Did money mean a lot to me? I’d never thought of myself as someone who cared much about money. You don’t move to New York to be a poet if money is your thing. But hearing Daisy say it aloud makes me realize that I do care. Money would mean that I could spend time with Holden. Money would mean Roman wouldn’t have to worry about getting laid off. We wouldn’t have to worry about filing for bankruptcy if we lost our health insurance. I wouldn’t have to stress about paying my co-pay next week at physical therapy. We wouldn’t have to bust our asses to afford a nine-hundred-square-foot apartment with a scaffolding exoskeleton. I have a baby, and money means a lot to me.
I still don’t really get why Daisy wants to invite theJuju Beanmoms. I mean, most of them are pretty irritating. “It’s so perfect here. Just us. Quiet. Alone.”
“Em, this idea that you have to be broke and miserable and lonely to be a good mom? It’s kinda fucked-up.”
“I never said that.”
This is when Daisy gives me her sales pitch—the excuse that we’ll use to try to rationalize what went down in 527 Park. The excuse thatI will try to recite verbatim to Roman, and the lawyers and the press and the cops, when people start asking questions. Daisy explains that even though her work involves men, she’s been around every kind of woman, every kind of mother. Every mother she’s ever known, my mother, her mother, felt like they were failing a thousand different ways. “But what if it wasn’t their fault?”
“Oh, it was definitely my mom’s fault.”
“What if it was, like, society?” Daisy defends her thesis with such eloquence that I begin to believe that this is why we reunited. This is why she found me on a Wednesday afternoon. This is why she reappeared now, right after I had a baby. We have a purpose. I listen to her talk and begin to ask myself so many questions: What if our moms had been overwhelmed? Bored? Put down? What if they’d been in pain? What if they couldn’t even walk ten feet to the bed? What if they didn’t want to leave their babies to go back to dead-end office jobs but couldn’t afford to stay home? What if they’d been shamed for buying a highly rated battery-operated STEM toy when all they wanted to do was bolster their baby’s early brain activity? What if they had nowhere to go on weekdays, which lasted approximately seven thousand hours?
“Look, those moms you hate? Exhausted. Crying in the laundry room. Up to their tits in debt.” She flags down a passing concierge—“Can we please get a gluten-free bread basket out here? Put it on eight-seven-eight-nine?” She turns back to me. “Let them come here. Let them breathe. Feel human. You don’t have to lead them. Just…open the door.”
I sip my matcha latte, teasing—“Ohh, what happens when the door swings open? Matching sashes? ESP?” Daisy doesn’t laugh, but she doesn’t deny it.
“You’ll feel less alone. And maybe I won’t feel like a ghost in this obscene glass box.” She looks over at me, the same look she gave mebefore we cut class, ignored the power plant’s no-trespassing sign, hoisted each other over a chain-link fence, and dove into the reservoir. “I’ve thought about this ever since I made you read Atwood in college. I’ve thought about my mom, the moms I met at clubs, at jobs. I’ve thought about you, Em, and I just wonder, what if things could be different? What ifwecould make things different? Stir shit up? Spread the wealth? Otherwise, what’s the fucking point?”
I stare at Daisy when she says this part, and I know that she means it. This isn’t some manic episode. This is her brilliance. I’ve just forgotten what it feels like to witness it. I do not ask about all the pain and disappointment and darkness that Daisy has been through, but she tells me that maybe it was all leading her here? To me. To Holden. To a luxury apartment tower and a Black AmEx with no limit.
To home.
For the first time since I became a mother, I am not checking the time. Not counting down until Roman gets off work. Until I can tell somebody who is not a nursery appliance or an anonymous handle onJuju Beanabout my day. I am content. For now.
Chapter Eighteen
• • • • •
The STAR Physical Therapyand Rehabilitation Center had several locations in the city, but they only did pelvic-floor therapy on the third floor of a 1970s-era office building in the Financial District, with a stack of trash outside and a security guard who was always eating hot chicken and who never checked my ID. The creaky elevator opened directly into an office that had low ceilings and flickering fluorescent lighting and gym equipment and massage tables and stacks of rubber exercise bands and spiky massage balls. The only sign, besides the reminder to clean the equipment with sanitary wipes after use, featured a photo of Mount Everest with the quote, “I didn’t come this far to only come this far.” There was a cheap Chinese takeout place downstairs and the whole gym had an eau de egg roll.
