Laura & Emma

by Kate Greathead

  The baby fell asleep in the middle of nursing. Laura laid her in the pen in the corner of the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea as she waited for Sandra to come back and take over. The front door opened, but she could tell from the heavy footsteps it was her father.

  “Hello,” he said, shuffling into the kitchen.

  “Hello,” Laura said, picking up a section of that morning’s paper.

  “Smells funny.” He headed toward the liquor cabinet.

  “I agree,” Laura said. “Not sure what it is.”

  After pouring himself a whiskey, Douglas disappeared through the swinging door into the living room, and before it swung shut her mother slipped in, a nervous, giddy look on her face.

  “I did something naughty,” she whispered.

  “What did you do?” Laura asked.

  “Something I should’ve done a long time ago.” Bibs fingered her pearls, glancing skittishly at the swinging door.

  “Where’s the TV?” came Douglas’s voice from the living room.

  After covering her mouth to silence a giggle, Bibs composed herself and shouted back, “I threw it out!

  “I did,” she whispered to Laura. “I really did!”

  Her father came back into the kitchen. “You did what with it?”

  “Sandra and I carried it out to the curb,” Bibs said. “Also the VCR. A sanitation truck hauled them away.”

  “And why, exactly, did you throw the television away, dear?”

  “I hated being lied to and told what to do—don’t change the channel, we’ll be right back,” she said. “After umpteen commercials they’d be back!”

  Douglas looked unamused.

  “That’s not all,” Bibs said. “There was also another reason. I found a tape in the VCR. I tried to burn it on the stove, but Sandra had a fit and the smoke alarm went off. Anyhoo, I think you know what it is.”

  Douglas made the throaty noise that signaled he was about to speak.

  “Uh-uh!” Bibs wagged a finger. “You don’t need to say anything. Just look in the mirror, give your head a little shake, and we won’t speak of it again.”

  Wearing a poker face, Douglas turned to leave the room. “Tell me, dear.” He paused by the door. “How am I supposed to watch the evening news?”

  “You can read a newspaper,” Bibs said, and hurled a section of the Times in his direction. It unfurled midflight, landing on the floor beside Emma’s pen. The commotion woke her up and she lay there looking startled, her eyes darting about. When she saw Laura, her face puckered like an overripe tomato and she began to cry. As soon as Laura picked her up, the crying stopped.

  “I think you’re a faker,” Laura said in an animated voice. “My soft little faker.”

  Laura drummed her fingers atop the summit of Emma’s belly, which trembled as Emma let out a spastic infant cackle. Laura, who’d hated being tickled as a child, felt a little bad doing this, but oh, she loved that sound. And she could tell, by the expectant gaze on Emma’s face when she pulled her fingers away, that Emma liked this—that she was waiting for it to happen again. The little space between her nose and upper lip dimpled in anticipatory excitement; she fixed her eyes on Laura’s and followed them like liquid magnets. Laura’s love felt like a bird in her chest, beating its wings against her rib cage.

  And then Sandra returned, and Emma’s arms shot out in her direction and she let out a despondent wail, which stopped the moment Laura passed her over.

  “Thank you, Sandra,” she said. “I’ll be in the next room if you need anything.”

  “Thank your father, he pay me,” Sandra responded, bouncing the baby on her hip.

  * * *

  LAURA HAD NO DOUBT WHAT was on the VHS tape her mother had discovered, and she was relieved when there was no further mention of it. She wondered how her father had acquired such a video. Had it come in the mail? Had he gone into one of those awful little stores in Times Square?

  As a child she had discovered her father’s stash of dirty magazines in the back of the linen closet. She couldn’t remember how old she’d been—young enough not to think anything of the fact that she enjoyed looking at the photos. And she had periodically returned to the linen closet to look at them again. This had gone on for a while—a few years, maybe. Then one day Nicholas had been caught in the library with a pair of binoculars, peering out the window that overlooked the garden.

  “What are you looking at?” their mother had asked.

