The Mermaid of Brooklyn (17 page)

There was a break in the foliage and we were out in the Long Meadow, delicious as an enormous bowl of sunshine, unleashed dogs bounding around like friendly spirits, kites dotting the sky on a mission to make everything look bucolic. The view always reminded me of some freewheeling city-park experience in London or Paris that I wasn’t sure I’d ever had. The view made me think how ridiculous it would be to be dead. How ridiculous that anyone was dead and how unlikely it seemed. I didn’t believe in it anymore, in death, and like a child, I ignored it entirely.

At this point in my life, I’d gotten good at dismissing people I didn’t agree with. It was one of our best talents, Harry and I, mocking the opinions of others. But still it nagged now and then, my parents’ urban anxieties, my own. Maybe it was true that my children faced more daily danger here than they would elsewhere. Maybe it was a crime against childhood that Betty was never allowed to be simultaneously outdoors and unsupervised. It was possible that having to hurry to obtain a ticket for story time made it less fun. There would be a line; there would be a rush of nannies; they would run out of stickers.

Soon we’d reached Grand Army Plaza and its terrifying traffic circle which itself felt like a shield against outsiders: If you can’t handle almost getting run over by a livery car, you don’t deserve to get to our library. I hurried over the cobbled sidewalks where the farmers’ market taunted me on the weekends, populated with happy families. With Harry working so much lately, I was already well versed in the customs of the lonely, knew to avoid family spots on weekends when grinning pairs of parents flaunted their coupledom, the ease of tag-team child wrangling. What I needed to fuel
me through my days were the bad times, the prickly moments, help to hate Harry and not miss him—not the time he had taken over a street performer’s failing marionette show to Betty’s delight and the crowd’s admiration. Or seeing him across the busy market and for an instant not recognizing him and thinking,
What a handsome guy,
and the happy jolt of realizing he was mine. The afternoon when I was miserably pregnant with Betty and he’d bought me the hugest bunch of flowers imaginable, but I’d been so annoyed at the thought of having to carry the prickly bouquet home that he’d given it to a couple of old ladies from the nearby rest home and replaced it with a much more welcome chocolate-dip cone from the ice cream truck. I closed my eyes, shook my head, the way they do in movies: Scat, memory.
You, dear, are a mess. I’m telling you, just forget about him. Try. It would seem he has forgotten about you.

We made it to the library in time to score the last ticket. I dumped Betty out of the stroller, nudging her into the grim story-time chamber, and then plopped onto a chair, unhinging Rose and turning her around so she could experience our hard-won reward: a librarian mumbling
Goodnight Moon
in a moist, windowless room. It was truly a wonder that such a majestic building, its facade complete with columns and sweeping staircases, could conceal within such crummy warrens. In this way, it was like the city itself. So much of its sparkle was on the outside—the glitter of the skyline on rare cab rides across the bridge (my last one had been on the way to the hospital to deliver Rose, and I had been in no mood to appreciate the view)—while the places where we spent our time were smaller and grittier than would have been imaginable elsewhere.

For all my crankiness, I did feel something in me loosening, opening, expanding, just like I had in baby yoga. It seemed I could relax only when I was with the girls doing something silly and little kid-ish, when my anxieties about what kind of mother I was and
what kind of life they were leading were allayed for an hour or so because I knew we were somewhere appropriate, doing something they enjoyed. There was some sort of equation that I think we were all trying to decode: How many hours a day did we have to actively cultivate the children’s senses of wonder before we earned a few hours to ignore them? Betty wandered into the center of the rug, befriending a stricken-looking boy. There were usually other mothers and sometimes even a friendly nanny with whom I could share mindless banter. The librarian pressed play on a rattly boom box (she couldn’t be bothered to sing a song), and Betty joined in on a flamboyant round of “The Wheels on the Bus.”

