The Mermaid of Brooklyn (15 page)

Oh, right. I explained about Harry as best as I could. Then I moved on to my own questions. “And you? Got tired of the whole ‘unresting spirit’ thing?” It was your average, everyday getting-to-know-you kind of talk. And where are you from? And how long have you been dead? “What was it—what made you do it? I do know a little bit about your kind. An unloyal husband? An illegitimate baby?”

But she was offended.
What? What kind of thing is this you ask me? What’s with you?

“Jeez. Sorry. I figured since you—since we—” Since we what?
Since she had possessed me? Saved my life? Compelled me to jump in the first place? It was a tricky relationship to define.

Bubbe,
please. Let’s focus here. I have some ideas. But first we’re going to need some money.
Ah. Wasn’t that always the way?

In the morning we embarked on a mind-numbing round of errands, which, I’m sorry, is what you get when you possess a stay-at-home mom. I walked briskly, propelled by this chatty new force within. Every now and then my knees would buckle. I think she was trying to do the walking part herself, relearning in my legs. I understood her desire, though I wasn’t in love with the idea of lurching down Seventh Avenue in a perpetual palsy. These were, I admit, unusual times.

We eventually made it to the bank. I’d realized that, humiliatingly, I didn’t know the password to access our accounts online. How had I let Harry take over? I wouldn’t have imagined myself this way, but here I was, a housewife who never saw my own bills or bank statements, who was made anxious at the thought of handling anything by herself. The more I considered these things, the more my sadness festered into a hot irritation. I found myself wondering not what had I done to Harry or what he had done to me but, um, how were our 401(k) investments doing? Did we pay our car insurance monthly or annually? Had we ever started the 529 college plans we said we would? I hadn’t always been this way. Once I had lived alone, traveled alone, balanced my checkbook—in some distant alternate reality a half decade in the past—and now I needed to access that part of myself. Today. In the fluorescent buzz of the bank, while Betty whined in her stroller and Rose whined in her sling, I transferred most of our down-payment-fund savings account into my old personal checking account, which had been dwindling down to cobwebby dregs and which I hoped Harry did not realize he had access to. We would live off of this while he
was gone. If he never came back, the plan would need to be reassessed—a contingency that, like the cost of three-bedroom apartments in our neighborhood, I could stay sane only by ignoring.

Now for some housecleaning. And I don’t mean that crazy-cuckoo-Sylvia-lady kind of cleaning. I mean, let’s get ready to live.
At home I cleared off the answering machine, including all the aging messages containing only an ominous click of disconnection—a well-trained mistress, or a weirdly considerate bookie, or perhaps a string of disappointed telemarketers. I clicked through every file on Harry’s computer, searching for clues and finding only a disconcertingly large stash of pornography (“Psh,” Laura said dismissively when I called her in a weirded-out panic, “completely normal. As long as there are no animals involved, I wouldn’t worry.”). The rusalka was a believer in feng shui. Harry’s stuff had to go. I spent a sleepless night clearing off his cluttered desk that hulked in a corner of our bedroom and emptying his side of our cramped closet. It called up all the ruthlessness I’d learned from living in New York apartments. Sentiment was for the suburbs. We didn’t have the space.

The next time Sylvia came over, I asked her to take everything and store the body-sized duffels in her basement, saying it was all too painful to look at. Surprisingly, she agreed. That was the thing about being a little crazy sometimes. People were really accommodating when they were afraid of being responsible for an episode.

That afternoon I sold Harry’s television for cheap on Craigslist, unloading it to an incredulous and psyched college student who changed my hall lightbulb on his way out. Betty wept when the boy came to take the TV away. “Elmo?” she said mournfully. “Wiggles?” The rusalka barked out orders, a spectral director.
Don’t think.
I took off my wedding band and the jelly-bean-sized engagement diamond, wrapped them in a wad of Kleenex, and stuck them in the top drawer of my nightstand.
He is the one who left.

That wasn’t the worst of it. How can I explain myself? I was in the mood for betrayal. After the television ran off, I called Fred. “I need you to come pick up Juniper.”

He was driving somewhere, cursing at traffic. “Jenny? Hello? Why, what’s wrong with the dog?”

“Nothing. She’s a great dog. You like dogs, don’t you?”

“Well, yeah,” he said suspiciously. “What’s going on over there?”

“I just can’t do this all on my own. It’s ridiculous. She’s Harry’s dog, anyway.”

Betty was watching me, alarmed. I turned away from her.

“Jenny, I’m staying with my mother. You know she won’t let that dog in the house.”

“If no one picks Juniper up by tomorrow afternoon, I’m taking her to the pound,” I said. Betty stood with her hands in fists, emitting a shriek of cartoony distress. I covered the phone and whispered, “Not
really
! Stop shouting, honey, please!” Fred’s voice pixilated robotically, and I hung up. Juniper ran over as if I’d whistled for her (not that she ever came when someone actually wanted her) and rested her slobbery head on my knee. I patted her muzzle and stood up. My heart pulsed with pain once, twice, thrice. Then I closed my eyes, shook my head, and the pain fizzled and dissipated, leaving behind a sense of calm, like an existential Alka-Seltzer.

