Visible City (7 page)

“I used to be the same way. Do you remember when I was writing my dissertation?” Leon said. “We had a tiny apartment in Harvard Square and we managed to squeeze two desks into the bedroom, which worked as long as we didn’t both need to get up at the same time.”

Emma forced a smile, though it was an anecdote he told so often that she felt as if she’d actually been in that apartment with them. “If you think you worked hard, you should see Steven. He’d work all night if I didn’t make him take a break,” she said.

“When did you start running? I’m surprised you never mentioned it,” Claudia said.

“I need to be outside more,” Emma said, and stabbed the remaining cupcake with a fork.

Before Steven left, they had both stayed at her parents’ apartment, in the trundle bed in her old bedroom like two kids having a sleepover. Steven tried to be deferential, offering to bring her drinks or dinner, anything he could easily supply. He touched her gingerly, finally recognizing that other parts were broken as well. For so long she’d wanted him to see how lost she felt, but now she said as little to him as possible, in order to maintain the pretense that she was alone in a room. There was no point saying how she felt—he only wanted to see a small sanctioned part of her; the rest of her had to stay hidden from view. In their relationship, there was no room for the thrashing uncertain parts of herself.

Instead of talking to him, she spent her time in front of the living room windows. In the apartment she and Steven shared, their window faced a brick wall, but here, she liked that people could see her. Instead of imagining how other people spent their time, she liked to think about the various lives they might conjure for her, as though she could step inside whatever fantasies they created on her behalf. Pressing her face to the window, her hands up against the glass, she thought she saw a face staring from an opposite window, maybe someone waiting with cupped hands to catch her were she to attempt escape.

“Why won’t you talk to me?” Steven had asked plaintively, but she didn’t relent. Let him try in vain to get her to open up. She couldn’t help but smile at having used her silence to pierce his detachment—access by any means possible. “Emma,” he’d pleaded, “look at me,” but she trained her gaze out the window. He came up behind her and his body asked a question of her, insisted that she offer an answer. She resisted, but only briefly. She allowed herself to be led back to the couch, allowed him to take her crutches and lay them on the floor. She lay back on the couch, Steven on top of her. Usually she liked the crush of his body upon her, pinning her down, her wrists encircled by his hands, making her feel that she couldn’t go anywhere even if she tried. He was so close to her, yet had no idea that tears ran down her cheeks. He kissed her without noticing that she was curled up inside herself. As he took off her pants, she opened her eyes to see his eyes narrowed in concentration, the same as he looked when he was deeply absorbed in his work.

She pushed aside the voices that named all that wasn’t right between them; she stopped thinking about the strangeness of being undressed in her parents’ living room, stopped minding that a panoply of windows lay in full view. She stopped feeling the pain in her ankle. Thinking of that face across the way, and the other night watchers surely out there as well, she wriggled out from underneath and went astride him. It no longer mattered that even Steven’s most intense gaze was incapable of seeing down to the part of her that wanted to flee. Only a small fraction of her was trapped here with Steven. The rest of her was illuminated in the night sky. A city of eyes watched her, a city of hands was upon her body, every touch magnified, multiplied.

The world was recast in primary colors. All hard surfaces were covered with foam. Children bounded from mat to mat, crawled through tunnels, and disappeared inside a maze of passageways.

In a tone of ecstatic jollity, Mike, the Gymboree instructor, was singing “Wheels on the Bus.” The mothers sang along, their hands going up and down, open and shut, swish, swish, swish. Mike referred to them collectively as “the mommies” and probably made fun of them the second his bubble wand was put away. Like Steve from
Blue’s Clues,
like the inimitable Mr. Rogers himself, he was a rare male visitor to their land. At the end of the day, he rode out as freely as he’d arrived.

“‘The mommies on the bus say I love you, I love you, I love you,’” Mike sang, and Nina laughed. Not even the mommies on the bus were allowed to
shh,
shh,
shh
anymore.

