Motherland

by Amy Sohn

  “Yeah, I do. Anyway, he lost his space, and since I need money, I told him he could see clients here for a while. He’s giving me a commission.”

  “That’s smart,” he said. “That you’re bringing in extra income. I mean, that’s a good use of your apartment.”

  “That room was supposed to be a baby’s room. We thought we were going to have another one. Then . . . Matty left. I wanted another child so badly, I thought if we moved into a three-bedroom, I’d have another child. We had been trying for a while, and nothing worked. They couldn’t find anything wrong with me.”

  “Maybe there isn’t anything wrong with you.”

  “I have a feeling about it. I think I know what happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I was in high school . . .” She wanted him to know, but she was frightened, too. She took a deep breath and told him about Jean Pierre-Louis and the chemistry-room floor and the appointment her mother made for her after.

  “I’m so sorry that happened to you,” he said. “You were so young.”

  “It was my fault. I was stupid.”

  “I think you’re brave,” he said, holding her hand. “For going through that. You did the right thing.”

  “I know I did, but I think about that baby a lot.”

  “You didn’t have that baby so you could have Darby. And you can’t imagine yourself without Darby, can you?”

  “No. But when I started having trouble getting pregnant a second time, I worried it might be—because—it messed me up inside.”

  “You had Darby, though.”

  “I know. I’m not saying it’s logical. I thought there had to be a reason. And that was the only thing I could think of.”

  “How long were you trying?”

  “A year and a half.”

  “That’s not that long. You could have another baby. No one said you can’t, right?”

  “I just have a feeling. It’s not going to happen for me.”

  “Even if it’s not, there’s nothing wrong with having one kid. I only have one kid.”

  “I wanted two,” she said.

  “You gotta let it go. You’re not just a mother.”

  “That’s the problem,” she said. “I don’t know what else I am.”

  Wesley set down his dessert wine, leaned toward her, and kissed her intently. It was better than their other kisses, and longer. He seemed more relaxed. She stood up, took his hand, and started to lead him down the hallway. “Are you sure?” he said.

  “I was sure already,” she said. “I’m still sure.”

  On the bed no man had been in since Matty, Wesley pulled down her pencil skirt and her burgundy lace panties, the same sexy pair she had worn during her massage. He went down on her, making high grunts while he did. He did it for a long time, like he wasn’t in a rush, and he didn’t do the annoying thing Matty sometimes did, the oil check, where he put his finger in just to see if she was wet enough to penetrate. She decided to think of images that might excite her, and very quickly, one floated into her mind of Seth touching himself as he watched her and Wesley have sex on the massage table. The image disturbed her, but she went with it, and her orgasm was so strong that her ovaries hurt.

  She put her mouth around him. He turned out to be big and wide, much bigger than Matty. She usually closed her eyes with Matty, but with Wesley she ran her hands over it, licked it, examined it in the streetlamp light coming through the window.

  He had brought a condom, which she thought was very menschy. She tried to roll it onto him, something she hadn’t done in years. After Darby was born, she had gone on the pill and then gone off when she and Matty started trying again. It was more difficult than she thought, and Wesley helped her as they laughed together softly.

  He got on top of her. It was slow and loving, and she wasn’t afraid. It felt right, like sex between two people who cared about each other. After Wesley came, he stared at her and said, “You’re so beautiful.” She started to say “No, I’m not” but stopped herself.

  She asked him to sleep over, but he said he needed to get back to Ayo. As a compromise he lay next to her and they dozed for a few minutes before he stirred and rose.

  Rebecca

  “We need to talk,” Rebecca said.

  Theo was sitting on the couch, watching The David Keller Show, a sketch in which two Jewish-looking, chunky comedians did a blind malt-liquor test while David Keller stood over them making jokes. Theo turned slowly from the television toward her and got the look that all men get when their wives say “We need to talk”—dread.

  “Oh yeah?” he said.

