The Mermaid of Brooklyn (46 page)

“And I feel miserable, which my doctor said is a good sign.”

“I’m so glad, Laura. I hope you continue to feel utterly miserable.”

She laughed. “Me, too.”

I told her to let me know what I could do to help with Emma, promised her all our baby stuff, and hugged her again. As soon as I hit the street, I called her, and when she answered, I said, “Hey, I forgot to ask you something. When we’re old, want to go on a trip to Egypt with me?” She laughed. “Of course! Can we wear fanny packs?” “Future fanny packs,” I said. “They will hold our future passports but also get future Internet and allow us to breathe underwater.” “Done.” “Okay, good. Later.” “Yes.”

Somehow her news made me feel like we were all going to be all right. The babies didn’t care about our weird petty things. They just wanted to be born and to grow toward the light. An unaccountable happiness loosened my limbs. I stopped on the way home to buy a bright armful of blooms at the bodega, as if I could capture the feeling of lightness and make it zing around my home, reflecting off the children’s crowns like the sun.

Somehow I got talked into a Lipkin family picnic at the end
of September to celebrate, of all things, my thirty-fifth birthday. It was a perfect Indian summer, if anyone called it that anymore. The heat that had leaned against us since spring, like a tumor displacing organs, had dissolved, dissipated. Betty frolicked around the meadow, bringing us poisonous bouquets of berries, feathers, the first changed leaves. By now the baby allowed Harry to hold her, and Fred and Cynthia chased around Juniper, who miraculously minded them, though she did pause to lunch on a desiccated squirrel carcass. Sylvia presided from an unraveling folding chair at the edge of the blanket. After we’d eaten our sandwiches and watermelon slices and bean salad and pickles and the last of the Ever So Fresh candy stock, Harry and I went for a stroll along the edges of the woods and down to the boathouse. It was a day when I felt less furious at him than usual, maybe only because the weather was so nice. We walked by the lake, scummed solid with green algae that a few resigned swans mucked their way through. Harry reached out to hold my hand. For the first time since he’d been back, I let him.

It was annoying to admit to myself, but it felt good, being with Harry. I’d missed the me I was with him in our best moments.
Certainly, things would have to be different. Because I also liked the me I had unearthed—that the rusalka had dredged up—and it was weird for me to feel this way, to feel that there was a kernel of myself that was undespicable, that I was capable of life, of living, of being whole. So I didn’t protest when he took me in his arms and, to the lewd hooting of a passing flock of summer-fat geese, he kissed me.

It’s a curious feeling to have a second first kiss with your own husband. Though I wouldn’t recommend the months of abandonment and anger and loneliness, it was a lot more exciting than the welcome-home peck on the lips we’d gotten into the habit of before he left, complete with stomach quivers and tooth clashing and flesh flushing. Everything about Harry seemed as simultaneously new and familiar as it had that first time. Maybe, in a way, it was a true first kiss. After all, I had died and come back to life and learned to live a whole new way since he’d been gone, and the new me was kissing the new him, and thankfully, since we had those kids and all our books and stuff were mixed together and everything, we fit.

You know how, in certain kinds of stories, a kiss can awaken a slumbering maiden, transform a creature into another kind of creature? I can’t say I ever thought much of that sort of scene until the whole thing with Harry happened. When you think about it, the idea that pressing your mouth against someone else’s mouth can be romantic, can be something your body desperately wants you to do, is weird enough—all that saliva and plaque! Then to think that by kissing this man, I could turn myself inside out? I know it’s strange. But that’s just what happened. What I mean to say is that I could feel the rusalka, my dear old mermaid, who in recent weeks had all but evaporated, emptying out of me like an exhale of smoke. For a moment it hurt. For a moment I was terrified, convinced that without her, I would collapse like a sleeve of snakeskin. Then, though I
know this can’t be true, I could have sworn I heard a watery plunk, as if something had dropped into the pond beside us.

I can only imagine she was pretty pissed once she realized what she’d done, finding herself flattened out in a shallow divot of weed-choked water, more likely to be razor-burned by paddle boats’ bottoms than to encounter any fallen sailors to seduce or wanton women to inhabit. I don’t imagine she ended up staying very long. No, I see her hitching a ride with some poor lost soul as far as the river, and then traveling out to sea.

My eternal thanks are due:

to the intrepid PJ Mark, Cecile Barendsma, and the whole team at Janklow & Nesbit;

to Sally Kim, my kind-hearted, big-brained visionary of an editor, from whom I’ve learned so much, and to her wonderful crew at Touchstone, including Allegra Ben-Amotz, Cherlynne Li, and Beth Thomas, who helped make these words into a book;

to the sagacious Jenny Geras, who really
gets
it (and not just because she’s a Jenny), and the good people at PanMacmillan;

to my forever first-readers, Lauren Haldeman and Amanda Fields;

to my mom-friends, particularly Sarah Holden, font of sewing expertise; Gilly Berenson, fancy shoe consultant; and the woman at the playground who said, “I just want a book for moms like me”;

to all the women who watched my children so that I could write, and especially my mother, who once flew across the country so that I could have a moment to concentrate;

to the original Jenny Lipkin, my great-grandmother, who had a ne’er-do-well husband she divorced and remarried, who supported her girls with her virtuoso sewing, and who, according to my grandmother, once had her life saved by a pair of shoes;

to my amazing children, for never being colicky, and for reminding me daily what it is to see the world with scrubbed-clean eyes;

and above all to my husband, Adam, who has supported me in every way throughout my writing life, and who has, kind soul, allowed me to sneak away from my perfect family again and again so that I could write about a disgruntled mother. The life of a writer’s spouse, I imagine, is a tiring one. My apologies, and my thanks.

