Keep Me Posted (2 page)

In my defense, it had been a rough year. After months of layoffs and salary reductions, the magazine where I’d worked for seven years had finally folded just before the holidays the year before. Leo and I had decided that with the magazine industry the way it was, and with child-care costs the way they were, I’d stay home with the boys, just until the economy recovered. I figured I could pick up freelance writing assignments to keep myself in the game and bring in some money and, eventually, find another job. But I hadn’t so much as sent a single work-related e-mail, attended a networking event, or even updated my LinkedIn profile since the day late last year I brought home that cardboard box of desk accoutrements. Likewise, the urban planning, architecture, and real estate news that used to occupy much of my headspace went completely disregarded. Since my Twitter identity was so connected to my job as managing editor of
City Green
magazine, I gave that up too. But Facebook was still there for me, a sort of bridge between my old and new lives.

Without my commute time to read the
Times
, I rarely knew what was going on in the world. Even our
New York One
time in the morning had given way to
Sesame Street
. Before I knew it, Facebook and the odd
Daily Show
became my main sources of news.

On the occasion that I did catch a few minutes of real news, there was hardly any context for me, and so I became uninterested. After a while, the only world events that resonated with me were unspeakable tragedies (like school shootings or child abductions), celebrity marriages or divorces, and weather phenomena.

I could foresee a future in which my role as a full-time mother contextualized the world, where topics like poverty, education, food, and gun control could be made more real when viewed
through my mom eyes. But despite my substantial efforts to land this job, I’d undertaken my occupation as a full-time mother somewhat reluctantly and couldn’t quite bring myself to rally around the mommy causes du jour.

So maybe I got a little carried away, but Facebook was the one thing I found that distracted me from my daily grind just enough to keep me sane.

Lulu stirred, and Sid stood up and started swaying with her to “Here’s Where the Story Ends” by the Sundays, which, because our last name was Sunday, was on every high school mixtape anyone ever made for us. I sipped my wine and stared at my sister, thinking that it was like we were the same person but she had been dipped in some kind of effervescent fluid.

Lulu was sleeping by the end of the song, and Sid carefully lowered her next to me on the musty couch. When she looked up and met my eyes, she wore a satisfied grin, like she had just figured something out. Then she said—slowly, definitively—“I’ve got it. Let’s be pen pals.”

It wasn’t really a question, but she perched herself on the edge of the couch next to me, awaiting an answer. Having continued to imbibe at a steady clip since we’d come down to the basement, I was drunk enough that I had to close an eye to see just one of her. She handed me her glass of water, taking my wine for herself now, and I drank the water as she laid out the plan she’d formulated during the Sundays song.

“It’s perfect. It’s been impossible to talk on the phone with me in Singapore. Let’s not even e-mail. Just the letters. Maybe when we’re old we’ll read some out loud to our grandkids—how cool would that be?” Switching to a singsong voice, then, “I think we have a new tra-di-tion.”

Sid is like a female Bill Clinton. I say that with the authority of someone who once met him. One of the things about growing up in Ohio is that you have plenty of opportunities to meet presidential candidates. He was jogging with his Secret Service guys at the park where Sid and I walked our neighbor’s dog for twenty dollars every Saturday morning. The dog, a golden retriever named Thumper, led us over to a small mutt among a cluster of people taking pictures. We knew he was there, because we’d had to go through a security checkpoint on our way into the park, but we weren’t expecting to have an impromptu chat with him. Yet suddenly, there he was, leaning down and patting Thumper’s head and saying something about him being a “beautiful animal,” cameras clicking all around us. I can’t remember much about anything else he said, but I do remember feeling like we were friends—like he’d be all, “Of course I do! How have you been?” if I ever called him up and said, “Remember me from the park outside of Columbus, Ohio? I had the golden retriever?” I felt he saw me—really saw me, even though Sid was standing right next to me, which typically rendered me invisible—and I wanted to say the right thing to let him know I was cool. He said something about “young people” being our country’s most important asset, and he nodded right at me, like
I
was our country’s most important asset. I felt sparkly and important for days afterward.

