The Mermaid of Brooklyn (16 page)

I’ve found that living through your own personal drama
—like falling in love, like having a baby, like being left by one’s husband—has the result of making a person feel extraordinarily unoriginal. You think:
But how amazing/awful this is! How intangible this joy/pain and how distinct and how difficult to express!
Then you hear a corny song on the radio or remember a scene from a romantic comedy you always dismissed, and you realize that everyone goes through the exact same thing, feels the exact same way, that it seems every bit as singular and surreal to each of them, and that others have managed to express it after all. That you’re not the first person in the world to experience something unpleasant and try to weather it with slavish devotion to daily routines. Bedtime rituals, diaper-change ablutions, the communion of mealtime. “You just keep going,” I kept remembering my mother saying when my aunt lost a quick and catastrophic battle with breast cancer. “You just
do
.” Instead of making me feel better, like part of a community of the brokenhearted, it made me immeasurably bored with myself. Selfish even in misery, I wanted my feelings for my own.

Predictably enough, after I died, I devoted myself to business as usual. Why should a long day feel any longer than it had before?
From the postcard (which sometimes seemed to glow in its hiding place in my apartment, like a paper telltale heart), I knew that Harry was okay somewhere, that I had permission to be wounded but not worried, which was sort of my resting state, anyway. My job, as the rusalka reminded me, was to get from one day to the next.

Just
be,
just get on with your life. You have to be strong for your kids if not for yourself. You have to start acting like a halfway normal person.

“A halfway normal person who came back from the dead possessed by a mermaid spirit?”

You know what I mean.

I would tell myself that Harry would be home late and put it out of my mind, pretend he was leaving the next morning before I was awake. The rusalka approved. Naturally, she didn’t miss him. How could she? She didn’t know what there was to miss.
So,
nu
? What do we do here when we aren’t moping around all day? When I was alive, we didn’t have this time to mooch around and feel sad. We had things to do. So? Here we are. What do we do?

Because I lived in white-person Brooklyn, an important part of my post-abandonment routine turned out to be doing a lot of yoga. I made fun of myself as I was getting the girls ready for the trek to the Y, apologizing to the rusalka—“I know, I know. Oh, the hardships! Only mom-baby yoga can save my soul!”—but I have to admit that as soon as I dropped off Betty in the babysitting room and took Rose into the baby-yoga class, I could feel something unclenching.
Why should you apologize for this? You exhaust me. Just stop with the thinking so much already. I give you permission. In fact, I order you, how’s that.

Maybe it was being in a quiet room with gleaming wood floors, other mothers cooing at their gurgling grubs, or maybe it was the moments alone with my baby in a world governed by her big sister.
Maybe it was the mere fact of doing something physical, paying attention for a few moments at a time to my limbs, the rare instants of balancing. I noticed that for the first few days after I died, my body acted strangely, responding slowly to my commands. Maybe it was mad at me for not exercising, for eating so many cookies, for trying to kill it. For letting in this strange force that occasionally, without warning, twirled me around in a pirouette or steered me toward water, any water, sprinklers, kiddie pools, other people’s beverages, because for all her talk about helping me to be normal again, the rusalka sure had me doing some weird things. In those first days and weeks of my new life, these yoga sessions were the times when I felt united with my body, less like warring triplets—flesh, Jenny, rusalka—and more like a powerful new kind of creature.

It had been a long time since I’d done something, in the parlance of ladies’ magazines and the blogs of more competent mothers,
for me
. What with all the procreating and nursing I’d been up to lately, it had been years since I’d had my body to myself. Including relationships in which sex was regularly expected, it had been at least a couple of decades. It was exhausting, all that being needed, the friendly parasitism, the amorous symbiosis. For years I’d had the strange feeling of living slightly to the side of myself, connected to my body by a few tenuous threads.
It’s all the thinking. Entirely too much thinking.

