Chapter 7
One of the problems with meeting someone at a pool when you don’t have your glasses on is that it’s hard to recognize the clothed version of them when you can actually see.
The glasses-off version of the ringmaster was virtually indistinguishable from the other weekend dads at the pool: beard, bare-chested dad bod, Ray-Ban Wayfarers.
The glasses-on man standing in my bedroom has a striking face: that broad nose that looks like it got broken and never healed right, dark brown eyes, a little scar on his prominent brow.
He could be a character actor from the golden age of Hollywood if he wasn’t wearing a hoodie emblazoned with the Rutgers University logo.
“The ringmaster?” I squint at him.
“Nick Martino,” he replies, extending his hand. “Ringmaster is the alias I use at the pool. I’m also known as Kira’s dad.”
Maybe it’s because I’m holding a stack of comics, but I can’t help sifting through my mental catalog of characters for Nick’s two-dimensional, line art doppelg?nger.
There aren’t that many comics characters with…
average body types. Dan Dreiberg, the retired Nite Owl II from Watchmen?
But the face is wrong. Nite Owl II doesn’t have a salt-and-pepper beard.
“Sam Pulaski.” I take his hand and attempt my firmest handshake.
But instead of shaking my hand, he pulls me all the way up to my feet.
“Pulaski,” he repeats thoughtfully, like he’s tracing a memory of my last name.
“Nick just moved into Mrs. Morgan’s apartment,” Mom says. “He offered to fix our bathroom sink.”
“I can hear it dripping from my apartment. I brought my tools,” he says, nodding at a large black toolbox next to his feet. “I bet you need a new O-ring. It’s a simple fix.”
I purse my lips. I don’t like other people being in this room. I don’t like being around those other people in my pajamas, without a bra. And I don’t like our new neighbor using the term O-ring while standing a foot away from my bed, where I would probably use a sex toy with that same name.
“Come on in the kitchen, Nick,” Mom says. “I was just about to have a little breakfast. Can I make you some coffee?”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he says, but I can hear her footsteps heading for the kitchen. She’s already in Entertaining Mode.
I clear my throat. “Are you a plumber?” I find myself tidying up the room, pulling up my quilt to make the daybed more presentable, kicking a rogue pair of underwear behind the desk chair.
He’s watching me do all these things, but I can’t stop.
I don’t invite people in this room because it only takes a brief glance around to understand how small my life is right now. Hal calls it the Fortress of Solitude.
“No,” Nick says. “But I’ve fixed plenty of sinks and I have very good hearing. The walls are thin here.” He gives me a look I can’t quite decode. “Doesn’t the constant dripping sound bother you?”
“I probably got so used to it that my brain tunes it out,” I suggest.
I kneel again, gathering the Batman issues into a pile, hoping he’ll join my mom in the kitchen. But he doesn’t move.
“So, are you a Juilliard-trained actor or a government agent who doesn’t give her phone to nine-year-olds? Smart move, by the way.”
“I’m an art historian,” I say, using the present tense. “And you’re the person hammering and drilling on my wall first thing in the morning?”
He shrugs. “The place hasn’t been updated in years. I’m installing some shelving,” he says. “It involves lots of wall anchors.”
“My entire bed was vibrating.” He raises his eyebrows in a way that makes me wish I had phrased that differently, and I quickly return my attention to my Batman piles. I wonder if he was able to hear everything on the other side of his wall.
He turns to look at my unsightly metal bookshelf. “I think you need wall anchors, too. I can look at it when I’m done with the sink if you—”
“That shelf is just temporary. Don’t worry about it.”
Nick squats down next to me on the carpet, angling his neck to look at some of the covers.
“Why didn’t you tell me that you live in the building?”
“It’s my mom’s apartment,” I say, trying not to sound defensive while having the opposite effect. “I’m basically subletting. Temporarily. Because of the pandemic.”
“Temporarily?” He reaches out to grab the corner of Batman #635. “For five years?”
