Motherland

by Amy Sohn

  Rebecca

  Rebecca had come up with the Seed Late Night idea. She wanted to do something festive in the store during the holiday season that would feel more like a party than a night of shopping. She had decided to stay open till nine on a weeknight in December and serve free wine and food. She had publicized it on the local blogs and invited everyone on her e-mail blast list. She’d had a local novelist read from a racy book about Park Slope, and after the reading, the store stayed open so the women could shop at 20 percent off. Now, at nine-thirty, Rebecca was behind the counter and the store was still packed with women whose cheeks were flushed from wine, all of them spending money on clothes for their children.

  Sonam was at Carroll Street watching Abbie and Benny. Rebecca and Theo had rented a pied-à-terre on Third Street, and they split the week there. For the days when they each had Abbie, they took turns staying on Carroll Street, so Abbie didn’t have to shuttle between them. The neutral apartment, it was called. Benny spent half the week with Stuart.

  It had been lonely at first, figuring out what to do with herself on the nights she was alone on Third Street, but now she enjoyed the total break. For a few hours a week she and Theo spent time together with both kids. He didn’t want to say goodbye to Benny, and she didn’t see any reason that he should. It was awkward, but she tended to focus on Abbie and let him focus on Benny. They went to the playground or the Greenmarket, and Benny still called him Daddy. He called Stuart Papa.

  Theo was continuing to see Veronica. It wasn’t clear how serious it was, but when he talked about her, it was in a reverent tone that Rebecca found unsettling.

  She had vowed not to think about Veronica and Theo tonight. She wanted to be in a good mood. For the party, she had put out tables with cheese and crackers from the Prospect Park Food Coop. The women were doing something she wasn’t used to seeing Park Slope mothers do: enjoying themselves. CC was there with her boyfriend, Seth, whom Rebecca found funny and bright. Gottlieb had come back from L.A., and CC had asked for a divorce. She said he was coping with it fine; he had other problems, too, like getting his career back on track. He was renting an apartment on Van Brunt Street, where the boys visited him; running his film school; and working on a new screenplay that Paramount had hired him to write. CC said he had become a better father since they separated, more giving and loving to Harry and Sam.

  Karen Bryan had come with Wesley, whom Rebecca had gotten to know after inviting them both to dinner. He was a sweet, serious man and seemed crazy about Karen. Rebecca’s initial jealousy of Karen—for having a handsome, doting boyfriend—had morphed into optimism. If a single mother who looked like Karen could get a guy like this, then someday Rebecca could, too.

  Since Rebecca had moved back to Brooklyn, the two women had had wine a few times in Rebecca’s apartment. She had left the kids at Karen’s on several occasions when she had to run out to the Food Coop. She had started training with Wesley and was discovering physical strength she didn’t know she had. Her biceps had new definition and she had finally dropped her five pounds of baby weight. She was even doing jiujitsu at a space near Union Square.

  “Do I get a discount for knowing you longer than anyone here?” CC asked Rebecca, bringing an armful of boys’ clothes to the register.

  “I’ll take another ten off the twenty,” Rebecca told CC softly, so the others wouldn’t hear.

  “I’m just kidding!” CC said. “How are you going to make any money if you shmear all your friends?”

  “I saw this snap-button striped shirt I wish you had in my size,” Seth said. “This place makes me want to be eleven again.”

  “You are eleven,” Rebecca said.

  CC and Seth were cute together—she was always smiling when she was around him—though Rebecca couldn’t see his physical appeal. He was four inches shorter than CC and skinny, with bony shoulders.

  Rebecca scanned the room. Aside from CC and Karen, most of the faces were unfamiliar. Where had they come from? Rebecca’s cynical side thought that the attendance had to do with the publicity she had gotten through her relationship with Stuart, the thousands of stories that had run online and in the tabloids about the reunion, breakup, and settlement. After she and Stuart reached their child support settlement (twenty-seven thousand dollars a month plus half of Sonam’s salary and 100 percent of educational and medical expenses), the magazines had speculated on the sum, each quoting sources close to her and Stuart, each of them wrong. Even CC and Marco didn’t know what she was getting. One item, which referred to Rebecca as Stuart’s “baby mama,” had mentioned that she was the owner of Seed, “a high-end vintage boutique for children in the up-and-coming Brooklyn neighborhood of Gowanus.”

