The Mermaid of Brooklyn (38 page)

I hadn’t seen him since that ill-advised playground kiss
despite dragging the girls on languorous strolls around the neighborhood, slinking along under awnings, strategizing across game boards of shade, moving slower and slower the later it got, until I was shuffling along like a tourist in a museum or a dying person. Rose squirmed fretfully in the bottom of the double stroller. She rode so close to the ground down there that I would often unearth her at the end of a walk to find her cheeks darkened with a city-dirt facial. I was shamed at these times by my desire for someplace clean and air-conditioned, the shopping malls I’d thought I hated as a kid. What I wouldn’t do for a day in the antiseptic cavern of the Mall of America, where first-graders birthday-partied in a vomitiously pink storefront, having makeup applied until their faces were immobile as baby Joan Riverses, where everything to eat was fried and no one cared. It would be easier elsewhere, I was always telling myself, without regard to whether or not this was true.

Why did I have it in my head so unrelentingly that mine had been a more wholesome upbringing than the one I was giving my girls? So summer smelled to them not of cut grass but of rotting
trash, sounded not of locusts but of the buses and bar crowds you could hear when the windows were open. So I had been on the subway with them once when a drunk woman activated her pepper spray, so they had seen the flaccid wiener of a homeless man peeing in the park. So there were things I couldn’t protect them from. So what. Suburban kids may have had their own backyards, but they also loitered in large structures devoted to commerce and tumid with formaldehyde, spent their teenage years driving around stoned. Most of my summer memories involved making lanyards at day camp and then watching untold hours of television in our carpeted basement, sometimes catching a titillating flicker of staticky Skinemax. It hadn’t exactly been Shangri-la. Still, as many times as my fishy fairy godmother hissed
Don’t be such a fucking bore,
the midwestern part of me spent these hot, sticky afternoons craving an Orange Julius in someone’s dim rec room.

Instead, we strolled. We ran into people we knew, waved to the firemen and their dog at the storybook firehouse, invented errands that could be completed entirely at shops with propped-open doors and aisles wide enough for our monstrous stroller. We stopped at the bookstore and the health-food store and the wine shop and the Italian meat-and-cheese market, so by the time I finally did see Sam, the stroller was ponderous with packages, Rose was passed out in a heatstrokey nap, Betty was a whining wreck refusing to be entertained by even the Holy Grail of my cell phone, and I had a net bag of bloody meat slung jauntily over my shoulder.

“Well, hello,” he said. He said it proprietarily, as if our relationship had progressed without me, as if he’d always known he would have me and now he did. Was I reading too much into his tone? Nah. He was without his kids. I didn’t even ask.

“Oh,
hi,
” I said, or she said. Batting my sweaty eyelashes.

We were on the busy, unforgivingly exposed corner of Seventh Avenue and Ninth Street. In another lifetime, I would have pulled to the side in consideration of pedestrian traffic, but I couldn’t find it in me to care about such things anymore. A line of tired-looking middle-aged women, each holding too many plastic bags, waited for the bus. I felt automatically that Sam and I were performing for them, even though none of them showed any sign of paying attention. Betty arched her back in the stroller and expressed her feelings about this last stop in a sound that resembled a dinosaur toy running out of batteries. My beloved child, I ignored her.

“Have you been getting any sleep?” Sam said. He shot me a meltingly sweet look before leaning over to offer Betty a complicated series of high fives that distracted her from her overheated crabbiness. What was a question like that? I unconsciously smoothed my too tight tank top, my skirt, checked quickly my golden thongs. A question like that meant we had been seeing each other at night. Did it? No, ridiculous—it meant I had young children and looked tired. My heart pounded against engorged breasts (we really had to get home to nurse soon).
What have you done? We’ve never left the girls alone, right? Oh God, has he come over? The neighbors! The mess!

You would do well to relax every once in a while, you know that?

“I don’t know,” I said finally. “Um, why? Have you?”

He laughed. Whatever that meant.