My cheeks burn. He turns the book to ninety degrees to read the title and every memory of some condescending man trying to explain comics to me floods my brain. I want to go the rest of my life without hearing another man’s opinion about two things:
How long I’ve lived in my mom’s office.
Any iteration of Batman.
“Don’t touch that!” I snatch the issue from under his index finger. “It’s valuable.”
Nick pulls his hand away. “I wasn’t—”
“Sam! Do you want to grab some breakfast while Nick works on the sink?” Mom shouts from the kitchen.
When I hear Nick turning the bathroom faucet on and off, I venture out of the office in search of a bagel.
“Those are for Nick!” Mom practically slaps my hand away from the sesame bagel I was reaching for.
“He’s not gonna eat five of these, Mom.”
“He might want the sesame.”
“Fine,” I say, grabbing a plain bagel off the platter.
“Say, I went ahead and called Barbara Silverton yesterday.” Pause. I tear a chunk out of the plain bagel. “Do you think you should email her? She said that her college does have a graduate program in art education.”
“Art education isn’t my field.”
“And she said she’ll keep an eye out for any job opportunities. Don’t you think she’d be a good connection for you?”
“Mom—”
“Here.” Mom wipes her hands and takes out her phone. “I can forward you her LinkedIn profile. Or do you want me to send an email and officially connect you? Less awkward?”
“It’s not that it’s awkward.” It is awkward, but I’m doing my best not to be insolent. “I just don’t see how she could help me. I have a plan. I know exactly where I’m applying. We’ve talked about that.”
“Here, let me slice that for you.” She takes the bagel out of my hand and saws it in half with a serrated knife. “Have you thought about casting the net wider than grad school?”
Her tone is so innocent that I’m 90 percent sure this is a phrase she’s been rehearsing in her head for a week.
“I can’t get the jobs I want without a PhD.”
“Academia is a really tough job market,” she says, like the last several years haven’t made that glaringly obvious. “What about another type of position in the arts? Raising money, maybe? Wouldn’t you like to have more options?”
“I don’t want more options. I want to do something that’s meaningful to me.”
Mom puts down the knife. “You’re working in a restaurant right now, Sam. How is that ‘meaningful’?”
“I’m not going to sit in a cubicle all day pestering old people to rewrite their wills.”
“I’ve been through several recessions, Samantha.
I had to find a new job during the dot-com bust. Do you know how many English majors work in PR?
They can’t all write the Great American Novel.
Sometimes highly educated people do things that they’d rather not in order to earn money and pay rent and buy food.
People who have full-time jobs in fundraising have insurance. ”
That’s been her bulletproof talking point since I got kicked off her health insurance plan for the crime of being twenty-six.
“What about a life coach?” she whispers.
“I have a therapist.” Whom I haven’t booked an appointment with in…five months because I haven’t had anything new to say to her.
“There are small steps you can take. I have this app that helps you cross off things on your to-do list. Remember how we talked about you getting your driver’s license when you started living here?”
And now she’s playing one of her greatest hits.
“I’m not ‘living here.’ I’m staying here temporarily until I start grad school.”
“I want to do everything I can to support you. So does Perry.” She puts her hand on my shoulder. “And I think it’s time to start talking about what things are going to look like after the wedding. It’s only a couple months away.”
Perry is slightly younger than my mom. It’s only an age gap of five years, but Perry has identified as nonbinary since their early twenties.
They’ve had their entire adult life as an out and proud member of the queer community and honed their style (well-tailored androgynous clothing, a very expensive and hard-to-maintain undercut) over time.
In contrast, my mom could be considered a late bloomer.
She’d been married to a man, had a child, spent a lot of her life playing the role of mother.
Living with Perry for the past year has helped my mom define herself.
But I can’t imagine how a legal document will alter our day-to-day lives.
“Are you kicking me out of the office or something?” I give a little chuckle but Mom’s not laughing.
