I walk through therevolving doors, waving to the doormen and security guards, who all know me by name. No poor doors for me. But when I get to the apartment, no one has seen Daisy. Lately, whenever I am there, Daisy is somewhere else, doing something else. Maya says she hasn’t seen Daisy since the morning affirmations. She thinks she had an errand to run at Alexander Wang? Or maybe ABC Carpet? But when I find Viktor, he says he hasn’t driven Daisy anywhere today. Through a cracked bathroom door, I hear snippets of a hushed fight between Audrey and Brit. (“What the shit, Brit? You better not ruin it for the rest of us.”) Bianca, with the eyebrow, interrupts. She heard I was looking for Daisy? She went upstairs hours ago, Bianca says. To the penthouse.
I don’t take the elevator upstairs, mostly because I have developed a feeling in my gut that I’ve never felt before. I need to see Holden. It’s a heart attack building inside me that can only be stopped when I hold him. I’ve had anxiety. I’ve loved. I’ve missed Roman. But I’ve never had all the feelings all at once like I do now. The walls of the condo are closing in, the peacock feathers mocking me. This feeling, it could make me destroy entire villages, self-immolate, burning inprotest like a Buddhist monk, become a subway pusher to catch the F train home. I can’t explain it exactly, but that’s how it feels in that moment when I need to see him.
The elevator stops on twelve. It’s taking forever, so I get off and race down the stairs. I am sweating and frantic when I tell Miss Iowa that I need to get Holden. She tells me he had a “marvelous” day. This makes me feel better about sitting in a cubicle all day and eating a nineteen-dollar pureed salad. It makes me feel better about peeing when I laugh. But also, can she speed up the checkout process because did I mention that I will commit actual homicide to see my child?
Miss Iowa hands me a folder with a hedgehog on it, filled with Holden’s art, ink-stained footprints, a log of everything he ate, photos of highlights throughout the day. She tells me he is excelling at Spanish. How does she know that?
“We just know,” Miss Iowa says, displaying her Invisalign smile.
One of the caregivers brings Holden out. He’s dressed in a white onesie with red crabs on it and sucking on a matching crab-themed teething ring. They tell me to always call it achupete,so that he keeps up his Spanish at home. “It is part of the pedagogy,” Miss Iowa says. Does she even realize that Daisy and I pulled that word out of our asses? But I just smile and nod and put my nose against Holden’s, wet and cold. My koala.
On my way out, I ask, “Oh, have you seen Daisy?” Miss Iowa just smiles.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
• • • • •
To celebrate my firstweek back at the office, we did something we never did. We ate out. I met Roman at Tequila Mockingbird in the East Village, right by Tompkins Square Park. This used to be my spot. Molten cheese, a bad book pun. Before we started dating, Roman had never spent much time in the East Village or discovered the wonders of Tex-Mex. He lived in Murray Hill, and I still fell in love with him.
In the same way that I brought Roman into my world, and his world got bigger, Holden had expanded my world. For years, I’d walked through Tompkins Square Park almost every day. As rancid as it sounds, I’d sit on a bench and read. I’d stumble drunk past the mural of Joe Strummer. Penelope and I once wore pink wigs and walked barefoot through the park and ate French fries off a stranger’s plate at the Odessa Diner. If there was anywhere in New York that felt like my own backyard, it was this half-assed urban excuse for a green space. But in all of my years coming here, it wasn’t until Holden, until Daisy, that I learned there is a little postage stamp of a swimming pool in the northeast corner. Daisy and I had been walking through the park one afternoon, heading back to my apartment after a day of exploring.
“Look!” she said, pointing to a lifeguard stand and kids in bathing suits.
I’d brought a Dr. Brown’s baby ice pack to put on Holden’s cheeks because he got so flushed in the humidity. My thighs chafed, but the conversation—a heated debate about Tarantino and whether every movie needed to pass the Bechdel test—kept me going. Then, all of a sudden, we saw this mirage in Alphabet City. An actual pool. Daisy walked up to the lifeguard, who couldn’t have been more than sixteen, with tricycle-red shorts that looked glued to his deep tan. “Excuse me, but can anyone use this pool?”
“As long as you don’t take a shit or fuck in it,” he said, twirling his whistle.
She looked back at me, that glowing smile of hers. We could do that. We double-diapered Holden. Daisy lifted off her sundress. No chafing on her thighs. She had a conservative cotton bra and panties on. I’d typically feel insecure taking my clothes off, but she was so happy, so carefree, and this would be Holden’s first time in a swimming pool. I had to get in. I left my tank top on and slowly got in. We’d hit every splash pad in the city, but nothing cooled us off like that first dip in the pool. Daisy did a cannonball. I cradled Holden in my arms. He was elated. Chlorine, a revelation. It was a weekday afternoon, and it was just a few kids from the nearby housing projects and us. Daisy dove down and did a flutter kick. When she came up, she’d found a gold tooth. She turned it in to the lost and found.
