Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
He picks Holden up and puts him in the stroller. We walk back to his office. A couple of security guards check credentials. Roman kisses Holden, then me, goodbye.
“That was nice,” Roman says.
“That was nice.”
He disappears through the revolving doors into the bright, art-filled lobby. I lean my head into the Yoyo. “Ma-MA. I’m Ma-MA.”
“Daaaadaaaaa,” Holden babbles.
“Fucking men.”
—
I push Holden past the Pier 25 playground, on our way to the subway.
That’s when I see Daisy. She’s getting out of the Mercedes, the unbothered look of someone who popped a Prozac on a private jet.
I push Holden faster. I don’t know why she didn’t show for Roman, but I suspect it had something to do with the penthouse.
She catches up, handing me a wrapped gift.
“Hey. Hey. I got you a present.”
I open it. A first edition of The Bell Jar. I hand it back. “She kills herself.
“I should get back to work,” I say. I’d never had a fight with Daisy.
Not when we lived together, our beds two feet from each other, the Tiffany light between us.
Not even when she’d given my boyfriend a lap dance.
But you come to the playground on a weekday afternoon to introduce your husband to your best friend and she isn’t there.
“I can’t believe you’re so pissed. Em—”
“I’m not. It’s fine. It’s just…You could’ve at least texted. It’s not easy for Roman to get out of work.”
“Um, and you think it’s easy for me to text during my work?”
“Your work, right.” As quickly as the words leave my mouth, I try to snatch them back. Daisy looks at me like a wounded bird. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that. I am just stressed, and I’ve got PT later.”
I felt myself becoming territorial, voyeuristic.
Daisy wasn’t mine any more than any person can belong to someone, and yet, I worried that her old life might interfere with the new one we’d created.
What if the Greek came back and wanted Daisy to go with him to a yacht in Mykonos?
Or St. Tropez? Or wherever Greek oligarchs bring their hired girlfriends–slash–house managers?
What if Daisy disappeared as quickly as she’d reappeared?
I never expected that Holden and I would become so reliant on Daisy, that she’d feel so much like family, but I also never expected to be carrying an Itzy Ritzy Boss Backpack.
Like I’ve said, motherhood does crazy shit to people.
So I do not ask where she was. Or what she does in the penthouse. Or if she tells her clients about us.
We keep walking, Daisy trailing just behind us. I push the Yoyo, passing a couple of Tribeca moms with their Bugaboos. Am I staring at them? No, wait. They’re staring at us. Daisy waves hello. “Do we know them?” I ask.
“Louise and Naomi? Aren’t they the ones who drank all that mint melatonin tea and passed out in the sauna? I think their babies are Bear and Axel, or Alec, maybe?”
My face is blank. No clue. “I guess they all sort of run together.”
I knew it was just a matter of time before we started seeing one another out in the world, at playgrounds and public libraries and Baby Beluga, but I still felt a potent little rush.
Our secret was out. On good days, I’d stared at these moms with envy.
On bad ones, with disdain. But now they looked at me with something else: gratitude.
I had the hottest friend with the hottest play center in Manhattan.
Still, the recognition made our experiment alive in a way that I hadn’t anticipated.
I guess there are no secret societies in a city built on social climbing.
Daisy is taking off her Lanvin flats to climb into the sandbox with Holden. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise,” she says.
Holden squirms, reaching for me. (“Your baby recognizes familiar faces and has developed a fear of strangers.”) I grab him, maybe too abruptly. Daisy stands empty-handed, hopefully reminded that we can leave her, too. Then where would she be?
Daisy pulls a chupete out of a Balmain bag. To think, all this time, we could’ve kept the pacifiers in Balmain. Can. You. Imagine. She pops it into Holden’s juicy lips. “I can take Holden uptown with me, if you want.”
I nod, Yes, please.
We found each other on a Wednesday. Three months later, we are sisters. We can hurt and love and disappoint and delight each other all at the same time. We can call each other a cunt and then share nachos five minutes later like nothing ever happened.
We walk uptown along the waterfront. Daisy takes my hand.
If being in Roman’s arms felt like a warm bath, being around Daisy felt like a cold plunge, a quick shock to the adrenal system.
I constantly thought about when I’d get another hit.
I needed more and more attention just to reach the same high.
I won’t make it back to work today. We will walk for a long time, the wind at our backs, holding hands.
When we get back to 527 Park, we will get IV drips and watch the karaoke scene in Lost in Translation for the six thousandth time.
After that, I will take Holden home, give him a bath, put him to bed, sprinkle some ReptoMin freeze-dried sticks into Turtly’s tank, and pass out on the sofa.
We’re walking in the Meatpacking District, past the Eurotrash tourists eating moules frites at Pastis.
We pass bros bored on bad Hinge dates with girls who looked better in their pictures.
We pass a pack of females who feel time running out.
We pass the Apple store that used to be an S and M club—gay men in chaps facing a plague giving way to a college kid with an Izod and iPad asking if you’d like AppleCare with that.
I’d been in New York long enough to know about the cruel cycle of life of the place, but something about staring into the windows of a Restoration Hardware near where Florent used to be hit me particularly hard.
I studied my messy reflection, a body I didn’t recognize, just a dowdy mom pushing a stroller.
I would’ve pushed past her in the subway.
“OMG this mom won’t fucking move.” It was then, staring into the RH windows, that I had something like a religious experience.
Dreams don’t work out. Elevated casual furniture chains push out everything cool.
Marriage is sixty percent talking about your taxes.
I see Daisy’s reflection behind me. “It’s not like I thought it would be,” I say.
“What’s not?” She leans down to check on Holden.
“New York with you. It’s like we got here too late.”
She shrugs. “Fuck it. We’re here now.”
“But…I found you too late.”
“Hey, Em. You gotta stop. We’re together now.”
Daisy quotes from Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. “ ‘Very early in my life it was too late. It was already too late when I was eighteen.’ ”