“Perry gave up their condo to move in here. I want us both to feel like this is our home where we have an equal—”
“All done,” Nick calls from the bathroom. I wonder if he made the announcement in order to give us some warning before walking into some heated mother-daughter argument.
“Here, let me get you a bagel,” Mom says, pivoting back into a gracious hostess.
“Really, don’t worry about it,” Nick says. “I usually don’t eat breakfast.”
She ignores this and hands him a plate. “We saved you the sesame. It’ll just take a minute to toast. Now, how old is your little girl?”
“Nine,” he says. “Actually, we met Sam at the pool yesterday. Kira loves swimming.”
“I love that there’s a pool here,” Mom says, even though she rarely uses it.
“It’s so important for kids to feel comfortable in the water.
” She places his unwanted bagel in the toaster oven and turns to me.
“Remember how scared you used to be to get your face wet? We had to practice by dunking your head in a plastic tub next to the sink.”
I stare at her, praying that she can pick up my telepathic message to stop embarrassing me in front of this near stranger who I’m bound to encounter in the breezeway, taking out the trash, in the parking deck, the mail room.
“It’s not a problem anymore,” I tell him. “I wash my face now and everything.”
Nick smiles. My mom pours him some orange juice.
“I think it had something to do with holding your breath,” she says, ignoring my brain waves. “They wouldn’t let her take advanced-beginner swimming lessons until she would go completely underwater. I was so worried she had some kind of phobia.”
“Oh my God, Mom.”
“Well, you were a really good sport with Kira,” Nick says, glancing at me.
“Really?” Mom exclaims, placing a bowl of fruit salad in front of Nick.
“You’re always complaining when kids are at the pool.
” I mean, I do complain about kids at the pool, but does she have to point that out in front of a literal parent?
“You barely tolerated kids when you were a kid.” The timer on the toaster rings.
“I’d send Sam to camp and she’d make friends with the staff members instead of the other campers. Maybe it’s an only-child thing.”
Can I help that I was mature for my age? At least at that point in my life.
“Kira’s an only child,” Nick says, “but she’s pretty outgoing.”
Mom nods approvingly and places the lightly toasted bagel I wanted in front of him.
My face feels hot. I’m makeupless, braless, lacking any maternal instinct, and possibly a recovering aquaphobic.
There’s a lull in the conversation as Nick politely takes a bite of the bagel and I sense my mom’s unease with just a few seconds of silence.
“Nick, could you use a Bundt pan?” My mother squats down and begins rummaging through a lower cabinet. “I have two and I’ve been trying to downsize.”
“Does anyone need a Bundt pan?” I ask, reaching for a speckled banana from the fruit bowl.
“Maybe he bakes.” Mom stands up with an armful of baking implements that she hasn’t used since the nineties. “Do you bake?” Before he can answer, she adds, “Does your daughter like to help in the kitchen?”
“I don’t do a lot of cooking. Kira mostly survives on chicken tenders and mac and cheese,” he says. “We’re working on it.” And then, as if to reassure her that he does know how to mix ingredients together and heat them up with an appliance: “I make waffles.”
“Well, I’m sure I have something that would be useful for you.” She pushes an assortment of cookware across the counter. “I have all these extra mixing bowls and sauté pans since Perry and I combined households. You already have a colander, right? What about a lemon juicer?”
“She won’t stop until you accept at least six useless kitchen supplies,” I say. There’s a whole My First Grownup Kitchen starter pack stored in these cabinets that was meant for me. And now she’s determined to offload it onto someone who actually has their own kitchen. “I don’t really cook.”
“That’s not true, honey,” says my mother. “You made all that bread.”
Ah yes, the Great Sourdough Revolution of 2020 when we all decided to place containers of bacteria on our kitchen counters for a month.
“Okay, I’ll take a few things,” he says, probably sensing that it’s the path of least resistance.
Mom beams at Nick’s surrender, like he’s the good-natured son she never had.