The Mermaid of Brooklyn (8 page)

“Hi. Fine, and you?” I said. Betty had added a tutu to her pj’s
and now presented me with a stack of about fourteen books. I shook my head and held up three fingers. She slumped away, dropping books as she went. Sorry, downstairs neighbors. I shifted my weight, tousling Rose’s hair with her hooded towel.

“Something about it just feels weird.” Sylvia lowered her voice, though she was in her own home. “Jenny, he took a thousand dollars out of the company account yesterday.”

I covered the receiver, as if she would hear my smile. Okay! This meant he was
somewhere,
as I’d suspected, and not loitering corpsily in the Gowanus Canal. A gambling binge was good. It was identifiable. It was finite. And that he’d taken money from Ever So Fresh and not our slender savings account, for once! A secret candle of relief flickered beneath my breastbone.

The last dregs of sun spilled into the living room. It was a mellow, flattering light, one that camouflaged the clots of dog hair in the corners, the dull spots on the wooden floor’s tired varnish. The kitchen mess had begun to migrate into the living room. Whenever Harry was gone for a few days, the apartment annoyingly proved his theory that he was the one who cleaned up. Pieces of Betty’s Peter Rabbit plate set and piles of Cheerios colonized every surface. Even Juniper was sick of eating floor Cheerios. Beneath the mess, it was possible to see how we once envisioned the room, how we’d imagined our lives would be: Harry’s framed vintage travel posters, my books and magazines in color-coded grids on the bookshelves, a black-and-white wedding photograph of us looking thin and young and like someone’s parents before they were parents. On the mantel of the nonworking fireplace sat a snow globe from Atlantic City. I took the snow globe and went over to the kitchen, cradling Rose in her towel burrito. The trash under the sink was full, but I pressed the globe into it, anyway. “He’s only been gone since yesterday. I doubt they’ll do anything.”

Someone said a muffled something on Sylvia’s end of the line. “His brother says he thinks he knows where to find him,” Sylvia translated.

“Fred’s there?” I asked. Betty padded over again, this time with a phone-book-sized children’s encyclopedia. I shook my head and mouthed, “Three short books.” Her posture, walking away, was that of a shamed politician, chastised but defiant. She disappeared into the girls’ room.

“Cynthia kicked him out. He’s living here now.” I could hear Fred’s protest. “Tempo
rar
ily, he wants me to say.”

“Let me talk to Fred,” I said.

My mouth-breathing brother-in-law exhaled moistly on the line. “I’m just here to keep Mom company. She’s really worried about Harry.” Fred sounded like he’d already been drinking. What a pair they made. The television screamed in the background. Sylvia was the last person in the world who videotaped things, but she did it every day, taped her favorite soaps and then watched them in the evenings, frowning as she fast-forwarded the commercials with what she called the “clicker.” There was a pause. Fred went on, “What if someone forced him to take that money out at gunpoint or something, my mother is asking. Ma, please, it’s not exactly unheard of for Harry to do something like this. Ma!” They were arguing offstage.

Rose had tired of wearing only a towel and started whimpering, rubbing her eyes. I went into my bedroom, the phone pinched between my ear and shoulder, and laid her down on the unmade bed, trying to fasten her diaper without losing the phone. “I mean, we pretty much know where he is, right? I’m not saying it doesn’t suck, but I also feel like we’re going to see a very contrite Harry in a few days.” And maybe a very rich Harry, I didn’t say. Obviously, it was wrong to indulge this kind of fantasy. Obviously, this was what got
Harry into trouble in the first place. But you never knew, was all. Sometimes it worked out. We were finally getting close to being able to afford a bigger place. One little luck could put us over the top. One little friendly sprite enchanting Harry’s hand in exchange for otherworldly favors or maybe his free drink tokens. You never knew.

“Yeah, I don’t know. Ma’s bugging out.”

“Does she know something we don’t?”

There was a pause.
Fred,
I wanted to say,
I can’t hear you shrugging.
Rose had rolled to her side and discovered a corner of the sheet that she busily tried stuffing in her mouth. I watched her, honestly unable to remember the last time I’d washed the sheets. It could not have been before she was born. It just couldn’t have. At last Fred said, “I say we give it a few days, see what happens. I feel like he’ll come back on his own.”

“Yeah, me, too.” Betty crawled onto the bed, shifting the mattress and rolling Rose onto her stomach, which surprised her and inspired a gale of tears. Betty perched on top of my pillows and primly spread out three of the longest storybooks she owned. Juniper leaped up beside her and started licking her own butt with long, wet slurps. Betty found this hilarious. I lifted Rose and bounced her. “I gotta go.”

“Sure. Hey, Jenny, you’re okay, right? I mean, I know—”

“Why does everyone keep asking me that? God, I’m fine,” I said more testily than I meant to.

“Nothing. No reason. I just mean—if you’re feeling, you know—”
If he says “crazy,”
I thought,
I’m hanging up.
“Uh, overwhelmed or whatever. You know. Cynthia would love to take the girls for the day, I’m sure, sometime. Heaven knows she doesn’t have a fuckin’ job right now.”

Fred’s soon-to-be-ex-wife was the sort of woman who called kittens “babies” and babies “kittens.”
He
couldn’t even stand her, and he’d married her. “Gee, that’s a nice offer.”

“Well, you don’t have to be like
that,
” Fred said. “I was just trying to help.”

