The Mermaid of Brooklyn (42 page)

The sun fingered down through the tree branches. When Karen leaned toward Sam, light spangled the tips of her hair. All the dozy, sunny, lazy happiness was making me feel a surge of generosity toward Karen, toward all these moms I knew. How I loved them in that weird moment! These women whom I had, if not loved, at least seen a lot of all summer; who had known my children, if not well, for their whole lives, at least. How lovely it was to find these friends in the park and picnic an afternoon away—what other way could it possibly be? Why should I feel bitterly toward any other woman when we were all just doing what we could, trying to navigate the rapids of our strange new lives, exhausted from the demands on us and clawing toward how to be good mothers and wives, toward ways we could still be ourselves? I’ll tell you why. Because in the next moment Karen purred something under her breath to Sam, and he laughed. I mean the special Sam laugh, the laugh I’d
thought
was special, the way he had of holding your gaze and seeing only you. She touched his arm—oh, ha-ha!—and leaned back, annoyingly well lit in the dappled shade.

It sounds like just an instant, and it was. Maybe it was the first time in a while that I’d been far enough from Sam—it took a bed-sized picnic blanket to lend you some perspective sometimes—to see him, really
see
him. It wasn’t me he was in love with. It was ridiculous of me to think what he felt toward me was love at all (and only now did I realize I’d assumed all along that it was, that he couldn’t live without me, that what we’d done was my fault and would break his heart forever). Cute Dad, like anyone, wanted
some
attention
. He wanted to feel wanted. And who knew why Karen was all in his face like a kid with someone else’s toy, but when she giggled at something he’d said, his whole self lit up—it’s possible he was trying to make me jealous, but it’s also possible that he had moved on already—and, fucking fuck, that was what I had been doing, too. From across the blanket, the flirty back-and-forth looked desperate and sad. It looked ridiculous. It looked
obvious
.

I flopped back on the blanket, ignoring the twig that impaled my spine. Rose crawled over and started working my hair into cornrows with her mysteriously sticky hands. I knew Laura was watching me and that Nell and Evelyn probably were, too, wondering why I would cede my flirting rights to Cute Dad so summarily. It seemed obvious that everyone knew everything, that it had been clear to everyone we knew that due to a convenient confluence of circumstances, Sam and I had found ourselves that summer just that much more susceptible to the emotional equivalent of the common cold. We wanted to be noticed. We wanted to be sexy and desirable and more than someone’s spouse or parent. We wanted to be wanted, and it made us stupid.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I didn’t even know what it was I liked about Sam. He was nice. He had lovely brown eyes. We both liked lame movies. He was available in that unavailable way. There was the thrill of the illicit. I now knew he was good in bed. So
what
? We were just like any idiots drawn to hotel-room trysts. If we’d met in a bar somewhere when we were both single, I was willing to bet my nonexistent life savings that I’d never have thought twice about him. His screenplay! His ponytail! Jesus Christ!

And poor Harry. After all, he was still alive, still a person, still my husband. Even though we hadn’t spoken in months, there was this tether connecting us, and even though he was wrong to be
doing whatever it was he was doing, an insistent adult voice in my head pointed out that it didn’t give me permission to act badly, too. If anything, I had to be the good one, the example for our children, the moral Elmer’s that would keep this scrap heap of a family together.

Oh, STOP. You really must be the most boring woman in the world, you know this? This is your LIFE, Jenny Lipkin. This is the only one!

Listen. You had your life. You threw it away. Why don’t you just shut up?

Me shut up? Maybe I should have let you drown.

What kind of thing is that to say to me? I thought we were friends, kind of, a little. You are a real crab sometimes, you know that?

