Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

by Ayelet Waldman

  “William is having a hard day, Emilia,” Sharlene says. “He's been having a difficult time processing what happened in the park this past weekend.”

  I no longer love and admire Sharlene. Sharlene is an idiot. Sharlene should not be allowed to teach small children.

  “There's not a whole lot to process. He slipped and fell. His feet got wet. It's no big deal.”

  “I think it was a big deal to William. I think he's having a hard time feeling safe with you right now. Safety and security is a big issue for children, particularly for those whose sense of stability in the world has been compromised by divorce or other trauma.”

  Sharlene is sitting next to William in the book nook. He has taken out an oversized dinosaur reference book and is reading it, licking his forefinger and ostentatiously turning the pages. I stand over them, shifting from foot to foot. I am hot in my winter coat.

  “William,” I say. “I'm sorry about the Meer. I'm sorry you got wet. I'm sorry about all of it. I just wanted to show you that part of Central Park. The Harlem Meer is one of my favorite places and I wanted to show it to you. I had hoped you would like it as much as I do.”

  William squints and leans closer to his book.

  “William,” I say. “If you come right now I'll take you to buy a copy of The Secret Garden. You can prove to me that it's not too hard for you. And we can get the other Lyle books, too. All you've got at our house is The House on East 88th Street.”

  Sharlene takes her hand and lays it gently over the page. “William, are you ready to go home with Emilia?”

  “No,” he says.

  “Do you think you might be ready soon?”

  “No.”

  She removes her hand. “I think we should call Jack or Carolyn,” she says. “I don't like to force him, not when he's feeling so fragile.”

  William is about as fragile as the outcroppings of schist on the bluffs above the Meer.

  “Fine,” I say. “I'll call Jack.” Jack, however, is not at the office. Jack is not reachable on his cell phone. Jack, according to Marilyn, is in a hearing and will not be free before five o'clock.

  “William isn't registered for any afternoon programs,” Sharlene says.

  “We're going home, William,” I say.

  “No!” William bellows.

  “I'm afraid I don't think we have a choice,” Sharlene says. “I'm going to have to call Carolyn.”

  “Of course you are,” I say. “Why not? Things haven't quite deteriorated to a complete shambles. I still have one or two tiny shreds of dignity. You'd better call Carolyn so we can lay waste to what's left.”

  “Emilia, this isn't about you. It's about William.”

  “Tell me about it,” I say.

  I wait for Carolyn. Not because I am a masochist, not because I believe I deserve the laceration she is bound to give me, but because today is Wednesday and Wednesday is Jack's day with William. I can't just leave and deliver him into the hands of the enemy with nary a peep. I want Jack to know I went down kicking and screaming.

  Carolyn swoops into the Red Room like an avenging angel, like a mother hawk come to rescue her fluffy chick. She is smooth and sleek, smooth hair, smooth skin, smooth lips, long sleek legs, long sleek cashmere coat. I can actually feel myself growing shorter and more rotund. In a few minutes I will be a hobbit.

  She gathers William to her narrow, stingy bosom and says, “William, darling. Are you all right? My poor darling. Are you frightened?”

  Sharlene seems embarrassed by this lavish display of inappropriate maternal concern. “He's fine, Carolyn. He's just having some difficulty with the schedule this week, that's all.”

  Sure, be sensible now, traitor, I say silently.

  “William, darling, there's no need for you to go to your father's house,” Carolyn says. “Sonia is waiting in the lobby. You're coming home.”

  “It's Wednesday,” I say, as if that is the problem. As if William is confused about what day it is. As if William has not been reciting the days of the week, in order, since he was fifteen months old.

  Carolyn shoots me a malevolent look. She hustles William to his feet and out the door. I follow. On my way out I pass the clothesline drooping with family drawings. I spot William's right away; it is the only one taped down the middle. I peer at it, trying to discern the features of the lightly drawn angel baby. She has curly hair, and she is smiling. Her wings are very elaborate, decorated with curlicues, hearts, and, for some reason, dollar signs. Isabel makes a pretty angel. William has done a beautiful job.

