The Mermaid of Brooklyn (20 page)

“Maybe Will is going to get laid tonight.”

She cocked her head. “He’s probably asleep in front of the news.”

“Hot,” I said.

“It’s true,” she said, plunking down Will’s gold card. “My Prince Charming.”

It took all the remaining energy I had to pretend not to be drunk as Sylvia briefed me on the evening’s diaper contents and bedtime-stalling techniques. I considered pumping my winy milk, I really did. I even spread out the pump parts and stared at them. But I was feeling kind of all right for once, and ending the night bovinely nipple-shielded did not exactly appeal. I wandered into the girls’ room to check on them. All day I could be desperate for a moment alone, and then once I was away for an hour or two, I’d hunger for a sniff of their hair, long for a grabby, sticky hug.

The room was Sylvia-tidy, lit by an owl night-light and cracks of streetlight breaking and entering past the edges of the blackout curtains. On one side, Rosie kitten-snored in her crib, her paper-crane mobile spinning gently in the breeze from the air conditioner. Sylvia, goddamn her, had tucked a teddy bear and blanket into the crib. She refused to accept that nowadays you weren’t supposed to put anything in babies’ beds except the babies, preferring to believe I denied Rose blankets and pillows and lovies out of sheer cold-heartedness. I fished out the danger bear and dropped it onto the glider, hissing, “Stay away, murderer!”

On the other side of the room, Betty turned over in her toddler bed. “Mommy?” she whispered. Shit. My feelings of missing the kids hadn’t extended so far as wanting any extra duties for the night past ruffling sleeping heads. I knelt by her bed. “Hi, baby,” I whispered.

Betty sat up. “Not a baby,” she whispered back. “Big girl.”

I stroked her curls and eased her back down into her pillows. “Of course, Bets. Sorry. You are my big girl.” This had been an important distinction lately. All distinctions had been important lately. No one had ever warned me how
conservative
small children were.

Betty trampolined back up, this time clutching to my arms. “Big hug, Mommy. Big, big hug. Monster hug.”

I smiled. “Monster hug! Yes!” I squeezed her tiny body close. She rested her head on my shoulder and I stroked her wing bones.

“Mommy,” she said, finally resting back on her pillow, dark lashes fluttering closed despite her best efforts. “Mommy, Gwamma said you come back and you come back.”

“Of course I came back, honey. I was just with Laura. You know I’ll always come back.”

“No going wif Daddy?”

Cue heart: crack in two. “Oh, sweetie, sweetie, sweetie.” I wedged myself beside her in her Thumbelina bed, holding her close, breathing in her bready sleeping smell. “Of course not. I’ll always come back. You know that. And Daddy will come back, too. I prom— I think he really will. We love you, my babe—my big girl.” She was already asleep again, but I lay there for a long time, studying her face, sweetened with sleep.

Harry had once accused me of loving the kids more than I loved him. On one hand, it was a perfectly ridiculous thing to say. There was no comparison. It was like having to deny preferring one child to the other—impossible and preposterous and inevitably guilt-inducing, particularly when you knew your answer was the wrong one. “Of course I have a favorite! Whichever one of you isn’t crying at the moment.”

Because there was something about the accusation that couldn’t be completely ignored, something about the feeling that couldn’t be explained. A certain surge zipped through my veins during moments such as these. It was like being in love, like those first heady days with Harry, but also it wasn’t. It felt more like a narcotic working through my body—more complete, less pleasurable in a way, though more entire. It worried me. I’d never panicked about loving Harry, never worried that I couldn’t take care of him or that I was damaging his life by simply existing in it (although in retrospect,
maybe I should have). With my children, everything felt so fraught. There was so much to do for them, so much to protect them from, that my days were suffused with shaky moments, times when I wondered whether they wouldn’t be better off without me, with someone else altogether. And now they didn’t even have their father. Oh, these girls. Who had let me have children, anyway? Why wasn’t there a test or something, a gauge of fitness? It had been more difficult to register for Mommy and Me swim class.

I woke up an hour later, stiffened into a parenthesis, and un-creaked myself gradually, sneaking away without disturbing the cozy beasts. I knew I was feeling overly emotional from drink and sleepiness, but I couldn’t bear to leave the room. I stood in the doorway for a long time, frozen by a pair of undersize Medusas.

Lately, as Betty had gotten more independent and we—I mean
I
now, I guess—started to think about things like school, it had occurred to me that this whole having-children situation was essentially a process of unspooling. Once Betty had been so close to me that her feet had gotten stuck in my ribs. We lived literally tethered. And then she was born and screamed if she wasn’t being nursed or held. But with each day, she unspooled a little farther away—rolling over, eating food, sitting, walking, screaming, “Go away, Mommy!”—the crimson thread connecting us unraveling more and more as she wandered out into the woods of the world. I had to remind myself of this, of how, even though I hadn’t had a moment to myself in years, and even my bowel movements were observed and commented upon by my tiny Greek chorus, before I knew it, they would be off on the other side of the woods and I would long to tug on that crimson tether and call them tumbling home.

