Chapter Twenty-Two
· · · · ·
It didn’t take much to win over the Juju Bean moms. The facility was so plush, the childcare staff so overqualified and attentive, the organic diaper stash so plentiful, twenty minutes in and they were sold.
By the end of week one, Sloane was saying “mommy” in two languages and had baked dairy-free crème br?lée.
When Olivia picked Zoe and Chloe up, they were in embroidered onesies from that company that makes three-hundred-dollar cashmere sweaters with feminist slogans.
Daisy appears behind me in a caftan, the silk enveloping her entirely, making her somehow look like a Saudi wife and a nudist. We check each other’s breath.
Hers is like warm mint and ten hours of sleep.
Mine is…not great. She takes her spearmint gum out and puts it in my mouth.
She gives me a nudge. A jolt at her fingertips on my skin.
I look at her. If Daisy thought I could do it, then I could do it.
I recite a couple of affirmations, sticking to safe clichés at first. (“I am allowed to ask for help…” “I can miss who I was and still love who I am becoming…” “Motherhood didn’t erase me. It expanded me.”) The moms repeat the phrases halfheartedly.
Daisy signals to Bianca to push play on a Spotify mix that includes Patti Smith, Janis Joplin, Siouxsie Sioux, Sinéad O’Connor.
She’s never said anything, but I don’t think Bianca likes me.
Whenever I gently ask for something, making my voice several notches higher, as people who have never had help tend to do (requesting a fresh pot of rooibos tea, etc.), she gives a subservient smile and lifts one piercing triangle of an eyebrow.
Her face, a full range of contradictions.
“You’re a real good friend,” she said once, out of nowhere, as she refreshed my simple syrup.
“I wish I had a friend like you.” I make a mental note to be extra nice to Bianca, maybe a gift card next week.
It’s Friday, so that means it’s Courtney Love. The Sonos speakers blare, and everyone, even the moms born way after Hole was cool, scream bloody murder. “FUCK YOU!” Like Daisy always says, from up here no one can hear you scream.
Daisy has none of my hesitation. She has this ability to give herself entirely to the room.
The muscle memory of a life spent exposed.
As soon as she lifted a hand and spoke, whatever reservations some of the women had, whatever knot in the gut that said something didn’t add up about this whole thing, melted away.
By now, I’d heard her pitch a dozen times. It never got old.
“The sexual revolution was a fraud, perpetrated by men who wanted sex without consequences, dual incomes, and dinner on the table. We’re a generation of women who watched our mothers try to be men.
We’re here to tell you it’s a con. We were told to hustle.
Well, you did. Poured your souls into LinkedIn profiles.
Blink—your ass is thirty-five and still too broke to procreate.
You want to keep buying into their bullshit?
Or you want to burn it down? Say it with me. ”
Daisy looks out, her eyes spending time on each one of us, every type of mom, the full multiethnic spread of a Central Park playground on a September day, and we all repeat in unison, “To everything I’ve lost, thank you for setting me free.”
The moms are all rapt. Daisy could say anything.
Tell us to bathe in pesticides, microwave our Gerber baby oatmeal, breastfeed the devil, we’d do it.
By then, nobody hesitates about signing the NDAs—that only adds to the sense that we get to be there at the beginning of a great experiment.
We are the chosen people, creating a community based on compassion.
Down there? They bleed us dry. Up here? We take something back.
We just can’t tell anyone about it, not yet.
The way Daisy put it, 527 Park wasn’t just a condo.
It was a portal out of the broken contract below.
Back to when motherhood was possible—only better, because we have GLP-1s.
It’s a new type of postpartum society, but the idea is based on rituals as ancient as motherhood itself.
In Korea, they have joriwons, postpartum care centers where nurses help care for newborns as mothers recover.
In Nigeria, there’s omugwo, a period of maternal healing surrounded by extended family.
During the jaappa period in Hindu households in India, older women take care of new mothers, lavishing them with warm oil massages, herbal baths, and Ayurvedic diets.
Watching Daisy like this, that megawatt smile—she has such an infectious vibrance.
It’s the kind of intensity I used to have.
Yes, it’s an energy that comes with being childless and getting twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep in high-thread-count sheets and (presumably?) a preposterous amount of sex.
But it’s more than that. Daisy has this ability to give us all energy, like life and love are there for the taking, up here in the clouds, and she has a complimentary bowl. Even if we are stuck in the shit.
—
The rest of the day was open play, so to speak.
No one had to do anything they didn’t want to do.
You could curl up in a lavender-scented sleep pod for a nap.
Several moms moved in for days at a time, learning how to work the thirty-two-thousand-dollar espresso maker.
