The Mermaid of Brooklyn (36 page)

Maude looked up at me and frowned. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said to her dad’s hip.

“Me, too!” I squealed. “Let’s all go! Laura’s watching my kids for a second.”

I was rewarded for this idiocy by a perfect specimen of the Cute Dad smile, the intense eye contact, the slight shyness pursing the edges of the mouth. We slipped around the corner of the parks department building against which the shadiest benches, my best friend, and my baby were all lined up, and Maude ducked into the bathroom. She poked her head out to say, “I have to do a number two, but I’ll wipe myself and everything. I’m a really good wiper.”

“Sounds good,” Sam said, raising his eyebrows at me.

I looked around quickly and then—it was stupid, maybe the stupidest thing I’d ever done, and obviously, I’d done my share—there, on the fringes of the playground where innocent children—
my
innocent children—romped around, where all the adults I knew were loitering, bored, vaguely but voraciously anticipatory—I leaned forward and kissed him, lingering to breathe the musky perfume of his neck. He smelled so different from Harry. Woodsier, somehow. Darker. Delicious and impossible, like someone else’s meal. He looked at me, squeezed my hand, let it drop. “You’re crazy,” he said, laughing.

“I
know,
” I said. “I really missed you.”

“There’s nothing so crazy about
that
. I’m very charming.”

“It’s true!”

He rubbed his hands over his face. I wished I were his hands. “Jenny. You’re making me nuts, you know that? I can’t stop thinking about you—I mean, all week—”

“Oh!” Nell jumped in from nowhere, and as if someone had shaken out the pavement like a crumby bedsheet, Sam and I jumped apart, and Maude popped out of the bathroom and jumped, too. We’d been standing too close, and that, I had to reassure myself a thousand times, was all Nell could possibly have seen. And what did that prove? Nothing! Not a thing! Body language, whatever! Maybe we were slightly European or something, for all anyone knew. So what? Nell had nothing on us, nothing nothing nothing, so we weren’t at all troubled or the slightest bit perturbed in the least when she said, “Oh,
hi,
kids. I didn’t realize it was that kind of party!”

Fucking Nell. She fluttered her manicure at us—a deeper pink than usual, I noticed, for the coming of autumn, must have been—and winked. Betty stood unblinking at her side like a creepy life-size doll. “Found this little lady making a break for the running path!” Nell trilled. “Thought you might want her apprehended.”

I stared at Betty, her sweaty curls matted to her head, the black comb clutched in her fist. “Oh,” I said. “Oh, yeah. Thanks.”

Nell shook her head. “No problem, neighbor! I mean, what is this neighborhood if not one big family all looking out for each other! Right?” She tousled Betty’s hair. I automatically tensed, waiting for a swat or bite that, thankfully, didn’t come. Betty only scowled up at her without coming any closer to me.

“Right,” I said. “Betty, don’t run off like that.”

“So,” said Nell, looking from me to Sam and back. “So.”

“I—” I said eloquently.

“You—” Sam added brilliantly.

She shushed us and winked again and made that awful locking-lips-and-throwing-away-key gesture, dear God, if only, and shimmered into the concrete cave of the public restroom.

We probably should have known then that we were done for. We should have been able to tell that, like the summer, our
whatever-it-was had an expiration date, that we’d dithered too long without acting, that too many people were starting to examine us, a pair of molding specimens in the local petri dish, and to suspect before there was anything that interesting to suspect. As I guess everyone else already knew, it was stupid to believe that rules didn’t apply to you just because you weren’t paying attention to them.

Sometimes I wish this were some other kind of story. That there weren’t the humid realities to trudge through. That Sam and I run off to Paris together and drink fine wine and have mind-blowing sex and live thrilling, sophisticated, lusty lives happily ever after, the rusalka happily bossing me from one adventure to another from her whirring homestead amid my internal organs. While we’re at it, I lose ten pounds without even trying, my hair always looks good, I find lucrative and satisfying work at a charming dressmaker’s shop, my kids go to French boarding school and turn out well behaved, bilingual, bereted. Believe that, if you like. End here.
Salut.
Enjoy.

At least the wedding dress—for which I really was going to
be paid a shitload, thank you very much—was coming along swimmingly. I would sit down each night feeling exhausted and utterly daunted. But every morning when I awoke, there was a gorgeous new stretch of satin embellished with almost invisible freshwater pearls. I could understand why people loved what I was making these days. Whatever my process was, it somehow changed the fabric, which came out more luminescent and responsive than you’d think ordinary cloth could be. My seams were dainty, the fittings impeccable—all this in a world where everyone was used to shuffling into ill-fitting, cheaply constructed garments born on conveyer belts in countries with lax labor laws. Had I always been so skilled? Had it always come so easily? Of course not. It had little to do with me. Still, it felt good to be—or to act, for now—an expert in something. I’d always considered myself a bit of an interloper, a dabbler in many things but expert in none, and when you got to a certain point in your life, this began to feel distinctly depressing.

