The Mermaid of Brooklyn (34 page)

Sylvia drew an invisible line on the table and examined her fingertip. “Suspect in what? The going theory is that he left of his own accord. Isn’t it? Didn’t he?”

I’ll handle this.

Please, no, be polite—

“I don’t know where he went or why, Sylvia. That’s the whole problem. Remember?”

Sylvia sighed. “The point is, there’s good news. Do you want to hear it or not?”

Betty was sitting in her lap and watching us both expectantly. “Little pitchers have big ears,” my father’s voice echoed in my head, or maybe it was Pa from
Little House on the Prairie
. “Go play,” I
said to her. She looked at me like I was speaking Chinese. Which she didn’t understand. Because I didn’t sign her up for toddler Mandarin. Because I sucked. “Go watch
Dora,
” I said, because I really sucked.

“Yippee!” Betty said, springing up and racing past me. She knew how to turn on my laptop and find the
Dora
DVD, because I really, really sucked.

“He’s been able to track Harry as far west as Reno.” Reno! Not even Vegas but Reno, dust bowl of decayed grandeur. Classy. Still, it was a relief to have confirmed what we’d suspected—that he was okay, he was out there, it was all another gambling binge. An epic gambling binge, but still. This was the Harry I knew. The wave of relief was followed at once by eddies of dread. I wondered how much he had lost—that had to be why he’d stayed away so long—and, dear God, what sort of unsavory characters he’d mixed himself up with. It was terrible to think about, terrible. But, Sylvia went on to say, that was months ago. Harry seemed to be dealing in cash and not leaving much of a trail, until the car had broken down outside of Reno—it served him right, didn’t it—and he’d had it fixed. He’d paid in cash—okay, so he was doing pretty well, all things considered—but had given his name. A sloppy mistake for someone determined to stay hidden, the detective had told Sylvia and Fred, suggesting maybe on some level, Harry wanted to be found. Since then the detective had lost the trail. I imagined him as a cartoon fox in a Sherlock Holmes outfit, smoking a pipe and slinking up a tree after a bluebird with Harry’s face. Clearly, I was spending too much time with small children.

Rose subtly and politely requested a diaper change, which was one of those situations that requires an outfit change as well. Then my phone buzzed in my shorts pocket: a text from Sam. The park was boring without me. Life was boring without me. I slipped my
phone back into my pocket, unable to answer. What did he think he was doing? Didn’t his wife ever look at his phone? Rose and I rejoined Sylvia in the kitchen, where she was examining the dress form for Anne’s gown, draped on the mannequin in the corner like a patient ghost. “Hey,” she said to me softly, softer than I’d ever heard her speak. “Hey, this is darling. This is just darling.”

I pushed my hair out of my flushed face, plopped Rose down on her play mat. She started screaming. I scooped her up again and bounced. “This is very educational, this play mat,” I told her. “It’s extremely developmentally appropriate.” The baby ignored me. To Sylvia: “Oh. I mean, it’s nothing yet.”

“You’re making a wedding dress?”

“Yeah. It’s for this woman— I don’t know. A friend of a friend, sort of. She’s paying me a shitload.”

“Oh, how vivid.” But she smiled a little.

“What do you think?” I said. I looked over her shoulder. We’d finally cracked it, I think, the bride and I. It was going to be modern, sculptural, a form-fitting, Jackie O-esque sheath, but with a peacocky flounce in the back. Unusual but not insane, flowery but not
quinceañera
material, and flattering to her curvy figure without being apologetic about it. I was surprised by how into the process I was getting. And it
did
make me remember my own wedding, and how it had been exciting, how I had felt like something out of a fairy tale. A good part of a fairy tale. The rusalka had been helping, she must have been, because I would sit down sleepily and stare off into space, and then when I awoke in the still-dark morning, an astounding amount of work would be sitting there, neatly folded or draped on the mannequin.

Sylvia looked at me, her eyes cataracted with dreaminess. “It’s beautiful! I knew you could sew, but this is really marvelous.”

