Chapter Forty-Four
· · · · ·
Grandma Sue flies back to Melbourne in the morning after a monthlong visit.
She and Holden had an instant, visceral connection, as if they lived in the same Australian lullaby.
He loves her woodsy scent, the way her entire body shakes when she laughs, his eyes lighting up at every bedtime story about wombats.
I look at them together and realize that she gives him something that I cannot, and I am not jealous.
I am happy because he needed what Sue gives him.
We all did. My mom is even visiting for the big birthday.
She is staying at the Pierre with a cosmetic dentist named Lloyd who drives a Porsche and has hair plugs and treats her like a queen.
We sold the diamond ring, paid down some of our medical debts, and used the rest for my mom’s mortgage.
She downsized to a condo. (You’re welcome.)
We invited Molly over and all feigned cooperation, showering her in attention and as much free swag as the Times’ ethics rules allowed.
We didn’t get into the drugs or the sex toys or the suicide attempt or the unauthorized injectables.
I’d tightened up the NDAs. Nobody wanted to get banned.
What if they had another baby? Try cleaning two butts in a Starbucks bathroom.
In the end, it was Brit who talked. She told Molly that Daisy had indoctrinated all of us.
She even agreed to sneak in a recording device, leaking audio of Daisy’s morning affirmations, which, thanks to Courtney Love, sounded nothing like me.
Brit told Molly that Daisy had threatened her, gone scorched-earth when she started asking questions about who owned the condo, who bought the art, who employed the full suite of childcare professionals.
Last I heard, Brit moved to Hoboken and is expecting. It’s a boy.
Molly’s article, titled “The Privileged Squatters of Park Avenue,” was the type of throwback Times Style section cover that everyone talks about over brunch.
Molly took a snarky tone—who could blame her?
—calling out our hedonism. Not buying that the condo was actually a “portal” to a more equitable era of motherhood, Molly poked fun at us for sprinkling non-FDA-approved “Brain Dust” in our matchas and for throwing our pain in the fire in the cathartic mind-body workouts.
(In retrospect, this did have a faint Rajneeshee flavor, like something out of an Oregon ranch before the feds raided it.)
“Here they were in Vuori bodysuits doing glorified Jazzercise in a thirty-seven-million-dollar apartment on a Tuesday afternoon. How bad could it be?” Point taken.
I emphasized the social-emotional component.
“You know how for men, the revolutionary act is beating each other up?” I told Molly, my words tramping all over Daisy’s catchphrase.
“Well, for women, it’s just, you know, taking care of ourselves.
” I said we were creating a throwback communal space where a village of women could take care of our babies and one another, the way it used to be, only with heated floors and a screening room.
But Molly only quoted me talking about “the self-directed play inspired by Scandinavian pedagogy,” pointing out that I am a grant “processor” (she didn’t even use the word “writer”) and not an early childhood development expert. (Thanks for that, Molly.)
We must have looked ridiculous to a twenty-seven-year-old Yale grad on the Style desk who’d never experienced a torn perineum with a side of hemorrhoids.
Molly had asked everyone to put her in touch with Daisy for an interview.
We all stayed on message, politely declining.
Daisy was, unfortunately, not available.
Nobody ratted me out or told her about the whole “two women in one body” thing.
Maybe they were afraid I’d enforce the NDA.
Or maybe—and I kept this ugly thought quiet—they were afraid of me.
Or maybe they just thought it would make them sound even more brainwashed.
Whatever the reason, nobody said a word.
Molly wrote only of “the enigmatic leader of the quasi cult that has sprung up inside 527 Park. The women all refer to her as ‘Daisy’ and speak of her with utmost reverence and intimidation. Multiple women said Daisy allegedly organized the entire operation, first inviting women to the condo in a post on Juju Bean, an app designed for like-minded mothers to connect. The post has since been deleted. Daisy was not in the apartment the day the Times visited. She could not be reached for comment.”
