Chapter Nineteen
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“I’ll keep you company!” Penelope sounds so offended when I tell her that I’ve found Daisy and that she agreed to help with childcare when I go back to work. That we are fast friends again.
“You’re never here.” Penelope is one of those aggressive FaceTimers.
Did she need to see me collecting soiled onesies into a plastic basket?
And did I really need to see Penelope lounging by a fireplace wearing a Princeton sweatshirt?
Pine trees and river rapids in the background.
Scaffolding and honking in mine. “Where are you?”
“Ugh, Aspen.” Ugh? “Beau’s family summoned all of us to this house they bought, since no one goes to the Hamptons in August anymore.”
“They don’t?”
“But there’s nothing to do except, like, hike and eat and read.”
“That sounds like my literal dream. When are you back?”
“Thursday. No, Friday. But then we go to the Bahamas for my dad’s birthday. I have to meet the new girlfriend. She’s a jewelry designer, of course, younger than me. It’s a whole thing.”
“At least it will really piss your mom off.”
“Always finding the silver lining, Emily Joan. That’s why we’re friends.” She squints, then cringes, noticing the dirty laundry. It’s as if she caught me churning butter.
“Pen, I wanted to thank you. I might not have found Daisy without you. She said the PI’s what really convinced her to get back in touch.”
“Hey, anytime you need to track down an elusive porn star, I got you.”
“That lawyer, August, in the Armani, kinda hot?” She knows I am digging, my reporter instinct. One of the twins crawls into her lap, saving her.
“Hiii, you. Where is Bertha?” Penelope shoves the child off her lap. Not mean, just rich. I hear Beau say something in the background. “Fall is crazy with the renovation. Beau figured we might as well use the London place, do Europe…”
Roman is stuck working late on an audit.
I decided to live it up. I ordered Greek takeout from the place across the street with extra pita and cracked open Nurture Light Organic Pureed Peas for Holden.
But I must have put him in his Bluetooth-enabled MamaRoo Multi-Motion Baby Swing too soon after eating, because as Penelope is droning on about the H?tel du Cap going downhill, Holden is projectile vomiting.
“Oh shit. Shit. Shit. Oh no, baby, poor baby…Hold on a sec?” I lay the phone on the kitchen counter.
Penelope hardly notices. “So, you’ll check on the apartment while we’re gone?”
I yell toward the phone. “Puke crisis over here. Can we talk later?”
“You’re on the list and have all my codes. Just, like, swing by? Make sure everything is turned off? You know the drill.”
Holden is happy enough, but we are both soaked in syrupy green. I pick him up and wipe my hair out of my face. Some of the vomit gets into my mouth. It gets everywhere.
“You can use the gym or whatever, no one is ever there.”
I can’t believe she is still talking. “Pen. I gotta go. I’m covered in pea puke.”
“Yeah. Me, too. We’re going to Matsuhisa tonight because my mother-in-law fired another chef. She’s impossible.”
“I have no idea what you just said.”
“And the housewarming party is on. If I don’t fire the contractor…You better be there.”
I look down at the phone, holding Holden in my arms, my face smeared in regurgitated puree. “Wouldn’t miss it. Bye.”
I undress Holden to give him a bath in his Frida Baby Soft Sink Baby Bath.
The Juju Bean moms said I should bathe him in the bathtub now that he can sit up on his own, but I’m not ready to let go of this routine.
The kitchen sink is too overflowing with dirty dishes and baby bottles and plastic nipples to fit the Frida.
Only in New York could I somehow wind up with one friend lounging by a fireplace in Aspen (“Ugh.”) and another living in a thirty-seven-million-dollar condo with a screening room, and not have a dishwasher.
I know that a lot of girls read Edith Wharton and move to the city aspiring to immerse themselves in a certain modern Gilded Age social set.
Invites to charity galas, ladies’ lunches.
That was never me. All I ever wanted were beatnik literary friends.
I wanted friends who ate ramen and argued about Bukowski and slept on mattresses on the floor and used a stack of secondhand books as a bedside table and who would never do Ecstasy because who would want a drug that made you love everyone?
Like Kerouac said, “The only people for me are the mad ones…the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles…” But I also wanted a dishwasher.
We opt for a sponge bath, and by “sponge,” I mean I used an entire box of the Kirkland Signature Baby Wipes that Roman bought at Costco before they realized he was using a friend’s membership and cut us off.
