Chapter Fifteen
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Daisy and I meet at the little park on Elizabeth Street, the one that the city is about to bulldoze to build another condo.
We sign a “Save the Park” petition, and then, walking through this sliver of outdoor space, with hydrangeas and a sculpture garden, we agree that the park is toast. The rich always end up bulldozing everything.
“Damn shame,” Daisy says.
We find a spot on the grass by a pergola where a librarian on a metal folding chair unpacks a bubble machine and sets up for Mandarin story time.
We spread out the Aden + Anais Essentials Muslin Baby Swaddle.
We both drink iced red-eyes—cold brew with a shot of espresso—out of red paper straws.
We both love red-eyes and hate paper straws.
Daisy tells me that she speaks a little Mandarin.
“Job requirement,” she says. “I’m not fluent or anything, but I can order at a restaurant, take a taxi.
I could teach Holden, if you want?” Yes, I’d like that, I tell her.
“You’d love Shanghai. It’s so alive. You come back to New York and feel like everyone is asleep. ”
“I want to go sometime,” I say. Who am I kidding? Chinatown is a treat.
Marcela sits down nearby with Noah and a couple other Central American nannies on one side of the semicircle.
Marcela always wears sundresses and a full face of makeup and never forgets wipes and makes it look like taking care of a baby is the world’s easiest job.
The Caribbean nannies spread out on the other side, opening Tupperware with pureed sweet potatoes inside.
The Tribeca moms arrive late, grabbing territory as if they were westward expansionists.
Daisy studies how we all stake out our spots.
“I’ve seen actual mobsters sit down with less tension,” she whispers. We giggle.
“Ni hao. Hello!” the librarian says. “Xièxiè. Thank you!” And we all mutter “Ni hao” and “Xièxiè” at our babies.
I wave to a couple of moms I recognize from Juju Bean meetups.
Tribeca moms. They are fancier than the Stuy Town moms. I feel Daisy watching me watching these moms. She can see how tense I get when they breeze in, toned and elegant.
They are walking alongside their nannies—an extra set of hands—pushing the latest Bugaboo Fox 5 Complete strollers, the model that had been famously backordered after supply-chain issues in Europe.
After this, they will take their babies to a cooking class at the Preschool of the Arts, which costs seventy-five dollars for forty-five minutes and has a wait list.
Daisy refused Queenie’s ring and insisted I wear it. I feel the diamond on my finger and fiddle with it, hoping the sunlight catches just so and it blinds the Tribeca bitches.
“They your friends?” Daisy asks, lying back on the blanket.
“What? Oh, no. Not really.”
“You don’t need them,” she says. “You have me now.”
—
After story time, Daisy and I wander down a quiet tree-lined street eating soft serve from the Mister Softee truck. Daisy licks a dollop of ice cream off my cone before it falls on my shirt. “There, saved you,” she says, smiling.
“Thanks.”
I get an alert on my phone and open the Juju Bean app. @BoyMomBrynn wants to connect. Daisy grabs my phone. “No. Please don’t.”
She feigns a QVC voice, reading, “Bonds between women can positively influence emotional well-being and connectedness. Find your custom-made village for just ninety-nine dollars.”
“It’s stupid.”
Daisy laughs. I take my phone back. “I mean, I want to have mom friends. Not just for me, but for Holden. Playdates, community, whatever. But the only thing we have in common is that we all recently gave birth below Twenty-Third Street.”
“Hmm. Maybe you just hate women?”
Before I can tell if Daisy is joking, she’s leading us to a used bookstore. “Oh, I love this place. C’mon. You still writing poetry?”
She holds the door open and easily pulls the Yoyo inside. “Nah. There isn’t anything poetic about my life. It’s strange,” I say, following them into aisles crowded with first-edition books. “My days last a thousand hours and nothing happens. Until you.”
Daisy rubs her finger over the books’ spines. “Em! That’s a downer. I get really depressed if I’m not, like, constantly creating, living every day on the edge, ya know?” She takes a James Dickey book off the shelf and flips through the pages.
“Does eating soft cheese count?”