I had no way to explain it to her. This summer had shown me how difficult it was to go it alone, how soul-sucking. If I hadn’t had the rusalka, I wouldn’t have survived it. I found myself missing Harry and our old life so badly, it hurt. I could do both, I was pretty sure I could. I could be this new version of myself, making dresses, making money, happier and lighter, while also being his wife, their mother. It had to be possible. Didn’t it? Couldn’t it? I ignored the rusalka’s rueful laugh. What cynics these spirits were.

There I lay on the ground in the forest in the city, staring into the too bright sky, listening to Sam’s husky laugh. I may not have been perfect or extraordinary or even normal, but in that moment it felt okay to be lying there having my children climb all over me, their grubby fingers coiling in my hair. Had I noticed them all summer? Poor Betty and Rose had become like tiny coworkers—always there, barely known.

Betty peered curiously into my face. “What
doing
?”

“Um, I’m looking at the clouds,” I told her, scooting a little ways out from under the tree’s shade so that this might be true. “Looking for shapes.”

“Awesome,” said Betty, having obtained the word from somewhere and now happy to show it off, like a traded-for sticker. “Me, too.” She lay down beside me, and we touched our heads together and stared into the largely cloudless sky. Rose inched in between us, laughing at something. “Mermaid,” Betty said.

“Where?” I squinted. I didn’t see the mermaid, and wonderfully, I didn’t feel the rusalka. I reached out and squeezed Betty’s hand. “I see a heart,” I said. “All full of gooey, marshmallowy love.”

“Where?” she asked.

I pointed.

I left the picnic without really speaking to Sam. I wasn’t
sure what I was supposed to say to him at this point. Maybe I should have called to say,
I’m terribly sorry for sleeping with you, but if it’s all the same, let’s not actually have an affair
.
Cool? And for what it’s worth, good luck with Karen, she seems up for anything. Hey, you guys wanna go to the pool next week?
Everything was so murky here in the etiquetteless existence of the post-adultery world.

And then it happened on an ordinary whatever it was—Thursday, I think—yes, because it was after yoga and then toddler ballet (my bad little ballerina, decked out in her tutu and light-up sneakers, had been threatened with expulsion after having bitten two classmates) and a stop at the overpriced but convenient grocery store and then an overburdened schlep up the stairs with Rose squirming on my hip and Betty chanting, “Sponge-Bob! SpongeBob!” and me chanting, “No way, Jose, no way, Jose”—and then our grouchy next-door neighbor brushing past us on his way down and making a face as if we were a surfeit of skunks stinking our way into the building—and when I stuck the key into the lock, it opened too easily and I thought,
Shit, I left it unlocked?,
but no.

I almost didn’t recognize him, froze, heart racing. The rusalka—I’d
forgotten about her for a minute—surged like adrenaline.
My God. Are you kidding me? Jenny, whatever he says, don’t listen. No excuse could excuse this
. She made good points, that spectral friend of mine, I was just getting tired of hearing them.
I mean it now, mermaid. Go away.

I needed to think. I needed to think a thought of my own. A thought like:
Harry? But I’m not ready yet.
Because there he was, husband of mine, sitting at the kitchen table, his back to the door, his newly unfamiliar shoulder blades working beneath his T-shirt like vestigial wing bones. He was fingering a length of silk chiffon, and I had to stifle my instinct to scream,
Put that down! I need that for a skirt!

He stood up and turned around. I had expected some big reveal here, a half-burned face, a missing eye. I think I was hoping for a bedraggled knight home from the Crusades, or a virtuous youngest son who had completed his trials and proved his worth to the witch. But he looked, when he warily met my eyes, the same as always. A little tired, maybe, but the same, as if a rough night at the track had passed and not an entire summer. All the tender thoughts I’d been having for him in the wake of sleeping with Sam, talking to Sarah, all the guilty daydreams about how I would do anything to restore our sweetly nuclear family, leaked out of me in some psychic water-breaking. I wanted to kill him.

Betty, as if channeling my rage, collapsed onto the floor in an instantly top-velocity tantrum. “NO DADDY! NO DADDY! NO DADDY!”

