The Mermaid of Brooklyn (4 page)

“Girls!” Laura interrupted. “No eating wood chips!” She turned back to me. In her mirrored sunglasses, I looked overly round and worried. I focused on relaxing my brow and applying a small smile. “Didn’t you say business wasn’t good there, though?” Laura said. I loved her, I did, but sometimes her attention to detail was exhausting. I closed my eyes and jolted them open. Was it possible to sleep standing up? If I fell asleep standing up, would I fall down? When I fell down, would I stay asleep?

“Well, that’s why he’s so busy,” I said, starting to feel confused.

“Hmm. Okay,” said Laura, frowning into the distance. “Emma! No!” she called toward the girls, who looked back at us and retreated farther into the dusky distance beneath the slide. It was one of the curious qualities of our friendship that Laura and I never looked each other in the eye as we spoke. Maybe this was how it was with mothers of small children. When I thought about it, I wasn’t exactly sure what Laura looked like, though I knew Emma by heart. Laura and I sat side by side, quietly heckling the park populace like a non-Muppet Statler and Waldorf. “Is he trying to drum up new business? Or something like that?”

“Something like that, yes,” I said. “And in the meantime, I get the shitty parts of being a single mother without any of the fun. Like dating. Maybe I should start dating.”

“I hear it’s not as fun as we remember it.”

“I don’t remember it being all that much fun, so I probably wouldn’t be disappointed.”

“I just— I would just watch him, you know? Remember what happened to Jeanie and Jon, is all.”

“Geez, Laura. You’re a real ray of sunshine.” These Park Slopeians we vaguely knew had been the talk of the playground for a few weeks, when Jon absconded with the nanny and Jeanie had to sell their condo at a huge loss. I hardly saw the parallel. If there was a lesson to be learned from them, it was that, hello, when hiring live-in nannies, you went for the overweight grandmotherly type, not the hot recent college grad with an education degree. I mean, didn’t everyone already know that? I’d never be able to afford a nanny anyway, let alone a hot one.

Laura didn’t respond for so long that I finally looked up, and—oh! Cute Dad. She nudged me. “Stop that,” I said.

Sam held the distinction of being the least uncute stay-at-home father we knew, and accordingly had been mythologized as Cute Dad. I think we just needed a Cute Dad in our lives. We saw him nearly every day. We’d once followed him around the entire loop of the park, like giddy preteens. Our shared crush seemed totally innocent to us, but I admit it probably would have struck our husbands as a little creepy, possibly predatory, had they known. “Shh!” Laura giggled. Cute Dad flashed his famous smile as he fast-walked past, trailing his kids on their scooters.

“You’re terrible,” I told Laura as we watched him disappear into the woods. “The timing of this is highly inappropriate.”

“Timing of what? I’m just waving hello to a neighbor.”

“And blushing.”

“I am not.”

But she was. I mean, we both were.

When Harry hadn’t shown up or answered his phone by ten a.m., I called Sylvia at her desk, across the office from Harry’s. I could practically see her frowning at Harry’s empty desk, then picking up her phone gingerly between her flawlessly manicured fingertips. She kept a pencil near the phone for dialing, one of many household items that had been transformed into prosthetics to accommodate her metallic magenta talons.

“Ever So Fresh,” she droned, the antithesis of fresh. They had to be the last place of business in New York, perhaps the world, to not have caller ID. Or a receptionist. Sometimes if she was feeling playful, Sylvia imitated a dial-by-name directory, but that was about as technologically savvy as they got. They didn’t have a website, not a single sad page with their contact information.

“Sylvia,” I said. My voice cracked unexpectedly. I was not used to sharing a great deal of emotion with my friendly but brittle mother-in-law, and here I was, wet-faced, snuffle-nosed. Betty stopped running a crayon over Juniper’s back and stared at me. Rose grinned toothlessly from her swing, a plastic contraption that took up half our living room.

“Hello? Hello?” I could hear another phone ringing in the background. Was someone calling Harry? The police, having found his wallet floating in the Hudson? A not-so-secret secret girlfriend? I tried to pull myself together, pressing at my eyes with my fingertips. “Sylvia, it’s me, Jenny.”

“Hi, dear. What’s the matter?”

It was difficult to speak.

“Honey, let me put you on hold.” On hold! I sat there, listening to the hold music—an ancient assortment of Rat Pack crooners Harry’s father had chosen before he died, nearly three years earlier—feeling more and more depressed. I dabbed my eyes with a burp cloth that smelled of sour milk. “Mommy?” Betty said hesitantly. I shook my head, voiceless. Then Sylvia was back. The other phone had stopped ringing.

“Is it so bad having Harry home for the day?” Sylvia had the lox-y voice of a lifelong smoker, which was enough to annoy me on a day like today: the unhealthy rasp of her stretched-thin voice.

“Home? Sylvia, I haven’t seen Harry since yesterday morning.”

There was a pause. “You mean he’s not home sick?” It was amazing how we’d all figured out ways to explain it—explanations that demanded so much work on our parts! The mental calisthenics! I heard a muffled sound, as if Sylvia had placed a hand over the receiver and started talking to someone else.

“I was hoping he’d—I don’t know—fallen asleep at the office. And forgotten to call this morning. I guess. Or something.” It sounded incredibly stupid when I said it out loud.

“Wait, what? Jenny. Have you tried his cell?”

“Of course. It goes straight to voice mail.”

“Why didn’t you call earlier? He could be bleeding to death on a subway platform somewhere!” I had always thought Sylvia was given to histrionics until Betty was born. Then I realized there was nothing crazy about believing your constant vigilance to be the only buffer between your child and the abyss, about feeling sure that you could keep your baby safe by sheer force of anxiety. “Have you called the police?” Hearing her say this made it sink in. Something had gone very wrong with my husband. People didn’t just not come home and then not call. Well, okay, Harry did, now and then. But it wasn’t something you got used to easily. “Should
I
call the police? Jenny? Hello?”