“Well, thank you. You don’t have to sound surprised to learn that
I’m capable of something, but—thank you.” I was trying to make a joke, only it came out sounding defensive.

“Oh, no, it’s not that. It’s just— You know what this reminds me of?” I could have sworn that Sylvia was transforming before my eyes. Her painted eyebrows softened, impressionistically. She drew her forefinger across the fabric and leaned toward me. “It reminds me of dancing. Did you know I used to dance? I did. I used to dance before I was married. I was in a traveling ballet for one season, in the chorus. I was never any better than that, but oh, I loved it. Especially the costumes. The princess dresses, the frothy tutus. And I loved to dance.”

I was almost speechless. Almost. Sylvia! A dancer! It seemed so . . . sensuous. I wandered around the kitchen, looking for something to occupy myself. Dora sang ecstatically in the background, Betty humming along and sometimes singing mostly nonsense words. “You’re kidding. Why didn’t I know that? And then you just—stopped?”

She smiled bitterly. “Stopped. Just like that. I married and became a housewife, and once Ever So Fresh started, I worked there. And we never so much as went out to a disco. I can’t believe it, when I think of how much I loved it.” It’s not that it didn’t make sense. She’d been older when she’d married Harry’s dad, and she must have been doing something before that. It also explained her stalky posture. “Do Harry and Fred know?”

“Of course. There’s a picture of me dancing up at the house. They grew up with it there. And I’d drag them to see
The Nutcracker
until they were old enough to protest, which wasn’t very old. They never really asked. Boys, you know. I think they know.”

“That picture is
you
?” I knew the photograph she was describing. It hung at the top of the stairwell, its sepia-toned finish lending it a look more antique than it was, as it turned out. So that hard-bodied
ballerina with the arched back, toes en pointe, arms outstretched like wings, was my crabby mother-in-law, Sylvia? I’d always thought it was a cheesy stock photo, maybe the one that came in the ornate frame. What a jerk I was.

Sylvia and I ended up having the nicest morning we’d ever spent together. It was strange that just remembering the self of her youth seemed to melt some of her elemental hardness, but it did. We were buddies, almost, a little, sharing stories about our fanciful dreams and how we had shelved them and conveniently blamed the shelving on someone else, our husbands, for example. “He didn’t make me give up dancing. But the way I tell the story in my head is that it’s his fault I never made more of myself, that I never became a principal at the New York City Ballet. It was easier than admitting that I was never that good.”

“Wow, Sylvia. You’ve figured it all out.”

“I’m old. And half of my family has disappeared. I’ve had a lot of time to think.”

It all seemed to be of a piece—my mother’s wanderlust, Sylvia’s dancing, Laura’s midnight recordings. Everyone and their others. The next day Laura was positively glowing at the swing set. I plopped Rose in a baby swing and shouted at Betty to be careful as she scowled her way along the perimeter of the swing enclosure, clutching the black comb she’d unearthed from an old suitcase of Harry’s. I’d seen plenty of kids get clocked in the head by errant swinging feet, and the last thing this family needed was head trauma. She didn’t acknowledge that she’d heard—she’d been especially glowery lately—but clung to the chain link like a mini juvenile delinquent, watching a shirtless man do pull-ups on the exercise equipment that was placed (oddly, as if to shrug in the face of
creepy peepers everywhere) directly facing the baby swings. Finally, Betty skulked off to the sandbox, where she sat raking the comb through the diseased sand, creating a crooked Zen garden.

“Well, look at you,” I said to Laura. “Did Will try something fancy last night or what?” It came out sounding meaner than I’d meant. I hadn’t seen or heard from Sam in two days—the girls and I had sat on the damn hill for hours, encountering no one more significant than a friendly pug named Lola—and it was making me exceedingly crabby. Pregnancy hormones, baby blues, spousal abandonment: As any teenager could tell you, none of this was anything compared to a crush.

