The Mermaid of Brooklyn

by Amy Shearn

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

In this beautifully written novel that blends the whimsy of The Time Traveler’s Wife with an indelible portrait of motherhood, a young woman strives to pick up the pieces after her husband mysteriously leaves—and she finds strength from the unlikeliest of allies.

Jenny Lipkin is an average, stretched-too-thin Brooklyn mom tackling the challenges of raising two children in a cramped Park Slope walk-up and bonding with the other moms about breast-feeding while spending endless hours in Prospect Park. All she really wants is to survive the sweltering New York summer with a shred of sanity intact. But when her husband Harry, a compulsive gambler, vanishes one evening without a word, Jenny finally reaches her breaking point. In a moment of despair, a split-second decision changes her life forever.

Pulled from the brink by an unexpected—and as it turns out, sometimes annoying—supernatural ally, Jenny is forced to rethink her ideas about success, motherhood, romance, and relationships. Confronting her inner demons—of both the mermaid and nonmermaid variety—is no easy task, and eventually Jenny has to come to terms with who she truly is, for better or worse.

Publisher: Touchstone

Print pages: 368

Sample

The Mermaid of Brooklyn

one

Before I died the first time, my husband left me broke and alone with our two tiny children and it made me feel very depressed, etc. It’s the same old story: He went to buy cigarettes and never came home. Really. Wouldn’t you think you’d want to pack a bag or two, leave a forwarding address? Couldn’t he have at least taken the dog? These were the things I wondered in the beginning. Not: was he having an affair, or: was he mixed up in something nefarious, but: I can’t believe he wouldn’t bring his datebook, his favorite loafers; I can’t believe he didn’t change the lightbulb in the hallway before deserting us. He knew I couldn’t reach that lightbulb. The whole thing was unlike him. Then again, I was the one who died, which was unlike me, too.

I would be lying if I said his leaving wasn’t a tiny bit of a relief, at least at first. My initial thought—due mostly to sleep deprivation, the effects of which, as any mother or political prisoner knows, never entirely fade—was that once the girls were in bed, I could ignore the dishes to be done and laundry (still in a compact three-day-old brick from the Laundromat drop-off service) to be put away; I could take a bath and then sleep (until Rose’s next feeding) in a big empty bed with pillows mounded up on either side. I wouldn’t need to make a grown-up meal for Harry, who annoyingly preferred dishes seasoned with things other than butter, and who inconveniently favored dinner conversation consisting of topics other than whether or not mermaids existed and, if so, whether or not their mommies made them take baths. I would not need to stifle the yawns that he mistook for boredom as he dramatically recounted the undramatic details of his day. I would not need to come up with a compelling excuse to avoid sex and then feel guilt both at the refusal and at the unoriginality of the desire, the undesire.

I know this doesn’t make me sound like the nicest wife. But back then I only thought he was late coming home from work. I didn’t know he would be gone so very long, that it would take him months and months to battle his way home, as if he were returning from the Crusades and not the Ever So Fresh Candy Company headquarters in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. It didn’t occur to me that nothing would ever be the same.

I forgot and didn’t remember for some time that I actually had spoken to him on the evening in question. My days had a habit of bleeding together, and it was often difficult for me to pinpoint whether we had indeed talked a few hours earlier or whether I was remembering the day before. But no, I think it was that night, that fateful night, when, believe it or not, it was raining ominously, a storm of Great Plains–style velocity, unleashed by restless nymphs polluting the city’s clouds, must have been, because there was such vindictiveness in the thunder rattling the kitchen window and spooking the imminently spookable baby so that she was wailing into my collarbone as I called Harry’s phone, wanting to know if (oh God, so typical) he could pick up some milk, a request that was met with irritation—he didn’t see why I couldn’t take care of these things without involving him. Betty sat on her booster seat, swinging her legs with a buoyancy that belied her scowl. I looked over just in time to see her open her mouth and hatch a mound of chewed grilled cheese onto the table.

“Jenny?” Harry answered, sounding confused. “Is everything okay?”

“Oh, sure. Just another day in paradise,” I said. Rose quieted, distracted by a hank of my hair.

“I miss you,” Harry said. “I miss the girls.” He sounded sad, or maybe just tired.