“Just breathe with your babies,” murmured the purple-clad yoga instructor. “Clear your mind.” As soon as she said it, the worst thoughts imaginable surfaced, rubber duckies of doubt. Were they mine? The rusalka’s? These were scary moments, when she was new and I wasn’t used to sorting out my thoughts and desires from hers, when I couldn’t tell.
Maybe Harry has another woman. Maybe he has another family. Does the other woman know about me? Does she pity me? I think I could stand his straying but not her pity. He probably says
the things all cheating men say: “My wife is crazy, but I’m stuck.” It’s true in this case, but still, they all say it, don’t they? Sure their wives are crazy—they’re being cheated on and lied to. That would make anyone crazy, wouldn’t it?
“And now let’s chant
om
, creating a soothing vibration for our babies and ourselves.”
Or maybe he really is dead. No, I think I’d know if he were dead. I’d have a feeling. So maybe he’s lost everything. Maybe he’s been taken prisoner by Mafiosi he owes money to. Maybe they’ll be coming for us next.
“Now let’s sing ‘I’m a Little Teapot’!”
He’ll be back in a few days. He’s done this before. He has a problem. But he has to stop. This is no good for kids to live through. And it’s not my fault. Maybe a little, but mostly not. We’ll work it out when he gets back. After I kill him.
“Tip me over and pour me out!”

I glanced at Rose, gumming an unfamiliar teether, and then stole an upside-down look around the room while creaking myself into a mangy downward dog. For an instant I was sure each of the other mothers in the room was weathering a similar internal tempest. The super-together mom whose baby was always better dressed than I’d ever been in my adult life, the frazzled-looking sweatball in a stained T-shirt who shushed her child with a slightly hysterical “SH! SH! SH!,” the beautiful black lesbian everyone was always trying to befriend in a sick kind of friendship-affirmative-action way. All of these women had some trouble you wouldn’t suspect from the outside. Didn’t they?
Let me share some wisdom,
bubeleh,
from the great beyond: It’s true. Everyone has something. No matter how perfect their lives seem. Everyone.

These were women I knew slightly from the neighborhood—I knew their children’s names but not their own—women with whom I would have weirdly intimate conversations at the drop of a hat. After yoga was over, we all mooned around, slowly gathering our various baby toys and accoutrements, making excuses to
talk to each other about infant sleep patterns or our various bodily ailments, discussing cracked nipples and lingering hemorrhoids, chatting breezily about how we’d lost our identities as if it were all an experience as shared as weather. How we missed our old bodies. How we missed our old relationships. How we missed sleeping and reading newspapers and having uninterrupted meals and going to the bathroom by ourselves, resources we’d never known were exhaustible, had never thought to appreciate. Ever since Betty was born, I’d found I possessed a limitless fascination for these conversations, that if I went a few days without finding some other mom to bitch to, I started to feel as if I would completely lose it. Even when Harry had been around, it wasn’t like he was living the same life I was. Another unoriginal problem, I’d learned from chatting with neighborhood moms. It wasn’t that our new planets, populated by sippy cups and tiny socks, were so terrible. It was that our husbands didn’t live there, and interstellar travel can be a bitch.

After yoga, I found Betty hoarding the toy daddies from the babysitting-room dollhouse; managed to drag her away from her game (what a novelty it was for her not to have to share with Rose for an hour! what a horror it was for a two-year-old to have to share, being a tiny walking id after all!); and convinced myself I had the energy to stop at the grocery store. Every step I took down the sweating stink of the street, Rose plastered to my chest, Betty kicking her feet in the stroller, I told myself,
What a normal day! Just walking to the store! Harry will be home tonight! Maybe he will be home for bedtime! Maybe he will tell me to go take the night off and get myself a manicure and read stupid magazines somewhere air-conditioned! I bet that will happen tonight!
I was almost able to convince myself for moments at a time, gritting my teeth into a simian grin. The rusalka broke in:
Throughout time, mothers have been coming up with ways to get through the days. Since the very first mother spent the
very first day with small children. Someday your prince will come, or however you want to do it. Whatever works, dear. Whatever works.

I reminded myself of the educational value of shopping trips, chirping at the girls as I wedged groceries into the stroller basket. “How many apples do I have? What color are these apples? Betty, what’s one apple plus one apple?” I sounded psychotic. The flickering of a damaged fluorescent bulb threatened to unhinge me completely; the jangly Muzak grew spikes that jammed into my eardrums as we made our way past a demented-looking lobster clawing at the side of its tank. But I could do this. I could. I could think about dinner, I could pretend I’d need dinner for Harry, too, I could select ingredients and pay for them and arrange them in the stroller basket, I could buy Betty a sticker from the gumball machine on the way out, and I could smile at a familiar mom on the sidewalk. Somehow it helped to have the rusalka reminding me in her slightly cranky way that this was nothing new, that my everyday struggles held within them an echo of the legendary, that maybe if mothers had time to write, all the old epic poems would be about trips to the grocery store instead of wars.

