Chapter Thirty-One
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I sat in a red velour chair at the Mughlai Curry House, strewn with streamers and Christmas lights up all year.
Penelope was almost an hour late. I scrolled on my phone.
Brit blocked me on Instagram. Had I scared her when I warned her that posting Quinn dressed as Glinda in the playroom production of Wicked, adorable as it may have been, was a blatant violation of the NDA?
Or—and I hated to admit this—maybe Molly Gibson had been onto something?
What if Brit wasn’t ghosting me? What if she’d been silenced?
I checked the time again. Went ahead and ordered a twelve-dollar tandoori lunch special that used to cost eight.
I texted Penelope again. “Hey, should I order you samosas?…Mango lassi?…Call me?…You alive?” When the check came, Penelope finally called.
“Heeeeeey. Where are you? You have to see the new Guido Faleschini leather bed that’s currently being installed. It’s beyond. Also, these movers, kinda hot?”
“I’m in the East Village. I thought we were meeting for Indian.”
A huff of a laugh. “Curry Lane, Emily Joan? I thought you were joking.”
“No. We said we’d meet here.”
“Yeah, well, I never said that. But come over. You need to see the renovation.”
I looked at the time. Gramercy was on my way uptown to pick up Holden. “Okay.”
“Oh, and pick up some Pellegrino? And maybe a rosé? Doesn’t need to be fancy, can be Provencal…” Then: “Not Trader Joe’s.”
“Okay.”
—
Penelope’s Gramercy Park town house is all empty space and contemporary art. She is showing me an Ai Weiwei sculpture of bronze stools tangled in a semicircle and an Urs Fischer waxwork that looks like a house made of loaves of bread. “Do you love it?”
“I love it.” I hate it. It looks like Art Basel barfed in her foyer.
We walk to the living room. I hesitate to sit on an ivory chenille sofa. “Is it okay?”
“Obviously. It’s a sofa.” I sit. As I lean back: “Just don’t touch the pillows.”
She sits across from me on a chair that looks like an open hand.
“You’re coming Friday, right? Say you’ll come!”
“What’s Friday?”
“My housewarming party. Duh.”
“Um. Yeah. Yes. I just have to check if someone can watch Holden.”
“Please come!” I hesitate. “It won’t be the same without you. Just get a sitter. Besides, it will be good for you to get out. Come!”
“Okay.”
“Fab!” Penelope’s voice turns sugary. “Soooo. Where’s the little man? I want to see him!”
“Oh yeah. He’s with Daisy.”
She flinches. Was that a hint of envy? “I still want to meet this porn-star friend of yours!” The way she just dismisses Daisy as a “porn star” only reinforces my determination to never introduce them.
Penelope only wanted to meet Daisy as a novelty, something she could talk about at cocktail parties.
“Totally,” I say. “Daisy would love you.” She’d hate her.
A housekeeper puts an individual bottle of Pellegrino on a coaster for Penelope, then turns to me. “Can I get you something?”
“No, thank you.” I squint at Penelope, who is taking a sip. “I thought you needed me to bring you sparkling.”
“We can always use more.”
Penelope tells me about Paris, the new nanny, the ninetieth birthday party they’re planning to throw for Mimi, the matriarch of the whole clan.
How would they all survive in that Tuscan villa if she isn’t speaking to her mother?
I am listening to her drone on about her mom (“Her new man is coming—she’s really talking about marriage.
Can you imagine? At her age.”) and real estate (“And don’t get me started on the apartment.
It’s the right time to list it, and she’s dithering…
”). She’s talking about private wealth management (“Of course it’s on me to sort it out…
”) and it occurs to me that the power dynamic between us has shifted.
For the first time, I don’t need Penelope.
I have Daisy. I have 527 Park and the Juju Bean moms. I look out the window, the leaves exploding in yellows and oranges on sugar maples.
“Emily Joan? Are you even listening?”
“No, sorry, I tuned you out at the Tuscan villa.” And then I lean back—hard—on the forbidden pillows.
—
When I get to 527 Park the next day, I see flashing lights.
An EMT taking Audrey out on a stretcher.
She is pale, half conscious, the impish grin gone.
Audrey had always been the (mostly) sober busybody of the group.
Seeing her laid out like that, drained of color, her waterproof mascara smeared, her face limp, made me feel so guilty.