“I don’t know. What if he’s—you know. In Atlantic City or something.”

A chilly pause. In my panic, I had broken the unspoken Lipkin rule: You don’t talk about the Lipkins. Even to the Lipkins. Especially to the Lipkins. You don’t talk about Fred’s drinking problem. You don’t talk about the paterfamilias’s obesity, and when he dies of a heart attack, you act like no one ever saw it coming. You don’t talk about Harry’s obsession with gambling, even when it’s painfully obvious, even when he’s your own husband and it’s your money being frittered away on poker nights and Vegas weekends. It was all very suppressed, very 1950s. Sylvia wasn’t going to rescue me, either, or heaven forbid admit that I sort of had a point. That it had sort of happened before. Finally, I said, “Is Fred there? Has he heard from Harry?”

“He’s here. He doesn’t know anything. We assumed Harry was home sick, or that maybe he’d taken the day to spend with the family. He’s been so upset about everything lately, and—”

“About what?” I interrupted.

Sylvia paused. Was it a knowing, considered pause? Or the normal pause of the interrupted? A paranoid queasiness percolated in my gut. “I’m sure he’s told you business is bad. And I know you kids are looking to find a bigger place, and it’s stressing him out, and that you, you know”—and oh, duh, I got it—“you haven’t been feeling well . . .”

“All right,” I said. “I didn’t know if there was something else. I’m feeling fine, by the way.”

“Of course you are, dear.”

“I’m just tired. You know? Rose doesn’t sleep. It’s tiring. Betty,
no
! Do
not
feed boogers to the baby!” I said it a little too loud and right into the phone.

Sylvia paused. “Dear, why don’t I come over.”

I looked around the apartment. This was not one of those “Oh, ha, sorry it’s such a mess” moments. It was dangerously messy. It was call-child-services, doubt-the-mental-health-of-the-mother messy. It was TLC-reality-programming messy. We cohabited with dust bunnies I knew by name, tiles that were actually milk spills. The windowsills were furzed with old-building lead dust. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find the jumbled hall closet mobbed by mischievous gnomes. Moments earlier Betty had been sitting on the kitchen floor playing with “ladybugs,” a friendly assortment of crumbs and shed paint chips.

“No, no,” I said too quickly. A weepy weight welled in my throat. “No, thank you. We have a ton to do today. But—keep me posted.”

“If we haven’t heard from him by tomorrow, I’m calling the police,” said Sylvia. This was a small victory: Her all but admitting that Harry might have gone off to gamble, that there might be a reasonable, unreasonable explanation for everything.

“All right,” I said.

“You don’t think he might be—”

I pretended not to hear and hung up the phone. When I turned around, Betty’s face was screwed up bulldoggishly.

“Wanttoo talk to Grandma!” she wailed.

“No, you don’t,” I said. “Trust me.”

Getting to know Harry after we’d married was interesting, I’ll give it that. The gambling problem, for example. Who knew there was such a thing? When we were first together, he’d taken me to hipster poker nights in smoky speakeasies, tucked into warehouse warrens or behind doors hidden in brownstone bookcases. I loved the whole secret-supper-club phenomenon for the retro charm, the sense of
in-crowd illicitness, and most of all, for the excuse it gave me to wear high heels too impractical for real life. Besides, Harry looked so cute leaning over in his pressed dress shirt, his hair slicked back like a movie gangster’s, calling someone’s bluff. I was enjoying myself, infatuated with being infatuated with him. I didn’t realize that for Harry, these nights were about the shuffle of cards, the plunking down of dollars. Which is to say, I didn’t think about the poker part of things much at all.

Once we were married, I would wake up in the middle of the night and wander into the living room to find him up in front of the computer, his face flickering in the light of an online poker site. I never suspected that this was his intermediary fix, like a junkie trying to take the edge off with drink. When I was eight months pregnant with Betty, he disappeared one Friday, just never got to work, without calling or answering his phone or responding to the dozen texts I sent. I dedicated that Saturday to calling every hospital in New York City, spent Sunday-brunch time hysterically camped out at my local police precinct, scored an exclusive tour of the Kings County morgue to view a baseball team’s worth of frozen white men. Needless to say, when he reappeared, rumpled but triumphant, in the meager light of Monday morning (having weekended in Atlantic City and doubled the money we’d received as wedding gifts and had been saving as a down payment for something or other), I was a hormonal mess—relieved, furious, exhausted, overjoyed, threatening murder and/or divorce. “I looked at dead people!” I’d screamed. “You made me look at dead people!” The fight that ensued caused both our upstairs and downstairs neighbors to call 311 on us. (No one thought to knock on the door to make sure the shattering plates weren’t meeting skin—thanks, Brooklyn!) Still. You wouldn’t think this of yourself—I know I didn’t—but it so happens that it’s easier to forgive when your
wrongdoer (contrite, begging your pardon, crying for the first time in your presence) has suddenly become twenty thousand dollars richer and apologizes with a weekend at a SoHo spa. It sounds shallow, I know, but hold judgment until you’ve had a Thai herbal rub applied to your extremely pregnant belly.

So here was this man I’d married, revealing himself to me as we formed our family together. A gambling problem! Either he was really good at hiding it or my powers of denial were superhero strength, because by the time I understood the severity of his sickness, our lives were so entangled that it became my problem, too. I remember wishing (and then immediately taking it back, pretending not to have thought it) that he could have had a health problem instead—something I could feel sorry for him about, something we could try to survive together. The gambling thing was embarrassing. It was something I’d never heard of, which made it feel somehow weirder than something like plain old alcoholism.