The Mermaid of Brooklyn (5 page)

Once, before I knew better, I mentioned it to his mother. She was so offended, I feared I’d caused irreparable damage to my standing among the Lipkins. Which I had. I’d been unintentionally offending my in-laws ever since I’d arrived on the scene and their mistrust of me—an overeducated gentile from Minnesota—metastasized when I refused the ridiculous job Sylvia offered me when Harry and I were first married.

The thing was, I actually loved my job as an editor at a home-decor magazine in Midtown. What was so confusing was that I’d thought it was something Harry liked about me—that I had a career, that I had ambitions, that I was, modesty aside, a really good editor. I worked long hours, sure, but I was happy there in my tweed skirt, biting a pencil (a prop, as I typed away) in the buzz and flicker of my cubicle at nine p.m., ordering in sushi on the company card and trying to sift the various pieces of interviews and
research and background material into a story that read smoothly, that illuminated the photography, that expressed its meaning and humor and good taste in a breezy but not too breezy manner, that people would read, admittedly, on the toilet (but that was hardly the point, now, was it?).

My job held no allure for the Lipkins. They’d never heard of my magazine and had only a fuzzy concept of what it was I did. (I once overheard Sylvia at a family Passover seder describe me as a “sort of a newspaper columnist.”) So when we’d been married a month, they banded together, decided that I would be happier writing advertising copy, managing contracts, and answering phones at Ever So Fresh. It had been a whole
thing
. I was horrified at the thought and even more horrified that Harry, the stranger I had married, would think I would want to do such a thing. I loved my job. I complained about it constantly, but there was no denying the thrill of excitement I got every time I walked into the cavernous lobby of my fancy building near Times Square. I spent a lot of time getting dressed in the morning, blow-drying my hair, de-scuffing my oversize, overpriced handbag, selecting my shoes.

Sometimes I think what I liked most about working was the shoes. I had always been on the shrimpy end of the spectrum and, in adulthood, had topped out at barely five feet tall on tiptoes, with a size-four foot. In New York this was weird enough, but back home in Minnesota, land of big-boned Scandinavians, it had been downright freakish. My whole life, large-limbed friends had gasped at my feet and told me how lucky I was, but in truth there is nothing so great about having to special-order every single pair of shoes you own. As a result, my shoes were stupidly expensive and carefully chosen. A cobbler’s sample here, a ballet slipper there, perhaps in a pinch a child’s extra-large patent-leather party shoe. Working had given me an excuse to collect more variety in footwear than I’d
ever had in my life. I’d spring out of the shower and pace in front of my tiny closet with its tidy racks of shoes. The evilly pretty sling-backs (Marni, snakeskin) I blew my first paycheck on? The buttery calf-skin boot brought back from a friend visiting Japan (that mythical land where an elf like me wore a medium)? The Manolo Blahnik d’Orsays (feathered, like the bird-human hybrid feet of a sirin) presented by Harry, flying high from a big win at poker? I had shoes no one back home had heard of. I minced through the city like a salaried Cinderella.

Harry found it all faintly ridiculous. It
was
all faintly ridiculous, but I didn’t care. I’d call and apologize for missing dinner when I had a housewares store opening or cocktail party to go to (in the stalky, sparkly stilettos I kept stowed under my desk) or when I was just mooning around the office, waiting to sign off on a proof during the crazy monthly close. I would take home each issue as soon as the glossy tablets arrived, and show Harry—“This is the architect profile I edited, God, that guy was a douchebag”—and he would flip through it with very mild interest.

One night—I was drunk, admittedly, from too much champagne at a going-away party for a coworker—Harry finally said, “It’s just that you’re so smart, Jenny. You should be writing for
The New Yorker
or working on a book or something.” I’d reeled. “What’s that supposed to mean?” It stung because I knew the magazine was idiotic, I knew it took over my life in an idiotic way, and also because it implied that I had the ultimate choice in the matter, as if I could say,
Hey, ya know, that sounds great, I think I’ll start as the features editors of
Time
next week!
I busted my hump all month, endured tirades from the fascist editor in chief, worked and reworked stories and spreads endlessly, all for a wage slightly higher than a waitress’s and far less than a stripper’s. But I was a good editor. I knew I was a good editor. And I’d had the job (complete with
business cards and a line on the masthead) only a few years, having suffered though several horrid assistant positions to get to where I was. I certainly didn’t need Harry saying, “There’s hardly any
words
in it.” I knew that. Obviously, I knew that.