Daisy turns the corner. “You’re funny, Em. Most people aren’t funny. Most people are humorless and boring as fuck. Everyone thought you were lame in college, but I always knew you had a lot going on in that head.” She taps the side of my head. “A loud inner voice.”
“I don’t know. I think I was just insecure,” I say. I show Daisy an early edition of Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, a book we read over and over in college, a book we cemented to memory.
“Fuck that. You seem basic, but you’re actually a locked vault, always writing in those journals,” she says, tucking the novel into her bag.
“We didn’t belong in Texas,” I say.
“That’s why I fucked my way out.”
I am so enraptured by our conversation that I don’t realize she’s walked out of the store without paying.
—
Later, we turn into a park with a swing set and a slide and artful graffiti all over a temporary wooden wall.
Daisy sees me struggling with the Omni Breeze Dream Carrier.
She takes the baby and the carrier, effortlessly securing him to her chest. “Strap him high, tits up, then tighten. None of this dangling baby-low-around-your-crotch bullshit.” I watch.
Holden, happy, secure. She sits on a swing and snaps a selfie with Holden.
I push them higher and higher, staring at Daisy and my baby in the sun, smiling.
When the sun is getting low, we walk up the West Side Highway, along the Hudson. A shirtless jogger with incredible abs checks out Daisy. I study the way he looks at her body, her lips. He catches my eye and looks away, jogging faster. Daisy doesn’t notice.
I try to give Holden a bottle. He thrashes, refusing my breast milk.
Daisy reaches for him. “He’s not chugging a Miller Lite.
Angle him sideways, Em.” She taps the bottle.
He latches instantly. I ask Daisy why she’s such a natural.
She lifts a shoulder. “Half the girls at the Landing Strip had babies. Dressing room looked like a goddamn day care.”
That’s when I tell her that Roman agreed. We’d love it if she’d be Holden’s caregiver—or at least help out until I can figure out childcare. Truly, she tells me again, it would be her pleasure.
“The world is wild. I can’t tell from one day to the next what I’m going to do, who I’m going to meet. But I’m really stoked it brought me to you, Em.” She leans down and gives Holden a kiss on his forehead. “And you, mon amour.”
We agree that it’s fate that I found Daisy when I did. Bashert. Destiny. Not some bullshit Briggs Dorm Roommate Compatibility Quiz.
Daisy says 527 Park has a playroom that no one ever uses and offers a full range of complimentary baby classes that are almost always empty.
We can turn one of the rooms in her condo into a nursery, fill it with wooden Montessori toys.
“We’re not a Fisher-Price family,” she says, smiling at Holden in the Yoyo.
He is really going to town on his bare foot.
(“Your eighteen-week-old thinks of her feet as built-in toys and snacks!”) “Yum. Is that delicious, little cutie koala?” Daisy says, using my nickname for him.
You find her on a Wednesday, and by Friday, you are a family.
—
That night, some friends invite me to go out to dinner.
They got a last-minute four-top at nine p.m. at this French bistro on the Bowery that became so famous on TikTok that nobody goes there anymore.
I can’t really afford it, and I’m a half-asleep pumping machine by nine, but I tell them I’ll try to swing by.
We all met when I was interning at BuzzFeed.
They sent Uber Eats gift cards when Holden was born, but none of them have kids.
They drink martinis without worrying about damaging an infant’s development and think a Juju Bean is something you eat.
They talk about hookups and the Vulture writer we all envied who recently got caught plagiarizing a high school student’s Medium posts.
Somebody pulls out their phone and flashes a Zillow listing of the brownstone apartment that their parents are helping them buy, saying it’s a bargain because it needs work.
Another is planning a trip to Thailand and wants to know if anyone has hotel recommendations in Phuket, but apparently Phuket is over and we should all go to Krabi now.
They think I am a drag but still occasionally invite me out. They don’t know about Daisy.
I fall asleep on the sofa with Holden on my chest and half a boob out.
Holden cries and I wake up at two a.m. to a string of missed texts.
