The Mermaid of Brooklyn (31 page)

“If I try hard, I can sort of remember how this neighborhood struck me before I lived here. I remember thinking it was so beautiful—all the rows of brownstones and trees and little shops—and how it would be impossible to ever find a parking spot—”

“Which is true.”

“But I also remember thinking it seemed kind of fake,
too
pretty, and like everyone else in Manhattan—we were living in Murray Hill then—I thought it was all annoying self-righteous moms shopping at the Food Coop and judging everyone.”

“Also true.”

“But no, you see—that’s what I think these recordings are turning out to be about. The life of this neighborhood that’s been going on for decades and keeps going on despite everything else. The real reason why we love it here. It’s getting forced out—people getting priced out of their apartments and white yuppies moving in, you know,
us
—but also people are finding ways to make space for themselves, if not actual space, then mental space. The privacy of the nocturnal world of the neighborhood. You know?”

“I think I do. You’re saying it’s about the double life of Brooklyn.”

“I guess. Oh, I like that. That makes it sound all smart.”

“I
did
go to graduate school once upon a time. Have you started editing it down?”

“No, not yet. I don’t know where to begin or who to think of as the audience. Oh, that sounds so ridiculous. I mean, what audience! Right?”

“I think you’re being too hard on yourself. Just enjoy the process.”

“Listen to you. Since when are you the Zen master of creativity? Speaking of which, how’s the sewing?”

“Honestly? I have more business than I know what to do with. I made five dresses last week. And Laura, I think maybe I’ve never been happier.”

That was what I had not yet admitted to anyone, what I figured Fred and Sylvia suspected, what I tried to tamp down because it seemed so wrong. Because shouldn’t I be miserable?

You’re alive. You’re young, and healthy, and attractive. Why shouldn’t you be happy? Why shouldn’t you have everything you want?

Everything? Well. There are plenty of reasons why I shouldn’t have everything I want. Where to start?

Life’s too short, Jenny Lipkin. Life’s too short.

Laura and I stopped talking, a little embarrassed by the earnestness of the conversation we’d been having. Betty and Emma bounded over begging for snacks, and we dosed them with graham crackers and sent them back to the swings, Emma angling her cast out like a pro. Rose was getting restless, so I got up to plop her in a baby swing. She kicked her fat legs and squealed, and I checked my cell phone for texts while simultaneously judging a nearby nanny doing the same.

I should have known—it was as if she had a homing device alerting her to bubbles of peace she might swoop in and pop—Nell appeared by the fence, waving her flabless arm like Princess freaking Diana. She looked fresh as ever, supermodel legs in tiny seersucker shorts, sandals displaying a perfect pedicure. Her copper-colored hair was effortlessly swirled up in a silk scarf. Whenever I tried that
it made me look Hasidic. I squinted to see Nell’s daughter, Sophia, join Betty and Emma in collecting the sprinkler water into filthy plastic cups they’d swiped from the wreckage of a nearby barbeque.

“Oh, hi, Nell,” I said without enthusiasm.

“Hi, Jenny! Hi, Rosie-posie!” I guessed I would be idiotically happy, too, if I were Nell. I sucked in my breath and mentally added fifty dollars to the price of her dress. “How’s my frock coming along?” she asked. She leaned against the fence as if posing for a summer-fun fashion shoot in a parenting magazine.

I bared my teeth. “Great!” I hadn’t started it. “How’s my cash coming along?”

She giggled. “You’re too
funny
.” It sounded like an accusation. I could just hear her asking Mr. Nell to take out the trash.
Could you do me a teensy-weensy favor, sweetie? Since I’ve been on my feet absolutely all day, do you mind terribly? It’s not too heavy for you, is it, lovey-dove?
But who was I kidding? She was Nell, after all, and Mr. Nell was probably just as irritatingly perfect. He probably got up at four a.m. every morning and cleaned the whole house and entertained Sophia and made breakfast for the whole family while Nell took a leisurely shower. He probably loved taking down the trash.