The magazine folded while I was on maternity leave with Betty. I never got to clear off my desk. It was what was happening. Even my bookish friends took to saying things like “Well, we all know print’s dead!” and then laughing nervously, like they’d gotten away with some outrageous joke. So in that way, the working/not-working conundrum decided itself for me, and for a while things were fine. I was home with the girls, which was its own kind of interesting. Though I could never say it to Harry, there was so much he missed during the day. I knew my babies. I knew every inch of them, every predilection, every habit, every experience they’d ever had. I saw Betty’s giddy joy when she took her first drunken steps; I memorized Rose’s constellation of recurring diaper rash.

Still, it took a leap of faith not to think about what I would end up doing once they went off to school—getting into, one prayed, G&T, which in our strange new world meant not an alcoholic beverage but the much less refreshing Gifted & Talented public school program. When I did think about my future, I became immediately nauseated, headachey, heavy with fatigue. I was either harboring some serious self-doubt or had hepatitis B. It was the same life crisis everyone I knew was having, the same conversation all Park Slope moms shared around the swing set.
But my production company! My teaching degree! My doctorate!
Blah, blah. My work had been kind of my deal. It was who I
was
. And now? I dreaded meeting new people and facing the inevitable What Do You Do?: “Oh, this,” I would say sheepishly, gesturing toward my sweaty offspring. Or else: “Nothing.” Nothing. How I would have loved a day to do nothing, to lie perfectly still on the couch and stare at the television.

I would have to do something eventually—we couldn’t afford for me not to be working, not financially and certainly not mental-healthily—but all my work up until now had earned me a whole lot of experience in a field that barely existed anymore, that might have vanished by the time my kids were in school. Well, I’d gotten that sweet master’s in Russian folklore that I was still paying for, from the small liberal arts college in St. Paul where I’d puttered around before gathering up the nerve to move to New York. So! That was sure to come in handy amid recession and growing unemployment.

In the meantime, I stayed at home with the girls and sewed and baked cookies (and then, unfortunately, ate the cookies) and went to a lot of sing-alongs and story times. It was a pleasant enough life crisis. I admit there were plenty of times when I was walking with the girls at seven a.m., trying to convince Rose to take a morning nap because she’d already been up for hours, and I’d see women going to work, hurrying toward the subway in skirts and heels, and I’d feel a pang of—something. At least, as Sylvia was always reminding me in a tone I knew was meant to be conciliatory but which struck me as foreboding, there was always a place for me at Ever So Fresh. Jesus. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted out of life, or even who I was, but one thing I did know was that I didn’t want to end up in that stuffy Bay Ridge office with my in-laws, selling jelly rings in bulk to grocery stores and bars. And they sensed it. The Lipkins knew. They knew me for the superficial snob that I was.

Meanwhile, my own family could not have been farther away while on the same continent—my pathologically busy sister, Sarah, all the way in Seattle, my travel-averse parents marooned in the Midwest. Every time I spoke with my mother, she said something like “Gosh, it sure does kill me to be so far from those sweet grandbabies of mine,” so I’d been calling her less and less frequently to avoid the guilt trip. My pre-baby friends in New York were
magazine people who had visited with flowers and impractical gifts—dry-clean-only onesies that buttoned up the back, gorgeous picture books for clean-fingered six-year-olds—when Betty was born, and most of whom I hadn’t seen since. I didn’t have a job or my own money; I couldn’t see past my own nose, really. And now I was alone with a toddler and a colicky infant, and it was hot, and I was tired, and Harry was gone.

