When I Ran Away

  It’s one of those beige, rubber, French ones. Johnny named it Jeffrey. I don’t really get it, some retro toy trend. It has brown oval spots for eyes and orangey dots for its giraffe skin. People kept giving them to us when Rocky was born. We got three of them. A prerequisite for babies in a certain tax bracket. I picked one up in a store to see how much it cost—£15. It’s ugly, it doesn’t do anything, it’s not cuddly. They’re supposed to chew on it but the only part that fits in a baby’s mouth is the ear. I thought about sending one of the extra ones to Stacy for her baby, except I knew that she would open the box and the next text would be: WTF? What is this thing? I wouldn’t have even kept this one, would’ve dropped it off at the charity shop with the others, but Johnny opened the box and showed it to Rocky. It’s really more for Johnny that we kept it; something he could be in charge of for the baby.

  I don’t mind that Rocky lost it. It has no sentimental value. It’s just another thing we have because there’s a rule book somewhere about these things we’re supposed to have so people don’t think we’re poor; not actual poor, but rich-person poor: Bugaboo stroller; Range Rover/Land Rover and Fiat or Mini for zipping around town; Rolex for the man; Cartier for the woman; Chloé Marcie cross-body saddle bag for daytime or, if you work, Mulberry Bayswater; a cleaning lady; a Burberry trench; matching Boori nursery furniture with an ergonomic sliding feeding chair; Orla Kiely bedding, or at least the set of kitchen jars in three different sizes with matching tea towels and/or oven mitts; Diptyque candles (£47 each, and that’s not even for a big one); a skiing holiday; an au pair; Sophie Conran Portmeirion dinnerware; a Stokke high chair; Taittinger on standby in the fridge; tonic in the cabinet always ready for G-and-Ts, and preferably Fever-Tree, not some store brand; a regular window cleaning service; a Micro scooter for Johnny and an Islabike at £350 a pop; an Ocado grocery account; highlights touched up every six weeks; a regular gardener; wine that’s £15 a bottle minimum on a rack or preferably in a mini wine fridge built into the newly renovated kitchen; a personal trainer; a cashmere beanie hat with a faux-fur pom-pom; and a weekly fresh flower delivery.

  And this French, rubber giraffe.

  I’m relieved that it’s gone. I felt pressured by it, like I just couldn’t live up to its English middle-class standards of clean, uncluttered homes and landscaped gardens and a knowledge of how to roast lamb. And Rocky doesn’t care. But Johnny’s here and to him, like any child, the loss of a toy is tragic and urgent. God, please let it just be on the sidewalk somewhere so we can go home.

  Johnny runs back down the block to look for Jeffrey before I can stop him. The houses on this street are the same attached, narrow, three-story houses that line every street, but so far this part of the block has resisted the finance power couples and their children—families like my family. These houses are skipped over by the daytime army of nannies and cleaners and window-washing guys. The retro milk truck doesn’t stop here with its glass bottles at dawn. Instead there are lace curtains, ceramic menageries, garden gnomes, plastic conservatories added to the front thirty years ago and leaning at odd angles. There are no shades in the slim windows by the doors to hide the shelves of shoes kept there. Sometimes you might see an old reel for a washing line hanging from the corners of the outdoor/indoor foyers, with the boxers of the man of the house on display. The houses might be sided in cracked pebbledash, or aluminum siding from the eighties, or bricks painted a red-brick color.

  The yummy mummies walk by pushing their babies and the professional couples say to each other, “Such a shame. That could be such a lovely house.” Which is another way of saying that these people and their crappy stuff should just move somewhere else already, somewhere where they won’t ruin the aesthetic and dampen the property values.

  In front of one of those houses Johnny is talking to a sturdy bruiser of a boy and his grandma. The boy is holding the giraffe. “My baby brother dropped that, may I have it back, please?” Johnny says. But the boy and Grandma act like they haven’t heard him. They mull around their front garden space with its carpet of Astroturf. Not the expensive, middle-class, velvety kind. The kind that is obvious and unapologetic about being plastic grass.

