The Mermaid of Brooklyn (13 page)

I almost think the “for once” was the worst part—implying as it did that this was one in a long line of her incredibly annoying behaviors. I know that distinction is lost on a toddler, but I felt rotten the instant I shouted it, my anger escalating rather than diminishing as my voice rose, and I felt even worse when Betty stopped and blinked and stared at me and then started bawling, as did Rose. Great. I knelt down, beckoned Betty close, guiltily soothed her, promising everything was really okay, okay, okay, like a maternal Ike Turner.

In the afternoon Sylvia came over to watch the girls. Rose had started to cry every time I left the room, so we had to do these sneaky exits. “Look at this, Rosie!” Sylvia shrilled with manic cheeriness. “Watch Betty,” I said. “Don’t let her murder the baby.” Sylvia nodded, waving me away without looking at me, rattling a wooden contraption the opposite direction from the door. I waved at Rose’s tiny back, at Betty and Sylvia, who both ignored me. These stealth goodbyes made me feel jumpy and superstitious, but they were better than having the baby’s screams chase me all the way down the stairs. I closed the door, and then I was gone.

It was the hottest part of the hottest day of the hottest summer in the world. I rode the subway just to be in motion. I stared straight ahead of myself, trying to evince a sense of purpose. It felt important that the other people on the train thought I had somewhere to go. And then I did. I did have somewhere to go. I switched trains at Jay Street and got onto the A, which I never took. Being on the A made me feel like an entirely different sort of person, the sort of person who took the A, whoever that was—me but with a limestone in Brooklyn Heights, meeting a friend at some pretentiously unpretentious restaurant that had been ours
alone until it got written up in the
Times,
or maybe a harried single mother toting too many plastic bags, maneuvering her way downtown. I got off at High Street. Here was a whole new landscape. I could see Harry’s point. There was something delicious in escaping, in that moment of losing oneself in a crowd. These people didn’t know I had two small children whom I had failed at sleep training, that my apartment was a mess, that I was worried about money, that I was worried about my future, that I was the kind of woman whose husband left her. I was just a thirtysomething person in a sundress and crooked sunglasses and non sequitur shoes.

I’d dug into my working-days shoe stash and chosen, to go with my spit-up-stained shift, my favorite pair of all time, footwear so fantastic I was almost afraid of them, dreamlike slippers that fit my midget feet as if they had been made with me and only me in mind. In a fit of inspiration or maybe desperation, I had slipped off my molting flip-flops and left them nestled in the box where usually these heels slept like twin Sleeping Beauties in a tissue-stuffed coffin: ruby-red satin and calfskin leather, with a crystal-crusted flower that perched like an engagement ring on my dirty toes. These shoes were perilously precious to me, literally priceless, and so beloved that I never wore them.

They’d been prototypes sent to one of the fashion magazines in the building and arriving in a mangled box with labels rendered illegible by a rain-soaked city tour in a bike messenger’s satchel. The market editor who found the box weeping on her desk had wanted to use the mysterious slippers in a shoot—everyone who saw them fell in love—but even the most dogged interns couldn’t track down any details on who had made them or where they had come from. I was friendly with the editor, and I once (drunkenly, goofily) gushed about her at some party to a woman who turned out to be her boss, so she had a soft spot for me. Also, none of the other girls at the
magazine could wedge their big stepsister feet into the diminutive things, even though every last one tried. In the end she interofficed them my way, much to my unending mystification.

They were truly shoes that made you believe in the power of shoes, once-upon-a-time pumps that transformed you the second you put them on, with soles that made the city sidewalks sound sweeter, heels that clicked along beneath you with the spritely optimism of Dorothy’s ruby slippers, hand-crafted vamps that lifted you up toward the you that you wanted to be. They made you believe the story of
The Red Shoes,
made it seem totally reasonable that the right footwear could make you so vain it would break your brain, that you would eventually have to cut off your own feet because you couldn’t stop dancing. Wearing them, I could have been anyone. I could ride to Grand Central and take a train anywhere and be a whole new me, a better someone. I could start fresh. But these were crazy thoughts, I reminded myself, and I was too practical to be crazy. I was Jenny Lipkin, dependable friend. Jenny Lipkin, average wife. Jenny Lipkin, passable mother.

