Motherland

by Amy Sohn

  She missed the vacations they’d had before Matty left, like the one to Cape May, New Jersey, when Darby was two. Old-fashioned mini golf with windmills and corny courses. Crab cakes and lobster rolls, milk shakes, sand castles. Governors was the wrong kind of island. She wanted Fire or Shelter or Block. New York was awful in the summer. It had been record-hot, in the low hundreds. Despite the heat, it seemed every week a different movie or television crew was filming on her block.

  It was a sweltering late-August Tuesday, and Karen had taken Darby to Governors Island in the false hope that it would be cooler there. Instead it was dirty and hot. The boat ride had been crowded and nausea-inducing. She and Darby had wandered into the officers’ houses and stopped at an arts-and-crafts station for children, but he grew bored quickly. He didn’t like collaging or decoupage, activities that had entranced him just one year before. KGOY, they called it: kids getting older younger.

  Afterward they had stopped on Colonels’ Row and staked out a patch of wilted grass to eat lunch. She unwrapped the chicken curry sandwiches and potato salad that she had made at home and packed in a picnic basket that she and Matty had gotten for their wedding. The curried chicken had wine-soaked raisins and Honeycrisp apples from Hepworth Farms that she had bought at the Prospect Park Food Coop. She had made the mayo and the curry powder by herself, gently toasting the cumin, cardamom, and black pepper before running it through an old coffee grinder. She’d been cooking up a storm. She had always been interested in cooking, but since the separation, it had become therapeutic. She had introduced Darby to farro, homemade lobster salad, game hen, mussels, roasted beets, celeriac puree, ramps, and fiddleheads.

  But when she had passed him the sandwich on Governors Island, he had spit it out. “Give it a chance!” she said. He shook his head. The potato salad didn’t go over any better. She finally gave up and sprang for a hot dog from one of the trucks.

  A handsome blond family came by. The WASPy wife had a prominent underbite and was unusually tall. She pushed the younger one in a Bugaboo while the older one ran ahead with the father, a hearty type with receding reddish-brown hair and an easy gait. This was the family Karen had dreamed of, two sons, moneyed, living out the New Urban Ideal. Her eyes met the blond mom’s. Karen felt certain the woman could tell she was a single mother and detected a pitying look.

  At the Food Coop once, Karen had found herself on the express line behind a crazy lady with thick eyebrows. The woman kept yelling at people for leaning over her to select things from the shelf. Karen had been marveling at her insanity when the woman spun around and shouted, “Look at you, all satisfied with yourself! I bet you own your apartment, have a great job and a lover!”

  Karen had sputtered, “Yes, I do!” and everyone laughed. At the time she had been aghast at the woman’s rage. These days she found herself thinking the same kinds of thoughts—envying mothers with three or more babies, even the haggard and shell-shocked mothers of twins.

  After the lunch fiasco with Darby, she had hoped the miniature golf course—recommended to them at the visitors’ stand—would make the trip worthwhile, but it had been nothing like what she’d expected. The tees were designed by an artists’ collective. They were strange and shabby, with titles like “The Golf Between Us Is Small.” Darby pranced from station to station, showing off, while Karen sweated and waited for him to finish.

  When she told him it was time to go home, he had asked for ice cream. Because she felt badly that he had to settle for trips to Governors Island instead of Wellfleet, where her rich upstairs neighbor Rebecca Rose was vacationing, she said yes. Karen thought of Rebecca lying on a beach, enjoying herself. She didn’t like Rebecca. When Karen and Matty were fighting a lot, Karen often told him to lower his voice. Later, after he moved out, when she wailed alone at night, she made sure to do so into her pillow. She didn’t want Rebecca and Theo hearing, even though she’d had to suffer through their baby son’s nighttime bawling. That was different. In a Park Slope coop building, a baby’s cries were normal but not a mother’s.

  When she told Rebecca they had separated, Rebecca looked uncomfortable and then said blandly, “I’m sorry to hear that.” After Matty left, Rebecca hadn’t made one overture, not even to invite Karen over for a cup of tea. Karen was convinced they looked down on her for being separated. They were probably worried that she and Matty would default on the mortgage. Divorce was terrible for the husband and wife but also very bad for small apartment buildings.

