The Mermaid of Brooklyn (6 page)

“I’m so tired,” Laura said.

“Me, too.” It was an exchange we shared about thirty times a day,
like songbirds trading musical phrases. Here was something else I loved about city life, when I managed to remember to appreciate it: Laura. Not Laura, exactly, although she was a reliable and convenient friend; we’d grown closer recently, as most of my mom friends had gotten swept away in the “second kid, gotta move” migration. I loved how, whenever I left my house, I was bound to meet some mother of small children, how there was this community of parents—a sometimes bitchy, competitive community, sure, but a real community. I couldn’t imagine what I would do in some Minnesota suburb like the one where I’d grown up, where everyone drove everywhere and housewives were truly alone all day, unless they arranged to meet at the mall. There may have been a lot of assholes in my neighborhood, but at least they were
around
.

“Is Harry working late tonight, too?”

I laughed out loud, surprising both of us. “Actually, he never came home last night.” Some dream city life I’d turned out to lead, mired in domestic muck.

Laura raised her eyebrows. “What?”

My brain was too soggy to pretend. My eyes welled up. I looked away. “Yeah.”

“And why was that?”

“Didn’t say. I mean, I haven’t spoken to him yet. I mean, I can’t get ahold of him.”

Laura raised her eyebrows even higher. I was tempted to warn her that her face would stick that way, but it kind of already had. “Oh, Jenny.” I knew what she was thinking, and while I understood why, I still didn’t think he was having an affair. It just seemed so . . . normal. Too normal. Or maybe too horrible. At least a gambling binge was nothing personal. It was expensive and demoralizing, but it didn’t implicate me, my personal failings, my waning attractiveness. At least I didn’t think it did.

“Well, actually, he did call”—Rose started squalling, and I stood up to sway, a baby-soothing automaton—“and said he was stopping for cigarettes on the way home. Around seven. Last night.”

“And?”

“And nothing. That was the last I heard from him,” I said, pressing at the quiver in my cheeks. “God, could it be any hotter? What do you think it is, like, a hundred degrees?”

Emma stood on one of the jets of the fountain, leaping off and squealing when the water shot out. I wanted to feel that filthy city water on the bottoms of my feet. In that moment I wanted nothing more than to trade places with Betty. I wouldn’t stand off to the side, frowning at my friend that way. I would lie down along the jets, letting the sewer-warmed water pound at my back. I would play and play and play and then go home and lie on the bed, fun-weary and sun-soaked, and look out the window and be bored, and then someone would make me dinner and bathe me and read me stories as I fell asleep. It sounded like heaven.

“Aren’t you worried? What if something happened to him at the store? Or on the train?”

“I don’t know.” I was annoyed that I’d said anything at all. It made it real, which I wasn’t quite ready for. I didn’t want to find out he was having an affair and have to acknowledge the chest pains I suffered every time Laura suggested, weirdly hopefully, that he might be. I definitely didn’t want to know if something terrible had happened to him, if he was expensively languishing in some ER somewhere with amnesia or a gunshot wound.

Depressingly enough, the best option was that he’d once again taken our down payment and was slapping it down on an Atlantic City poker table, charming a busload of retirees. The thing was, he often had a lot of luck. It was both the best and worst part of the whole situation. When he came home from a poker night with an
extra thousand dollars or two for me, telling me to get something nice, do something fun with the girls, what could I do? I had to not act too happy about it, though it was always like a ray of light bleeding through the gray wool of everyday life. As soon as I ordered in a lavish meal of sushi, or signed Betty up for a stupidly expensive toddler music class, or hired a babysitter for a few hours and went and sat by myself somewhere and did nothing, I was complicit, like the greedy peasant wife in a fairy tale whose husband makes a deal with a devil so they can eat roast goose. And I wasn’t quite big enough, or good enough at being poor, to refuse his money because I didn’t approve of where it came from, to go back to eating gruel. “When the girls are old enough to understand, you have to stop this,” I’d say, sitting at the computer desk in our bedroom, ordering an inappropriately gorgeous roll of damask or oil-slick-shiny patent-leather boots that cost about the same as a week of day care. He’d flash that smile of his and say, “You worry too much, you know that?”

