The Mermaid of Brooklyn (30 page)

Yes, the neighborhood itself was charming, even with all the American flags and conservative bumper stickers and preponderance of sweatshirts, but it would take an astigmatic squinting to see any charm in Ever So Fresh. The blocky storefront was marked above the door with smallish jade-green letters reading
EVER SO FRESH CANDY CO
in an unintentionally retro font. The long blinds were almost always drawn, lending the place a vaguely nefarious look. The front door opened right into the narrow, carpeted office—Sylvia’s desk to the left, Fred’s to the right, and beyond, Harry’s abandoned mess. Here they made calls (or, lately, didn’t), fielded orders (or, lately, didn’t), and arranged the personalized gift baskets that people in the neighborhood still ordered out of kindness or perhaps an earnest desire for tooth-cracking peanut brittle interred in neon cellophane. Easter was usually a big time, but here it was, late July, and a hutch of bunny-themed baskets still huddled on one of the shelves. The whole office reeked of resignation, like a sick person who takes to housecoats and daytime television.

The room ended in a door with glass panes like a detective’s office in an old movie, and behind this door was the factory. A few years earlier, Fred had done the math and realized how much cheaper it would be to outsource the actual candy and nut-mix production to a larger distributor somewhere in the distances of Queens, and the factory workers (that is, Juana, Felicidad, and Carlos) had been let go, the equipment left fallow like ancient ruins. The factory once was a bustling place, I was told, full in the summers and over Christmas breaks with local students—“the girls,” Sylvia called them, as in “There’s Marla! She was one of our best girls. Hi, honey, how’s your grandbaby?”

Something about the abandoned factory made me immeasurably sad. It wasn’t just that the company had gone from being Harry’s father’s successful brainchild to a weird abstraction; they now neither made nor sold candy but
distributed
it in a way that seemed kind of futile and doomed. It was simply the place itself, the machines ghosted in cloths like furniture in a haunted house, the faded smell of cocoa and butter laced with grease and dust, like a necrophilic truffle.

But here we were, having what Fred was Cosbyishly calling a family meeting. I wheeled in the girls while Sylvia watched from her desk. “Oh, honey, do you want help with the door?” she asked once I was in. An instant later, Fred arrived, preceded by a familiar scrabbling of claws. “Joomper!” Betty squealed. It was weird to see the dog straining at someone else’s lead. I thought I might die of guilt. Fred struggled with the beast. “No jumping!” he cried as Juniper stood on her hind legs and waggled her front paws at Betty like a rampaging horse. “Cynthia thought you might like to see her,” he said to me, shrugging. I detected an evil smirk behind his eyes.

Betty and Juniper rolled around on the floor, and Sylvia bounced Rose like the freaking grandmother of the year as Fred called our meeting to order. “Do you know what today is?”

I slumped in the aerodynamic office chair and stretched out a leg, examining my golden gladiator sandal. “Your birthday?” I guessed.

Fred gave me a dirty look. “No, Jenny. It is not my birthday, although it was two weeks ago, thank you for remembering. No, today marks two months. My brother, Harry, has been missing for two months.”

“God, really? Is that true?”

Sylvia nodded meaningfully at me. There was some implication here, and while I didn’t understand exactly what it was, I knew I didn’t appreciate it. Even the way Fred had said “my brother, Harry”—
his
brother, as if Harry weren’t also my husband, the father of my children, as if
my
Harry weren’t also missing.

“Without a word,” Sylvia confirmed.

“That
we
know of, anyway,” Fred said, nodding at his mother.

Now would have been a good time to mention it. The postcard. To help a mother worrying for her child, a brother sick over his
sibling. Above all, let’s be honest, to make me seem like less of a monster. I could say it now and fix things in this small way: “You know why I’m haven’t lost it completely?”

You don’t want to do that.

Don’t I? Why not?

