Chapter Ten
· · · · ·
Penelope suggested we meet for lunch at an “upscale Oaxacan” restaurant on the ground floor of a new Avalon Place condo on Lafayette Street in a neighborhood that real estate brokers named Nolita.
It has a wraparound outdoor patio, twenty-four-dollar mezcal margaritas, and a fashionably emaciated hostess who has never seen a baby before.
I am ten minutes late, anticipating that Penelope, whose trust fund means time and space do not exist, will arrive even later.
“It’s probably under Penelope? Penelope Keaton?”
The hostess doesn’t look up from her iPad.
“I’m not seeing anything and we are fully booked.
” Apparently, half of Manhattan is eating fennel and watermelon ceviche in the middle of a weekday afternoon.
Somebody’s bejeweled Labubu smacks the stroller.
I force a smile. “I can just…wait?” Just as she’s about to seat a couple of girls swallowed up in mom jeans and tiny translucent tanks with no bras, I hear Penelope.
“Harlow. It’s under Harlow.” Penelope turns to me, harried even though she is not the one with the stroller or the twenty-two-block walk to get to Nolita. “Sorry. My new chief of staff put it under her name.” Her chief of staff?
As the hostess leads us to a corner table, past a couple of girls holding ring lights over sea urchin tostadas, Penelope looks over her shoulder at me. “I blame you, you know. I told you to hire me a competent assistant.”
“Sorry.” I am always apologizing to Penelope, a stutter I’ll never outgrow.
The hostess looks at the stroller, then to a squashed prime table with a Reserved sign.
Holden sighs slightly; I wouldn’t even call it a cry.
The hostess grins. “Maybe you’d be more comfortable outside?
” It’s not really a question because we are already being led outside to the leper colony in the outdoor dining shed that should’ve been taken down a year ago.
The hostess almost drops the door on the Yoyo.
Penelope leaps to my defense. “Hello? Could you please not drop the door on my friend’s baby?” Even when Penelope is mean, she is polite.
“Sorry,” the hostess says flatly.
This is the third—or fourth?—door that has been slammed on us today. I’d gone through life feeling invisible and I regularly felt like an inconvenience. But I had never felt both things so intensely, and at the same time, like I did in New York with a newborn.
Penelope grabs Holden’s Yoyo and pushes him to take up half the aisle. “We can’t have him blocking the waitstaff…” the hostess says.
“He’s not blocking anyone. We’ll take a bottle of still.”
The hostess goes back to her stand. Bye, bitch. Penelope has more confidence than anyone I’ve ever met, not in a rude way, just in a way that quietly communicates that she could buy your restaurant with her debit card.
I dig into the chips and salsa, spilling some on my T-shirt.
“You seem really great,” Penelope says, regarding me glumly.
“I am. So great.”
“Did you call Enzo?” Enzo is Penelope’s physical therapist, the one who got her lower back working again after she had Tate.
The one with the wide shoulders and the lumberjack beard, whose hands Penelope looks forward to weekly, especially since she doesn’t want her own husband to touch her.
Sometimes I think Penelope keeps getting pregnant with Beau’s babies so that Enzo can keep touching her.
But I know that’s not really it. Penelope keeps having babies so that someone keeps loving her unconditionally, until they reach puberty and have to go through her chief of staff.
I did call Enzo, but he does not accept my insurance. Enzo does not, in fact, accept any insurance. “Yeah, he was really cool, but—”
“I know. I know. He’s a pain with the whole no-insurance thing, but I am telling you, he is life-changing.”
I wouldn’t really call Enzo’s eight-hundred-dollar-an-hour rate an inconvenience, more like a bankruptcy filing, but I let it go.
Daisy had been from a wealthy family, but it was different.
That was Texas. Penelope existed in an entirely different stratosphere.
Shinnecock Hills and the Maidstone meant nothing to me.
Maybe that’s why we bonded. I was intrigued by the little things that came with generational wealth—Penelope’s ability to drop “oeuvre” into casual conversation, the way she ate her food without looking like she was murdering it.
But the specifics went entirely over my head.
