Laura & Emma

by Kate Greathead

  * * *

  THEIR BUILDING DIDN’T HAVE AN elevator man, or even a doorman, just an elderly super named Frank. Most supers stayed behind closed doors and kept to themselves. Not Frank. A cat-collecting, chain-smoking religious fanatic who spent his days painting pastel portraits of Jesus Christ in various ethereal settings, Frank—and these extensions of his identity—were a part of the atmosphere of their lobby.

  To the left of their building was a long brick wall featuring the colorful scrawl of local graffiti artists, and Laura braced herself for the day Emma would be able to sound out F-U-C-K, S-U-C-K, C-O-C-K, and P-U-S-S-Y, among other vulgar words on that wall.

  There was no hosing down of the sidewalk outside their building and it was speckled with pieces of gum that had been spat out, smooshed into the cement, and caked with soot and grime. As you approached the subway entrance on the southeast corner of Ninety-sixth and Lexington, the constellations grew denser.

  On the adjacent corner a store called Kwik Stop advertised twenty-four-hour cash-checking services. Next to this was a row of condemned tenements. The buildings were supposedly vacant, but there was definitely some sort of activity going on in them. At night you could hear dogs barking, and during the day a collection of men hung out on the stoops, occasionally stepping out to the street to lean into the passenger windows of idling cars, their dangling chain necklaces catching the light. Laura wondered if they had guns. It gave her the creeps to live so close.

  On the northeast corner of Ninety-sixth and Lexington was a grocery store called Associated Value. From the outside it looked grungy and depressing, possibly even dangerous. It had never even occurred to Laura as an option. But one evening when they were out of milk, rather than trekking all the way over to Madison, she mustered the courage to venture inside.

  It didn’t smell great; the aisles were narrow and congested with people taking a lot of time to consider their options; the checkout lines were long and moved slowly as customers handed over coupons and, occasionally, food stamps. But apart from this, Laura discovered it was pretty much a normal supermarket. You could find anything and everything you’d need, except it was all significantly cheaper.

  Laura began doing her grocery shopping there, and she couldn’t believe how much she was saving. “People think New York City is so expensive,” she started telling people. “It’s not—you just have to know where to shop.”

  The aisles of Associated Value were difficult to navigate with a stroller, and as Laura got more comfortable shopping there, she would park Emma by the store’s entrance, right beneath a collage of Polaroids featuring the distressed faces of all the people who’d ever been caught shoplifting there. Emma was fascinated by these photos.

  Because they were among the only white people who regularly shopped there, Laura and Emma became minor celebrities among the staff, who loved to tease them and called them snowflakes. Laura felt cozy filling up her cart at Associated Value. It reminded her of the stores of her childhood, before her neighborhood was overtaken by fashion and pretension, when there were small, practical, family-run businesses and people had charge accounts and the shopkeepers knew your name.

  * * *

  EMMA WAS A FEW DAYS shy of her fourth birthday when she began asking about her father. The questions didn’t concern his identity or whereabouts, only his absence, which she’d apparently conflated with nonexistence. Why didn’t she have a dad when everyone else did, she wanted to know. Not everyone did have a dad, Laura countered, some families just had a mom. As an example of this she named Grace, a child they knew from the playground.

  This didn’t answer Emma’s question.

  Laura knew this day was coming, but she hadn’t expected it to come so soon. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing one consulted the pediatrician about, but Dr. Brown was so nice. He always called back right away, and was so patient and kind, no matter how small the issue was.

  “I’m a proponent of telling children the truth,” he told Laura over the phone.

  “The truth,” Laura repeated, realizing Dr. Brown was referring to the story she’d told him four years earlier: that she had conceived Emma using a sperm donor. It was the lie she’d had no reservations telling her parents, her brother, and various acquaintances, but she regretted having told it to Dr. Brown, of whom she’d come to grow quite fond. If there was anyone she trusted more, she couldn’t think who.

  “Children are surprisingly able to understand science,” Dr. Brown said, “if you use the right words.”