This woman is terrible. Why do you care?

I don’t care. She just bothers me, is all.

You need to stop worrying about other people. Let it go already.

You sound like a self-help guru.

I
am
a self-help guru, in case you haven’t noticed, your own personal version. But no, really, we do need to keep an eye on her.

Wait, what? I thought you were telling me not to worry about her.

Oy, my dear girl. Don’t be such a fool. She wants to be the happiest one, don’t you see? She wants to win. And you can’t let her. I’m saying there’s nothing to be jealous about. Don’t envy her; watch her. She’s watching you.

I don’t have any idea what you mean.

Of course you do.

Then: Cute Dad. Riding his bike down the path that skirted the playground, Maude and George pedaling along beside him. It must have been later in the afternoon than I thought. No wonder it was so hot and stagnant. No wonder Rose was looking wilted. He raised an arm in greeting, and I waved back, trying not to blush. Nell wiggled her fingers at him, then turned back to me. “Isn’t he adorable?” she cooed.

You’re fucking kidding me.

I
told
you.

“Don’t you think?” Nell pressed. Everything she said was a trap in some way, though I didn’t always know which way. I was bad at this sort of thing, which explained my lack of social success in both high school and the magazine industry. I didn’t get it. Did she also have a crush on Sam? She couldn’t possibly, could she? I imagined she could love only a broker with a crew cut. No, she seemed to me more like a professional yenta, like the propriety princess of the neighborhood. She didn’t want the order of things to be interrupted. Maybe it was silly of me to imagine no one would notice what I was still pretending was an innocent flirtation. After all, I did live in the biggest small town in the world.

I shrugged, pushing Rose in the swing and clapping my hands at her when she swung toward me. Even I could sense the overcompensation in my animated swing pushing, the wigged-out enthusiasm, like a working parent on a summer Friday off.

“You two have gotten really close, haven’t you?” Nell continued.

“Uh, what? No. I mean, you know. We just see each other around a lot.”

“Do you!”

“What? I mean, you know, here. At the park.”

Nell arched her eyebrows, smiling. “Any word from Harry?”

Betty raced over just in time, saving me from the trouble of strangling Nell with a swing-set chain. “Mommy, Emma said ‘doody’!” I gave a Nell a “whatcanyado?” shrug and lifted Rose from the swing.

“It’s time for us to go home, kiddo. We need to start thinking about dinner.”

Betty headed toward the stroller. “Okay, but Emma said ‘doody’!”

“I heard you.”

“Doody!”

“But now you’re saying it.” The unassailable logic of this statement stopped Betty in her tracks. She looked up at me wonderingly. I wrestled Rose into the bottom bunk of the new stroller, which I hadn’t totally figured out yet, and shackled a goggle-eyed toy to the strap. I never got used to that action, which seemed hilariously unfun, as in
Play with this toy! Or else!
“Get in, Betty.” She knit her brow as she climbed into her seat, whispering, “Doody,” and chuckling to herself.

Nell, who had followed our procession from the swing enclosure to the shady benches where Laura was parked, leafing through a magazine, winked—
winked!
—at me. What an asshole. “Bye-bye, Betty! Bye-bye, Rosie!”

“See you around, Nell.”

“Can’t wait to see the frock!”
I think we should add $25 to the price every time she says “frock.”

Agreed.

“Okey-dokey!”

Nell perched on the bench beside Laura, who sent me a despairing look. “Bye-eee!” I trilled in my best Nell.

I spent the following evening hours in a funk, everything tinged with a dull wash of dread.

She knows. But it doesn’t matter.

She knows
what
? There’s nothing to know. I haven’t done a thing.

Jenny. Stop. You can’t fool me. You can fool everyone else, maybe even yourself, but not me.

What do you want from me, anyway?

I want you to be honest with yourself. With yourself. You want him. He wants you. Anyone can see it. No one will say it. That’s what you don’t realize, that’s the beauty of it. No one will ever say a thing.