Lately, it seemed like Roman had to work late every night, either with an audit or “team building” drinks.
Another guy got laid off. Steven. That was six from his team.
He was always complaining about Steven’s constant ice chewing.
“Nice bloke,” but the habit drove him “bloody mad.” Still, the team needed to mark the moment.
After all, it could be any of them next.
He had to “at least show my face” at every wake.
Why anyone would want to be a member of a team that was based around Heineken on tap and happy hour at P.
J. Clark’s was beyond me. The words “work drinks” echoed in my ears like an early humanoid man’s chest thump.
A prehistoric cry that reminded me each time he said it that Roman gets to go to an office and expense fried calamari and loaded nachos.
I get to stay home and clean up projectile vomit.
I know he is tired and stressed and hates that Holden is asleep when he gets home, but from where I sit and moan, still stuffing my hospital underwear with ice packs, while trying to keep a baby alive—he gets to go back to normal. Whereas I will never be normal again.
But even as the pang inside me wanted to wrestle the popcorn shrimp right out of his cold corporate hands, I didn’t want to trade places with Roman.
Motherhood was funny like that. And I realized that it had been this impossible contradiction—this voice to “Enjoy it!” even though I felt bored and lonely, a shell of my old self—that had driven me to find Daisy.
That had brought us together. That made me get behind her crazy idea to turn her condo into a decadent day care.
Because when we are together, the three of us, I do enjoy motherhood. Almost all of it.
It was a sign of how my marriage was going that I’d started to appreciate Roman’s late nights at the office.
By the time he got home, I’d already be asleep on the sofa, and we didn’t have to have the “Are you coming to bed?” conversation.
If he had asked me that night—which he didn’t—the answer would have been no. No, I am not coming to bed.
At my PT appointment two weeks ago, I’d laid spread-eagled on the exam table waiting for Carleigh. A burly man in a Jets jersey named Derek walked in instead. He put on rubber gloves. “Where’s Carleigh?” I asked.
“Migraine. Lay back for me?” He dipped his fingers in the lube.
“Not gonna buy me dinner first?”
I swallowed hard as his fingers entered me.
I told him it still hurts when I walk. On the way there, I’d almost keeled over carrying Holden’s Yoyo down the subway stairs.
The invisible knives so sharp and sudden, I almost watched my newborn plummet down the dank cement stairs at Broadway-Lafayette.
Luckily, a Hasidic woman balancing three children of her own reflexively caught the back of the stroller.
“How would you rate the pain?” Derek asked.
“Zero stars. Do not recommend.” Derek didn’t reply. We didn’t speak again. I just lay there. Like a Handmaid.
Whoever said “don’t go to bed angry” didn’t have a newborn or pay to get finger raped by Derek.
It’s not that I am not coming to bed because I am mad at Roman.
I could go from rage to deep REM in seconds.
I am not coming to bed because I am worried I might snuff the life out of him as he slept.
But I wasn’t just mad at Roman; I was mad at the idea of him.
And how do you snuff that out? I was mad at all of the men in Brooks Brothers eating Buffalo wings as their wives bled in Epsom salts baths.
I’d never really thought much about gender before I had a baby.
Men, women, weren’t we all just spoiled and self-absorbed, waiting in line for brunch at Jack’s Wife Freda?
But now, when I finally see things clearly and have the urge to channel my inner Betty Friedan and stand up for myself—to stand up for women everywhere!
—all I want to do is lie down. Why do we open our eyes right when all we want to do is close them?
I put Holden in his crib. I don’t know what time it is in Australia, but I text Sue a bunch of photos from the past couple of days, photos in the condo that I wanted to post but Daisy didn’t want me to.
I don’t have the energy to shower, but sleeping with vomit in my hair is not ideal.
I drag myself to the tub and turn on the water.
Blood and moss-colored puke swirl down the drain.
I am used to the blood, every week after PT.
Carleigh says it is normal. But every time she tells me that, I wonder, How is it normal? How is any of this normal?
It’s almost ten when I hear Roman unlock the door. I hear his keys. I smell his smell. “Babe? You up?” he asks. I squeeze my eyes tight. Fast asleep, for now.
—
We’d start small, spreading the word on Juju Bean about a new luxury play space on Park Avenue.
Daisy set up an account using one of my pregnancy pictures.
I hardly took any photos when I was pregnant because I thought my face looked fat.
In this one, in the snow on the Central Park Mall, my head is covered in the furry hood of the Theory coat I bought at Loehmann’s my first winter in New York.