“Do you think Mike has ever been on a bus with a crying kid?” Nina said to her friend Wendy and to the other mothers sitting next to them.

“The kids love Mike,” said Wendy as her twins, Sophie and Harry, banged together red rhythm sticks.

It was best to just sing along. The children played with balls and scarves, the mothers monitoring the kids’ interactions like UN peacekeepers, determining whether intervention was needed. When Sophie stopped banging the sticks and slid one up her nose, Wendy grabbed her hand. From her diaper bag she pulled a small plastic bottle.

“Purell, anyone?” Wendy offered, and all around her, mothers obligingly rubbed some between their hands.

When Circle Time ended, the kids moved on to the mats and jungle gym. “Be careful,” Wendy called to Harry as he climbed. “I’m worried he isn’t up for this today,” Wendy explained. “Usually the kids sleep a solid twelve hours—they actually like going to sleep—but I don’t think Harry got in his full sleep last night. He dozed in our bed while I was reading to him and I had to wake him to bring him back to his bed.”

“Why didn’t you leave him in your bed?” Nina asked as she nursed Lily, who still expected that at the sound of her cry, a nipple would magically appear in her mouth.

“You sound like my husband—he thinks anyone can get a kid to sleep. He has no idea how complicated it is. I’m doing Weissbluth, and he says that anytime a child sleeps somewhere besides his own bed, it doesn’t count as sleep. It’s not the good kind,” Wendy said, waving to Sophie and giving a smile intended to telegraph confidence that
You can do it!
I like the way you’re climbing up there, all by yourself!!

While the other kids returned their musical instruments to the basket, Max refused to surrender his tambourine. He rustled against Nina’s leg, and she tried to read his face, which could register a grownup’s range of feelings, even if he didn’t yet know how to name them.

When Mike tried to convince him to put away the tambourine, Max ran to the far reaches of the room. Preparing to give chase, Nina kissed Lily’s fuzz-dusting of hair and put her on the mat, momentarily grateful for her immobility. Though she still complied with the role of easygoing second child, surely the tantrums were encoded inside her, sleeper cells waiting for the right moment to emerge.

“Max, sweetie, it’s going to be fun, okay? Remember how much fun you had on the slide?” Nina said to Max, who was now wearing the tambourine on his head, a crown of defiance that if pulled any lower would need to be surgically removed.

“Gymbo doesn’t want you to be sad,” Mike tried, holding his puppeted hand in Max’s face.

Max lay down and began to scream and kick. The shoes came off, then the socks. As he was splayed on the floor, thrashing so furiously that he seemed to be made entirely of limbs, all the mothers stared at her. She was the pariah of Gymboree.

But Max was only getting started. Still to come, the furious striptease of T-shirt and pants, down to his Buzz Lightyear pull-up, which, after a moment’s pause, came off and landed with a thud. So much for her attempt to hide the fact that Max was resisting her civilizing efforts. She’d long ago passed the stage of elimination communication and had failed countless times at potty-training-in-a-day. Now that you had to attach yourself to a particular parenting ideology, she had no choice but to embrace the new and improved Brazelton, who endorsed these extra-large pull-ups. She’d convinced Max to wear underwear for a few hours each day as “practice,” but it was mere ornamentation.

The other kids weren’t embarrassed to rubberneck. “He’s naked! I see his penis!” they screamed. With bright cheery voices, their mothers shepherded them away, while from the corners of their eyes they watched as Nina attempted to quiet a hysterical kid, without raising her voice, without lifting a hand.
Who is the mommiest of them all?
they asked in the reflections of each other’s eyes.

The red illuminated Exit signs hanging at either end of the room beckoned. If she bolted, she could add this to the secret chronicles of maternal failure: The time Max vomited as she was about to go to work, so she quickly bathed him, changed his clothes, juiced him up with Tylenol, then took him to school. The time he heard her swear, and to wrest his promise that he wouldn’t repeat the word in public, she allowed him to say the word in front of her, so that in especially tender moments, he leaned close, his apple juice breath warm on her cheek, and whispered
shit
softly in her ear.

