If We Lived Here (20 page)

Chapter
19

T
he noise that came through Emma’s speaker when she pressed Listen was like a pack of laughing hyenas. She wondered if her buzzer system was broken, and pressed Speak. “Excuse me?”

“Sorry, Emmy.” Max’s voice. “Aimee and Caleb were screaming their hellos.”

“The kids are here?” That had not been part of the plan. In addition to the problem of how all of her and Nick’s stuff was going to fit in Max’s van with two extra bodies, Emma was nervous about those bodies entering her apartment, which was currently all sharp edges and dangerous implements. She pressed Listen, hoping for an explanation, but heard only chaos. “I’ll buzz you up,” she said, then ran around picking up loose nails and tacks and an X-Acto knife while Max and his kids climbed the flights of stairs.

They burst through her door like a sweaty storm, the kids squirming free of their father’s grasp, then scurrying away to investigate the apartment’s corners and hiding spots. With so many people present the space felt even more cramped than usual. This might make it easier to say good-bye, Emma reasoned.

“So sorry about the kiddos.” Max sounded exhausted, like it was midnight instead of nine a.m. “Alysse wanted to keep them out of Hebrew school because of the bomb threats at that temple.”

“You mean the one in Crown Heights?” Max nodded, and Emma felt a prick of pride at knowing this Judaism-related news item, which she’d heard an hour ago on NPR.

“Apparently they’re planning to install metal detectors at the entrance to the sanctuary. Can you believe that?”

“But, Max, that’s, like, fifty miles from where you live.”

“More like thirty.”

“Well, it might as well be a world away, considering how different the two places are. Crown Heights is a pretty poor area, with Hassids and a black community basically living on top of each other. The clashes have been going on forever. Isn’t Irvington still, like, ninety-five percent Jewish and a hundred percent upper-middle class?”

“Look, I’m not defending Alysse’s decision. It’s what she wanted, and she’d already planned a JCC fund-raiser today, so here we are, the kids and me. Sometimes there are things you just go along with. One day when you’re married you’ll understand.”

“All right-y.” Emma felt belittled by the implication that she didn’t know how relationships worked. She reminded herself that Max was here doing her a favor. “Nick’s on his way over. Why don’t you two load up the car, and I’ll take the kids to the park.”

“Thanks, Emmy, I could use a break. You know that Christmas carol Nick taught them at Rosh Hashanah? They’ve been screaming it on auto-repeat all morning.”

Serves you right,
she thought. “I’ll stick to Hanukkah songs at the park.”

 

Passing through the gate to the park’s play area, Emma felt a thrill, as if she were accessing a club’s VIP room. Adults had to be accompanied by a child to enter, and while in theory Emma understood the rationale of keeping out creeps and perverts, she’d always felt weirdly excluded; if she wanted to swing on the public monkey bars, she thought it should’ve been within her rights to do so. Before she had a chance to warn Aimee and Caleb to stay within her view, they were off, swallowed into the swarm of city kids.

Alone now, Emma examined her surroundings. Aside from the children, there were two main clusters of women, plus a stray man or two—one group was mostly late-thirtysomethings, mostly white, mostly holding coffee cups from Ost or Ninth Street Espresso, all well dressed in that fashionable-but-not-trying-too-hard way; the other group was a livelier, more diverse crowd, mostly non-white and of varying ages, some speaking Spanish. Each group gave off an intimate vibe, like these were their people and this was their hangout: the moms and the nannies, Emma assumed. She herself wasn’t sure where to stand. That is, until she spotted a lone woman in a corner, who looked a bit like Annie, only heavier and with curlier hair. Emma missed her friend, which may have been why she approached the woman.

Emma waved hello, and the woman introduced herself as Rosie, then launched into a mile-a-minute monologue, as if this were her first opportunity in weeks to speak. “That’s my Chaz over on the slide. He’ll be five next month. He looks older, but he’s just big for his age. I can’t decide if that’s going to help him or hurt him in the kindergarten application process. What a nightmare, right?—all those tours and interviews and IQ tests, as if they’re applying to college. Have you started all that with yours?” Rosie didn’t wait for an answer, so Emma couldn’t clarify that she was just an aunt. “Of course my ma wants us to ship out to the suburbs, move into her leaky basement in Jersey, and send Chaz to the schools out there. Someone shoot me if I have to move back in with my ma.” Rosie popped a piece of gum into her mouth. “Want one? It’s Nicorette.” Emma shook her head. “Remember when they used to let you smoke in here? Some of the snooty types would give you the stink-eye, but screw ’em; I always exhaled the other way.”