Sid has a similar effect on people. I’ve seen it hundreds of times. When people were around her, you could feel them yearning to lock in the friendship. There was this photo booth at the mall, and in middle school, if anyone was within forty feet of Sid and that booth, they would persuade her to go get pictures taken together, so they could tape the strip of black-and-white images up in their locker or on their mirror at home as proof of their association.

In high school, her turns of phrase and affectations became part of the common vernacular. She used to do this thing when someone paid her a compliment, where she’d kind of comically, kind of sweetly, kind of ironically say, “Ooooh, kitten,” and suddenly everyone was saying, “Oooh, kitten,” all the time.

People assumed I was jealous of her, or that I felt inferior, and I suppose in some ways I did, but it did little to affect my feelings toward Sid. When people would patronizingly suggest this as a foregone conclusion of me being me and her being her, I would direct any negative feelings at them, not at my sister.

Through it all, Sid and I were always best friends. We laughed over nonsense and had deep conversations about life. We fantasized about the future—what kind of men we’d marry, how many kids we’d have, where we’d live (next door to each other, with a circular connecting driveway). More accurately, I fantasized about the future for both of us, narrating detailed plans while she humored me, occasionally interjecting that she didn’t want a blueprint for her life, that she hoped her future held things that couldn’t possibly be imagined by a thirteen-year-old.

“Okay,” I said to her. “I’ll write to you,” and then I rested my head against the back of the couch and closed my eyes.

B
y the time I got back to New York, I already had a letter. It stuck out like a sore thumb among the catalogs and junk waiting for me in my little mailbox. I tore it open immediately, thinking,
So we’re really doing this
. And that’s exactly what the letter said:

We’re Really Doing This!! No backing out!! xoxo

—Sid

My guess was that she had penned it Christmas Eve night after I’d passed out on the couch, since it was written in a faded purple Magic Marker on a torn-out page of notebook paper, both items easily found in Mom and Dad’s basement.

Sid’s loopy and childlike writing always made me feel tender toward her. Soft and wide and squishy, it evoked Mylar balloons, cookie cakes, and boy-band crushes. Dumb girl handwriting. It’s okay; I can say this because Sid is not dumb. She was a National
Merit Scholar and has never in her life been on the losing team in a game of Trivial Pursuit. She does possess a certain innocence that no amount of intelligence or hard knocks will erode; that is what I see when I look at her bubbly scrawl.

That’s all it took to catapult me from lukewarm to enthusiastic about our experiment in communication. I wanted to run inside and write to her that, yes, I was on board. We
were
really doing this. But I knew it would be hours before I could grab a second alone. Instead, I wrangled the twins up the stairs to our second-floor walk-up while Leo returned the rental car to the lot around the corner. Our mountain of luggage sat inside the foyer of our building. Leo would take the car seats to our basement storage locker and bring the luggage up after he returned the car. Our neighborhood and building were relatively safe, but leaving all of this loot in the hallway was still a risk and just one of the many inconveniences we suffered for the privilege of living in Manhattan’s West Village.

When I found out I was having twins, one of my first instincts was to panic about whether we’d have to move from our beloved apartment. Leo thought yes. I convinced him that we could stay. “Much larger families live in much smaller spaces in other parts of the world,” I remember saying, feeling smugly proud of my worldly outlook—picturing families of seven on the African plain huddled in a grass hut and how we’d be more like them than a family of four living in a McMansion in, say, suburban Houston. Or how every story I can remember reading in this Immigrant Women’s literature course in college seemed to mention there being only one bed for the entire family. We weren’t like ordinary Americans, needing their ridiculously large houses, raping the earth with fertilized lawns and central air. No, we would take only what we
needed. We were New Yorkers, I told him; we could handle this. How evolved, how drunk on my own superior lifestyle I felt.

I regret it at least four or five times a day. Say, for example, when I’m coming home with the boys and the dinner and the dry cleaning, and Quinn has a stage-five meltdown on the front stoop because I again refused to patronize the Mister Softee ice cream truck that followed us home from the park like a fucking stalker. (I’m sorry, but that Mister Softee driver has caused more family strife than a Vegas bachelor party.) And then I forget I’d promised Joey that he’d be the one to stick the magnetic key fob into the sensor on the outside door, and
his
meltdown begins. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for the general angst of the moment to be escalated by one of the boys pooping in their pants or falling down and beginning to bleed. In these situations, I think about how I’ve made my life so much more difficult than it needs to be. I surmise that I’d be a happier, calmer, and better-groomed person if I lived in one of those suburban McMansions where the boys had space to run around and I had a kitchen with room for more than two days’ worth of food and the counter space and appliances required to prepare it.