  “Nothing,” Nicholas said. He returned the binoculars to the shelf and abruptly left the room.

  Bibs walked over to the window. “Well, at least we know he’s normal,” she said, giggling.

  When her mother had left the room, Laura went over to the window to have a look. In the adjacent garden a woman lay sunbathing. She’d peeled the top part of her bathing suit down and her breasts were exposed. A hat covered her face.

  When Laura next found herself in the linen closet, her mother’s voice popped into her head: At least we know he’s normal. After that, she stopped doing it.

  EMMA, AT THE TOP OF the charts for weight and height, was behind when it came to physical milestones. To encourage her to crawl, Laura used butter, which she loved, as a lure. She would put Emma down on one side of the room, a stick of butter on the other. Working her arms like flippers, Emma would pull herself across the kitchen floor toward it. Her legs, too thick to bend or separate, dragged behind like a single useless appendage. Cries of excitement, grunts of exertion, and the sound of her rubbery palms smacking linoleum ended in tears of frustration when, just as the butter was in reach, it was taken away.

  The pediatrician assured Laura that there was nothing to worry about. Dr. Brown was short for a man—only a few inches taller than Laura—and had a boyishly slender physique. He wore round tortoiseshell glasses, a bow tie, and impeccably polished shoes. He had a gentle, soft-spoken demeanor, but when he found something amusing, which he often did, he was quick to laugh. It moved her to think of a man who didn’t have any children of his own spending his days taking care of other people’s.

  Laura was surprised to learn Dr. Brown wasn’t married—he was so kind and easy to talk to. Then again, most of the women she knew were fools when it came to choosing husbands.

  NICHOLAS WAS CONSTANTLY TRYING TO prove himself. This was how Laura made sense of his girlfriends over the years, all of whom looked like they’d stepped out of the pages of a magazine. Stephanie, the latest one, was the first who was an actual professional model. Nicholas had told them something vague, that she was an assistant of some sort, but during the meal it came out that she was really a model, albeit for clothing catalogs they had never heard of and newspaper circulars. Laura had no interest in the fashion industry, but did her best to pretend otherwise as she asked Stephanie questions about her work. Stephanie had just started to tell them about her latest shoot when Nicholas aggressively steered the conversation toward President Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile-defense plan, of which he was fully in favor. A two-way conversation between Douglas and Nicholas ensued.

  “You know what I think of the current political situation,” Bibs interrupted. She waited a beat to make sure she had everyone’s full attention. “I think it’s boring.”

  After Nicholas and Stephanie left, Bibs stood before Laura and Douglas in the living room, a confrontational glint in her eye.

  “So she grew up in Florida, so she loves Princess Diana, so what,” she said. “Don’t be such a snob!”

  Laura glanced across the room. Her father either hadn’t heard or was refusing to validate the accusation with a response.

  Bibs disappeared and returned a moment later holding the pastel-blue carnations Stephanie had brought, which she’d put in a vase. Setting it down on the table with a thump, she repeated the charge. “Don’t be such a snob!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Douglas finally said from behind his copy of the Times. “I thought she was lovely.”

  “I wasn’t
talking to you,” Bibs responded. “But of course you did. You couldn’t take your eyes off of her—I think everyone noticed that.”

  “But Laura was very polite to her,” said Douglas. “She made a real effort.”

  “I saw the way you were looking at her nails,” Bibs said. “And I saw your face when she said she’d never heard of Edith what’s-her-face.”

  Douglas peered over his paper to offer Laura a sympathetic eye-roll.

  “I thought Stephanie was very nice,” Laura said. “I’m happy Nicholas has someone.”

  “Very nice!” Bibs scoffed. “Do you ever say how you really feel?”

  “And how, exactly, do I really feel?” Laura asked.

  “Since you’re the expert,” Douglas added.

  Her father’s coming to her defense buoyed Laura—but only for a moment, as Bibs shook her head, more in disappointment than condemnation, it appeared, and left the room.

  “Don’t worry about your mother,” Douglas told her. “You were perfectly appropriate with Stephanie.”