  The show went to a commercial. It was for the DVD set of Girls Gone Wild. She stood up and shut off the TV, and he didn’t stop her. She would tell him the truth about Benny, tell him she was moving in with Stuart. She had made all the necessary preparations. She had withdrawn extra cash from her account in case Theo decided to close it. She wasn’t sure whether to try to take Abbie with her to Stuart’s loft, not wanting to vex Theo too much. Stuart had encouraged her to bring Abbie, saying it would help ease Benny’s transition.

  She took a deep breath. “It’s something I should have told you a long time ago,” she said. “I kept it secret, and it was wrong of me, but I don’t want to keep it secret anymore.”

  “That is so crazy, because I have something to tell you, too,” Theo said. It wasn’t the response she had been expecting. “I should have told you, but I was worried you’d freak out. It’s exactly like what you just said. You want to go down to the stoop?”

  “Why?”

  “It’s such a nice night. It’s going to get cold soon, and there won’t be many more nice nights.”

  “All right,” she said. As they walked down the stairs, she wondered what he could possibly have to tell her—that he was unhappy? He didn’t have the pallor of a man about to ask for a divorce. Instead, he was grinning like a schoolboy. But he looked like that a lot of the time now. In a pothead, it was impossible to distinguish genuine excitement from brain-cell depletion.

  How was she going to tell him?

  Terse: “Benny’s not yours.”

  Soap Opera: “After Abbie was born, it seemed like you no longer loved me. I missed you, and you stopped touching me. When a woman is neglected, she needs attention. I fell in love with someone else, and though I never intended the consequence that befell me . . .”

  Comedic: “You know that expression ‘I’m going to beat you like a redheaded stepchild’?”

  Scientific: “Ten percent of all children conceived in a marriage have been fathered by a man outside of the couple.”

  Soft: “What I’m about to say is going to give you quite a shock. You might be angry or surprised, but I want you to know that I never intended for this to happen. And no matter what happens from here, I’ll always love you, and so will Benny.”

  They emerged onto the stoop. “I bought a motorcycle,” Theo said.

  “What?” she said. “Are you crazy? You have kids.” A kid.

  He led her down the front steps and up the sidewalk. “I’ve always wanted a—” He stopped midsentence, the smile gone from his face. Just up the street from the brownstone, parked between two cars in the street, was a big, shiny black motorcycle with the word “Norton” on it. A large bearded guy in a vintage motorcycle helmet and black leather gloves was sitting on it, his hands on the handlebars, making childlike engine noises.

  “Excuse me,” Theo said, approaching the front of the bike.

  “This your bike, brosef?” The guy was wearing a T-shirt with a graphic of a red one-eyed creature Rebecca recognized as the character Muno from the kids’ TV show Yo Gabba Gabba! Underneath Muno, it said, “Don’t bite your friends.”

  “Yeah,” Theo said, frowning.

  Muno stepped off the bike, and his fist shot out clean to Theo’s nose. Theo’s head flopped back like a cartoon character’s, and he fell to his knees, hands to his nose, moaning, blood slipping through his fingers
to the pavement in dark droplets.

  “Hey!” she cried, as though saying “Hey” could undo what had just happened.

  “It’s better if you stay out of this, Rebecca,” Muno said, putting out his gloved hand. How did he know her name?

  She didn’t know what to do: call for help or scream. Who was this guy? He pulled a red handkerchief from his pocket and held it to Theo’s nose. Then he put Theo’s hand over it. “You’re going to want to hold it real tight. Press it there underneath the bridge. Good job!” He took off his gloves and guided Theo, guiding him to the stoop of 903 Carroll, two buildings up from their own. “Here. If you hold your head back, it’ll help. Breathe through your mouth.” Theo sat awkwardly, perched on the step, his beautiful blue guayabera stained with blood. Muno rested his arm on the step above them. “Do you know the street value of three pounds of A1 Purple Octopus shipped UPS from Arcata?” he asked Theo.

  “No,” Theo said, holding up his chin, his eyes pressed shut.

  “It’s about fifty thousand dollars. Consider it a loan.”

  Theo’s eyes opened wide behind the bandana. “But I still have some left. I’ll go upstairs and get it for you right now!”