  The boy is eight or nine, tall and destined to be a big guy. Johnny’s nearly the same height, but he’s a twig next to him. The boy is sullen, in an Arsenal jersey and shorts that are too tight though he doesn’t seem to mind. He’s much too old for this toy and has no real interest in it. He knows it; Johnny knows it; Grandma knows it too.

  Watching this scene is like reading a page pulled from the script of my childhood and the childhoods of everyone I grew up with. Mom is working her ass off somewhere in a dead-end job where they don’t pay her enough for all the hours she does. Dad is working his ass off too, if he’s around. Grandma doesn’t want to be doing this but she has to. She’s doing what she can but her swollen ankles and her diabetes and her blood pressure and just her fucking exhaustion from an entire lifetime of this shit don’t make it easy for her to raise this boy. The boy takes care of her more than she does of him. He carries the groceries, washes the dishes, sits in the waiting room with her when she goes to the doctor. His hands already calloused.

  He sees how the skinny, rich families look at this street, at his house. At him. Like when the foxes get into the trash but Grandma can’t bend down to clean up the mess in the morning. So he’ll do it when he gets home from school. But the bankers in their suits on the way to the Tube who have to step over the scattered garbage don’t know that, and they shake their heads in disapproval and disgust when they walk past his house. As if it was Grandma’s fault, or his.

  It’s fucked-up and unfair and upside down and this kid’s been left behind before the race even got started. I know all this and I just want to walk away. But my boy’s here too and he doesn’t understand urban socio-economics in a class-based society. He doesn’t know about structural inequality and capitalism. He just wants the toy back because for him there’s only right and wrong.

  I say, “Hi there, excuse me, my baby dropped that.” Grandma’s wearing a tank top tucked into the elastic waist of her skirt. She heaves herself into a folding chair in the pathway to her door and takes a slow drag of her cigarette. The elastic of her nude knee-highs is cutting into her calves below the knee. She says, “Well, ’ee found it. So I said ’ee could ’ave it.” She takes another drag. The boy stands behind her squeezing the giraffe. It squeaks.

  “C’mon now, you know that’s a baby toy. He’s too old for something like that. My baby dropped it. I’d like it back, please,” I say, and I hold out my hand and Johnny’s eyes get wider and wider.

  “Well, ’ee found it. It were on the pavement. So it’s ’is.” I look at the front garden: broken concrete, plastic grass, the old folding chair. Then I see her shoes and my heart catches, beats a double beat. She’s wearing pink terry-cloth slippers just like Ma’s. Molded to her hammer toes. They’re gray around the edges where the pink cloth scrapes the sidewalk because she probably wears them to the store and to pick her grandson up at school. I wasn’t expecting to see Ma today.

  I can feel Johnny’s hot child’s anxiety and disbelief at the unfairness of the crime he’s watching this woman and her boy commit, disappointed in me for not fixing it and making it right. The past and present are burning up in front of me and falling off with the ash at the tip of Grandma’s cigarette.

  I drop my hand, drop my head. I look at her again and I know that with her silence she’s challenging me to continue the confrontation. She’s teaching her grandson to take what he can get, keep what he finds, give nothing away to people who’ve taken so much from this neighborhood, even if it’s theirs. Keep the things they’re stupid enough to lose and don’t give anything back. For spite. In protest. If she teaches him to take what he wants from a world that’s not ever going to give him anything then he’ll survive and she’ll have done right by him.

&nbs
p; I don’t know how to tell this woman that I have much more in common with her than with the people on my street and it’s not even about the fucking giraffe. I don’t know how to tell Johnny that, yes, there’s a difference between right and wrong but sometimes a small rightness doesn’t matter because there’s a much greater wrong happening. I’m not going to fight this boy and this old lady. But I can’t let Johnny be bullied either.

  “Johnny”—I turn to him, look him in the eyes—“we’re going now. What this lady and her boy have done is wrong, and they know that, but this isn’t worth it so we’re going to let them keep it. OK? Rocky has lots of toys and he doesn’t even like that one. So we can let them have it.”

  “But, Jeej, they took it, that’s wrong. That’s wrong!” He’s so upset. He stamps his little foot; the tears are hot on his face. “It’s a baby toy, he knows that!” And he points an indignant finger at the boy.