  * * *

  THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, DR. BROWN’S secretary called to say that there was something at the front desk for her to pick up when she had the chance. Laura stopped by after dropping Emma off at school.

  Dr. Brown was talking to his secretary when Laura arrived. He took a manila envelope from behind the desk and invited her into his office. The envelope contained a booklet that managed to explain the alternatives to conventional conception in terms that a child would understand. It addressed the basic facts of the human anatomy without embarrassment. While breaking things down in a straightforward way, there was also a reoccurring metaphor of a flower growing in a garden. Lovely, whimsical pencil drawings offset the hand-lettered text, which rhymed.

  “A Very Special Baby,” Laura read the title. “This is perfect. Where did you find it?”

  “Being a doctor wasn’t always my plan,” Dr. Brown said. “Growing up, I wanted to be an author.”

  “You mean you made this?”

  He blushed.

  Dr. Brown soon usurped Margaret Wise Brown as the author of Emma’s favorite bedtime book.

  “A baby grows in her mother’s tummy, where she gets everything she needs,” went the first page. “But a baby’s not how she starts out—she starts out as a . . .”

  “Seed!” Emma would recite, reaching out to turn the page.

  * * *

  “BUT HAVE YOU TWO GONE on a trip yet?” was Bibs’s response to Nicholas’s announcement over dinner at Claude’s. “They say you shouldn’t marry someone you haven’t traveled with.”

  “You mean he didn’t tell you?” Stephanie said with sunny incredulity. “He took me to Bermuda—the Coral Beach Club! That’s where it happened, where he proposed. There was a gorgeous sunset and—”

  Nicholas put a restraining hand over hers.

  “Well, congratulations,” Laura said, raising her water glass to initiate a collective clinking of glasses. “We’re all very happy for both of you!”

  After setting his scotch down, Douglas addressed his wife from across the table.

  “You’ve got it wrong, dear,” he said. “I believe it’s, ‘You shouldn’t travel with someone you’re married to.’ ”

  They all laughed at this, Bibs the loudest. Other patrons turned to look as her cackle ripped across the room.

  “Shouldn’t travel with someone you’re married to!” she repeated several times.

  * * *

  THERE WAS A CERTAIN KIND of woman Laura noticed more and more of in their neighborhood. They were tall, tall, tall, and rakishly thin, and the delicate features of their Oil of Olay faces were dwarfed by oversize dark glasses. They wore miniskirts and high heels and fur coats. Their jewelry was not subtle. Nothing about them was. They spent their days traipsing up and down Madison Avenue, pausing to take in the window displays of luxury boutiques, which had proliferated. Where had these women come from and what possessed them to feel so at home here?

  Laura was pushing Emma home from preschool one afternoon when one of these creatures popped out of Laura’s old deli on Madison and Ninety-third clutching a frozen fruit Popsicle. The temperature was below freezing and the woman was wearing leather gloves, which made it difficult for her to remove the wrapper. As she stood there trying to do this, she and her voluptuous fur coat blocked the narrow strip of sidewalk between the store’s entrance and the row of Christmas trees for sale along the curb. She may have been oblivious to Laura’s standing and waiting—though it was
also possible she was indifferent. When the woman finally managed to remove the Popsicle from the plastic, the wrapper clung to her glove. Transferring the pop to her other hand, she shook herself free of it. It fluttered for a bit then landed sticky-side-down on the sidewalk. Wanting to set an example for Emma, Laura bent down to pick it up.

  “Litterbug,” Emma said, pointing at the woman’s back.

  “That’s right,” Laura said.

  “Litterbug!” Emma repeated, this time more a shout. But her little voice was lost in the hiss of oncoming traffic, which was a good thing, because when the offender stepped off the curb to hail a cab, she removed her sunglasses, and Laura realized it was her most recent client—Emma’s aunt-elect, her soon-to-be sister-in-law.

