by Lisa Beazley
Ubud, Bali
July 7 Cassie,
I’m in Bali right now on a yoga retreat. It’s so beautiful here, and my problems seem like a distant memory when I look out at the rice paddies built into the hillside across the way. The edges of green that make up each tier of the watery plateaus, sometimes intersecting or crossing, look kind of like a road map. The monkeys, meanwhile, are a menace! They keep stealing food and pooping on my patio. When I try to scare them off, they look at me like I’m the pest. Cass, unless there’s something I don’t know, Leo is a good person. He is great with the kids and has always treated you well. And I see the way he looks at you. He loves you so much. If you are bored, please don’t mistake boredom for a bad marriage. I know what an actual bad marriage looks like, and I know what actual single motherhood looks like. I’d take a boring marriage to a good guy over either one of those scenarios any day. So your heart doesn’t sing when he walks in the door. So what? Did you expect to feel like a newlywed your whole life? You’ve got to stop waiting for something to change and make something happen. You have all of the ingredients for an exciting life, but maybe you haven’t figured out the recipe yet. (Oh Lord, that was corny—sorry—but true!) You know what our writing experiment has taught me? The power of having something to look forward to. Knowing every day that when I go to the mailbox there might be a letter from you—it’s transformed my whole outlook. Let things transform you. Little things, even, can be magic. Be open to them. Create some rituals with Leo that you look forward to. So that’s my rescue effort. Please say you’ll give it a try. I can’t bear to see your marriage fall apart; you have one of the good ones. Love, Sid The mail from Bali was obviously slower than from Singapore. I’d had to wait nearly two weeks from when we spoke on the phone until I received that letter. I know because I’d just finished a ten-day course of antibiotics for strep throat. Going so long without the letters was hard on me. And it wasn’t just the letters I’d missed. The act of scanning, saving, and posting them had become an empowering and comforting ritual, an antidote to the impotency that comes with mothering three-year-olds. To compensate, I doubled down on my Facebook habit. But that’s like replacing a nourishing breakfast with a glazed doughnut. It gives you momentary pleasure but ultimately leaves you empty, disappointed, and hungry for more.
Needless to say, her letter was a welcome delight, and one I devoured greedily. I nodded my head yes and teared up as I read. As soon as I finished, I read it again. And then I scanned it and read it yet again. She was not wrong about Leo. I bristled to see “fall apart” used in association with my marriage. I stopped short, though, of heeding her advice directly. But I promised myself I would—soon. Meanwhile, my most recent letter, well on its way to Singapore, likely gave her little confidence in my ability to turn things around. New York July 10 Sid, I’ve started acting—in secret—on my fantasy to move out of the city. There are several levels to it. The most guilt-inducing one is when I picture myself driving some sort of big, gas-guzzling vehicle while the boys watch cartoons from a screen in the back. I go to Target and Costco and buy giant containers of toilet paper and juice boxes. I pull into our garage and let the boys charge in, where they have their choice between a basement rec room full of plastic toys of unknown origin and our big backyard jungle gym. The more mild versions of this reverie involve Brooklyn. So today I went to look at apartments with my secret broker, Wendy. Leo has no idea I’m thinking about moving. I fought him so hard to stay, but I am going insane here. Last night I told Leo I was going to dinner in Brooklyn with a friend, which was not really a lie—I did grab a burrito, and Wendy is like a friend. She showed me two apartments in Park Slope, which is kind of like the West Village but with gay women instead of gay men balancing out the families. One was amazing—the bottom two floors of a brownstone on Garfield Place. The seven quiet blocks to the subway seemed so strange. I’m going all the way to Westchester County next week, just to see if I can picture us living outside of the city. Tell anyone about this and I’ll deny it, by the way. What is going on with Adrian? Have you confronted him? Sid, you could always have any man in the world—and you still can. I know that’s not the point, but it must be some small comfort to you. Or is this stuff just as hard on beautiful people as it is on us mere mortals? I’m thinking of you all the time and hoping for only good things. Love you. —Cassie My fantasy of leaving the city felt almost as scandalous as the one about leaving Leo. My commitment to urban life—and more specifically to New York—was deep and well documented. As managing editor of City Green magazine, I’d carved out a public persona based on the firm belief that cities were the key to the world’s environmental salvation. I’d moderated panels of urbanists and “futurists” who preached that developing existing cities—up and never out—was the only way to save the planet from certain ruin. How handy that where I live became the ultimate reflection of my values. My perfect-ten “walk score” delighted me and validated my lifestyle all the more. But now I see that I was simply (and often smugly) taking credit for the situation I found myself in. I was no better than Jenna, claiming to be a parenting expert because she has an easygoing child. But beyond that, my address was as much a part of my identity as being a mom or having brown hair was. I arrived in ninety-nine and stayed after 9/11. It’s how I bought my apartment for such a good price. It made me interesting to my friends and family back in Ohio. Sid is the beautiful one, the kind and charismatic one, the one who had the baby so young, the midwife, the one who married the dashing and rich man, the one who moved to Singapore. And I’m the plain one—but the one who lives in New York City. It was a vital differentiator. When I got pregnant, it was like a three-way honeymoon between Leo, the city, and me. The first weeks after that plus sign finally appeared on the little stick were a combination of secretive celebrations, trying not to get our hopes up too far, and detoxing from a year of chore sex. By the time my second trimester hit, we let ourselves believe that it was actually happening. When I started to show, I felt special and cute. Even though we didn’t have a savings account, I spent an obscene amount of money on fashionable maternity clothes I could wear to work. I was in love. In love with my city, with my husband, with my life and my future. The hormones buzzed around inside of me, making me