The Mermaid of Brooklyn (33 page)

Sure enough, Evelyn’s acquaintance, a bubbly twenty-seven-year-old named Anne, called me that night. I sat at the kitchen table with a mismanaged skirt lying limply beneath the sewing machine’s idle foot, hoping that if I squinted long enough at the dump of dishes in the sink, they’d transform into something pleasant. It had not been an easy bedtime. I was exhausted, prone to visual hallucinations flitting around the corners of things. “So I’m getting married!” cried the girl, as if anyone cared.

“I was excited about getting married, too,” I told her. “A long, long time ago.”

“Oh! How great! How long have you been married?”

“Three and a half years.”

A pause. “Oh! Ha-ha!”

“So you need a dress,” I prompted.

She gushed on and on about how she couldn’t find
anything,
and oh, she’d tried on every dress in the world, but
nothing
was the
dress of her
dreams,
everything was too frilly and lacy or else too sheathy, and she had some
curves,
for heaven’s sake, so she needed some
structure
but not a “big beautiful bride” situation, if I knew what she meant. I did. They had this whole garden kind of theme to the invitations and favors and everything, and it was going to be at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in early autumn, and they had everything set from the photographer to the place settings, but she needed a darn dress, didn’t she! She did. The problem was she didn’t know exactly what she wanted it to look like, but she did know how she wanted to feel in it; she wanted to feel how she imagined a bride would feel when she was a little girl marrying off Barbie and Ken in the backyard; she wanted to feel beautiful and flowery and earthy and ethereal, and she wanted it to be hers, all hers, and oh, she knew that didn’t make sense, but she’d tried on every dress in the world and the wedding was coming up and she was starting to feel desperate and did I know what she meant? Even a little bit?

I did. I knew exactly what she meant. Despite myself, I felt a seed of excitement sprouting. A wedding dress. It would be a challenge in so many ways, not the least preventing myself from making bitter asides about the state of marriage. A fairy tale! Right! With enchanted in-laws and an angelic elfin offspring and a fantastical 401(k). Good luck, sister.

It has nothing to do with marriage. It’s a wedding dress.
The rusalka was acting funny these days. She’d disappear for hours or days at a time only to buoy back up to the surface at weird moments. Sometimes I physically jerked when I felt her return, as if possessed by a B-movie demon.

For her wedding. To her future husband.

That’s what I’m saying. It’s called a
wedding
dress, not a
marriage
dress. It has nothing to do with
your
marriage. You get to make
someone into a princess for a day. You can’t say that doesn’t sound fun.

Princess. Where did girls get the idea that being a bride was anything like a fairy tale? And how on earth did this idea stick with us through all the toad-dating and premarital cohabitation, the path to wedding bells littered as it was with odiferous tube socks and empty beer bottles that never managed to get thrown out? The rusalka scoffed, shook my hair, stood me up. I tried to resist, which never worked.
I need to finish this skirt.

I need a soak.

Her needs, as always, came first. Otherwise, it was nag, nag, nag, and then inexplicable cases of heartburn I’m sure she stirred up somehow. So I ran us a bath, poured in the envelope of brackish powders she’d prepared one night when I was coaxing Betty to eat and not paying close attention to either thing. Within moments I was asleep. When I awoke, I was flung across the unmade bed, dry but not feeling especially clean. According to the dusty alarm clock, six hours had passed.

Okay. What just happened?

Oh, well, golly, we danced all night at an enchanted ball until our slippers were worn through! What do you think? We took a bath and then went to bed. Exciting times.

No, seriously. I passed out. I don’t even remember getting out of the bath. Did you date-rape-drug-bathe me?

Ha-ha.

That wasn’t a joke.

Why do you worry so much? I know what I’m doing.

I couldn’t help feeling uneasy. And I dreaded seeing Sam, as if I might discover something in his look that proved the rusalka was up to no good and, in losing patience with me, might start taking things into her own scaly hands.

In the morning I was back to normal, by which I mean that I
was so depressed, I couldn’t get out of bed. It was as if I’d never died, as if I’d never met the rusalka at all. Rose nursed and then crawled around, playing with pillows. Betty loitered, begging for breakfast. “I know, I know, I know. One second,” I said to her, my face muffled beneath bedsheets. (I knew I said this too much when Betty’s dolls started constantly telling one another, “One second! One second!”)

I couldn’t, I just couldn’t, and it was heartbreaking to be like this again. I’d thought the rusalka had fixed me, that now I was one of those normal people for whom the word “depression” meant an economic downturn, a person who cried only when she had a reason, or onions to chop. Maybe the rusalka had been not a tonic but a Band-Aid. Maybe trying so hard not to think about Harry had been too exhausting for my subconscious, and something had worn through, broken irrevocably. Maybe I was the same as ever. Because leaving the building seemed impossible, staying in all day even worse. I had this weird feeling that the rusalka had done something the night before, had taken me somewhere, to see Sam, maybe. What did I know about the laws of this habitation, anyway? Had
I been sleepwalking around Park Slope all summer without even suspecting? I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing Sam. I couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing Sam. My head, usually humming with the rusalka’s nattering narrative, felt hollow and far too quiet. As if in answer, the phone rang. Could it be she’d left me, taken up residence in someone more sassy and fun, and was calling to gloat?

Don’t be ridiculous. Get out of bed.

Oh! There you are!