Harry raised his eyebrows at me. I was not conscious of making any expression at all. I stroked Rose’s back proprietarily. She craned her neck with mild interest toward the newcomer. It broke my heart to think that even though she would never remember it, on some cellular level Rose had already lost her father, had absorbed his absence as she grew.

And then there was Betty, a dervish of tears, showing off how her tantrumming skills had improved in the past few months. Betty, who had been clutching Harry’s black comb as a talisman, sleeping with it tucked beneath her pillow like a warning to any errant tooth fairies. Betty, who had (I couldn’t have recognized this only now, could I?) transformed in response to his absence, who’d gone from a typical happy-go-lucky if mischievous two-year-old to a glowering menace who attacked other children. Betty, who had taken to responding to everything I said with a charming “Go away, Mommy”—this Betty now clung to my leg, her face shiny from crying-fit snot, screaming, “That’s not Daddy! Not my daddy! I want Mommy!”

I knelt down and squished her against a corner of my chest not occupied by the baby. “Shhhhh” was all I could think to say. “Shhhhhh.” I was not in the least bit happy to see my child so heartbroken and confused and sad—I’m not
that
bad—but I admit that a part of me smirked.
So there, Harry. You thought you could just drop back into our lives like nothing happened? What did you think, we’d throw you a welcome-home parade? Of course Betty hates you right now. We all do.

Even so, I experienced an unwelcome flicker of sympathy for the man who stood there with his arms futilely outstretched, his mouth open. He obviously couldn’t figure out what to say or do, and he seemed to just now realize what he had broken by leaving the way he did. I knew he wanted to step back into his family, to collect the ecstatic post-work greeting to which he had become accustomed, to be the revered relief pitcher who swooped in each evening and made everything okay again. Every time he stepped forward, Betty flinched, as if being approached by a noisy birthday-party clown, and howled louder.

We moved the scream show into the living room, and within a few minutes I’d somehow calmed her down, and sooner than I
would have expected, she was even smiling. Then Harry said, “I have something for you in my suitcase, half-pint.” The tiny traitor lit up, having forgiven, for the moment, everything. Kids.

“I want it! I want it!” Betty did her best impression of a pogo stick while Harry presented her with an elaborate baby doll. She shrieked, “It pees! Mommy, the dolly PEES!”

“Is that so,” I said, trying to stop Harry’s heart with my glare. It didn’t work. I tried harder. I watched Harry whirl Betty around in the air, now that she was allowing him to touch her, kissing her cheeks and smoothing her dark curls. “I missed you,” he said into her scalp, looking over her at me.

I raised my eyebrows. “I hope you brought me something better than that,” I said, nodding toward the doll.

He smiled apologetically, the expression of someone who’d forgotten to pick up milk on the way home. Or cigarettes. “I didn’t.”

I was seething. In all the time he’d been gone, all the times I’d imagined how or when he might return, I had never decided what I would say to him, and now that he was here, finally really actually here, I wanted not, as I would have guessed, as I had imagined so many times, to beat at his chest and scream at him and demand an explanation, but to cry, to collapse into his arms and cry. This too was his fault. Everything was his fault.

Harry stood up, Betty’s legs slung around his waist, her body pressed to his chest like a pink polka-dotted shield. “Jenny,” he said finally. “You’re looking well.”

“You think?” I was trembling all over, I couldn’t help it, and I released Rose onto the rug. She sat there blinking at Harry and smiled, showing off her big hillbilly tooth. “Surely you remember the baby?” I said over my shoulder as I hung up the diaper bag and tossed a couple of rattly plush toys toward Rose.

Harry looked genuinely wounded. He gently let Betty down and
got onto all fours, crawling toward Rose, who giggled and swatted her hands, doughy as tiny pork buns. “Rosie, my sweet,” he murmured, nestling his nose into her belly before scooping her up. She squealed in panic, tensing her back into a feline arch.