Watching her shimmying around, bus-wheeling her arms, I felt such love for her that I thought I would burst. I never would have imagined it, the love I had for my kids. I closed my eyes. In my old life, this would have been a moment for crying or accidentally falling asleep. Now the rusalka rose within and provided an image of me transforming into some sort of maternal gorgon with a laser-beam gaze, capable of protecting my children from anything. I could shield these small people from quotidian dangers, from the sadness of a broken family, from the eyes of the world. I could! Whatever was happening with Harry, I had to make it all look okay, to protect Betty and Rose from the pity of outsiders. The world we lived in was inhabited by perfect families—successful parents with interesting careers and famous friends, beautiful children who played piano and knew how to ski. Even people’s pets were better than ours, well-trained thoroughbreds with urbane social skills. Maybe I couldn’t give my kids the advantage of wealth, which safeguarded you from anything, or the super-bohemian artsiness that lifted you above conventional expectations, or the born-and-bred New Yorker toughness that nullified all questioning, but I could love them, and I could try to show them what I loved about the
world, and I could make them at least feel like everything was okay, even when it clearly wasn’t. I could take them to goddamned story time, and we could have fun, goddammit.
Yes. You get it. Good, Jenny, you’re learning! I knew you weren’t hopeless.

I took a deep breath and opened my eyes and joined in “The Hokey Pokey,” singing along with the children, the librarian, the rusalka, the world, “That’s what it’s all about.”

Conveniently, or maybe I mean crucially, the rusalka made it
possible for me to let Harry’s problem, whatever his fucking problem was, be Harry’s problem. Well, okay, she forced me to. She had other things on her mind, and her mind was on my mind. She loved to be out in the hot, flat, sunny world. She loved eating things. Unsurprisingly, she loved water—swimming, dashing through the sprinklers at the playground with the shrieking kids, taking long baths. At thirty-four and three quarters, I found it strange to become this new kind of person: the kind drawn to aquatics; the sort of woman who lounged languidly in her own body, feeling, thinking all the time of sex, of flesh, of touching, reaching out to hug people on greeting, mastering the cheek kiss, even (I’d always been so stymied by those European pecks!); above all, to be, in this new way, not fully alone in my body. Then again, it was strange of me to die and to be saved by a spirit. I couldn’t be too picky.

Above all, my mermaid loved shoes. She wanted to see them lined up in the bedroom, the fantastic ones only. She made me throw out my ruined flip-flops, the decaying gym sneakers. She wanted to be told the story of each stalky heel, each spiky boot.
Every morning she picked out a more amazing pair. “But we’re only going to the sing-along.”
Oh? Is there a rule at singing time that you can’t wear those patent Chanel flats?
“With jean cutoffs?”
Is there?
She would compel me from within, slipping foot into ill-conceived slipper like one of those twelve enchanted sleep-dancing fools. It fit every time. We would admire our tiny feet—even legs were a novelty to her—and then patter out into the hallway, the street, the world, half blinded by leather and vanity.

Which explains why I wore ridiculous sandals, impractically strappy and audaciously high-heeled, as I milled about, bright and early, alone and never alone, Rose in the sling, Betty in the stroller, not quite knowing where to go or what to do. With Laura and Emma broken and stuck at home, my morning lacked structure. Betty had cruelly dropped her nap, which meant there was way too much day ahead of us, an endless desert of time. Even factory workers get coffee breaks. I saw a leg extend from the stroller and kick like a tiny Rockette’s. “Wanta cupcake,” the leg announced. “Fine,” I said, surprising all of us.
What’s a cupcake? Finally, we do something that sounds fun.
We turned around and headed for the tiny bakery on Eighth Avenue. A cupcake. Some coffee. We could do this. Here was another day we could conquer, fueled by processed sugar and caffeine, which I’d recently read reacted in the brain the same as crack, a fact I ought to have found alarming but instead rather liked.

The small round tables at the Two Little Red Hens bakery were perpetually covered in a spread of newspapers that I never saw anyone touch but that always looked just read, as if each section had been vivisected by a crew of news surgeons. Ah, the newspaper—I remembered it, sort of. Betty unhygienically plastered herself to the pastry case, pointing at each sprinkle-speckled cupcake and muttering under her breath, an inquisitor of icing.