  Rebecca didn’t like being followed by the occasional paparazzo, but she didn’t feel guilty that Stuart’s child-support money was helping her grow the business. She had been able to tap into her savings to put more money into the store, hiring a salesgirl and expanding the selection. She was in negotiations to open a second store on Court Street in Cobble Hill, which she was going to call Seed 2 because the alternative, Seedy, didn’t sound right for something connected to kids.

  A woman stepped up to the register. She was a knockout, with high cheekbones and an Elle Macpherson vibe. “We’re going to Costa Rica, and I had to get this for my daughter,” she said, plopping down a 1950s bathing suit with a skirt in a Pucci-esque print.

  “It’s adorable,” Rebecca said as she folded it and put it in crepe paper. “Can I ask how you heard about the event?”

  “My girlfriend got an e-mail about it,” she said, pointing to a leggy woman by the door. “I think it was forwarded by a friend of hers. We came from Tribeca. We don’t have any vintage stores for kids in our neighborhood. Open one near us, please!”

  They had trekked to Gowanus on a cold Thursday night from lower Manhattan. Maybe someday she could open a store there. Rebecca never would have dreamed that rich Tribecans would come to Gowanus to visit a kids’ store—but there were no limits to what people were willing to do for their progeny.

  Karen and Wesley were talking near the food table. Sensing a lull, Rebecca beckoned her salesgirl to take over for her and moved around the counter to neaten the buffet table. “You guys having fun?” Rebecca asked Karen.

  “Oh my God, that reading was too much,” Karen said. “Is our neighborhood really that dramatic?”

  “Fiction is always more interesting than reality,” Rebecca said. CC and Seth had wandered over, and CC was diving into a bowl of olives.

  “It’s so weird,” Karen said, looking at CC and Rebecca. “Each of us is a single mom. You know, Rebecca, you should come to a Park Slope Single Parents mixer. I think you’d get something out of it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Who knows? You might meet a man.”

  “I’m not really looking right now.” Rebecca would not say it aloud, but she would not be caught dead at Park Slope Single Parents.

  There was a line at the register again—young mothers, all holding children’s clothes from another generation. The salesgirl looked overwhelmed. In a second Rebecca would go over to help her. She glanced beyond the sea of faces to the cars flashing by on Fourth Avenue. They were calling it a future boulevard. It would be like Fifth Avenue, dotted with high-end restaurants and cafés, and someday no one would remember that it was once glass shops and tire stores.

  Rebecca had mixed feelings about being part of the change. Hipsters now did beer runs on bicycles to the bars up and down the avenue. The Nets arena was going through; they had already broken ground, and you could see it rising as you passed. Poor people would soon be booted out to make way for high-end retail shops. Rebecca had been part of the transformation, but it was taking off on its own. You walked down the same street a thousand times, and then one day, everything was different.

  Marco

  Wednesday afternoons at three Marco went to an A.A. meeting in Greenwood Heights. It was in a modest sober-living house, in the fron
t room. He would take the R from Borough Hall, near Morham, get off at Twenty-fifth Street, and ride his scooter from Fourth Avenue. There was a rough high school right near the meeting. As he rolled past the yard on the Xooter, a Chinese kid with a Mohawk called out, “Faggot! Fucking faggot loser!” He knew the kid probably said “faggot” because of the scooter, but it stung anyway. He remembered being called that on the street with his boyfriend the unemployed actor. Guys would shout it from passing cars.

  He was early to the meeting, and watched it fill up with the regulars. He wasn’t sold on A.A. but had found that he liked the stories—the crack addict who looked like an accountant, the dominatrix who shot heroin, the handsome black schoolteacher who almost wound up homeless. Marco liked listening more than talking.

