Chapter Twenty-Three #2
I shift in my lounge chair. There was no way to take back what happened, when Daisy’s stepdad lost a poker game and got tired of her asking for money to buy books because she was too pretty to care that much about books.
They got into a fight, and he grabbed her the way he’d always grabbed her.
But that time she pushed him back. Then he grabbed her in a way he’d never grabbed her, not before that summer when her soft teenage body had belatedly turned overnight into this elfin girl with breasts, cupped and curved, as if designed to fit in a man’s open hand.
He wasn’t her real dad. Her biological dad died when she was six months old in an accident on a fishing boat off La Paz, Mexico.
He was allegedly the only one her mom ever really loved.
They were supposed to get married and then there was a squall, and, well, it doesn’t really matter after that.
But this man had helped raise Daisy. This man had been the dad who made her scrambled eggs and burnt buttered biscuits before middle school and who signed the silver charm bracelet beneath the artificial tree To: Daisy.
Love: Dad. He was drunk, and maybe on pills, but still…
She hit him, swinging until his lip bled, a drop of blood on his custom shirtsleeve.
He looked at it, then looked at Daisy. He laughed.
There would be no more money. No more tuition.
This gush of wind, violent in how quickly it came, blew her off the sidewalk, off the course of a very different life.
I’d done exactly what Daisy hated. Built her up in my head, her mysterious past, her sex work, as if finding her, knowing her, would somehow make me more interesting.
Make me the costar in the bodice ripper of her life.
Why else had I kept all those porn mags?
Kept the clippings under my bed even when Roman told me to get rid of them?
But the truth was so much simpler than that.
We are all the same. Until we aren’t. What a fine, invisible line there is for a girl, between a matcha latte and a methadone clinic.
“I adored you.” As soon as I say it, I feel like the words are so stupid, and I want to pull them back into my chest like a puff on the Camel Light I should not be smoking.
“We were nerdy little girls in a dorm room who’d never shaved our pussies.
Did you know that I only work with a contract now?
It’s not even really about sex anymore. I get paid to just…
exist.” She waves her arms, taking in the full expanse of New York.
The park. The river. The opportunity. “I just live here, let myself be open to what they need, when they need it, and they lavish me with everything I could possibly want. You know all about wanting, right?” I did.
I wanted so much, all the time. I was drowning in wants.
To have a more attentive husband. To stop hurting.
To feel like my body was my own again. To live in an apartment in the clouds on a barren stretch of Park Avenue. To be a good mom.
“What about…love?” Jesus, Emily, stop talking.
Daisy laughs. “Oh, Em. You were always such a romantic.” She pats my thigh, declaring this conversation over.
She is happy again, her moods moving as quickly as Olivia’s burpees.
Up and down, heart open and shut. “I lied when I said neighbors are overrated.” She tosses a cashmere throw over our legs. “I was lonely without you.”
I inch closer to Daisy, her body against mine. My heart beating so fast. “I’ve been really lonely, too…I was lonely without you, too.”
The women are stretching now, contorting their bodies on their mats into happy baby and child’s pose, the same exercises that Carleigh is always telling me to do.
It’s all getting very heady, so I say, “But I do have this perv of a neighbor who stares at my boobs every night, and I don’t know how to handle it…”
“Oh,” Daisy says, as if she gets this question all the time.
“Peeping Toms are easy. Give him what he wants and he’ll stop.
” I don’t want to show this stranger my naked body.
But Daisy doesn’t see it as giving in. “It’s taking your power back,” she says.
“He’ll get all scared and freaked out and go back to his wife and get off to her instead. Trust me. Works every time.”
How many times had Daisy had a Peeping Tom?
We keep talking after the other moms have all rolled up their mats and gone inside to wash off with icy-cold towelettes and collect their babies and go home to their partners, who will have work drinks and grow paunchy around the middle.
We keep talking, past the time I’d promised that we’d FaceTime with Grandma Sue.
We keep talking until it is dark and I forget about my PT appointment and that I need to get Holden home. We keep talking just like we did when we were nineteen.
—
Daisy and I celebrated Holden’s six-month birthday with a cake from Milk Bar at her place.
Just the three of us…Well, the three of us and a magician, an Encanto show, and a petting zoo with a camel.
Daisy didn’t want to go overboard. The same day, I got a call from Kathy in HR.
The party was over. My medical leave was up.
