by Kelly Harms
Cori chews her lip and works her jaw.
“What?” I ask her.
“Sometimes I act like I’m better than everyone else. You know, boys like it when you have confidence.”
I smile. “Maybe it’s not an act. After all, I think you’re the best girl I’ve ever known.”
“You’re my mom. You have to think that.”
I shake my head at her. “Not true. But anyway. You are wonderful. But there’s plenty of wonderful to go around, so keep that in mind if you find yourself walking around with your nose in the air.”
“I will if you will,” she says.
“Will do what?” I ask her back.
“Not be a snob. You’re not too good for the entire male gender.”
“What? Who on earth said I was?”
“Well, why else wouldn’t you go on a single date once in three years?”
I blink at her blindly. What can I say? Because I was convinced John left me because I was unlovable? Because I am a forty-year-old mom-shaped librarian, and not the porn kind with glasses and long hair in a bun but the regular kind with clogs and pants blindness? Because every man I meet in my daily life is a parent of one of my students or a teacher of one of my kids? Because somehow after all this time I am still married to my ex-husband?
“Mom? Are you there?” Cori is waving her hands in front of my face. “Ground control to Major Mom.”
“Sorry, I spaced. I was thinking about . . .” My eyes dart around the room and land on the clock. “I was thinking about your brother. I’m supposed to bring oranges tonight. Do we have any oranges? I’d better get to Wegmans before pickup. Do you want anything?”
It’s as easy as that. My daughter loves the Wegmans sushi counter. “Sushi!” she cries jubilantly, and all talk of dating is forgotten.
“Ok, sushi it is,” I reply. “I’ll be back in an hour and a half. Will you bag up whichever clothes are awful and match outfits for the rest while I’m gone?”
“Duh, Mom,” she replies. “What do you want me to do with the other hour and twenty-nine minutes?”
I cock my head at her. “How about you write a college-admissions essay on the fine art of shoe packing for airline luggage weight restrictions?”
“I’ll get right on it,” she says sarcastically.
“Or text with Brian,” I add as I’m halfway out the door so she can’t feign disinterest. “Just a thought!”
—
When it is finally time for me to go, I feel like I am the child and my kids are sending me off to summer camp. John, Lena, and my neighbor Jackie, who has offered to watch over my house and be a backup plan for the kids if they need it, are all there for the big goodbye, and I have the distinct sensation of being shoehorned out the door. Before I know it, I am being reassured that all is well and I’ll get lots of video calls and Jackie will look after the yard and mail and Lena will look after anything else. John looks so . . . capable as we all say goodbye. He brought extensive pics of the condo he’s rented, which looks immaculate and well equipped, and he even is driving a rented Volvo. I can’t help but think, This is ok; they’ve got this, even as my mom brain screams, NO! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? DO NOT LEAVE YOUR CHILDREN!
The sensation is so powerful that I actually make the cabbie turn around and drive me back by the house, pretending to have forgotten something. But when we reapproach, I see that the kids are sitting on either side of John on the front step, looking down at something. The book of hiking trails he brought over is open in his lap, overleaf unfolded wide to a map. His posture is relaxed and easy, leaned back, with each hand propping him up on either side behind the kids’ backs. Cori’s and Joe’s heads are tilted in toward him, and they are laughing.
What did Cori tell me this morning? “Your work is done here, Mom.” I laugh at the very thought. My work will never be done here. But for today, it’s time for me to go. I tell the driver never mind, and we turn around, head back to the station. And I feel something happening to my shoulders that hasn’t happened in five years—or maybe longer.
They’re relaxing.
I feel the unfamiliar weight of my shoulders sliding down and the pleasant sensation of tension unwinding from my neck and the base of my head. How long have I been holding my shoulders up by my ears? I wonder. And why was I doing that?
I immediately think of the Christmas I caved and brought home a gaming system for my kids. The use policy on it is pretty stringent even now, and the first rule was I play every game they play. No Call of Duty 17 coming in under the radar at my house. Joe wanted to play a driving-simulation game that required a little steering wheel attachment to the controller. He saved up and saved up and got the controller and the game, and then he came home with it knowing full well he would have to immediately hand it over to me.