  * * *

  WHAT MADE LAURA GOOD AT her job was that she was careful not to make her clients feel delusional or demanding. “We’ve never done that before,” she’d say. “The logistics might be a little challenging, but I’ll look into it.”

  This was important because, for many women, planning a wedding became something much more: an opportunity for the universe to make good on all the ways in which the bride felt she’d been shortchanged in life. Stephanie wasn’t the worst client Laura had dealt with, but she was definitely in the top ten.

  Their meetings went like this: Laura would present Stephanie with the options and Stephanie would cut Laura off and say, “I’m imagining . . .” and then describe something that wasn’t on the list. Her most ridiculous request—which fell outside the domain of Laura’s typical responsibilities, as well as jurisdiction—was to wear the wedding dress that had been worn by Laura’s great-grandmother. While owned by the Library, it was currently on loan to the Museum of the City of New York.

  “We—our family—has never done that before,” Laura told her. “I’ll look into it.”

  The dress was scheduled to be returned to the Library well before the date of the wedding, but the Library’s trustees declined to grant permission for it to be worn, even only for the ceremony.

  “I think this is for the best,” Laura told Stephanie. “It’s seen its best days, that dress—it’s yellowed, it smells a little funky. To be honest, I thought it might look a little Miss Havisham.”

  “Miss who?” Stephanie asked, clearly miffed by the trustees’ decision.

  “Charles Dickens,” Laura told her. “Great Expectations. The point is, I think you’ll be happier in a new dress.”

  The wedding day arrived. Emma was the flower girl, the first of the bridal party to process down the aisle. She took her time scattering petals, and Laura was relieved when she finally reached the altar and took her place off to the side, as she’d been instructed to do at the rehearsal. There were bridesmaids—Stephanie’s sorority sisters, with whom she was still close—and one after another they kept coming out, as if from a clown car, and then finally the bride. The ceremony commenced; pews creaked as everyone took a seat.

  “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels,” thundered the minister’s voice from his pedestal, “but do not have love”—here he lowered his voice and paused for dramatic effect—“I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” Now his voice picked up its former volume and urgency. “If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do NOT HAVE LOVE”—another theatrical pause before proceeding in a whisper—“I am nothing.” Loud again: “IF I GIVE ALL I POSSESS TO THE POOR . . .”

  Laura hated Corinthians. It was one thing to celebrate love, another to sanctimoniously demean the existence of those who did not have it. How was it in the spirit of Christ to tell people who were alone in the world that whatever else they had going for themselves—spirituality, wisdom, a virtuous heart—none of it counted because, at the end of the day, no one loved them?

  Laura was so deep in this thought that it took her a moment to notice Emma had left her spot at the margins of the bridal party and was now standing at the center of the altar, facing out to the congregation, as though this were a show and she was about to break into a solo.

  And then she did. Not a whole song, but a line from a song: “The sun, has gone, to bed and so must I.” After singing these words she lay down on the floor and shut her eyes, pretending to go to sleep.

  There were a few titters, but for the most part the church was silent. Laura knew what this was: a reenactment of her favorite scene in The Sound of Music. Laura figured Emma was imagining this scene would unfold similarly and that a bridesmaid—or, better yet, the bride herself!—would walk over, pick her up, and carry her off while the congregation sang the good night chorus.

  Shortly after lying down, Emma stood back up, curtseyed, and returned to her place. The whole interruption had been no more than a minute, but it felt like the longest minute of Laura’s life.

  The ceremony concluded and everyone spilled outside the church. There was some milling about on the sidewalk as people waited to get into the cars that would take them to the reception. The bride and groom would be traveling in a horse-drawn carriage, which had yet to arrive.

  When Laura was done speaking to her, Emma looked chastened. Sandra took her hand and began leading her down the block, away from the crowd.

  “I don’t know why she’s in trouble,” Bibs said, blowing her granddaughter a kiss. “I thought it was adorable, the best part of the ceremony.”

  “It was completely inappropriate,” Laura told her.