For a while, we were famous. The New York Post couldn’t get enough, saying the billionaire developer behind 527 Park and a bunch of other big buildings had “Serious Mommy Issues.” New York put the “Stylish Squatters of Park Ave.” squarely in the “Lowbrow Brilliant” category of its Approval Matrix.
The Today Show did a segment on how you could re-create the 527 Park experience in your own suburban home, calling it a “Rich Mom Squatter Kit.” Call Her Daddy and Vogue both reached out, hoping to get an exclusive with Daisy.
A think piece in The Atlantic called 527 Park “socialism with skincare” and posited whether our “glossy rebellion” could “lead to an actual rewriting of the rules.” On TikTok, a short-lived #DraftDaisy campaign tried to recruit her to run for mayor.
I tried to step up, keep the group going, to balance, as she had, that knife-edge between privilege and protest. But without Daisy, the thrill was gone.
I guess a lot of the moms didn’t realize that the condo didn’t belong to Daisy, and they didn’t want to be associated with illegally occupying an apartment—lest squatters get the bright idea to turn up at their brownstones or pitch a tent in the vestibule of their co-op apartments.
Juju Bean started to advertise knockoff women’s clubs, charging a nominal fee or paid for entirely by sponsored content.
Turns out, I didn’t need to steal a Black AmEx.
I could’ve gotten BuyBuy Baby and Graco and Carter’s to pick up the tab.
Sometimes I feel bad about what I did to Penelope.
I never told Beau about her affair, and honestly, I hope August makes her happy.
But then I remind myself that it wasn’t really my fault.
I don’t blame Penelope either. I blame the way things are.
What kind of city has homeless shelters that are full and luxury apartment buildings that are empty?
What kind of society lets the world drop doors on new mothers?
Roman finally stopped keeping his head down at work.
We spent weeks rehearsing exactly what he would say.
He waited until the height of tax season to march into his manager’s office and threaten to quit unless he got a raise and the company’s standard three weeks of family leave.
The team was so understaffed by then, with all the layoffs, and the workload so heavy, that his manager had no choice but to agree.
I’m grateful his gambit worked, because shortly after the Times story ran, Phil fired me. He got Veronica to tell me. I think she enjoyed it, ending the call with a “You take care now, mkay?” that sounded exactly like “Fuck off forever now, mkay?”
Getting fired was, as I’d expected, the kick in the ass I needed, because I am now working on a book.
It started as a poetry collection, but when Leo showed my poems to a literary agent, he said they were “puerile.” He said he read about me in the Times and wondered if I wanted to write a book, a sort of roman à clef about the elusive cult leader of 527 Park… Daisy.
We sing “Happy Birthday.” (“Bye-bye, baby! Hello, toddler! Your little one is turning one! Where did the time go, you ask? Join the club of moms everywhere who feel the same way.”) Roman and I stand behind Holden, who is shoveling cake into his mouth and chortling so hard I worry he will choke.
His joy fills the space and makes everyone else joyful.
Even Bianca, who has warmed to me and offered to help with the party, and June, who thankfully no longer has thoughts of self-harm, are all smiles.
I look around at all these faces. The wellness war room is gone, but here they are.
My people. The kind of community I never had before, never imagined someone like me could have.
Women I now adore and whom I never would’ve been friends with before I had a baby. I could almost burst into tears.
I no longer hurt. I still see Carleigh and Dr. Horowitz regularly. I sleep in bed with Roman. We don’t have to pretend I am somebody else anymore.
When we are finished singing, Marcela comes to clean the cake off Holden’s face with baby wipes that no longer remind me of the stench of the Landing Strip.
The balloon twister makes a turtle hat and puts it on Sloane’s head.
Holden crawls over to bang on a wooden toddler piano with all its keys.
(“Let your one-year-old stop and touch a leaf on a bush, peek behind a mailbox, check out what the dog is sniffing, or see where a path leads.”) My mother (aka “Glammy”) sinks into a beanbag chair, eating cake.
