“Oh? Let me know if you think Sloane would be into it?”
“I will. Have a great rest of your day.” Your husband has seen my nipples.
—
Holden and I decide to walk west, away from the moms who think we have museum class uptown. We walk across town and down Fifth Avenue, past doormen in white gloves and the NYU students drinking smoothies bought with their parents’ credit cards. We walk to Washington Square Park, under the arch, past tourists gathered around breakdancers and a gigantic boom box blaring Young MC. Past Hare Krishnas chanting in orange robes. Past men playing chess. We walk past the fountain to the southeast corner of the park. That’s where we find the jazz band on Wednesdays. They’re doing Coltrane today. The jazz is not something that anyone tells you about. I’ve never seen it advertised online or mentioned onJuju Bean. It is not sponsored by Spotify. It’s just some street musicians Holden and I found one afternoon when we had nowhere else to go. New York, that moody bitch. Every time she was mad cruel, when, say, I almost got mowed down by an e-bike. Or I had to carry a stroller down two flights of subway stairs only to hear that the F local train is now making express stops. Every time I was ready to pack up, dump that NogginStik in the community room, and move to Morristown, I’d bring my baby to listen to a concert-level tenor sax in Washington Square Park on a Wednesday afternoon, and I knew there was no way I could ever leave.
I lie down the Aden + Anais Essentials Muslin Baby Swaddle in the grass under a tree and away from the crowds. I put sleeping Holden next to me and close my eyes. My hand holds on to one of hismonstrously chubby thighs, Twinkies with feet and tiny toes attached.
I don’t know how long we’ve been asleep, but I know that when I wake up, “In a Sentimental Mood” fills the air. When the song ends, I hear a scattering of applause. When I open my eyes…
Daisy is sitting next to me.
PartTwo
• • • • •
Chapter Thirteen
• • • • •
You open your eyeson a Wednesday afternoon and the person you’ve been searching for is sitting next to you. She is not just sitting. She is sketching, with colored pencils on a Strathmore pad, the way starving artists draw caricatures of couples from Ohio, except hers is art. Cooper Union–scholarship art. She is sketching, wearing cat’s-eye sunglasses that look like either Chanel or Chinatown and a chiffon tank top with spaghetti straps, no bra. I can see the shape of her nipples, unapologetic and alive. Natural curls, frizzy, blanketing her back. You assume that you are dreaming except that you are wide-awake, and this woman is nothing like the woman you imagined. She does not look like Jacki, the unabashed porn star, or Daisy, the reluctant sex worker. She is not an addict who needs anyone’s sympathy. She is not Roxy Love, trying too hard onstage at the Lusty Lady sports bar. This is not a girl who needs saving. This is a beautiful bohemian with a palatable haggardness. This is the fairy nymph in Cot’s painting, with a Brazilian wax.
I am too stunned to process that Daisy is really sitting there. Too punched in the gut to realize that Holden has cracked his eyes. He isn’t crying as much as cooing.
“You need to give him the tit or something?” Daisy says, not looking away from the sketch pad. Those are the first words Daisy says to me since we last spoke, when we were both impossibly young and she begged for money to buy heroin. I dig around in the Skip Hop Grab & Go Essential Stroller Organizer.
“I have a bottle.” I rub my eyes, reorienting myself. “Daisy? What are you doing here?”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“What are any of us doing here?”
How did she find me?
“How didIfindyou? You’re the psycho stalker who’s been talking to every member of my kindergarten class,” she says. (Fair.)
“I tried calling. Your email bounced back. Anyway. Hi. Hello. Wow. You’re really here. I just…I missed you. Sorry.”
“I missed you, too, Em. Well…‘missed’ might be generous. I pretty much blocked out that entire part of my life. Don’t take it personally.” Daisy takes out a cigarette. Camel Lights. The same brand we used to smoke in our dorm room. Who still smokes in New York? I take it out of her mouth. What would Dr. Brooke say?
“You can’t smoke.”
“Why not?”
“Because, secondhand smoke? I have a baby…and it will kill you.”
She eyes Holden. “So will that.”
True. Holden had almost killed me, but it was different. I’d almost died creating life. I’d turned food (pretzel croissants, mostly) into a human being. I hadn’t risked my life for a puff of dopamine.
Daisy explains that no matter where she’d traveled—Berlin, Bangkok, Shanghai, Shenzhen—she always called Queenie on Sunday afternoons. Even when a client locked her in the hull of his yacht offthe coast of Montenegro (at least, she thought they were in Montenegro). She convinced a cater waiter to loan her his cell phone so she could call her grandma. So, this past Sunday, she called and Queenie told her that Emily visited. Daisy assumed Queenie was talking nonsense. But beneath the dementia, Queenie was trying to tell Daisy that her college roommate had visited, that I’d been concerned, hoping to reconnect. But all she said, over and over, was “I saw Emily.”
Daisy assumed it was just Queenie’s wishful thinking that we’d be friends again. “She always thought you were a good influence,” she says. But then Daisy asked Queenie’s health aide, and the aide confirmed Queenie had a visitor about Daisy’s age. Then she found the note I’d left on Queenie’s bedside table, with my contact information, and gave it to Daisy. “You actually went to Katy? Crazy bitch,” she says. It’s a miracle. I am not being praised for being a good mother or for losing weight or for always having a stash of Honest biodegradable baby wipes on me.
Daisy explains that she left her life in Texas behind her. “It wasn’t a good time for me, Em.” I don’t push. I don’t ask about her work. I see in her eyes, her giant brown, sad, alluring, sexy eyes, that she does not want to talk about it now. She might not want to talk about it ever…and that’s okay. Just as I had associated Daisy with my awkward years in a place that I didn’t belong, and found her to be an inspiration to get out, she had associated me with a time when her life went wildly off the rails.