And, in those early years, Penelope for her part, found my relative poverty equally novel.
If we were partying late downtown, she always wanted to come back to my old apartment.
She’d choose greasy takeout from the Moonstruck Diner, eaten on the floor of the one-bedroom in the East Village that I shared with Tyrone and Paul and his collection of vintage Pez dispensers, over any multicourse tasting menu.
We were both voyeurs in each other’s worlds.
Holden is awake again. He opens his big brown eyes, looks right at Penelope, and starts to wail. The passing hostess looks at us. I reach to give him a pacifier.
“Aw. Poor thing, he’s hungry,” Penelope says.
“I just fed him. He just gets scared sometimes when he wakes up and doesn’t know where he is.
” Being a baby is a trip. You can go from sleeping deeply in your crib to waking up in the dining shed of an upscale Oaxacan restaurant that New York magazine says “epitomizes a new breed of multitasking all-day cafés.”
“Can we please get some guacamole?” Penelope says, flagging down a waitress.
A short waiter with enormous biceps comes by with a cart and various Oaxacan accoutrements and begins to grind avocados in a molcajete.
“Oh, no habanero. Make it mild?” Penelope says. The waiter nods.
A man wrapped in a soiled blanket, duct tape for shoes, pushes a Gristedes cart filled with rotting cardboard past the dining shed. He stops at our table, mumbling, with his hand out. Penelope thrusts her whole body toward the guacamole cart.
“Is the cilantro local?”
“We collaborate with a Zapotec collective to source all of our produce,” the waiter says, popping a bouquet of green on top and laying the heavy mortar bowl on the table.
I extend an untouched tortilla to the man. He waves me off and scoots his cart along. Penelope spoons some guacamole to give Holden. I try to stop her.
“Oh, we’re just easing into solids.”
“I have three children, remember?”
Penelope thinks that because she has three children and can eat elevated barbacoa tacos without the chipotle adobo spilling all over her Jil Sander, she can just pick up my baby and feed him avocado for the first time, and all I can do is stand by, ready to perform the Heimlich.
Except I don’t know the Heimlich because I didn’t pay attention in the prenatal first-aid class.
Penelope takes Holden out of the Yoyo. He yells like the claws of death just grabbed him.
He won’t go to anyone but me. I pretend that this is a problem that we are working on, but actually, I love it.
I know, eventually, I will have to give him away to a nanny, to a day care, to a school, to a partner.
I will spend the rest of my life trying to pretend that I am happy to give him away. But right now, he is mine.
I put Holden back in the Yoyo, give him a bottle, and cool him off with an ice cube against his cheeks. I swab sweat from my face, the napkin clumping on my forehead.
“What are you doing for childcare?” Penelope asks. “Did you talk to Alma? Because there’s this mom at Avenues who aggressively wants her.”
“I called her, but I don’t know…”
“You need to find someone. Don’t you have to go back to work soon?”
“Maybe?”
Penelope perks up. “Oh? Are you quitting? I think you should quit. You’re trapped there. They don’t deserve you. It’s a dead-end job. Quit. Quit.”
“I can’t quit. I need the money.”
Penelope’s face flattens. Money, that old thing. “I hear ya.”
Penelope has a full-time nanny, a cook, a housekeeper, and a “lifestyle manager” who has worked for her family for so long that she lives in the Connecticut home where Penelope was born.
We met in Nolita because Penelope had to drop Tate off at the Chapter One Preschool in Gramercy.
Chapter One is the top nursery school in the city, implementing the Reggio Emilia philosophy, an Italian teaching theory that says children should express their own personalities through self-guided curricula.
I try to delicately pivot to why I really asked Penelope to get lunch.
“So, I’ve kind of got this side hustle, or hobby.
I don’t know,” I tell Penelope, thinking about how to explain that I’ve been spending every spare second trying to track down Daisy.
How I should’ve tried to find her earlier, but life just sort of happened.
And yet, as soon as I got pregnant, Daisy started to occupy more and more of my thoughts, like a vanishing twin.