We didn’t have towels but we dried off fast, walking home. My hair, thick with a New York City public pool layer, felt as fresh as if I’d just climbed out of the Aegean. Holden snored lightly in his stroller. We got Italian ices that turned our lips tangerine.
“I used to swim in the ocean every day,” Daisy said.
“Where?”
“Everywhere.”
I wanted to swim in the ocean every day. I wanted to be everywhere. And that afternoon in Tompkins Square Park with Daisy, I was.
Because we have separate, minuscule closets, Roman hadn’t noticed that I’d basically burned all of my old clothes and started to exclusively wear his. A couple of days ago, he did a double take on his way out the door. “What’ve you got today?” MeaningWhere do you think you’re wearing that?We hardly ever saw each other during the day and hadn’t had the time, the bandwidth, to talk about it more than that. He was never the type of guy who cared what I was wearing and hadn’t registered my new look at all until I strolled up with the Yoyo that evening, coming straight from Daisy’s. I looked like I got dressed at a Goodwill in the dark, lugging the Yoyo into our old Friday-night spot, and he looked at me like he didn’t recognize me. He looked at me like I was some other girl entirely. “Are those my track pants?” he asked. Yes, yes, they are.
I order my usual quesadilla deluxe. He gets his chicken burrito, no sour cream. We both get margaritas, syrupy and salty with only a vague hint of tequila. A busboy brings a couple of tortillas, still puffed up like clouds. Roman rolls up a doughy crumb of tortilla to give to Holden. He gnaws on it, crossing his eyes slightly—a look that only I know means that he wants more. We are having a family Tex-Mex dinner, and it is nice. It feels like we’re on a date, but better because Holden is there, tortilla in hand.
On Sunday, Holden fell asleep early after we drove two hours in traffic to pose for the requisite fall photos at Harry’s Pumpkin Patch on the North Fork of Long Island. For twelve dollars, you got a wristband and access to a corn maze, a haunted hayride, and apple picking. The Ferris wheel and gold mining were extra. If you wanted to keep the apples, they cost fifteen dollars per pound. We put Holden in a red wagon and dragged him around the pumpkin patch. The ground was littered with trash from the cotton candy and fresh corn concessionstands. The innards of pumpkins people had stomped on squished under my feet. Hardly any of the pumpkins were presentable on both sides, either covered in warts or kicked in. Determined to get one photo, we leaned Holden against a pumpkin, turned deformed gourds around trying to find a good side. We cropped out the porta potty and the generator of a nearby cider doughnut truck and got Holden, sweating in a navy cardigan, to briefly look at the camera before he fell in the dirt and started sobbing.
That night, we ordered Lombardi’s pizza. Finished off a large pie. Roman started to kiss my neck, tried to lure me to bed. I reflexively cringed, maybe too obviously.
It always turned into a fight. His feelings hurt, my feelings ignored. I didn’t want to flinch at his touch. Sure, I’d had a series of wet dreams in which the bartender at the Peppermint Elephant banged me several different ways in the parking lot—and one in which we (inexplicably) did it hourly to entertain tourists at Graceland—but I’d have chosen Roman every day. Except that everything about sex with himstillreminded me of the pain. And now there was this new pain of not understanding why I felt revolted at the idea of even being close to him. “Touch aversion,” Carleigh calls it.
“What’d Daisy say?” Roman asks, taking a sip of his margarita.
Holden whimpers, one eye fixed on the tortillas. I break off a couple of bite-size pieces. I get why Roman is impatient to meet Holden’s caregiver, but it still rubs me the wrong way that he switched so quickly from checking me out to asking about my professionally sexy best friend. He thought maybe I’d invite her to join us, but I’d told him amilliontimes, she can’t do nights: 527 Park closed up at eight so that Daisy could do her actual work. Did this mean hosting rich men? Getting her vagina steamed? Paying the maintenance and electric bills? I honestly didn’t know and I didn’t care. As long as I didn’t see any of it during business hours. All I know is that whether you were aworking parent or a stay-at-home parent, at sundown, we all picked up our babies and turned into wart-covered pumpkins.
“I told you, she has work and stuff at night. You know, kind of like you always have work.” Roman eats a chip, ignoring my dig. “But we’ll figure something out soon, I promise. She feels like she knows you.” I dig into the queso, putting some on the top of my finger for Holden, but when I reach to give it to him, he is fast asleep, still clutching what’s left of an emotional-support tortilla.
“You’ve got your hands full. I’ll coordinate with Daisy and figure something out. Don’t worry about it,” he says.
I almost spit out my margarita. Excuse me?! How exactly will Roman “coordinate” with Daisy? I try to hide my horror. “Yeah, sure. That works. I’ll give you her cell.”