Add to that the publicness of it all. Can no moment of childhood ugliness happen in private? Why is it that some meticulously dressed gay man who lives in my building—one of the same guys I used to chat with about politics and restaurants while doing laundry or sorting recycling—seems to appear at the most shameful mommy moments, wincing past me, no doubt silently congratulating himself on the bullet he dodged by not having easy access to an ovary, and making me feel like a pox on our perfect neighborhood.
Don’t you remember? I’m one of you!
I want to yell. Or,
I almost didn’t have kids! I didn’t know it was going to be so hard!

But there’s no “almost” about twin three-year-old boys, no blending in or quick and quiet entries. My only chance at getting them into the building smoothly is if one of Mrs. Tannenbaum’s white pugs—the friendly one, hopefully—is hanging around the first-floor hallway. If the boys made enough noise, Mrs. T. would appear with a small dog biscuit and break it in two for them to give to Mitzi. “Thank you,” I’d say to her as if she’d just fortified me for the long journey ahead. It’s one flight—eighteen steps with a landing halfway—and we’re home. It’s not unusual for it to take fifteen minutes.

The apartment itself is lovely. The perfect place if you are childless, or maybe if you have anything other than twin boys who are between the ages of zero and three. It’s technically a one-bedroom with a study, which was our combination closet and office until we turned it into the boys’ room. The whole place is eight hundred square feet—about the size of the back porch in the house I grew up in.

During my pregnancy, I nested like some kind of crazed Martha Stewart protégée, intent on delivering on the promises made in my hard-fought campaign to keep the apartment. Determined to be right about how easy and wonderful life in our little apartment would be, I transformed our abode into the ultimate small but cleverly designed family home. It was even featured on ApartmentTherapy.com as “Cassie & Leo’s Dreamy Oasis.” Our dovel gray walls and white Eames rocker, the chandelier and half-sized travel cribs we painted the same midnight blue, handsomely awaited the arrival of their tenants, who were markedly less impressed than the
dozens of ApartmentTherapy readers, who commented on our brilliant storage solutions and sophisticated color palette.

There are some upsides to living in our tiny apartment, including needing only twenty minutes and five or six baby wipes to clean it. But when I see my boys slithering off our supertall bed, running four steps to the sofa, jumping on that, then repeating the loop over and over, I can’t help but think of a pair of puppies forced to live in a small pen.

Leo grew up with a bunch of brothers, but I only had my sister. My earliest memories of playing include coloring and dressing up dolls, and I guess I pictured the boys doing slightly more masculine versions of that. I did not foresee constant wrestling or the compulsion to run and jump and knock things over that is programmed into their DNA.

When I was pregnant, the market was booming and we could have sold our place for a nice profit. Now we’d have to take a loss to sell it, so I didn’t feel like it was worth it to admit to Leo I was wrong about staying, to let on how frustrating I found my day-to-day life and that I held the apartment responsible.

Still, I loved our street. Someone once told me that Morton Street is the most photographed street in New York. I have no idea if that’s true, but at certain times of day, it is breathtaking. In a city of straight lines and rectangles, Morton is one of the few with a bend, which allows the street to reveal itself slowly. With its low trees and stately town houses, it’s quintessential West Village. Also, it’s magically quiet. The crowds of
Sex and the City
tourists that can ruin Charles or Perry streets on a Saturday morning seem worlds away, though they are only a few blocks over.

It seemed unfair—impossible, even—that these two things I
loved so much—my kids and my apartment—didn’t go together at all. I wanted to sit them all down and say, “Can’t you all just try to get along, for my sake?”

Upstairs, I stuck Sid’s letter into a book under my bed and helped the boys negotiate the bathroom. I didn’t need to open my refrigerator to know that we had nothing to eat. Still, I was poking through its contents in search of the source of an awful stench when Leo returned from his second trip up the stairs with our luggage.

