The Mermaid of Brooklyn (24 page)

Rose, the new rusalka-trained Rose, went to sleep easily that night. But Betty was feeling rambunctious. I suspected Sylvia had given her juice, because of course there was no reason to listen to me when I asked her not to. What did I know about these kids, anyway? In the hyperactive whirlwind of evening, picture books were browsed through and then flung at the wall, a raucous tea party ended badly when Emma the tiger bit Emma the bunny. I motioned for Betty to come out of the bedroom, where she was kicking her blankets on the floor and heartbreakingly moaning, “Daddddyyyy . . . my daddddyyyy,” and less heartbreakingly, “My arrrrmmmm is broooookkkkkennnn.” Her eyes wide in disbelief, she followed me into the hallway. I pointed to the couch. She padded over cautiously, a small specter in her ballerina nightgown. I opened my laptop and popped in a
Dora the Explorer
DVD. Betty’s
eyes widened. This was so out of the ordinary that she didn’t have the proper structure in her brain to even comprehend what was happening. “You may quietly watch, but Mommy has some work to do. And if you wake up the baby, I am sending you to live with Grandma. So you must be quiet.”

Betty nodded and sat down, trying to hide her grin. “Mommy?”

“Yes?”

“Where I will sleep at Gwamma’s?”

“I’m kidding, sweetheart. You won’t really go to live with Grandma. Just please please please don’t wake up Rosie. Please just be quiet and watch
Dora
.”

She nodded. I turned toward the kitchen table. “Mommy?”

“Yes, baby?”

“Can I sing with Dowa?”

She crouched on the couch, peering into the laptop’s moony screen as if it were a mystic oracle. The expression on her face, the crinkle of her dark brows, looked so much like Harry that I almost lost it completely. I took a deep breath, gathered up whatever I had inside—
This is not so bad, any of it. How lucky you are, when you think about the big picture
—and went over to kiss her black curls. “Yes, sweetheart. Sing very quietly, though. Whisper-sing.”

“Okay, Mommy,” she whispered.

The hardest part of making the dress was getting the kitchen table clean enough to lay down the delicate silk. What
was
all that grit? The dollops of crusted dinner bits, the spatters of sticky something—so she
had
given Betty juice, the traitor—the driblets of salad dressing that I could blame, much to my dismay, on no one but myself. It was one of the many luxuries of marriage that I had been tabulating since Harry’s disappearance, having someone to blame things on; unless Rose had developed a predilection for roughage, this mess had to be mine. After a hot and heavy session
of scrubbing, I was ready. I fed the sewing machine a spool of silver thread. I laid out the dress Evelyn had brought over, carefully unfolding the tissue paper, spreading it over the two extra kitchen chairs like a precious shed skin.

I spent the next few hours draping muslin over the dress form that had been serving as an anthropomorphic coat rack for longer than I cared to admit. My grandmother’s tricks were all coming back to me—she’d given me lessons along with the ancient Viking sewing machine the summer I was thirteen, friendless, and looking for a pastime. In a kind of trance, I pinned the fabric into place, consulting the original now and then, and before I knew it, hours had passed and I was creating and then trueing the pattern. My fingers flew over the fabric as if enchanted, moving much more quickly than they should have after so many years of relative disuse.

I didn’t even notice when Betty closed the laptop and tiptoed off. I remembered her existence (some mother, I know) only when I crawled into bed to nurse Rose back to sleep after she woke up around three, and I found Betty curled up in a nest of my pillows. For a brief, painful instant I missed Juniper’s sweet, slobbery presence, her furry warmth. And then, with a more painful pang socking my stomach, I missed Harry. I missed Harry so much, so deeply, curled up there in what was once our bed, with Rose suckling at my breast, my breast that once was more than just food, with Betty curled at my back, her sleeping fingers coiling into my hair, my hair that Harry had always said he loved, no matter how unruly it got—I missed my husband so much I thought I would die of it. My chest went hollow, and as Rose began to doze off, I saw in the dim light a few of my tears dampening her brow. The rusalka, with all her bluster and bravado, seemed to have left me. Left me? Had she ever been there? Or had she just been a stressed-out housewife’s imaginary friend, a nice way for me to convince myself that I was
a little less alone? I cried that night, there between my children.
It is only because I am so tired,
I told myself.
It’s just that I need to sleep.

I did feel better in the morning, even when Rose woke at five, even when Betty began bounding around begging for juice. I stumbled out of the bedroom in my underwear and stopped in my tracks. I had been very sleepy by the time I went to bed, so it was possible I didn’t remember. I mean, it must have been that: I was too tired to remember exactly all I had done. There was no other explanation. No other explanation for the finished, perfect dress (which should have taken me at least eight more hours), finished with French seams and all hung, neatly ironed, on a pretty padded hanger (propped on a hook usually reserved for my singed oven mitts). No other explanation for the tidied kitchen, the original dress folded and returned to its paper bag, the sewing machine closed back in its case and returned to its corner, replaced with a coffee cup and a bowl of dry cereal for Betty. Her Snoopy spoon lay sweetly on a folded cloth napkin. The coffeemaker dinged. Had I suddenly remembered, in my exhaustion, how to program the damn thing like Harry used to do? I must have, because it was full of fresh coffee, and the whole apartment smelled like a Folgers commercial.

Betty stood in front of the dress, reaching out a hand. Then she looked at me. “No touching?” she guessed. I nodded, stroking Rose’s peachy cheek.
You did it. That dress looks perfect!

