Daisy smirks. She gives me a light kiss on each cheek and leads us toward the side of the massive building. I feel the cool breeze of the AC. My pits drying in the breeze. Holden’s cheeks losing their bright, frenzied color.
“So, check this out,” she says. “The city and developer are now suing each other over the subsidized housing units, which means everyone can come and go as they please through ‘poor doors’ and no one will notice.”
She plugs in a code and holds the heavy back door open. I push the Yoyo inside. From there, Daisy leads us into the belly of this beanpole for the superrich. It’s as if we’ve entered a surreal shaft to another universe. What is this place?
Daisy flips to sales mode and escorts us through the 180-unit building and all it has to offer. I follow, feeling the glass eye of security cameras watching us.
“For the bargain price of thirty thousand dollars in monthly maintenance fees, residents—and their guests—can partake in all of the amenities,” Daisy explains. The offerings include a movie theater, a bowling alley, indoor and outdoor pools, a gym (obviously), a golf simulator, a podcasting studio, a meditation room, and—importantly, for our purposes—a children’s playroom designed by Antonino D’Nario. D’Nario, according to a profile inNew Yorkmagazine, “has come to define the essence of contemporary luxurious interiors.” Holden’s eyes practically bulge out of his baby face when we enter. It is the classiest fucking Gymboree you’ve ever seen.
The playroom is equipped with pastel cushions, fluffy clouds on the ceiling, a climbing wall, a clay studio, a shrunken Ina Garten–style kitchen, a stocked Smeg fridge. Oat, soy, almond, goat. They have all the milks. There is a play lemonade stand. “Look,” Daisy says. “It’s just like the one I had growing up in River Oaks.” And a theater set after Julie Taymor’s heart. “Maybe we could also get one of those unicorn bounce houses? And fill one of the Jacuzzis with bouncy balls?” she proposes.
“Who doesn’t love unicorns?”
We walk into an adjacent children’s reading room. The city’spreeminent “bookshelf curator” had organized color-coordinated first-edition children’s books:Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz, Charlotte’s Web, et cetera. A quote fromThe Little Princeon the wall: “All grown-ups were once children, but only a few of them remember it…”
Daisy explained that the management company tried for years to get residents to use the facilities, offering a range of incentives, including complimentary golf lessons in the simulator and free babysitting. Every once in a while, when real estate agents would take actual potential buyers to an open house, the building needed to look like Xanadu for Manhattan families—not a tax haven for foreign money. So the office happily provided a polyglot of on-call childcare professionals, offering the building’s youngest residents a full menu of “enrichment” classes—Spanish, cooking, chess, digital photography, portraiture, et cetera. Daisy explained that in addition to the thirty thousand dollars in monthly maintenance fees, each condo unit had a minimum of twenty thousand dollars annually to spend on amenities: massages; meals in the Michelin-starred French restaurant; Pilates. “Use it or lose it,” Daisy said. Management didn’t care if residents or their guests partook in these offerings.
I admittedly have a hard time processing the playroom. The golf simulator is one thing, but this? “Wait. So, anyone can just drop their baby off when they need a break?”
Daisy nods. “As long as they live here or are visiting a resident, but the ‘residents’ all live in Qatar and Moscow and London, so yeah, they’re pretty chill about it.”
We put Holden on a blanket and shower him in teething balls. Daisy waves a brand-new squeaky French giraffe rattle named Sophie in his face. He immediately puts it in his mouth. She starts to play peekaboo and he is laughing with every limb. Big peekaboo phase, this age. I look at Daisy and Holden. I look at the playroom’s fluffy clouds and pastel cushions—a Malibu sunset in real estate form.
Why did we need to tell anyone else about this place? “It’s nice, just us here.”
“Don’t be silly. You need friends.”
“I have friends,” I say. A slight pause. “I have you.”
“Holden needs friends,” Daisy says, tickling his side. Dr. Brooke did say that at six months, babies should play together to develop nonverbal communication skills and improve social and emotional intelligence. Don’t I want Holden to be comfortable seated next to strangers at dinner parties one day? “We won’t invite any assholes, I swear.”
I turn to look out the widows. Daisy can see that I’m resistant. Finding Daisy, I thought it meant that I wouldn’t need anyone else. I wouldn’t need theJuju Beanmoms.
“Look,” Daisy says, growing more animated. “I don’t give two shits how luxe it is in here—youneed a village. Holden needs a village. There’s a reason moms have left their babies off in baskets in forests since the dawn of, like, moms and forests. It’s just that now the forest is Central Park and the village is theJuju Beanmoms—and I know a lot of them suck, but you’re stuck with them and they’re stuck with you and there’s beauty in that. There’s beauty in, like, millions of years of human evolution, of needing each other to do this child-rearing thing. Why fight that? Let me do this for you.”
Good night, good night, public bathrooms. Good night, Good night, dirty looks at coffee shops.
Chapter Seventeen
• • • • •
We spent the restof the day in the playroom. We didn’t see a single other baby or parent or nanny or human, other than Bianca, the head of the condo’s staff.
We started to kick around ideas for how to recruit theJuju Beanmoms. No idea was too ridiculous. “Art history classes? Sculpture?” Daisy says.
“Mommy & Me-chelangelo?”
“Write that one down!”
Daisy programmed Willie Nelson into the speakers and was trying to get Holden to clap, which doesn’t typically happen until nine months, per Dr. Brooke, but my gifted almost-five-month-old was down for the challenge. We’d revolted against most country music in Texas. But Willie was different. Willie reminded me of Daisy because no one else understood how you could live in New York and be hanging in a legitimate Tony D’Nario indoor/outdoor playground and still know every word to “Highwayman.”
“He’s doing it, Em!” I race back from organizing the Jane Austen board books. Holden is doing something resembling tapping his palms on the mat. He doesn’t exactly have rhythm, but then again, neither does his father. I take my phone out.
“Yesss. Yesss, my sweet koala. That’s Willie.”
We both collapse on the blush-colored carpet. Daisy and I look at each other. She sees my smile fade, my nerves kicking in. “Em. You gotta stop worrying,” she says, taking my hand. “Can I be blunt?”
“Um. Yeah. I just need to give the girls a break,” I say, popping my sore boobs out of the nursing bra.