I’d stand on the scale to weigh in at doctor’s appointments and not even hear Dr. Weatherstone, too busy thinking, Hm, what would Daisy say about me becoming a mother?
Was she a mother? We’d talked about everything those nights in our dorm room, but we’d never talked about this very big thing.
Maybe one day our babies would be best friends and share a dorm room and wear butterfly wings.
I started to have dreams about Daisy. Images of her, of our time together, came over me like nausea and then would pass.
But as soon as I became a mother, I started to learn about this new type of love—the kind of love that means always being there, just keeping a person alive even if they scream and yell and never say thank you and continuously do things that could kill them.
I’d rock Holden in the quiet dark, kissing his head, feeling his hand in mine, and I’d think, This is the kind of love Daisy needed.
The kind of love she deserved. Stubborn.
Selfless. I hadn’t been strong enough then, but could I make it up to her now?
Was it too late? I’d lie awake all night, replaying our falling-out.
Thinking about how I could have saved Daisy.
How maybe I could have shown her this other kind of love—the worst and the best—had I only known about it.
Penelope has a million questions as she flags a waiter for another mezcal margarita. “What kind of porn? Anal? Animals?”
“Unclear. But we had all these big plans. We were going to move to New York, be artists, get our noses pierced. Be broke and happy.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“And then she just disappeared after freshman year. Poof. Gone.”
“State school seems wild.”
Every time I explain my maternity-leave project aloud, it sounds unhinged.
My neighbor Brit taught herself to needlepoint.
I procured back issues of a British lad mag called Muff.
But whereas Roman was concerned about me, Penelope is loving it, popping a thirty-two-dollar split pea tlacoyo as if it were popcorn.
She tells me a guy on the rowing team at Groton hired a local to rough up his girlfriend after he caught her cheating, but no one she knows ever became a sex worker. This is all so “fascinating.”
Holden is asleep with a bamboo straw in his tiny hand and we probably have another twenty minutes, half an hour max, before he will wake up and need to be changed at a multitasking eatery that almost certainly does not have a changing table.
I look down at my fish taco. No more amateur sleuthing. I need a pro.
“The guilt of watching your closest friend spiral like that, knowing you can’t save her…
” I look up. I need to phrase this just right.
Penelope will recoil if she thinks I’m using her.
“I met this guy in Atlantic City. I think he was a pimp?” Penelope’s eyes set on me, serious. “He said I need to hire a PI.”
Penelope slurps her margarita. “You should, honestly.”
“Like, how do you even do that? Are they on Yelp? Five stars, discreet, tracked down my ex for child support in twenty-four hours?”
“My lawyer has a guy. Ex-CIA. He can find anyone. Want his info?”
“I can hardly afford a babysitter.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah.” I let the quiet hang there.
“We’ve got the firm on retainer—ever since that thing with my mom, until they can rewrite the trust. Just put it on my tab?” Penelope says, taking a business card out of a Goyard case. August Levin, Managing Partner of Sutter, Lang & Weintraub LLP. “Tell August I sent you.”
“Are you sure? Yeah. I mean, if it’s not a problem? That would actually…mean a lot. Thanks.” I take the card. A lifeline…and a leash.
The check arrives. Penelope dusts off her Celine sunglasses. The check sits there for an uncomfortable amount of time. I finally put my Visa down. This is another thing I’ve learned about the über-rich: They’re cheap as shit.
We walk outside, me pushing Holden toward a bus stop and Penelope trying to find her car. Impulsively, I hug her. I hang on for a long time. Gratitude tipping into neediness. The expensive fabric feels so soft and cool on my face. Penelope pulls away.
“Want to get coffee?” I ask, trying to sound casual and not like an emergency flare shot over Lafayette Street.
“I’ve got to be uptown,” Penelope says, eyes on her phone.
“Oh yeah. Okay.”
Penelope’s driver calls. She answers. “What? No. I’m across the street.”
“It’s just…I guess I’ve been really lonely.”
“Just wait there? I’m coming!” Penelope kisses me on the cheek and rushes over the cobblestone street and into a black sedan.