  “Is there an ATM on the island?” Karen asked the Sedutto girl.

  “Go through the arch to the left. By Water Taxi Beach.”

  Grabbing Darby’s hand, Karen led him away from the stand. “We’ll get ice cream someplace else.”

  “I don’t want ice cream someplace else,” Darby said. “I want it there.”

  “I saw a Mister Softee van.”

  “I don’t want Mister Softee!” She was so livid that she walked ahead of him, periodically casting her head back to be sure he hadn’t disappeared. It was the nature of motherhood to be unable to be within twenty feet of your child and simultaneously need to check that he hadn’t been abducted.

  When they finally found the ATM, she stuck in her card and selected two hundred dollars. The machine beeped a few times and said INSUFFICIENT FUNDS. It had to be a mistake. She tried again. Same message. She tried one hundred. The machine spit out five twenties as though in disgust.

  Matty, who had moved out a year ago but was still legally her husband, wired her five thousand dollars on the fifteenth of each month for living expenses, and he also paid the mortgage and maintenance on the coop. Cell phone to her cheek, she dialed him. “What’s going on?” she hissed. “Where’s the money?”

  “From now on I can only do four grand. I’ll get it to you as soon as I can.”

  “Why?”

  “Unforeseen circumstances.”

  She glanced over at Darby, who was kicking pebbles at pigeons. “Stop that!” she said. “What do you mean, unforeseen circumstances? Does this have to do with . . . her?”

  “My cost of living has increased. I can’t explain why. I can’t talk now.” He hung up.

  Their financial arrangement had been strained ever since he told her he was leaving her for Valentina, a Puerto Rican transsexual he had met online. She had caught him jerking off on his laptop to she-male porn months before he said he wanted to separate, but she’d chosen to tuck away the information the way she-males tucked away their penises. She told herself it was a one-time thing. He had chanced upon the images in search of something benign. That happened sometimes: You Googled “carrot salad recipe,” and before you knew it, you were looking up the names of Jennifer Garner’s children.

  After that she didn’t catch him on the Internet again. And then one night they were out to dinner at Applewood on Eleventh Street when he announced suddenly, “I met someone in a chat room, and I think I want to be with her.” As soon as he said the name Valentina, Karen knew it was a tranny. She began to cry into her pan-roasted Vermont lamb leg.

  He said that he’d never touched her but that they’d met for lunch a few times in diners. Karen didn’t believe it. She was certain he had paid her for sex, which meant—oh God. Was he a pitcher or a catcher? She had to call their family physician, the same one who had calmed her through Darby’s lice and his fifth disease, that strange virus with its lacy red rash, to request an HIV test—and she spent a week worrying before the call came with the results.

  The sad thing was that even given Matty’s probable bisexuality and potential for infection, she would have forgiven him and taken him back for Darby’s benefit. But he was determined to leave. An affair of escape, they called it in the infidelity books. Two weeks later, he moved out.

  The therapy she’d had with a Union Street psychotherapist named Linda Weinert had done little to quell her feelings of abandonment and rage. The many Internet message boards for women in her situation—Brokeback Wives (women married to gays) and Smokestack
Wives (women married to tranny chasers)—only agitated her further. Many women felt that if they had been better in bed, it wouldn’t have happened. Some people thought interest in she-males was genetic. It was so confusing. If he had come out as gay, she would have been more sympathetic.

  No one knew the embarrassing truth about Matty’s departure. Her friends from the Garfield School, the nursery that Darby had attended inside Garfield Temple, thought Matty had left Karen for a woman he’d met on a plane. She was aware of the lunacy of trying to make a humiliating event sound less humiliating by altering the gender of the mistress but could not ’fess up.

  It was impossible to reconcile the Matty Shapiro she knew with the Matty Shapiro who had left her for Valentina. She had married him because of her utter confidence that he would never decide she wasn’t good enough for him. He was a devoted, hardworking white-shoe lawyer. He was Jewish, for God’s sake! Matty Shapiros were not the kind of men who left their wives for transsexual prostitutes.

