The Mermaid of Brooklyn (25 page)

So?

So your life’s not that bad. You’ve hit a rough spot. Buck up. It’s hard to be a mother. It’s hard to be a
person.
You need a little money. So make a little money.
Nu,
so, what’s so difficult?

It was impossibly exhausting, like trying to argue with Betty when she really wanted to wear her rain boots into the bath. “Fine. I’ll give it a shot. It’s not going to work, but fine. I guess I can always borrow some money from my parents. God, how humiliating.”

You’re not going to have to. Trust me.

You’re annoying sometimes, you know that?

So are you.

Gee, thanks.

Nu?
Do you have anything else to say to me?

I’m sorry. Sorry I called you a parasite.

And?

Um. Thanks for saving my life. Or whatever.

You’re welcome. By the way, you might as well discontinue your cable, since you’re not using it, and get Sylvia to buy your groceries at Costco. You could probably save a couple hundred bucks a month that way.

All this, and financial advice, too? I was starting to think that jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge was the best thing to ever happen to me.

Until word of my dress magic spread, I never realized how much of a nonentity I’d considered myself. I slunk through the rarified world of Brooklyn yuppie parenting like a mousy high school girl, neither popular nor unpopular, following just enough of the rules to stay unseen. As in high school, there was an unspoken undercurrent of competition that I secretly wanted to be a part of and couldn’t hack. There were too many exceptional people here. Laura thought this was why we liked it, and she was probably right, but it was also why Brooklyn made me crazy at times. Every day I met some mom who was beautiful and stylish, patient and kind with her well-behaved and well-dressed kids, and was also a successful conceptual artist/Internet entrepreneur/Emmy Award–winning television writer/locavore caterer/homeopathic dog masseuse/
something
amazing, and usually the owner of some mystifyingly great bit of real estate besides. It always struck me as funny when I read some article or another about how Park Slope moms were slobs, but it all depended on whether you were coming from Manhattan or Minnesota. Whenever I was back home, I felt a bit stunned by the widespread politeness, lack of worldly ambition, and acceptance of sweatpants.

A few days after Evelyn wore her dress to the party, things started changing for me. First Julie ran up to me at the playground and reported that she’d seen Evelyn’s dress and it was too beautiful for words and I should go into business or at least post on Park Slope Parents. “I had no idea you were so
talented
!” she gushed. I know it was meant as a compliment, but I couldn’t help responding with a bitter laugh.
Like it comes as such an earth-shattering shock that I of all people have some talent! Like she knows me so well and was so sure I was just this total schlub!

Relax. This can only be good for business.

What business?

Just wait.

Then it was Mary, a mom I had befriended strictly because her apartment was actually worse than mine. Hey, sometimes you needed a playdate in a dim, tenementy one-bedroom stuffed with particleboard furniture for a bit of perspective. Mary cornered me at the riotous Barnes & Noble kids’ section where we’d decamped to soak in the air-conditioning on a particularly unforgiving day. I nodded, trying to keep track of Betty as she pillaged the Elmo books. “Everyone’s talking about the gorgeous dress you made!” she cooed, as if I’d discovered the cure for cancer or the secret to finding affordable co-ops. She was one of those ladies who was so sickeningly nice that it made me nervous. I half suspected that she was at all times an instant away from wiping the smile off her face and telling me what was really on her mind. Mary. She never whined about not having money or about sharing a bedroom with a two-year-old; she seemed to be genuinely and completely in love with her husband and kid. In other words, she was sort of hard to like.

“Oh!” I said. “Uh, thank you!”

“You are
too
good! Do you do stuff for little kids, too? Because I’m looking for something really special for Sydney to wear when she’s the flower girl at my cousin’s wedding . . .”

If I’d ever doubted what a small town I lived in, that was all over. Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk to me, everyone wanted to place an order, and I don’t think I was imagining a change in the way people regarded me. I was the woman whose husband had disappeared, yes, in the land of storybook marriages (divorced people and single moms were supposed to flee to Manhattan or, if they were poor, to Queens), but more than that, I was the magical seamstress with quick fingers who would make you look hot while saving you money, and honestly, what was better than that? I was able to forget about the mess of my life for whole minutes at a time.
See, Harry? I’m not so useless after all. You probably thought I’d just disintegrate into salty little tear bits when you left, but look at me now.

You know what? Here’s a game for us. Don’t think about Harry for, I don’t know, half of every day. It’s not doing you any good.

That’s a lot easier than it sounds. Haven’t you ever been in love?

You’re not in love. You’re married. And you’re pissed off, not love-struck.

What are you, anyway, some sort of built-in shrink?

Convenient, no? Now, Jenny. About this Cute Dad.

Oh, no, no, no.

But I was beginning to learn that she didn’t have to listen to me, and thus, like a sly toddler learning the loopholes, she usually didn’t.

