Visible City (26 page)

She pulled the engagement ring off her finger, which bore a red-lined impression where it had been. All along it had probably been too tight, but she’d told herself that it was supposed to feel this way.

“I should give you this,” Emma said.

“And I was going to give you this,” he said, and handed her a rubber-banded manuscript. She looked at the copy of his book as if he were belatedly handing her the uncensored, wide-open access to him that she’d craved. Flip the pages, and there finally he would be. Read his words, and she would no longer feel as though she had to chase him down. Despite his protestations that he couldn’t work in her absence, he had managed to reach the ever-receding finish line. The jealousy she felt wasn’t enough to make her want to return to her own struggling sentences. Everyone around her was blinded by work, but she knew that she could be happy without it.

She didn’t want to be swayed, didn’t want to be reeled back in. Emma tossed his manuscript into a shopping bag but didn’t slow down, even when Steven pleaded with her to stay. She lugged the last bag down the four flights of stairs. In the car, her bags were piled so high she couldn’t see out the back window. She drove to her new apartment and unloaded everything into her bedroom. Then she got back into the car, so she could get a few more things from her parents’ apartment. The few blocks she drove felt like a thousand miles, a cross-country journey undertaken alone.

When Claudia returned home after a week away, Emma was standing in the doorway, holding a duffel bag.

“I found an apartment,” Emma told her. “I just came to get the rest of my stuff. You’re not going to like it, but I’m not going back to school. I got a job in a nursery school, in Queens, right near my new place.”

Claudia opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. She shook her head in disbelief, but then she laughed. All children were surprises, even those who once seemed to know where they were going.

“And what about Steven?” Claudia asked as she looked at Emma’s bare finger.

Emma shook her head. “I know you liked him. Or at least the idea of him,” she said.

“Emma, it doesn’t matter if I like him or not. I wanted you to be happy.”

“I know you think this is crazy,” Emma said.

“I don’t,” Claudia said, and it was true. A new version of Emma was taking shape in her mind. More than dismay, she felt envious that her daughter wouldn’t quietly withstand what left her distressed, unhappy, alone. She was capable of acting on what she knew to be true instead of quietly living with dissatisfaction.

“I need to go. I’m supposed to be baby-sitting soon,” Emma said, but when she made no move to leave, Claudia reached for her.

“Do you really want to know why I’m leaving him?” Emma asked. “I don’t want to get married so I can be alone. I don’t want to be with someone who can’t see who I am.”

Emma’s words sank in. Claudia tried to hide from them but she couldn’t.

“I don’t understand. Why do you let him ignore you? Why don’t you care?” Emma asked.

“It’s so much more complicated than that,” Claudia said.

“Do you ever wonder where he is? Do you even care enough to go looking?” Emma asked, motioning to the window, to the great expanse outside.

“Do you think you’re the only one who’s ever felt this way? Do you think you’re the only one who’s ever wanted to run?” Claudia asked. She wished there were some way to shield her daughter from her pain, anyone’s pain, and yet make her understand that no one really knew the inner workings of anyone else’s marriage. Even inside, there was no way to see it entirely; even to your spouse, you couldn’t fully explain the relationship you were in.

“Why didn’t you? Please tell me. I need to understand,” Emma said.

Why for so many years had she tucked away the feeling that she was invisible? Why had she told herself she did not really feel what she felt, why did she hide so much of herself away in order not to rouse anyone, shake anyone? She wanted to offer Emma some confession or revelation, to boil down her love and pain into a shining, essential truth. When Emma was a child, Claudia had wanted to hand her the world in its safest, most comprehensible form. But now, she wanted to offer Emma the truth about the imperfection of marriage, and the consolations sought in other people, other places. She would allow her to see not a mother’s smooth, protected façade, but the all-too-human reality.

“Your father and I,” Claudia started to say, and stopped, scared to put into words what she knew to be true. “It’s hard,” she admitted. “Sometimes it’s very hard.”

“Is what you have enough?” Emma asked.

“No. Not anymore,” Claudia said, and took Emma in her arms and wrapped her in, tighter than she had in years. Emma leaned forward into the hug, not wanting to be released either. Claudia drew closer to Emma, then farther away, to see her both up close and from a distance.

When Emma left, Claudia went to her office. The glass bottles along the windowsill were shaking from the construction. When she was away, she had forgotten the sensation of being besieged by so much noise. She had barely been gone a week, yet it felt like months had passed. In no time, the building seemed to have progressed from steel frame to a nearly completed structure.

She lifted the window, planning to scream once again. But as the words assembled in her mouth, the urge dissipated. She was screaming at the wrong people, asking for the wrong thing. All this time, she had been demanding peace and solitude when it was engagement and interaction she so badly desired. What if she had asked for more? Her loneliness swept through her, emerging from the hiding place so deep inside her that not even she had known it was there.