  Some left? What is he talking about?

  “Are you familiar with the term ‘vigorish’?” Theo nodded. “I bet you don’t know the derivation. It’s Yiddish slang. From the Ukrainian vygrash. For winnings. Yiddish is such a hybrid language, such a rich textual mishmash. The vigorish on a fifty-thousand-dollar loan is two thousand a week. My package went missing nine weeks ago. You’ve got a month. I’ll give you one week gratis on the vig, for the nose punch. Sorry, but first impressions are everything. So seventy-two grand. Are you listening?” Theo nodded mutely. “Let me give you some advice. You are way too stupid to be dealing drugs. Don’t you know what happened to that chick above the Carnegie Deli?”

  The door behind them opened. Jessica Webster, a young mother Rebecca was friendly with, emerged pushing a Bugaboo with one arm and holding her baby son with the other. Muno looked up and hastily climbed the steps two at a time. “You need some help with that, ma’am?”

  Startled, she shook her head. “That’s fine, I’m—”

  “These Bugaboos are terrific,” he said, and gallantly carried the stroller down the stairs for her. “Great ride. But so unwieldy.”

  “Thank you so much,” Jessica said. As she spotted Theo with the handkerchief to his nose, she asked, “Are you all right?” and glanced nervously at Rebecca.

  “Yeah, yeah, fine. I . . . tripped on the stairs.”

  Jessica frowned a little as she came down, and glanced from him to Muno to Rebecca. Then she put the baby in the Bugaboo and headed up the street toward Prospect Park.

  When she was out of earshot, Muno put out his hand and said, “Now give me the keys to the Norton.”

  “Come on,” Theo said. “I just got it today. Just today. I told you. I’m good for the money, I promise.”

  “I only got one hankie, Theo.”

  Theo stood, reached into his pants, and handed over a set of keys, his face racked with pain. Muno swung his leg over the bike and pulled his gloves back on. “The Norton 850cc Commando,” he said. “Seventy-three, right?” Theo nodded as if about to cry. “Did you know that the Norton was designed by a former Rolls-Royce engineer? The single top tube.” Theo said “single top tube” at the same time, whimpered it. “You can see the attention to detail, the glamour of the design.” Muno keyed the ignition, expertly rolled the bike out of the spot, and kicked the starter.

  He zoomed down the street. Rebecca raced to Theo and tenderly put her hand to his nose as he winced. “Oh my God, are you okay?”

  He was still looking off in the distance. “My Norton! My Norton!”

  “Is that the guy at 899 Garfield, the one who was supposed to get the pot?”

  “He must be. I never thought he’d find me. I didn’t even know it was meant for a dealer.”

  “You got three pounds of pot in the mail and you just decided on a whim to sell it?”

  “I started out giving it to friends, as a gift, and then people wanted to pay me. I fell into it. I bought these Lucite boxes and I had stickers made up. I call it Park Dope.”

  She was furious with Theo for being such a bald-faced idiot. What if he couldn’t come up with the money? The children. Would this Muno character try to hurt the children?

  “You keep it upstairs? Where is it?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  Karen was coming down the steps of their building. She was with a handsome black man who resembled the actor Taye Diggs. When the two of them saw Rebecca crouched over Theo, the blood all over his face and shirt, they hurried over in concern. “Oh my God,” Karen said. “What happened? Who did this to you?”

  Her friend took a white hankie out of his pocket and offered it to Theo. As he reached for it, there was a roar of an engine and a siren blast, and a blue car-service sedan with tinted windows and a strobe sped down the street the wrong way. It screeched to a stop, and two uniformed cops got out, hands on their holsters, a white guy and a black woman.

  Rebecca could only think of the marijuana upstairs in the apartment. Where did Theo keep it? In the fridge?

  The white cop pointed his gun at Taye. “Put your hands on your head, sir.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “I said put your hands on your head!” Taye folded his hands over his scalp.

  Rebecca looked at the black officer and saw nothing at all registering in her face. “He was just trying to help!” she said. “He didn’t do anything wrong!”