We mocked up a classy PDF and I wrote the copy, posting about “a new—free!—interactive wellness and play center on Park Avenue.” We invited any parent who needed “a place for your baby to play and learn, and for you to relax and recharge, to stop by.” We said it’s an idea “inspired by the Scandinavian philosophy and pedagogy that children should have active and spontaneous, self-directed experimental play in a relationship-driven environment, while parents engage in active rest and self-improvement.” I made Daisy add “pedagogy.” We didn’t know shit about how they raised kids in Sweden, but it sounded good.
For the moms, we advertised a spa-like communal space offering healthy organic meals, complimentary workout classes, napping pods, showers, pumping rooms with grapefruit essential oils and no one walking in on you, no smell of another mother’s stale milk.
Daisy posted a sign-up sheet on Juju Bean under a pseudonym.
I came up with a full cast of fictional characters, faux accounts that made it look like all the spots were taken, only the wait list available.
—
Daisy had a Thomashilfen Recaro Monza Nova 2 Reha Car Seat that cost more than my first car installed in the Mercedes, so that Viktor could give us a ride home, an unfathomable luxury.
Holden and I rolled like rappers. But tonight is one of those rare late-August nights when the air sticks to every part of me.
Daisy and I decide to walk. We’d head east and then downtown along the East River. “What do we call it?” Daisy asks.
“Does it need a name?” I feel myself losing brain cells every time I say one of these moronic play-space names. “It’s always the Playful Pineapple. Or Giggles Galaxy. The Little Learners Lodge. Lollipop Tree.”
“I think I danced there one time.”
I laugh. “What about just 527 Park? It sounds exclusive, like this stupid private club that my friend Penelope belongs to.”
“I like it,” Daisy says. “No name. Just an address. Not any address, but the address. It’s elusive, expensive.”
“It’s perfect.”
A big part of Juju Bean’s business model is that every post is vetted and verified, and the data isn’t shared, so users can be assured that we aren’t trolls or human traffickers or Herbalife salespeople, though the herb people always make it through the cracks.
The Juju Bean moms lapped up our posts like a Happy Baby teething wafer.
Sure, there were skeptics. That was to be expected.
Daisy, as much an outsider to this world as I was to sex work, cracked up at the comments.
We are almost to Twenty-Third Street. We’d walk-laughed thirty blocks.
She does a dramatic reading as I push the stroller.
Holden takes in the fresh air and chews on Sophie, the French giraffe.
“ ‘Is this a real estate hoax? You gonna lure me there and hard-sell me a time-share?’ You couldn’t afford the free tote bag, FunBuns223.
MomPoochPooBah: ‘How is this free?? My tits call bullshit. Oh, wait, LovinInMyOven claps back: ‘Who cares?! It’s a thousand degrees. Give those sweaty tits a vacation.’ That’s right, ladies—we’ve got your AC right here.
” She keeps flicking her thumb. “Citymomma76Hi wants to know if we’re nut-free.
Adorable. And here’s one from workingmom_daily: ‘Wow, must be nice to have a weekday off. Some of us work full time.’ Excuse me, Working Mom Daily—we see you, martyr queen. ”
Being on the Juju Bean app with Daisy was like going to some faraway country together.
I imagine Japan is disorienting and crushingly lonely when you are by yourself.
But the second you get to experience the place with someone you love, you are laughing your ass off.
You love it there. You cannot imagine a better place.
It is a different planet, Planet Juju Bean, when I am exploring it with Daisy.
“Wait, MrsMommyMD wrote—‘I’d sell my body to put my baby in a bounce house and take a shit on a Toto toilet in peace.’ ”
I think about this. “And she’s a medical doctor?”
Daisy nods, looking at her bio. “Cardiologist at Weill Cornell.”
“Imagine,” I say. “This woman is a fucking cardiologist and the only warmth in her life is the thought of a heated toilet seat.”
“That’s some haiku right there, Em,” Daisy says.
I start to think about poetry again with Daisy, not quite writing as much as composing in my head.
We turn on Twenty-Third Street, past a desperate man half asleep in a bus stop.
I look at people differently now. I look at this man and I see somebody’s baby boy.
Somebody’s Holden. Daisy leans down, puts a twenty in his hand.
We keep walking. The Mercedes is idling behind us, ready to give Daisy a ride back uptown.
I pass men living on the streets…
on the way home to an empty luxury condo.