“Are you sure he doesn’t want to hug Gymbo?” Mike asked, as Max writhed at her legs, as Wendy and the other moms smiled combinations of pity and pleasure.

“No,” Max screamed, the same no that resounded inside her body and that she tried to swallow back down.

“
No,
” Max screamed again. “
No, no, no.
”

“One kiss for Gymbo?” Mike asked.

Nina tried to make the right words emerge. “Fuck Gymbo,” she said instead.

Max narrated the way home: A mailbox, a bus, a pigeon. A pay phone, a taxi, a subway station. They passed a woman and Max loudly asked, “Why is that lady so fat?” They passed a man on crutches, and Max asked, “Why does that man only have one leg?” Nina explained that Steve was a real person but Blue was an imaginary dog. Mermaids were imaginary but dragonflies were real. Max’s world was one where the real effortlessly intermingled with the pretend. As amazing as it was that her body could form another body, what truly stunned her was that she could birth a separate consciousness.

Along the way, they were joined by a menagerie of Max’s imaginary friends, his favorite of whom was Maurice, who had x-ray vision and sometimes was invisible, not just imaginary. She had been amused by the emergence of these characters, Max’s conversation suddenly containing references to people she didn’t know. A mother she knew made birthday parties for each of her child’s imaginary friends and set places for them at the dinner table, acting as though she too could see them. But Nina had decided to leave Maurice for Max alone.

“Mommy? Does Hop know his name is Hop?” Max asked.

The animal in question was all too real, hatched in the fish tank in his nursery school classroom and now living as their summer guest in a small glass bowl on what used to be her desk. Max had named him Hop, in anticipation, though at the moment he was still in the nebulous territory between tadpole and frog.

As Max talked, Nina realized that coming toward her was the crazy woman whom, through a coincidental confluence of schedules, she saw nearly every day. Today she was wearing a sequined blue beret, a loosely knit white sweater with a red bra underneath, and a floor-length pink satiny skirt that, in a previous life, was probably the inner lining to another skirt. On her feet she wore white lace-trimmed bobby socks and black patent leather Mary Janes; from the knees down, she was a little girl dressed for a birthday party. Usually Nina tried to look away, but today’s outfit was so outlandish that Nina couldn’t help but stare.

Spotting the set of pay phones nearby, Max ran toward them, grabbing one of the dangling receivers. “Maurice?” he screamed into it.

The woman stopped walking and approached him. “Hello, beautiful,” she said.

Max smiled and for a moment, they all stood still, as if someone had located the city’s Pause button. Inspired by Max, Nina broke the rule prohibiting eye contact and smiled with what she thought was sympathy.

The woman’s expression grew wild. “I always see you staring at me, you asshole, you crazy bitch,” the woman hissed at her and spit.

Drawing back in fear, Nina glanced first at Lily, who was sleeping blithely in the stroller, then looked around, wondering who else had heard. Ignoring Max’s repeated questions of “Why did she say that to you? What did you do to her?” Nina buckled him into his spot in the stroller and left a message for Jeremy, wanting to tell him about their day which took place not miles but continents apart from his. She wasn’t surprised that he was unavailable. He rarely answered when she called, and when he did, she felt like she was taking him from his work. Her anger at him reared. If by some miracle Jeremy had been the one at Gymboree, he wouldn’t have needed to know how to handle Max. His presence alone—a daddy on the bus!—would have earned universal acclaim.

Rather than go home to another lonely stretch of evening, in which she would wait in vain for her husband to come home, Nina kept walking until she reached Georgia’s, where displayed in the window were the three-tiered cakes that looked like the fanciful illustrations in a picture book. A new sign was hanging on the door, the words written in bright red Magic Marker:
Children of All Ages Are Reminded to Use Their Inside Voices.
Would mothers of loud children be chastened, she wondered, or would they bring the whole nursery school in to stage a protest?