“Well, you’re in luck,” I said. “We’re all right here, and we’re taking visitors.”

“I wuv you, you wuv me,” Betty sang to her grilled cheese. The girl had a passion for dairy.

“Shh, baby, please,” I said to her, to Rose, to the thunder that grumbled a little farther in the distance now, to the world. “What, Harry? I’m losing you.”

“I’m going to stop for cigarettes on my way home,” it sounded like he said.

“So you’re not quitting, then,” I said, having forgotten all about the milk. I would remember only when I poured my dinner bowl of Cheerios at eleven p.m., which I ended up eating with water, as I’d done more times than I cared to admit. Then he was gone. He would stay that way for a while.



When Harry left and I died it was the beginning of a desperately hot summer, a long sun-scorched stretch of days determined to silence doubters of global warming. The sidewalks of Brooklyn baked all around us, Prospect Park an expanse of brownish hay. I had these two babies, and people were always saying that my whole life was ahead of me—nosy grandmothers on the subway tugging at Rose’s bootie or boinging Betty’s curls, neighborhood eccentrics dispensing unsolicited advice from their bodega-front benches. I nodded and thanked them, or sometimes rolled my eyes.

My life with Harry had begun five years earlier, right around the time I started feeling my biological clock doing the My Cousin Vinny thing. I was working an exhausting job at a magazine that I was just starting to realize was not going anywhere: not the magazine, not the job, not me. I was officially Single and Loving It but in reality too tired by the end of the day to do anything more fabulous than drag myself home and watch fabulous amounts of television. (Romantic comedies counted as educational if they were in black and white. “We all go haywire at times, and if we don’t, maybe we ought to,” I’d mouth along with The Philadelphia Story.) I was too old to still have a roommate who called it “cooking” when she added pepper to her ramen; I was too young to retreat to the Midwest, capitulating to a life with many cats. It is annoying to find yourself living a cliché. It is doubly annoying to turn your life upside down only to settle into a fate even more banal than the one you were trying to avoid.

I met Harry on my thirtieth birthday, which I took as an omen. It was a few weeks after September 11, the bad one, and everyone in the city was feeling existentially wigged out, nostalgic for things we’d never noticed before. There was a barbecue on one of the last warm days of the year in someone’s closety backyard, morning glory strangling the brick. (“Those vines are lovely,” I told my host, trying to be friendly. She’d frowned, confessed, “They’re killing everything.”) I didn’t know these people well, but in those weeks everyone was overly solicitous and given to gallows humor, getting together to consume comfort food and avoid the subjects of death and patriotism in favor of those vaguer favorites, What Was So Great About Our City and The Things That Really Mattered. It smelled like burning rubber in Brooklyn. Every night I dreamed I had children who got lost in my pockets. In other words, it was a dangerous time to meet someone new.

Over by the fence was Harry. He was wearing a leather jacket that was too warm for the weather, which I didn’t question at the time. His white shirt gaped open at the collar. I first noticed that triangle of neck. He stood talking to a trio of pretty blondes, and I couldn’t hear what he said but all at once, as if choreographed, they threw back their heads and laughed. Here was Harry in one of his—of course I couldn’t have known this then—manic highs, characterized by bravado and boisterousness, beloved by all. I thought (ha! ha!), There is an uncomplicated man. Having split recently from a morose Bushwick-loft-inhabiting artist, I looked at Harry and my gut said, I know him. He is happy. He knows (he knocked back a swig of microbrewed beer, squinted at something over my head, the fire escape maybe) how to enjoy life. People are always saying to follow your gut. Unfortunately, as it turns out, my gut is kind of stupid.

You know you’re in trouble when you refer to your own relationship as a “whirlwind romance.” Harry was fond of this phrase, which to me stank with a rot-sweet whiff of desperation. It’s true that it all happened very quickly. There was something deeply flattering about his passion for me, how he had to have me immediately and forever. His professions of affection were always larger than life. Two dozen white roses would greet me at work on a gloomy Monday, to the cooing envy of my coworkers. Or I’d wake on a weekend to a homemade cappuccino, a new pair of golden gladiators (he’d pinpointed my weaknesses), and marching orders—“Get up, get up! We’re going on a helicopter tour of the city in an hour!” My therapist posited that Harry was the Un My Father, what with his charisma and spontaneity and vague sheen of hazard. She called him the Prince of Darkness Charming. She called him James Dean Lite. I called her Not My Therapist Anymore.

