Visible City (17 page)

In late August, with all the therapists away, the city’s problems flowed, untreated. But Wendy wasn’t entirely on her own. Dr. Davison was a presence in her day, a voice to summon when she was about to erupt in swirling, swarming rage. She’d grown up with a mother who was a screamer and she knew how that felt. Around her kids, she needed to maintain calm, yet nowhere else did she feel so on the verge of losing control.

Over the past weeks, she had become aware of her feelings for Dr. Davison. She looked forward to each session, taking great care in getting dressed. She started seeing him walking ahead of her on the street; her heart soared with anticipation only to crash-land in disappointment when she realized that it was not in fact him. She was envious of his daughter and wife, whom he’d once mentioned in an offhand way. They had unlimited access to him.

After their last session before his vacation, she’d actually passed Dr. Davison on the street. She had pretended not to see him, and only when he was out of her line of vision had she turned around in regret and followed him to what she guessed was his building. She was embarrassed to be someone who did this, yet she needed to see him outside the confines of his office, to know that their connection existed beyond that private space.

In his absence, she looked for ways to keep herself busy. She reorganized the kids’ closets. She continued her efforts to protest the sign that still hung in Georgia’s window. She called a friend who freelanced for a small local paper and told her about the sign. Over the listserv of the nursery school, she sent an impassioned note about the rights of children.

Finally, she got a response, far better than she’d imagined. A reporter for the
New York Times
Metro section contacted her and asked to interview her. After putting the kids in front of the latest
National Geographic
movie, Wendy laid out her points which the reporter dutifully recorded. The words flowed from her. Not since leaving her job had she felt such purpose; not since then had anyone taken so seriously what she said.

“It’s really an issue of how we define public space,” Wendy said, and explained that it wasn’t the sign itself she disagreed with—certainly she had the responsibility to control her children—but she had been stunned by the hatred on the other patrons’ faces. People took over cafés with their laptops; they talked loudly of anything that came to mind. Everything was tolerated except the noise of children.

When she got off the phone, Wendy went to check on the kids, who sat spellbound by the screen. To celebrate the fact that her publicity efforts had succeeded, she decided to make cupcakes that would outrival the cakes at Georgia’s. In her mind, she rehearsed the cheerful, busy version of the day she would describe for her husband. He had been skeptical that she would be happy at home all day, but with these cupcakes, with outings to the zoo and the Met, with a refrigerator door adorned with art projects, she had more than proven him wrong.

She let the kids watch the rest of the movie, and as they learned about the wonders of nature, she replicated those animals in fondant and buttercream. If she were here with other moms, they would exclaim over her creations, yet privately attribute the cupcakes to excessive competitiveness, to maternal one-upmanship. They wouldn’t think about the satisfaction she derived from matching the image on the table to the one in her mind. They wouldn’t know her pleasure at seeing the work of her hand.

She was almost done when she heard screams from the living room. “What happened, what’s wrong?” Wendy asked as she rushed in.

“Promise you’ll save me,” Sophie sobbed as Harry described the scene they’d watched, where the mommy eagle stood by while one baby pecked the other to death.

“No, sweetie, that’s not true. I’m sure you must have misunderstood,” Wendy reassured them.

She sent them to the bathroom to wash their hands, and while they were out of the room, she replayed the scene in which the narrator calmly explained that the African black eagle, like the mother panda and the mother penguin, allowed for the natural selection of her young. She watched the scene to the end, transfixed by the carnage. In equal parts, she wanted to rush in to save that baby eagle, and wanted to sit back and watch nature run its hungry course.

When her kids came back into the room, Wendy smiled brightly and turned off the movie, stashing it on a high shelf where no one could reach. She put on another movie, this one a cartoon of smiling fuzzy baby animals where no one was mean and no one got hurt, and she finished icing the cupcakes.

“Come see what I made for you,” she said, wanting to erase the predatory images from their minds.

Vanilla-iced polar bears, with miniature chocolate chips for eyes. Chocolate monkeys, orange lions, yellow birds, white and pink bunny rabbits, an entire forest coming to life in their kitchen.

“You made these?” the kids asked in awe.

It was as though she’d shown them the Grand Canyon and said she was the one who’d created it. As the kids sat and ate, she wished she could grab hold of this moment, decorate it with glitter, and display it on her fridge. She wanted to preserve it whole inside the leather-bound scrapbooks of their lives. In those pages they would see the documentation of her perfect love. They would know, one day, how badly she had wanted them and how close she had come to losing them.

On the day she reached thirty weeks of her pregnancy, a few hours passed without her feeling the babies kick. She drank cold water, prodded her stomach, and willed the babies to kick, but there was no response. Another twenty minutes passed. Relax! Relax! She called her husband, who tried to reassure her that this was nothing. In front of him, she tried to swallow the rising, spiraling, incapacitating fear. He expected to see her calm and in control, and she wanted to remain this way, always intact. Only to her doctor could she confess the terrible fear, and only his commanding voice instantly soothed her. It was impossible to believe that in his presence anything could go wrong. The mere sight of him in his scrubs made her feel that she was safe.

Finally, when she could stand it no longer, she called her doctor and this time he told her to come to the labor and delivery floor. Everything’s fine, the nurses assured her. Relax! Except this time, they couldn’t find either heartbeat. Relax! Her doctor quickly turned on the sonogram machine where, on the screen, one of the normally pulsing white comets was faintly moving. Everyone began talking at once. Her stretcher careened through the hospital corridor into the operating room where someone jammed a needle into her back. She was lifted, tugged, torn open; her body ceased to belong to her.