  The meeting turned out to be a B minus. A little slow. Some sharers were better than others—funnier and more exciting. At the end a white woman with a nicotine voice and a gaunt, weathered face came up and said, “You’re Tony, right? You wanna come over to my place and hang out?”

  “I’m not Tony,” Marco said.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. Then she paused and said, “You wanna come over to my place and hang out anyway?”

  Not everyone at the meetings was a bore. Once he met a black transvestite named Janet, whose best line was “I’m not in relationships. I’m in situation-ships.”

  Though Marco hadn’t had a drink since the accident—soon it would be eighty days—after they got back from Greenport, he bought an iPhone on a new plan and created a new Grindr account. His handle was “DILF.” Since then he had hooked up with a skinny sober Jewish literary agent in the guy’s home office, thrilling, over-the-top sex where everything was allowed. He knew Todd would be furious if he found out. There were others, too. Acting teachers, trainers, osteopaths, even a minor league baseball player. He suspected that Todd knew and was choosing to turn his head. The subject of couples therapy had been dropped, and they still made love only once a month. How could Todd think that was enough?

  After the A.A. meeting, he was careful to avoid the school yard in case the kids were there. He went into the subway station at Twenty-fifth Street. He found a seat on a wooden bench and took out some papers to grade. The train came. He got on and found a seat, tucking the scooter between his legs. He became conscious of someone looking at him, and when he raised his head he saw a young Latino man in scrubs, smiling broadly. Marco didn’t remember him, and then he had a vision of the guy crouched over him. “Eduard?” he said.

  “I thought it was you!” Eduard said. “But I wasn’t sure. You remember me?”

  “Of course I remember!” They embraced. Eduard’s smile was exuberant. “I wanted to call you,” Marco said, “but Todd didn’t get your number. I wanted to thank you.”

  “Oh, come on, anyone would have done the same thing.”

  “I don’t think so.” Marco indicated the scrubs. “How are you? What are you doing?”

  “I’m an RN now,” Eduard said. “I love it. I just got off my shift. I work at SUNY Downstate. How is everything? How are your boys?”

  Jason was an easier baby than at the beginning. He cried less and slept more consistently at night, and Marco’s initial fury with him had faded. He was cuter, more of an observer, less hyper than Enrique.

  They were arriving at the Prospect Avenue stop. “They’re good, good. The baby’s six months now. He can sit up.”

  “And your husband?”

  Todd was still punishing him for Grindr and the drinking. He would be sweet for a week and then get upset over something stupid and give Marco the cold shoulder for a few weeks more.

  “He’s . . .” Marco was going to say something banal and complimentary, to keep the conversation light, so when the words came out, they surprised him: “We broke up.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I moved out.” It didn’t feel like he was lying; he could see the plan emerging in his mind as he spoke. The doors opened at Prospect Avenue and closed. “I still see the boys. But we’re not together.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Eduard said. He was so trusting that Marco almost felt guilty. Almost.

  “It was a long time coming,” Marco said. “We were bad together, and it was bad for the boys.” Todd was probably cooking dinner right about now. Enrique would be playing dress-up in his room, and Jason would be banging pots on the floor like he always did when Todd cooked. “Listen, can I take you out to dinner?” Marco asked.

  “Sure, when?”

  “Now. We ran into each other on the train all this time later. What are the chances of that? It must be a sign from God. You saved my life. The least I can do is buy you a nice meal.”

  “I’m kind of tired,” Eduard said, but there was a flicker of hope in his eyes. It made Marco high to think he could be attractive to this Puerto Rican boy. “I was going home to my mother. I need to sleep.”

  “Come on. I want to take you somewhere nice. Name a restaurant you’ve never been to, that you’ve always wanted to go to. Anywhere.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I’d be dead if it weren’t for you. You’re my angel. Mi angel de la guarda.”

  “You are seriously exaggerating now.”

  “Did you know that Joseph Heller married his nurse?”

  “Who?”

  “Joseph Heller,” Marco said. “He wrote Catch-22. When it was late in life and he was almost dead, he left his wife for his nurse. You know why? It was cheaper.”

