Cobble Hill

by Cecily von Ziegesar

  “Mom,” Liam moaned. “That’s the wrong way.”

  “He knows,” Peaches said.

  Humoring their beloved old dog, they continued down Kane. At Cheever Place the entire family stopped short.

  “Whoa. Someone’s having a good night,” Liam said.

  “How do you know what that smell is?” Peaches demanded playfully. When she’d asked Liam about pot before, he’d acted like he’d never heard of it. She turned to Greg. “Am I wrong to be suspicious? How does he know?”

  Greg kissed her forehead. “Everyone knows.”

  “Kids smoke weed in the bathroom at school all the time,” Liam explained. “Not me, per se. Other kids.”

  “Uh-huh.” Peaches inhaled deeply and peeked down the dimly lit street, still feeling playful. “Let’s go spy on them.”

  * * *

  Mandy’s head was heavy on Stuart’s shoulder, but it was a pleasant heaviness. He couldn’t remember if he’d ever been this high. He felt almost ecstatic.

  “We don’t even have to move. We can stay here ’til the sun comes up.”

  “Mmmm,” Mandy responded.

  A family was walking their huge dog down the street. The woman’s hair was a pretty strawberry blond that glowed gold beneath the street lamps. Their dog’s fur was the same color. Stuart watched them get bigger and bigger. It was her—Nurse Peaches, with a couple of guys and a gigantic hairy animal.

  “Hey,” Stuart called out a little too loudly. He wanted to say something more formal and stand up and shake everyone’s hand and give the dog a biscuit and be charming, but Mandy’s head was so heavy and he was pretty sure it was safer to stay put. His mouth and face were not functioning very well.

  Nurse from school comes by my crib

  Tongue don’t work, I can’t ad lib!

  “Nice night,” Nurse Peaches called back brightly. “Guys, this is Stuart Little, and um—”

  “Mandy, the mother of our child,” Stuart said biblically.

  Mandy didn’t stir. She was either asleep or completely comatose.

  “Their son goes to my school. We’ve been de-liceifying. Good times!”

  Peaches was overcompensating. How had she missed Stuart’s address when she’d searched for his number? If she’d known he lived on Cheever, she would never have allowed Big Boy to drag her there.

  Stuart wavered on the step. Should he invite them in?

  “I’m Greg.” The dude who must have been Peaches’ husband raised his hand. He was wearing dark denim overalls, a brown bucket hat, and Doc Martens. He was either very punk rock or very weird. “You’re that Stuart Little?”

  Stuart nodded slowly. He closed his eyes and then opened them again. “I guess I am.”

  “He is,” Peaches verified. “Liam,” she added, addressing the tall, blond teenager hiding deep inside his hoodie, “Stuart is a famous musician.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Liam’s mouth said.

  The dog pleaded with his sad eyes. He wanted to go smell things. He wanted to go poo and pee.

  “We’d better keep moving,” Peaches said. “Big Boy makes some pretty huge poops. I don’t want him to mess up your sidewalk.”

  “Thanks,” Stuart said weakly, grateful that they were leaving. “Good night.”

  Mandy chose that moment to wake up. She lifted her head. “Hey guys. What’s going on?”

  No one quite knew what to say. The dog sat down again and began to pant.

  Peaches wondered if it would be okay to ask about the quality of the pot, since she was the one who had purchased it for them. Liam and Greg might both be sort of impressed. She could even ask to try some. Liam could try it too. Greg used to take off his pants whenever he smoked pot. He probably shouldn’t have any.

  A face appeared behind the glass pane to the right of Stuart Little’s front door. A small hand slapped the glass.

  “Ted?” Mandy’s green eyes widened. She tried to stand up, reaching for the railing and missing it completely.

  “Holy shit.” Stuart grabbed her and steadied her before she toppled down the steps. “Just a sec, Teddy!”

  “You guys okay?” Greg called up to them.

  “We’re okay!” Stuart shouted back way too loudly.

  “Mom, Dad,” Liam whined. “Maybe we should just leave them alone?”

