The Mermaid of Brooklyn (32 page)

“Oh! Well!” I grinned idiotically. “Fancy meeting you here!”

He looked tired. Maude handed him her helmet—she’d gotten a scooter and rode it everywhere, which fascinated Betty—and marched right over and flopped down. “
Now
can I have my snack?” She glared at me before turning back to her daddy.

She knows. She knows everything.

Don’t be ridiculous. She’s a
child.
He obviously told her to wait for her snack.

Until they found us? Do you think he said that? He wouldn’t be so obvious, would he?

And exactly what difference would it make? You’re neighborhood friends, meeting in the park. No one can say you’re doing anything wrong. You haven’t done anything wrong.

But we want to.

I know you do.

Everyone knows we do.

What do you care, “everyone”? Grow up. This isn’t high school.

Of course it is.

Just—shh.

Maude and Betty quickly engrossed themselves in a game that seemed to involve mostly collecting sticks and then fighting over them. Rose sat at attention, gnawing on the wipes case. I lazily waved a rattle, which she ignored. My phone buzzed. Laura. Where were we, and did we want to play? They missed us. I closed my phone, turned to Sam. “You look tired,” I said sympathetically. It was a hard habit to break, the wifeliness.

Sam smiled but didn’t say anything. He extracted from his pocket a mangled wildflower. “Maude and I found this in the meadow.”

“A Johnny-jump-up,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows. “Heartsease.”

“Same thing,” I said, probably blushing. I couldn’t help it. “Thanks. No one’s given me flowers in ages.”

“Flo
wer,
” he corrected.

“Ah, yes. No one’s given me flo
wer
in ages.”

“What can I say? I give good flower,” he said, and my smile felt arch and knowing to me but probably looked pinched. He leaned back so that, it seemed, I could see the length of him. He was a largeish guy and soft-seeming, but when his T-shirt strained against his front, it revealed a musculature that made my suddenly teenage blood heat up. I wanted to strip off his shirt and press my face against his hot, sweaty chest. I wanted to smell his scalp and poke at his belly button and touch the smooth skin beneath his belt.
Stop stop stop,
I told my stupid brain. But it wasn’t listening, not to me, not anymore.

“Juliet wants to move,” he said.

I suffered a mild cardiac arrest, recovered, and smiled. “Oh? Where?”

He lay back on the blanket and shielded his face with his arms. “Queens. Or Staten Island. Or maybe Jersey.” Any of those places, we both knew, may as well have been the opposite end of the earth. We’d been through it before. Betty was at the age where her babyhood friends were starting to scatter as their families outgrew their expensive and tiny Park Slope setups. It was all fine and good to stow a newborn in a corner of your bedroom or a toddler in a cutely wallpapered closet, but at a certain point you started to crave a door. So people would shrug and explain that they’d found this great house in the suburbs but would be in the neighborhood to visit all the time, and you’d see them one last time, maybe twice if you were motivated to schlep out on the LIRR or New Jersey Transit to their housewarming party. And Queens, forget it, that
was just as bad. Worse, even, depending what train line they’d stranded themselves on. It was better if someone moved to Chicago or L.A., where there were at least direct flights. Someone in a cute row house out on the J-M-Z line might as well have gone to outer Mongolia for all you’d ever see them. And you’d tell yourself they were fools, that while their children languished alone in their unnecessarily large bedrooms, yours would be reaping the benefits of all that city culture and diversity that they never really did because you were usually too exhausted to take them anywhere at all.

“Oh!” I said, trying to sound cheery. “Well, not far away, then.”

There was no response.

“But Maude got into pre-K at St. Ann’s,” I said. “People would kill for that. They might. They might kill you for it. Wait, is that why? Don’t worry, Sam, I’ll protect you!” Rose was starting to scoot off the edge of the blanket. “Rosie, we’ve got to protect Sam!” I lifted her up and whirled her around in the air, a chubby helicopter. She giggled and drooled on my head. “Ah, thank you. How refreshing.”

Sam forced a smile. “I know. It will take us a while to find a place, anyway.”

“But. So. Why?”

You,
I was afraid he’d say. But of course not, it was ridiculous. “You know. Same old thing. We need more space. I mean, we do. We definitely do.”

“Do you? Can’t you, like, have a stoop sale?”

“We’re beyond that. I mean, Jenny, we live in a studio. Juliet and I sleep in the walk-in closet.”

They did? “You do? I always thought— Why did I think you had a fabulous three-bedroom?”