Within a year Harry and I were married (he wanted a Vegas wedding but worried it would kill his mother), and I’d traded my Xanax for prenatal omega-3s; a year after our wedding, Betty was born, and not quite two years after that, Rose. I’d been in college longer than I’d known my husband. I’d had a more protracted relationship with my academic adviser than with the father of my children, the man whose DNA I’d chosen to tangle with mine. And now here we were, piled into the crummy two-bedroom rental that was all we could afford in Park Slope, the yuppie neighborhood we clung to because I was afraid to bring my kids anywhere else in the city. Or here I was, anyway. Who knew where Harry was.



When I awoke at three a.m., Rose howling wolfishly at a blackout-curtain-defying streetlamp, Betty standing in the hallway with her hands over her ears, and Harry still wasn’t there, it occurred to me to worry.

“Rosie, Rosie.” I launched myself from bed, the sheets withed around my legs, only to step squarely on the dog. Oh. The dog. I was perpetually forgetting about the existence of Juniper, Harry’s scraggly, immortal mutt. Our mutt now, of course. Had I taken her down to pee before bed? There were too many creatures’ bodily functions to keep track of. The dog looked up at me mournfully. I apologized, stumbled into our nubbin of a hallway. My legs were stiff, Frankensteiny. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d exercised in any way more significant than a walk pushing the stroller around the park, which I hoped counted for something. Every day I promised myself I’d at least stretch out before bed, and every night I was twelve times too tired to even consider it. Anyway, “going to bed” was more like waiting for Rose to relent and then immediately applying myself to my mattress.

Rose had hiked her swaddle up around her neck in a sort of haute couture cowl and was inching across the crib like a demented caterpillar. She stopped howling when she saw me, grinned toothlessly. “All right,” I said. “You’re very charming.” I pulled the swaddling blanket off of her and lifted her out. Betty followed us back into my bed. I didn’t bother trying to stop her. I nestled Rose down in the center of the mattress, and she immediately started snorting with the pre-meal enthusiasm of a true Lipkin. I lay down beside her and offered her the boob with the less destroyed nipple. Betty lay down on the other side of Rose.

“Mommy, where Daddy?”

Rose popped off and craned her neck curiously toward Betty.

“Sweetheart, please don’t distract the baby,” I said as dread gripped the top knob of my spine. Right. Where was Daddy? “Daddy’s, um, at work.”

Betty considered this. “Aren’t the lights off?”

Rose latched back on. I closed my eyes and allowed the pull of sleep to drag me under the surface. Sleep was like water, my brain thought, unoriginally. And as with a river, you never stepped into the same sleep twice, it was always a different texture somehow, there was a different current tonight, something roiling in the distance. What was this dream that I—

“Mommy.”

Without really waking up, I said, “Yes, honey, the lights are off. He has a flashlight.”

“Oh.”

Rose stopped nursing to stare up at Betty again. “Please, no talking, Betty,” I said, already mostly asleep. I was so tired that it hurt to wake up and fall back asleep. It was like how it used more energy to turn something off and on than it did to— But the thought stopped making sense as I thought it, breaking apart like bread dropped in water. I was dimly aware of Juniper jumping onto the bed and coiling up behind me. Being sandwiched between little bodies this way seemed cozy for about thirty seconds, until my leg wanted to stretch and couldn’t. It was another hot night, the mugginess unfazed by the air-conditioning unit lodged in the window, and here we were glued together by sweat and spit-up and dog hair. It was all very glamorous.