exceptionally agreeable to Leo’s infatuation with my pregnancy-induced porn-star breasts. Instead of being hungover on Friday and Saturday mornings, I felt vibrant and healthy. While I walked around all glowy and sexed up, the city embraced me as never before. I reveled in the renewed attentiveness: seats offered on the subway; nods of respect from transit workers and police officers—family men and women, no doubt. As I waddled across Seventh Avenue sometime in my eighth month, a man yelled from his car, “You look beautiful!” Then, as if to explain himself, he added, “Sorry! I just love pregnant women!” Leo thought it was weird. I thought it was about par for the course. Neighbors carried things for me. The delivery guys from FreshDirect and UPS asked me how I was feeling. The manager at Health & Harmony—after having ignored me for years—suddenly knew my name and which brand of yogurt I preferred. Being pregnant turned the West Village into my own personal Mayberry. I wonder if all of these kind strangers had known they were going to turn on me when the babies were no longer constrained to the safe haven of my gigantic womb, but out in the world and demanding to be reckoned with. I was crestfallen to learn that a mom with a stroller ranks nowhere near a pregnant woman in the city’s hierarchy of acceptance. In fact, she is right down there with chubby Midwestern tourists puttering three abreast down Forty-eighth Street during rush hour. My favorite cafés and shops became off-limits. My double-wide stroller fit through almost no doors, and when I did manage to jostle my way in, I always felt as if I were in breach of that unwritten contract among New Yorkers: Don’t mess up the flow. I looked with envy at the mothers of one baby, casually going about their day with their little treasure strapped to them in a sling like a poetic accessory,
while I might as well have been riding around Manhattan on a tricycle kitted out with a siren and a flag. Had all those smiles and well-meaning chat sessions been goodbyes? If it was assumed that we’d be leaving once the babies were out, I didn’t get that memo. Looking back, I suppose it’s what a lover who knows he’s about to spurn you might do. Be a little more patient, a little more kind in those days and weeks leading up to the big letdown, knowing that the day was coming when he would turn to you and say, “You have too much baggage and you don’t fit in my life anymore. I’m afraid you’ll have to move out now. Also, you look like shit. Get some sleep and get out of those sweatpants.” In those early sleepless months, I wanted to cry sometimes when a counter person was impatient with me. It just no longer seemed crucial that I have my money out and ready, my order on the tip of my tongue, when I’m sixth in line at the bagel shop. But each time people behind me ordered and paid, with me still fishing for my wallet in my messy diaper bag and yelling out changes to my order, I proved to them that I no longer belonged. I made silent apologies to any slow-moving tourists or dreamy newly initiated New Yorkers I’d ever let feel my impatience. And although I couldn’t remember ever heaving a heavy sigh at a discombobulated new mother, I’m sure I must have, God forgive me. I no longer walked the streets with easy confidence. No one stopped me to ask for directions. I wondered if one less baby would have mattered, or if maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a mom. Three and a half years on, I’ve gotten over a lot of my insecurities about motherhood, but most days I still struggle to feel like a valuable part of the living, breathing, perfect mess that is New York. And depending on the day, the general mood in the air, and the behavior of my children, my attitude ranges from meek (I’m so sorry. Excuse me. I know we don’t fit. We’ll be out of your way in a minute. Sorry.) to defiant and brazen (We clog up the subway entrances, we spill things, and we’re here to stay. Deal with it.). When I started looking at other apartments, it felt slightly icky. I loved that Morton Street apartment like a family member. I considered the fact that I had purchased it (with a loan from my parents for half of the down payment) to be the crowning achievement of my life. Anyone with a working uterus can have babies, but a precious few can own a charming prewar apartment in Manhattan. The first place Wendy showed me was truly dreadful and only reaffirmed my commitment to Morton Street. I was going through a phase where I thought I wanted a place that wasn’t so old. Someplace where each night from September through April the creaking and clanging radiator didn’t work itself into such a frenzy that you worried it would burst from the floor or, worse, wake the children. Someplace where when I scrubbed the floor, it would appear clean. Someplace perhaps with a second bathroom or, say, a broom closet. But the new construction in “Park Slope” was atrociously banal. Its location, on dodgy and treeless Fourth Avenue, between a parking lot and an auto-repair shop, across the street from a crumbling cement wall and a garishly signed chiropractor’s office, deflated and depressed me. It was a far cry from the leafy brownstone-lined streets dotted with small cafés and bookstores I’d imagined when I’d schlepped out there. (Thank goodness Wendy later showed me the real Park Slope.) The apartment itself did feature the sleek and modern kitchen and baths it advertised, but the cheap drywall and fake little “balconies” half the size of my fire escape sent me running back into the loving arms of Morton Street. And yet. It did get the wheels spinning. After the Fourth Avenue disaster, I needed to erase that bad taste from my mouth. If I was going to step out, I was at least going to do it with a handsome, large, well-dressed number, not some cheap and pretentious poseur. So I spent every spare minute scrolling though real estate listings on the New York Times website and StreetEasy, e-mailing links to Wendy. Are these in your budget? she’d ask, as the apartments became more and more generous in size. I intimated that there may have been a touch more wiggle room in the budget than I’d originally let on. I just needed to see a place in the city in which I could envision being happy. Someplace with charm and character and convenience and space. It had to exist, I told myself. I didn’t go so far out of the budget that it would be impossible to fathom—just enough that I’d have to go back to work at a 20 percent raise, or maybe win the Powerball, which I’d started playing every week. I quickly learned that the farther I went from my beloved neighborhood, the more I could get for my money. If I went to Red Hook, I could have closets in every room. To Westchester, a front porch and a backyard. To the Hudson Valley, a proper upstairs and a second bathroom. Singapore