Do you know howPenelope found out? She caught them. That’s how stupid Emily is. She went right back to 527 Park the next day. She even brought the baby. What kind of mother does that? Emily would tell you that she rushed straight uptown to try to shut it all down, to undo the damage I’d done. But by the time she got there, dropped the kid off, and got upstairs, it was too late. She couldn’t shut something down that was bigger than her, bigger than all of us. Thanks to me, the place had become its own gravitational force. A sci-fi blob that swallowed up anyone who tried to stop it.
Emily stood on the balcony, dressed like a grungy grant writer. She held up her hands to silence the room. There must have been at least fifty women staring up at Emily, all noticing that she lacked authority, confidence. That she was wearing a worn men’s cardigan. All waiting for me. Emily told everyone that 527 Park had been fun but the party was over. “I need you all to please go home now.”
They shared thornyAs iflooks.
“Hello? Go home. Please.”
Blank stares. Nobody moved. Somebody yelled, “You ever tried to be at home with a baby?” And a couple of moms smirk-laughed.
Emily tried again. “I hear there’s a new open play center in Flatiron. Go there. I need all of you out of here.Now.” Her eyes pleaded with Bianca and Viktor, who stood in a corner, arms crossed. “Well? Evict them?” They didn’t move. How could they evict women who didn’t have any less ownership of the condo than Emily had?
“I invited you over! Got you on the guest list! None of you would be here if it weren’t for me, and now I need you to pick up your babies and clear the space.”
Shrugs. The moms started to disperse, getting back to their original programming. Finally, one of the hedge-fund manager moms looked over a print copy of the salmon-coloredFinancial Timesand yelled from the kitchen, “You told us you’d say that.”
Emily just stood there, mousy, powerless. God, I’m glad I’m not her.
We’d moved the deejay inside because of the wintry mix, and before Emily knew what to do next, the music was gearing up again and all those bitches she thought she could control started to thrust their bodies into burpees and squat thrusts and yell at the top of their lungs.
Outplayed and overpowered, Emily staggered backward into a guest bedroom, hit with a wave of fatigue and doubt and culpability. She fell back onto the sheets, blocking out the music, the utter mess she’d made. She needed to sleep. She needed to step aside and let me handle this shit show.
—
I see Tina first. Tina is Penelope’s real estate agent. She turns the keys and walks into Apartment 8789. She’s wearing a teal sheath dress and has legs that look dusted in gold and a Hermès bag that is trying too hard. At first I think that maybe we got lucky. Maybe it is just Tina. Maybe Penelope is too busy organizing a charity lunch oroverseeing the installation of some bullshit piece of art to come to the bowels of Midtown East to list the thirty-seven-million-dollar apartment that she forgot she owned. The apartment she bought amid a litigious battle with her mother over the family trust. But no. Penelope walks in right behind Tina.
Both women expect a vacant apartment, as sanitized as anADspread. Instead, they find at least fifty ladies in nylon-Lycra blend, dancing in a sort of sanctuary-meets-nightclub setting. Tina peeks into the hallway to check the apartment number. Three moms in leg warmers and leotards speed past on Rollerblades.
“I think I know my apartment,Tina,” Penelope snaps.
“Of course. I’m sorry.” Tina quivers. She takes an iPad out of the Hermès and begins to swipe the screen. “I just…I thought you said this unit was empty.”
“It is…it was. The whole fucking building is empty. What is all this?”
Penelope hasn’t seen Emily, not yet. But she already blames her. She’d asked her to check on the apartment. Not let a bacchanal of basic moms take over. Of course, Penelope didn’t think Emily started the whole thing. She didn’t have enough friends, ingenuity or, frankly, the balls, for that. But, at the very least, she’d let it happen.
TheJuju Beanmoms are in a zone, throwing their heads back, chanting. They don’t notice Penelope and Tina. Skylar, a crowd favorite, leads the class. She has flaming red hair and wears a TED Talk mic and paces around the room with her eyes closed.
“In the words of our vanguard, our mother, our Daisy, it might feel a little wild, a little uninformed, a little terrifying, but this work is essential.” The women all tilt their heads back and moan. “Don’t be held back by criticism, by judgment. Express the wounds of your childhood. Of your lineage. Your past wounds—and place the present over truth.”
This is the part when they all scream at the top of their lungs…Penelope holds her hands over her ears. “CAN YOU PLEASE DO SOMETHING?” she yells at Tina.
“Absolutely. I’ll check with building security,” Tina says. “Don’t worry. We had something like this happen when I was at Corcoran and we still got over ask.”
I have to intervene. I have to stop Emily. Obsequious little Emily whose first instinct is to rush downstairs, to apologize.I can explain. I can explain everything. But could she, really? Could she explain that her split personality convinced her to open up Penelope’s condo to the masses? Not only to open it up but to use the Black AmEx that Penelope had entrusted her with years ago—to buy, for instance, lobster salad on the Vineyard, prosciutto and melon on Mott Street. The one that Emily knows is paid directly by the family’s financial adviser each month. Do you honestly think people that rich look at their credit card statements? Would anyone really notice if she bought a playroom full of Montessori toys, stocked a pseudo women’s club with overpriced collagen-infused products and bottomless acai bowls? Used the condo building’s handful of on-demand educated nannies? Only Audrey’s hospital bills, the upgrade to the private room, had triggered Penelope’s private wealth manager at JP Morgan.
He bypassed Penelope’s incompetent “chief of staff” and went straight to her most trusted staffer—Emily. “There’s been some unusual activity.” Unusual. That’s one way of putting it.
Emily asked him to send the statements right over. She even gave them to Penelope, knowing that Penelope would never get around to reading them. Not with ski week and the renovation and Mimi’s ninetieth at the villa in Tuscany. Besides, reading boring-ass bank statements is what Emily is for.
The way Emily saw it, she had two options. Option one: Apologize profusely. It was all a misunderstanding—“You told me to use the facilities.” She’d offer to work for Penelope for the rest of hernatural life, until all the debts were repaid. Option two: Lie. She had no idea who these women were or how they got here. Maybe Brown Harris Stevens thought it would help make the place more marketable if it looked lived-in? Like furniture staging but with girlfriends? Nobody wants to move into a secluded ghost town. Management recently staged the penthouse, one hundred and ten million dollars, languishing on the market, fully furnished. None of it had ever been mine, alas.
Emily was a gifted lackey and, unlike me, an awful liar, so it would probably be option one, and I couldn’t accept that, so I found a third option.
Penelope cuts the percussion band. “I can’t hear myself think.”
Once it is quiet, she starts to look around. I watch from the security cameras upstairs, on a slight delay. She opens a bedroom door to find a woman about to climax using the rechargeable cordless Magic Wand. Are those bloodstains on the Pratesi sheets? “What the—” She keeps exploring. The screening room.The Bling Ringplaying. Bowls of edibles, a spread of magic mushroom chocolate bars. The pumping room, where a busty mom with cracked nipples the size of tea saucers demonstrates how to apply soothing spray. Another mom with tiny boobs applies cooling hydrogel nipple pads.
In an adjacent bedroom, Penelope finds a well-known influencer leading several women in a demonstration with a postnatal perineum massager and dry-heaves a bit. She explores a walk-in closet stocked with piles of plush beauty products and hypoallergenic, vegan sex toys, all presumably purchased with her family’s credit card. She picks up a butt plug with a diamond rhinestone, looking at it like it’s a turd in a teacup.
