Chapter Thirty-Nine
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I made nearly a thousand dollars that first night on the pole, when Brandy tossed me a stuffed bunny and the manager stood backstage cheering me on.
I figured it was beginner’ s luck, an accidental collision of adrenaline and desperation.
Hell, even Emily could pull off one killer striptease if she was hungry enough.
Anything after that would be a cheap knockoff of that first time onstage, familiar but frayed at the edges, requiring actual acting chops that Emily didn’t have.
I was wrong. Instead, that stuffed bunny became the formative sexual event of my life.
For years, I couldn’t get off without it.
Without thinking about the man in the brown suit and his “Yum. Yum. Yum.” I was myself, but I was also Daisy.
I was him. I was the eager manager backstage.
I was Emily. I was all of them, wrapped around my French-manicured finger.
Ever since that first night onstage, I’d done a modified bunny rabbit move for every boyfriend I ever had.
Except one. He was a very stable and sensible man, an accountant, of all things, and I didn’t want him to think I was a nutjob.
—
In record time, I went from stripping near the airport and porn videos to a high-end escort service.
That work eventually led me to a billionaire, a Malaysian financier.
He took me to New York. Put me up in a luxury condo on Central Park South.
I had everything. Then The Wall Street Journal did this whole investigation and I guess the glass condo was actually a money-laundering front, and Hu Lee had pillaged Malaysia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, essentially bankrupting his native country.
The feds seized the condo, confiscated most of my closet and two Jeff Koons balloon dogs.
Hu disappeared on his yacht somewhere, and I got spit out into the city.
It may not have been exactly as we’d envisioned getting to New York, but I ended up exactly where Emily had always wanted to be.
Smug little Emily, who always did things on the straight and narrow.
But there I was, the sex worker, with a notebook full of poetry and enough cash to pay the first month’s rent and a deposit on a one-bedroom East Village walk-up with a courtyard garden that I shared with Tyrone and his boyfriend, Paul, and his pile of vintage Pez dispensers.
Help me become somebody else.
I told them my name was Emily. I sold most of the designer clothes that weren’t confiscated, put the rest in storage, and went on a shopping spree at Madewell.
I was just another basic girl from the burbs who moved to New York with the dream of becoming a writer.
Because even after all I’d been through, all I’d seen and the things I’d done that I wanted so badly to forget, I was, deep down, also, still, Emily.
That’s the thing about women who are impossibly young—we are all both.
Emily and Daisy, two sides of the same coin, depending on how the world flips us and lets us fall.
I got a job fact-checking at Domino and took a creative writing extension course in a loft in SoHo, where I met Leo.
I did my bunny rabbit thing with him, before we became strictly friends.
He connected me to the Job Genie Global placement agency.
I got a permanent job with benefits. Penelope’s family foundation hired me to write grants, and then to organize her closets and label shoeboxes and alphabetize her address books.
I started to feel the euphoria, the paranoia, going clubbing with Penelope for nights on end, then hating myself on the floor of my bathroom for a week.
In the H section, I found Dr. Elaine Horowitz, a psychiatrist at Mount Sinai, where Penelope’s dad is on the board.
I made an appointment at her office on a stretch of the Upper East Side with tulip beds and doormen in white gloves.
An amber glow. New York, just like I’d dreamed about it.
On the third floor, a secretary with a tight bun asked for my insurance card.
She xeroxed it and, as she handed it back, told me that the doctor didn’t accept my insurance.
I pleaded to have Dr. Horowitz see me anyway, dropping Penelope’s name.
Dr. Horowitz wore a taupe cashmere sweater set and small disapproving glasses and had what looked like a Renoir above a bookshelf.
I spent the first twenty minutes obsessing about whether or not it was real.
I decided it was and then recited my psychiatric history.
I was fifteen, ninth grade, when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
I wore a uniform and braids in my hair at the stuffy St. John’s School.
They called it manic depression then and said it was prompted by puberty.
The doctors weren’t sure exactly what to do with me, so they tried Klonopin and Seroquel and lithium.
I stopped taking this cocktail in college because it made me feel sluggish and dull.
It made me feel average, and I wanted to feel alive and free and anything but average.
I told Dr. Horowitz that for years I self-medicated, first with Adderall, which can increase the risk of severe symptoms (mania, hallucinations, delusions).
Then I moved on to weed and booze, then coke and heroin—and then anything, really.
But I was clean now—after a stint in a rehab in Laurel Canyon that my stepdad paid for—and I wanted the voices in my head to shut the fuck up.
She took out a prescription pad and said my previous doctors had failed me.
I was safe now. I was on the Upper East Side with Dr. Elaine Horowitz and a real Renoir.
She got me on a thorough new regimen of meds—a mix of mood stabilizers (valproic acid, carbamazepine), antipsychotics (risperidone, quetiapine), and benzos to help me sleep.
We had regular visits and calls until I started to feel normal.
Not just normal, but ready to be a productive member of society.
It was around that time that I met Roman and found myself so drawn to his normalcy.
He had a Roth IRA and called his mom every Sunday and sent flowers on his sisters’ birthdays.
But it wasn’t just the security of him. When we were together, I was happy.
From the very first night we spent together.
Chinatown. A band at Arlene’s Grocery. Kissing on the subway platform.
Laughing our way home past McSorley’s. One a.m. steak frites at Schiller’s.
Every day, pure and easy and light. It was like a spell had been cast. It altered my brain chemistry.
I stopped seeing Dr. Horowitz. I became me again.
I told Roman that I struggled with mental illness.
You can’t spend that many nights with someone and hide that many pills, that many moods.
I tucked any evidence of my old life in a storage bin that I kept under the bed.
I moved it all to the apartment in Stuy Town.
I didn’t look at any of it for years, not until I got pregnant and worried so much about my baby that I stopped taking my meds and then felt trapped at home with a newborn and simultaneously hurting and lonely and exhausted and bored.
Daisy took over my thoughts, a thing she did sometimes at particularly shaky times.
Like, when I was nine and my mom met a rancher and moved to Oklahoma.
And when I was thirteen and got three short-lived stepbrothers.
Then, in college, when I woke up on a dirty couch at the Alpha Sigma house, no recollection after someone had swiped me a plastic cup of punch out of an inflatable kiddie pool.
I was eighteen and could’ve died of claustrophobia.
Bullied and teased and wanting to be anywhere but alone in a two-hundred-square-foot dorm room near the vending machine.
I would’ve drowned myself in the shared shower had it not been for Daisy.
The only one in the world who could save me.
I should’ve slept when the baby slept. I should’ve been content in the playroom with Mr. Pete and the Juju Bean mom meetups, but instead I started to search, catalog every Daisy detail I could remember.
I didn’t see Daisy as an aberration but as a flesh-and-blood person.
The strawberry nipples. The dark curls. The exaggerated swell of cleavage.
Lube and lipstick on a nightstand. A mink coat on the floor.
The fleshy scar where she’d had her implants removed, wounds Roman had touched and kissed but loved me too much to ever ask about.
I posted a photo of myself in butterfly wings with a broken-heart emoji and asked if anyone had seen my soulmate, my sister. My Daisy. I started to pull the thread, and sometimes when you pull a thread, it can unravel the whole damn thing.