  “Isn't it lovely?” Sharlene says.

  “Yes,” I say, and leave the classroom.

  When the door to my elevator opens to the lobby, I see Carolyn and William just stepping out of theirs. I curse the notoriously unreliable 92nd Street Y elevators, steel myself, and follow them. Carolyn hands Sonia the booster seat and grips William's mittened paw.

  “Hello, Sonia,” I say.

  Sonia nods. “Hello, Emilia.”

  “You really take the cake,” Carolyn says to me.

  “What?”

  “You have some goddamn nerve. Trying to force yourself on my son after what you did to him. It's sick. You're a sick person, you know that?”

  The lobby of the 92nd Street Y is full of people heading up to the gym, old women on their way to the senior citizens' center, parents of preschool children, older children attending after-school programs. Carolyn's voice is low but it carries. We are putting on a little show.

  “I didn't do anything to William. It was an accident. We slipped, and his feet got wet. It was water, for heaven's sake, not hydrochloric acid.”

  “How dare you?” Carolyn steps up to me and pushes her pretty face close to mine. The irises of her eyes are pale blue. Even the whites of her eyes are blue-tinged, like skim milk.

  “How dare I what?” I say, backing away slightly.

  “You took him to Harlem!” she hisses. “And don't think I don't know about the skating. You sent him out on the ice without a helmet. You're lucky he wasn't killed.”

  I sigh. William ratted me out.

  “You have some objection to your child visiting Harlem?” The woman who has interrupted our conversation is about four and a half feet tall, no more. She has a dowager's hump and wields her walker like a weapon. Her voice is deep and raspy; it holds too much gravel to come from such a brittle, bird-boned frame. “You say Harlem like it's so terrible. You should be ashamed, young lady.”

  Carolyn steps away from me, and looks down at my defending crone, her mouth agape.

  The old woman continues, her face raised to us like a wrinkled moon. “Many a night I danced in Harlem, listened to music, ate dinner. All alone or with my girlfriends. We had no carfare, we walked home. All the way. No one laid a finger on us. So you should maybe think again before you make such criticisms of Harlem. And let me ask you this.” She raises a gnarled finger and shakes it at Carolyn. She is so small that she is shaking it not in Carolyn's face but at her belt. “Do you pay her social security taxes, this young girl you're yelling at? Do you put money into a pension plan for her? What about overtime? Do you pay time and a half? Maybe instead of criticizing your nanny for showing your child the city in all its beauty you should be thinking about behaving less like an overprivileged fat cat!”

  “She is not my nanny,” Carolyn says. “She is my husband's wife. And I'd kindly ask you to mind your own damn business.”

  “It is my business, my friend. It takes a village to raise a child. You should read the book. Hillary Clinton. It's wonderful. I'm your village, my dear, whether you like it or not.” The old woman humps her walker away, toddling along behind it.

  “I'm not just Jack's wife,” I say. “I'm also William's stepmother.”

  “And what does that mean?” Carolyn says. “I'll tell you what. Nothing. It means nothing. You have no rights to my child. None. None, do you understand me? If you ever cause him harm again, if you ever throw him into a lake, or take him to Harlem, o
r take him skating, or even into Central Park, so help me God, I will have you arrested for child abuse.”

  Carolyn has not, I notice, mentioned ice cream. Clearly there are some secrets William is still happy to keep.

  Carolyn leans her face so close to mine that one of her long, fine, brown hairs, lifted by the static electricity of the forced heat of the room and her rage, hovers between us and attaches itself lightly to my lip. “Stay away from my son,” she says, a mist of saliva spraying my face with every sibilant S.

  “Carolyn,” Sonia says, very softly. “Dr. Soule. Carolyn.” She tugs gently on Carolyn's arm, pulling her away from me. “Not in front of the boy.” She points to William who is standing, his hand still clasped by his mother's, but his whole body leaning away, like a water-skier pulling back on the bar. His face is turned to the floor, almost parallel to it, and as we stare at him a tear splashes down, then another. He is crying silently, motionlessly, his body not wracked by sobs, not trembling with weeping, just taut like wire strung against the restraining hand of his mother, tears dripping onto the dirty stone slabs of the lobby floor.

