Visible City (13 page)

“Fine. Do you want to know what I really think? Do you know what it feels like to pour all of myself into the kids, to love them so much and want to give them every single thing they need, and yet even then, to worry that no matter how hard I try, it’s not enough? Do you know what it feels like to so badly want everything to be perfect but to worry all the time that I’m going to ruin it by getting angry at them?”

After all the time they had spent together, maybe they were actually friends. “I think we all need to lose it once in a while. Maybe it would be good for them,” Nina said.

“I never used to feel like I could lose control. In college, I played varsity ice hockey. Can you believe that? I was completely in control of my every move. Sometimes I try to get myself into the same zone I was in before a game, visualize myself flying across the ice, seeing only the other goal.”

“Do you still skate?” Nina asked.

Wendy shook her head. “Not since the twins were born. It’s like that person doesn’t exist. I thought that if we moved I would feel more in control. But I keep having this nightmare that I’m driving carpool and instead of dropping the kids off, I get on the highway and keep driving until the squad cars are chasing me OJ style, and all the headlines say ‘Soccer Mom Goes Crazy. Refuses to Get Out of Minivan.’”

Nina laughed. “Should I even ask how your nightmare ends?”

“According to my husband, it’s going to be much easier once we move. But I always thought we’d stay in the city. The only place I said I’d move to was Australia. Do you read your kids the Alexander books? Whenever I’m having a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day, that’s what I whisper to myself over and over—just the word
Australia.
”

“When do you want to go?” Nina joked.

Wendy laughed too, though she looked like she was on the verge of tears. “Do you want to know the other crazy thing? For years, I thought soccer moms played soccer.”

Finding her father alone in the apartment, Emma circled, gauging his mood before attempting to talk. When Emma gave an especially exaggerated sigh, Leon put down his book.

“Steven is coming home today,” she said.

“Is that a good thing?” he said.

“I don’t know,” Emma admitted. “He’s been gone for almost two months and I still can’t figure out what I should do. I can’t even remember why I’m getting married in the first place.”

“So why are you getting married?” he asked.

How could she put into words the rush of emotion that used to come over her when she was with Steven, the feeling that in his presence, she had grabbed on to something deeper and truer than was available elsewhere? Someone else might compliment her, but it meant little; the same words from Steven, so whittled down to the bare-bones truth, carried her for weeks. He pulled her toward him, into their bed, or on the floor, or up against the wall, and stared her down. “You understand me,” he whispered in her ear, words that she assumed were an emotional palindrome, equally true when read in reverse.

He had proposed to her on the beach in Montauk, the same week that a hurricane was brewing off South Carolina. The storm was far off, yet the waves in Montauk crested so high that no one dared to venture in. But she had stood at the edge as the water slammed against the shore. Despite the danger, she’d felt sure that if she walked into the waves, she would be buoyant, then emerge dry and unscathed.

“At the time, it seemed so clear to me that this was what I wanted to do. When we got engaged, I wasn’t even nervous. I was so sure of how happy I was,” she said.

“So what changed?” he asked, and checked his watch, as she was about to describe how every decision she’d ever made was now assaulted by a barrage of questions that tore into her. There was no part of her left whole and intact. She swallowed back her words, feeling embarrassed to have taken up too much of his time. How quickly his attention faded when she was still in need of so much more.
I’m sorry but we’re out of time,
she imagined him saying at fifty-minute intervals to her as well as to his patients, about whom she’d always been curious, their need for him seemingly more pressing and valid. But unlike her, they came to him with their problems. In order to get the same attention, she had to earn it with accomplishment. He was proudest of her when she needed the least.

“Are you happy?” she said, turning on him.

“It depends on how you define happiness,” he said.

“Come on, Dad. What am I supposed to do with that?”

“I’m not sure what you want me to say.” His expression shifted, something inside him breaking open, and for a moment he looked as lost as she felt. “I wish I had all the answers, but I really don’t know,” he said. “All these years, what I’ve wanted most was to be left alone. Is that happy? You tell me.”

What strange hole in the wall had she passed through? She was used to her father, dispassionate and calm. Before she could ask him anything else, he pulled out a notepad and ordered her thoughts into columns of pros and cons. He listed for her all the reasons to stay with Steven, lined up next to all the reasons to leave. All the reasons to finish her dissertation. All the reasons to find something else to do. When she was a teenager, he’d occasionally made these lists for her when she was wrestling with a decision. Those were moments she had wanted to stretch out, adding reason upon reason, all so that he would continue talking to her. She’d never felt as organized, as listened to, as when the contents of her mind were written down with her father’s pen, in neat block letters that conveyed such sure-handed authority and were so eminently readable, unlike her own scrawl that was sometimes illegible even to herself.

The door opened and Claudia walked in. Both Leon and Emma jumped as though they’d been doing something wrong.

“Come sit with us,” Leon invited Claudia as Emma put the list in her pocket and stood up to leave.

“No, it’s fine. I don’t want to disturb you. You look like you’re involved in something,” Claudia said. Though she acted unbothered, Emma caught sight of pained resentment, and she understood that the hurt expression on her mother’s face wasn’t directed at her but at her father.

Despite her parents’ pretense of normalcy, Emma was newly aware of the tension. As close as she and her mother supposedly were, she knew little of her inner life. She had managed not to know that her mother had one at all. Apparently she hadn’t passed the stage when it was impossible to imagine her mother as an independent being. Never had her mother confided in her anything about her marriage; rarely had she heard her parents fighting. Whatever more complicated dynamics existed between them took place quietly behind closed doors, if at all. Rather than think of their relationship as having its own oscillations, Emma preferred them to be entirely fixed and unchanging. She would always be moving while they remained firmly in place, markers from whom she could always measure her own movement.

