt like I should have been a great mom. All the prerequisites had been met: a happy childhood; an affinity for children in general; positive role models in my mother, grandmother, and sister; a supportive spouse; a strong desire to become a mother in the first place. So what was the problem? All signs pointed to some defect of my personality. Still, I preferred to assign little bits of blame here and there, a good chunk going to the complicated feelings churned up by Jenna.

Her blog was called
My Funny Valentine,
and it was a record of everything Valentina ever did or said. It had a cool, spare design and ethereal photos. Each post would wrap up with a bit of parenting wisdom from the mother of this amazing child who did and said only altruistic and hilarious and precious things. The way I saw it, she’d lucked into having a girl with an extremely easygoing temperament and a taste for broccoli, and was going around taking credit for something she actually had very little to do with.

She had one post about how she had planned out Valentina’s
gradual exposure to screens. Valentina had not touched an iPad and never watched TV, and Jenna claimed to use her phone for emergencies only while she was in Valentina’s presence. Jenna planned to start introducing television in ten-minute increments, slowly building to her first feature film, which would be
The Wizard of Oz
when she was seven. I love
The Wizard of Oz
, but I would never admit it to Jenna.

It bothered me that our neighbors tended to group us together, assuming we were close friends. There weren’t many kids in our building, which was made up of mostly gay men and elderly people hanging on to their rent-controlled apartments from before the building went co-op. I worked hard to distance myself from her in every way I could. Unfortunately, we have similar tastes in furniture, music, and children’s clothes. And even more maddeningly, I agreed with a lot of what she said about children and parenting in general, but her superiority was so sickening that I fought every instinct to side with her, even if that meant not doing the best thing for my kids. For instance, every time she blathered on about “screen time,” I went home and sat the boys in front of the TV for a healthy dose of it, a prophylactic against ever being in the position to tell some poor beleaguered mother that
my
children hardly ever watched TV. When she “discovered” Elizabeth Mitchell’s children’s music, I had also recently been playing it for the boys every night while we got ready for bed. When she told me, complete with a smug explanation as to why this was the perfect bedtime music for Valentina, that Valentina sang along so sweetly and that it was their special thing, I pretended like I thought it was fine, but that we usually listened to lullaby versions of Ramones songs. I
immediately went inside and downloaded that
Rockabye Baby
!
Ramones album, so it wasn’t really a lie.

Monica and Jenna have never met and I don’t plan to introduce them, because I couldn’t bear to watch the carnage that would ensue if Monica got ahold of her. Despite being terribly annoying, Jenna wasn’t a bad person, and I felt slightly—perversely—protective of her.

When we were dating, Jake had tried to get me to go to yoga classes with him, but I was a Pilates girl and we became jokingly exclusive to our chosen exercise regime, never crossing the line. Aside from one or two prenatal classes I took four years ago, this was my first real yoga class. Needless to say, Jake and Jenna were the last two people I’d want witnessing a potentially vulnerable or embarrassing moment—let alone hour. I considered staging an emergency with the help of my phone, but I naively thought my years of Pilates and ballet would help me fake my way through the class.

As I sat down, Jenna looked impressed that Jake and I knew each other. He was becoming quite famous, and with his sleeve of tattoos, scruffy face, and perfect teeth, he looked the part.

“I’ve never seen you here before,” said Jenna.

“Yeah, I haven’t taken a yoga class in years,” I said, making an effort to speak slowly and softly.

A wiry and kind-faced woman who looked to be some exotic mix of South Asian races approached me and quietly asked, “Is this your first time here?”

“Yep,” I said quickly, a bit uncomfortable with her eye contact.

“Not your first time to yoga, though?” she said, making a face as if this possibility would be unfathomable.

“No, no,” I assured her with a wave of my hand.

“Okay, then, we’ll get started,” she said to everyone.

I shot the instructor a look that I hoped said,
Cover for me—my ex-boyfriend and my archnemesis are here, and I need to look good, okay?