I was aware, maybe only in my own invention, of the bus-stop ladies glaring at us in disapproval. Julie, one of the playground moms, walked by and waved. I might have imagined the askance once-over. My ground chuck moldered at my side. I took a breath to speak, only to whip my head around at what I thought was another wave but was really the broken wing of a smashed pigeon
adhered to the road, flapping in a breeze. “Sam,” I said.
I feel terrible,
I was going to say.
I didn’t mean to kiss you, and I am sorry about that. That is very awkward, is what that is.
She wouldn’t let the words out. She held them like a selfish child clutching a bunch of balloons.
I shouldn’t have kissed you. And we shouldn’t be sending all these texts to each other. And we shouldn’t—

He had to lean in to hear me through the clamor of the street. “Jenny,” he said.

The rusalka was fighting me. She was trying to say, and I was trying to stop her,
Come by tonight. Come over.

“What is it, Jenny?”

Come, come to me, after the kids are asleep.

He smiled uncertainly. “I do have to go pick up Maude from ballet.”

I waved at him. “Oh, nothing, nothing! I forgot what I was going to say!” Brilliant. He raised his eyebrows and nodded. “Okay, Bet, my pet, be good for your mama.”

“No!” screamed Betty.

We exchanged shrugs—oh, toddlers! oh, parenthood!—and went our separate ways. I walked home as quickly as I could, sweating a heart shape on the back of my shirt. But a few hours later, I took out my phone while the girls were distracted and tapped out an inviting text I hoped no one but Sam ever read. I couldn’t take it anymore, or maybe
she
couldn’t take it anymore. I was sure I would explode into a million fleshy chunks if I didn’t see him soon. I wavered before pressing “OK” to send. The rusalka tamped down my finger. In a suspense-filled instant came the reply, the most thrilling line in the history of romance. John Keats never wrote anything more eloquent in a letter to Fanny Brawne, Tom Hanks couldn’t have said it better to Meg Ryan: “C U AT 9.”

I spent the afternoon in a confused tizzy, microwaving Betty’s
spinach patty into a rubbery puck, skipping everyone’s bath time and speed-reading bedtime stories. Betty came up to me and held my face in her hands and said, “Is Mommy sick?” But the heat of the day had sufficiently melted her so that I could bury her in an avalanche of stuffed animals, and she was soon snoozing. One down. Rose nursed and nursed and nursed until I was sore, and then she dozed off, and after bargaining with the clock (five more minutes and she will really be asleep), I oh so gently placed her in the crib, and the instant her back touched the mattress, it arched and her eyes popped open like a plastic doll’s. She had forgotten all about being sleep-trained. This went on for over an hour. My shoulders twinged with each careful lowering. When she finally relented, it was nearly nine. I accidentally chose to hurl some toys toward the bin rather than shower in the few moments I had before my phone lit up. I’M HERE.

Harry and I once rented a movie about a suburban stay-at-home mom who had a torrid affair with a stay-at-home dad. Harry had teased me about it: “So that’s what you fantasize about, huh?” I’d laughed. “The real fantasy here is that their children both nap at the same time and long enough to allow for any kind of illicit encounter,” I’d told him, and it was true. Between the kids’ activities and naps and colds and errands, who could ever coordinate such liaisons? I could barely make playdates. Sam was sneaking out tonight, but then what? Maybe I simply wasn’t cut out for having an affair. Here we were, allegedly getting together to chat, and I was a nervous wreck, hearing him tromp up the stairs and worrying the whole time about the neighbors listening, seeing, suspecting. We hadn’t gotten to second base, and already I was obsessing over the ninety people on our street who surely had seen him slip out of his front door with his gym bag, walk the long way around the block, and reappear on my stoop. Maybe,
like everything else, sneaking around was easier in the suburbs. To have an affair in Brooklyn, you had to be organized. You needed a discreet babysitter and the patience to ride the subway to some other neighborhood in order to meet. Or you had to be rich enough for livery cars and hotel rooms, and who could afford that on top of rent?