“Blech. This has got to go,” I said, plunking the loosely wrapped morsel of soft stinky cheese into the trash and tying it up.

“Fair enough,” he said, grabbing the trash from me. “Hudson?”

“Yeah, let’s go. I’m starved,” I said, and began herding the boys back out the door.

The Hudson Diner wasn’t known for its food, but it was right around the corner and never crowded, so we could usually get a big booth by the window. There was something about that place that had a calming effect on the boys. Maybe it was the smell of gravy, the dim orange fluorescent lighting, the geriatric crowd, or the giant pile of individually wrapped saltine crackers the humorless waitress always plunked in front of them as soon as we arrived, but this was the only restaurant where we could eat an entire meal and not have to apologize to a half-dozen different people on the way out.

While the boys munched on saltines, I took out a pack of baby wipes and asked Joey if I could give his car a wash. He never went anywhere without clutching a little matchbox car. Sometimes I worried that his left hand would be permanently deformed into a little claw, and at night while he slept I’d pry his sweet little fingers away from the silver vehicle and massage his palm.

With the car scrubbed, I reached across the table and wiped the
boys’ hands clean one by one while Leo set up a windy sugar packet racetrack on the table. I cleaned my phone with a new wipe and then scrolled through Christmas pictures. “Hey, Joey, nice camera work,” I said when I got to the million shots he’d snapped at Joe and Margie’s. “Oh, bud, I love this one!” It was a shot of Sid and me sitting on the sofa, my head resting on her shoulder and both of us beaming in the completely unguarded way you do when a child asks you to smile. I posted it to Facebook and captioned it, “Good to be home but missing this gorgeous gal already.”

It was such a nice shot that I cropped it and brightened it and made it my profile picture. By the time the food arrived, I’d accumulated forty-some likes and nearly as many comments from old friends who hadn’t seen Sid in many years—virtually or otherwise.

I had to put my phone away when Joey spilled his water, and I spent the rest of dinner preoccupied by the logistics of getting letters from here to Singapore. How long would it take? What kind of stamps would I need? Oh crap, would I have to go to the post office? That in itself could be a deal breaker.

That night, after the boys were in bed, I got out the stepladder and rifled through the tiny cupboard above the refrigerator. Behind a ziplock bag containing our tax returns from the last five years, I found the dust-coated shoe box of old postcards, thank-you notes, and the set of yellowing monogrammed stationery Mom gave me when I graduated college.

Leo turned on the TV and lay on the floor groaning about his back being sore from sitting in the car all day. As the IT director for a chain of gyms, he spends his days crisscrossing Manhattan on his bike to fix one computer issue or another at the gym’s eight different locations, so sitting for long periods was unusual for him.

I halfheartedly offered a back rub and surveyed the dozen or so
dull pencils and freebie pens jammed into the jar on the desk in the foyer. The pencil jar was like a microcosm of my wardrobe, I thought: overstuffed with uninspiring items, most of them with no shot of being chosen.

Selfishly relieved that Leo responded, “That’s all right,” to my offer, I settled in on the sofa, using a fat September
Vogue
as my lap desk, a clicker pen from a Realtor in Pennsylvania in hand, and froze. I couldn’t think of how to begin. I’d withdrawn only a single sheet of stationery and an envelope from the box, so I had to get this right if I didn’t want to get out the stepladder again. But even without the logistical concerns, I just didn’t know what to
say
. If asked, I would definitely have described Sid and me as close, but that moment of paralysis brought home the reality that many years had passed since we’d exchanged real intimacies. She was right, I thought, with a wave of sadness: I did know more about those people on Facebook than I did about her.

I promised myself that that was going to change this year. My letter had to be a good kickoff. I didn’t want to set the tone for a year of vague updates and pleasantries. I wanted this thing to be real and meaningful.

But first, an important thing to know about Sid: She was nineteen and single when she had River. I’ll tell you the story because having an unplanned baby at that age really changes a person.

It was the summer of 1994, and I had just graduated from high school. Sid was home from her first year at Ohio University, where I was to join her in the fall. She had declared a perfectly Sid-like double major in biology and poetry and thrown herself wholeheartedly into the pervasive counterculture in Athens, Ohio: that of the latter-day hippie.