The Mermaid of Brooklyn (18 page)

“Oh,” I said, maneuvering Betty out of the way of the next customer. “Yeah. We went to story time. So edifying. And by that I mean air-conditioned.”

“That sounds great,” Sam said. “I always forget about actual activities. You moms are good. Real good.” I could hardly look at his eyes. Maybe it was that they were so large and dark. Maybe they were the reason I felt he was so kind, so open, so interested in me and me alone, which was the secret feeling I had whenever we spoke. The rusalka was getting the wrong idea. It was nothing personal between me and Cute Dad. It was only that all the neighborhood moms were contractually obligated to find him adorable, though he wasn’t—he was soft and a little galumphing and utterly unstylish. But he was
there
. And so were those enormous near-black eyes, and the sense that he was really looking at you, really wanting to hear what you had to say. It was the sad fact of our married lives that our husbands were not particularly interested in what we had to say. Whether Cute Dad was interested or whether it was the circumference of his pupils that lent him the appearance of being so (clearly, Laura and I had spent way too much time analyzing this
particular topic), it was enough. I couldn’t decide whether our obsession was pathetic or totally reasonable. Probably both.

We exchanged see-you-arounds, and Betty inserted herself back in the stroller, and I plugged my coffee into the stroller’s cupholder (one of many inventions I thought ridiculous before having kids and now found indispensable) and walked down the sidewalk, maneuvering over the familiar cracks and tree-root eruptions, an unearned lightness heating my chest.

Whenever I saw Sam, I thought of his wife or, rather, of her absence. Working moms! What mysteries they were to me! When I did talk to the working moms I knew, we would have these tennis matches of conversations that went something like “I don’t know how you do it!” “I don’t know how
you
do it!” “No, no, I don’t know how
you
do it!” Which was all any mother wanted to be told, the thing our husbands would never say, the thing we all wished people thought of us. Here were the magic words, the key to unlock any woman’s heart: “Gosh, you do SO MUCH, and no one really APPRECIATES it!”

Unfortunately for my stay-at-home sanity, when I remembered working life, I tended to conveniently forget about long hours or the editor in chief’s propensity for public humiliation or disastrous pitch meetings or botched interviews or miserable photo shoots. Years after the fact, it was all a highlight reel of satisfying moments, good stories, fat paychecks, meeting people at parties and telling them what I did and having them respond, “Oooh!” Working had been a fairyland of free lunches, unsticky surfaces, magical creatures who never required diaper changes and cried only occasionally and then quietly in the bathroom, trying to hide it. I remembered the monthly moment when the issue arrived in glossy, string-bound
stacks and each of us would pick up a copy to flip through, self-consciously groaning over how this shoot had been mismanaged or that spread looked bad, like skinny girls moaning about looking fat. I could still feel the tiny thrill every time I saw my name in print beside the stories I’d edited. I loved walking by newsstands and recognizing the familiar face of our newest cover. Even after years on the job, I wanted to stop everyone I saw reading our magazine on the subway or in the park and say, “I made that, you know!”

Now I found myself daydreaming about the clean, air-conditioned quiet of conference rooms, about drinking entire cups of coffee rather than finding them hours later, their surfaces corroded with curdled milk. I recalled only a handful of days, the exciting assignments, those wonderful (and few) moments when it all clicked and I clacked away at the keyboard in a kind of dream. I would think at odd times of a particular afternoon in a bucolic English-style garden in the Hamptons, interviewing a designer about her eco-friendly home, and how a pair of rabbits had tumbled through the brush like a children’s-book illustration come to life. Or a Fashion Week party in a circus-bright Bryant Park tent, wearing a borrowed cocktail dress and too-large Givenchy stilettos and therefore walking as oddly as a child shuffling in dress-up shoes, scribbling notes like the ace reporter in a studio picture.