  Eduard didn’t say anything and then burst into laughter. The doors opened at the Fourth Avenue–Ninth Street stop, Marco’s. He looked up at the red light next to the doors. They shut, and the light blinked off before the train rumbled into the tunnel.

  Melora

  When the bearded man sat beside Melora in the first-class cabin of United Airlines Flight 347 from JFK to LAX and looked at her once, then twice, she sighed. One of the frustrating consequences of her star turn as Gwen in Fifth of July was that she had to contend with many more overzealous fans. They were the worst kind—theater people—wacky on a level that made Tolkien readers look mild-mannered.

  “Big fan,” Melora’s seat-mate said. He had a faint beard, like Bob Dylan’s in the 1970s, scruffy and thin.

  She nodded, smiled vaguely. The day the Brantley review had come out, everything had changed. The same people who once cast her pitying looks on the sidewalk now mobbed her for autographs.

  She began to feel that she had audiences in the palm of her hand. She would take note of the laughs she got and then refine her comedic timing in subsequent performances to make it sharper. It got to the point where she controlled each moment she was onstage.

  Vanessa had been busy fielding all the casting calls. The Public needed a Rosalind for Shakespeare in the Park, and Melora had signed on after the director, Dan Sullivan, had begged her to do it opposite Clive Owen. HBO wanted her to play the lead in a new series about a female pornographer, called Hard Luck. Showtime was doing a series about a gynecologist with a bad love life and wanted her to meet about it.

  She had hired an assistant, an industrious bisexual Oberlin grad named Alice, to handle all the attention. Dozens of film executives had flown to New York to meet with her, since the play schedule didn’t allow her any weekends in L.A. They were pitching roles that would have gone to Julia, Sandy, or Nicole. Vengeful mothers. District attorneys in Grisham-like courtroom dramas. Moralistic public defenders. The Grete Waitz story. A feature on the woman in England who was rumored to have raped her Mormon lover. A football movie about the oldest cheerleader in the NFL.

  Melora was taking it all slowly and calmly, reading scripts, discussing them with Vanessa, not rushing to make any decisions. When she won the Oscar for Poses she had hurried to sign up for new projects and as a result, she made poor choices. Now she knew to take her time.

  After two extensions of the run and $7 million worth of ticket sales, Fifth of July had closed in January. She was on her way to L
.A. to begin work on a reverse-gender remake of The Stepford Wives. She was excited to do something light after the loftiness of Fifth of July and thought the film script, written by a girl right out of Columbia, was sharp and intelligent.

  Stuart had been surprisingly supportive during her comeback. She had never understood when women said that they were better friends with their ex-husbands after the marriage than before, but now she did. At the beginning of her Fifth of July run, he confessed that he had fathered an illegitimate son with a Park Slope mother while still married to Melora. He met the woman working on his shift at the Prospect Park Food Coop, the coop Melora had insisted they join for its public relations value.

  At first she had been horrified and wounded. She felt it was her own fault for driving him into another woman’s arms. All the old feelings of self-loathing and loneliness came back. But then she started going for runs alone in Hudson River Park and thinking about it, and she realized she hadn’t been much of a wife to Stuart during that part of the marriage. She had been so worked up about the wallet. She wasn’t an adult woman, she had been a trembling, fearful child.

  The baby mama, a clothier named Rebecca, had moved in with Stuart briefly in Chelsea, but it hadn’t worked out. Afterward Melora had gone over to meet Benny, who turned out to look exactly like him. He was almost two, sociable and chatty. Melora felt surprising affection for the child and for Stuart. It was good that Orion had a brother. He talked about Benny all the time, invigorated by the new relationship. It didn’t make sense to be angry, not with a toddler.

  The flight attendant asked what they wanted to drink. He said an orange juice, and she did, too. She was trying not to drink during the day.

  “I caught you in the closing week of Fifth of July,” the man said. “After all those raves, I was expecting to be disappointed, but I wasn’t. You were just—real. Which I know is a strange thing to say about a performance.”