By early afternoon Laura and I had reunited at our usual
playground bench, Betty and Emma tiptoeing toward the sprinkler and then boomeranging back, screaming. I couldn’t tell whether I loved or hated how, for little kids, every mood—happiness, sadness, hunger, boredom—inspired top-volume shrieks. Rose rubbed her eyes crankily in the sling. I gazed at all the grouchy nannies on the benches opposite, rocking strollers back and forth, ignoring their screaming charges as they motormouthed into their cell phones like auctioneers. It would be nice not to care. It would be nice to let Rose howl in a stroller, as she would do, since she hated the stroller. Until she was born, I hadn’t known it was an option for babies to hate strollers. I looked down at her just as she horked a glob of spit-up directly down my sweaty cleavage. Refreshing. “Girls, careful!” shouted Laura as they skittered in their plastic shoes across wet pavement.

No matter how dark I was feeling, a trip to the park did always seem to help. We, like all the Brooklyn families I knew, essentially lived in Prospect Park, our shared backyard, our landscaped Garden of Eden. There was enough wildness here to keep us human: stands of trees, fields of flowers, snaking woodland paths lined by
drug-dealer sentries. My brain had lost its ability to picture a forest engineered by deities other than Olmsted and Vaux, waterfalls that didn’t get shut off when the city needed to conserve water. The dreamy names helped, too: Lullwater Trail; Nethermead Meadow. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the tagged trees cackled at night and reached their spindly limbs toward lost children, or that urban ornithologists spotted the occasional firebird on their weekend walks, or that witches homesteaded in the historic cabin preserved in the park’s innards.

It was a big place, after all, with unknown depths: 580-some acres of sculpted nature as artificial as the cobalt-blue daisies they sold at the bodega and every bit as irresistible. Those glinting ponds, the antique carousel corralling antic carnival beasts, the capacious flower-dotted meadows, the ice rink and the horse trails, and all the way at the other edge, the Parisian roundabout lassoing Grand Army Plaza and the beaux arts central library (which, for as long as I could remember, had been shrouded in a facade-repairing net like an ill-conceived Christo installation). I was a sucker for the park’s crumbling foot paths and shady culverts lined by ancient benches, relics of times when Edith Wharton-y pairs promenaded in too many clothes, whispering beneath their parasols of flouting New York society’s honor codes.

I think my obsession with the park, with our whole neighborhood, had something to do with the dream of Brooklyn that had beckoned in my brain long before I’d ever seen the real thing—some vague seed planted by
Sesame Street
or maybe
The Cosby Show,
pollinated by books about urbane city kids who got lost in museums and caused trouble at prep school, nurtured by tales of beatniks and bohemians, until, in that perfect hothouse of a midwestern girl who’d never been anywhere, there bloomed this vision of New York City as It, as Everything, as The Only Place to Go. The
concurrence of
Sex and the City
fever and my own supposedly glam career-gal days calcified my NYC chauvinism.

Though people made fun of the stroller-clogged yuppie enclave where I’d settled, Park Slope was, aesthetically speaking, my fantasy Brooklyn: leafy streets lined by brownstones with jewel-box gardens, the main avenues dotted with mom-and-pop shops and restaurants and cafés. I loved how old everything was. I loved how the bluestone sidewalks smelled after a summer rain; I loved the song of the pigeons cooing in neoclassical eaves. I loved how I had come here and started my adult life just like that, with no one I knew around to remind me of the person I used to be, or who they thought I was. That is to say, I was new enough to the city that it seemed largely imagined, like a place where anything could happen.

So no matter how cramped our apartment got, we clung to it because of its proximity to the wide world of the park. I figured with all the hassles of city life—the lugging of children up stairs and on subways, the yin-yanged plagues of tourists and trash in the summer and cabin fever and household mice in the winter, the endless laps driving around looking for parking, the gritty air, not to mention the confused but constant sense that everyone was either doing much, much better than you or else was, like, homeless—we might as well get the good parts, too. Here was a good part: sitting beside a friend in the shade on a hot summer day. Hailing a woman pushing a brick of ice around in a shopping cart to stop and concoct a crimson shaved ice. The children racing around the playground amid a picture-book-diverse swirl of other kids. And knowing that if, at a moment’s notice, we were struck by a desire for Thai food or a handmade wooden baby rattle or an obscure volume of poetry, we could probably have them delivered to us there on the bench.