I walked as if in a movie; the streets passed me by on camera dollies, as if they they were moving and I was standing still. Was it just the shoes? No, things had felt this way for some time. Harry’s leaving had transformed me into a kid in the family-vacation backseat. I was no longer doing the driving but kicking the seat in front of me, sullenly watching the world smear by, waiting to find out where I was headed. There was a movie theater that Harry and I had gone to once or twice. There was the all-night diner with the wan waitress trapped in a terrarium of perpetual daylight. There was a row of ornate brownstones, like an illustrator’s idea of Brooklyn. There was the bridge. The bridge! I was drawn to it, mothily.

It was always weirdly difficult to find the footpath’s start, but there, in an unassuming corner of the small pigeon-noisy park, was
the handwritten sign, charmingly unofficial, as if written by some tree elf in the parks department. I started up the incline to the bridge. My lungs swelled with the exhilaration of a moment of freedom. It was exciting to be doing something alone. It reminded me of the anticipatory pleasure of sitting down at the sewing machine, about to lose myself in the rhythm of stitches, or of being a little kid and being allowed to walk to a friend’s house by myself. Trees leaned forward, their kindly faces visible to me for the first time. A butterfly landed on my shoulder for a cartoonish instant. My magical shoes were not cut out for such a long walk. The bones in my feet began to twinge, quietly at first, like an overture.

It’s hard to remember exactly what I was thinking as I climbed up to the bridge and first saw the city view rise like a cat’s back arching in panic. It would make sense that I was thinking of Harry. Things had started to surface, things I had willfully ignored for so long that I could now barely convince myself they were real—for example, an odd frequency of text messages that he’d received in the past few months. And when I had once accidentally reached for his phone (identical to mine), it was snatched away with an accusation of snooping, I recalled. His mood had been strange, jumpy and defensive and restless. A gambling binge had seemed inevitable, though full-scale go-out-for-smokes-and-never-come-home family desertion had not. Still, I blamed myself. How could I not? It was like Wile E. Coyote looking down and realizing he’d run off the cliff into the air, and then, the spell broken, sinking into nothingness.

I guess I’d been running on air, and that day I looked down.

The bridge’s walkway was strangely underpopulated, probably because it was the middle of the afternoon on a blazing weekday. The pavement simmered. A bedraggled-looking posse of tourists ambled by, bowlegged from more walking than they were used
to, slugging back overpriced bottles of water. Manhattan’s skyline leered, a grinful of broken teeth; the river shone too brightly to look at. Because I was going crazy, the brilliant sun angered me—what kind of place was this, that there weren’t trees to soak up all that heat? Cars growled beneath the walkway, and the whole bridge vibrated. I stood at the edge, my hands on the rail, which burned my palms. When had the city turned on me? I remembered a night when Harry and I were first together, when we were bored in the airless apartment and decided to walk across the bridge, and we had stood with our arms around each other and the city had seemed warm and humming and alive with twinkle lights, as homey and pleasant as a Christmas tree, and an excitement had thrummed up my spine and I had pressed against Harry’s side and closed my eyes and thought,
I am alive. I am alive—
and the sheer strange truth of it had made my fingertips tingle. At least I tried to remember it. It seemed impossibly distant, that kind of feeling. A flutter overheard: a glowing red firebird, conspicuous in a swarm of seagulls, leered down at me, dropping a feather into the river. A bad omen, signaling a dangerous quest, but also a mythical creature. I elected to ignore it. I turned my head toward Brooklyn, toward the warehouse with the giant letters spelling WATCHTOWER, and this too seemed like a sign of something. But no one was watching. There was no one around. I slipped off my shoes, to my aching arches’ relief.