Laura puckered her eyebrows at me and gave Emma another gentle push. “No, Looney Tunes. I finally talked to Julie’s husband. Remember? About the recordings? They came over for dinner and Will made this amazing feast and the kids watched a video and I played Ed the recordings and . . . he thought they were great! He really did! At least he said he did. He wouldn’t say it if he didn’t mean it, right? There wouldn’t be any point. Right?”

I shook my head, giving Rose a push with a little too much velocity. She knocked the back of her head on the rubber swing and looked at me, offended, puffing out her bottom lip. “Shh, shh,” I said, trying to locate Betty out of the corner of my eye at the same time. They needed to outfit playgrounds with periscopes, they really did. Rose started to snuffle. “No, I’m sure he likes it, if that’s what he said.”

Unless he just wants to jump her bones.

Oh, please don’t say that. Even I’m not feeling mean enough for that.

Why do you all insist on pretending not to notice that you’re all eyeing each other, testing each other out, trying to see who’s game . . .

Why do
you
insist on pretending this is some exciting soap opera and not just a neighborhood full of stressed-out parents? You know, before
you came along, my most fervent desire was for a few extra hours of sleep. My guess is it’s the same for most everyone else.

But don’t you think my version is more interesting?

I don’t know. Maybe.

“So anyway,” Laura said, lifting Emma from the slightly too small swing, “he said I could use his editing equipment to turn it into a demo to play for NPR! He said that!” I ignored my initial riot of jealousy and allowed myself to experience a surge of pride in my talented friend. Here we were, doing the things we’d said we would do! I wasn’t sure why something that sounded so easy felt like such an unlikely triumph, but it did, and I reached out to squeeze Laura’s arm in congratulations.

“That’s great, Laura! So promising! When do I get to hear them?”

“Mama. Mama. Mama.” Emma tugged at the bottom of Laura’s shorts. Laura had cute shorts, cuffed linen with silver specks, shorts that were never other pants sheared on a hot afternoon. Another reason to love her. And hate her sometimes, a little. “Mama. Mama. Mama!”

“Oh, whenever you want—I know you don’t have time, but I’d love your help—what, sweetie? I’m talking to Jenny. What is it.”

Emma gestured around frantically, a tiny Richard Lewis. “I want to play with Betty, but where is she?” Emma was so much more articulate than Betty, a fact I tried unsuccessfully not to worry too much about. Was it my fault? Too many cartoons? Not enough classes? Had my parenting skills decreased that dramatically since Rose had been born? I seemed to remember reading many more books to Betty before Rose. I was so busy running down my own failings and extracting an increasingly fussy Rose from the swing—it was so hot that the swing rubber seemed to have gone slightly gummy—that it took me a moment to process what Emma had said.

“Oh, sweetie, Betty’s right—” I spun around. “Oh, man. BETTY!”

We exited the swing enclosure and stood sentry by the playground entrance, scanning the bouncing dots for signs of Betty. “Do you see her?” Laura shook her head, squinting. As soon as a kid could walk, you had these awful moments, though they were usually over after a few heart-racing seconds when you spotted your own dear dot leaping through the sprinkler or hawking imaginary ice cream beneath the slide. Unless the kid was running into the street, or getting kidnapped by aliens or, worse, a religious cult, or maybe falling, like Emma, accruing an injury other playground moms would surely, if silently, hold you accountable for. Betty had been so naughty lately, probably acting out, probably missing her father . . . there, I had landed on a way that this, too, like everything, was Harry’s fault. If anything happened between me and Cute Dad, it would be Harry’s fault for leaving. If anything happened to the kids, it would be Harry’s fault . . . though it was more satisfying to feel this way when there was a Harry to bicker with about it.

There was a dark-headed girl in a yellow tank top. Not Betty, too tall. There was a curly little head—a boy. She’d probably wandered off and was halfway to the street because people were too idiotic to close the goddamn playground gate. She’d probably been abducted by some shirtless creepo who pretended to exercise so he could leer at the children. She—

Stop. Stop. You’re getting hysterical.

Prove me wrong, then. Make it right.