I’d invited Audrey to 527 Park, drawn her deeper in, and then neglected her.
I race to the private doctor who sits in a clinic on the fifth floor on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, in case residents need anything and can’t be bothered to leave the building.
He hardly has a flu shot to tend to, but it’s part of the menu of 527 amenities.
“What happened? Is she okay?”
“We’re not sure. Maybe a blood clot?” the concierge doctor says. “Do you know if she is prone to those? Does she have preexisting conditions?”
Preexisting conditions? This whole thing was supposed to be about barre classes and luxe pumping rooms. I notice the spot in Audrey’s vein where a wellness infusion went.
It is red and swollen, the size of a golf ball.
The EMT finds a vein on the other arm to insert a needle attached to an IV bag.
The concierge doctor is twitching. He snorts and holds his nostrils between his fingers.
His gaze can’t focus. His eyes fill with the black iris of a cocaine bender.
I grab the nearest EMT, a snake tattoo sneaking out from beneath his shirt collar.
“Is she going to be okay? What do you think caused it?” I look at Audrey, so delicate and vulnerable and blank. “Where is Sloane?” I feel faint, too.
“This is what happens when people play doctor,” he says, helping to lift her into the ambulance.
Audrey opens her eyes and looks into mine.
I touch her hand and feel her use the little bit of strength she has to grab my fingers.
“You’re nothing like who I thought you were.
Thank you…” She has a glazed, distant look in her eyes, and as they close the doors, I think I hear her searching for— “Daisy. Daisy.”
Daisy? Why did she want Daisy? It had been Daisy who hired a man away from his previous job as the head of building sanitation to insert IVs in these women, and who left me there to clean up the mess.
Daisy who introduced all of us to a world beyond the one we’d all felt stuck in, welcomed us into utopia, and now she’d never let us forget it.
Every day Daisy made her rounds, welcoming new moms, encouraging regulars, a love junkie soaking up the adoration.
She needed us to express gratitude with every sip of oat milk latte, every bite of organic berry.
Audrey had every right to sue us, break her NDA and go public, but Daisy must have known that she’d never do it.
Not unless she wanted to go back to her ordinary life.
Have a pigeon shit on you on a park bench.
Lay a poplin blanket on the scalding asphalt.
Daisy didn’t just offer us something new, something posh and complimentary and comfortable; she served it up with the unspoken threat that she could take it all away at any time.
What then? Where would we go? Most of the 527 Park moms had cast aside the nanny search, tossed the day care applications, told their partners that they’d found a better, cheaper way.
A lot of moms went back to work, confident that their babies were in the best possible care in a Tony D’Nario–designed playroom.
Working or not, we were all invigorated by the idea that at the most isolating time in our lives, we’d become part of an unlikely sisterhood. A communal village.
What if all that just went away?
It wasn’t just me. We’d all become so reliant on Daisy. We’d perk up like donkeys at a manger anytime she walked into a room.
Some women started to spend so many nights at the condo that I worried they didn’t want to go home.
Without us even realizing it, one mom spent two weeks in a studio apartment—a model that no real estate agent ever showed, because if you have 5.
7 million dollars to spend on an apartment, why would you want a seventh-floor studio on the Middle East Side?
She finally emerged to find that her husband had put out a missing person report.
It was on NY1. Even then, Daisy hadn’t told her to go home.
She’d only asked why she didn’t want to.
“You can tell me,” Daisy said, touching her arm.
We were a judgment-free society, Daisy liked to say.
I pulled her aside that day. “This is basically kidnapping. She has to take the baby home, now. No one except us can stay overnight anymore. Okay?” Daisy looked at me with the empty gaze of a mannequin.
“Okay?” I said again, a hint of force that I almost never used with Daisy.
As she stood to leave, she said, “Whatever.”
When I was fourteen, I ran away from home.
It wasn’t even like I was pregnant or got suspended or had some catastrophic fight with my mom.
I just stared at half a chicken cordon bleu and creamed spinach that she’d heated up, leftovers after a date took her to Christie’s Seafood & Steaks, and I knew I had to get away.
I got as far as a twenty-four-hour House of Pies, where I fell asleep in a booth and woke up in the back of a police car.
My mom dragged me back home. I stared at Daisy walking inside, carefree, and in that instant, I smelled the leftovers.
Creamed spinach screaming at me to get out.