My dear Jenny, you almost sound actually happy to see me!

I can’t do this alone. You know I can’t.

A secret for you, dear—you can. And eventually, you will. But for now you will pick up the damn phone. That ringing is driving me mad.

The rusalka took hold of my limbs, launched me out of bed. The phone stopped ringing. She moved me into the kitchen, reminded me, like a spectral physical therapist, how to drink a glass of water, how to begin breakfast, how to answer the phone when it rang again. It was my mother. I sighed, pinched the phone between my ear and shoulder, and started toasting Betty’s waffles, then raced from one air conditioner to the next, turning them off so the toaster didn’t blow a fuse. “Hi, Mom, still hot, still no Harry, how are you.” I felt myself settling back in my body, the depressed heaviness starting to dissolve.

“Oh, fine! Getting ready to leave for Egypt tomorrow!”

I deposited Rose onto the changing table, where she immediately began to writhe onto her side so that I had to pin her down with one arm while fastening the puffy generic disposable. “Oh,
yeah.
Mom, that’s insane. Don’t you think you’re going to miss Dad?”

There was a pause. “Eh, between you and me, kiddo, not so much. Yesterday I was starting to think I really would miss him, and then he asked me what he was supposed to eat for dinner while I was gone, and sweetie, I just about lost my mind.”

I knew what she meant, and I knew that my husband (assuming I still had one) doing something like that would make me crazy, too, but it seemed different when it was my dad. I mean, the poor man hadn’t fixed a dinner in forty years. True, that was annoying and ridiculous. It was also true that he hadn’t because she always had, so she hardly had the right to be so huffy. It’s not like she ever offered to mow the lawn so he didn’t have to. I wondered about my parents’ marriage sometimes, I really did. Though I know everyone thinks this, in my case it seemed not just unlikely that they’d ever had sex but entirely impossible. Had they ever felt driven mad by passion? Had my mother ever flirted on the playground, made out with another man—Dr. Olson!—in our living room while we slept upstairs and Dad was away at a conference somewhere? The thought turned my stomach.

“Did you leave him some frozen dinners or anything?”

“Jennifer! No! He’s a grown man. Let him figure it out.”

“Okay, okay.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just that—I’m so darn excited. I can’t remember the last time I was so excited. I feel like I’m about twenty years old. Yesterday Beverly and I went to buy fanny packs—”

“Mom. Fanny packs?”

“Of course, dear, we have to put our passports there so they don’t get stolen by scam artists.”

“You’re supposed to— Oh, never mind. What were you saying?”

The toaster dinged. I deposited Rose into the pre-crusted high chair, which she was finally able to sit in, albeit a bit unsteadily. I arranged a landscape of measuring cups in front of her, fished the waffle out of the toaster with a fork, and extracted the margarine from the fridge. “Betty! Breakfast!” I called toward her room, holding the phone away from my face.

“So Beverly told me that the Wilsons got mugged in the airport
in Rome . . .” I tuned her out, staring blankly at the coffee machine, hoping to be struck by inspiration. The steps involved in making coffee seemed so complicated that I imagined I’d be able to complete them only after I’d had some coffee, which I couldn’t have without making it, an impossible logical loop that clicked through my head like one of my dad’s ludicrous train sets Möbius-stripping its way throughout the attic. I held the phone away again. “BETTY!” Not having heard a peep from Betty, I went to poke my head into their room. “Oh my God. Mom, I gotta go,” I said, clicking the phone off. “Betty! What on earth are you doing?”

“Nuffing, Mommy,” she said, standing in the middle of the destroyed room, her dark eyes open wide. She had unearthed from somewhere a few of my fancy handbags, and they sat on her bed, gaping open, stuffed with unwholesome meals of markers, dolls, pajamas, a tiara, what looked like my cell phone. The dresser drawers all hung open goonily, the sheets were pulled off the bed, the rug was dampened with a sordid stain of semi-recent chocolate milk. The room looked like it had been gutted. I slumped down onto the floor. “Betty. What did you do?”

She burst into tears and threw her arms around my neck. I patted her back. “It’s okay, sweetie. It’s fine. But what happened?”

“Going to see Daddy,” Betty said into my hair.

“Oh, Betty. Oh, Betty, Betty, Betty.” I pressed my eyes into her shoulder so she wouldn’t see me cry.

A few hours later, Sylvia showed up to watch the girls, looking like she’d won the lottery. There had been news from Harry. “News?” Not news, exactly, but a clue. “Like a postcard?”

“What? No, why would— No, Jenny, something from the detective.”

“The who?”

She plopped down in a kitchen chair, stabbing her hair with her nails before welcoming a hug from Betty. I rocked Rose on my hip, swaying back and forth. “The private investigator we hired, Jenny. Remember?”

“Well, no. What? Was I even consulted?”

She shot me a withering glance. “You would have been, but if you’ll recall, you stormed out of our family meeting in a huff. And then you skipped our meeting with the detective. Which made him very suspicious, of course! Very suspicious!”

“What! I hope you told him—I don’t remember this at all, by the way—”

Sylvia cocked an eyebrow. “Fred said he left you a message about the meeting.”

“I never got any message. I hope you told him that I am a single mother to two little kids right now and don’t exactly—”

“He knows that. Obviously, he knows that, dear. He’s looking for your husband.”

“I hope you told him I wasn’t a suspect.”