“Maybe you should call the police? Or something?” Laura said.

“Uch, yes. Possibly. I think his mother did, or is going to,” I said, swaying, rubbing Rose’s back through the fabric of the sling. “Can we talk about something else?”

“That’s just so weird. Harry, what are you doing?” Laura sighed. “Isn’t it weird how little you can know a person? How you can think you know a person more than you know yourself, how you can think you know everything about them and then it turns out you don’t?”

“That’s not changing the subject. I’m not that dumb.”

“Actually, it
was
changing the subject.”

“Are you talking about Will? What kind of secret life could Will possibly have? He’s so . . . nice.”

Laura shook her head, said, “Never mind,” and called to the girls, “Hey, no throwing sticks! You’ll take someone’s eye out.” Then she looked at me grimly. “Never thought I’d say that one.”

Rose emitted an angry squeak, as if in response. Poor Rose. I didn’t want to think of her as a tiny, red-faced enemy. I wanted us to be on the same side. I wanted to make it all okay. She often seemed to me like an extension of my own body; I picked over her like a monkey, which, since becoming a mother, I felt I had become or reverted to; I wore her in a sling while watching Betty on the playground, picking golden curls of wax out of her ears or flaking shingles of cradle cap off her scalp. (Now that Betty could smack my hand away when I tried to pick her boogers or spit-finger her cheek, I had to focus my unquenchable grooming energies on Rose.) I slept with her attached to my breast. I looked into her eyes, sometimes the only thing that calmed her fits of colic, and studied her corneas, trying to determine exactly what color her grayish-greenish-brownish eyes were.

I’m sure I was this way with Betty, too, probably more so, but it was hard to remember now that she was a little person with opinions and the ability to sass. Betty was such a happy baby that I secretly congratulated myself. People—strangers!—on the subway, in the C-Town supermarket, would compliment me on what a calm and competent new mom I was. I would smile and say, “Oh, it’s just that she’s easy,” not believing myself at all, suspecting that I was a natural, that my own competence made Betty feel at ease, that my love was enough, that it infiltrated her every cell with sanguine grace. Was I the same mother with Rose? What had I forgotten to do? What was I missing? Because I often felt like she already couldn’t stand me; no waiting until tweendom for her! Standing on the playground, I rubbed her tiny back, feeling each articulated knob of her spine, and I closed my eyes and tried to think to her:
I am here, and I love you, and my love will protect you. My love is a huge white light surrounding you. Everything will always be okay because I love you so incredibly much. You can feel my love, and it makes you
know everything is okay.
I have to admit that a lot of times I was also thinking,
Shut up, shut up, shut up, please shut UP already would you PLEASE.
When I opened my eyes I saw she had hurled her pacifier into the dirt and was sticking her bottom lip out. There it quivered, and there (
But you are surrounded by this vast halo of love!
) she began to cry.

I paced back and forth. Laura handed me a fresh pacifier—she always had a clean stock of the eco-friendly, good-for-your-gums kind, even though Emma had mostly outgrown them—which I deposited in Rose’s mouth. It sat there on her vibrating tongue for a while, only slightly muffling her cries. I sighed, took it out, resisted the urge to suck on it myself. I could have used some self-soothing, as the lingo had it. I promised myself a glass of wine and some time at my sewing machine at the end of the night, hours and hours from now. “Anyway, I’m sure there’s some completely normal explanation,” I said over Rose, rubbing my temples. “Maybe he fell asleep somewhere. No one is getting much sleep at our house. If I had a quiet moment, I’m sure I would conk out.”

Laura lowered her brow. “Hm.”

I shrugged, mad at Laura for not offering the sensible explanation that would make it all okay, or maybe for not having a disappearing husband herself, for suspecting Harry of having an affair, for having only her one sweet girl to deal with and still having the gall to claim she was tired sometimes or busy. Fucking Laura. How hard could her life possibly be? She had a dishwasher!