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that the rusalka was
more obsessed with Cute Dad than I ever had been with my low-octane, largely symbolic crush. But there were lots of other things I needed to be thinking about. Fred kept bringing up the idea of a private investigator. “Something’s just not right,” he said. “He’s never been gone for so long. I have a bad feeling.” I knew, and I know, that I should have told Fred about the postcard, about the gift of reduced worry Harry had offered, but the rusalka kept me from sharing the news that Harry was on an ill-timed soul-searching mission, less in danger than he was inconsiderate.
Feh, we both know Harry could have sent them a card, too, if he really cared to spare them the heartache. Maybe he wanted them to suffer.

Fred was worried sick, Fred couldn’t sleep at night. “Also, Juniper is licking her butt a lot, any ideas?” I could hardly concentrate on what he was saying because I’d just gotten the electricity bill, and those air-conditioner window units must have been on more than I’d thought. The total made my eyes cross. Though that was nothing compared with Betty deciding she didn’t like to go on the potty that much after all, preferring to remove her own dirty diapers and finger-paint with poop like a mentally ill monkey, which I found
a particularly unpleasant form of rebellion and which of course coordinated with Rose’s resurgence of fussiness and, one morning, a razor-sharp sliver of white on her bottom gum. “Teething? Right now? Are you kidding me?” I asked her as she gnawed furiously on a frozen bagel. And so, naturally, this was when the rusalka began her hissing in my skull.
Sex. I want to have sex.

You’re kidding, right? You can stop that right there. I’m sort of preoccupied, in case you haven’t noticed, and honestly, tired of bodily secretions.

Do you have any idea how long I was swimming around with a goddamn fishtail? Jenny, enough is enough.

Well, maybe you shouldn’t have come back as someone whose husband is missing. Honestly, my most fervent fantasies these days are of not being touched at all. Of sleeping for hours and hours. So yeah, I don’t know how I can help you with that one.

Yes, you do.

No. I don’t.

Sam. What about Sam.

“Nothing about Sam. Nothing. That’s— You’re crazy, you know that?”

Am I? You’re the one walking down the street talking to yourself.

Damn her. But she wanted what she wanted, and what she wanted, I wanted. It was like being possessed by a sex-starved demon or a teenage boy. I was constantly horny. I had never been that way my whole life. I don’t think I’d ever uttered the word “horny”—it always struck me as so ugly and uncouth and
male
. In my former life, sex had been pleasant but not something I ever obsessed over. I had never done things like gone nude under long skirts so I could feel something, anything, everything; watching men in the street or the park or the Laundromat and wondering what they would be like, picturing them naked; touching myself
under the cover of a bubble bath late at night. It was insane! I found it vaguely embarrassing, not to mention incredibly inconvenient. I blamed it all on her.

Very Minnesotan of you. Very Puritan. You Americans.

Shut up. I have responsibilities, you know. I do put some stock in being faithful to my husband.

Oh? Right, because he’s been so faithful to you.

I—you—we don’t know that. As far as we know, yes, he has been. We don’t know anything. Innocent until proven guilty.

Like I said. You Americans.

That has nothing to do with anything. I love Harry.

Of course.

In this weird, overheated state, I was learning some things, things that probably would have been helpful to learn years earlier. Such as: People liked to be flirted with. Even if you weren’t much to look at, almost anyone was happy for the attention. How had I gotten through so much of my life without learning how to flirt? The new boy at the bakery across the street was disarmed when I complimented his latte-making skills. “No,
really,
” I said, smiling, looking him in the eye. It wasn’t what I was saying but the way I said things—I mean,
obviously,
but it felt like a revelation—and here he was, practically blushing. And I was wearing a baby in a pouch on my front, and my toddler was dumping the basket of picture books on the floor, and I hadn’t showered, and my greasy curls were swirled up in a natty bun. He was one of those people who I figured was about my age until I realized I was probably ten or fifteen years older than he was, that he was wearing a Nirvana shirt not because he’d seen them in concert but because it had struck him as an ironic retro find. But I touched his arm and said, “Seriously. The way you steam the milk! You should get an award or something!” and then I could feel it turn on like a switch, feel him opening slightly toward
me and saying, “Well, it
is
my life’s work,” and we both laughed. It reminded me of something, or maybe of someone, the way it drew people to you, the way you knew you could then make them do things for you: “Oh, shoot, I don’t have any cash. I know this is below your credit card minimum . . .” “Oh, please, don’t worry about it. You know what, it’s on the house.”

I walked out into the press of sunshine, the avenue twinkling with sunflares in shop windows, the nail salons and bodegas transformed into ornaments, the flock of pigeons lunging toward an old man’s sprinkling of birdseed, the bus rumbling by like a large hungry beast, my daughter by my side humming to herself, and the happiness of having flirted, having been flirted with, the hope it aroused in my coffee-gurgling gut, followed us down the block like a sweet smell until we reached the corner and I realized who it reminded me of. Harry. It was Harry who was good at that. He could get anything from anyone because he had that magical ability to reach inside and flip them on—acquaintances’ beautiful wives, grouchy postal workers, me. God. Maybe I had been a fool all along. Maybe it had been ridiculous (as a few of my girlfriends had suggested when we met) to think that a man who had flirted and dated and slept around and charmed the world for decades would stop cold because of one woman, and not even some spectacular sexpot but plain old Jenny. Maybe it was obvious to everyone but me.