From the blue-gray sheets draped over her body one baby emerged, then another, as if they’d been birthed from the sea, from the expanse of a rainy-day sky. Wendy didn’t see her children until they were hooked up to respirators, lying in a row of incubators filled with babies so small they seemed closer to rodents than humans. On bright signs their names were written, as if these words might carry them to safety. Harry Alexander. Sophie Elizabeth. Their heads were disproportionately large, and their skin still so translucent that the blue veins that ran the length of their chests were visible. The cartilage of their ears had yet to form, and they were folded down like unneeded flaps of skin. Each weighed little more than two pounds, and they were the most beautiful things she’d ever seen.

As her babies were hooked up to ventilators, to feeding tubes, she sat by their side. Slowly, slowly, her babies grew larger. The ventilators were removed and they began to breathe on their own, first Sophie, then Harry. She suctioned her breasts with the hospital-grade Medela pump, filling specimen containers intended for urine with enough milk to line her freezer. Soon both of their IVs were disconnected; both her children had passed out of the port of danger. Only then did the resident who was on call the night they were born tell her how, when they lifted the babies out of her body, they had been startlingly blue. “You came this close,” he said, pinching his fingers almost imperceptibly apart.

The resident had meant to reassure her, but he had unwittingly increased her fear. What if she hadn’t gone to the hospital when she did? They took the babies home twelve weeks after they were born. Stepping through the double doors of the hospital, Wendy had waited for a nurse to call them back. Buckling their car seats into a taxi for their first views of the world outside, she waited for an alarm to sound. Only once the hospital grew smaller in the rearview mirror had she realized that these babies actually belonged to them. No more monitors, no more IVs. Their lives were in her hands alone.

Leon and Claudia’s apartment was larger than Nina had realized, the hallways extending farther back, rooms opening into other rooms whose windows she couldn’t see. What she’d only glimpsed took on definite shape and form. What had been impossible to see now lay before her.

The rooms were spacious, with an abundance of light. Nothing was cluttered or out of place. On the walls were black-and-white photographs of Emma as a kid, matted and framed. The beige damask curtains were drawn back as usual. But mostly, the apartment housed books. They lined every room, on ceiling-high, built-in shelves. The only interruption to all these books was the windows. There were books and walls, and then, all of a sudden, there were grass and trees, there were other buildings, there was a park, a river, a sky.

It had been a few weeks since Nina had seen Leon. Even if he hadn’t told her of their plans to be away, she would have known because their windows had been dark. Nina too had escaped the city. Tired of being alone every night with the kids, she’d taken them to her parents’ house for a week where they played in the backyard. At night, Nina went outside and looked at the houses beyond the fence. From here it was hard to know what really went on in people’s lives. If she looked out her parents’ windows, she might know whom she was watching, but there would be less to see. She’d have to traipse past the backyard wonderlands of plastic toys, entangle herself in their bushes, if she wanted to catch a glimpse.

But there were other things to look at. When she tipped her head back, she saw, to her surprise, not the insides of apartments but the smattering of stars. When she was a teenager, her family had taken a trip to the Grand Canyon and they’d stayed after dark to hear a park ranger explain the constellations; for the first time, she’d seen the Milky Way, so bright and alive she couldn’t believe she’d never seen it before. Now, having lived in the city for so long, she’d forgotten that such wonders existed. For the first time, she hadn’t longed for the city’s people and light. Under the solitude of a night sky, under these less imposing lights, she tried to seek refuge not just from other people but from the surround sound of her own self.

Upon coming home, she thought about telling Jeremy how she’d felt but didn’t know how to explain her restlessness. To talk about it would supposedly make it better, but she knew there lurked another danger as well: she would talk and he wouldn’t understand. After a few nights home alone with the kids, she was once again looking out her window, binoculars in hand. Even if she didn’t see Leon, she felt the sensation of contact. She called him when she realized he was back in town, once again using the book she was going to borrow as her excuse. Now they stood in front of his living room windows, which offered the best view of her own.

There, across the way, were the baskets of colorful plastic toys on the windowsill. If she looked closely, would she see herself inside her own apartment, busy with the kids; could she wave, one part of herself bidding hello to the other? A part of her wanted to run home, grab the kids, send Emma home, and close the door, to keep herself inside her glass-domed world which suddenly felt fragile.

“That’s where we live,” she said to Leon.

“I know,” Leon said. “The other day, I was looking out my window and I happened to see a woman dancing in her apartment. At first it looked like she was alone, but then I realized that she was with her children. I couldn’t see the look on her face, but on the kids’ faces, it was pure joy.”

He hadn’t seen the less idyllic moments that preceded this, or the even less idyllic ones that followed, but he had seen that one. “Let’s dance,” Max had said, and she’d scooped up Lily, taken Max’s hand, and they’d spun around. In a matter of minutes, someone would inevitably scream, hit, or cry, but until then, she’d wanted to hold on to the happiness on their faces.

“What else have you seen?” Nina asked.

“I’ll never tell,” Leon joked.

“Then neither will I,” she said, and the feeling between them fluttered, with no way to grab hold of it.

“Claudia’s right,” Nina said, becoming aware of the sounds of construction. “It is much noisier here. Our apartment isn’t nearly this bad.”

“We’re much closer. Come, I’ll show you something.”

Nina followed Leon to Claudia’s office, where he pointed to the construction workers out the window, a few feet away, on cages of metal scaffolding. If they opened the window, she could touch them.