Hey Harry, Hey Matilda

by Rachel Hulin

  .

  Matilda,

  I really need you to help me out here.

  .

  Harry,

  OK, OK—relax! I do enjoy this piqued interest suddenly, but this feels slightly voyeuristic. Fine. But I’ll tell you now in advance: There is no reason to be angry with me.

  So we met outside the Algonquin at 3 p.m. I got Alexis to spring her for the whole afternoon, because you just don’t want to feel encumbered by a deadline when you’re meeting your future sister-in-law. I was there first. Have you been to the Algonquin recently? It holds up as a pretentious writer’s paradise. It now has a little side bar that has been updated with blue modern fixtures, maybe added as a direct counterpoint to the musty plush red hotel lobby you must walk through to reach it. (When you first enter the hotel you’re greeted by an ancient orange cat in a basket, who gives you a discerning scowl. “You’re not literary enough to belong here,” he says to you and sends you back to the blue room.)

  But it’s not unpleasant to come into this dim, watery side bar for the less literary miscreants and be greeted by John the bartender, who is a tan man wearing a white vest and a more pleasant, welcoming expression than that cat. I arrived at two, because I had some business in Manhattan and finished early. I always think they should have a daytime hotel or maybe a holding cell for folks stuck in the city from outer boroughs in between appointments. It’s probably why a lot of people just shrug and have a martini at two in the afternoon, which is just what I did.

  I sat there for a while and chatted with John.

  “Hot enough out there for you, miss?”

  “It’s ridiculous. Though I think the extreme temperatures of winter and summer bring out the best in us, don’t you think? They force us to—for example—examine how we feel about sweating on a train crammed next to a hundred other heatstroked bodies, which in turn advances our understanding of the human condition, and therefore ourselves.”

  “Well, that’s an interesting way to look at it, I suppose.”

  “I enjoy looking at things in interesting ways. I also like assuming Californians are weak, otherwise we’d have to face the fact that they’re living a better life than we are.”

  “Oh, I can relate to that. I used to live in LA. I might go back, things seem a bit intense here.”

  “When did you get here?”

  “Last month.”

  “Yeah, you probably should go back. It’s not too late for you.”

  You know, Harry—the last time I was at the Algonquin it was in a winter squall with my friend Margaret. We were competing with each other for who could be more distracted and destructive in her doomed twentysomething relationship. I’m pretty sure she hit a cab driver in the face that night with her hand. So I came in a close second. She’s a psychotherapist now. Guess where? Wait for it….

  in

  …

  …

  Malibu.

  .

  Hey Matilda,

  Let’s get to the part with Vera, if you don’t mind. (I do remember meeting that Margaret once. Boy was she nuts.)

  .

  Hey Harry,

  You’re not supposed to call women crazy anymore. It’s offensive and dismissive. And she was fabulous.

  .

  Hey Matilda,

  Don’t be crazy; please continue with your story.

  .

  Hey Harry,

  Very well! So I went to fetch Vera when she arrived.

  I saw her coming down the sidewalk before she saw me and I immediately regretted my outfit. You know how certain people have that effect on you? It’s like when you date a man who’s especially short and you feel like a giantess behemoth. Even your voice feels deeper.

  She was quite a bit better than I’d imagined, Harry. I actually think maybe she should just give up the literary aspirations entirely and be a patchouli-wearing-natural-mama pregnancy model. Wear prosthetics out on the town after the thing comes out. Maybe it could be her trademark, like a good pair of glasses.

  Her hair has gotten quite long (it must have been up when I last saw her), but this time it was down and haphazard and spectacular—as natural as a palomino pony’s tail on a mesa in Dakota. And blond, Harry—bleached almost white at the temples from the sun in a way that suggests neither stylists nor summer on a boat, but the very life force of the sun itself, glowing from within.