  EMMA WOULD BE TURNING THREE in May; it was time to move out of 136 and into an apartment of their own. Laura was hoping for something near the park, close but not too close to her parents. “A sunny two-bedroom with a working fireplace on one of those shady streets between Madison and Fifth would be ideal,” she told Joan, a former classmate, now a real estate broker. Joan said no such thing existed in the price range Laura quoted, not between Madison and Fifth. But there was an apartment between Lexington and Third: a prewar penthouse. It had two and a half bedrooms, a terrace, a view of the Empire State Building, and a wood-burning fireplace. It had just gone on the market and would get snatched up any minute, so they’d have to act fast.

  It sounded too good to be true, and then Joan revealed the exact street address.

  “Harlem,” Laura said. “That explains the price.”

  “Across the street from Harlem,” Joan corrected her.

  * * *

  LOCATED ON THE SOUTH SIDE of the street, thus placing it officially on the Upper East Side, 166 East Ninety-sixth was the only high-rise on the block. All four sides of the building were jarringly exposed, giving it a certain primitive look: sky, street, building. Randomly perched atop this structure, like the afterthought of a child’s crudely simplistic, precariously tall tower of blocks, was the penthouse.

  The apartment was small for a penthouse. Surrounded by a terrace of potted plants, it felt separate from the rest of the building. Taking Laura outside to admire the unobstructed view, Joan said, “Unlike other penthouses farther south, you have complete privacy up here.”

  The interior had casement windows and original hardwood floors. The bathroom fixtures and appliances had not been updated in some time, which Laura liked.

  “I don’t know about you,” Joan said, “but I feel like I’m in a cozy brick cottage on the edge of a cliff in the English countryside in the nineteenth century.”

  On their way down, the elevator stopped on the fourth floor. An African-American man stepped on carrying a hamper of laundry and pressed B, for basement.

  “He’s the only one in the building,” Joan whispered when they got off in the lobby.

  Laura wished she hadn’t said that, or had at least found a better way to phrase it than “the only one.” Not knowing how to respond, she just nodded slightly, as if this information couldn’t have mattered less to her.

  “The washer-dryers were all replaced last year, by the way,” Joan added brightly.

  * * *

  IT WAS DIFFERENT, LIVING SO high up in the sky; it would take some getting used to.

  With the views came a greater awareness of Manhattan and the rhythms that governed its chaotic pulsing sprawl. At the end of each day the city slowly wound down as hot dog men packed up their carts, metal grates rolled down over the mom-and-pop shops, curbs accumulated freshly bagged trash, and people disappeared from the streets into the warrens of the subway system. Following this came a brief lull in noise and activity, during which their apartment felt like a peaceful, cozy place to be.

  Like watching a soap bubble emerge from a wand only to see it pop, upon being registered this precious pocket of tranquility was immediately punctured by the rip of a motorcycle, the shriek of a siren, a whoop here, a whoop there, gradually forming an off-kilter chorus of unwholesome sounds as packs of hoodlums began swaggering about, marking their territory with gobs of spit and booming voices, while cars of bombastic proportions bounced through the streets blasting music that buzzed the windows and rattled the foundations of apartments as high up as the seventeenth floor.

  * * *

  NOW THAT IT WAS JUST the two of them, Laura would need someone to watch Emma while she was at work. A perk of having an extra half bedroom, Margaret had pointed out, was that Laura could get a live-in au pair: a European girl, young and well educated, eager to live in America, full of light and energy. “An incredibly good bargain,” she’d added, explaining room and board were considered part of their salary. Indeed, Laura was shocked to learn how low the going rate was.

  She contacted an agency and began interviewing candidates, all of whom seemed highly competent, warm, and enthusiastic about the job. This final quality perplexed Laura, who couldn’t imagine leaving some picturesque European village to move to filthy-crowded-loud Manhattan and essentially become an indentured servant. They were all lovely in their own way, but Irene especially so.