Roman leans down and sniffs Holden’s baby jeans.
He walks to get a clean diaper out of his own backpack.
Good night, good night, Itzy Ritzy Boss Backpack.
The party is winding down. I sneak out. I walk to the elevator and plug floor 87 into the keypad. I feel my ears pop and my stomach sink.
I walk into the condo where it all started.
The condo where Penelope almost suffocated the life out of me.
The condo where I came back to life. It’s empty.
I walk out onto the expansive balcony, and I can almost smell her scent, tuberose and jasmine with a floral undertone.
I can almost hear Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” playing, just like the first time Daisy and I stood on the balcony together.
When she told me to invite all my friends over, told me she needed something to pour herself into.
I find a battered pack of Camel Lights in my coat pocket.
One lucky cigarette left. I light it. Daisy appears beside me, taking the cigarette.
I take in her profile, the delicate outline of her nose. “Why did you leave?”
“Who said I left?” She exhales a plume into the sherbet-colored sky.
“I haven’t seen you in weeks.”
“You haven’t needed me.” She hands the cigarette back to me.
I inhale. I know that Daisy is toxic, the worst part of my past, and yet I can’t imagine life entirely without her.
She’d taught me how to be a mother. How to bathe my slippery baby.
How to swaddle and toss him without worrying about a neck injury.
She’d brought me back to Roman. Led me to a village.
Who would I be if Daisy just didn’t exist?
Why couldn’t I tuck her in my coat pocket?
The lucky cigarette in the forgotten pack?
Hide her in a storage bin under my bed? Pull her out whenever I needed her?
“I think I miss you.”
“You don’t miss me.” There is a coldness to her delivery that I didn’t expect.
“I think about you all the time. Every time I close my eyes. I’m worried that without you, I’m just a nice girl with a nice husband and a nice boring life.” I can never say this next part aloud to anyone else. “With you, I’m somebody, and without you…I’m just…I’m just somebody’s mom.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“What?” She finishes the cigarette and tosses it over the balcony.
I’d messed up. I’d said something that pushed her even further away.
But I couldn’t help it. I felt a desperate need to plead with her to stay.
“You said it yourself, you saved me. Before you, I was pathetic. Broken. I was drowning and you dove in and saved me. You solved every problem in my life—you. And now you’re just going to leave me here? ”
Daisy walks over to the patio furniture. She drags a galvanized steel end table to the balcony with superhuman strength and then stands on it, her body cresting over the edge like a mermaid on the bow of a ship.
I grab the side of her caftan. “Get down. What are you doing?”
“I didn’t save you, Em. Don’t you get it?
I’m a liar. I was pretending. We all have to pretend sometimes.
To survive. I was desperate, but you’re not.
” She says this part so quietly, a tiny diminutive voice: “You’re loved.
” I look up at her. She is so ashen, so damaged. She leans farther over the balcony.
“Please. Just leave me something. Anything. Some part of you.”
So much had happened to me since I left sex work behind—a husband, a baby, an apartment, an office job—it was clear to me now that none of that had happened to Daisy.
I hadn’t become a puddle for people to step on.
I’d morphed into one of life’s most alive things.
Daisy had sown that somewhere in my youth, in a lap dance, in a porn video, a secret side that would always steady me.
Oxygen rushed through my body. I felt purpose fill up every pore.
And in that second, I realized that she had been right when she quoted Marguerite Duras’s The Lover.
Very early in life, it was too late for her.
But it isn’t too late for me.
Daisy turns to study my face, really study it, maybe for the first time. We study each other. Two sides of the same woman.
She is reading my mind. She quotes the Duras novel, a muse when we first met—or rather when I’d first conjured her—and we stayed up all night talking books and art and dreams of moving to New York and hosting dinner parties and being artists.
“Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young,” Daisy says, looking back at me, my eyes wet, my head shaking no. No. Don’t do it. Don’t you dare leave me. “But I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.”
And then she jumps.