But they’ll know.

But it doesn’t matter.

Did it? Would everyone continue to pretend not to notice our heated flirting? We lived in an only slightly updated Puritan colony,
The Scarlet Letter
with cell phones and contraceptives. I didn’t want to be
that
girl, the Hester Prynne of Park Slope, the one who crossed the line everyone had agreed not to cross, from playground flirtation to— To what? I hardly knew myself what I meant, where I thought this was headed. The rusalka purred in my head, in my chest, in my gut.
Look, Harry is gone. That’s the choice he made. You are here, and you are alive, and you and Sam, you want each other. It’s summer. You’re both here and lonely. Why not? Why not take some comfort in a kindred spirit?

I was starting to realize the rusalka wasn’t the best person to listen to. What did I know about her? Who
was
she, this new self of mine, this recently arrived Siamese twin? It was beginning to strike me, in moments of sickening dread, that I might be just another sailor coiled in her hair, seduced by her promises of impossible passions, believing I was being buoyed up as she slowly strengthened her squeeze, dragging me down to the ocean floor.

I know this will seem strange, but it was only then, a month after I died, once she had transformed me from a cowering weepy mess to the self-assured woman in cute shoes and unapologetically
wild hair who flirted with men and told off my obnoxious in-laws, performing her supernatural makeover tricks when I was least prepared to protest, once I found myself becoming the most sought-after seamstress of Seventh Ave., that I began to wonder about her. About who she was or once had been.

I found myself flipping through the old tomes of Russian folklore that had somehow survived our many small-space-necessitated book purges, tattooed with my grad-school self’s embarrassing notes, looking for, I don’t know, something. A clue. It seemed like decades since I’d concentrated on anything, though, and I never got to read an entire passage before being interrupted by one kid or another, or remembering some crucial household chore. It was like conversations I had with other moms, the only people I seemed to know anymore—I’d get home from a playdate or a day in the park and, hours later, wonder where that strand about so-and-so’s husband had been going, or the thread concerning her antidepressant dosage, but no, the conversations were blown this way and that, never anchoring anywhere.

But
how
did you die? But
why
wasn’t your spirit at rest?

She resisted my questions like a mental tennis player.
You sound like your toddler. Why, why, why? I’ll tell you one thing, if I’d lived to be as old as you are now, I wouldn’t have spent my time shilly-shallying around the damn park all day, feeling sorry for myself.

Ah, so you died young.

A reluctant pause.
Yes.

Did you kill yourself? Is that why you became a rusalka? Were you a spurned lover? Unwed and pregnant? And you jumped into the water? That’s what it always is in the old stories.

Another pause. I kept waiting for her reply, but there was nothing. Just the coldest, emptiest silence I’d ever felt.

Cute Dad and I kept pretending it was an accident that we
ran into each other in the park by the Picnic House every afternoon at three on the dot. I told myself there was nothing unseemly about our daily volleys of flirty text messages. Which was how you knew, wasn’t it, when there was something wrong with what you were doing? We hadn’t said anything that lacked propriety, done nothing officially against any rules, and yet I didn’t tell Laura about it and he didn’t tell Juliet about it and we insisted on pretending it was an accident every time. “Oh, HI!” I’d cry, waving and waving like he was a grade school chum I was unexpectedly encountering in Helsinki. “Oh! Jenny! Hi!” Sam would say. Sometimes we got as corny as “Fancy meeting you here!” or “Mr. Kralik!,” our awkwardly cutesy nickname for each other. It became a game—pushing the carriage over the hill, scanning the field dotted with picnics and summer-camp mobs and the occasional unleashed dog. One time I didn’t see him right away and was surprised by how heavy my heart felt. He hadn’t come. Okay. Okay! What was I, twelve? But there was no escaping that leaden weight. I spread out our juice-besmirched picnic blanket, and then I heard him call, “Oh, hey, Jenny!” And it’s ridiculous how
my heart slopped against my ribs. How I loved the way he said my name.