“There are fabulous three-bedrooms in the building. We just don’t happen to live in one. And the kids are getting too old for it. They need their own space. We all do. It just—sorry to be babbling
on like this at you”—I shook my head vigorously, like a bobble-head in a fender bender—“but it makes me so mad. We love this neighborhood. It’s pretty, it’s safe, it’s easy. And it’s so goddamned expensive, it makes me mad. I feel like the city is slighting us. No one can live here in any civilized way unless they’re millionaires, and soon it will be them and the completely poverty-stricken, no room for normal families like us or, God forbid, artists. My in-laws are paying for private school, and thank God for that. It’s humiliating, but still. I don’t know. I used to feel such love for this city, and now I feel like it’s this huge evil Fritz Lang machine and it’s spitting me out. God, sorry, end of rant.” He laughed self-consciously and shook his head.

“I know,” I said. Really, I was thinking,
Ohhhh, your in-laws pay for it. Okay, there’s one mystery solved.
“It’s crazy how poor you can feel here without being actually poor. My relatives in the Midwest think we’re total morons. They’re like, ‘Wait, we don’t get it, why do you live in such a tiny apartment?’ As if it hasn’t occurred to us to live somewhere decent. My mother basically thinks it’s tantamount to child abuse, the way the girls share a room and don’t have huge plastic toys.”

“Well, it
is
prosecutable by law.”

“True. And it
is
actually only because I don’t really love them.”

We shared a bitter laugh. Then I said, momentarily possessed by my mother, “You guys really live in a studio?”

Sam rolled his eyes. “It was never meant to be anything other than temporary, and then somehow, suddenly, it’s our life. You know? You reach that point where you realize that this is it, we’re in it, that real life isn’t about to begin but has begun and here you are with no career or accomplishments to speak of, nothing in the bank, two kids, a wife who’s fed up with you . . . jeez, sorry. Listen to me.”

How much more of an invitation do you need? He needs you
.
He wants you. You coward.

She jerked my hand like a cranky puppeteer. I reached out then and squeezed his leg. His leg! Had I ever touched a leg? In the cloudless sky, a pair of bright kites tangled together.

“I know. Believe me.”

He didn’t open his eyes. “Is there anyone who doesn’t feel this way? Is there anyone who is really living? Do you know what I mean?”

“I do know. I keep wondering when I’m going to feel like an adult and not just the same goofy me.”

He looked at me now and smiled, resting his large paw of a hand on mine. He sat up. And who knows what it might have been about, because Rose crawled into his lap. He held her comfortably, let her reach her fingers into his mouth and examine his teeth. I watched her, weirdly jealous.
I
wanted to touch his lips.
God, how sick is that? She’s a baby. My baby with my husband.

You are remarkably boring, you know that, don’t you? What year is it, anyway? I thought people did whatever they wanted anymore.

Maybe they do.

You
don’t.

Well. Maybe I do.

Leaving the neighborhood. We’d talked about it a million times, Harry and I, like everyone else. When I was first pregnant, we’d viewed sprawling apartments in distant reaches of each borough and calculated the commute times into Manhattan. We’d tiptoed through “marginal” and “up-and-coming” neighborhoods, telling ourselves it wouldn’t work not because we were racist—of course not! who was racist anymore?—but because of the schools, oh, the schools, the schools were no good. We’d driven out to the suburbs and made fun of all the chain restaurants and drooled over the square footage at open houses. Though all the bitching about the cost and the space and the
yuppies and the lunatics and the stink of the city lent the scaffolding to a good percentage of my interactions with other adult humans (what did people who lived in other places talk about? the weather? politics? advances in astrophysics? I honestly didn’t remember), it’s true that I probably would have been even more miserable had we left.

One of my problems had always been that when I started to feel sad, I went into hiding. In college I would go for days barely speaking to anyone, avoiding even my roommate’s cat, as if an obese furball purring against my leg were too much of an emotional drain. The worst part was that I knew an interaction of some kind would cheer me up. It just seemed too hard. Ignoring my antisocial fits and dragging me out of my gloomy shell was one of the ways Harry had won me over. It was how the city had won me over, too.

Whatever else you could say about the part of Brooklyn where I’d landed, it was pretty much guaranteed that every time I left the building, I’d encounter a Mr. Rogersy barrage of neighborliness. Sometimes it was the nosy Puerto Rican lady who lived on the first floor and stuck her head out the window all day, pretending not to speak English until she wanted to tell me it was too hot to take the girls out or else to accuse me of stealing the
Post
she’d left on the stoop. Sometimes it was a mom I knew or sort of knew from around the neighborhood, and we’d find ourselves matching our gaits to discuss some parenthood minutiae, and a few blocks later, I’d wave goodbye feeling somehow less alone and maybe armed with a helpful project idea or tantrum tamer. It might be the friendly proprietors of the butcher shop or cheese store or fruit stand chucking Betty on the chin, or a flock of birders fluttering toward the park, or a young couple much too pleased with the new puppy that they’d be considering abandoning as soon as they procreated a few years down the road but in the meantime asking
for directions to the dog beach; there was always someone around, trying to engage you, if in the most superficial of ways. It kept me on my melancholy toes.

