Chapter Sixteen
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Outside, the horizon looks like orange sherbet.
Daisy touches a keypad. Neil Young. “Harvest Moon” comes on.
We step out onto the expansive mezzanine, leaving the door cracked so that we can hear Holden, who is still sleeping.
Daisy looks inside, checking on my baby—our baby.
She softens. I have no idea what this means to her, to have us in her life.
She riffs on a Sylvia Plath poem—“I need this, I need someone to pour myself into”—then she takes out Camel Lights.
I double-check that Holden is still asleep and signal for her to give me one.
We are smoking cigarettes on a balcony. Daisy asks about my family.
I tell her how I texted my mom the ultrasound and she called to warn me that a baby would ruin my life and my marriage, “speaking from experience.” I was twelve when my mom tried to get me on the pill.
I hadn’t even gotten my period yet, but I came home from ballet and she was sitting on the stairs with the little pink plastic compact, adamant that she did not want to be a grandmother.
Three weeks after Holden was born, I finally told my mom to stop calling me.
She put on this whole phony hurt act. Drama.
But she didn’t even want me to have a baby.
Didn’t think I’d be a good mother. Imagine telling your pregnant daughter that and then saying, voice quivering, that I’ve broken her heart.
She invites us all to Texas. She wants to meet the baby.
It’s hard for me to not say yes. To not forgive her and book a ticket and rush into her arms and hope that she has changed.
That she can be a mother. But I know better.
“I told her that we needed to stop talking for a while,” I tell Daisy. “It was always a fight and I just don’t have it in me. Sometimes I feel guilty and text her a photo.”
“Em, you did the right thing. You have to protect yourself, your family. Your mom was always a menace.”
I shrug. “She’s not that bad. She bought us the Tripp Trapp high chair off our registry.
It’s pricey, but it grows with the baby…
” I stop myself. Who fucking cares? Point is, my mom had actually made an effort the only way she knew how, an olive branch in the form of a five-hundred-dollar high chair that he can take to his dorm room at Stanford one day.
“But who needs her, right? I still talk to my grandma. Oh, and Roman, Roman has the world’s best mom.
She’s like a mom out of a 1950s sitcom except not all trad-wife lame.
She’s cool. You can, like, talk to her about stuff, you know? ”
“I love that for you.”
I step on the cigarette butt. “Yeah, well, she lives like a million miles away in Melbourne with the rest of Rome’s family, so it’s almost like she doesn’t exist. It’s just us.”
“What about your stepdad?” Daisy asks.
I take another drag. “That one is tough. What about yours?”
She tells me that he paid for rehab. “Six hours of therapy a day at this crumbling house in Laurel Canyon, but I haven’t touched junk since.
” I remind her that she always wanted to live in Joni Mitchell’s backyard.
But I don’t understand. “Why would he pay for rehab but not just pay for you to stay in college?” Daisy says it’s always been about control.
“College, art school, it meant I could do whatever I wanted. Live my own life. Be my own person. But rehab—oh, rehab!—that meant he’d saved me, that I’d always need him. I think he secretly hoped I’d relapse.”
“That is dark,” I say.
Daisy twitches her lips. “It’s done…We don’t need men to save us ever again. We have each other.” She says this as we look out at New York, on a thirty-seven-million-dollar wraparound balcony owned by a Greek oligarch.
It happened so fast, this treasure I’d hunted and then found.
I feel a rush. Daisy’s scent, tuberose and jasmine with a white floral undertone (Le Labo, maybe?) and the Camel Lights and all that matcha.
We can do anything. Create, travel the world together, accomplish extraordinary things.
We have nothing to be afraid of. My fingerprint had unlocked the door.
I just had to push the Yoyo inside. I inhale the cigarettes and the rarefied New York air of a high-net-worth altitude.
Daisy yawns, and suddenly I feel tired, too.
The tangle of life below, all of Manhattan, a dark ocean with a mean undercurrent.
It isn’t Joan Didion biting into a peach, but I think I always knew that this moment, our friendship, would cost me something.
That sooner or later, I would have to pay this debt.
I ask what Daisy wants me to do. She takes a final drag. “I want you to invite all your mom friends over.”
—
The way Daisy put it, 527 Park was the perfect building for the Juju Bean moms because it was basically empty.
During the day, we’d have the entire eighty-seventh floor and the two floors above and below us to ourselves.
These condos, with hidden staircases and Toto toilets, had owners somewhere, but for all intents and purposes, they were owned by limited-liability shell companies with names like Columbus Skyline LLC and West Lake Properties LLC and 25CC ST74B LLC. The tax code’s loss is our gain.
It was pouring. I’d covered Holden’s stroller in the Babylo Universal Raincover, but the Velcro got so wet that the plastic kept flying up in the wind.
Everyone was too busy with their own upturned umbrellas to help us down the subway stairs.
The elevator smelled of vomit. Holden yelped at the thought of getting on.
I crouched down to lift the stroller down the stairs.
A girl talking loudly on her cell kept trying to pass us.
(“I mean, I don’t, like, like his music—Uh, excuse me?
—but I’d totally go and just, like, hang in the desert—Hello?
—OMG this mom won’t fucking move…”) She knocked the stroller as she slunk past. Two subways and an hour later, I backed into the emergency exit to open the heavy gate, triggering an alarm, and pushed Holden, wet and wailing, out into the ether of Midtown East.
The sun came out and the rain turned to a light drizzle as we walked toward Park.
The air had a soupy feel. I had sweat circles under my arms. My thighs rubbed together, damp and irritated.
I held a cold bottle of Poland Springs against Holden’s beet-red face to cool him down.