  She worried constantly about what Matty’s choice would do to Darby. How would it affect his future relationships with women? How would it affect his budding masculinity? She had not allowed Darby to meet Valentina on any weekend visits with Matty. Instead, Matty came to the apartment and took Darby to soccer practice, Prospect Park, or Yankee games. According to Darby, it was always just the two of them. Once Matty had slept in Karen’s apartment with Darby while she went to a spa weekend in the Berkshires with her friends Cathleen Meth and Jane Simonson, two mothers from the Garfield School, but she had made it clear that Darby could never sleep over at Matty’s. What if he saw Valentina peeing upright in the bathroom, like in that Felicity Huffman movie?

  The worst part of Matty’s departure was that he had left at a time when Darby’s school situation was in turmoil. She and Matty had bought the apartment on Carroll Street when it was zoned for P.S. 321, but then their building had been rezoned for P.S. 282 on Sixth Avenue, which was “underutilized,” meaning that most upper-middle-class white parents tried anything they could not to send their kids there. It was 10 percent white and attracted aspiring African-American kids from failing school districts for whom 282 was a step up.

  The comments about it on Insideschools.org referred to the “strict atmosphere” and “bullying.” The most glowing endorsement, by a former student, sang the teachers’ praises but ended with a disconcerting “When I was in that school I learned evreything,” an error that Karen wanted desperately to attribute to poor typing. She had applied to half a dozen other, better-utilized public schools in Park Slope, Gowanus, Windsor Terrace, and Boerum Hill, but Darby hadn’t gotten into any of them because they all prioritized zoned students. So off to Sixth Avenue he went to start kindergarten just a few months after Matty moved out.

  Most of Darby’s classmates had turned out to be black children of single mothers and arrived in large, leased, gas-guzzling SUVs. Within weeks, he was using terms like “baby daddy,” “aks you,” and “Moms.” The teachers were strict and had good control, but she worried that Darby would grow up a victim of reverse racism, feeling odd for being one of the few white kids.

  Clutching the hundred dollars in her hand, she led Darby away from the ATM to the Mister Softee truck. He picked chocolate with chocolate dip. She thought about trying to talk him out of the dip and then took pity on him. If he wanted to overeat to compensate for missing his father, she wasn’t going to stop him.

  “Can I have a lick?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Give me a lick!” she said, grabbing the cone and lopping off the top with her lips. He looked up at her, injured, as though she and not he had transgressed. What kind of a child wouldn’t share with his own mother? It was her greatest failing as a parent: She had raised a selfish child. He was like this because he was an only. And he would be an only forever, because Matty had left her.

  She was relieved when they were back on the Brooklyn side of the East River, inside her Outback, with the air-conditioning cranked up. She took Atlantic Avenue to Fourth Avenue and turned right. Just before Carroll Street, she saw lights behind her. She knew she wasn’t speeding and was flabbergasted but pulled over anyway. An Italian-looking cop came up to the window. “Ma’am, I saw that you weren’t wearing your seat belt.”

  She pointed to the belt across her chest. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “Ma’am, I saw you at the last light, and you weren’t.” Clearly, the guy had a ticket quota, thank you, Michael R. Bloomberg.

  “Yes, I did! I did have my seat belt on! Ask my son!” She looked at Darby in the rearview. “Did I have my belt on?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, her iPhone in his lap. He was playing a bubble-popping game that she was sure was going to turn him autistic.

  “I never drive without a seat belt, Officer!” she exclaimed. She had read somewhere that when interacting with a cop, you should always call him “Officer.” She noticed the guy’s name, Lotto, on his badge.

  “I saw you. You weren’t wearing it. It’s your word against mine, ma’am. You have the right to argue in court.”

  Of course she wouldn’t argue in court. No one ever got tickets reversed. You spent a day in court and came home still owing money, sometimes a penalty for having fought it in the first place. He took her license and registration, spent a long time in his car, and returned with a ticket. “I’m sorry I had to do this in front of your son.”

