Chapter Twenty-Three
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I split my days between my literary pursuits and taking Holden to classes downstairs.
(“At twenty-four weeks, your baby requires new activities and toys to boost large and small motor skills as well as social, intellectual, and language development.”) We go to “Lit Baby Book Club” on Tuesdays; a dance party hosted by a former deejay at the Limelight on Wednesdays; “Tiny Tennis” to hone hand-eye coordination with Pete Sampras’s favorite US Open ball boy on Thursdays; American Sign Language on Fridays.
In between his classes, I had creative writing class on the sixty-fourth floor.
We read Elizabeth Bishop, Sapphire, Sandra Cisneros.
I’d spend the afternoons—and all of Holden’s multiple naps—writing in a leather journal in Daisy’s study, with the Eero Saarinen desk, natural light streaming in from southern-exposure windows, and a variety of Japanese ink pens.
I’d wanted pens like that my whole life.
All the moms who always wanted to write or read and never had the time holed up in other quiet corners.
Virginia Woolf was wrong. A woman doesn’t need a room of one’s own.
We just need three hours with no one asking us for a snack.
I hadn’t seen Daisy all day when, that afternoon, she suddenly came up behind me, smelling like the sixties. “Read it to me when you’re ready?”
I touched her hand on my shoulder. She placed a warm lavender-scented compress on each breast, and I immediately felt the steady pain recede. She was right. She was right about everything. “I can’t wait. You’ll be my editor.”
As she turned to leave, Daisy slid me a peppermint tea and a blue pill.
Adderall. I’d recognize that shock of creativity immediately.
I hadn’t seen the pills since our dorm, when Daisy told me how she couldn’t really think without them, even though stimulants weren’t advised with a bipolar diagnosis.
They increase the risk of mania, hallucinations, delusions.
I took the pills without thought then, but now I sounded like Nancy Reagan.
“Drugs? No. Just no.” I was still pumping or, at least, attempting to, expressing my last drops into the Elvie rechargeable, cordless, hands-free double breast pump with nine levels of smart, hospital-grade suction strength.
That meant no Adderall. I get a flood of memories.
The last time Daisy and I were in each other’s lives, when she’d struggled with mental illness and addiction and begged me for money to buy heroin.
She’d been clean for so long. I felt protective, not just of Holden but of Auntie Daisy.
“Um. You do realize half your friends are downstairs tripping their asses off on mushrooms watching The Virgin Suicides?”
“They aren’t my friends. You invited them.
” My tone surprised me, some buried anxiety about all the things I knew about Daisy and all the things I didn’t blubbering out.
I soften. “And shrooms are natural. The building’s chakra adviser is handing them out.
” For the record, the topic of magic mushrooms had actually been raised on Juju Bean.
@IncognitoMamito was going to see Cypress Hill at the Sphere in Las Vegas.
The consensus was that if you waited twenty-four hours before breastfeeding, you were fine.
That prompted the Juju Bean safety board to throw on a warning that advice shared on the app is not verified by a medical professional.
But, still, mushrooms grew on cow shit. They weren’t classified as a Schedule II amphetamine.
Daisy sighed. “Damn. Forget I asked.”
—
By the time I go back downstairs, it’s after five p.m., and most of the moms have dispersed to pick up their babies and head home.
A handful are outside on the mezzanine doing a cathartic mind-body experience.
This is basically calisthenics with crystals and nude-toned bodysuits.
Techno blaring from the Sonos speakers, so loud, the floor vibrates.
The women are opening their hearts and throwing their pain in the proverbial fire.
It is odd and messy and sexy all at once.
I wade into the hovering mass of bodies to ask if anyone has seen Daisy, but they are too busy doing burpees. I almost get smacked in the face. I find Audrey. “Hey…Hey. Have you seen Daisy?”
“Did you try upstairs?” Audrey says, pointing up and then diving down into another burpee. She’s exuberant. “I feel like I’m about to die! It’s so good!”
I am about to head inside when Daisy appears, an aberration on the mezzanine. “Heard you’re looking for me?”