  Her cheekbones give her a hint of something other than garden-variety Puritan blue blood. Cherokee? Amber eyes, almond. And a crimson silky tank top expertly picked from Goodwill or procured by Millicent to rest over a small, almost-too-perfect bump of what all would agree is a male baby curled up inside like a perfect volleyball, ready for a beach match, just hanging out under its red tent to get out of the sun. Cowboy boots.

  Vera grasped the knob to get into the hotel as I grasped the knob to let her in and she said “Oh, hi, Matilda!” through the pane, laughing as we both pulled at the door from either side so that neither of us could get the thing open. The glass was so thick that my name actually came out “Tilda,” in her coltish voice, close to “Teeelda,” which made me feel reborn. Tilda Goodman. Wearing all cotton.

  She finally let go and she fell into the room quickly, as I’d been pulling too hard against her. There was a blast of hot air from the street that was half flowery sunshine from Vera and half hot-dog air, an oddly alluring mixture. As the door slowly closed behind her I saw a lone magazine intern rushing across the street toward Bryant Park to catch a half hour of lunchtime sun, dodging a tourist in one of those huge spongy hands you get at baseball games (grotesque out of context) and an off-duty cab that was turning left with too much abandon. And I thought: Manhattan is for the very young and very old, but it is not so much for me.

  The cat immediately changed its mind about me with Vera in the mix, and ushered us right to a table in front of a window in the main lobby. Vera led. She knew the names of the water pourer, the waiter, and the cat by the time we were seated. She does not really appear younger than us at all, Harry—aside from her glowing, lineless skin, she coded “born in the early eighties.” There wasn’t a hint of pregnancy bloat aside from the taut volleyball. Hooray for teen motherhood.

  I won’t lie to you, Harry, I felt a touch awkward at first. You know me—extroverted sometimes, but often shy at first, even when it’s not this important. So though the martini was doing its job, I just wanted to watch her. Which felt odd, because I’d had so many questions in mind initially. I was going to introduce her to MATILDA. But it was quite the other way around.

  She went first.

  “Tilda—can I call you that? I had a friend on an adventure once named Tilda, so I’m fond of it. I’m so glad to finally meet you in person! I really do see the resemblance between you and Harry. You guys are so lucky to have each other.”

  “Are we? Harry can be really irritated with me sometimes.”

  “Oh, he loves you to pieces! Which is why I was actually a bit nervous to meet you today—it’s obvious I’ll have to stay on your good side, right?”

  “Well, I’m not sure I have that much power. Maybe I have to stay on your good side.”

  “No, no. Harry is definitely very connected to you. He has pictures of you two all over his room, you know. I’m really interested in twins, in general. In fact—I’m babysitting twins this summer who are named Denim and Houston! I do have a hard time calling her House. Although who am I to talk, with my own silly name!”

  “Really? Houston is a girl? People have gone mad.”

  “Yes! Isn’t New York just ridiculous? These two have bunk beds and she’s on the top bunk, so naturally there’s a sign above his head that says SOHO.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “I know!”

  “You know, twins used to be much more special. I originally thought Harry and I were the only pair in the world.”

  “It’s spectacularly special, Tilda. Think of it: You were conceived in a single moment, and then curled around each ot
her in a womb for nine months. I mean, you two are forever like this now—”

  And she grabbed the napkin and drew a little yin-yang. They’re not just from the ’90s, Harry—still relevant.

  Actually, she drew each side and I added the dots.

  Vera colored in the yang side, adding one line next to each other until the whole side was black.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  “Anything.”

  “What does it feel like? Having a human burrowing inside you? I mean, is it just wild? Is it a good feeling, like you and the baby are in on it together, or is it more like having a parasite?”

  “Oh well, I actually don’t feel that different day to day, you know?”

  “Really? Because I’m thinking it would feel like a parasite! Maybe I’ll pull a thirty-niner with a dermatologist someday and find out for myself.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s having a baby at thirty-nine. You know. The last chance dance.”

  “Oh, dear, that doesn’t seem ideal! But I know what you were saying before about the special thing. I used to be the only kid with two moms, but now it’s all the rage. But very few folks my age have moms who started out together, and made a baby with a sperm donor. Usually it’s ‘My mom left my dad for a woman, so I have three parents now.’ But that is not the same, at all. My moms made a choice, to begin with. It was very bold back then.”