I hung up and immediately lost the phone somewhere on the cluttered bedside table. Rose was snuffling around at my shirt, and Betty was impatiently tapping at the god-awful
Little Mermaid
book Sylvia had bought her twice despite our protests. I sighed. Bedtime.

Once the girls were asleep, I knew my duty as a halfway decent friend was to call Laura to check on poor Emma, but I could not muster it. It was as if I didn’t want to risk contamination by getting any closer to her bad luck, and I’m sure she felt the same way about me; she wasn’t terribly secretive about thinking my marriage doomed. In this way, our friendship had its limits.

Besides, all I wanted was this: to be settled at the sewing machine with a glass (okay, mug) of wine, a bolt of corduroy, and a pattern for a simple one-piece rag doll. If there were a thing in the world that made me unadulteratedly happy, it was sewing. My seamstress grandmother had taught me when I was a kid, and as soon as I’d conceived, my inner crafty housewife had emerged out of some dormant hormone bundle. Every spare moment I had I spent sewing for my brewing baby: clothes and blankets and pillows and too-elaborate dolls. Our kitchen table was usually lost beneath my hulking hand-me-down Viking and some piles of mismatched fabrics. Harry found this more annoying than anything else. It had not occurred to me, let alone to him, that I was good at this and that it might be useful in some way. Then it was just another way I made things more difficult than they needed to be.

I closed my eyes to breathe deeply and enjoy the moment of peace, the small tremor of anticipation, the promise of an hour or two to do something uninterrupted. Immediately, Fred texted that
I should call. It was tempting to ignore the text, but if I did, Sylvia would call the home phone, and in the time it took me to find the damn thing, everyone would wake up, so, reluctantly, I did. “They won’t do anything,” Sylvia answered the phone.

“Why am I not surprised?”

“Why are you so
casual
? Jenny, your husband is
missing
! They said we can put up posters of his face if we want, or drop off his
dental
records to help identify a
body
if it comes into the
morgue
!” I could hear Fred in the background, or maybe it was the soaps. I yawned, collapsing onto the couch, letting Betty’s affable Raggedy Ann hold the remote.
Access Hollywood
flickered soundlessly through a scrim of fingerprints, the Barbie-doll host trying to look solemn. Red-carpet footage of an actress flashed across the screen, then a paparazzi shot of the same actress with her kids, looking tousled and tired and much better than I did on my best day. Then a still photo of a hospital with a well-known psych ward.

“I don’t have his dental records,” I said.

“That’s not the point! I mean, he’s not dead!”

“Well, right. Exactly. He’ll be back in a few days, Sylvia, don’t worry. We all know he’s done this before.”

“And no
wonder,
since you seem to care so little!”

Fred was saying,
“Ma!”

Oh? And what about the last time he disappeared and I did all that running around for nothing?
I wanted to say, but a yawn preempted it. It wasn’t that I didn’t get it. It was a mother’s prerogative to freak the fuck out every time her son didn’t answer his phone. I felt for her, I did. I even appreciated how her terror allowed me to be the calm one.

“Jenny? Are you there? Listen, can you believe this—they said, ‘Well, ma’am, it’s not illegal to disappear.’ They said, ‘It may be inconvenient, but not illegal.’ Do you believe that?”

I did believe it. “It
is
awfully inconvenient.”

There was a pause. “I really don’t understand you sometimes, dear.” Sylvia sounded almost soft. Then, back to her regular brisk self, “So, unless we think he’s in danger or kidnapped or murdered or something, they’re not much interested. They were halfway interested when they thought he was a child, but when I told them how old he was, there went that. As if a mother doesn’t mind her child missing as much when he’s forty as when he’s four. I mean!”

“Thirty-nine,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“He was thirty-nine. I mean, he
is
thirty-nine.” Juniper scooted by, rubbing her butt on the carpet, a look of great consternation puckering her brow.

Sylvia could not possibly have sighed louder. It was like a windstorm in a receiver. “Just—just call if you hear anything. Can you do that, dear?”

“Of course,” I said. “Don’t worry.” I believed myself, too. Here was what I had to go with:
He’s fine. He’ll be back. And then everyone will get to be mad instead of worried.

“Right,” said Sylvia. I turned off the television and sat back down at the sewing machine just in time to hear Rose start to wail.

I probably should have seen it coming: his departure; my death. Harry came home from work cursing his brother, cursing his mother, cursing clients who kept them in business whom he’d known since he was a boy. This was the way it always started, and if I’d been paying more attention, I might have felt the twinge in my elbow joints, like an arthritic predictor of storms ahead. He was getting antsy. Everything made him jittery. “I’m leaving that place,” he was saying for the millionth time, drinking whiskey out of a
sippy cup we’d lost all the complicated straws for, his hands spread out on the sticky table, his thumbs tapping. I was doing the dishes, annoyed that he wasn’t offering to help and thinking only of that. This was the night before he left or maybe the night before that. “I gotta get out.”

“Yeah?” I said, not that nicely. The sink was soppy with cereal bits and not enough suds. I kept forgetting to buy dish soap.

“I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. Ever So Fresh is going nowhere. All I’m doing is prolonging the drawn-out demise of what my father created. It’s not—it’s not what I’m meant for.” Harry was staring at the wall. His loosened tie looked dangerously nooselike.

“Not what you’re meant for, eh?” Here was an attitude I blamed on Sylvia. She had always been convinced her boys were special, destined for greatness. His whole life, because of his charm and good looks and bravado, people had led Harry to believe he was something, a star, a noble creature. As much as I loved him, even in the dazzle of those first days, he was just a guy. A good guy, but—a guy.