Daisy agreed to watch Holden, a life-changing development. Because if there is one thing worse than a finger-fucking session with Carleigh, it is having to pay for childcare during a finger-fucking session with Carleigh. If I am going to be away from my baby for a full sixty minutes, why can’t it be for a facial?
I walk past the other patients, past the torn meniscus and the sciaticas and the hip replacements, to a back room. The Red Room. I take off my clothes from the waist down and put on a medical gown. Iclimb on the exam table and I wait. If I use these few minutes correctly, if I stare at the popcorn ceiling, fixate on the outline of brown around an air vent that looks like a brontosaurus that I want to show to Holden, in just the right way, then I can go to another place, another planet. If I do it just right, I do not even notice when Carleigh comes in. (“Hiiiii. How’s the baby?!”) I do not notice that she has put on rubber gloves. (“Sleeping any better??”) Or that she is dipping them into an industrial-size tub of K-Y Jelly. (“Let’s see what’s going on in there!”)
The hurt cuts through me like gardening shears. I grip the side of the table.
Carleigh asks me each week how many times I urinate at night. Five. It is always at least five, in addition to two or three night feedings. If I am lucky, the pees coincide with the feedings, but they usually don’t. Roman tells me not to drink before bed, as if I am downing a sweet tea at nine p.m. Yes, beverages, that’s my problem, not postpartum urinary incontinence. I am supposed to keep a diary of piss, but I don’t.
I feel like a fish being filleted on a slab, but still I find a way to ask Carleigh the same question I always ask, my voice small and throaty. “How’s the wedding planning?” From there, I am being operated by some kind of vagina ventriloquist. The question will kick off thirty minutes of small talk about flower arrangements (“Baby’s breath looks so cheap…”) and band versus deejay (“Both, obviously”). And “I told Troy, if there’s no seafood tower, what’s the point of even getting married?” My mouth pulled open; words somehow come out. “I couldn’t agree more.” And “That’s what event planners are for.”
If we are talking about venues and vows and food trucks, then we don’t have to talk about how I’ve failed,again. Truth is, as sweet and good-intentioned as she is, Carleigh is constantly disappointed in me. She tries to couch her irritation in an anecdote about trying on dresses at Mark Ingram, but I know what she’s thinking. “Hmm. It’snot feeling any tighter,” Carleigh says, really in there now. My insides are a messy bin of Magna-Tiles that Carleigh is trying to clean up. “Squeeze?”
“I am squeezing.” That’s not the ventriloquist. That is me, about to cry because I am fucking squeezing. At least, I think I am squeezing? She takes her fingers out. I am no longer hiding in the ceiling. I am there on the table, in real time.
“Are you doing your Kegels?” Carleigh asks.
“Every night,” I say. What is a Kegel? I am afraid to admit to Carleigh that, after weeks of physical therapy, I still don’t really know.
“Remember, you pretend you’re holding a blueberry in there and then breathe out…and…let it go,” Carleigh says. Every week she gives me the blueberry analogy. She’s given me the blueberry analogy so many times that I am tempted to put a blueberry up there just to see what she is talking about.
She massages my pelvis and then moves to an electric wand. I try to go back to my safe space in the popcorn ceiling. The ceiling could be the white sands at Waikiki Beach. The ceiling could be that endless salt lake in Bolivia that I saw inNational Geographic. The ceiling could be the first page of my poetry book. I am floating outside of myself. I am lifted off the exam table and the crumply white paper roll. I am lifted out of New York. Out of womanhood. I don’t even remember jumping off the table, wiping between my legs, putting my clothes back on. I just appear in a flash, like some quantum space-time continuum, at the front desk, where Diane asks how everything was today.
“Fantastic,” I say.
Diane asks me for my insurance card. I give it to her, accidentally knocking over a stack of pamphlets titled “Happy Mom, Thriving Kid!” I kneel down to pick them up. Diane xeroxes the card and as she hands it back to me, she says, “We no longer accept your insurance.”
“What?”