We sit on a couple of lounge chairs watching this ritual from a distance. Brit, quencher cup at her side, convulses to the Beastie Boys. Olivia looks like Mata Hari, hair braided, bodysuit, body gyrating, breath, when I pass by, smelling vaguely of vodka.
“I never thought I’d see that woman so unclenched,” Daisy says.
I’m not an idiot. I do, in this moment, stop and look around and ask myself, Why does Daisy want Olivia to unclench? Why does she care that Zoe and Chloe got the back-ordered cashmere onesies? Or that Sloane can say “Mu
Through an exhale, Daisy gives a vague, breathy “Upstairs.”
What was she doing up there? I don’t want to be nosy, but…
Before I can ask, Daisy looks around at the condo, the altitude, the glass and limestone, the watchful eye of the security cameras.
“This lifestyle, the architecture, it’s like it eroded my sense of self.
The chef on call downstairs, the cortados.
Like, I know that I am free to venture into the streets, buy a pretzel from a hot dog vendor, get a Frappuccino with the masses, but why would I? ”
“No, really, why would you?” Venture out and the hostess at an upscale Oaxacan restaurant says, without looking at you, that they are fully booked. Venture out and you risk being run over by a guy on an e-bike who shoots you the finger.
“When I heard you were looking for me, it’s like something woke me up, pulled me out of this prison for the overprivileged.
” It’s not that Daisy never thought about me, she says; it’s just that our time together felt like another life.
Then she wound up in New York and started to think about me again.
“God, do you remember how much we talked about New York? We were insufferable. No wonder we had no friends.” Daisy explains that it felt like time to finally stop running.
“And that’s when you started stalking me. ”
“That’s not entirely—”
“So I figured the cosmos was telling me something, ya know? And when the cosmos speaks, you sure as shit better listen.”
“I am always saying that.” (I’ve never said that.) I bum a smoke, taking Daisy’s cigarette to light my own.
I exhale. Again, I bite my tongue. I tell myself that I don’t care what Daisy does.
I don’t care where she goes. I don’t care what happens in the penthouse.
That’s the most expensive unit. Ninety-seven stories above the play center, where Holden is in his crib, enjoying Ursa Major and The Marriage of Figaro.
That’s the unit we don’t ask about. The one we don’t wander upstairs to.
I tell myself I don’t care as long as she comes back.
As long as she doesn’t leave me again. But then I feel the wrench.
I need Daisy to let me in on her secrets, even the smallest piece of her depths, something only for me.
“What’s it like?” I ask. Shut up, Emily. “What’s your work like?”
Daisy looks straight ahead off the balcony, making me feel like a passing cloud in her orbit.
“Lucrative.” Then she cocks her head toward me wearing a smile I haven’t seen before.
I imagine her telling me the worst things possible.
But instead, she looks irritated. “What, Em? Do you want me to cry and tell you how nobody loved me so I equated sex with love and started doing it a dozen times a day on a dirty mattress for a pimp in snakeskin boots and a gold Rolex? Is that what pimps wear? I honestly have no idea.”
“No. I just—”
“You know what? I just realized, maybe this is why I’ve never had any civilian girlfriends. This conversation.”
“I’m sorry. Forget—”
“They all look at me like I’m some nympho slut or some curiosity, maybe one of those sad hot girls in an A24 movie sent to save them from mom apps and playdates and conversations about feeder schools and husbands who are getting a little paunchy in the middle.
But truth is, we’re exactly the same. Any bitch in there, if life had knocked them off the leafy sidewalk of a Seven Sisters school, they’d be letting an insurance salesman come in their face for four grand before going home to his wife and kids.
Nah, they probably wouldn’t get that much.
” She notices one of the moms, her skin glowing like luxury leather.
Her body so firm nothing moves under a white leotard.
“Okay, maybe she would.” Daisy puts on a voice like she’s narrating the audio memoir of someone else’s life.
“ ‘I confused the value that men gave me with having actual value.’ ” She flashes me a look.
“That’s what years of therapy got me to say. ”