When I awoke again—five minutes later? an hour later?—Rose was snoozing with her mouth slightly open around my nipple, milk pooled on her tiny tongue. Betty and Juniper were curled together at the foot of the bed. The room was shadowy, lit by the streetlamp, the lights of night-owl neighbors, the lights of early-rising neighbors, the hazy undark of the city at night. And really, now, where was Harry? Alarm rang through my limbs. I tried to temper it with some Vulcan logic, a technique I’d had to teach myself over and over, every night of my anxiety-laden first year of motherhood. No, no, he wasn’t dead in a ditch, that wouldn’t make any sense— He had said something . . . Oh. He was going to stop and buy cigarettes. My brain, still half-sleeping like a dolphin’s, invented a story: He’d gotten a call from his alcoholic brother, Fred, he’d gone over to comfort him, he’d probably called my cell phone but I hadn’t gotten the call because the phone was loitering as usual somewhere deep within the diaper bag. He had ended up spending the night at Fred and Cynthia’s place near the office and had texted me so as not to wake up the girls in the miraculous case that one or both of them might be sleeping and when I saw him tomorrow, today, whenever, he would chastise me for not paying more attention to that particular hunk of electronics, which, it was true, I saw more as an emergency distraction device for Betty than as an actual tool for communication. Okay, that made sense. I was drifting back to sleep, so tired that my joints felt jumpy, my skin prickly. I couldn’t process whether I’d fallen asleep or else had slept for hours when there was Betty, patting my cheek.

I opened an eye. Rose sprawled out on her back, taking up more room than seemed geometrically possible for a person who weighed twelve pounds. It was a good thing Harry wasn’t here, actually. He hated when I let Rose sleep in our bed. “You made me buy that rocking chair for the nursery,” he’d say crossly. “I thought that was for nursing. It’s not safe to sleep with her in our bed.” I had a mature, reasonable response to this, being the excellent wife and mother that I was: I waited for him to turn around, and then I stuck my tongue out at the back of his head.

“Mommy. Cookies?” Betty said experimentally. When I opened both eyes, I saw Juniper behind her, wagging her tail. When Juniper diagnosed me as awake-ish, she leaped up and started pacing around. “No and no,” I said to both of them. I probably fell back asleep. “MOMMY,” Betty said, patting my cheek harder. Okay, hitting. Smacking my face. Her hand was sticky, somehow, already. It was a lovely way to wake up. It wasn’t even light out yet. So, four forty-five, maybe? Juniper jumped up onto the bed, and Rose’s eyes popped open.

“Oh God,” I said. Every morning I lay in bed thinking, I cannot possibly do this for one more day. Then I got up and did it for one more day, every day. All parents did, I told myself. My exhaustion was nothing special. And likewise, the moments in which I managed to cope in a halfway-decent way were not exactly the triumphs of maternal spirit I liked to pretend they were—more like basic competence. “Tell Daddy to take out Juniper,” I said.

Betty shook her head. “It’s too far.”

“What?” I lifted Rose, who belched loudly, looking surprised and pleased, a diminutive frat boy. I hadn’t burped her after her last dozy feeding. Another habit Harry hated.

“It’s too far. Daddy at work.”

Oh God.

Thirty seconds later, I was wearing the same T-shirt and shorts I’d worn the day before; Rose and her diaper, transformed into an anvil of pee, were tucked into the sling; Betty was dressed in her pajamas, a tutu, and pink Crocs her grandmother had gotten her expressly against our wishes; Juniper was harnessed into her leash. The whole happy family clambered out on the street. It was already about eighty degrees out, the world damp and steaming from the night’s rain. Day-old spit-up baked on my shirt, emitting a not entirely unpleasant bready odor. The sun was just beginning to rise, a bright sore bleeding over the park. Juniper peed in someone’s tree box, irrigating the “Curb your dog” sign. Some days the city seemed almost supernaturally beautiful to me. Then there were days like this, when unforgiving light revealed rats performing acts of daytime derring-do, when everything in sight—a withered crone collecting cans, a paralyzed poodle dragging its hind legs on clanging wheels—looked damaged and deranged. It was garbage day, and stinking boulders of trash punctuated the sidewalk, which reminded me that I hadn’t taken down our recycling, a thought that filled me with despair. Betty toddled over to a rank pile, lifted up a diseased-looking teddy bear.

