The Mermaid of Brooklyn (11 page)

I knew what Sylvia was getting at with all the volunteered child care. I knew that she was trying to help me keep an even keel. Despite all our differences, she was the person in my life who came closest to understanding my situation, which was a weird thing to realize. She knew Harry. She knew what it was like to take care of small children. She knew that you could tell yourself you had it easy—that, thank God, your children were healthy, and that you didn’t have to work nights at a donut shop or cleaning houses or whatever actual single mothers did, and what if you had to live in the projects and had a deadbeat boyfriend who beat you, and what about pioneer women who had to do all this plus make their own soap and eat salt pork!—but really you were thinking that everyone around you seemed to have it so much easier, the well-groomed ladies who stayed home and still had nannies so they could work on business plans for vanity projects like benefits or boutiques or just get lunches and manicures and things, ladies whose stupid kids would have every advantage that yours wouldn’t, when obviously yours were much more deserving. Sylvia probably also knew—did she? could she possibly?—about those moments when you looked
at the sun glinting on the water like light on the crown of a child’s head, and all your courage left you and you thought,
Me? Somebody’s mother? Two somebodies’ mother? I can’t do that. I can’t do that. I can’t.
Wait, maybe she didn’t. Maybe these were not normal mother thoughts at all. I kept them to myself, just in case.

Anyway, it was nice of her to watch the girls, it really was. “Free day care!” Laura exclaimed when I mentioned it. “That’s, like, from another dimension.” I tried to focus on feeling appreciative, but in those days it was hard for anything to pierce the gray blanket draped over me. Every evening Betty stood by the front door, opening it at random intervals. She didn’t say, and didn’t have to, that she was waiting for her daddy to come home.

“Oh,” said Sylvia before leaving one sultry afternoon. Harry had been gone about a week. That morning I heard Betty informing Emma that Daddy was at Coney Island, stuck on the teacups ride. I kind of wished she were right. That would show him. “I meant to tell you,” Sylvia continued, biting her lip. A flicker of uncertainty was out of character. I braced myself.

“Oh?” I said.

“Harry took his bag.”

“His bag?”

She nodded. “He kept an overnight bag in the closet at work.”

“An overnight bag?” I was reduced to repeating phrases like a toddler learning to talk. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I never asked. One time, a while ago, like months ago, I was looking for something and opened it. It was packed. I thought maybe you guys were planning a vacation. Anyway, I meant to ask him about it, but I never did.”

“And now it’s gone.”

“Yes. I mean, at least we know that wherever he is, he has some clean underwear. Right?”

Betty skidded by on her stocking feet. “Onionware!” she shrieked.

“Okay,” I said. “Well, thank you for telling me.” We were calm as could be, as if discussing the purchase of paper towels and not proof that my husband had been planning for months the abandonment of his family.
What a dick
was all my brain offered.
Seriously. Dick.
Also, for some reason, I thought:
Oh, our fucking car.
In all the weirdness, I had forgotten to move it for street cleaning, a chore I was used to leaving for Harry, so it was surely adorned with one of those cruelly expensive, heart-stoppingly orange tickets, a sticker plastered to the back window passive-aggressively announcing that “because of this vehicle, the street could not be properly cleaned,” impossible to remove, like a scarlet letter from the Department of Transportation. The city was obviously conspiring to crush my soul. I wanted to think about where Harry had gone, to review any clues I may have missed, honestly I did, but in the meantime, I had to deal with the car.

Only, when I walked by the spot where the car had been, where I thought it had been, where I was pretty sure it had been, Rose in the sling, Betty in the stroller, Juniper lunging for a squirrel and jolting me and the baby and tangling her leash in the stroller wheels, the car was gone. I blinked at the irritatingly cute Mini Cooper in its place, nestled between bumpers, snuggled up close to the curb. Perhaps there was another reality in which my life was aesthetically perfect and this was my car (in this other life, I always used cloth napkins, adorned my table with fresh-cut flowers, and even my crying fits were sort of soft-focus and Garboesque); perhaps a momentary super-string-twitching had confused the two? It was always possible that I was remembering the wrong spot, remembering where I had parked the week before, or the week before that, but no, fuck all, Harry had taken the car. I turned our ungainly craft around and began the quest toward home. Fine. At
least it was one less thing to worry about. Or really, more realistically, one less chore to manage in my here-and-now life, even if it was also one more thing to worry about Harry messing up.

Harry. Once we had lain in bed together, a soft summer breeze blowing the curtains in the window, and I had closed my eyes as he stroked my skin and I hadn’t known where I ended and where he began; we had been one dozy, loving creature. Now I found it impossible to imagine what on earth he could possibly be thinking. At this point, even if he came back, even if he were back when we returned from our walk, there would be something that could never heal, a third-degree burn scarring our marriage.

He wasn’t back. He was somewhere, driving down the open road with all the windows down, maybe, or shivering in an over-air-conditioned casino on some Indian reservation. I pictured our humble Honda, disfigured from its life parked on the street, sitting out there alone in a sunny lot somewhere, and I felt immeasurably sad.