I took it, we opened it, and Joe gave me the gist of the game: steer, don’t crash, try to collect floating coin things, use turbo points. It looked almost exactly like the driving games I played at my guy friends’ houses when I was in high school, except for better graphics and a very impressive soundtrack. I thought it would be no problem. But once I was playing, I was terrible. I couldn’t steer and work the turbo at the same time, and I kept crashing into various obstacles like I was drunk. Finally Joe grabbed me by the shoulders from the rightward lean I was in as I tried to steer the car out of a puddle and said, “Mom, steer with the controller, not your body.”
Now, as I sit on the hard wooden bench waiting for the New York express train, I realize I have been driving my life with my body. Trying somehow to carry my worries and sorrows and insecurities on my shoulders, as though I could wad up all the hurt and fear I’ve felt since John moved out, stuff it in a backpack, and hike through life with it. Every time I have fretted over Joe’s social life or lain awake listening like a hawk for Cori to make curfew or looked at my income and our bills and tried to figure out who won’t get paid, I have put that in the backpack and carried it around on my shoulders. They ache, and I haven’t even noticed until right this minute.
Consciously, I take a huge breath. I bring my mind to those poor muscles and sinews and vessels and think, Melt. I think of my kids safe with their father, overseen by Jackie, who is overseen by Lena, and think again, Melt. I think of my waiting guest room in Talia’s swank apartment and the classes I’ll get to take at Columbia and the lunches at bistros with big, gorgeous, fresh salads and crisp white wines I’ll linger over, and I just feel it happen for the first time in as long as I can remember: I melt.
And it feels so good.
And then my train comes, and the entire adventure begins.
CHAPTER FOUR
Dear Mom,
You’re in New York! Having a life! Mom, I am so freaking proud of you. You are, like, a marvel and an inspiration to us all. I am totally being sarcastic, in case that’s not clear. But really, I am proud that you finally took a vacation, even if it’s not really a vacation and you’re actually doing library stuff nonstop and the only way we got you to do it was to sacrifice our own week, which, let’s be clear: Dad is not our first choice right now. But here we are, and Dad is, like, Mr. Happy Cheerleader, and he is going to give us anything we ask for out of guilt, and I will have failed myself and my country if I don’t get out of this with a new car. At least. Joe is angling for Space Camp, did you know that? I am so proud of him. I didn’t know he had it in him. And all you get is a stupid week in New York probably staying at, like, the Super 8 in Yonkers and reading books in bed all night.
You should have brought me with you. I’d show you how this whole vacation thing is done. We’d be at the spa—not the $12 nail salon but the spa that, like, rock stars go to. We’d get you a makeover and then go out to Balthazar and then go see Hamilton. We would eat that pizza you fold in half, and we’d go to the art museums, and you’d let me drink white wine.
Here is what I’m doing instead: the same thing I’d be doing pretty much if you were here. SOMEONE gave Dad a copy of Coach’s summer rule
s, so I’m on curfew, and he is serving salad with every meal. Also, when we first walked into his apartment, there was Diet Coke freaking everywhere, and I was so pumped. Then, while I was literally in the bathroom doing my hair, the Diet Coke just vanished. Did you, like, text Dad and tell him no Diet Coke? How can you hate Diet Coke, Mom? Diet Coke is the foundation of America. Why do you hate this country so much?
Dad said I can have Diet Coke once a day before noon but only after practice, and he said I have to have a shot of wheatgrass juice to go with it. And I said, “Where is this wheatgrass juice coming from, the Bucks County Municipal Pool concession stand? Is it right next to the Slurpee machine?” And do you know what he said back? He said, “Your team doesn’t have a juicer?” No kidding, Mom. (I was going to say “No shit.” But I’m moving into my summer vocab for lifeguarding, so, no kidding.) I was like, to Dad, “Hey, Dum-Dum, on what planet does a community day school have a juicing machine for team sports?” And he got out this link to Harvard Business Review, which is something he reads, like, on the regular, and showed me a story about a juice-bar company that revolutionized the efficacy of NFL double-day practices, and then he went on his Amazon app, and—no shit—he bought a wheatgrass juicer for the team.