A phalanx of Japanese tourists was headed my way from the Manhattan side of the river, following a white-gloved tour guide who toted a red balloon. It was all wrong, the symbol of childhood harnessed into such a dreary task. I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. For once I wasn’t crying; just beat. Just—beat. I hadn’t planned on doing it. Even during my craziest moments, I had never been one to plot ways to off myself, and if I had, it would
have been something housewifely and painless, like pills, or maybe a Drano daiquiri. I never even thought of jumping until the instant before I actually did. I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular as I set down my shoes and climbed up onto the guardrail. I was thinking only of weightlessness, of being alone in the air, of not having to think anymore. The water winked. I thought,
Well, there you go, I could be free of everything
. I could have sworn the river beckoned, something swirling beneath the surface and hissing to me and me alone, an eerie
Here, here, here.

Someone shouted, far down the bridge—you couldn’t ever have a minute to yourself, it was awful!—and involuntarily, I turned. What I saw was: my shoes. Those gorgeous shoes sitting there side by side, patent, patient, like kids waiting to be rescued. And I thought,
Fuck if I want someone taking those shoes
. They were
my
shoes, and it had not been easy to get them, and I would never have shoes as lovely ever again. The crystal petals shone, frozen flowers fallen victim to an early chill. Something about seeing those shoes reminded me of my whole sad little life, of all the things I liked about being alive. A cup of coffee. A thicket of herbs at the farmers’ market. Coming up from a subway station and feeling a pocket of city assemble around me. The soothing tread of my sewing machine huffing along a seam. The pattern the sun made trickling down through leaves at our favorite spot in the park. And—the girls. My girls. It was as if I’d been shocked back to life, as if someone had zapped me with those dog-brush-shaped things paramedics placed on chests in TV shows.
Clear!
My girls! I saw not my life flashing before my eyes but the world flashing on without me—Sylvia giving the girls dinner when I didn’t come home and letting Betty eat some processed junk, giving Rose her bath but making the water too cold and using the wrong soap. I loved bath time. I wanted to rub the sponge over Rose’s shining belly and dance the rubber
ducky around until it made her laugh. Sylvia wouldn’t do it right. And I wanted to see these girls grow. I wanted to know the women they would become. How I loved those girls, with such a gorgeous ache in my chest! How spoiled I was, in the grand scheme of things—how lovely my life! And I didn’t want to die, of course I didn’t want to die, not
really,
only somehow that hadn’t registered for a minute, but now it did, and I was going to climb back down and put on my beautiful shoes and run home and hug the children and possibly even the dog—to be alive! what a gift! what a blessing, if I’d believed in that kind of thing!—but I lost my balance. I slipped over the edge, seeing myself fall in slow motion. And what happened then was, I died.

Dying wasn’t at all how I thought it would be. The fall was
not like flying, it was just like falling. I closed my eyes and thought,
No, no, no,
and hugged my arms across my chest and tried to not be falling. My girls! My life! Harry, even! Then the water opened and swallowed me down.

Well, shit,
I thought.
Now I’ve done it. Now I’m dead.
How annoying was that? Honestly, I could not do one single thing right. I floated there, somewhere, berating myself. When, after a minute, nothing else had happened, I opened my eyes, first one, then the other, waited for them to focus on the sand and cartilagey strands of tide-spun trash, and then I was a goony, gape-jawed tourist, there at the bottom of the East River. Who knew it was like
this
? My dress and loosened hair floated around me with seaweedy grace. The river floor glittered with seashells and glass bits and the lacy sculptures of spines stripped clean. Light refracted down from the upstairs world, illuminating a school of small fish like a handful of fairy dust. Weedy roses bent in the watery breeze. It was
nice
down there. It was
wonderful
. At the ends of my limbs, my toes and fingers looked far away and beautiful. In that moment I forgot all about dry land, about my angst coming down, the shoes, the girls,
everything. I could have stayed in that silent, enchanted world forever, and I would have, too, but the water above me whooshed, warm as a bath, and something blocked the trickle of light and I looked up and there she was.