  “Come on, guys.” Peaches steered Big Boy back the way they’d come.

  “That was fucking Stuart Little from the Blind Mice.” Greg was clearly miffed. “You know him?”

  Peaches bristled. “Yeah, their kid goes to my school.” She yanked on the leash, forcing Big Boy to pick up the pace.

  “You work at a public school now and the kids get even richer,” Greg scoffed.

  Anticipating a parental spat, Liam shoved in his AirPods and strode on ahead.

  Peaches knew Greg would be weird about it. Weirdly jealous.

  Greg had been the big man on campus at Oberlin, at least in the music department. But you don’t get rich and famous like Stuart Little majoring in ancient woodwinds and double-minoring in accordion and banjo. You wind up teaching music at a private elementary school to support the younger day student English major from small-town Ohio who liked to play the drums and had to drop out of college altogether because you knocked her up. Greg was so annoying. Hadn’t she tortured herself and gotten her nursing degree and the school nurse gig for precisely this reason, to stop him from constantly making comments about money? She was making the big bucks now, picking nits off famous dads and their spawn. Even Liam had two jobs, tutoring that girl and at the Strategizer. Sure, they lived on the wrong side of the Gowanus in a small street-level rental, but they were fine. Getting to know Stuart Little was the highlight of her current existence. Only Greg could turn something fun into a huge bummer.

  “I guess they must be rich,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” she added, even though she wasn’t sorry at all.

  Chapter 6

  It wasn’t neat and tidy like his house. In fact, it was kind of a mess, like a storage unit for someone who never threw anything away. That was part of the design process, Roy supposed, creating faulty prototypes and then dissecting them to see what was working and what wasn’t. A set of seven white wooden chairs—all in different sizes, their backs adorned with brass plaques bearing the name ELIZABETH—stood in a circle, like something out of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” only more sinister.

  “Those are hers,” Tupper explained. “She’s interested in Identity.”

  Roy thought he detected a capital I.

  “Shifting identities within one person,” Tupper went on, as if that clarified it.

  “Right,” Roy said.

  “My workshop is back here.” Tupper led the way through the airplane hangar–like space filled with detritus. Roy tripped over a life-size boa constrictor that was wound around a rotten wooden oar. “That was from her Adam and Eve series,” Tupper noted as he continued on.

  At the back of the enormous studio was a large glass box. Inside the box were two wooden cradles. Nestled in the cradles were two toddler-size papier-mâché dolls with yellow woolen yarn hair, black bird-feather eyelashes, painted red cheeks, and red kissy-face lips. Their lumpy bodies were swaddled in felt and birch-bark patchwork quilts with just the tips of their papier-mâché fingers poking out. The fingers were oddly gray, as if the girls had been playing on the sidewalk before their nap.

  Roy stared into the glass box.

  “The twins,” Tupper explained unnecessarily. “She wheeled them around in a carriage for two years.”

  Roy followed him through a rusted metal door that led to a bright, spotless workroom with huge windows that looked southwest, toward Sunset Park and Industry City. In front of the windows was a long worktable with a large computer and 3D printer. There were also a potter’s wheel, a refrigerator, a kiln, and a wall of shelves filled with white, porcelain figurines. There were elves and unicorns, Arc de Triomphes and Eiffel Towers, parrots and peacocks, cacti and cora
l, pineapples and watermelons, gorillas and elephants, skunks and squirrels, mice and owls, sea lions and Sasquatches, wolves and polar bears. Lined up against the walls and in the corners were department store mannequins and other humanlike figures, all devoid of faces, clothing, and hair.

  “This is where I work,” Tupper said.

  Roy was entranced. It was a bit like Santa’s workshop. A person could really make things here. If only he had a workshop. He could go inside and close the door and feel instantly confident that he would achieve things.

  Something was nagging at him. He picked up a polar bear and quickly put it down again. “Your… this… Elizabeth,” he said and swallowed. “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but where exactly is she?”