Sitting at the table in the nook by the window with the basket of books was Cute Dad Sam and his daughter, Maude. Their heads were almost touching, bent over a picture book and a shared oatmeal cookie. I dreaded the moment when he’d look up and smile, the goony way I would wave and then look away. Why did I have to act so awkwardly, perpetually the ugly girl being asked to dance?

Weeeelllllllllllll.

Oh, stop.

Now, this is interesting. This is
interesting
. Now we are talking, my dear.

We are not talking. Stop talking. We are talking about nothing. This is just a person I know. A parent in the neighborhood.

Riiiiiiiight.

When it happened, when he saw me, the rusalka took over—my back straightened, my mouth pouted into a smile that was pointed but not overly friendly, eye contact was brief but intense. It was like a three-second tutorial in flirtation. So
that
was how you did it.

“Hey, Jenny,” said Sam. He was one of those people who always said your name when greeting you. I couldn’t tell whether I loved this or hated it.

“Hello, Sam,” I said. One of my nipples started leaking. Hot.

“What kind of milk?” the girl behind the counter interrupted. Milk? Had she seen my leak already? Oh,
milk
. It was a tiny shop. We could have reached out and all held hands—Sam, me, the bakery girl. I looked at her. For a weird instant, I wanted her life. She was maybe twenty-five, with a vaguely artistic air that made me think she was probably slinging coffee and cake to support an oil-painting habit or a burgeoning crafts business—ironic quilts, maybe, or hip totes screen-printed with owls. I imagined her apartment was an airy loft shared with aspiring filmmakers in a marginal
neighborhood that offered a few cool bars and maybe a recently opened fancy cheese shop but bad public schools and library branches without story times. They probably drank mixed drinks from thrift-store glasses on their roof and complained about their stupid day jobs and all looked wonderful doing it. At this particular moment in her life, the girl looked, if not happy, at least lovely in a way she would probably acknowledge only later in life—her hair glinting in a tousled ponytail, a small stud glittering among the freckles on her nose, a pert vintage dress beneath her apron. She probably had the time and energy for things like bike trips to Rockaway Beach, bathing suit under shorts; she probably went to art openings and flirted with handsome men who would make terrible fathers. Maybe if I reached out and held her hand, we would trade lives, like in a corny movie.

“Um, skim,” I said finally. I hated when they asked. I wanted whole milk, but I wanted it without asking for it, and I couldn’t bring myself to say “whole” in front of Sam. It seemed too vulgar.

“Anything else?” The girl, just a bakery employee again, shot a dismayed look at Betty, who was flattening her nostrils against the glass in front of a vanilla cupcake covered in a riot of sprinkles.

I nodded at the cupcake. “That one.”

“We missed you at the playground yesterday afternoon,” Sam said. The rusalka thrilled at every exchange. She burbled girlishly:
He missed you, eh? Look how he looks at you. I think we could have some fun with this, Jenny. I think you’ve been holding out on me.
I struggled to tamp her down, to ignore her voice like just another bad idea vaporing around my brain.

It was true that we almost always saw him in the afternoons, after he’d picked up his kids from their fancy school in Brooklyn Heights. (I once looked up the school’s “2’s and 3’s” preschool program online and suffered a heart palpitation—the tuition was more
per year than I had paid for my in-state undergraduate degree.) Laura and I completely devolved when Sam showed up. Coolheaded Laura would immediately apply lip gloss, which was often how I knew he’d been spotted. “What? My lips are dry,” she always said. Because sad as it was, Sam was the highlight of the three p.m. playground shift change, when most of the nannies began to wheel their infant charges home, when the big kids who had been in school all day arrived with their motley assortment of part-time babysitters and flexibly employed parents. But really, we weren’t as hysterical as all that. It was just that there were days when Sam was the only adult male either of us spoke to. We couldn’t help it if our biology betrayed us. We bloomed, deranged daylilies.