He is from another planet, Mom. Planet Rich Guy. But look, it’s not all bad because now my team gets a juicer, and I got a subscription to Harvard Business Review, and I am pretty sure I used the words revolutionized the efficacy appropriately in that sentence up there, so it’s win-win-win! Dad buys our love, I get a vocabulary, team gets a juicer. Except I guess you are the loser. I have to remind you of that, according to every teen movie I have ever watched.
But if it makes you feel any better, it’s almost like you’re here every time you text me and tell me to get reading on my next book. And not in a good way. Untwist your thong: I will get on with it. I’m just letting the love story of the senator’s wife and her rich married boyfriend wash over me.
Next, according to you, I’m supposed to read The Book Thief. I read the first chapter, and let me tell you, it sounds GRIM. Pro tip, Mom: It’s not summer reading if the narrator is actual Death Incarnate. Like, if you open any magazine ever and look at their Summer Beach Reads Roundup and see a book starring Death, just let me know. Until that day, I am reading Twilight again because if I am going to be goth, then it should be sexy goth at least.
What? At least I’m reading.
Love,
Your vitamin-rich daughter, Cori
—
New York is exactly as I left it—and entirely different. Grand Central is the same grimy/glossy crossbreed that it should be. The oyster place is going nowhere. The hubbub is as loud, the goings-on are as ongoing. But the clothes are different. The stores are unfamiliar. The sense of having been here before and yet being utterly lost is pervasive.
I march through the echoey corridors and try not to look confused searching for the right subway stairs. Then I get my carry-on suitcase stuck in the turnstiles and give up on coolness. Hello, New York! Get ready to chew up and spit out another willing bumpkin.
Last week when I gave her the high sign about my arrival, Talia told me her apartment is a zillion miles from Columbia and tried to talk me into skipping the conference and just using my time to “lie about the apartment looking wan and drinking wine.” I couldn’t look wan if I were on a hunger strike, so I stuck to my plan, believing there are worse things than an hour on the train each way. I can read. It will be peaceful.
But it’s rush hour, and I wedge myself on the local because the first two express trains are too full to fit my suitcase, much less my body, and there is nothing peaceful about what happens next. We are packed in so tightly that I do not need to hold a handrail to stand upright, but the helpful spinner wheels on my suitcase that are so nice when rushing through an airport—something I never do, by the way—become deadly on the train. At every stop—and there are about four hundred stops—the bag demonstrates the “thing in motion tends to remain in motion” principle and rolls into the person next to me, banging them against the shins. I attempt to hold the suitcase back but am being pressed forward by the postworkout gym rat behind me, who is carrying a duffel on his shoulder and letting it hit me in the kidneys every time he shifts an inch. And so we go. My suitcase bruises shins, the duffel of rocks bruises me, and just out of reach, eight middle-aged men in suits sit comfortably on the benches that line the car, legs spread open like they are on their own personal Barcaloungers, papers folded into precise fourths, phones clenched in right hands for dear life. It’s a funny little thing, the miracle of getting a subway seat, and I am starting to feel bitter that I do not have one when a woman with a pregnant belly the size of a small neutron star gets on the train, and the humanity parts. She is sweaty and wide and no kind of fertility goddess, but first one, now two, then three men leap to their feet in something resembling a panic. “Ma’am,” each shouts. “D’ya wanna sit down?” She does, and one of the men who wasn’t lucky enough to actually give up his seat to her puts his phone away and carries her enormous Bed Bath & Beyond bag on his lap for the rest of the ride.
Oh, how it warms my heart, this whole little play that runs a thousand times a day. New York. The city that never sits.
When we get to Brooklyn Heights, I pop out of the train like a champagne cork the moment the doors open. I walk the wrong direction on several slanted, crisscrossing streets, falter a bit, and then become the woman getting turn-by-turn directions from her phone while walking. Luckily, it is New York, and nothing here is noteworthy. Certainly not me.