I needed to either resign or return to work.
I was posting a photo of Holden sitting in his stainless steel Bloom Fresco high chair when I got the call.
Daisy and I were standing on either side of him, his tiny hand grasping a brand-new Maisonette Sophie La Girafe Non-Spill Cup in cerulean, one of dozens of gifts from Daisy, who somehow knew that at twenty-six weeks, he was ready to move on to a sippy cup.
I found the other moms downstairs in the playroom.
Olivia’s hair hung down, flat and oily. She’d ditched the turtleneck for a V-neck T-shirt, a nursing bra peeking out from underneath.
Chloe and Zoe secured in a pair of MamaRoo swings, Olivia lay back on the floor of the soft-play center and closed her eyes.
Audrey reclined on a couple of throw pillows, while trying to shove a pacifier into Sloane’s screaming mouth.
She looked at Olivia, confirmed that she’s settled into a catnap, and then whispered to me that her boss called.
The firm lost the Google account and had to cut back.
Olivia didn’t need to come back. It made sense now.
That wasn’t Olivia unclenched; that was Olivia unemployed.
“Shit. Is she okay?” I asked.
“She had to ask her parents for money. She’ll get another job. She, like, clerked for some Supreme Court justice, I think.”
“Which one?”
Audrey shrugged. We looked at Olivia, who let out a snore, drooling on a Baby Einstein tummy time play pillow, tangling herself in a poplin baby blanket.
Quinn rode in a plushy elephant rocker. Brit handed Holden a large box wrapped in gift wrap that she designed with a row of koala bears holding letters up to spell “I heard it’s somebody’s half birthday!
” I walk over to open it—a Crawligator gross-motor activity toy, “contoured to match the curvature of your baby’s body,” inside.
“Aw, Brit. You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know it takes up a lot of space, but Quinny was obsessed—obsessed! I couldn’t get her off it, and it really improved her posture.”
I kiss her on the cheek. “Thanks.”
Brit takes my arm, whispering in my ear. “So, you’re not mad?”
“What? Why would I be mad?”
“Yesterday? When I went upstairs, I just thought…” She registers my curious expression, then thinks better of it. “Never mind. It’s nothing. There’s a gift receipt if you want to exchange—”
Daisy comes out of nowhere. She takes the Crawligator out of my hand, tossing it near a box of broken toys. She gives Brit a tight grin. “We did say no gifts.”
I watch Brit’s eyes questioning Daisy’s apparent dislike for her, and in an instant a question floats into my head: Were we all Daisy’s very own box of broken toys?
But now wasn’t the time for questions. I was so touched that Daisy had gone all out, celebrating Holden’s sixth month of life.
Before I knew it, he’d be thirty-one weeks.
After the playroom, Daisy draws a bubble bath for Holden in a freestanding marble plunge tub that looks like an exorbitant piece of jewelry. She’s singing “Octopus’s Garden” and making his hair into a sudsy mohawk. I hand him a rubber duck.
Lately, Holden hates bath time with me. He’s grown out of his Frida Baby Soft Sink Baby Bath and has gotten so restless in our deep tawny tub, a soft twist of limbs and need.
I’d put baths off for a day or two, too tired and terrified to fight with a jar of Jell-O.
(“Infants can drown in as little as one inch of water. Your vigilance saves lives,” Dr. Brooke says. SUID, Sudden Unexpected Infant Death.)
But he somehow loves bath time with Daisy, and honestly her tub is way better than even the finest Home Depot renovation in Stuy Town.
She’s supporting his back with one hand and lathering on tear-free shampoo with the other, all while maintaining a decent rendition of one of the odder Beatles hits.
The door is cracked. Daisy barks orders at a mousy girl with braided pigtails.
“Caroline?” This girl looks too young to be a mom, at least a mom in New York.
She has an adorable face, like the shellacked winner of one of those child pageants but grown-up.
“Um, hello? Caroline?” Daisy says, more bite in her voice.
“It’s Claire,” she corrects Daisy.
“Be a doll and grab us Holden’s Petit Bateau robe?”
I hand Daisy a towel from a warming rack. She gets Holden out and wraps him, snug and toasty. Claire comes back with a monogrammed terry-cloth robe that makes him look like a miniature mogul. Daisy hands Holden back, clean and cooing. “You’re good with him. Just let it be fun sometimes?”