  Tupper gazed out the window at the gray industrial landscape. It wasn’t a nice view, but it was a view.

  He sighed deeply. “That’s the thing about Elizabeth.”

  Roy checked the time on his phone, hating to interrupt his lonely neighbor when he might be about to bare his soul. “I’m so sorry, but I have a meeting.”

  * * *

  “It’s great. I mean, it has the potential to be great. But you’ve only just begun. You have to keep going, fill it out and finish it.” Peaches thrust Roy’s flimsy pages across the bar. They were dirtied with what looked like mustard and coffee and tomato soup, and there were scribbles in green crayon, or perhaps eyeliner. “I made notes. Don’t feel like you have to listen to any of them.”

  Roy took back the manuscript. It was even thinner than he remembered. Forty-seven pages was not a book. He sniffed it. Not mustard, curry. He’d given the pages to Peaches yesterday, printing them out and waiting in the bar, pretending to write until she turned up. She’d said she was an English major, and he’d much rather she read it than someone he lived with and had to see at breakfast, like Wendy or Shy. They wouldn’t be able to hide their shame and disappointment if it was terrible. Peaches had not been party to his cinnamon bun binges or his ability to look at a blank wall, thinking about Starbuck and Apollo and Cylons and Jane Seymour, for minutes on end. And he never had to speak to Peaches again if he didn’t want to. He’d thought about giving it to Tupper, but he didn’t want to depress him even more.

  Peaches was honored that a renowned author had asked for her opinion. She’d been thinking about Roy’s pages all day. They were a welcome distraction from her embarrassment over catching Stuart Little and his wife, high on their stoop, and her annoyance at her husband, Greg, who would not shut up about it.

  “The whole boy-girl thing is like The Blue Lagoon in space, which I love. I mean, it’s genius that they’re up there without their families. They are their family now. But at the same time, they have these urges. I just think you need to be careful to keep it fresh and not like, too Blue Lagoony. Like, Bettina should not get pregnant and the baby should not eat bad space ice cream and almost die. And maybe neither of them should be white. In the future, no one is white, everyone is beige.”

  It was too much to take in. Roy shook his head. “I’m sorry, I don’t know it. The Blue Lagoon, what is that?”

  “Oh! Woo!” Nurse Peaches blew her wispy strawberry blond hair out of her face and blushed, presumably because she was making sounds, not words.

  She was a very attractive person. Not just because she was dimply and smiley and bosomy and smart, but because she was so awkward and filterless, saying each and every thought, however fragmented, that entered her brain. She made Roy feel almost cool.

  “Is it a film?”

  “Yeah. It’s from the seventies, or maybe early eighties, and kind of so bad it’s good. It’s about two teenagers who get shipwrecked and have to survive on a deserted island. They’re children when it starts, but then they go through puberty. She gets her period and boobs. His voice changes. Eventually they figure out how to have sex. They keep doing it so much she gets pregnant and they have a baby. She breastfeeds it. There’s even this weird scene when the baby appears to be swimming in the ocean on its own before it can really walk. I’ve been pushing for that movie to be shown to the whole fifth grade instead of the dumb sex-ed class they do in like forty-five minutes the second-to-last day of school, but the assistant principal thought it was inappropriate. She’s from Staten Island and super Catholic and conservative. I made my son watch it when he was eleven. I think it was sort of liberating for him but also really scary. Your character Ceran totally reminds me of my son—so little confidence and self-awareness he appears almost stupid. But I guess you were a teenage boy once too, not that long ago. You know what you’re writing about.”

  “Not really,” Roy disagreed. “Not at all, actually.”

  Peaches stopped talking. Roy Clarke made her nervous. He was either completely brilliant or just a very lucky clueless person—she couldn’t tell. His pages were like a script for a movie that would never get made. But if she tried to write a book, it wouldn’t make any sense either. And what was her problem anyway? Did she have to be so critical? Why was she so competitive? Yes, for the five minutes that she’d actually attended college she’d thought she wanted to be a writer, but she was a nurse now. Roy Clarke was a real writer and he’d asked her to read his pages, which was amazing. But it was also confusing. Surely he could have asked someone more qualified.

