Chapter Twenty-Seven
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To celebrate my first week back at the office, we did something we never did.
We ate out. I met Roman at Tequila Mockingbird in the East Village, right by Tompkins Square Park.
This used to be my spot. Molten cheese, a bad book pun.
Before we started dating, Roman had never spent much time in the East Village or discovered the wonders of Tex-Mex.
He lived in Murray Hill, and I still fell in love with him.
In the same way that I brought Roman into my world, and his world got bigger, Holden had expanded my world.
For years, I’d walked through Tompkins Square Park almost every day.
As rancid as it sounds, I’d sit on a bench and read.
I’d stumble drunk past the mural of Joe Strummer.
Penelope and I once wore pink wigs and walked barefoot through the park and ate French fries off a stranger’s plate at the Odessa Diner.
If there was anywhere in New York that felt like my own backyard, it was this half-assed urban excuse for a green space.
But in all of my years coming here, it wasn’t until Holden, until Daisy, that I learned there is a little postage stamp of a swimming pool in the northeast corner.
Daisy and I had been walking through the park one afternoon, heading back to my apartment after a day of exploring.
“Look!” she said, pointing to a lifeguard stand and kids in bathing suits.
I’d brought a Dr. Brown’s baby ice pack to put on Holden’s cheeks because he got so flushed in the humidity.
My thighs chafed, but the conversation—a heated debate about Tarantino and whether every movie needed to pass the Bechdel test—kept me going.
Then, all of a sudden, we saw this mirage in Alphabet City.
An actual pool. Daisy walked up to the lifeguard, who couldn’t have been more than sixteen, with tricycle-red shorts that looked glued to his deep tan.
“Excuse me, but can anyone use this pool?”
“As long as you don’t take a shit or fuck in it,” he said, twirling his whistle.
She looked back at me, that glowing smile of hers.
We could do that. We double-diapered Holden.
Daisy lifted off her sundress. No chafing on her thighs.
She had a conservative cotton bra and panties on.
I’d typically feel insecure taking my clothes off, but she was so happy, so carefree, and this would be Holden’s first time in a swimming pool.
I had to get in. I left my tank top on and slowly got in.
We’d hit every splash pad in the city, but nothing cooled us off like that first dip in the pool.
Daisy did a cannonball. I cradled Holden in my arms. He was elated.
Chlorine, a revelation. It was a weekday afternoon, and it was just a few kids from the nearby housing projects and us.
Daisy dove down and did a flutter kick. When she came up, she’d found a gold tooth. She turned it in to the lost and found.
We didn’t have towels but we dried off fast, walking home. My hair, thick with a New York City public pool layer, felt as fresh as if I’d just climbed out of the Aegean. Holden snored lightly in his stroller. We got Italian ices that turned our lips tangerine.
“I used to swim in the ocean every day,” Daisy said.
“Where?”
“Everywhere.”
I wanted to swim in the ocean every day. I wanted to be everywhere. And that afternoon in Tompkins Square Park with Daisy, I was.
Because we have separate, minuscule closets, Roman hadn’t noticed that I’d basically burned all of my old clothes and started to exclusively wear his.
A couple of days ago, he did a double take on his way out the door.
“What’ve you got today?” Meaning Where do you think you’re wearing that?
We hardly ever saw each other during the day and hadn’t had the time, the bandwidth, to talk about it more than that.
He was never the type of guy who cared what I was wearing and hadn’t registered my new look at all until I strolled up with the Yoyo that evening, coming straight from Daisy’s.
I looked like I got dressed at a Goodwill in the dark, lugging the Yoyo into our old Friday-night spot, and he looked at me like he didn’t recognize me.
He looked at me like I was some other girl entirely.
“Are those my track pants?” he asked. Yes, yes, they are.
I order my usual quesadilla deluxe. He gets his chicken burrito, no sour cream.
We both get margaritas, syrupy and salty with only a vague hint of tequila.
A busboy brings a couple of tortillas, still puffed up like clouds.
Roman rolls up a doughy crumb of tortilla to give to Holden.
He gnaws on it, crossing his eyes slightly—a look that only I know means that he wants more.
We are having a family Tex-Mex dinner, and it is nice.
It feels like we’re on a date, but better because Holden is there, tortilla in hand.
On Sunday, Holden fell asleep early after we drove two hours in traffic to pose for the requisite fall photos at Harry’s Pumpkin Patch on the North Fork of Long Island.
For twelve dollars, you got a wristband and access to a corn maze, a haunted hayride, and apple picking.
The Ferris wheel and gold mining were extra.
If you wanted to keep the apples, they cost fifteen dollars per pound.
We put Holden in a red wagon and dragged him around the pumpkin patch.
The ground was littered with trash from the cotton candy and fresh corn concession stands.
The innards of pumpkins people had stomped on squished under my feet.
Hardly any of the pumpkins were presentable on both sides, either covered in warts or kicked in.
Determined to get one photo, we leaned Holden against a pumpkin, turned deformed gourds around trying to find a good side.