  “I know, baby, I know, but it’s not that important to us. It’s more important to them, which is why they’re choosing to do the wrong thing.” I try to take his hand to lead him away and to end this awful moment when he thinks I’ve failed him and Grandma thinks I’m just another rich bitch and none of us have won.

  As I turn to take us home, thinking that it’s over, Grandma says, “That’s right. Walk away.”

  An old anger from long ago rises up. Ma did this to us too, pushed us down instead of lifting us up. I turn to the boy, his young poker face already trained to give nothing away, and I say, “It’s wrong to steal from babies. She should have taught you that. You can be better than her.”

  I’m embarrassed as soon as I say it. He’s just a kid. Just like my kid. Just like I was. And I’m standing here putting his grandmother down. What have I really said? I said that I’m ashamed of what I have now, of what they see that I have. Of Johnny’s private-school uniform, emblazoned with the insignia of privilege. I’m upset that they don’t recognize me anymore, that they can’t see that I’m from a street just like this. That guilt and regret follow me everywhere. That the first time I went to the supermarket here and filled the cart with steak and fresh vegetables and chocolate and name-brand detergent I was exhilarated and then ashamed. By the abundance, the excess, the beauty of it, the fact my mother had never filled a cart with anything but white bread and pork-and-beans cans and store-brand dish soap that never got the dishes clean. And I remembered going to the store when it was still just me and Johnny, saying no to everything he pointed at, wiping away his tears and teaching him a hard lesson about the difference between want and need. So I watched other people fill their carts at Waitrose, not even thinking about the prices of things, not counting up the cost of every item as they took it off the shelf, tomatoes on the vine and actual Heinz ketchup and Brie and a pound of shrimp from the fresh fish counter. And I left my full cart at the end of an aisle and walked out of the store without buying anything, silently apologizing to whoever had to put it all back on the shelves.

  Grandma says nothing, just stares into the distance like we’re not there, smoking and pretending she didn’t hear. I’ve failed. I was supposed to handle this but I didn’t. I lead Johnny away; he’s hanging his head, still crying, his footsteps heavy with disappointment in me. He’s resigned to the injustice. But which injustice will he remember when he comes back to this memory decades from now? Will it be what the boy did to us? Or what we did to the boy? The only difference between him and the boy—my marriage to a rich guy.

  And what’s hurting me the most and making my cheeks burn? The fact that Grandma thinks I’m just another one of them, or the fact that I am?

  I hear the giraffe squeak behind us as the boy throws it to the ground and it bounces off the plastic grass. Already forgotten and cast aside.

  9

  dettol, diazepam

  A Wednesday in August 2016, 5:30 p.m. London, Grand Euro Star Lodge Hotel, Room 506

  I stand at the door until my back aches. I let go of the doorknob and slide down to the floor. I sit, surveying the room from this angle. Red and white is the color scheme of the Grand Euro Star Lodge Hotel. Red carpeting, white linens with a red blanket and bedspread. The walls are painted red from the floor to the middle, then white to the ceiling. The wall above the bed is smeared with a dingy, gray accumulation of years of hair grease and styling products. There’s a stain of unknown composition on the carpet.

  It’s filthy. An inch of dust on the baseboards. That bathroom—I can’t even get into what’s going on in there with the grout. Our house was never nice but it was always clean. Ma never said she loved me but she made sure my clothes were always ironed and spotless. Never new but clean. I crawl over to the card table and lean on the metal folding chair and push off of it to get to standing. Where they cut you for a C-section, it makes your legs work different. They don’t have the same power. I kick off my flip-flops and pour some wine into a complimentary plastic cup that I’m pretty certain was used by the last guests of this room and not replaced.

  I listen to the Housewives in the background. It’s part one of the reunion episodes when they talk with Andy Cohen, their executive producer, about the events of the past season. They all wear glittering evening gowns. They’re spray-tanned and highlighted to perfection. They sit on white sofas, drenched in expensive jewelry, as they recount hurt feelings and betrayals and watch the most emotional clips of the show. Amber is questioned about her husband, Jim, and his Jekyll-and-Hyde personality. She says, “I don’t piss him off at home, we don’t hurt one another and he really is truly amazing as long as you don’t fuck with him.” Oh, Amber, sweetheart, that doesn’t sound good. That sounds like something my husband would say about me.

