The Mermaid of Brooklyn (12 page)

He had been gone two weeks when I got the postcard. A postcard! He couldn’t even be bothered with an entire letter. It made me feel exposed and quivery; I imagined the inside of some dusty mailbox reading the note and mocking me. The whole thing was as predictable as it was surreal—the postmark claiming Nevada and the image on the card, of all things in the world, depicting the Coney Island Mermaid Parade with its greasy-looking, scantily clad women frozen in midsummer revelry on the scuzzy boardwalk, the ocean peaked merenguishly in the background.
Really, Harry? This was the postcard you wanted to send me?
Then again, I doubt he’d thought about it that much. Maybe he hadn’t even looked at it. He was doing things hastily these days, this much we knew.

“J,” he’d scratched out in his cramped hand. It was dead-giveaway leftie handwriting. I couldn’t believe I once found it adorable. How could I possibly have cared? In retrospect, the minutia of new love was so exhausting. “I want you to know some things: I’ll be back. I swear that I will. And I’m really, really sorry. I am. I just have some things I need to figure out. I know I don’t deserve you. Have my mother help out with anything you need. I’ll be back soon. I hope you can forgive me. My love to the girls. H.”

I read it over three times there in the vestibule of our building. Betty had unsteadily climbed halfway up the treacherous staircase before I came to my senses and hurried after her. What I really wanted was to punch the metal mailbox in its stupid keyhole-eyed face. How dare that smug compartment spit such a note at me? I stomped up the stairs, mad at the mailman, mad at the inventor of the postcard, mad at the designer of the postage stamp. After the girls were in bed, I read the card about eighty times more, like an errant student cramming for an exam. I wish I could report that I
did something dramatic and destructive with it—tore it up, set it on fire, ate it so that I could shit it out. Instead, feeling like I should cry but pressing my lips together instead, I climbed on top of a chair, reached up to the top bookshelf, and stuck it into our wedding keepsake box. Bouquet, guest book, postcard from the road. There was my marriage, preserved for the future.

I would have this thought a dozen more times in my life, and each time it would zing throughout my skull with the electricity of a real revelation. But it was true, wasn’t it, how you came to hate the very aspects of a person you first fell in love with? In most cases, I’m sure “hate” was too strong a word—Laura complaining about Will’s workaholic behaviors she once admired; Sarah bitching about how
nice
her husband was to everyone all the time. But with Harry’s twin demons, compulsiveness and impulsiveness, I think “hate” was exactly the right word. I wanted to hunt him down and wring his neck. More than that, I wanted him never to have done this thing to us at all.

I didn’t look at the card again, and I didn’t receive another one, and—I know this is unforgivable—I didn’t tell Harry’s family about it. But in the worst moments of the months that followed, I thought of it up in that box like a kind of talisman. The card meant that he was alive and he would be found when he was ready to be found. The card meant that I wasn’t to look for him or imagine him dead in some accident or pester the police. My work for now was to survive.

Fred found out how much a private investigator would cost and decided to wait a bit longer. “I have a really good feeling,” I kept saying to him, to Sylvia—they surely thought I was insane or else guilty of an expertly concealed murder. “I’m sure he’s okay! And I’m sure he’ll be back when he’s ready.” It would have made things easier to tell them about the postcard, in case Harry didn’t think to
send them one, too, which apparently, he hadn’t. But I couldn’t. I wanted the card to be mine and mine alone. To tell the truth, none of us had expected his return would take that long. Another week or two, we gave it, until he won big enough or his money ran out. For once it was hugely fortuitous that Harry was employed by his family; despite their own financial woes, Sylvia assured me that Harry’s paycheck would keep appearing in our bank account. Less his sales commission, which was often most of our income, but it was something. In the meantime, I became a subject-avoiding ninja, backflipping and shimmy-footing around the edges of conversations. Laura was the only non-Lipkin who knew what was going on. His friends were not my friends—they were hardly even
his
friends—so in his absence, we had no contact. My day-to-day acquaintances were used to not seeing Harry when things got busy at Ever So Fresh, so they were easily deferred with vague apologies. I got used to our new Harry-less existence the way you get used to a new puppy or getting your period. For a week or two it seemed like nothing would ever be the same; I would jolt awake and feel normal for a few seconds and then remember with a great ca-chunk of dread. I told myself that worse things had happened to people. I tried to believe myself. Soon enough it was just life. I dragged myself through the days, trying not to think very much or, especially, to feel anything.

Sometimes I think that we are a secret tribe—because in
saner times, I know that I’m not alone, it’s why they invented antidepressants, for heaven’s sake—living life perched on the edge of the abyss. For those of us in this tribe, it’s a matter of circumstance. Here is the half-assed version of chaos theory that I privately use to explain my moods, which always feel as though they have been pressed down on me from without rather than bubbling up from within: Somewhere a breeze gusts, a window slams, a feather falls, and eventually, this confluence collides with an unfortunate conversation or a passing thought. If all this happens to happen to a person like me, and that person is in possession of prescriptions or a pistol or a precipice, that person might—poof!—disappear. If the feather never fell, if that person weren’t alone with a length of rope when the dark mood swarmed and massed, everything might be different. I know I’m getting gruesome. All I mean to say is that I don’t believe, especially after what I’ve been through, that our fates are sealed, that some people are destined to be suicides, or that even suicides always have compelling reasons to do what they do. I mean, this is true. I know it for a fact. I remember.