This business of making dresses had deepened the way I saw my corner of Brooklyn, adding another dimension to the familiar streets and shops. The neighborhood had been a part of me for some time, and now I’d become a part of the neighborhood. Like with Evelyn. After I’d measured her, fondled her inseam, come to know the damp smell of her body as she undressed in my kitchen, after I’d glimpsed the soft expanse of her back, the tiger stripe on her belly from her most recent baby, now that I knew she got bikini waxes and wore weirdly sexy underwear—silken lacy things that looked expensive, tucked beneath her creased khaki shorts; who knew?—and after I’d seen how lovely she could be in a well-tailored (if I do say so myself) shift, and after I’d seen her mood lighten, her whole body seem to lengthen, in a few moments away from her kids, from her life as the scatterbrained mom, it was different when I saw her on the playground or, like now, in line at the bank. I knew there was a secret Evelyn in there, that I’d caught a glimpse of the Evelyn she imagined herself to be, her platonically ideal self.

My kids squirmed in their stroller—but at least Rose wasn’t screaming, that was an exciting new development—as I fished out of the diaper bag a personal check from my landlord’s daughter. I’d hemmed an armful of suit pants for her at half of what the dry cleaners charged. Or rather, the rusalka had. Whatever.

“Jenny!” Evelyn waved as if we’d found each other by strange chance and she couldn’t believe the serendipity. “Hi!” And then in a baby voice, “Hi, Betty! Hi, Rosie!” Betty hurled a raisin at her. The pickle-faced man between us in line scowled. I shrugged. I’d stopped apologizing for other people’s behavior a while ago. I closed my eyes. It felt wonderful in the bank, so air-conditioned and quiet.
The tellers all looked scrubbed clean, brand-new, as if they’d just popped off a bank-teller conveyer belt. We’d been in the park all morning, and I was Pompeiied in a gritty paste of apple juice, dirt, and sandbox. When I opened my eyes, Evelyn had replaced pickle-face in front of me. “Ack,” I said, like a bedraggled character from the funny pages. “Where are the little guys?” I asked, not because I cared but because it was what you said when you saw a mom friend without her tiny entourage.

“Today’s one of my nanny days. Oh, thank you for the raisin, Bets!”

Betty started talking, and we both ignored her. “I didn’t realize you were back at work.”

Evelyn waved her hand. “Oh, I’m not, I just—you know, you need some time to do errands and things. You know? And the housekeeper comes today, so we all have to be out, anyway. Tabitha’s taking the kids to Music Together right now. Are you guys taking that?”

I mumbled some excuse, swatted away a swarm of mom guilt, and smiled. “How’d the dress work out, Ev?”

She leaned forward and touched my arm. “Oh my GOD. Huge hit. Huge. And I told everyone how you made it. People love the idea of a handmade dress, they really do! So couture. But budgety. People love that.”

I bent over to pop Rose’s paci back in her mouth. “Oh, good. I aim to please.”

The line inched forward. Evelyn was next. “I hope you can handle some more business, because I am sending tons your way. Long story short—too late, I know!—my former boss’s daughter is getting married, and she wants you to make her a wedding dress! Isn’t that a scream! She’s prepared to pay hundreds and hundreds, it’s not that, but she’s— Oh, okay, I’m up. Listen, I gave her your
number, hope that’s okay?” She scooted toward the open teller. I felt like everyone in the bank was staring at us—we were the only ones talking—and thinking what idiotic Brooklyn moms we were, what stereotypical shallow yuppies. I hated when people talked loudly to me in public spaces. I’d always hated the sounds of public spaces, the dings and Muzak and phone rings fizzed like water spots in my vision, cross-sensory blips crowding out the ordinary thoughts. I willed myself to smile and nod at her, and mouthed, “Okay!” I heard her say, “I need to get a necklace from my safe-deposit box” before the next teller called me. I heaved the stroller forward, slapped down my slimy check and, swallowing the mucousy embarrassment, the sackful of coins I’d toted along to be exchanged into bills. “I’d like to trade you these things for some actual money,” I told the teller’s mask of a face. She didn’t blink throughout our entire transaction.