The Mermaid of Brooklyn (26 page)

I dropped my perfect latte in the trash can on the corner. Easier to do when you hadn’t paid for it. It was too hot for coffee, anyway. “What we are doing today?” Betty said, spinning in circles while we waited for the light to change. I held on to her shoulder to stop the spinning. Enough with the ceaseless joy already.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Nothing.” Oh God, what a long day stretched ahead with nothing to do. We walked around aimlessly
for a few blocks, and just as Betty started to get whiny, I was struck with inspiration. “The Y. We’re going to the Y for open gym.” Betty managed to grimace and light up at the same time. She really was her father’s daughter.

Forget preschools and their various well-thought-out philosophies, forget guided-creativity play workshops and bilingual music classes and underwater toddler Latin lessons, here was the hot spot for the under-four set. For a few hours each morning, the stinking, sweat-soaked gym at the Y was padded in big cushy mats like an enormous lunatic asylum cell, with a couple of germ-infused plastic play sets thrown in for good measure, so that the toddlers of the neighborhood could run around and go berserk. I balanced Rose on my hip and watched Betty race toward the collapsible tunnel. I scanned the parents clumped into small groups, all looking in different directions to make sure their kids weren’t licking anything too disgusting. I didn’t see anyone I knew and felt a flicker of disappointment that made me wonder what I had been expecting. I had just squatted down, releasing Rose to push herself up on all fours and practice her almost-crawling rocking, feeling my capris poof out behind me to reveal an awkward stretch of underwear and butt crack, when—

“Jenny!”

I squinted up at him. The dank atmosphere of the gym called to my attention the semicircles of sweat beneath my armpits and breasts. “Oh! Hi, Sam!”

He waved at Maude, who was directing smaller kids down the slide. “She’s too old for this, but she said she wanted to come.”

“That’s sweet,” I said, not really caring. What was more boring than other people’s kids?

Cute Dad plopped down on the mat beside me. It’s difficult to explain what happened next. I thought I heard a loud
hhhhhhhhhh,
so loud that I looked around at first, thinking a ventilation system had coughed to life, before realizing it was her, the rusalka emitting an annoyed sigh with a sharp, guttural edge. And then she took over. That was when I realized she had been holding back all along, humoring me by letting me think I was in charge, that she was content to stay a nattering voice in my head, a hedonistic Jiminy Cricket. Had I really thought she would be content, having saved my life and returned from the dead, with art museums and new iced-coffee flavors? She shook my head—I shook her head—we shook our head—and sat up straighter and beamed at Sam. “She’s a lovely child. You’re such a good dad.”

“Well, I don’t think I can exactly take all the credit, but thank you.” He smiled, got on all fours, play-growling at Rose, who giggled, delighted.

Nice ass! Look at that!

Please. Please stop this. Look where we are, for heaven’s sake, this is about the least appropriate place in the world for—

For what? Will you just shut up for a second and let me drive?

“So, Sam. How are you?”

He looked up, his dark eyes twinkling in the glinty gym light. “Oh, I’m fine. And you?”

“No, I mean,
really
. How are you
really
?”

His smile was cautious, as if I’d urged him to jump into the pool, saying I’d be in right behind him. “Are we at that stage?” he said. And—there it was. Something had switched. Strange how that worked. It was nothing you could anticipate, but once it happened, there it was and, at the risk of sounding like the tot-yoga teacher, all the energy between us changed. “Don’t you just want me to say ‘Fine’?” His eyes crinkled, pushing his smile toward the precipice of laughter.

“You could. If you’re really fine.”

Sam rocked back on his knees and sat up. Our eyes met, and then we scanned the gym for our girls, located them, ascertained their safety, and looked at each other again. “I mean, I’m really fine in the polite-conversation way.”

“So am I. But in the real way, I am definitely not fine.”

Sam sighed, still smiling. We all smiled too much, as if trying to convince the world we were that good at what we were doing, that everything was fine, fine, fine. “Yeah, me, neither.”

“Is everything okay with Juliet?”