By the next day, Juniper was gone—Fred made Cynthia take her—and I found myself staring at the crusty length of the kitchen floor where her food and water dishes had been overturned so many times. Harry and I once used our sweet treatment of the dog as evidence of our good-parent potential, so the implications of shipping off the animal to my almost-ex-sister-in-law were uncomfortable at best. I tried not to think about it. Anyway, whenever I got too sad, I remembered walking the dog with the babies, squatting to scoop
up runny poops into bags that, once filled, inevitably revealed previously invisible holes. Forget it. I felt like a general: I had to be strategic. I had to wear emotional blinders, focus only on what was ahead of me, or all would be lost.

My life baffled the rusalka. She was unimpressed by the children but extremely amused by the microwave. She loved my cell phone so much that I found myself flipping it open and closed and staring into the lit screen way too often, garnering strange looks from fellow adults. Like any visitor from another realm, she marveled at the diversity of people in the city and the speed of the cars and the height of the buildings. She especially loved the bridges, so that we had to visit the harbor-side park down in DUMBO again and again, just to be beneath the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges, which crossed over our heads like the gestures of a giant priest.

The rusalka did not like how the noise from the street invited itself into the bedroom at night. She hated taking showers, begging me to linger in impossible baths instead. She disapproved of what she saw as my overinvolvement with my kids, finding my treatment of Rose particularly annoying.
You run like a chicken with no head every time that baby peeps,
she hissed one night after I’d tried to put Rose down in her crib for the billionth time.

“What am I supposed to do? Wait for her to submit a request form? She’s a baby.”

Yes, and you’re her mother. You need to teach her.

“Teach her what, exactly?” I was pacing around the living room, muttering to myself, jostling Rose in a not-very-nurturing way. “Psychology? Long division?” I was too strung out to be comforting; even I knew this. “SHH! SHH!” I whisper-screamed into Rose’s pink face.

To sleep.

“Right, right, right. How easy. Harry was saying the same thing before he left. Hard-core cry-it-out. Let the baby shriek until she’s so depressed, she goes to sleep while all that sadness seeps into her cells. Great idea. Do you have any idea how it feels to me when she cries? It’s like I’m being stabbed in the heart again and again. It’s not exactly relaxing.”

Oy, what’s with you? Depressed, are you crazy? She’s not depressed. She’s a baby. Babies cry. You know what? Forget it. Let me handle this.

I felt as if I could be described only in the kind of hacky cliché I’d once so delighted in editing out of magazine pieces: my eyes roving wildly, my hair snaking around my face. “You make it sound like it’s my fault she doesn’t sleep. That makes me feel even worse, you know.”

You’re doing that to yourself. Just trust me. I had lots of brothers and sisters. I had lots of babies. I know what I’m doing.

And then she was behind the controls, moving us dreamily into the bedroom, rocking Rose, who insisted on ignoring these soothing entreaties. Betty roused, and I told her to go sleep in the big bed. “Smart. Sleep-train one kid, sleep-derail the other.”

Relax, will you? It’ll be like this a couple of nights, and then they’ll both be asleep all night in the same quiet room. For millions of years, babies are born, they cry, they figure it out, they sleep. You are not the first person to have such miserable struggles. Why do you think the Virgin Mary looks so sleepy in all those paintings? Trust me.

I didn’t have any other choice. We placed the squalling babe down in the crib (was Rosie comforted by the fact that the sheets were made of responsibly harvested organic cotton? no, no, she was not) and then floated back out into the living room. The baby screamed as if her life depended on it. Maybe it did. “I can’t do this. That’s my infant daughter in there. My whole body is telling
me to go back in and scoop her up.” Well, not my whole body, exactly. A stolid new sector was sitting my bottom firmly on the couch, where I stayed. Not because I wanted to or had come to terms with the whole parenting-philosophy concept but because I physically could not get up. I struggled to, but the rusalka was stronger than I was. I spent a solid hour there, glued to my seat like Odysseus lashed to the mast, while the baby siren-sang in the other room. It was torture, it truly was, but in the end, I hate to admit, she was right. By the next night it took twenty minutes, and the next night five. I ignored the poor thing throughout the night, too, and before I knew it, the rusalka had my sleepless wonder snoozing until dawn. This was a bona fide miracle, better than spinning hay into a barnful of gold. Soon I was starting to feel rested, which made me feel like I was returning to myself. It’s a testament to how sleep-deprived I’d been, and to how dreadful it is to be that sleep-deprived, that I felt I owed the rusalka everything, anything she wanted.

And then came a night when both girls went to sleep quickly and I found myself in a dogless, dustless apartment, unexhausted at eight p.m., a glorious stretch of free hours ahead. Dying and then undying was one thing, but this! This was ecstasy! I settled down at the unsticky kitchen table with my sewing machine and a glass of wine, buoyant with joy.

What’s this?

“This is what I really love. The mutter of the foot across the fabric. The neat X’ing of thread.”

Sewing? You’re kidding me. I used to have to sew all day. I was the oldest sister, so, you know, I had to make all the younger kids’ clothes. Tuesday was sewing day. Then Wednesday was darning day. Feh! I hated it. You modern girls don’t know how good you have it.

“Really? But it’s so satisfying. What’s better than holding up a
dress you’ve made that turned out just right? I don’t get to do it as often as I would like.”

Right. I can think of a lot of things that feel better than that. Almost anything, really. Where I’m from, that’s just another chore.

“The bottom of the river?”

I mean originally.

“And where is that again?”

She ignored me, started humming instead. And so, to the mermaid’s ancient lullabies, I sewed.