  Sonia slips an arm around her employer, easing her away from me. Then she loosens Carolyn's grip on William's hand and substitutes her own. Strangely, Carolyn allows herself to be led, succumbing to the temperate authority of this young woman. She backs off and then whirls away, storming across the lobby and out the front door, leaving Sonia, William, and me standing in a stunned little clot in the middle of the room.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  Sonia nods, picks up the booster seat that Carolyn has left lying on the floor, and leads William out the door. I follow them, and watch as they dodge around the cement planters to where Carolyn is waiting impatiently, one hand on her hip. I stay near the exit, as far from them as I can be, as Carolyn waves down a cab with a snap of her fingers. She has more luck than I do, even with the dreaded booster seat. She opens the door and holds it for Sonia, who gets in and installs the seat. William climbs in and Sonia buckles him, testing the straps to make sure they are tight. Carolyn leans inside and says something to the driver. Then she slams the door and lifts her arm to hail a second cab.

  Chapter 24

  When the driver of my taxi asks me where I am going, I hesitate, unable to bear the idea of going back to our apartment where I will have nothing to do but wait for Jack to come home so I can confess what has happened. Instead I say, “Le Pain Quotidien, on Madison and Eighty-fifth.”

  I sit once again at the community table, and while there are no babies, there is a little boy, a few years younger than William. He is eating a chocolate cupcake and I wonder if it is dairy free. I order my latte, and am about to order a strawberry cupcake with which to soothe the ache knotting my stomach from my horrible encounter with William's mother, when instead I ask for a vanilla cupcake with chocolate frosting, dairy free like the one William gets.

  “Did you want soy milk in that latte?” the waitress asks.

  “No,” I say.

  She looks confused for a moment and then shrugs, as if she has already spent too much time puzzling the intricate eating disorders of neurotic East Side matrons and has vowed not to squander any more.

  When the cupcake comes I lick the frosting and then take a bite of the cake. It's surprisingly tasty, light and fluffy, with little of the oily texture I would have expected from butter-free pastry. Still, William is right, it isn't as good as the strawberry cupcake. I lick the frosting thoughtfully, swirling my tongue through the chocolate.

  I would not have expected William to cry like that. He is too young to be embarrassed by a scene, and it must have been, after all, what he wanted. He had all but insisted that Carolyn come and rescue him from me. And yet, when she bore down with her righteous and bilious indignation, he had cried.

  I wave to the waitress.

  “Is the pastry chef here?” I ask.

  “There is no pastry chef,” she says. “We have everything made at a production facility in Long Island City.”

  “What about the owner?”

  “It's a chain. Why, is there something wrong?”

  “No, no. Nothing. Everything's great. It's just . . . I sort of have a suggestion.”

  She sighs. “I'll get the manager,” she says.

  When he comes the manager is extraordinarily polite, but firm, as if he has become accustomed, by virtue of the restaurant's address, to dealing with a certain kind of patron, one who views complaint as not merely a right but an obligation, one who does not hesitate to write scathing letters to corporate directors and throw shrill and costly tantrums in crowded restaurants.

  “What can I do for you, madam? Is there some problem I can help you with?” he says in an accent of undefined European origin.

  “No, not at all. There's no problem at all. It's just. My stepson is allergic to dairy. Sort of. Anyway, he thinks he is, and his mother never lets him eat dairy. He loves the dairy-free cupcakes here. But you only make them with chocolate and vanilla frosting. I was wondering if you might consider adding pink frosting to the menu.”

  “Ah,” he says.

  “Because he had some of my pink cupcake, and he loved it.”

  “He is allergic to dairy but he ate the regular cupcake?” The manager is perturbed, as if he can already imagine the cupcake litigation; he can see in his mind's eye the depositions, the discovery requests demanding release of secret recipes, the expert witnesses—scientists with multiple degrees in lactose intolerance and the digestion of dairy enzymes.