Rosie snapped at her gum. “Anyway, I may just end up out in Jersey. Chaz’s dad doesn’t give us a dime unless I shake him down like the Mafia, so we’re stuck in a crappy studio over on Avenue C. But it makes me feel better, living in the city, like I’m not being totally robbed of my twenties. What a ball and chain kids are, am I right? You gotta get a sitter to go out, and the kid doesn’t care if you’ve got the worst hangover of the twenty-first century, you still hafta get up and take him out to play the next day. On the plus side, I’ll only be thirty-six when Chaz is off to college, God willing, and then I get my freedom back.”

After this torrent of information, Emma felt tongue-tied. “He’s very fast on the slide,” she said moronically, then did the math: Rosie must’ve had her son when she was eighteen, which put her at twenty-three now; she looked older, her eyes heavy with bags.

“Who’s yours?”

Emma pointed to her niece and nephew, who were swinging side by side on the monkey bars. It seemed too late to mention that they weren’t really hers. Rosie nodded. “Confession: I kind of can’t stand other people’s kids. No offense, it’s nothing personal.”

“None taken.”

A moment later a teary Aimee rushed up to Emma, exhibiting a freshly scraped knee. Caleb followed closely behind: “That girl pushed her,” he announced, a little too gleefully, if you asked Emma. Emma followed his finger and landed upon a kid who was small but seemed older than Aimee—age four? five?; she was headed for the swings. Emma knew she was supposed to do something, but what—yell at the girl? Tell Aimee to go work it out on her own? Find the mom or nanny associated with the girl and talk it through? She felt woefully uninformed and feared that whatever action she chose, she might violate some complicated bylaw of playground politics.

Rosie, who’d been swiping at her phone, humming what sounded like a Justin Bieber song (Emma was embarrassed to even recognize it), stepped in. “Hey you,” she yelled at the offender. The girl turned away, casting down her eyes. “Yeah, you, I know you can hear me. Get your butt over here and say you’re sorry. No one likes a bully. Come on!” The girl did as she was told, looking frightened, and Aimee stopped her whimpering. “It’s okay,” Aimee mumbled.

Rosie returned to her screen, waving away Emma’s thank-you. Emma then watched as the girl ran across the playground and collapsed her body into one of the nannies. The woman shot a dirty look in Rosie and Emma’s direction, which Rosie seemed to ignore. Although under her breath she spat, “Stupid cunt,” in reference, Emma hoped, to the adult and not the little girl.

It was exhausting trying to keep track of Caleb and Aimee among all the small bodies flitting around at a fever pitch, and it seemed like hours later when Max finally appeared at the park gate. He waved to Emma, and Rosie looked up from her phone, as if she had a radar for the arrival of testosterone in the estrogen-heavy play space.

“Holy shit, is that your man?” she said, then whistled. “Lucky you.”

“My brother, actually.”

“Ooh-la-la.”

“Hey, Em,” he said, oblivious to the woman next to him who was now thrusting her chest forward. “We’re all packed. How’s it going out here?”

Aimee and Caleb must’ve heard their father’s voice; they tumbled over, yelling, “Daddy,” and flinging themselves into his arms.

“Did you guys have fun? You’re covered in filth!”

“That’s city living for you,” said Emma.

“I got into a fight, and my knee is scrapened up, and Auntie Emma watched me go down the slide, and Caleb found a bro-kened glass bottle in the sand.”

“Wow, Aims.” Max’s eyes widened. “Let’s go clean you guys up.”

“Nice meeting you,” Emma said to Rosie, but the woman barely glanced up. Emma felt a funny stab of hurt, like she’d been cast out of the mom club (a club she’d wanted no part of in the first place). She hoisted her niece into a piggyback, and they set off to find Nick and the van full of all of Emma’s belongings.

 

Annie’s building featured on-call daycare, so they dropped off the kids then set about hauling their things, some into basement storage and some into the guest room, which was already crowded with parcels from Barneys and Tiffany and Jonathan Adler—the wedding gift bounty.