It was disconcerting to feel the way I was feeling—happy
and strong and capable not only of leaning over to pick a slug of gummed bagel off the ground but even of such a Herculean task as taking the kids on the train somewhere. Harry’s departure meant he’d had the last word on everything. I didn’t have all the pieces of the story; I couldn’t guess at the trajectory. Was I mad—a scorned lover left for some bimbo or, even worse, someone just like me? Was I a widow in mourning? The shamed victim of some crazy hoax? Was I a feel-good news story about to happen? (“And he reappeared months later,” anchorman Pat Kiernan would confide to NY1’s viewing public, his boyish charm adding a certain sparkle to the tale, “his mysterious amnesia cured!”) I couldn’t figure out whether I was supposed to be frantically searching for Harry or adapting to my new single life. Enough time had passed that a simple gambling binge was probably out of the question.
Pretty sorry state of affairs. Your most optimistic fantasy is that he’s lost too much money and is ashamed to come home. He sounds like quite a catch. Your mother must be so proud.
“Unhelpful,” I told the rusalka at times like these. “I thought you were supposed to be helpful.” No response to that.

Strangely enough, most things were exactly the same. Daily life. Story time. Sing-alongs. Complicated trips to the C-Town supermarket or the kid-friendly (make that kid-swarmed) Tea Lounge. There we were in the park with Laura and Emma, who slouched in the dirt scratching at her arm beneath her hot-pink cast while Laura implored her to stop and Betty ran around us in circles, blowing bubbles with soapy solution that was probably full of toxins but looked so darn shimmery and innocent. Anyway, I was sure organic chocolate-milk boxes counteracted detergent inhalation. Rose lay on her front on the blanket, trying to scootch herself forward and seemingly in a better mood all around thanks to this new project. The heat had abated a little. The viscous air pressed around us but had lessened, loosened. The park made its summer music—Caribbean nannies shouting into cell phones, Hasidic tweens cheering each other on through softball games in suit pants, thumping Reggaeton music heartbeating its way through the trees from some distant noisy barbecue. And the coos of children—Rose’s determined oofs and squeals, Betty’s unmelodic humming, Emma’s soft grumbling. I stretched out in the grass, arms above my head, like a girl in a movie about the summer that changes everything. I was happy to be alive. We both were.

The feeling of sun on skin! The gleam of dragonflies! The smell of grass and dirt!

“I know. I know!”

Laura peered at me over her froofy Frapuccino-wannabe iced coffee. We sucked them down all summer, investing most of our disposable income into plastic cups that were repurposed as sandbox toys, sometimes before we were quite finished with the fattening totally-not-milkshakes within. I’d gotten mine chocolatey, with whipped cream. It was no good, coating my teeth in a sweater of
sweetness with every sip, but I was compelled from within to try things I never would have tried before, even things as small as different flavors. Laura said dryly, “Nice shoes.”

I looked over at my Jayne Mansfield-y wedges and smiled, closed my eyes. “Hmm? Oh, thanks.” The rusalka had spied them in my closet and ordered me to don them immediately. They
were
nice. They were also ridiculous—it was a miracle I hadn’t broken my neck and died all over again on the way to the park—but
really
nice. Laura paused. “You’re in a good mood today.”

“Am I?” Was I different? Had I changed? Through my eyelids, the sun was a bloodred clot. I opened my eyes. I once read that because they had not yet accumulated all the tiny scratches and scrapes of an adult’s corneas, newborns’ eyes saw the world with almost unbearable brightness, and that felt like what was happening to me. The sky looked as white and meaningful as the palm of a hand. Everything I saw—a ferny tuft of mosquitoes, a cloud in the shape of a meringue—made me glad I hadn’t died. What a stupid idea! Who would want to
die
?

“You are. Did you hear from Harry or something?”

I shook my head and rolled onto my stomach, watching my hand automatically pull a thicket of grass from Rose’s fist and reposition her on the blanket, enjoying Laura’s puzzlement.

“Did you find a suitcase of money?”

I laughed.

“Did Cute Dad ask you to the prom?”

I propped myself up on one elbow. When the rusalka and I shared a feeling, it was as if a chime reverberated in my breastbone. “Laura. I need you to tell me something, and I need you to be perfectly honest. Do you think Cute Dad is even really that cute?”

Laura shrugged. “Of course he is. Otherwise how would he have gotten his name?”

“Good point.”

Emma and Betty were squatting by a jumble of tree roots, digging “potties” with sticks, pretending to poop in them, and then screaming with laughter. It was all going beautifully, though I was preparing myself for Betty to stab Emma in the eyeball. She’d been acting out at every opportunity, biting and pushing and grabbing and kicking, generally operating as if I were one large button to be pushed.

“I feel like they’re going to remember their childhood as if they lived in a forest. All they do is play with sticks. Such sophisticated city kids.” Laura picked up Rose and airplaned her overhead. Rose giggled, drooling onto Laura’s sunglasses.

“I hope so. Sometimes I worry that the city is kind of stunting their growth. Or at least the apartment. Nowhere to roam, you know?” I paused. “Do you think it’s okay? For kids to grow up in the city? I mean really okay? Or are we just being selfish?”