His smile dimmed. “No, not really.” He paused. “Any word from Harry?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It can get lonely inside a marriage.”

He stared at me. I stared back. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d looked for so long into anyone’s eyes, besides maybe my children’s. It felt hugely risky, baldly flirtatious. We studied each other’s faces.
Listen, you. This is nothing new. All anyone wants is to be known. To have somebody know you, to have somebody be interested.

Sam looked away. “Juliet’s annoyed with me for working on my screenplay instead of looking for a job. She thinks it’s a waste of time. It probably is. Maude starts pre-K in the fall, and that’s when we always said I’d go back to work. But I have no idea what to do, and I’ve been out of work for so long now, and everyone says there’s no work, anyway. I think she’s sick of having a deadbeat husband. Why wouldn’t she be? And I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, and I’m afraid of wasting my life doing something stupid, and it’s scary.” Our eyes met again. “Too much?”

“Not at all. Believe me, I understand. You have no idea how much I understand.” And there was a tender smile and, Jesus, a hand squeeze.

I know, I know. Just a hand squeeze. Hardly enough to shock a sixth-grader on a mom-chaperoned first date. Afterward I couldn’t remember who had reached out for whom, only that our hands met, our palms pressed together. The hair all over my body stood up, a heat squiggled between my legs, a flush lit my flesh. The truth was that no matter how innocent a hand squeeze sounds, we both pulled away as if electric-shocked and looked around, because we didn’t want anyone to have seen, because it wasn’t the kind of thing you would want Juliet to somehow hear about, so it couldn’t have been all that innocent, now, could it? It was not something the old me would have thought to do or would have known how to pull off.

Just then a shriek pierced through the air, and the rusalka disappeared as quickly as she’d whooshed in. Betty. It took me a second to scan the crowded gym and locate her. I stood, scooping up the baby, and jogged over to the plastic slide, where Betty sat on the floor, wailing. “Sweetheart, sweetheart,” I said, pulling her close. The whole time I berated myself: My daughter was hurt because I wasn’t paying attention! It was every mother’s greatest fear, and for the millionth time I had proved—this time by flirting with Cute Dad so intensely that I’d practically gone blind—that I was a terrible parent. Betty pushed away and rubbed her wet eyes. “What happened, baby?” I cooed, overly nice, as if to make up for my negligence. Here came Sam, Maude at his side, concerned and friendly. Sam and I exchanged guilty, freighted glances.

Betty sobbed, “I . . . fell . . . my arm! My arm!” and pulled away from me, examining her knees and elbows for bruises. Another mom leaned in. “I saw what happened. She just tripped. I think she’s okay.” I smiled gratefully and said, “Her friend broke her arm, and she’s super-jealous.” My voice sounded different—unsultry—my own again. “I think she’s hoping for a pink cast.” The other
mom nodded good-naturedly. Sam helped Betty to her feet, and we all automatically headed out of the gym toward the stroller parking.

“We should be going, too,” Sam said, half to Maude, half to me.

Both Betty and Rose were crankily rubbing their eyes. “We might get a good nap out of this,” I said. Voilà—we were innocent parents again, just doing our parenty thing, passionately desiring, if nothing else, a lengthy afternoon nap.

“I think my crush on Cute Dad is kind of like herpes,” I told Laura. We were spread out on a couple of bedsheets in the park, waiting for the sky to darken so the Fourth of July fireworks could erupt. Laura laughed. “Oh?”

It was too late for the girls to be out, but Laura’s husband was in emergency surgery—and, uh, so was mine?—and it was cooler outside than in our stuffy apartments. Rose had fallen asleep in the sling, so I laid her down in it like a miniature hammock. Emma was lying on her back on the sheet, flipping through a picture book and neatly eating raspberries, the picture of a perfect child. Betty was wired from being up late and was behaving as if she were possessed, running around and shaking her head and shrieking, attracting the glares of grown-ups gathered around citronella candles and clandestine bottles of wine. She had befriended a towheaded five-year-old, and they were leaping after fireflies, trying to trap them in an empty jelly jar. “Come on, people,” I muttered at the nearest grumpy faces—two of the approximately seventeen childless people in Park Slope, who made a sport of hating us breeders—“you don’t find that even mildly cute?” To me they looked like childhood incarnate, scruffy and wild and beautiful. Betty had been such a savage lately that it was a relief to see her channeling her energy into an activity that didn’t draw blood.