“You know, it looked a lot like this when Alysse and I first moved in together,” said Max, rolling a suitcase into the guest room. “We were staying in her parents’ basement while we looked for our own place. We had nowhere to put any of our things, so we just lived among the boxes. It was still a thrill.” That’s right, Emma remembered—the day after their wedding, Max had moved into Alysse’s childhood home in New Jersey, where she’d still been living while commuting to the city for work. They’d wanted an apartment in Hoboken—Alysse’s parents would’ve never stood for their daughter living in big, bad Manhattan—when the Feits announced their move to Spain, and Max and his new wife swooped in to claim the house in Westchester. It seemed odd and old-fashioned that the two of them had only ever lived in their parents’ houses.

“It’s a real adventure, living together for the first time,” Max said. Emma nodded dismissively. Max and Alysse had gotten hitched and moved in after one of those formal courtships straight out of
Fiddler on the Roof.
Emma doubted they’d even had premarital sex. Max continued: “It’s funny, even with Cindy—”

“Wow, Cindy,” Emma blurted. “I haven’t thought of her in years.” The name of Max’s college girlfriend seemed out of a different lifetime. Cindy had been non-Jewish, but willing to convert, if Emma remembered correctly.

“Yeah, well, even though she’d been sleeping over at my dorm for months—her roommate was an epic snorer—when we officially started living together, it felt different. We learned so much about each other.”

“Huh.”

“Like how her room was always a mess, but she kept the insides of her dresser drawers freakishly neat. And how she liked a beverage in the shower—she kept juice and seltzer by the towels.”

“That’s bizarre.”

“Cindy was a trip.” Emma wanted to ask her brother if he missed her, that girl she remembered as a spark plug, always up for an adventure, pretty much the opposite of Alysse. Even back then, Emma recalled thinking Cindy had been much too interesting for her brother. Max looked immersed in thought, so she didn’t interrupt.

“I don’t know, though. I feel like I already know everything about Nick.”

“I bet not. It’ll be interesting to see. I’m psyched for you guys.”

“Someone talking about me?” Nick appeared in the room, shouldering the body pillow Emma liked to sleep curled up with.

“Geez,” said Max, “I thought it was bad having a three-year-old show up in my bed at night, but that thing’s crazy. A serious cock block, eh, Nick?” Emma smirked at the comment her brother never would’ve made in front of his wife.

“We manage with an occasional ménage à pillow,” said Nick. Emma blushed at the dorky joke, and chucked a pillow at Nick. He deflected with the larger pillow.

“If this is some kind of foreplay, I’m out,” Max said. Emma rolled her eyes.

“Well, I think that’s everything,” said Nick. “All that’s left in the van is a layer of Goldfish crumbs and a stuffed penguin.”

“You sure the penguin isn’t yours, Emmy? Need more company to go beddy-bye?”

“Oh, shut up,” she said. “So should we grab the kids and order pizza, as promised in your mover contract?”

Max consulted his watch—Emma noticed he’d swapped out his usual Cartier for a sports kind on a fabric band; it looked good on him. “I actually think we’d better get going. Alysse is making tacos for dinner, and she’ll have a fit if we come home full of pizza.”

Emma was surprised to feel disappointed. “Okay, next time then. I still owe you.”

“For sure.” While they hugged, Emma went for the back of Max’s neck, where she knew he was most ticklish. Predictably he began convulsing with giggles, looking like his ten-year-old self; his laugh sounded just like his son’s.

“Pathetic, as usual,” she said.

“My sneaky sister,” he said. “I better scram before you launch another attack.”

Watching him go, Emma thought about how today had felt like the old days, the two of them just hanging out together. And it was fun to be with her niece and nephew in the city. Maybe once she and Nick settled into a new place, she’d suggest hosting them for a sleepover; they could go to one of those trendy origami workshops or a kid yoga class, then hit up the Central Park carousel and overload on sugar at Dylan’s Candy Bar.

Alone now with Nick, Emma looked around at all their boxes. “We should probably unpack and relaunch our apartment search.”

“You’re right, we probably should.”

“But I don’t really want to, do you?”

“Nah.”

“If I know Annie, they’ve got cases of fine wine stashed somewhere in this place. How about we hunt one down and go unwind on the roof deck?”