  “Oh, so do you know your dad?”

  “No, I know my sperm donor.”

  “So that’s your dad.”

  “Nah, he’s just a donor. Family’s what you make it, you know what I mean? There’s much more plasticity in families than people really want to believe. People should just choose who they want to be their family, and that should be the end of it.”

  “So you’ve chosen Harry, then?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Can I ask why?”

  “Oh, well it wasn’t even so much of a choice—Harry was sent to me.”

  “What! Who sent him to you?”

  “It’s surprisingly straightforward, really! It started when I sailed down the Hudson River with a boy I barely knew.”

  “Why did you sail down the Hudson River?”

  “Well, because I invited myself along. I’ll tell you the whole story. You see: The year before I started at college I was just hanging around home for the summer. But my moms were both working all the time, so I was hanging out with friends at the local café to stave off boredom, and some of them invited me to come stay with them. Naturally, I took them up on it, as I’ve learned never to refuse an obvious adventure. I settled in at their communal house—I guess it was a hippie house, but the hippest hippies.

  “One day my friend Angela told me she was milking a cow and a goat at Windy Mountain Farm and would I like to come along? So I started milking the cow and the goat with her every day, and learning how to make milk and cheese and yogurt. Milking days were always magical—incredible coincidences and synchronicity always happened on those days.

  “So after the second or third milking session, we’re in the backyard with our little baskets, picking blackberries, and I turn to my right, and I see a blond boy with a swoop of hair over one eye standing next to an eleven-and-a-half-foot upside-down boat on a sawhorse, and I immediately knew that he had built the boat. And I recognized that he was put there so I could see him. Like we had something to do together—have you ever had that feeling?

  “So I said, ‘Hello, is that your boat?’ My friend Angela turned to me, knowing that I’m weaving some magic. (She has always recognized my magic and sometimes I teach her my ways so she can navigate with a little bit of it.)

  “I got up and walked really close to him to ask if he built it, and he said, ‘You look really familiar’ and I said, ‘Where are you taking that boat?’ and he said, ‘New York City’ and I said, ‘Great! I’m coming.’ He looked confused and I said, ‘What do I need to bring?’

  “ ‘Um, a sleeping bag?’

  “It was out of his choice to say no, really. It was all predetermined. I said, ‘I don’t have a sleeping bag in Vermont,’ and he said, ‘I’ll have my mom send you one!’ So I said, ‘When are we leaving?’ And he said, ‘Two weeks.’

  “So I said, ‘Well great—I’ll leave you notes at your boat, and you can find me in two weeks.’

  “(For an adventure such as this, I find that once you exchange technological information, the magic is dead.)

  “A week goes by, and I get a call from my friend Sophie, who says, ‘There’s a love note for you on my porch.’ It was a white piece of paper covered in rocks (there was strawberry jam smeared all over it) to keep it down and it said:

  “Vera: Let’s go sailing. signed, the boat kid.

  “Inside the note it says your beautiful (no e), but that part was scratched out and there was another note that pointed to that and said pay no attention to this. Maybe that part was to another girl? I don’t know, maybe he only had one piece of paper, since he lived on a boat.

  “I told him we were going to need life jackets, and a white, red, and green light. I made a list of supplies he needed, as I had been doing some research.

  “It would be a ten-day journey.

  “I wrote everything down in my journal as we went. Every night we would pull the boat ashore, put it on land, and make a campsite. Then he would go and gather mushrooms when we camped.

  “It was a platonic journey, but one of real love. I told him not to fall in love in with me, but I knew he would anyway—this happens a lot to me.

  “I brought a list of songs to sing, and he cooked us amazing delicacies every day—salad with goat cheese and figs the first night, cinnamon buns over the fire on cold mornings.