  Another email:

  I’ve been looking for you. I thought I might find you walking somewhere on the common. Where are you? I’m so sorry. I didn’t know things were this bad. I’m so worried. Please can we talk? We’ll fix it, I promise, we’ll fix all of it. We’ll get you some more help for the house, give Stefka more hours, we’ll get someone for the kids, we can even get someone to do the nights for a few weeks, a night nanny? Whatever help you need, I’ll sort it, I promise…

  I breathe deeper than I have all day. I exhale slowly, my eyelids suddenly so heavy. This is why I haven’t said it, why I haven’t asked. Help. This is where I go left and he goes right. Because my skull is broken open and he offers me a roll of duct tape—gold-plated, finest-quality, first-class duct tape, but duct tape nonetheless. I love him, I love him. But he doesn’t know how to help. He doesn’t know what help I need.

  Ma was a cleaning lady. She cleaned offices at night for a few years when we were kids. Depending what shifts she got, if they clashed with Dad driving the bus at night, then after school me and Frankie would catch the ferry with Ma and go to work with her in the City. On the way to Manhattan we’d sit facing the Staten Island side, watching it get smaller and smaller, leaving the views of the City for the tourists who crowded the front of the boat. Within minutes we’d do something to annoy Ma, she’d yell at us and then we’d go out on deck and shout at the seagulls, barely able to hear ourselves over the roar of the engine and the water.

  It sounds hard, going to work with your mother, but we liked it. There were always musicians busking, Jehovah’s Witnesses walking around with the Watchtower. In the ladies’ room someone always had a velvet display board with big, fabulous earrings for sale. There were clusters of Russian and Polish ladies commuting to their night cleaning shifts and tourists from everywhere. Deep South church groups in matching T-shirts or French high-school kids with cool Euro sneakers or groups of Korean and Japanese families. There were cops patrolling the boat, walking slow. Deckhands, tattooed and burly. The pigeons hitching a ride to Manhattan. On the old boats with the wooden benches there were hundreds of messages carved into the wood. GM luvs KO. JJ gives good head. Graffiti tags on the emergency fire hose. The ancient shoeshine men
with their worn shining kits, their thick hands permanently stained with polish. Me and Frankie loved the ferry.

  We’d bring sleeping bags and sleep under a desk while Ma worked a building through the night. We’d go in through the service entrance, then hide in a bathroom until Ma checked that no office workers were working late, and when the coast was clear she’d set us up somewhere until her shift was over. Sometimes she’d have a key for some boss’s office and then we’d get to sleep on a sofa or in some big executive armchair while she vacuumed and dusted and mopped.

  Harry kept saying we needed to get someone to help with the house and he couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t hire a cleaning lady. He couldn’t know what it meant to me. And then one night he came home late and found me sobbing in the kitchen, standing at the sink with the water running, overwhelmed by dirty plates and pots I had to put on the floor because the counters were too full of groceries to put away and laundry to fold. He sent me to the shower and cleaned the kitchen. Then he sat with me, pushed my hair behind my ear and said, “We can’t go on like this, Pukes. Your mother isn’t here, my mother isn’t here, Stacy and Danielle and Sharon aren’t here. You just cannot do everything on your own. You’re not supposed to do this all alone.”

  I didn’t answer him, I just listened to the echo of the names of all the people who weren’t here but should’ve been. Like a bruise you forget about until you press it. I had a picture in my head of Ma, all the times she brought us into a fancy office at midnight to find they’d had a celebration lunch, leaving the catering boxes overturned; sticky soda spills still wet on the carpets; trash cans overflowing with half-eaten sandwiches; full coffee filters spilling grounds all over the floor. Or in the bathrooms, if a roll of toilet paper fell to the floor and unwound itself, they left it there, didn’t even kick it to the corner of the bathroom; left it to soak up the water from the washing of hands and splatter from the sinks. When I got my first office job I always took my coffee cups to the kitchen and washed them instead of leaving them on my desk; just a small sign of respect for the person who cleaned in the middle of the night, whose kids might be sleeping in the office next door.