The Mermaid of Brooklyn (40 page)

Sam smiled, took a breath, about to say—something. Something life-changing, I’m sure. But what happened next was straight out of a romantic comedy, one of the goofy studio numbers in black and white that I’d spent my evenings in front of before I remembered sewing. Not a good romantic comedy, either, but one that had been thrown together hastily on a back lot, the scenery showing its seams. We didn’t kiss sweetly and talk it over, we didn’t throw caution to the wind and get all hot and
heavy again. No, we didn’t do anything, because my baby started to scream. We leaped apart.

I buried my face in my hands before apologizing and running in to grab her before she woke Betty, and when I came back out, my nipples leaking coins of milk through my dress, he had gone. Here was the reality of my life—illicit sex to breast-feeding in five minutes flat. The rusalka raged, but what could I do? I left the dress on the couch, kicked off my heels, and, babe in arms, retired to the boudoir.

In the same way that it highlights a nose’s ruinous blemish
, or lays bare the black under-eyes of a hangover, the light of morning renders all our animal appetites ridiculous. The next day my rusalka delighted in the physical ache of the aftermath, how it hurt to sit, stung to stand. What she loved even more, now that I’d pissed her off by ordering her away, was how miserable the rest of me felt, guilt scintillating around the edges of my vision like a moral migraine. Come on. This was bad. It was the worst thing I’d ever done. It was done and could not be undone. Because this was me, my chosen commandment breaking turned out to be one entirely without lasting rewards. Couldn’t I have stolen a large sum of money instead? Guilt-inducing but at least helpful?

It didn’t help matters to have a rusalka storming around inside me.
After everything I’ve done for you. I’ve saved your life ten times over. And now you try to evict me? That’s not how these things work, little girl. And just how do you expect to get rid of me, anyway? Throw me off a bridge?
Her words sent a cold chill down my spine, or maybe that was her clammy caress. Here was something I had never considered: that I would be like this forever, harboring my spectral fugitive until I died again, for the last time. That I would be fielding
her demands as we wheeled around our futuristic nursing home, like any other Dame of Dementia (
No, I’m not stealing extra Splenda packets for you, leave me alone!
), or that if she were to untangle herself from me, the rest of me might die without her. Maybe she was all that propped me up, and my whole post-bridge life had been nothing more than a mythology-infused
Weekend at Bernie’s
. I shuddered. I hadn’t been thinking carefully enough about the consequences of my trysts lately, or possibly ever.

I was in such a state that it was almost—
almost
—impossible to enjoy the e-mail I got that morning from a reporter (okay, a mom I knew from the playground who happened to freelance) proposing a profile in
The Brooklyn Paper
. Of me. She’d heard about my fantastic dresses and thought that readers might enjoy hearing about a local mom’s burgeoning new business. After all, she told me, people loved that throwbacky-crafty stuff (so hip-grandma-y!), and I had such a talent—she was a friend of Evelyn’s and had seen my work—and would I mind having my photograph and an interview run in the paper? Relief spored over my guilt.
Oh, that’s right!
I was just a local mom, just a lady who liked to sew, an ordinary person with a charming hobby, not a supernaturally possessed sexual predator
at all
.

I read over the e-mail about eighty times, certain it was meant for someone else. Who would give a shit about me and my pointless stitchery? But there were too many details that checked out. She must mean me. I spun Rose around the living room, gave Betty a high five. Maybe it would bring more business! Maybe everything would work out after all! And maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t need the rusalka’s dexterous interference to make it work! It meant a lot of running around—the reporter mom promised linkage to my nonexistent website, wanted some sample prices I’d have to dream up, and needed photos and an interview by next week—but it also
made my sewing feel real, made my “business” feel like a no-quotes-necessary business, and, best of all, distracted me from the Sam situation. By the end of the day, my only question was why I hadn’t thought to throw myself into my sewing instead of off a bridge in the first place.

Funny how, after a part of your life is over, it all seems to fit into place, as if it couldn’t have turned out any other way, as if fact equaled destiny. First there was Sam, then there was the sewing thing, and then, with strange serendipity, my dad called me. “Dad? Oh God, who died?” My father never called. And yet I had been thinking about him, about him and my mother and their impressively long, remarkably anodyne marriage. They had lived without passion for at least the past thirty years, so why shouldn’t I?

“What? No, no one died.”

“Why are you calling in the middle of the night?”

There was a pause. “It’s eight thirty.”

“We can’t all be party animals like you, you know. Besides, it’s later here.”

Another pause. “So, nine thirty.”

“Like I said. What’s up, Pop?” I settled back into my sewing. I was working double time, staying up as late as I could stand it, my fingers cramped and creaking. To my surprise, the idea of having to go back to a real job, as suggested by Sylvia, had not come as a relief, as a return to real life, the way I’d always pictured it. Instead, I found myself taking on as many pieces of sewing as humanly possible, hustling for hem jobs, pushing Anne to tell her betrothed friends about my great work and free advice, throwing each scrap of money on the sad pile, hoping each time for a miracle of multiplication to occur.

My father cleared his throat. “Yes.”

“How’s the weather there?” I prompted him. How did this man not know how to have a conversation? What did he do at work? In a social setting, assuming he ever encountered those?

“The weather? Oh, fine, I guess.”

“Great. How’s Mom? Readjusting to American life?” She had returned from Cairo, triumphant, rattling with souvenir scarabs and pointless stories that even an exotic backdrop could not redeem, mostly about “hilarious” misunderstandings that she and her bovine buddy Bev had with the locals. I was happy for her. I was. I also looked forward to a time when every sentence wouldn’t be answered with, “Oh, well in
Egypt
you know what they do . . .” She was worse than a college junior after a semester abroad.