There you are. But I don’t even remember finishing it. How did you . . . ?

I don’t know what you could mean. Now call Evelyn.

Evelyn, once I had convinced her that the copy was really a copy, actually hugged me. “Jenny! You are a genius!” She insisted on paying me for the fabric and two hundred dollars extra. “It’s the very
least I can do. Are you kidding? This is beautiful! Better than the original!”

I had to admit, it was. It was kind of a shame to waste such a dress on frumpy, frazzled Evelyn, but in a way, it felt just right. I made her try it on, and when she came out of the bedroom, she was barely recognizable. The color was perfect on her, made her creepily translucent skin look like porcelain, invited her watery blue eyes to introduce themselves. It hung beautifully on her body, making her weight resemble curves and not just pregnancy detritus. Even Betty stopped playing to stare. Rose bounced on my hip, batting at my chin.

“All right, then!” I said, trying unsuccessfully to hide my excitement. “Tell your friends!”

I took Evelyn’s envelope of cash, and for a few hours I felt like a rock star. I was gleeful at bath time, singing “Rubber Ducky” with operatic gusto (the rusalka harmonizing in my head), and patient at bedtime, even when, as I was sneaking out of the room, avoiding the familiar land mines of creaky floorboards, Betty sat straight up in her toddler bed and said, “Want to say night-night to Daddy.” I shushed her and peered over at Rose, slowly, as if my turning my head too quickly might wake her, but she was snoring quietly in the crib, a pacifier dangling out of the corner of her mouth like a nonchalant cowboy’s cigarette. I tiptoed back over to Betty and sat on the edge of her bed, and she nestled comfortably against me as I stroked her dark mass of curls. “I know, sweetheart,” I whispered. I hadn’t decided how long I could keep up this business-trip business, but every day I put off the decision longer. It wasn’t like kids had the best concept of time, and besides, I told myself, he would be back soon, and when they grew up, they would never remember a thing about it. Reassuring myself, though, was starting to sour, to fill me with, instead of relief, a squicky dread.

Dread? Of course. You’re starting to live your own life. Forget him.

Forget him? Are you crazy? I kind of planned on spending the rest of my life with him, you know.

That was your old life.

Seriously, shut up. Just shut up.

Soon Betty was asleep again, and I shimmied out from under her, arranging her miniature frame on the pillows, pulling her blanket up to her pointed chin. Tiptoed back out of the room and took about thirty seconds to pull the door unsqueakingly shut, then cleared a space at the cluttered kitchen table, poured a glass of wine, opened my envelope of money from Evelyn, sat there, and smiled.

The fizz of joy lasted for about three minutes, because then I did something very reckless. I flipped over an envelope, and with a stinking Sharpie and the calculator on my phone, I did some math. I added up our monthly expenses, including the credit card bill minimum payments. In the opposite column, I wrote down Harry’s base salary. We’d never lived off just this salary. Even in lean times he had some sales, and the commission, though it varied throughout the year, bumped up his salary to a supporting-a-family-in-Brooklyn-with-liberal-help-from-credit-cards-and-gambling-windfalls wage. But the salary itself. I am not exaggerating when I say my heart skipped a beat. No wonder he was always so stressed out about sales. No wonder he couldn’t resist the poker table.

Oh.

Fuck.

“This isn’t going to work,” I said to my sewing machine. It wasn’t going to work. I had our down-payment fund to sponge off of, though the thought of emptying that was depressing, to say the least. Who knew how long he would be gone? Sylvia had offered to subsidize Betty’s preschool, but before I knew it, I’d have to worry about Rose going, too, or not going, and there were the bills, and
our huge credit card debt, and my student loans, and at any given moment Harry could, from wherever he might be, siphon off our bank account. And then there were whatever gambling debts he might have accrued that I had no idea about. I broke out into a sweat, my heart kicking at my throat. Miserable. It was just so miserable. If he stayed away—why, I would need to go back to work full-time, and leave the girls with Sylvia or some random babysitter, and what work did I think I was “going back” to? All my magazine contacts were out of work, too, or going to work at websites, and I was so tech-incompetent that I wasn’t sure what the Myspace thing everyone was talking about even was. Fucking money. Fucking New York and our bloated rent. Fucking Harry. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

What are you talking about? Jenny, you’ve got your sewing. There are others like Evelyn. If you could make a dress a week . . .

How can I make a dress a week? I know four people. And two of them are babies.

That’s not true. You spend a lot of time feeling sorry for yourself, you know that?

Excuse me?
She was nervy, but this was too much.
Listen, you existential parasite. If you don’t like it, why don’t you pick someone else to haunt?

It was an odd feeling to have her angry with me, sort of like extreme indigestion, or the end of pregnancy when someone is constantly palpating your ribs from within. I downed some more wine, hoping to calm her, us, me.
This is absurd.
“This is absurd,” I said out loud. “You can’t be mad at me.”

Me, a parasite? I saved your life!

Okay, okay. I’m sorry. I just . . . I think I’m allowed to feel a little sorry for myself. I’m all alone.

All alone? Jenny, please. What about me, hello? I’m here! And listen, your mother-in-law watches your kids three days a week for free. You
have more friends in the neighborhood than I had in my whole earthly life. Excuse me, but if you saw what life was for us then . . . My mother was illiterate and had nine kids and no heat or running water. She had to make her own soap, Jenny. From lard. You don’t even like cutting open packages of chicken breasts.