  She waited until he was gone to look. A hundred thirty dollars. “Shit!” Darby didn’t even glance up.

  She wondered what Matty’s mysterious “unforeseen circumstances” were. Maybe Valentina was trying to turn him against her. It had been only a matter of time before he tried something like reducing her payments.

  She had to get a divorce so he couldn’t avoid his obligation to her and to Darby. Even if it took awhile, she needed to know she could count on him. He had done well for himself in the years they’d been married, and she was entitled to some of his money.

  In the meantime, she would have to get a job so she could build up a cushion for herself. She had been at home with Darby for his entire life. It wouldn’t be bad for a sitter to take care of him while Karen worked. Maybe a good stern Trinidadian could teach him to be less spoiled. Before having Darby, Karen was a school social worker in the Bronx, but she had quit because her clients—the drug-addicted mothers, the absent fathers, the hyperactive, violent kids—were so demanding that she didn’t think she could be a good mother as long as she worked.

  Linda Weinert, MSW, had given Karen a long speech about how lucky they both were to have a master’s in social work during an economic recession, but Linda Weinert had an ugly industrial carpet and shared a suite of offices with a podiatrist and a Rolfer. Karen couldn’t go back to working in the Bronx with troubled black kids when her own son’s father was living with a she-male. She could find something else to do. She just had to figure out what she was good at.

  Marco

  “You’re cutting out!” Todd said into his cell phone, weaving in the sand on Newcomb Hollow Beach. Marco was embarrassed to be near him sometimes. In Wellfleet you didn’t broadcast that you were a New York asshole by talking on the phone at the beach.

  Todd plugged up one ear and ran toward the dunes in his flip-flops. When Marco turned back to the shore, he saw Enrique throwing rocks at a seagull. Marco ran down, grabbed him, and said, “¡Deja al pájaro tranquilo!”

  Todd was breathless when he returned ten minutes later. “They have a boy for us,” he said. “He’s three months old. From New Jersey. Guatemalan mother. The mother and the father aren’t together. They split up, and then she realized she was pregnant.” He kissed Marco on the lips. “It’s happening! All our waiting paid off. We’ll leave tomorrow.”

  Marco nodded robotically. The news felt like a death. He began to sweat, even on the cool beach with the breeze coming off the waves. “But we just got here,” he said. They had arrived three days before; they were barely
settled in.

  “So? We’ll leave tomorrow and bring him back. Did I tell you his name? Jason.” Jason was the name of Marco’s ex-lover, the student, but Todd didn’t sound odd when he said it. Maybe he’d forgotten.

  “This is such a bad time,” Marco said. “School’s starting.”

  “Rosa will help.” Rosa was their sitter, a frail, tiny Puerto Rican woman in her sixties who picked up Enrique from Beansprouts and took care of him till Marco came home from the Morham School, the Cobble Hill private school where he taught English.

  “I don’t think she could handle a newborn,” Marco said.

  “Spanish women can handle anything.”

  “What about the vaccines?”

  “He has some already. He’ll be fine.”

  Marco glanced at the water. Enrique, three, was throwing sand at a little girl whose mother was looking around angrily for a parent. He was a hyperactive, troublemaking biter. Marco frequently told other parents he was counting the days till he could put him on Ritalin, and he was only half kidding.

  Marco ran down and grabbed him. “I am so sorry,” he told the mother. “You’re getting a time-out!” he said to Enrique, whisking him up to the beach blanket. He was uncomfortable with discipline; it was like a suit that didn’t fit. Marco’s father had beaten him and his two brothers for every minor slight, and when Marco yelled at Enrique, he reminded himself of his dad.

  “¿Qué te pasa?” Todd spat at Enrique.

  Todd spoke a sloppy, horrible Spanish to Enrique even though he was a white Lutheran boy from Omaha who had learned the language from a Peruvian ex-boyfriend. Marco was supposed to speak only Spanish to Enrique, but he was lazy and often reverted to English, while Todd loved Enrique’s Guatemalan heritage and insisted on Spanish. No matter how many times Marco asked him to stop, he wouldn’t.