Finally I find Talia’s building. It is not what I expected. Based on Facebook updates, her monthly editor’s letter, and my memories, Talia is very glitzy. This building is not glitzy. It’s redbrick, no edifice, very institutional. It’s not a divided brownstone with cute wrought iron gates or a shiny glass tower with a bank of elevators zooming to the stratosphere. It looks to be about ten stories high and utilitarian in design, and the lobby is not exactly inviting me in.
Even so, I grab the handle and pull.
The door is locked.
I tilt my head. Pull again. No, this door is definitely locked. I put my hands around my face and try to see inside. Another bank of doors, then a small lobby with a desk. A concierge desk, one would think. A desk of a person who would, ostensibly, see me struggling with luggage and a locked door and get over here and let me in.
There is no one at the desk. There is no one in the lobby, period. There is no indication whatsoever that anyone has ever been in the lobby or that this apartment building is in fact an apartment building and not an abandoned shirt factory. Are there even mailboxes? I don’t see any in the vestibule. What kind of no-doorman building doesn’t have mailboxes in the vestibule?
Also, why did I assume this was a doorman building? Why did I figure Talia had amazing digs? Did she even answer me those weeks ago when I asked her if she had room for me? I look back at our texts. She did not answer. But it seemed like a yes to me at the time. What if she lives in a studio and expects me to crash out on the couch? Well, then I guess I will crash on the couch, I realize with some kind of gloomy disappointment. I was imagining at least a bed to myself.
Ah well, I’m a grown woman, and a week on a couch four feet from the kitchen is kind of a bummer at this stage in my life, but a far smaller bummer than a thousand-dollar hotel bill. And besides, Talia is so fun. Wherever she lives, it will be fun. Think of the zillions of trendy, twee spots I passed on the way to her apartment, after all. An artisan candy-bar shop that sells homemade Snickers and crème de menthes. A patisserie prominently displaying a wedding cake made entirely of lemony-yellow macarons. A bar designed to look like an ancient dive with a high shine on it that gives its youth away. A chalkboard sign outside, intricately hand-lettered with vintage flair, reads, FAR OR NEAR, WE DRINK BLATZ BEER. And next to it, the ubiquitous cotton-sportswear store boasting thong leotards and inexpensive American-made T-shirts cut for the bodies of
five-foot-eight toddlers.
I do not need a bed proper to enjoy a week in Brooklyn among the young and beautiful. We are going to have an amazing time. I text Talia.
how do i get into your apt?
There is no immediate reply. Oh well. I guess I will go have a cup of sustainably sourced, frog-safe, hand-roasted, burr-ground pour-over coffee while I wait for further instructions. It’s a good thing I only packed one very small suitcase.
Two cups of $7.50 coffee later, I have not heard from Talia. I also haven’t heard from the many other people I texted to pass the time. Nothing from the kids, which makes sense because they should be at Cori’s diving meet right now. A thumbs-up and the swimmer emoji from John, who is doing “same.” Nothing from Lena, who has plenty of good reasons not to be sitting by the phone waiting to entertain her lonely, temporarily homeless friend. My neighbor Jackie writes back when I say, “How’s it going there?” But all she says is “All’s fine. Hope you’re having fun!” so I do not take that as an invitation to chat.
I have my e-reader, and I’ve started and stopped a few different new YA titles, always looking for those unputdownable reads that I think will appeal to my trickier readers, and I’ve checked the address Talia sent me a few hundred times, and the weather, and the conference information page, and anything else I could think of to pass the time. Now it’s getting on in the day, and there’s supposed to be a cocktail meet and greet up at the conference in two hours. Knowing it could take a full hour just to get there, I am starting to feel nervous.
I text Talia again, sending her back the address she sent me and writing,
Do I have the right address? I’m sorry I didn’t think to figure out the key situation. I guess I assumed you had a doorman?
Then I wait five minutes and call her. No answer. I leave the calmest possible voice mail and then say, out loud, “Ok. This is bad.”