When I really thought about it, if I really thought about it, I could admit to myself that working life was pretty repetitive, and I had to keep this in mind now, when my new repetitions—feed baby, wipe face, change diaper, pick up toys, feed toddler, wipe face, change diaper, pick up toys—threatened to erode what was left of my brain. It’s not like working was all parties and bunny rabbits: wake to alarm, try to remember whether you were likely to see your boss that day and dress accordingly, wedge yourself on the subway, jockey for a seat, read the
Times
folded into the space-saving
origami it took you years to master, buy coffee and maybe an egg on a roll from the cart in front of the building, greet the security guard, fish for your ID, race for the closing elevator doors. Realize you’ve chosen entirely the wrong thing to wear, consider this miserably as you ride to your floor. Sit at desk, turn on computer, check messages, sigh. Work and tell yourself you’re going to take a lunch break today instead of picking at a cafeteria salad while hunched over your keyboard, gossip with a coworker in the kitchen, refill your paper coffee cup with the sludgy brew of free stuff, go to a meeting, note what everyone’s wearing, pitch article ideas, have one provisionally okayed and the rest humiliatingly killed, walk back to your desk complaining to a coworker in a blasé manner meant to mask your humiliation, pick at a cafeteria salad while hunched over your keyboard, stay later in the evening than you’d intended. Go home, read the rest of the
Times
even though it feels like old news by now because the headlines are familiar from a day on the Internet, try to think of something you might have energy left over to do once you get home and walk the dog, frantic with pent-up pee, and eat takeout hunched over your keyboard. Go to bed later than you’d intended. Wake up. Repeat.

After all, it’s not like I’d loved every instant or every person I worked with. Actually, I couldn’t stand most of them. I often relived the moment I’d encountered the scrawny editor in chief stalking down a hallway and explaining to the creative director, “Here’s my new thing: I just don’t eat during the week.” The creative director had nodded thoughtfully and then asked, “What if you have an event?” It hadn’t been the first question that came to my mind. “Just push it around your plate with a fork.” “Genius.” Everything was genius around there.
It’s a NOUN,
I wanted to scream. I was often so annoyed, I could hardly speak. I mean, I was still
me
.

And who was that, anyway? It had been a while since I’d known how to answer that question. It had been a while since anyone had asked. When Betty was a newborn, other mothers would ask when I was going back to work and what that work might be, but at this point I had the unmistakable look of a lifer. Now if people wanted to know anything, it was what my husband did, and that was only if anyone asked about me at all. They almost never did.

What intensified this feeling of me-less-ness was that with Laura stuck in the apartment with her damaged child, sense of guilt, and suspicion that she would be ostracized for her playground carelessness, I was forced to socialize with the dreaded Other Mothers. These were ladies I half knew from the Y or story time, people I would never be friendly with at all if we hadn’t happened to procreate around the same time, acquaintances who had no idea there had ever been any other version of me and didn’t much care to find out. Out of sheer desperation, I found myself at the big playground at Third Street. I was decidedly a South Slope mom and felt self-consciously grubby alongside the North Slope moms, who were more of the “I never thought I’d leave Manhattan, but it turns out it’s possible to live in Brooklyn and still be fabulous, wheeee!” school than the “We like this neighborhood because there are trees” sort of midwestern expats I tended to associate with. As much as I claimed to love big-city life, I essentially lived in a small town. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d left town. Er, the neighborhood. Er, my corner of it.

I stood there on the playground, squinting at the fringe of trees that were almost too green to look at. It hurt my head: the aggressive summer sun, the exaggerated green. Betty reached for the moon in a big-girl swing, high on sugar. I thought I had a stomachache. I didn’t know yet that this stirring in my gut was the rusalka was getting bored, that she was about to lash out by making me say something reckless.