The day I died, it was hot, just unbelievably way too hot, the kind of hot that made everyone creep around like sloths in sandals, attempting to cool themselves with makeshift fans—folded take-out menus, MetroCards, hands—and saying to each other, “Hot enough for ya?” because their brains were too melted to say anything less idiotic. It was hot enough. It was hot enough for anyone. The sky was the unwholesome color of singed laundry. Even Juniper just panted down the block, peed, and then begged to go back upstairs, where the window air-conditioning units leaked intentions of coolness. Betty went limp in the middle of the street, melted into a whiny version of herself. Rose stuck to me. None of us had slept. During a midnight fit, the baby’s razor-like fingernail had gouged a long scrape down my neck that stung when my sweat welled into it. The day before, I’d run into Nell, the annoyingly perfect mom about town, who was weathering the weather with her customary grace and who said, “Oh,
dear
. I heard Harry’s been MIA for weeks.
Jenny.
You poor
thing
! I’m
so sor
ry. You must be worried
sick.
” Had it been that long already? Her hair was pulled away from her face in a movie-star-fresh swirl. Her sunglasses obscured her eyes. I wondered who had told her. I didn’t see why Nell of all people should get to glory in my misfortune. It also seemed to signal that this misfortune was real enough for people to know about. That it was here to stay, part of me.
Jenny, you know, short, a little chubby, curly hair, husband disappeared?

What makes a person snap? In movies and books, it’s always something particular—a big emotional blowup, a letter received, a sign acknowledged—but in real life, things are never so simple. For me it wasn’t. It’s not that I was abused as a child and then something reminded me of that. It’s not that I learned, reading through his old e-mails or snooping in boxes, that Harry had a girlfriend
or a boyfriend or some other double life besides the one I already knew about. It was hot, and I was tired, and I hadn’t been eating well—grazing on Betty’s leftover kid food, and then, starved from a marathon nursing session, binging on sad combinations: freezer-burned ice cream, peanut-butter tortillas, rice with ketchup. I was drained. I was post-drained. I was empty. Maybe most important, the logistics were right. There were a few bottles of pumped breast milk in the fridge. I’d gone grocery shopping the day before, and the crowded kitchen shelves were Tetrised with Betty’s favorites: mac and cheese, Cheerios, cinnamon grahams. I didn’t have any errands to do. And I had a babysitter. For a woman in my state, a free afternoon was a dangerous proposition.

I had the thought in the morning, first thing, as I lay there more exhausted than when I’d lain down for the night.
I don’t want to do this anymore.
I dismissed it and peeled myself from the bed. Moments later Betty marched over while I was nursing Rose and smacked the baby’s leg. “Betty!” I said. She looked just like Harry when she was mad.

“No milk for the baby,” she said. When I was pregnant with Rose, I’d braced myself for a bit of sibling rivalry, but sometimes it was ridiculous. I understood Betty not wanting the baby to drool on her toys, but the baby wasn’t allowed to drool on me, either?

“Sweetie, the baby needs her milk.” Also, where did a two-and-a-half-year-old get off being such a grouch for no reason? “I think you woke up on the wrong side of your big-girl bed,” I told her.

Betty frowned at Rose, who beamed back at her—and there, in a nutshell, was the relationship between sisters. Jeez. I thought of Sarah, how, when we were little, I had adored her with a passion she recoiled from like a plague. Betty stamped her foot. “No! This is
my
mommy,” she said, trying to climb up on my lap, elbowing the baby out of the way.

“Hey, hey, now. Relax. Gentle with your sister.”

“No,” she said, still frowning. She sat on my knee, arms crossed. I adjusted Rose into what my lactation consultant called a football hold (as if I’d known how you hold a football before breast-feeding class), nestling her on a nearby throw pillow so she could finish nursing. Juniper came up sniffing to investigate. It was getting awfully crowded but sort of sweet, I was thinking, until Betty smacked the baby again, this time right on her soft-spotted little skull and as hard as she could. I shot up, lifting Rose and upsetting Betty and Juniper, who both tumbled to the floor. “No!” I cried. “Do
not
hit the baby!” Rose, her meal interrupted, started crying, and the dog began to leap around, excited by the chaos.

Betty gathered an assortment of developmentally appropriate blocks—I realized that all those responsibly crafted wooden toys from Sweden were just thinly disguised bludgeons—and hurled them at Rose one by one, aiming for her head. “But! I! Hate! The! BAAAAABBBBYYYYY!” she screamed. I sent down a silent apology to our neighbors as Betty pounded the hardwood. And then I stood in the middle of the apartment, Betty wailing, Rose wailing, the dog howling. Just stood there. I guess it could have seemed funny, but at the time it didn’t. It really, really didn’t. It felt like a nightmare. A nightmarishly boring nightmare. It was awful to have the thoughts I was having, to wonder if I’d made a huge life-level mistake by having a second baby, by having any babies at all, if everyone would be better off without me. I would never admit to anyone how I stood there and stared. A better mother—any mother—would have come up with some way to calm Betty or reprimand her or
something
. But I watched her like she was a stranger. She
was
a stranger. She wailed and shrieked, transformed into an ugly, pug-faced little monster. It’s awful, and I don’t want to admit
that I did it, but I did, I screamed, “Betty! Shut UP! JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP FOR ONCE!”