There’s something we haven’t really acknowledged, you and I, my dear, which is that as long as Harry has left without a trace, you have permission to be crazy with anger, senseless with grief. You know what I am saying, don’t you? He’s the wrong one. And that gives you permission to do, well, anything. You understand me,
bubeleh.
I know you know.

Then Fred said, “You’d think his wife would be the first one to hire an investigator, to be calling the police every day. I’m not going to lie, Jenny, I think your whole deal is a little weird right now. How you’re just . . . going on with life.” He didn’t look at me while he spoke. His mannerisms were enough like Harry’s to make me dislike him. And the rusalka, she hated him.
What is with this guy? Somebody has to stand up for you. Come on,
bubbe,
do I have to do everything around here?

She kind of did. I was in the newlyweddish habit of being ruthless with my own family but overly polite with my in-laws, and if we were going to get through, I would need some backup. “Listen,” I said, or she said, or we said. “You listen, and you listen well. Good. You listen good.” I flushed and continued: “Harry is the one who left me. He is the one who left his two young children.” I was aware that Betty’s ears had perked up in her extremely unsubtle little-kid way. She was frozen under a desk, a bunny in a field. I lowered my voice and leaned in. “He could be leading a whole double life. I mean, he probably is. We all know he’s a gambler. We all know he’s a flirt. What if he has another family? We all know he’s left for days at a time before. We all know he ‘works late’ an
awful lot for the third in command of a failing family business.” Fred uttered a sound of protest. Juniper ran over to him, thumping her stupid silky head in his lap. “I haven’t done anything wrong. If anyone should be heartbroken, it’s me.”

Sylvia faced Rose toward me like a tiny interrogator. “Then why aren’t you?”

I stood, sending the chair stuttering backward. “And what exactly do you know about it? How do you know how I feel? What, you need me to cry in front of you? Would you feel better if I drank? If I had a nervous breakdown? How about if I threw myself off a bridge, would that help?”

“Jenny, please,” Sylvia said. “Betty, sweetheart, why don’t you go pick an Easter basket and open it?” I glowered after Betty’s back, skipping toward the shelf. Great. Just what that kid needed, an overdose of petrified gumdrops.

“Don’t ‘Jenny, please’ me. Look, what do you two want? To find Harry? That’s what I want, too. So what are we talking about here? Just spit it out so that we can get home for nap time.” It was hard to sound tough when planning around naps. “You want to hire a private investigator? If anyone has any money to throw toward that, then great, I say we do it. We probably should have done it a long time ago. But I have my girls to think about and a bank account sucked dry by my husband’s unfortunate habit of flushing money down the toilet. So tell me what you want and let me be.” I heard my voice then and felt ridiculous. Who was speaking? The feathery fringe of post-pregnancy hair at my forehead had come loose from my ponytail and floated around my face with every jerky movement I made. Rose was squinting up at me, preparing to cry. I took her from Sylvia a little too roughly and gestured to Betty, who was holding a cheap stuffed bunny by the throat and looking dangerously close to tears.

“Oookay,” said Fred after a long, terrible pause. “I think this has gone well.”

I stormed out then, inasmuch as one can storm out when one has to settle two small children into a double-decker stroller, arrange pacis and sunhats, and struggle out a heavy door that of course no one helped with. “Goodbye, Juniper,” I called behind me. “Be good.” The door slammed shut. “Or don’t.”

No matter how many times I tried to tell myself that Fred
and Sylvia were sad and scared, too, by late afternoon, leftover Lipkin irritation still fizzled behind my eyes. It rendered me extra-sociopathic as Laura and I watched a waifish mom-or-grandma? candidate fuss over her Guatemalan toddler, who appeared to have obtained a splinter during ill-advised activities on the playground. You could tell by looking at her that she was one of those “Are you making good choices?” parents, that the kid was enrolled in six or seven classes all throughout the borough—bilingual music lessons, introduction to baby math, toddler tai chi—that she probably had researched charter schools and chosen one to volunteer at before sending in her adoption application. Poor woman, she was trying to do everything right, and here we were, sitting on our bench sucking down iced coffees and ignoring our effortlessly obtained offspring. But what could we do? Our favorite pastime, after all, our shared passion, was sitting around and judging people. It was like high school but on less sleep and more self-esteem.