I focused on the girls over by the fountain. Some big boys had arrived on the scene—a handful of parentless seven- or eight-year-old Latino kids in baggy hip-hop shorts. They shoved each other recklessly in and out of the water. Laura and I stiffened, our hackles up. “Girls, please be careful!” Laura called out. Emma craned her head to look at her mother. I studied Betty’s small back in
her striped sundress and hot-pink sandals, her dark curls in messy pigtails. My girl. I missed the days of just the two of us.
My little love,
I thought at her, willing her to get the message.
My girls, I will protect you with this insane animal love I have for you. You will always be loved.
I rubbed Rose’s back (she was quieting down, hiccuping, her face splotchy and red) and closed my eyes, and that was when I heard Laura gasp and scream, “Emma!” and leave the bench, running. Shit.

Laura had realized what was happening before Emma, who was still looking around, stunned. Only when Emma saw the blood speckling her arm did the long silent inhale of breath come, and then the high-pitched wail. The arm was ratcheted at a crazy, wrong angle. Rose blinked in surprise, looking around to find the source of the competing scream. I hurried over. Betty threw herself onto my leg, weeping, as if she, too, had fallen. The big boys scattered, spooked by the scene, probably thinking we’d somehow find a way to blame them, which we would, despite ourselves. It was one of those unspoken, awful things about life in the city. The boys were obviously from the other side of the park, where the playgrounds were scruffier and the dogs meaner and the kids louder and significantly less white, and we knew it and they knew it, and we never would have admitted to noticing, but then when one of the girls fell, we—even I, though this was not how I thought of myself in any way—blamed them, as if they themselves had imported free-floating violence over from the projects, like a flu virus.

Laura lifted Emma—who in all likelihood had slipped on the wet pavement; whose stupid idea was it to have a fountain in the concrete playground, anyway?—and held her, rocking her back and forth. When Laura looked at me, her face was pale. We all had terrible playground moments every day; we all witnessed our children taking lethal-looking plunges from poorly designed
equipment, sucked in our breath, and told ourselves to stay calm, ordered them to dust it off, pretended our hearts weren’t racing. But this was different, as if the fears of every parent on every playground had chosen to swarm and materialize. “Jenny,” Laura said quietly, “I think her arm might be b-r-o-k-e-n.” I was bad at that spelling-out-loud thing. It took me a minute to register the word as I watched Emma wail into her mother’s collarbone. The angle of her wrist turned my stomach. “Oh Jesus,” I said. “Oh God. Want to take my car? Wait, I have no idea where the car is parked. Okay. Okay, 911.” I said it as calmly as a person can say it. Now all three of our girls were wailing, moms and kids and nannies circling like concerned vultures. A mom I knew vaguely from some story time or another thrust a pink cell phone in front of me, then took it back. “I’ll call,” she said, looking warily at the screaming bundle attached to my chest.

Just like that, a day could take a turn. A two-year-old girl could step the wrong way on a poorly designed fountain’s raised spigot, and suddenly, life went eerie slo-mo; objects and people took on a sickly sheen; the entire landscape, so familiar I hardly saw it anymore, looked new, shimmery with danger. A group of bystanders made everything cinematic. Betty buried her face in my leg, and I stood there dumbly, my finger in Rose’s mouth. Laura shot me a harried look, and I knew my wailing girls were making it worse but couldn’t figure out what an appropriate response might be. Emma had stopped crying, which for some reason was terrifying. She lay collapsed against her mother’s chest, moaning quietly. An ambulance barreled down the park’s paved path, thanks to the competent mom with the pink phone, who was now shooing away the tiny gawkers. She was good, this mom! I tried to give her a grateful look, but just then Rose grabbed a fistful of my hair like a little bookie owed a lot of money.

So we couldn’t protect them with love alone: It was a thought I had almost every day in one way or another. The paramedics (my mind took a moment to notice how bizarrely hot they were, these young, fit men) scurried Emma into the ambulance with the automatic efficiency of ants. Emma! This tiny creature, broken, at the mercy of trained strangers! Laura stayed admirably collected throughout the whole affair, whispering with the paramedics while keeping a cool hand on Emma’s forehead. Our eyes met, and I waved as if they were leaving on a trip.
Bon voyage! Don’t forget to write!