(“You coming?” and “Should we order?” and “Maggie Gyllenhaal at the bar” and “Are you alive??”) I feel bad.
I am always flaking, always apologizing, but I can’t really do friendship with them anymore. Maybe I never could.
—
On Saturday, the whole house is up before six. We FaceTime with Grandma Sue and she reads Holden Curious George and seven different board books about trains that she has kept since Roman was a baby. Gigi is a little stronger and gets on the phone, too.
Roman and I decide to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to take Holden on a glass-enclosed antique carousel in Dumbo overlooking Lower Manhattan. Roman struggles to collapse the Yoyo, looking like he’s trying to drop-kick a rottweiler. I give him a smug look. “You’re not helping,” he says.
“Oh, I’m helping. With my eyes.”
I race to one of the only two chariots that could seat a family, beating out several tween tourists in sequined backpacks and chunky sneakers.
Roman finally joins us. He takes Holden and bounces him on a knee as we go around a couple of times.
I look at Roman, at both of them. “Don’t go,” I want to scream.
This could be us. We could do this every day.
The feeling lasts approximately thirty-seven seconds. Roman hands Holden back, telling me that I’m not properly supporting his neck. “And yet somehow I keep him alive without you all day, every day…”
“Here we go. I’m not supposed to work.”
Holden cracks his eyes. He is just beginning to grab at things and gestures for Roman’s phone. The Juju Bean moms say cell phones can transmit E. coli, aside from all the obvious concerns about screen time.
“You realize you’re basically handing him fecal matter?”
“I don’t shit on my phone,” Roman says.
“How do I know what goes on in there? You take long enough.” We both stare out at the skyline until the carousel stops and we get off.
—
By Monday, Roman is back at work, Gigi is back in intensive care, and we are back at Daisy’s place.
Half a dozen glass Bonpoint 210-milliliter French baby bottles on the marble island.
The Jane Birkin of baby bottles. Not even the Tribeca moms have these bottles.
A taupe hammock that looks like it should be at the Whitney dangles from the ceiling by white ropes over a shaggy rug.
A powder room transformed into a pink pumping room, patchouli burning.
Daisy lifts Holden out of his Yoyo and puts him in this usable art.
“There,” she says, giving him a little swing.
He makes a brand-new humming noise that sounds like heaven.
I check that the ropes are secure. “I got Viktor to pick up some baby stuff, for when you come over. I didn’t know what he likes so he got a little of everything,” she says, walking toward the kitchen.
“It’s all organic, non-GMO, obvi. Viktor can get us whatever you need. Just let me know.”
Yes, looking back, I guess I should’ve asked more questions. Maybe even just one question. But I was too happy to be with Daisy, too happy to be hanging at a Greek oligarch’s fully stocked, well-air-conditioned, money-laundering condo. So instead, I just said, “Thank you so much.”
Yes, please, Daisy, rescue me from public restrooms and Mommy & Me classes and organizing diapers and pelvic-floor therapy and moms who talk about nursery schools as “pipelines to the Ivies.” Deliver me from collapsing my Yoyo on the M14 crosstown bus and an apartment with a scaffolding exoskeleton.
Deliver me from medical debts and a boss who expects me back in my cubicle in Midtown East. Deliver me, Daisy, back to some semblance of who I used to be.
We work out a schedule. Monday to Friday, seven a.m. to seven p.m., Daisy agrees to watch Holden.
We will spend as much time together as possible before I go back to work, so she can learn the things he hates (thunderstorms, hand dryers in public restrooms, pigeons, hats of any kind) and loves (foot massages, the F train, grass, shadows).
Daisy digs around in her Goyard wallet, and pulls out a spare AmEx Black card.
“You can use this if there’s anything else he needs.
” I hold the card in my hand, thinking of the debt on my own credit card.
We still owe tens of thousands in hospital fees that insurance didn’t cover.
And weekly co-pays so that Carleigh can finger fuck me at pelvic-floor therapy.
So that I maybe don’t have to use a catheter. So that maybe I can have sex again.
“Anything you need, it’s taken care of,” she says.
I would just need to do Daisy one favor.