“There you go…” The plastic rain cover was a mess, smelling like a deflated pool toy at the bottom of the Yoyo.
Daisy was waiting for us, sitting on a sculptural bench in the tower’s Zen front garden.
When she saw us, a couple of wet rats walking toward her, she raced to us with open arms. She gave me the warmest hug and lifted Holden out of his stroller into her arms. I remembered, watching her walk to us that day, the feeling I had in college, that my life would be so much fuller—of love, creativity, spontaneity—with Daisy in it.
I had that same late-teenage feeling, like Daisy could tell me what to do and I would always do it, because she would always be right.
“How’s my little angel?” she says, snuggling with Holden.
“Soaking wet and fifteen pounds overweight.”
Daisy smirks. She gives me a light kiss on each cheek and leads us toward the side of the massive building. I feel the cool breeze of the AC. My pits drying in the breeze. Holden’s cheeks losing their bright, frenzied color.
“So, check this out,” she says. “The city and developer are now suing each other over the subsidized housing units, which means everyone can come and go as they please through ‘poor doors’ and no one will notice.”
She plugs in a code and holds the heavy back door open. I push the Yoyo inside. From there, Daisy leads us into the belly of this beanpole for the superrich. It’s as if we’ve entered a surreal shaft to another universe. What is this place?
Daisy flips to sales mode and escorts us through the 180-unit building and all it has to offer. I follow, feeling the glass eye of security cameras watching us.
“For the bargain price of thirty thousand dollars in monthly maintenance fees, residents—and their guests—can partake in all of the amenities,” Daisy explains.
The offerings include a movie theater, a bowling alley, indoor and outdoor pools, a gym (obviously), a golf simulator, a podcasting studio, a meditation room, and—importantly, for our purposes—a children’s playroom designed by Antonino D’Nario.
D’Nario, according to a profile in New York magazine, “has come to define the essence of contemporary luxurious interiors.” Holden’s eyes practically bulge out of his baby face when we enter.
It is the classiest fucking Gymboree you’ve ever seen.
The playroom is equipped with pastel cushions, fluffy clouds on the ceiling, a climbing wall, a clay studio, a shrunken Ina Garten–style kitchen, a stocked Smeg fridge.
Oat, soy, almond, goat. They have all the milks.
There is a play lemonade stand. “Look,” Daisy says.
“It’s just like the one I had growing up in River Oaks.
” And a theater set after Julie Taymor’s heart.
“Maybe we could also get one of those unicorn bounce houses? And fill one of the Jacuzzis with bouncy balls?” she proposes.
“Who doesn’t love unicorns?”
We walk into an adjacent children’s reading room.
The city’s preeminent “bookshelf curator” had organized color-coordinated first-edition children’s books: Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz, Charlotte’s Web, et cetera.
A quote from The Little Prince on the wall: “All grown-ups were once children, but only a few of them remember it…”
Daisy explained that the management company tried for years to get residents to use the facilities, offering a range of incentives, including complimentary golf lessons in the simulator and free babysitting.
Every once in a while, when real estate agents would take actual potential buyers to an open house, the building needed to look like Xanadu for Manhattan families—not a tax haven for foreign money.
So the office happily provided a polyglot of on-call childcare professionals, offering the building’s youngest residents a full menu of “enrichment” classes—Spanish, cooking, chess, digital photography, portraiture, et cetera.
Daisy explained that in addition to the thirty thousand dollars in monthly maintenance fees, each condo unit had a minimum of twenty thousand dollars annually to spend on amenities: massages; meals in the Michelin-starred French restaurant; Pilates.
“Use it or lose it,” Daisy said. Management didn’t care if residents or their guests partook in these offerings.
I admittedly have a hard time processing the playroom. The golf simulator is one thing, but this? “Wait. So, anyone can just drop their baby off when they need a break?”
Daisy nods. “As long as they live here or are visiting a resident, but the ‘residents’ all live in Qatar and Moscow and London, so yeah, they’re pretty chill about it.”
We put Holden on a blanket and shower him in teething balls.
Daisy waves a brand-new squeaky French giraffe rattle named Sophie in his face.
He immediately puts it in his mouth. She starts to play peekaboo and he is laughing with every limb.
Big peekaboo phase, this age. I look at Daisy and Holden.
I look at the playroom’s fluffy clouds and pastel cushions—a Malibu sunset in real estate form.
Why did we need to tell anyone else about this place? “It’s nice, just us here.”
“Don’t be silly. You need friends.”
“I have friends,” I say. A slight pause. “I have you.”
“Holden needs friends,” Daisy says, tickling his side.
Dr. Brooke did say that at six months, babies should play together to develop nonverbal communication skills and improve social and emotional intelligence.
Don’t I want Holden to be comfortable seated next to strangers at dinner parties one day?
“We won’t invite any assholes, I swear.”
I turn to look out the widows. Daisy can see that I’m resistant. Finding Daisy, I thought it meant that I wouldn’t need anyone else. I wouldn’t need the Juju Bean moms.
“Look,” Daisy says, growing more animated.
“I don’t give two shits how luxe it is in here—you need a village.
Holden needs a village. There’s a reason moms have left their babies off in baskets in forests since the dawn of, like, moms and forests.
It’s just that now the forest is Central Park and the village is the Juju Bean moms—and I know a lot of them suck, but you’re stuck with them and they’re stuck with you and there’s beauty in that.
There’s beauty in, like, millions of years of human evolution, of needing each other to do this child-rearing thing.
Why fight that? Let me do this for you.”
Good night, good night, public bathrooms. Good night, Good night, dirty looks at coffee shops.