  “He's not really allergic. He just thinks he is.”

  “But you want him to have dairy-free cupcakes nonetheless?”

  Well, no, I don't want to indulge this insanity, but his mother insists on it. “Yes.”

  “Ah.”

  “So I just thought you might consider making dairy-free strawberry cupcakes.”

  “I will present your suggestion to Claudio, the head of our production facility.”

  “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  “Not at all, madam. Please, enjoy your cupcake. You are eating now the dairy free, I see.”

  “Yes. Just to try it.”

  “Ah.”

  “To see if it's as good. As the regular cupcake.”

  “And is it?”

  “No.”

  “Ah.”

  “It's very good. Really. Delicious. It's just, you know. Not as good.”

  The manager leaves me to finish my cupcake and think how happy William will be if Claudio takes my suggestion seriously and adds pink to his dairy-free repertoire. Perhaps William will be so pleased that he will forget what happened in the lobby of his school. He will forget how his mother and I made him feel. He will be overcome by the bliss of a strawberry cupcake and he will forget the rage in his mother's face when she looked at me. I wish there was a cupcake that delicious.

  What will it take for me to forget, I wonder?

  Where's William?”

  These are the first words out of Jack's mouth, before he even hangs his coat up in the hall closet, while his umbrella is still dripping water down the sides of the tall, galvanized bucket in the hallway outside our front door.

  “At his mother's.”

  Standing in the front hall, I explain what happened, and I can see Jack begin to shrink. His long black raincoat loosens, hangs lower toward the floor, the shoulders droop, the cuffs hide his hand. He is contracting and shriveling before my eyes. Telescoping into his despair. He shucks his coat and it puddles onto the floor. He drops his briefcase on top of it. He walks by me, trailing raindrops from the wet cuffs of his pants. I follow him down the long hall into our bedroom.

  “It will be all right,” I say hopefully. I am hovering close to him, but not touching. I am afraid to touch him. It is as if we are poles of like magnets and between us is a palpable field of energy, pushing us apart. Or, rather, pushing me away from him. I sit down on the bed. My feet are flat on the floor, my back is straight, my knees are pressed primly to
gether. I look like a schoolgirl awaiting a scolding.

  Jack says, “Oh shit.” He looks at his watch, and then at the clock on the nightstand as if verifying that it really is 6:17. “Shit.”

  I say, “Do you think we should go get him? I mean, you. You should go get him. Should you go get him?”

  “I don't know.”

  I must figure out a way to change the ringer on our telephone. Something less malevolent. Something that doesn't scream “Carolyn” quite so loudly.

  “Shit,” Jack says. His “hello” is so wary it is nearly comical. So is his relief. “It's your mom,” he says, passing me the phone after an obligatory moment of stilted conversation.

  “Hi,” I say. I have not spoken to my mother since I abandoned her on that suburban main street, and I gear myself up to apologize.

  “What's wrong?” she says.

  “Nothing. Nothing's wrong. Wait, do you mean now? Or like, because of the other night?”

  She clucks her tongue. “Forget about the other night. The other night doesn't matter. I just wanted to make sure we're still on for that memorial walk.”

  “Yes. I mean, I think so.” I cover the mouthpiece with my hand. “She wants to make sure we're still going to the Walk to Remember.”

  Jack is standing in the middle of the bedroom, holding the lapels of his suit jacket as if trying to decide whether to take it off. “Why?”

  “She wants to come.”

  “Oh. I guess so. I mean, sure.”

  “Mom?” I say. “Meet us at four at Strawberry Fields.”

  “Let me write that down,” she says, and just then the call waiting beeps.

  “Hold on a second,” I say and press the flash button. Now it is, of course, Carolyn.

  “I'd like to speak to Jack, please.”

  “Hello, Carolyn.” I am impressed with how cool my voice is, given the knot in my stomach. It must be the lawyer in me. I am not my father's daughter for nothing. “One moment,” I say. I click back over to my mother. “It's Carolyn.”

  “Do you have to go?” my mother says.