“No!” My voice startled Rose, who started to cry. It was easier to have sympathy for her, I found, than her sister, the toddler terror. Rosie couldn’t help it. She was a baby. Her crying was uncomplicated. When Betty turned on the waterworks about one of her complex big-girl issues, like not getting an eighth Dora Band-Aid with which to decorate the dog, my skin curdled with irritation. But the baby I could deal with. I wasn’t that heartless. Usually. “Shhh.” I swayed back and forth, extracted a pacifier from my pocket, and plugged her mouth. “Betty,” I said in the creepy-calm voice of fake parental patience. “Put that down right this second. Haven’t you ever read The Velveteen Rabbit? Scarlet fever! Bedbugs! Death!”

Betty knitted her brow.

“Drop it!” I said. Juniper stopped walking and looked at me. “Not you.”

Betty released her treasure and poutily stuck her thumb in her mouth, the same thumb that, moments before, had been caressing the grimy toy’s eyeless socket. I closed my eyes. I’d been awake for two minutes and already felt overwhelmed by the length of the day ahead of me. I was officially over Harry’s disappearing act.

After Juniper had crapped a portentously watery crap—“What did you feed her?” I asked Betty, who pretended not to hear—we made our way around the block, dotted with trucks making their deafening morning deliveries to the corner store, the bakery, the bar. We trooped back upstairs. I finally changed Rose’s diaper. She grabbed at her crotch, grinning. We went into the main room, a relentlessly cluttered living room with an open kitchen, which had seemed like a good idea before we had kids. (“Perfect for entertaining!” Harry had said when I moved in. Ha!) Betty sat cross-legged next to Juniper’s bowl, crunching.

“Oh dear God, what are you eating?” I said, depositing Rose into her bouncy seat. She promptly commenced howling. I picked her up despite the twinge between my shoulder blades. Betty put her hand back into Juniper’s food bowl and then froze. “Please do not eat dog food,” I said halfheartedly. I searched for my phone in the diaper bag, which seemed to contain everything we owned except diapers. I heard Betty crunching again. Juniper lapped at her water. Betty splashed in Juniper’s water. Rose snuffled around at my chest. I only feel like crying because I am so tired, I told myself. It’s just that my eyes are all dried out.

No messages on my phone. No missed calls. Staying calm for the sake of the girls took all the energy I had. Which made me mad at Harry—what a jerk, to put me through this, and on such a hot day!—which made me immediately bite the inside of my cheek, hard, to punish myself for thinking such mean thoughts about someone who was maybe missing and in danger, or maybe just a huge fucking jerk, or maybe a huge fucking jerk who was nevertheless missing and in danger.

I called the office (neck prickling, lungs hollowing out), but no one answered. It was too early for anyone to be there in any normal sort of capacity. I pictured Harry asleep in his chair, head cocked back at a terrible angle. Okay. That would make a funny story someday: He was so tired, because you never slept, Rose, that one night he called to say he was on his way home and then promptly fell asleep in his chair. Cue Harry rubbing his neck ruefully, as if remembering the pain upon waking.

After all, he had been working a lot of late hours recently. I coped by changing into my pajamas at six p.m. every night and entertaining Betty and myself with elaborate, magical bedtime stories. He was the one missing out, I told myself, on these great bonding whatevers. After all the moments of parenting that, let’s be honest, really sucked, I lived for that twilight time when Betty snuggled up and prompted me, “Tell the fishy.” Then my oft-mocked master’s degree in Russian folklore (it sounded good at the time) got its moment to shine. “Yes,” I told Betty, working a comb through a post-bath snarl. “Once there was a fish-woman who lived at the bottom of the river. Every night she came out and danced in the meadow by the light of the moon.”

“At the park?” In Betty’s two-and-a-half-year-old mind (as in mine), all woodland adventures took place in Prospect Park.

“Yep. In the big field on the way to the carousel. And she would dance and dance. And sometimes climb a tree to brush her hair.”

“But only if her mama there.”

“Right. Exactly. For safety. And so one night a man walked by . . .” Betty loved when these ghostly mermaids lured children with fruit snacks and Pirate’s Booty (hey, water spirits know what little kids like) and especially when they tickled men to death.

“But not wheely? She tickle him? But not wheely.”