“Don’t you ever feel like a terrible mother?” It was typical playground banter: Nell, the perfect mom with the un-spit-upped-on sundress and movie-star sunglasses carelessly headbanding her reddish hair around her face; Nell, with the high-tech and weirdly clean stroller and the diaper bag that would go with an evening gown. Obviously, her perfect Sophie was over there helping a smaller child climb on the playground equipment. Nell, your average put-her-stellar-career-on-hold-not-that-it-matters-because-her-husband-is-a-rich-stockbroker-or-something mom with her flawless brownstone complete with gracious backyard garden, with her baby-sign-language classes and nuanced understanding of preschools; Nell, who lost the baby weight by the time she’d left the hospital (I knew this for a fact, since I’d had both prenatal and mom-baby yoga with her when Betty was born); obviously, Nell would lean back elegantly on the bench, squinting toward blond Sophie in her white sundress, and say, as if admitting something, when clearly, it was a trap, “Don’t you?”

Oy gevalt, these ladies are terrible. Terrible! What are we doing here? Where is the cute dad?

Stop. These are my friends. Sort of.

You stop. What, you think I don’t know your every thought, each hidden desire? Please.

We all nodded knowingly. It was too hot for anything else. I missed Laura. I stared down at Rose, snoozing in the sling with her sunhat drooped on her chest, like an old man siesta-ing away another afternoon of retirement.
I suck at this,
I thought miserably to the rusalka, who didn’t answer. The conversation, the socializing, the being-this-kind-of-mom. I wanted to sit alone in a backyard somewhere and let the kids eat dirt. Maybe when Harry returned, he would have won a bunch of money and we could buy a house in New Jersey and go to the mall and eat processed foods and not be judged constantly because our toddler wasn’t learning Mandarin. Maybe everything would be
easier somewhere else. I felt the gray wool pulling over me. The longer he was gone—the days seemed to multiply rather than add—the more certain I felt Harry had been all that made life in Brooklyn doable for me, life at all.
God, I miss him,
I almost let myself admit.

You only think you do. Enough with the hysterics already. And no crying.

Julie, mother of fertility-drug twins Aidan and Isabelle, nodded a strand of hair loose from her graying ponytail. (I was the youngest mom of the bunch, which my midwestern friends, whose kids were in grade school by the time I met Harry, found hilarious.) “Oh my God, yes. Sleep training, potty training—it’s all been such a disaster. I never knew it would be so
hard,
did you?” Of course. Julie was so tightly wound, it was difficult to imagine her body hosting a pregnancy at all. She had the twins on a nap schedule as reliable as a German train table. I’d seen her lose her mind completely when Aidan ate a fruit snack from another toddler’s palm. I could only imagine that whatever twins-induced chaos she had not been able to control offended her deeply.

Evelyn waved her hand as if fanning a fire ignited on the tip of her pointed nose. “No, no. Julie—you’re fine. We’re all fine. I don’t think we should be so hard on ourselves.” Obviously. Evelyn was a hot mess of a mother—ass baboonish with baby weight and still clad in drawstring pants at three in the afternoon. She was always missing at least one crucial element from her diaper bag. I suspected that was the only reason she had for being friendly with me—our kids were the same age, so if Gus needed a tiny diaper or Charlie lacked an age-appropriate toy or snack, she could come sidling over with an apologetic smile that more or less gave you permission to be impatient with her. It had been no surprise when I met her banker husband and found him to be something of a brute.

I stared into the distances of the playground, the glare of sun prisming off the slides, the constant whirl of kids kicking up dust. Mothers and nannies called to their children—“Cassiopeia!” “Scorsese!”—a chorus of unfortunate displays of creativity. The other day I’d met a toddler named Curly. “Curly
what
?” I’d said, feeling like my mother. “Just Curly,” the mom had explained placidly. I couldn’t stop myself. “Like the
Stooge
?” There were days when our neighborhood made me want to slam my head against a historically accurately restored brick wall. Around and around the kids ran, in their orthopedically sound footwear, their skinny arms smothered in all-natural sunscreen with astronomical SPF, half of them wearing helmets for no perceivable reason.