She picked up a glass bottle, the most delicately formed, the brightest blue, and cradled it to her body. She tried to stop her hands but couldn’t. Anything to free herself from the rising pain, anything to change the way she felt right now. She threw the bottle out the window, to the construction site below. One day, when this building was deemed outdated, the shards of blue glass would be discovered amid the wreckage. She was deprived of the pleasure of hearing it shatter, but she reached for the next bottle, and the next one too. How easy it was to destroy something she’d cared so much about preserving. But for what end? Why save what had no purpose? She wanted to shatter every illusion, false promise, false hope.

Claudia went back to the living room and grabbed the keys. Outside, she walked down the street until she found the spot where Leon’s car was parked. As she unlocked the door, she hoped an alarm would sound. In a rush of sirens and lights, she would be arrested for breaking and entering. For far too long, she had accepted Leon’s need for solitude. Until now, she hadn’t thought she had the right to intrude.

In a bright, noisy procession, Wendy marched Sophie and Harry uptown. The cookies, packaged in white bakery boxes, were in the bottom of her stroller, safe from the jostles and the pleas that
we promise we won’t touch, we just want to look.

How perfect they must look to everyone they passed, the kids dressed in bright fall jackets, their hats festooned with tassels and pompoms. But Wendy couldn’t stop replaying the fury that had overtaken her as Sophie screamed and Harry bit. Her smile was a growl. Her teeth had become fangs. Determined to wrest an apology from Harry, she had been overcome by an impulse to sink her teeth into his arm, to show him how it felt. He’d put his hand near her mouth, as though offering himself up, and in that moment, she had wanted to consume him alive.

A second later, she was mortified. No one else had ever felt such an impulse, no one ever. If another mother confessed to something half as bad, she’d have called Child Protective Services. Only at the last second had she pulled herself back: she’d kissed Harry’s fingers and smiled, but in that moment, she’d become newly, exquisitely aware of her children’s vulnerability.

Positioned within screaming distance of Georgia’s, Wendy pulled out one imperfect cookie after another. They didn’t match what she had envisioned or what she could have produced had she made them alone. But she was worried less about the cookies than she was about the kids. She searched their faces for signs of damage; with every flicker of expression that passed across their faces, she wondered how she had changed in their eyes.

On the walk uptown, they’d passed a familiar-looking woman sitting in a parked car. As Wendy laid out cookies and talked to the other moms who’d joined her, she realized it was the woman whose picture had appeared beside hers in the
Times.

She couldn’t tolerate the vulnerable looks on her children’s faces. She was not the selfish woman portrayed in that article; she was not the screaming mother her kids had caught sight of.

“Come with me,” she announced to the kids, who were awaiting their first customer.

Holding one of the boxes of cookies, she marched Sophie and Harry over to the car.

“You’re ‘the art historian who frequents the café,’ aren’t you?” she said when Claudia rolled down the window.

“And you’re the mother who doesn’t want to have to stay away from cafés until her kids are grown,” Claudia said.

They stared at one another. All her anger, all her readiness for a confrontation, so long stored up. Here was her chance to unleash it. The woman looked so different from the way she remembered her, softer, with kind, forgiving eyes. At the café she had seen a woman who had wanted to offer rebuke; in the article, she had read of a woman who had no tolerance for anyone besides herself. But which was she, which role did she play? She wasn’t sure of herself anymore.

“Do you have any idea how hard it is?” Wendy asked. Her voice was shaky, not her own.

“Oh, I do,” the woman said, sounding surprisingly rueful.

“Do you know how hard I tried to make them be quiet? What is it I’m supposed to do?” Wendy said.

“I’m sure you don’t want to hear this, but in the end, you have no control over who they’re going to be. Eventually they do what they want,” she said.

The woman may have intended her words as a warning, but Wendy felt only relief. She had lost control with the kids and they had survived. In this moment, she wanted to silence the constant thrumming, chiding voice in her head. She wanted to hold up her hands and call the time-out to end all time-outs.

Balancing the box of cookies on her hip, Wendy opened it and pulled out a dappled creation.

“Would you like one?” Wendy asked. “The kids made them. They’re delicious.”

Claudia took the peace offering, and Wendy and the kids ran back to Broadway, to the table laid with their creations. She pulled out a CD player and turned on
101 Disney Favorites.
“It’s a Small World” came blasting out, loud enough to be audible over the small crowd across the street, holding placards. Wendy too had come with signs, hand-painted and decorated with stickers and glitter, which read
The Outside Voices Café.
The children wiggled and laughed, touched the merchandise, licked it when no one was looking. None of the pedestrians who spied this infraction reported them, nor did they mind the space they occupied or the noise they made. Who could pass without stopping, without smiling? They were children, noisy, messy, delicious.