“Well . . .” And then would come a tickle to end all tickles. The fish-woman stories had emerged from a fit of overparenting pique, when it was revealed that while babysitting one night Grandma Sylvia had exposed my daughter to Disney’s insipid Little Mermaid movie, with its teeny-bopper heroine. I’d relented on a lot of the perfect parenting ideals I’d had as a pre-parent, but this was too much. Mermaids had been my favorite figures in the Slavic fairy-tale pantheon, but it was because they were weird and powerful and a little scary, not because they looked great in clamshell bikinis. I admit that I tended to neglect the girls’ wardrobes—the cuteness quotient of their coats and dresses not nearly as high as one might expect from a pair of brownstone-Brooklyn babies—and things like clipping their nails and educating them about etiquette or God or non-microwaved cuisine. But simpering female role models and saccharine fairy stories? Come on. I left out the parts about mermaids being the unavenged spirits of suicides, forsaken girls, betrayed brides, unwed mothers-to-be. I figured that stuff could wait at least until pre-K.



Bedtime, sleep. I never would have thought these would someday be my obsessions, occupying such large portions of my daily consciousness. Starting at around four p.m.—the witching hour, when all down the street you could hear children begin to howl like werewolf cubs: my mind clicked with calculations: If everyone has dinner at four-thirty and then baths at five and then cartoons for Betty during Rosie’s bedtime and then assuming Rosie stays asleep for Betty’s bedtime, it’s possible I’ll get some time to sew before Harry gets home—and I’d start zooming toward bedtime in a maniacally unsoothing manner. The day ended definitively around dusk, and I never left the building after dark, but when your kids are little and wake up all night, you don’t ever get to clock out. I fantasized about a sexy eight-hour block of sleep. I salivated while telling Betty the part of Sleeping Beauty where the princess snoozes for a century.

Such luxurious lengths of sleep were not to be, not in this lifetime. I remember reading—it must have been soon after Betty’s birth, when peaceful nursing sessions mellowed into snuggling naps, when she would snooze on my chest while I browsed child development books (nowadays taking care of one baby sounded so easy, total amateur hour)—that infants need something like twenty hours of sleep a day, and that by four months old they will sleep through the night and take at least two naps a day. Which is how I knew that Rose was an exceptional human destined for great things. Think what an advantage it would be not to need sleep! This was what Harry and I had joked about before we were too tired to joke, when Rose was a squalling kitten balled up in blankets; we assumed this would all be an amusing anecdote someday. “We have here,” Harry announced into a rattle, “the parents of the youngest ever Nobel Prize winner, Rose Lipkin, who credits her extraordinary body of work to the extra hours she has to work, as she only sleeps for forty-five minutes a night. Now, tell us, Mr. and Mrs. Lipkin, did Rose ever sleep like a normal person?” And while the old me would have answered in some funny, snappy way, I’m sure, at the time I smiled wearily into Rose’s sweet-smelling scalp. Even Betty, who seemed to forget about her little sister’s existence for hours at a time, eventually commented on the situation, strutting into the room on chunky toddler legs and pointing and saying, “Baby needs night-night,” furrowing her brow in droll fury. Baby needed night-night, indeed.

As a result I was worn down by exhaustion, my edges rounded, like a giant ambulatory pebble. My brain didn’t work the way it once had. I felt at all times an instant away from tears. I expended a lot of energy I didn’t have convincing myself this was due to being tired. I didn’t want to believe that it was, as my well-meaning psychiatrist sister seemed to be hoping, postpartum depression, which she insisted on calling, awfully, “baby blues,” as if describing Frank Sinatra’s eyes and not a mental health condition. Still, Sarah had called once a week from Seattle since Rose’s birth, the way she had with Betty—making small talk before edging up to the subject and finally saying, her voice taking on the queasy sheen of sympathy, “So, how are you feeling? Any baby blues?”

I knew the answer she was looking for. “No,” I’d tell her almost apologetically. “Everything’s great. I’m just tired.”

“Okay,” she’d say, exhaling. “Okay, good. Because after Max was born, I was a wreck, and I didn’t feel like I could admit it to anyone—”

“I know, Sarah, I know.”

“I hate that you stopped seeing your therapist. I just want to make sure you have someone to talk to.”

“Yes. Thanks.”

“Okay. The only reason