“And were you planning on explaining that romantic sentiment?”

I blinked at Laura. Then I lay back, kicking off the vintage Givenchy Mary Janes I’d found at a thrift store on my last trip back home. The shoes, combined with an uncharacteristic swipe of crimson lipstick, had me channeling a film-noir vixen, despite the unassuming bag of a dress they were paired with. A sliver of moon scored the side of the sky, an informative celestial chalk mark. I closed my eyes, enjoying the coolish breeze on my skin. It occurred to me that I was enjoying my own
skin
—perfectly comfortable for once, the extra baby weight feeling for a moment like an extra curve, desirable even. “Ah, yes, my herpes crush. Well, it’s mostly dormant. It’s not like I think about him a lot, not extracurricularly, if you know what I mean. But then I see him and he smiles or asks how I am or something and—
bam
—total red, blistering, itching flare-up.”

“Wow,” said Laura, jabbing her straw in her bubble tea. “Romantic.” Despite spending most of our days together for the past few years, we managed to mostly bitch about how underappreciated we were by our husbands and trade detailed anecdotes no one else in the world wanted to hear, like about our children’s bowel movements and sleep patterns. Since Harry had left, though, I’d found myself confiding in her more and more, really talking about my goddamn feelings, like some sort of guidance counselor or movie sidekick. Poor Laura!

I sat up, squinting at Betty’s jumping figure. “Do you think I’m terrible? I mean, God, it sounds terrible. My husband disappears and I’m like, oh, whatever, and start crushing on Cute Dad, because he’s around. Don’t answer. I know. It’s terrible.”

Oh, stop that. You deserve happiness. Some romance. Everyone does. Life’s too short, blah, blah. You have to think about you.

“But maybe I already do that too much. You know?”

Laura raised her eyebrows. “What?”

Oh, cripes. I rubbed my face. “Sorry, nothing.”

“Oookay. No, of course I don’t think you’re terrible. You’re—confused. And lonely. And—but it
is
just a crush, right? I mean, we all know that Sam is happily married. Right? I mean, I want you to be happy, and I know it probably sounds like a kind of adventure; I mean, the thought is exciting, but you wouldn’t really—”

“Of course not. I think.”

I didn’t say what I wanted to say, what
she
wanted me to say, which was that Sam’s so-called happy marriage wasn’t my problem. I had plenty of my own problems to worry about. It probably happened all the time, trysts sparked on the tot lot, but the goody-two-shoes in me couldn’t quite believe it. Did people
really
do that? Even though it was
wrong
? Didn’t they feel
bad
? The sky was stained a deep indigo. It wouldn’t be long until the fireworks. A few feeble stars appeared, pinpricks of light. I looked at Laura, but she was avoiding my eyes. “Well, it’s true that he’s married,” I said.

Laura paused. “And so are you.”

I nodded. “As far as I know.”

“This must be really hard for you.” Laura leaned forward, squeezing my arm. Part of me wanted to crawl into her lap and weep like a baby. I nodded, biting my lip. “You poor thing. I can’t even imagine how lonely and sad and confused you must be. But believe me when I say Sam is not the answer. Besides, Brooklyn is a small town, you know that, none of us has any secrets. It would just be so not worth it. So not fun.”

“It might be a little fun.”

I wanted her to laugh, in cahoots with my borrowed evil side, but she frowned. Maybe I needed to cultivate some new friends. Maybe Evelyn or Julie would giggle and tacitly approve of misdeeds and make it all feel more fun, less like a big bummer of an ethics
conundrum. Laura opened her mouth as if to speak, but then Betty came tumbling onto the blanket, breathing hard. “Mommy,” she said, panting, “we ran . . . soooo . . . fast.”