  “We got a call about an assault on the block.” The cop kept his gun pointed at Taye. Karen looked terrified.

  “There was no assault,” Theo said. “I just tripped coming down the stairs.”

  “Did you assault this man?” the white cop asked Taye.

  “No!” Karen said. “This is my boyfriend. I was walking him to his car, and we saw our friend bleeding.”

  “Ma’am, you’re going to have to be quiet,” said the black cop, frisking Karen’s boyfriend.

  “My husband fell,” Rebecca said. “This gentleman was offering help.” The frisk was over. Taye was putting stuff back in his pockets, looking furious. The white cop had put the gun back in its holster.

  “Okay?” Karen said. “Can we please be on our way?”

  The cops hesitated and conferred with each other quietly. “We were just answering a call, ma’am,” said the white one.

  In a few moments they were gone in their fake car-service car. “I am so sorry about that,” Rebecca said to Karen’s boyfriend.

  He shook his head silently. Karen walked him to his car and got in the passenger seat. They sat there talking, their expressions animated. “Did you see that?” Rebecca asked Theo. “You almost got an innocent man arrested!”

  “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I just wanted to help people.”

  Rebecca guided Theo toward the building. He was still wobbly on his feet. Everything in his life had been so deliberate, so thought out, and now he had done something so colossally stupid that it had put his wife and kids in danger. Maybe he had a brain tumor.

  “You should go to Methodist Hospital,” she said. “He could have broken your nose.”

  “I don’t want any more questions asked. I’ll see someone tomorrow.”

  As she helped him up the stoop, he turned to her groggily. “Hey,” he said. “You were going to tell me something.”

  “It can wait.” She opened the door and watched him move up the stairs like an old man.

  The Brooklyn Paper

  * * *

  Buggy Booty

  * * *

  by STEPHEN GORDON

  Early-morning visitors to Prospect Park’s Third Street Playground were shocked to find several dozen empty strollers parked inside its gates. Police said there were no witnesses to the Bugaboo dump, which appears to have been done in the middle of the night.
r />   At least one mother, Sara Rees-Kropsky, who had come to the playground with her daughter, Luella, 2, identified a stroller as her own, which she had reported stolen in August. For those whose heads have been under a Kiddopotamus stroller bonnet all summer, someone had been stealing untethered prams from the sidewalks in front of area stores, restaurants and even homes. Rees-Kropsky’s black Bugaboo Cameleon had been snatched from in front of a neighbor’s brownstone on Garfield Place, where it was left unlocked. “I’d given it up as lost,” she said, “and was shocked to find it in the same condition I’d left it. My daughter’s toys were still in the seat—and her lovey. She ran up to the stroller and grabbed Lambie and then she hugged it, crying, ‘Lambie, Lambie!’ ”

  Soon after the strollers were discovered, a call was made to the Seventy-eighth Precinct and the strollers were driven over in several police vans. Detective Tom Downey, a spokesman for the precinct, says anyone who had a stroller stolen this summer should come to the precinct to make a positive ID. “Of course, we wish the perp would come forward,” he said, “but if he or she is too cowardly to do it, it’s good that Park Slope babies once again have their modes of transportation.”

  He also noted that stroller owners concerned about future theft can bring them to the precinct to have them registered. The precinct puts a serial number on the stroller so that in the event of a recovery the police can check the serial number and trace it back to its rightful owner.

  The first theft was reported in early July, and they continued over the summer, leading Slopers to wonder whether the thief was a “baller,” as a local blog with an unprintable name refers to willfully childless people. Some believed the snatcher was anti-helicopter-parenting, as in Park Slope and surrounding brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods, one can see children up to age five or six still being pushed. Under the third theory, the most controversial, the thief was a parent from a poorer, adjacent neighborhood, looking to even the playing field.

  “I’m glad these mothers are finally getting their strollers back,” said Jane Simonson, a mother of three. “It’s unconscionable that someone would steal from the vulnerable—parents and young children! Of course, I never let my eyes off my stroller, even for a second. I’d rather lose my Subaru Forester than my Vibe 2 Buggy.”