“Wait, isn’t that the kid who was running in circles and shrieking at story time yesterday?”

Laura squinted. “Yep. That was him.”

“Oh, that was awful. Total parenting nightmare. And she sat there saying, ‘No, no. We’re going to have to leave if you keep doing that’ the whole time, in that super-nice mom voice that’s thinly veiled hysteria, but they never left, and then by the end,
all
the kids were screaming. Except Emma.” I paused at the conversational fork in the road. Maybe now I would ask Laura how she got Emma to be so infuriatingly well behaved all the time—special vitamins? secret beatings?—in a tone that would attempt lightness only to stumble clumsily toward accusation. I decided on “How does someone even end up with that haircut?”

Laura pursed her lips as if to chide me.
Little Miss Perfect. Doesn’t she think she has any flaws? She kind of gets to me sometimes.

Oh, stop. Laura’s basically my husband now. She’s certainly more dependable.

But I could tell even Laura was impressed by the don’t-ness of the do. Despite being alarmingly thin, the woman had a face that was mostly neck, and her nearly hip tortoiseshell glasses were framed by a mullety arrangement of mouse-colored hair, topped off with a short, spiky fringe of bangs. It almost could have been trendy in a so-bad-it’s-good way, sported by a Williamsburg hipster in leg warmers, but wasn’t on her, pushing fifty and wearing pleated shorts.

Laura tilted her head. “Maybe it looks better curled. Maybe she curls it sometimes?”

“Maybe her hairdresser was mad at her?”

“Maybe some gum got stuck in it and had to be chopped out.”

“A lot of gum.” We paused, enrapt, like wildlife photographers. Then I fingered my own ratty mop of a ponytail and said, “I should talk. I hardly have a ‘fashion point of view,’ like they say on all those makeover shows.”

“Psh. You’re fine. Look at your sandals. What are they, alligator?”

I channeled the East Coast Valley Girl drawl of my former coworkers. “I like to think of my look as ‘post-style.’ Like, my look remembers being stylish but has decided against it.” Laura put a finger to her chin and nodded in mock concentration.

“Oh, Miguel,” the woman was saying mournfully to the little boy. “Oh,
dear
.” I wondered if she was aware of being such a parenting type, like the crazy TMI mom we avoided on the playground, or the professional parents who belonged to every neighborhood institution you could belong to—co-ops and gardens and block-greening committees. Maybe I was just another parenting type: the pissed off and possessed.

“So I’ve been thinking,” said Laura. “About what you said.”

“Uh-oh,” I said. “What did I say?”

“You know, about the recordings. The midnight recordings at the diner.”

“Oh. Oh, yeah. How is that going? That’s a good title for them. ‘Midnight at the Diner.’ ”

“Hey, I like that. That or maybe ‘Laura Needs a Normal Hobby.’ Anyway, I listened to some of them, and you know what? Some of them are actually kind of good. I mean, parts of them. People say some really interesting things. I think there could be something. A story of the neighborhood. The way people make a neighborhood, the way a neighborhood is a kind of a family. That sounds so cheesy—”

“No, no, not at all,” I said. “Go on.”

Laura looked flustered. It was an unfortunate side effect of our shared passion for pooh-poohing everything that we were preemptively dismissive about anything we might try to accomplish ourselves. We moved through our lives prepared to be told no, ready to shrug and pretend that we’d never expected anything else. “When you don’t know a place, or you’re new to it or visiting, you
do all these things to try to live how the locals live. You get coffee at the place the guidebook says normal people get coffee, or you shop at a local market or something, and you walk around and look at things, and you think you’ve gotten an idea of a place.”

I nodded. I could remember, vaguely, such concerns. How to maximize a travel experience: what a childless person’s quandary. I thought of my mother and the awful tourist traps she would gush over when she returned from her Egypt trip.