  Roy couldn’t believe Nurse Peaches had a son, certainly not a teenager. He’d thought she was about twenty-seven.

  “It’s on TV sometimes, The Blue Lagoon,” Peaches rambled on. “Probably no one in England has ever seen it.” She crouched down to open the bar fridge, looking for boiled eggs, but the fridge’s shelves were bare. She slammed the door closed again and stood up. “It’s not, like, good cinema or anything—it’s really cheesy. But it is educational.”

  “I can’t believe you have a teenage son,” Roy said. “You’re what, twenty-five?”

  “Thirty-eight,” Peaches cut him off.

  “And your son? How old is he now?”

  “He just turned seventeen. I held him back in kindergarten. He and your daughter are in the same class. He’s tutoring her in math. Didn’t she tell you?”

  “Really? No, I had no idea,” Roy said, feeling a bit flummoxed. Shy spoke to him more than she spoke to anyone else, but clearly she didn’t tell him everything. This was good news, actually. Great news. Shy would have a friend. A clever boy with a wonderful mother.

  “So, is this like a dystopian novel set in the far distant future, or is it set in the near future, based on current space stuff and socioeconomic issues that are happening today?” Peaches went on, still trying to be helpful.

  “I don’t want to do a lot of research,” Roy said stubbornly.

  “Okay. But you do need to create verisimilitude,” she insisted, making use of her Oberlin creative writing workshop vocabulary. “You still need to draw a vivid picture of the space station or whatever it is they’re living in and the kids’ schedule of activities in order to make it as believable as possible. I’m imagining it like boarding school in space, except the adults are too busy being astronauts and scientists and doing ‘important work’ to pay much attention to the kids. So they’re raising themselves. They’re smart and interesting and horny. It will have all the same everyday tragedies and comedy as your other books, from what I’ve read about them—part of it just takes place in space.”

  “Right,” Roy agreed despondently. “Or maybe I ought to write about something else.”

  “No.” Peaches pointed at the pages in his hands. “You came up with that for a reason.”

  She leaned over the bar. Her breath smelled like coffee ice cream.

  “Just keep going. The story will become less disjointed. I know it will, because you are the connection. I know that sounds so cheesy. But you’ve done this before. It must feel familiar. It’s like, maybe you have to get a certain distance away before you can get into orbit, not to overuse the space metaphor. Then you have to stay up there and complete your mission. And then you have to come back.”


  She cleared her throat. Just for something to do, she picked up a lemon slice and ate the fruit off it. Then she ate another. They tasted like they’d been sitting out for a long time.

  “That makes sense,” Roy agreed, feeling slightly resentful because she wasn’t the one who had to go into orbit and complete the mission. “I suppose I’d better watch that Blue Lagoon film with my daughter.”

  “Oh God.” Peaches snorted. “Forget I even mentioned it. Just promise me no one’s going to give birth in space.”

  Chapter 7

  Big Boy had been acting funny all day. He turned his head away when Liam picked up his leash and lay down behind the sofa, panting. Liam’s mom thought just breathing some fresh air would do him good. So, after dinner, she and his dad sat on the stoop with the huge old dog and sent Liam out for ice cream.

  Ample Hills was only four blocks away from home. Liam wanted a cone, and he’d promised to bring his parents back a pint of Smack Mallow Pop. “It really is smack,” his mom said. “I’m going to eat the whole pint.”

  The weather had been weirdly warm and the place was packed. Bruce Cardozo, Ryan, and Black Ryan from school were in line ahead of him.

  “We’re going to PS 919 to play basketball,” Ryan said.

  “You should come,” Black Ryan offered.

  “Oh, he’s coming,” Bruce said and punched Liam’s skinny shoulder. It was only then that Liam was able to confirm that they were actually talking to him.

  They were all big guys, but they’d ordered child-size ice cream cones because they were cheaper.