Then Juniper lunged toward a lady’s perky Pekingese. I hadn’t seen the other dog coming down the narrow sidewalk and so hadn’t proactively reined in the beast. The leash shot out, upsetting the stroller so that Betty was flung backward and began screaming, jerking my arm so that Rose was jolted and she, too, began screaming. Juniper bayed at the rodent of a dog, scrabbling her paws, while the woman gathered the furball up in her arms and shot me a horrified look. “What the fuck is your problem?” I barked at her. It was a deeply silly question. I mean, there was only one thing I knew about her, and it was what her problem was. She rolled her eyes at me and said only “Oh,
Jesus,
” which was about the most infuriating response imaginable, and walked away. I examined Rose first—she was already over it, staring with great interest at the woofing Juniper. Then I hurriedly righted the stroller and yanked the leash in with all my might. Juniper regained her senses, cowering,
tail tucked under her butt. It was too late. I grabbed her nose and smacked her side as hard as I could without jiggling the baby. “You fucking dog,” I hissed into her watery eyes. “I am going to take you to the fucking butcher, you hear me?” Rage pumped through my veins. My hands shook. Why did the world hate me? Why was I so incompetent? Why was the dog such an asshole?

I wrapped the leash around my fist and peeked at a sniffling Betty. “I’m so sorry, sweetie,” I said. “Are you okay?”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “No!” she said, obviously fine. “Bad doggie!” She twisted around and wept into the back of the stroller. I felt like the worst mother in the world.

“Yes, true. Bad doggie. I’m so sorry, and I’m sure Juniper is, too.” My heart was racing with adrenaline and anxiety and grief at the thought of the girls getting hurt and humiliation at the ugly scene which I could only hope no one I knew had witnessed. You never knew, out there on the street. I pictured people watching from their windows, tsking their tongues at the way I smacked Juniper when she stopped in front of me.
But you don’t understand,
I wanted to say to them,
this dog is being an asshole! And she’s not even really my dog! It’s not my fault! None if this is my fault!
Unless it was. But I wasn’t going to think about that just yet.

I was still, then, dumb enough for moments of hope. When my phone rang and the caller ID read “Unknown Number,” I pressed it to my ear in a fervor. But no, it was my mother, calling from a new cell phone she’d just acquired at a mall kiosk. “How
are
you?” she trilled, live from Edina. I love my parents, I do, but they unironically worship
A Prairie Home Companion
and shop for clothes at Costco and call things “salad” when the main ingredient is mayonnaise. And they’re really nice. I mean, we just don’t have that
much in common. “How is the weather there? It’s terrible here.” I mouthed the words along with her. Every conversation with someone from Minnesota begins this way. It’s basically a salutation.

“Hot,” I said, switching Rose to the other boob. Betty ran into the kitchen to show me a large comet of a booger balanced on her forefinger. I widened my eyes and nodded in appreciation before swiping it into Rose’s burp cloth.

“Yes, that’s what Sylvia said. So what’s new? How are the girls? How’s Harry?”

“Oh, you know. Fine. Wait—Sylvia? You talked to Sylvia?” Rose popped off, and milk trickled down her chin and my shirt. I jostled her into a floppy sitting position and closed my eyes. “Why are you asking when you already know?”

“Honey. Is everything all right?”

“No, Mom, everything is really shitty, okay?” Here came the tears. God, I was just so tired. “Harry took off, as you already know, so I don’t see why you had to call, but okay, there it is, he’s gone. And no, there’s nothing I haven’t told Sylvia that I’m going to tell you now. I don’t know why he went or where. He’s just gone.”

There was a long pause. My mother had given birth to me, squalling and naked; she had changed my diapers and sung me to sleep. Why should we now pretend to be polite acquaintances? Why couldn’t we say what was on our minds? It worried me, my reaction to my mother, Harry’s to his: the hackles, the sighs. I didn’t want it to happen to me and my girls, and I couldn’t see how to prevent it. In fact, I could have drafted them a list of things to hate about me, in case they needed help. After the pause had gone on long enough to suck the air out of the phone, out of my head, out of my apartment, my mother said, “Oh, sweetheart,” and I forgave her. More than anything, I wanted her to come hug me and tell me everything would be all right. And then immediately leave.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, “I just— I didn’t know what to say. I don’t know what to say. I can’t believe he would do this to you.” What made it worse was my parents had never really liked Harry. I don’t think I was imagining the “I told you so” hitchhiking along in her dulcet tones. “Your father is beside himself.” Sure. I could see my father beside himself—sitting in his suburban office-park office in his cheap suit and tie, staring into his World’s Best Grandpa mug, looking exactly as he did when overcome with joy. He was about as emotional as a walnut.

My throat was constricting. “Mom, I have to go take out the dog. She looks like she’s trying out for the circus.” It wasn’t even a lie. Juniper had positioned herself in front of the door and was leaping straight into the air, trampolining off the scuffed wood floor.

“Well, sweetheart, you let us know what’s going on, okay? If you need to talk to anyone or, you know, go back on your medication—if you need some extra money or anything—just tell me. I’ll come there and help with the girls, you know I’d be happy to.”

Oh God. The mercenary! Trying to take advantage of my pain and humiliation in order to finagle a grandchild visit out of it! Just what I needed: a visitor who hated walking, feared the subway, and obsessed over how Brooklyn restaurants were all too small and stingy with portions (“I thought you said Apple
bee
’s,” my mother had once said in thinly veiled dismay as we were being seated at a new slow-food bistro called, confusingly, rudely, Applewood). “No, no. Thanks. But no. I’ll let you know if I hear anything. We’re fine. Thank you.”

“Well, okey-dokey,” said my mother, clearly disappointed. I could almost see her taking her blindingly white walking shoes out of her wheeled suitcase. When she hung up the phone, it felt weirdly final, as if I would never hear her voice again, as if I’d never had parents at all.