We cropped out the porta potty and the generator of a nearby cider doughnut truck and got Holden, sweating in a navy cardigan, to briefly look at the camera before he fell in the dirt and started sobbing.
That night, we ordered Lombardi’s pizza. Finished off a large pie. Roman started to kiss my neck, tried to lure me to bed. I reflexively cringed, maybe too obviously.
It always turned into a fight. His feelings hurt, my feelings ignored.
I didn’t want to flinch at his touch. Sure, I’d had a series of wet dreams in which the bartender at the Peppermint Elephant banged me several different ways in the parking lot—and one in which we (inexplicably) did it hourly to entertain tourists at Graceland—but I’d have chosen Roman every day.
Except that everything about sex with him still reminded me of the pain.
And now there was this new pain of not understanding why I felt revolted at the idea of even being close to him. “Touch aversion,” Carleigh calls it.
“What’d Daisy say?” Roman asks, taking a sip of his margarita.
Holden whimpers, one eye fixed on the tortillas.
I break off a couple of bite-size pieces.
I get why Roman is impatient to meet Holden’s caregiver, but it still rubs me the wrong way that he switched so quickly from checking me out to asking about my professionally sexy best friend.
He thought maybe I’d invite her to join us, but I’d told him a million times, she can’t do nights: 527 Park closed up at eight so that Daisy could do her actual work.
Did this mean hosting rich men? Getting her vagina steamed?
Paying the maintenance and electric bills?
I honestly didn’t know and I didn’t care.
As long as I didn’t see any of it during business hours.
All I know is that whether you were a working parent or a stay-at-home parent, at sundown, we all picked up our babies and turned into wart-covered pumpkins.
“I told you, she has work and stuff at night. You know, kind of like you always have work.” Roman eats a chip, ignoring my dig.
“But we’ll figure something out soon, I promise.
She feels like she knows you.” I dig into the queso, putting some on the top of my finger for Holden, but when I reach to give it to him, he is fast asleep, still clutching what’s left of an emotional-support tortilla.
“You’ve got your hands full. I’ll coordinate with Daisy and figure something out. Don’t worry about it,” he says.
I almost spit out my margarita. Excuse me?! How exactly will Roman “coordinate” with Daisy? I try to hide my horror. “Yeah, sure. That works. I’ll give you her cell.”
“I have it.”
He has Daisy’s cell? “You do?”
“Obviously. We text all the time. Who do you think sends me all the pictures and videos of Holden when I’m at work?”
I figured Miss Iowa or one of our army of caregivers sent him photos.
He and Daisy are texting? How long have they been texting?
Has she told him about us? About the moms?
About the shrooms? About what goes down at 527 Park?
My quesadilla arrives. A flash of Daisy giving a lap dance to my boyfriend, Todd, in college.
I didn’t really like Todd. He had a Proust collection on his bedside table.
He put me down, dismissed my dreams. He was the writer in the relationship.
One poem published in the Oxford American and suddenly he’s Seamus Heaney.
But still…it was my birthday and Daisy was my best friend and she was giving my boyfriend a giant boner.
Todd had acted above such things. Too literary for a boner was a new one.
I was a loner who finally got a boyfriend.
Not just any boyfriend but a boyfriend who looked vaguely like a young Elvis.
Wait, maybe that explains the Graceland dream?
A boyfriend who (allegedly) read Proust and who had a poem published in a major literary journal and who reminded me of that fact every time he got the chance.
I’d started to sleep over a lot at Todd’s garage apartment.
One night, he rubbed a finger on my nipple and told me that he’d been reading a lot of Hemingway and decided the only way to truly be in a relationship was to ruin each other, over and over again.
I should have broken up with him then, but he was very good at sex.
I went home to Tuscaloosa with him for Christmas and met his mom.
Then Daisy gave him a lap dance at my birthday and we decided to ruin each other.
Until he dumped me. He didn’t love me and didn’t think he ever could, so what was the point?
Roman notices that I am somewhere else, picking at a loaded quesadilla. “Hello, wife? You in there? Why are you getting all weird?”
“It’s nothing,” I say, smiling.
Of course, Roman is right. Why did I marry someone who was not only so male but also (almost) always so right?
It’s infuriating. Obviously, he should be in touch with Holden’s caregiver.
If this had been a regular nanny situation, Marcela or Priscilla, I would not have thought twice about Roman texting them.
This is my issue, not his. “No, totally. I’m so glad y’all are in touch.
Maybe we can meet up next week for lunch? Tuesday?”
Roman is pulling up his work calendar. It looks like a game of Tetris. He’s moving calls and team meetings and all-hands around. “Tuesday is a shit show. Wednesday? Somewhere downtown? Is there a park or a library or something?”
Is there a park or a library downtown? It was a throwaway question, but it reminded me, again, that New York, that life, had not changed much for Roman.
Because if you don’t have to take care of a baby in New York, you have almost no idea that the city is bursting with them.
But I don’t want to fight. I just want to finish my margarita and enter the weekend in a quesadilla coma, so I grin and say, “Sure. That works.”