He cleared his throat again. I wondered where he was in their big empty house. In the basement rec room, I guessed, by the dormant pinball games and teetotalers’ wet bar stocked with store-brand cola, while my mother watched
ER
upstairs, holding a tangle of yarn in her lap as if at any moment it might begin to knit itself. “Yes, your mother. She’s fine. She had a real nice time on her vacation.”

“Yes, so I heard. That’s great, Dad. Isn’t that great? Don’t you think that’s great?”

“Well. Yeah. I think she and Beverly were real pleased with themselves.”

“Sure. Of course. They had an adventure.” I tried to keep the eye rolling out of my voice.

“So now she wants to go again.”

“To Egypt?”

“What? No, no. Somewhere else. I forget. India, I think.”

“Really. Wow! Guess she really got the travel bug, huh?”

“Well, she had a little diarrhea, she said, but mostly, she was okay.”

“No, Dad, I— Never mind. I mean, she liked traveling.”

“Oh. Yes, I guess so.”

“Well? Is she going with Beverly again? How do you feel about all this?”

“She has to wait a year or so to save up enough vacation days again. But the thing is, she wants me to go.” A tremor crept into my dad’s voice. Fear? Excitement? Nausea?

“That’s good. She wants you to have an adventure like she just had.”
And she wants to stay married,
I didn’t say.
She wants to spice things up and make it work.
Who knew?

“We’ve taken lots of nice trips. Last spring we went to visit my cousin Herb in North Dakota.”

“That doesn’t count, Dad. That’s not a nice trip. That’s a shitty, boring trip. I’m sorry, but it is. That’s just—shitty.” My cheeks flushed. I’d
sworn
at my
father
. I was turning into a bad girl after all.

My dad paused. “Herb got a new pickup.”

“Yeah, see, no one cares. Mom doesn’t care. Mom wants to go to India, or wherever, and see interesting people and something famous, the Taj Mahal, I bet, and—”

“—get diarrhea again?” The poor man sounded positively furious. I hadn’t heard him so kerfuffled since I’d told him I was marrying a Jew. In a park. The interfaith issue was one thing, but the threat of bugs and rain was too much for him to handle.

“Maybe! I guess so! Why not, Dad? What’s the worst that could happen? You spend a few days on an air-conditioned bus, you take some snapshots, Mom embarrasses you by talking to strangers in a tourist market somewhere . . . So what? Live a little!”

He sighed meaningfully. Finally, he said, “I’ve never met anyone who’s been to India.”

“It’s really going to be okay. Why don’t you guys go out for Indian food in the Cities one night and discuss it?”

There was a long silence.

“Indian food, Dad. It’s like . . . rice. Potatoes. And, you know, curry. It’s . . . like ketchup. You’ll like it.”

“I don’t like curry.”

“You’ve never had curry.”

“Because I don’t like it.”

“Dad, you don’t know that. For chrissakes, you’re worse than Betty. Look, I have to go. Tell Mom I love her. You should agree to the trip. It would mean a lot to her.”

“It’s very expensive.” He was stalling. This was rivaling the longest conversation I’d ever had with him in my whole life. “We were going to refinish the deck.”

“Fuck the deck. Say yes. It’s weird for me to say this to you, but I think your marriage needs this. Mom’s going to jump out of her skin if you guys don’t start, you know, living.”
And shagging,
I couldn’t say.

“Huh.”

“Why don’t you go upstairs and talk to her?”

“Hmm.”

“Good night, Dad.”

“Hmm.”

“Bye.”

“All right, then.”

“Hanging up now.”

I could just see him sitting there with the phone in his hand, looking around the room. This was the marriage I’d grown up observing without realizing I was observing it. I’d derived half my DNA from a man who thought a nice vacation was a weekend in North Dakota admiring Herb Wilson’s Ford. Every night I could remember, my parents had slept with their door open. Nothing fancy going on in there! I knew it was unfair to blame them, but I
also knew that they had done it to themselves, they had let shyness become silence, distance turn into disdain. The chilliness of their marriage was not any more inevitable than it was irreversible.

So there was something hopeful in this unexpected future for them as tour-bus world travelers. I just wanted my parents to go to India or wherever they were going (never mind the fact that I could hardly leave the borough) and e-mail some grainy pictures of them grinning in moon-white sneakers in front of the Taj Mahal and have sex with each other or whatever they needed to do and leave me out of it. I wanted them to be happy with each other, as I realized they’d probably never been before.

It was as if my family somehow got my psychic distress signals months too late, only now dispatching themselves to check in on crazy, abandoned Jenny in Brooklyn. Because the next thing that happened was that Sarah and her hyperactive son, Max, came for an impromptu weekend. To stay with us. In our minuscule, packed-to-the-gills apartment. I wanted to murder her. Literally. As in I planned it, right down to how to produce the least blood.

Somehow I was able to swallow my anger, tamp down the raging rusalka, pretend I hadn’t just slept with my neighbor, and grit my teeth into an angry-gorilla grin for two whole days. I maneuvered my guests through brunch, the park, the nightmarish riot of the children’s museum on a Saturday, endured the constant squabbling between Max and Betty (their typical repartee went a little something like this: “No!” “NO!” “Mine!” “MINE!” In unison: “MOMMMMYYYYY!”), and absorbed Sarah’s annoying analyst’s pestering. How was I feeling? No, but how was I
feeling
?