This is the third—or fourth?—door that has been slammed on us today. I’d gone through life feeling invisible and I regularly felt like an inconvenience. But I had never felt both things so intensely, and at the same time, like I did in New York with a newborn.
Penelope grabs Holden’s Yoyo and pushes him to take up half the aisle. “We can’t have him blocking the waitstaff…” the hostess says.
“He’s not blocking anyone. We’ll take a bottle of still.”
The hostess goes back to her stand.Bye, bitch.Penelope has more confidence than anyone I’ve ever met, not in a rude way, just in a way that quietly communicates that she could buy your restaurant with her debit card.
I dig into the chips and salsa, spilling some on my T-shirt.
“You seem really great,” Penelope says, regarding me glumly.
“I am. So great.”
“Did you call Enzo?” Enzo is Penelope’s physical therapist, the one who got her lower back working again after she had Tate. The one with the wide shoulders and the lumberjack beard, whose hands Penelope looks forward to weekly, especially since she doesn’t want her own husband to touch her. Sometimes I think Penelope keeps getting pregnant with Beau’s babies so that Enzo can keep touching her. But I know that’s not really it. Penelope keeps having babies so that someone keeps loving her unconditionally, until they reach puberty and have to go through her chief of staff.
I did call Enzo, but he does not accept my insurance. Enzo does not, in fact, accept any insurance. “Yeah, he was really cool, but—”
“I know. I know. He’s a pain with the whole no-insurance thing, but I am telling you, he is life-changing.”
I wouldn’t really call Enzo’s eight-hundred-dollar-an-hour rate an inconvenience, more like a bankruptcy filing, but I let it go. Daisy had been from a wealthy family, but it was different. That was Texas. Penelope existed in an entirely different stratosphere. Shinnecock Hills and the Maidstone meant nothing to me. Maybe that’s why we bonded. I was intrigued by the little things that came with generational wealth—Penelope’s ability to drop “oeuvre” into casual conversation, the way she ate her food without looking like she was murdering it. But the specifics went entirely over my head.
And, in those early years, Penelope for her part, found my relative poverty equally novel. If we were partying late downtown, she always wanted to come back to my old apartment. She’d choose greasy takeout from the Moonstruck Diner, eaten on the floor of the one-bedroom in the East Village that I shared with Tyrone and Paul and his collection of vintage Pez dispensers, over any multicourse tasting menu. We were both voyeurs in each other’s worlds.
Holden is awake again. He opens his big brown eyes, looks right at Penelope, and starts to wail. The passing hostess looks at us. I reach to give him a pacifier.
“Aw. Poor thing, he’s hungry,” Penelope says.
“I just fed him. He just gets scared sometimes when he wakes up and doesn’t know where he is.” Being a baby is a trip. You can go from sleeping deeply in your crib to waking up in the dining shed of an upscale Oaxacan restaurant thatNew Yorkmagazine says “epitomizes a new breed of multitasking all-day cafés.”
“Can we please get some guacamole?” Penelope says, flagging down a waitress.
A short waiter with enormous biceps comes by with a cart and various Oaxacan accoutrements and begins to grind avocados in a molcajete.
“Oh, no habanero. Make it mild?” Penelope says. The waiter nods.
A man wrapped in a soiled blanket, duct tape for shoes, pushes a Gristedes cart filled with rotting cardboard past the dining shed. He stops at our table, mumbling, with his hand out. Penelope thrusts her whole body toward the guacamole cart.
“Is the cilantro local?”
“We collaborate with a Zapotec collective to source all of our produce,” the waiter says, popping a bouquet of green on top and laying the heavy mortar bowl on the table.
I extend an untouched tortilla to the man. He waves me off and scoots his cart along. Penelope spoons some guacamole to give Holden. I try to stop her.
“Oh, we’re just easing into solids.”
“I have three children, remember?”
Penelope thinks that because she has three children and can eat elevated barbacoa tacos without the chipotle adobo spilling all over her Jil Sander, she can just pick up my baby and feed him avocado for the first time, and all I can do is stand by, ready to perform theHeimlich. Except I don’t know the Heimlich because I didn’t pay attention in the prenatal first-aid class.
Penelope takes Holden out of the Yoyo. He yells like the claws of death just grabbed him. He won’t go to anyone but me. I pretend that this is a problem that we are working on, but actually, I love it. I know, eventually, I will have to give him away to a nanny, to a day care, to a school, to a partner. I will spend the rest of my life trying to pretend that I am happy to give him away. But right now, he is mine.
I put Holden back in the Yoyo, give him a bottle, and cool him off with an ice cube against his cheeks. I swab sweat from my face, the napkin clumping on my forehead.
“What are you doing for childcare?” Penelope asks. “Did you talk to Alma? Because there’s this mom at Avenues whoaggressivelywants her.”
“I called her, but I don’t know…”
“You need to find someone. Don’t you have to go back to work soon?”
