Chapter Four
· · · · ·
The Lusty Lady was next door to a Rainforest Cafe and had French doors that opened up to the boardwalk.
It was more sports bar than strip club, with a smattering of women with stretched breasts shoved into sports bras and skimpy satin athletic shorts.
When they weren’t balancing trays of beer Bierhalle-style, they were slightly shimmying near big-screen TVs showing a rerun of a Devils game.
The lights weren’t nearly dark enough; I could see every stain.
I found the manager, a severe woman who read more social studies teacher than madam.
“Hi, Donna. I’m Emily.” I reached out to shake her hand. She gave me a smile that said she didn’t have the energy to deal with me.
“What can I do you for, Emily? Happy hour for another half hour.”
“Hi…I’m just…I’m looking for a friend and was hoping you could help. I heard she maybe used to work here? Or around here?” I said, pulling out Daisy’s photo.
Donna took the photo, studied it, then handed it back to me. “I have seen it all.” She walked away to scold a busboy. “Table 9 still needs bussing.”
I chased after her. “Wait. Does that mean you’ve seen her?” She signaled to a bouncer, who appeared, towering over me. I got the hint.
I walked back out onto the boardwalk, enjoying the fresh potpourri of sea air and funnel cake until a guy with a face tattoo asked me if I had any meth.
“Not on me,” I said, for some reason.
I tucked into the heavily air-conditioned lobby of Harrah’s and peeked at a photo of Holden that Roman texted earlier.
Propped up on the couch in a fire engine onesie, holding the NogginStik, his chubby thighs on full display.
What new tricks had he learned while I was getting thrown out of an Atlantic City sports bar?
Did Roman even know that he was starting to roll over on his own? He could roll off the sofa.
The revolving doors turned, and I felt a warm ocean breeze and a wash of panic.
Wait. Did Roman put the NogginStik in his crib?
I tried to log on to the Owlet baby monitor app, but I had low data.
One of the Juju Bean moms saw the NogginStik in my posts and said she had a friend who had a friend whose baby had somehow opened a similar STEM gadget and pulled out the battery and choked on it.
Dr. Brooke calls this SUID, Sudden Unexpected Infant Death, a blanket category that includes any accidental sleep-related deaths.
Why wouldn’t the wi-fi work? Motherfucker.
Finally, the Owlet app loaded. A grainy image of Holden sleeping, in the Love to Dream Swaddle Up sleep sack that makes him look like a snow angel, sucking on his pacifier in an empty crib.
—
It was almost two a.m. I scanned my notes against the map and decided to take an Uber to the next stop, a higher-end joint closer to Cape May.
The driver dropped me outside the Peppermint Elephant, a windowless block of concrete with a parking lot still set up for a medieval times festival.
Blow-up castle, turkey-leg booth. This was a much more professional operation.
Twenty-dollar cover charge, two-drink minimum type of thing.
That evening featured a special guest, Roxy Love, famous in certain circles after starring in a hit antiwar adult film called The Axis of Evil.
Roxy was over forty, and what she lacked in youth she made up for in effort.
There were costume changes—top hats and boas and a dominatrix bra with silver spikes.
But the crowd looked more interested in buying the Roxy swag she’d be signing after the show.
I ordered a club soda at the bar and slid the photo over to a bartender. “Hey, just wondering if you’ve ever seen this girl? She’s a frie—” I stopped myself. “She’s my sister. I’m trying to find her to tell her that I had a baby and that she’s an aunt.”
“Nope. We don’t do that here,” he said, as if people come in all the time searching for long-lost aunts, daughters, mothers.
He’d turned to wipe down the bar, not even glancing at Daisy’s photo.
He tucked the dank rag into the back of his Dickies.
I noticed how fine he was. Nordic features.
Stubble that framed a jaw like a refrigerator.
Biceps out of a CrossFit catalog. He was not my type.
I did not gravitate to man buns. But I could hardly speak to him. He was that hot.
“It’s just…I just thought maybe—”
“Look, you seem like a nice lady and I’m trying to be polite,” the bartender said, giving me a little grin, a little scar below his lip.
Why was this man working the bar at the Peppermint Elephant?
Why wasn’t he seducing wealthy widows at mahjong, wrestling their fortunes away from estranged children?
Or modeling for Karl Lagerfeld? “But I can’t help you. ”
“Right. I get it. Thanks anyway.” I swiveled to watch Roxy’s big finish. Then, an idea. I leaned my swollen boobs over the bar. “Hey, but when you get a break, do you think you could follow me outside to the alley and penetrate me so hard that I feel alive again?”
Or at least that was what flashed briefly in my mind. In reality, I just smiled and left him a five-dollar tip.
—
When I was ten weeks pregnant, Dr. Weatherstone detected a blotchy spot on the ultrasound that she diagnosed as a “vanishing twin.” At the next checkup, it was gone.
She wasn’t sure if the “dominant embryo” had “absorbed” the twin or if it had just been a glitch on the monitor.
I went through the rest of my pregnancy wondering if my child ate his sibling or somebody just forgot to Windex.
He’d kicked like Pelé and positioned himself so low on my diaphragm that it rendered subway stairs and burritos almost impossible.
But I mostly wanted to give birth as soon as possible so that people would stop commenting on my body.
Yes, I was sure there was just one in there. Or was I?
Holden had weighed six pounds, five ounces, and had been a vaginal birth.
I thought you either had a cesarean or you popped out a baby.
To be clear, I never thought childbirth would be enjoyable.
I never dreamed of birthing my baby at home in an inflatable pool with a midwife and patchouli burning.