But now there was no denying that flash of pain across her mother’s face, no way to pretend she had not seen the way her mother’s eyes clouded and she drew more deeply into herself. Emma recognized on her face a loneliness she should have seen long ago. She was pulled momentarily from her own life into an unexpected view of someone else’s. As she understood her own nearsightedness, her mother changed shape in her mind.

Baby-sitting was a way to exchange her family for another. It was a chance not to think about her own life. With the kids, she didn’t have to worry about what she would say to Steven when she saw him later in the day. She didn’t have to be anyone other than who she was. She could talk as loudly as she wanted; there was always something to laugh about and there was nowhere they needed to be. Max could spend hours describing the further adventures of Maurice; they could take thirty minutes to walk a single block. As soon as she walked in the door, Max launched himself in her direction and started telling her how Maurice had recently relocated from the laundry room to the Central Park Zoo.

“Do you know, when I was a teenager, my friend and I once snuck into the Central Park Zoo at night?” she said. “Someone told my friend how to do it, and one night she told me to meet her after my parents were asleep. It was going to be our secret adventure and I couldn’t tell anyone, not even my parents.”

“Did you tell anyone?” asked Max.

“I didn’t,” Emma said, as she noticed that Nina too was listening to her story. Wanting to impress her—to appear as someone who knew what she was doing—she scooped Max up and carried him to the couch.

“I was afraid, but I decided to do it anyway. I watched the clock as I lay in my bed, and when it was ten o’clock, I tiptoed out of my room, still in my pajamas.”

“Did your parents wake up?” whispered Max.

“They didn’t, and when I got downstairs, my friend was waiting for me in her pajamas. ‘Run!’ she said, so we ran until we reached the zoo. It was closed, of course, but my friend knew how to climb over a fence, and as scared as we were, we climbed up. We jumped over to the other side and were alone in the zoo. We could see because it was a full moon, and I couldn’t believe it. Late at night, when no one is around, the zoo changes and it’s not really a zoo anymore. The animals aren’t asleep like they always are during the day, or bored, roaming the cages. They’re free to roar and run and growl.”

The story she told him had at least a kernel of truth—she used to sneak out at night with friends and sprint in large groups in the park, around the lake, through the Great Meadow, thrilled to be out late. She embellished the story as she talked, letting it become as fantastical as it had felt in her mind when she looked back at that person reveling in the freedom of being outside.

“One day I’ll tell you where the secret entrance is. We can go there together. You should come too, Nina,” she said.

Nina laughed. “Maybe I will.”

“The next full moon,” Emma said as Nina stood up to leave.

Alone with the kids, Emma began to plan what to do that day. In the few weeks that she had been baby-sitting, she had taken them on bus tours of the city because Max was afraid of the train. She’d sat on the floor and strung plastic beads, while cradling Lily in her arms. While Lily rewarded her gaze with a startlingly beautiful smile, Max had bedecked her with necklaces and bracelets. When every free surface was decorated with Max’s creations, he played Candy Land against Maurice, because he said it wasn’t a game grownups knew how to play.

Today Max wanted to play dress up, an activity she’d loved as a child and still did, this chance to transform at least the outer parts of herself. Max wore a lion costume and Emma had a silver cape tied around her neck when they ventured to the laundry room. While Emma bounced Lily in her lap, reciting to her the French nursery rhymes she’d had to memorize in college, Max sat in his chair in front of the washing machine, awaiting the climactic moment when the red light changed from Soak to Rinse.

Emma helped herself to some of the Veggie Booty Nina had packed in a diaper bag containing enough supplies to sustain them were they to be trapped in the basement for weeks. Around Nina she was probably supposed to put on a professional front, but she felt Nina’s interest, which opened her up. It was hard to believe she was only a few years younger than Nina; she tried to imagine herself in Nina’s life, but the fact that she had these kids made her seem light-years away, closer to her mother’s age than her own. She wouldn’t want to be her, not exactly, but it had to be nice to feel that so much of your life was fixed in place. It had to be nice not to want to upend everything you had.

While they waited for the washing machine to finish, Max rested his hand on Emma’s arm, lightly grazing her skin. Max put his imaginary friends on pause when the washing machine rumbled and rested. A dryer stopped, and Emma unloaded its contents onto a folding table and put in their laundry. As they scooted their chairs over to watch the second act, a man entered the laundry room and walked over to the dryer, drawing back in affront at the sight of the bright colors inside.

“Who touched my clothes?” he demanded, staring at Max and Lily as though their very presence was an offense.

“I believe that would be us,” Emma said, and smiled.

“Perhaps you’re not aware of the rules around here, but you’re supposed to wait twenty minutes before removing someone’s laundry.”

“Do you want us to rewash your clothes? Max would love that—anything to be down here longer,” Emma said. Until now, she had forgotten they were still in costume, and she expected that the man might at least crack a smile at their get-ups.

“You don’t even live here, do you?” the man said through gritted teeth. His expression was still angry, but even so, his gaze flickered across her body.

He wasn’t unattractive and in his ornery, spindly way reminded her of Steven. Emma waited for him to say more, or at least check her out again, but apparently she couldn’t compete with the allure of his laundry. The more intently he ignored her, the louder she spoke to Max, which made him more intent on ignoring her. And the more he ignored her, the more attractive he became in her eyes.
This, Max,
she wanted to say,
is a game that only grownups know how to play.