  Stephanie hovered by the church’s fire exit, enshrouded by the bridesmaids. She was crying, Laura realized. Nicholas stood off to the side, looking uncertain if he should join the effort to console his bride.

  Spotting Laura, he walked over. “She’s upset with Emma’s little performance,” he said.

  “That’s understandable,” Laura responded.

  “Well, are you going to apologize?” Nicholas asked.

  “Of course,” she told him.

  The bridesmaids nervously dispersed as she approached. “I’m so sorry, Stephanie,” Laura said. “I don’t know what got into her.”

  Stephanie’s cheeks were streaked with mascara. “Isn’t she old enough to know this was a religious ceremony, not a beauty pageant?”

  “You would think.” Laura shook her head in remorse. “I told Sandra to take her home for a time-out.” Borrowing the language of Emma’s preschool teacher, she added: “She’s considering her actions.”

  “I’ve been imagining this day for my whole life.” Stephanie’s eyes brimmed with fresh tears. “You get one chance to stand at the altar.”

  “Not necessarily,” Bibs murmured from a few feet away, shamelessly observing the interaction.

  * * *

  HAVING A CHILD DIDN’T STOP men from noticing Laura, and she enjoyed the occasional vanity rush of recognizing this was happening. When Emma was with her, she was all the more flattered, as she figured the men assumed she was married and thus had no agenda; they were just admiring her for the sake of admiring her, perhaps thinking what a lucky man.

  To further the impression of being a taken woman, she moved a ring she’d inherited years ago from her right index finger to her left. This generated disapproving comments from various female friends and relations, who were all the more adamant she find a husband now that she had a child. They continued to try to fix her up, and occasionally Laura cooperated and agreed to meet the man.

  She always regretted it. If Laura even had a “type,” it was not the kind she was set up with now that she was a thirty-six-year-old single mother: at least a decade her senior, divorced (acrimoniously so), disgruntled, cynical, and politically apathetic or Republican. The dregs of the Upper East Side dating pool.

  One evening Laura was duped into having dinner with a business associate of Trip’s who turned out to be an unabashedly outspoken member of the NRA. As she sat across the table from this Republican lobbyist lunatic, she thought of what her mother had said of marriage: Anything, anything, anything would be
better than this. That’s how others viewed her current situation as a single mother, she realized. How else to explain their rationale in matching her with such maniacs? They saw her and Emma as incomplete, stray people, a free-floating fragment; the goal was to make them whole and anyone, anyone, anyone would be better than no one.

  “WHEN YOU WERE PREGNANT WITH me were you scared I’d have brown hair like you?”

  Emma stood before the full-length mirror in the front hall closet. She’d removed the rubber bands that had secured her two braids, and now she was running her fingers through her hair, untethering the sections. She took her time doing this, admiring her reflection.

  “Scared?” Laura laughed. “Why would I be scared you’d have brown hair?”

  “Because blond is better.” As she spoke Emma’s breath fogged the glass, obscuring her image.

  “I don’t know where you got an idea like that,” Laura said.

  “It’s true.” Emma wiped the condensation away so she could see her face. “Everybody knows it.”

  “Bath time,” Laura said.

  “Maybe she’s born with it,” Emma sang as she bent over, so that her hair fell forward covering her face. “Maybe it’s Maybelliiiiine.” She flipped her head back up, teasing her hair into a poof.

  “Bath time,” Laura repeated.

  Emma held up a peremptory finger in her mother’s direction. “Good night, dah-ling,” she said, and leaned in to kiss her reflection.

  * * *

  WHEN LAURA WAS A STUDENT at Winthrop, things were a certain way, and when a student’s conduct deviated from this standard, she was told, “That’s not the Winthrop way.” Significant cultural changes had taken place in the intervening decades, but from what Laura observed on the tour for prospective parents, the Winthrop way had persevered. The day still began with Prayers, in which students sang hymns and recited Bible verses. The girls were no longer required to wear blazers and berets upon exiting the building, but wore the traditional lime-green tunics and seemed to carry themselves with the same deferential air.