Anne came over one evening for a second-to-last fitting before I finished the seams and hem. I was mildly humiliated at the thought of her seeing our home, with its plague of puzzle pieces and cuddly
lupine mobs, but it was easier than coordinating with Sylvia and lugging all the dress bits on the train. I also figured she would feel better about paying me so much once she’d seen firsthand our middle-class squalor. The first fitting of the muslin had been at her spotless apartment in Brooklyn Heights one steamy August afternoon while Sylvia had the girls. Her coffee table sported a glass bowl full of fragile metallic orbs that I couldn’t keep my eyes off of. It was like something from another planet. I literally could not process it. My hands itched to cradle one of the globes and smash it against the wall, if only to show her why it was a bad idea to display such hazards. Someday Miss Anne would have kids and would look back in wonder at the days when she’d owned such an object. Or maybe she would have the kind of kids who listened when told not to touch Mommy’s things, who played in their tidy rooms where they alphabetized their own toys.

Obviously, her parents had money or her husband did, because she was a social worker or something and seemed to work about three hours a week, yet the wedding that was being planned was completely out of control. The evening she came over for the fitting, she was frazzled because, as she explained, there was a problem with the calligrapher they’d hired to address the invitations—something about how the gold ink they wanted wouldn’t work. Anne was beside herself. “I don’t mean to sound like a total bridezilla or anything”—she’d said this one too many times for me to believe her; who even used that word? bridezillas, that’s who—“but is it so much to ask to just have the ink match the invitations, which match the table settings, which have already been ordered and paid for? I’m not being a lunatic here, am I?”

“Of course you’re not,” I said, pouring her some iced tea. It was a balmy eight hundred degrees degrees in the apartment. I felt bad.

“My friend had a total nervous breakdown when her florist said
she couldn’t have tulips in August. Total nervous breakdown. She literally slapped the florist!”

“Oh, my,” I said. I was trying hard to keep sarcasm out of my voice.

Anne lifted her white-blond hair from her neck and sipped the tea. I noticed a full Betty handprint on the side of the glass that I hoped Anne didn’t. She was obviously a lunatic. Who knew what she was capable of? As she continued on about all the perfect weddings she’d been to and how it didn’t seem too much to ask to have one of her own, just one perfect day, I tried to imagine the clean-cut banker she was about to wed. What did he think as he watched his blushing bride having conniptions over table runners and song lists? Did he think,
Yes, good, what terrific attention to detail
? Or was he filled with a sinking, sickly dread, knowing his life was about to be micromanaged with the same frenetic fervor? Were they hopelessly in love? I suspected they were more of the “planned to be married before thirty, and here is a suitable mate” school, but that was probably an unfair assumption I had about people with very neat hair.

Anne stood in the kitchen continuing to talk while I measured her. She’d added an inch to her waist since our first measurement—I checked and double-checked—but I wasn’t about to mention it. I was sure she’d had a lot of stress eating to accomplish, what with the whole horrendous calligrapher ordeal she’d somehow survived. I wrapped my tape measure around her, as I’d learned to, snugly but without touching the actual torso at all, murmuring, pins porcupining my mouth, like a masochistic lady-in-waiting, “Mmm-hmm. Mmm! Mmm? Mmm-hmm.”

“I can’t for the life of me see why Josh is insisting on having five groomsmen when he knows I only have four bridesmaids! You know? It’s going to look completely ridiculous. All the photos will be lopsided! What could he be thinking? And it’s just so awkward, you
know, what, do I ask some random sort-of-good friend to be a bridesmaid? My four best friends are, you know, we’re all best friends—we shared a house in college—and the fifth would be some random cousin or, like, a friend who’s not as good a friend, you know?”

Something about this last little rant broke through the haze in my head. I stopped my inspection of the hem-to-be and peered up at her, a skeptical supplicant. “Anne,” I said. “If I may.”

She blinked. “Is there a problem with the dress?”

I stood up and, in a completely uncharacteristic gesture, took her hands in mine. We stood closely enough that I could see the tiny blackheads peppering her pert nose. Brave blackheads, to infiltrate the perfection of white-fingered Anne! “No. The dress is going to be perfect, and you are going to look beautiful and feel like a princess.” She smiled gratefully. “But I have to tell you something. I know you didn’t ask. But I’ve been married for a while now, and I want to tell you something. A man can be a wonderful thing. A man can make you happy, like a beautiful day can make you happy, or your favorite song, or finding a dollar on the street. But no one can make you okay. You have to make yourself okay. Your husband may love you and he may be great, but he can’t get inside your brain and rearrange it for you. No one can.” I was glad these things were being said to this pale and fretful girl, standing in my kitchen wearing a cream-colored armor of unseamed dress planks. This girl who was staring at me like I’d put a dish towel on my head and belted out a number from
The Sound of Music
.

I continued. “What you have to do is let him let you be happy. He won’t be able to guess what would do it. For example, have you told him why you don’t want him to have five groomsmen?”

Anne bit her coral-glossed lip. “Well, no. But honestly, don’t you think he can figure it out?”

“Probably not. Don’t make him guess. Don’t do that to him, and don’t do it to you. Do you know what he’s thinking all the time? Of course not. He probably just wants his best buddies to be his groomsmen and is thinking of nothing other than that. I don’t want to say men are stupid, of course they’re not, not all of them, but they’re not fucking mind readers.”

She flushed, starting at the neck.

“Here’s the thing about being married. You’re still just two people living in the world. You know? It’s not going to make him any more sensitive or you any less sensitive. And you’re both going to be animals gnashing through life, driven by your same old appetites, thinking of yourselves first even when you think you’re not. And it’s like, I mean, we try to be better than that, and to be more evolved and everything, but I guess what I’m saying is—no one can make you truly okay but you.”