  “When you enter the lock routes on this particular river, you need to pay the lockmasters to let you through. We had no real money with us, but I knew people would welcome us, because we were doing something beautiful and pure. I brought cookies for the lockmasters, who would happily open the locks for us—as though no one had ever brought them treats before! They were completely bowled over by these cookies, which really tells you something about people in general. We’d be holding on to the ropes as the water went up and down, like whirlpools, when they let us through.

  “Once on the full moon, we took a bath on the river. We lost the soap pot on the current and sadly had to let it go, but then the next morning as we were sailing downriver, it suddenly appeared next to our boat. So that’s why I named my first album Soap Pot.

  “Did Harry tell you I sing?

  “One day we encountered a huge bridge near New Jersey—we were reaching the end of our trip and needed to maneuver beneath this bridge. He tried maybe fifteen times to tack us back and forth through the bridge, but he was unable to. The wind was too strong and we were close to capsizing the whole time. So I took the jib and the mainsail, which I hadn’t done the whole trip, because it was just assumed he was the better sailor, as he had built the boat.

  “But I got us under the bridge in one try. Which I suppose was the natural ending to the trip—it felt like it was over once I realized I was a better sailor than him. He knew it, too. The magic seal was broken.

  “And right after we went under that bridge, we pulled into a dock that apparently was a private club, which was having its annual barbecue. It turned out the fellow who picked us up at the club was Bon Jovi’s sound engineer, so he let me record my album at his home studio the next afternoon.

  “I learned two important things from that trip: (1) I thought I couldn’t do this kind of trip on my own, that I wasn’t a good-enough sailor. But I was. I could have done it two years prior!

  “The second and most important thing—and which answers your question—I learned from a fortune-teller in Penn Station on my way home. She told me the next boy I fell in love with I would have a love child with, so I should choose wisely.

  “And I knew that would be OK, because I am strong enough to sail the Hudson Riv
er alone, and I am strong enough to be a mother.

  “And a few months later I met Harry. And it just made sense that I needed to be with him.”

  “Wait, what happened to the boat boy who was in love with you?”

  “He built me a house on an island, but I never answered his messages to go to him.”

  “Wow.”

  “And actually, one day I ran into him at a farmers’ market in Burlington on a weekend away with Harry—our very first. He just looked at us, and smiled sadly, and walked away. He’s still a boy, but Harry’s a MAN, you know? There’s nothing to be done about that.”

  .

  Harry,

  It was around then that Vera stood up next to her chair and sang me a beautiful song. It was about you. You should listen to it, she sent me the recording:

  When I Saw You

  When I saw you

  well

  I just knew

  I had to had to had to have

  You

  Like a cold rock

  Carved out of stone

  I love I love I love

  You

  When I saw you

  well

  I just knew

  I had to had to had to have

  You

  Like a cold rock

  Carved out of stone

  I love I love I love

  You

  It was just lovely. And then she went off in search of a bathroom. Her notebook was sort of listing out of the side of her tote bag, which itself was hanging precariously on her seat. I went to rescue the bag, the notebook fell out, and I happened to accidentally catch it on the way down. And then it just seemed natural that I should read it, you know?

  Denim and Houston/week 3

  We drew rainbows on the easels today…their drawings are unbelievable!! I forgot to take pictures of them so I could remember them. But I’ll describe them, anyway. Denim drew vertical, brown lines; this was his rainbow. Houston drew a curve with 5 different colors…black, gray, pink. Then I pointed to the empty space in their drawings where they could add more colors. Denim decided to turn his rainbow into a forest and he added a monkey. At first he said he didn’t know how to draw a monkey. I told him, “Of course you do…simply start with the belly.” So, he made a circle, then a tail, then 4 limbs, then a head…and ta-da…a monkey. Then he added a banana. The tiniest banana. Houston added grass to her empty space and then a big purple elephant. After they left I considered their drawings and—Denim’s drawing was all straight lines, and Houston’s was all round full shapes. Which interested me because I’ve learned that masculine energy is in the shape of a straight line and feminine energy is a circle. When the two are combined you get a spiral.