But nobody told me that the baby can end up getting stuck and the doctor on call won’t know what to do, so she calls a semiretired ob-gyn who used to do “assisted vaginal deliveries” in the nineties.
He arrives with forceps that look medieval and you are rushed to the operating room and your husband is holding your hand as another half dozen doctors explain that by the time they get this kid out, you could die or need a blood transfusion.
It is so bright under the white lights of the OR—so not the sunny delivery room with the yellow lion wallpaper—and they have to cut the epidural so you can feel yourself pushing the baby.
You feel everything. You pass out from the pain, but they give you oxygen and bring you back because you need to keep pushing.
They can see the baby’s head, but his neck is wrapped up in the umbilical cord.
It is too late to do a cesarean, but you are losing too much blood.
Until finally, they rip him out and it is violent and bloody and so, so painful.
You hold your baby boy and look at your husband, and it is all so beautiful.
It’s so beautiful that you hardly feel the pain as they put thirty-five stitches in you to sew you back together.
“Fourth-degree tearing with a six-pound baby?! How’d you do that!
” the nurse said when I screamed trying to pee that night. You tell me, lady.
I couldn’t walk for three weeks. I had to sit in these warm Epsom salts baths and wear Holden’s diapers, stuffing them with ice every time I attempted to stand to get him a bottle.
Roman would hear my cries in the bathroom, the stitches stinging.
He’d gently knock on the door. “Get ya anything, babe?” He meant well, but what could he get me?
Tylenol? A new body? He’d gone to almost every ob-gyn appointment with me when I was pregnant, but nobody goes to the urologist’s office.
Nobody holds your hand through the afterbirth.
Thirty-three, sitting in a urologist’s waiting room, surrounded by patients at least twice my age.
Dr. Weatherstone said I’d need years of pelvic-floor therapy.
This would be out-of-pocket with my insurance plan.
Why did they call it that? As if I could just dig into my pocket and slap several thousand dollars into the physical therapist’s rubber glove?
And, yes, like the Juju Bean moms said, pelvic-floor therapy is basically like getting finger fucked by a PT named Carleigh who is planning her wedding on Long Island and doesn’t know why she has to ask her fiancé’s sister to be maid of honor.
I would always pee when I laughed, possibly have to use an at-home catheter in my thirties, and hopefully, after a lot of fighting with my insurance reps in a call center in India and years of doing Kegels (whatever those are), be able to attempt—never mind enjoy—sex again.
So, no, I did not ask the bartender at the Peppermint Elephant to railroad me in an alley near Cape May, but now you can maybe understand why some small part of me wanted to be the kind of woman who could do that type of thing.
—
The bouncer at the next spot, Club Crush, adjacent to the Claridge Hotel, which boasted “twentieth-century-style décor,” took one look at me and said, “Nah.” He waved in a man behind me wearing all denim and white sneakers that screeched on the concrete. I showed the bouncer Daisy’s photo again.
“Please. I’m looking for this woman.”
He didn’t even have the urge to peek. “I’m gonna need you to leave.”
In fairness, I wouldn’t have let me in either. I reached into my bag. As much as it pained me, I gave him a twenty. He shook his head, the “nah” implied. Another twenty. Fine, another. He gestured with his head, as if to say, Show me the girl.
“This photo is old. I think she has longer hair now, maybe brownish auburn? Her name is Daisy. Or she might go by Jacki now…”
He looked at the photo and then looked at me. “Man, what is this? Because if Jersey finds out that you come by, asking questions…”
He must have assumed I was a journalist. Was it my New Yorker Festival tote bag?
“Ohhh. No. No. I’m not a journalist. I used to want to be a journalist. But no, I write grants for nonprofits, do some freelance copyediting, fact-checking, it doesn’t matter.
I’m on maternity leave.” His eyes narrowed.
“You know what? Just forget it. But you can tell Jersey…Is he the manager?” He doesn’t answer.
“I am not a journalist. I’m just a mom.”
I sit on the sidewalk, still talking, to this bouncer, to myself, to everyone.
“But I don’t even know that I’m much of that.
I take off to Atlantic City because some random mom on a message board catfished me.
I put my baby in front of YouTube. I just had a very close call with a NogginStik, and I heat his oatmeal in the microwave.
Do you know what radiation can do to a child? ”
“Nah.”
“Well, neither do I, but my Juju Bean mom app says it is very bad.”
His tone shifted from irritated to concerned. “You okay, lady? You on drugs or somethin’?”
“What? No. I’m not on drugs. I hadn’t even had soft cheese until tonight. Look, this girl, Daisy, she was my best friend in college and I’m trying to find her. Somebody—possibly a scammer on this mom app…”
“Juju Bean?”
“Yes. Yes. Thank you for listening. Anyway, this NJ Mom person said she saw a girl who looks like her in the area, so I reported it out and took a bus here and booked a room at the Borgata…”
“Swanky.”
“Why does everyone keep saying that? Look, the point is she’s still a dancer.
Or at least I think she is. I don’t know.
I don’t know anything.” I looked up at him, conceding.
“It sounds like more of a long shot when I say it aloud.” His tough expression turned pitying.
“I have no idea why Roman—that’s my husband—didn’t try to talk me out of coming down. He’s the sensible one, ya know?”
The bouncer nodded. “That’s me with my wife.”
“I can see that. You seem really by the book.” I collapse my head into my hands. “I’m sorry. This was dumb. Daisy’s probably dead and I let it happen.”
Then I heard a man’s booming voice behind me…
“She ain’t dead.”