  “I’m the eldest of eleven, so I grew up with little ones,” she told Laura in her Irish brogue. “A little one in m’bed, a little one on m’lap, the house was crawling with ’em.”

  Her soothingly brisk, cadenced manner of speaking was punctuated by a quick, familiar laugh. Whatever she said had an amusing, musical quality, as if she were reciting the lyrics of a naughty song or reading from a book of nursery rhymes.

  Emma was immediately smitten, tugging her down the hall into her bedroom.

  “Missy, you’re a funny one, aren’t you,” Irene said, when Emma tried to push Laura out of the room and shut the door.

  When it was time for Irene to go, Emma threw a tantrum. After pacifying her by putting on The Sound of Music, Laura called the agency to let them know she’d made other arrangements and wouldn’t be needing their services after all. Her contact there asked if something was wrong with the girls they’d sent over.

  “They all seemed great,” Laura said. “I’ve just realized that a live-in au pair is a bit out of my price range.”

  * * *

  JACK, THE LIBRARY’S DIRECTOR, REJECTED Laura’s proposal to modify her schedule to part-time hours. “I’m sorry, Laura, I’m sympathetic to your situation, but this is a full-time position,” he explained.

  “I understand,” Laura said, privately balking at taking the next step. Jack was a kind boss and she hated the idea of undermining his authority. Conflicts made her second-guess herself. Was she being selfish or unreasonable? Taking advantage of her familial relationship with the institution? Asking too much?

  “Absolutely not,” Margaret assured her. “You’re a single mother—don’t be ridiculous.”

  So Laura approached the board, and the trustees got involved and a new contract was drafted—and it was even more generous than what Laura had originally asked for. Not only would she be a part-time employee (her hours corresponding with the hours Emma spent in preschool), but she would also maintain her full-time salary and benefits.

  THE ROUTE TO EMMA’S PRESCHOOL, Park Avenue Protestant, included one of Laura’s favorite blocks in the city, Ninety-fifth Street between Lexington and Park. The brownstones were beautiful, but it was the trees that did it for Laura. They were old and tall and healthy, and in the summer months their leaves formed such a dense canopy that it almost felt like walking through a tunnel. Margaret had grown up on this block and so had a few other people Laura knew, and they all called it Goat Hill. And so Laura and Emma called it that, too.

  “Do you want to know why it’s called Goat Hill?”
Emma asked one morning as Laura pushed her stroller up its sloping sidewalk.

  “Sure,” said Laura.

  “Because in the olden days, New York was the country and this is where the goats lived.”

  “How interesting,” Laura responded.

  “Wanna know how I know that?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “ ’Cuz I used to live here.”

  “No, you used to live on Sixty-fifth Street,” Laura corrected her. “But they look a little similar. I could see how you might get them confused.”

  “I wasn’t talking about that!” Emma snapped. “I was talking about my old life—when I was Wendy.”

  “I thought Wendy lived in a tree house in the woods—or was it a houseboat.”

  “No, Mabel lived in a tree house, Matilda lived on a boat.”

  Emma twisted around and looked up at Laura, her face scrunched in contempt.

  “Oh, yes,” Laura apologized. “Of course! So many previous lives to keep track of.”

  “We are poor,” Emma said as they approached the end of Goat Hill.

  “Why do you say that?” Laura asked.

  “ ’Cuz we have to live on Ninety-six Street between Lex and Third, which is not our neighborhood!”

  “What’s our neighborhood?” Laura asked, curious to hear Emma’s answer.

  “A neighborhood is where you see people you know and go into stores!”

  “I know what a neighborhood is,” Laura said. “My question is, what is our neighborhood?”

  “This!” Emma said, waving her arms as they emerged onto Park Avenue, where the sidewalks were hosed down each morning, and again in the afternoon, and the concrete had the slick, pristine look of the shoreline moments after the tide retreats.

  Laura didn’t say anything because she had to agree. Their neighborhood began on Goat Hill and went all the way to Central Park. This was where they saw people they knew and conducted their business. Once they crossed Lexington Avenue onto their block, it was a whole different world.