TOUCHSTONE READING GROUP GUIDE

The Mermaid of Brooklyn

FOR DISCUSSION

1. What do you think Jenny learns from her time with her mermaid? How does she change from the beginning of the novel to the end? What are her strengths and her weaknesses? How are your perceptions of these altered throughout the story?

2. How do Jenny’s ideas about what constitutes a “good” or “successful” mother change from the beginning of the novel to the end? Consider the revelations she has about herself, as well as about Sylvia and her own mother.

3. Discuss Jenny’s attraction to Sam, aka Cute Dad, before the rusalka comes into her life. Do you think she would’ve acted on her feelings if there weren’t a mermaid in her head urging her to? Why or why not?

4. What do you feel Sam’s motivations were in his pursuit of Jenny? Did your opinion of him shift throughout the novel? Toward the end, Laura plays Jenny Sam’s diner recording. Were you surprised by anything he said?

5. After sleeping with Sam, Jenny thinks:
“I’d found that people who said things like ‘I have to start thinking about myself’ tended to be people who were very good at thinking about themselves. And Sam and I were always saying things to each other like ‘We have to think about ourselves.’ Did we really? Was there anything so valuable in thinking about ourselves more than we already did, which was almost constantly?”
. Do you think there is a difference between thinking
about yourself and caring for yourself? Do you think sleeping with Sam was ultimately helpful for Jenny?

6. Jenny seems to have something of a love-hate relationship with New York; though she and the other Park Slope moms complain about the unique difficulties of raising children in the city, they continue to stay. What do you think it is that keeps them from moving? Do you think they see their frustrations as something of a badge of honor? Do you find that’s true in your life as well?

7. Think about all the different women who influence Jenny’s life. What does she learn from each of them at various points throughout the novel?

8. There are a multitude of characters—from Jenny to Sam to Laura—in the book who are constantly struggling to appear as though their lives match this grand, group-perpetuated fantasy of what family-dom in Park Slope should feel like. How does this affect them? What does this say about the power of belonging versus our intrinsic desire to stand out? Why do you think people put such stock in appearances, when the truth is that everyone has problems, often the same ones?

9. Most fairy-tale heroines are rescued by magic in their darkest moments, just as Jenny is. But often they realize that the magic isn’t enough to save them, just as Jenny does. If you could have a magic, what would you want yours to be? What would you do with the type of second chance Jenny receives?

10. At several points Jenny considers that no matter how dramatic personal problems feel, they are shared experiences, part of a larger narrative. The rusalka, too, points out that Jenny’s everyday
struggles are nothing new, that
“maybe if mothers had time to write, all the old epic poems would be about trips to the grocery store instead of wars”
. Do you agree?

11. Laura and Jenny go from having a fun, if somewhat shallow, friendship to something much more lasting by the end of the novel. What do you think causes the shift? Does their friendship remind you of any relationships in your life?

12. Where did you think Harry had gone? Were you surprised when he returned? What do you foresee for Jenny and Harry?

13. Jenny recalls her magazine days as having a haze of perfection about them, though she knows in reality she had an equal number of frustrations then. Do you think this grass-is-greener trap is one we all fall into during difficult times in our lives? Has it ever happened to you?

14. Similarly, she also reflects (about her daily life as a stay-at-home mom):
“I hated that I felt like I had to be unhappy in order for it to count as important”
. What do you think about her statement? Do you feel that today we equate stress with importance and contentment with a lack of ambition? Why or why not?

15. Jenny finds that sitting down at her sewing machine is one of her only ways to find a minute of peace and express herself. For Laura, her late-night interviews offer the same type of outlet. What hobby or talent allows you to reveal yourself more clearly to others? Is there something specific about you or something you are good at that you feel draws others to you?

A CONVERSATION WITH AMY SHEARN

You note on your blog that the book is (very!) loosely based on the life of your great-grandmother. What elements did you draw from her story?

Well! My paternal great-grandmother’s name was Jenny Lipkin, and she was married to a ne’er-do-well named Harry who supposedly had ties to the Chicago mob—but you didn’t hear that from me. He was notorious for leaving to buy cigarettes and not coming home for months or years, which I would think would be a very annoying habit in a husband. They actually divorced once and later remarried. (When I asked my grandmother why she thought Jenny would take Harry back so many times, she shrugged and said, “She loved him.” This, from the least romantic woman in the world.) Jenny and Harry had three daughters, Rose, Betty, and my grandmother May; and when Harry was gone Jenny supported the family with her sewing. According to family lore, Jenny became famous in their corner of Chicago for being able to perfectly copy department store dresses. She was also very small in stature, with tiny feet, and particularly in her later years, given to grouchiness.

Everything I know about her has been dispensed in dribs and drabs by my grandmother May, who is now in her late nineties and not much given to reminiscing about the past. About nine years ago we were shopping for shoes for my wedding and May rather casually said, “Did I ever tell you about how a pair of shoes saved my mother’s life?” This was a story that only the women in the family had been told—my father had never heard it. But according to May, back when Jenny was still in the old country (some unspecified region of Lithuania) and Harry had gone to America and not yet sent
for her (probably they were married, possibly she was pregnant), Jenny was feeling low. She climbed onto a bridge and considered jumping. But then she looked back and saw her shoes, a fancy pair of lace-up boots of which she was very fond. Remember that she had tiny feet and Zappos didn’t exist yet, so good shoes in her size were hard to come by. Jenny thought about how she didn’t want anyone to take her shoes. And then, she didn’t jump.