Then I was calm. The rusalka spread down through my limbs, like the creeping warmth of a comfortable, one-too-many-with-dinner drunk. I didn’t think. This was the great joy of my life as a dead person. The old Jenny Lipkin had been prone to fretfulness, forever running through logistics. The new me threw on a diaphanous shift I’d painstakingly pieced together for my local coffee-shop owner and was supposed to deliver tomorrow; somehow one irresponsibility bred another. Feeling like the evil sexpot in a cheesy eighties video—I could almost see the smoke-machine mist, feel my hair crimp and coil like a hair-sprayed Medusa’s—I slipped my feet into my shoes,
the
shoes, those beautiful lifesaving slippers from the bridge, as alien on my crumb-studded floor as a frog in a royal castle.

He opened and closed the door quietly, an expert in tiptoeing around sleeping babies. Seeing him in my tiny home made me realize how large he was, how ridiculously tall. I thought of the time a whale had found its way into the Gowanus Canal. The whale died, I remembered, dismayed.

Sam smiled. “Hi.”

My heart raced. I knew this feeling, kind of—the unhinged sensation of a moment more like a movie than real life. I’d felt it the day I gave birth to Betty; I’d felt it, awfully, on September 11, standing shoulder to shoulder with silent others in a bar to watch the gruesome coverage; I’d felt it on the day I died. I’d felt it, I was sure, when Harry proposed, although I was having trouble
remembering that right now. My handful of dramatic instants. And all this man had to do was walk through my door, and it was so wrong and so right and so deliciously unbearable that it took on the tenor of a national catastrophe.

So there I was in the kitchen, in my kitchen, my children’s kitchen, Harry’s kitchen, pouring wine into mismatched juice glasses. “Fancy meeting you here.”

What is that, a catchphrase? I would never really say that. This is just some bad romance novel to you, isn’t it?

Oh, hush. If it’s anything, it’s a good romance novel.

I couldn’t bear to look at him, turning to rummage nervously through the cupboards instead. “Are you hungry? Want a snack?” I sounded like such a, well, mom. “Goldfish? Cheerios? I can offer you some decaf instant coffee and biscotti. Well, teething biscuits, but they honestly taste just like biscotti.”

He didn’t smile. Maybe it had been too much, like starting off talking about our kids or mentioning the names of our spouses. He was looking around. I swallowed the urge to apologize for the mess, gestured toward the couch, and brought the wine over. “Sit, sit!” I cried, patting the cushion like the deranged hostess at a failing party.

Sam perched on the edge of the sofa, hands splayed on his knees. “What am I doing here?” he said, as if to himself. At some point in the day, his flirty bravado from the street had left him. I, I would have crumpled at this, at this poor hapless man, at Cute Dad of all people drawn into my living room of iniquity. But she had taken over, and she was in no mood to appeal to his guilty conscience, which was boring, and ordinary, and not worth her time, so she leaned in and smiled and offered, “Well? What
are
you doing here?”

He smiled unhappily. “I don’t know. You tell me. You’re
supposed to be the one with all the answers.” I just nodded like a therapist, which I knew was an annoying response. He shook his head, unloosing an unfairly adorable coil of hair. “I told Juliet I was going to the gym. I can’t stay long.”

You could tell he didn’t mean it, that it was only what he felt like he should say. You could tell he would stay all night if I made it worth his while, but that he thought he should let himself be talked into or out of it, that he was feeling reluctant to make the decision because he was unwilling to shoulder the consequences, the way men always were about everything. And I have to say here that this wasn’t me, this woman who leaned closer in such a way as to smoosh together some cleavage at him. It wasn’t even any part of me. I had never been that girl. I followed the rules! I loved the rules! It was one of the ways I maintained the moral upper hand over Harry, my ne’er-do-well husband—he was the one who did illegal things, he was the one who overindulged while I was home minding the children. So who was this? This was not me. This was just some mermaid.