Good night, good night, warnings about caffeine.
Some microdosed mushrooms while watching a Sofia Coppola marathon in the screening room.
Others went rollerblading down the luxe hallways wearing matching Dior leg warmers.
(Don’t ask me why, but Daisy had a drawer full of these.)
I opted for working on my creative writing, but you didn’t have to use your brain.
You could get a massage, play Ms. Pac-Man, do karaoke to the Cranberries, let your mind live in euphoric mush.
Go numb in a cryo chamber. Most of us just wanted a place to do all the things that we’d been too ashamed to do in public: openly breastfeed or, worse, openly formula feed.
Early on, Daisy detected a militant milk mom laying into an Enfamil mom (“You’re depriving your baby of critical…
”) and signaled to Viktor to have her removed (“Yes, ma’am”).
There would be no mom-shaming here. Other moms enjoyed the rechargeable cordless Magic Wand vibrators available on every bedside table and sterilized every night, their moans echoing throughout the space.
The women soon spread out beyond Daisy’s place, setting up in other empty units, many of them stocked and decorated as show apartments.
A forty-something mom and managing director at Deutsche Bank assembled a cohort of ladies on a brief maternity leave from their high-powered finance jobs.
They took over a three-bedroom apartment on the seventy-third floor, aimed at a potential Wall Street bro and already set up with Bloomberg terminals and multiple screens to track the Dow Jones.
It wasn’t until the SEC called months later that we realized they’d set up a whole shadow business trading derivatives (whatever those are) without any regulatory guardrails.
Olivia took advantage of the stocked wet bars in the various units we’d co-opted. Turns out, having two under two can make anyone a casual alcoholic. Olivia didn’t get trashed, but she settled into the steady day-drinking buzz of a kir royale.
For the crafty moms, we transformed an area of the co-working space to look like an aisle of Hobby Lobby.
I’d underestimated Brit, figuring she’d be all over the scrapbooking room.
Turns out, Brit was kind of a Renaissance woman.
In addition to musical theater and her burgeoning Etsy business, she also knew a lot about actual art.
She browsed Daisy’s apartment, marveling at an early Richard Prince, a lesser Barbara Kruger, reminiscing about her art history minor at UVA.
Brit did the math in her head, asking me, “What line of work is this Daisy in?”
Daisy appeared out of nowhere. “Hospitality,” she said with a concierge grin.
After the morning salutations, Daisy made herself scarce.
At first, I didn’t question these extended absences.
Daisy was our guide, but it was up to us to free ourselves, to find a new way of being.
But it also meant that people were always coming up to me asking if they could talk to Daisy, or if I could pass on a message or, usually, a complaint.
They had a blowout fight with the lactation consultant, and could we get a new one?
Or somebody was hogging the BabyBjorn bouncer, and can there be a time limit?
Or they didn’t want to watch The Beguiled again.
Ever since I’d posted on Juju Bean, everyone assumed Daisy and I were sisters.
I didn’t correct them. I relished my proximity.
You want to get close? You have to go through me.
But I also started to feel like a suggestion box.
Take a number, ladies. Daisy will see you when she’s ready.
But she wouldn’t see them. I learned to never bother Daisy with their gripes.
I’d take them to Bianca or restock the hypoallergenic wipes myself.
Any hint of criticism or ingratitude and Daisy would stiffen, a bite behind her eyes.
Early on, when a mom got locked out and needed a new fob, I found Daisy in some quiet corner of the condo, bowed over a book.
She sighed, dropping the book. “Em? I don’t want to hear it. ”
That afternoon, I found Daisy smoking a cigarette on the balcony.
I joined her and we surveyed the scene inside.
So many different women no longer trying so hard to look as if they had it together.
No longer getting MRIs to see if we have a brain tumor.
We all obviously have tumors. They’re eighty-seven floors down learning Mandarin.
“Look at what you built, Em,” she said.
“We built it together.” I took Daisy’s hand, proud of this thing, whatever it is.
I don’t even know how long we sat there that afternoon.
I was just so happy to be with Daisy, to be building something together, something secret away from normal life.
It’s what I’d wanted for so long, to feel revived, bathed in purpose.
Like she and I could take over the world.
We were in New York together, just like we always said we would be, but we were no longer outcasts.
We stood there, taking in this covert coven, a sprawling ranch in the sky.
The rest of the day passed in a dreamy stretch of sunlight.
Daisy talked and I listened. She said that everything in adulthood had led us here. That there was no limit to what we could do. That we were right where we belonged.
She never mentioned the penthouse or what went on up there.