Once we arrived at our building, I stood at the bottom of the stairway, panting, gathering my strength. What a dull daily Everest. One of my more grating neighbors, an older woman who had lived in the building since the beginning of time and paid about $12.50 a month in rent, waved from the landing, a useless Sherpa. “Gosh, you all look hot! Is it still so hot out? I haven’t been out! I was hoping someone would go out and pick up milk for me!”

“I bet you were,” I grumbled under my breath before propping my mouth back up into a neighborly smile. “It sure is hot out there today! Hotter than ever!” I freed Betty from her strapped-in perch and gathered up the hugely heavy shopping bags in one hand while abusing the stroller into a folded position with the other. Rose
started to fuss in the carrier, licking hungrily at my clavicle. I tried to balance out the grocery weight on either side of me. “Betty, no way. I know what you are thinking.”

Betty nodded, holding out her hands. “Carry! Carry!”

“No way, ladypants! You are walking! March!”

“Those little legs must get so tired on all those stairs,” called out Mrs. Second Floor.

“I assume you mean mine,” I said. Somehow the rusalka made even this easier, lent me strength enough to bound up the stairs, to repel the sticky heat.

“Aren’t you a hoot!” said Mrs. Second Floor.

“Must be,” I said. She didn’t move over, and I practically knocked her down with my bunch of bags.

“Oh, I sure hope that little girl doesn’t fall! Isn’t that baby too hot in there? Can she breathe in there? What is she doing right now? Is she licking you?”

“Yeah, seems that way!” I said. “Babies! Crazy! See you later!”

I stood in the doorway for a moment as Betty scampered inside. “I need to start drinking more milk,” I said to nobody in particular. “Maybe take a multivitamin.” As in an actual vitamin for adults, not a gummy vite swiped from Betty. I needed to be stronger than I was to live the life I was living. I could manage to feel fine for an hour or two at a time, and then it would slip away from me, like an unpracticed foreign language.

Oy, no, we’re not doing that. Jenny, you are strong. We are strong! You’ve given birth. Twice. How much harder is that than doing errands and entertaining kids on a miserable day, no?
There was something about having her there, even when she was annoying me by sounding like my mother (“Why so glum? Just turn that frown upside down!”), that did make me feel stronger. She was right. I could do this. I settled Rose on the floor and managed to make a game
of putting everything away and then cleaning the whole kitchen, singing a song I’d never heard. The baby napped, I parked Betty in front of a DVD on the laptop, and I was so invigorated by my twenty uninterrupted minutes mangling a hem at the sewing machine that, believe it or not, in the afternoon I launched us all out into the world again. Into shoes, into sling, down the stairs, into the stroller, down the stairs, down the street. Betty would have been happy at the playground, but I didn’t have it in me—the chasing, the tumbling, the constant near-death experiences. Instead, we shoved off for story time at the grand Central Library, starting the long walk a little too late, so that the whole time I was moving as quickly as I could through the soupy air, anxious about whether I’d be able to get a ticket. Oh, the sophisticated joys of urban parenting! Within a block, I’d glamorously sweated through my T-shirt.

I don’t know if it’s this way everywhere, or a special perk of being a suburban expat, but I found myself every day evaluating the pros and cons of where I lived, as if it were a decision to be made over and over rather than simply the way things were. I doubt my mother ever asked herself whether she was doing her children a disservice by rearing us in White Bread, MN, a few miles from where she’d grown up. Everyone knew it was Good for Families there, regardless of whether it was, and there’s no underestimating the comfort of common knowledge. Meanwhile (I pushed the stroller into the park, choosing the inner path shaded by trees, where you could pretend you were in the woods), my parents, whose concept of New York had been forged in the seedy chaos of the seventies, were sure I was dooming my children to playgroups of druggies and prostitutes, teaching them to read using unwholesome scrawls of graffiti. It didn’t matter how many times I told them that the brownstones on the park sold for millions. They’d squint down leafy Prospect Park West and shrug. “If they’re not worried about being mugged
by junkies, than neither am I!” my mother would concede cheerfully, clutching her purse as we strolled by the exquisitely rehabbed home of a famous local novelist.