Pineapple street, p.5
Pineapple Street, page 5
* * *
After the pigeon, after the bath, after Darley had spent the better part of an hour ordering birthday presents for the nine children with parties in the coming weeks, Darley changed into her pajamas and crawled into bed. Malcolm came home at midnight, letting himself into the apartment and moving silently through the kitchen to the back bathroom, where he showered and brushed his teeth before carefully peeling back the blankets to join her. Half asleep, Darley found him and wrapped her body around his. While she slept alone more often than not, she slept most soundly with their legs intertwined. In the morning, the children treated Malcolm with the reverence usually reserved for astronauts or Olympians, showing him drawings they had made at school that week, performing songs they had learned on the bus, telling long and convoluted stories about someone named Kale, whose older brother had been to a birthday party at a bounce house in Queens where there were more than fifty trampolines.
Malcolm made pancakes from scratch, which created a huge mess, a funny choice when Darley had a bakery box of blueberry muffins from Alice’s Tea Cup, but she sat at the table with a big smile on her face, sipping coffee and watching Hatcher drip syrup down his chin. After breakfast they took their scooters to soccer practice on the plaza, where a dozen kindergartners wore matching red T-shirts and constantly forgot what they were doing and picked the ball up with their hands. Darley had a hundred errands to run, knew she should use this time for a yoga class or tennis with her mom, but she wanted to be with Malcolm, so she snuggled up next to him on the bench and whispered with him about the other parents—the mom who hosted a dinner party at her ten-million-dollar apartment in Cobble Hill but never paid her share for the teacher gift at Christmas; the couple down the street who got a city permit for a block party, but instead of telling the neighbors, invited all their friends and blasted music until two a.m.; the unassuming lawyer who wore Green Bay Packers jerseys all weekend with his kids but then appeared on the front page of The New York Times alongside a Supreme Court justice.
After soccer they took the kids to lunch at Fascati, to the library to check out a dozen books, then to the Broken Toy playground, where they pushed around discarded bicycles. That night Darley fell asleep wrapped around Malcolm and barely moved when he slipped out at four, off to finish a presentation at the office before catching a flight to Rio that night. When Darley’s alarm went off at six, she registered that she felt exhausted. She wanted to stay under the covers, her head thick and heavy, but she forced herself out of bed to make coffee and pack lunch for the kids. She woke them and laid out their clothing, she made their breakfast—avocado toast for Poppy, peanut butter toast for Hatcher, coconut yogurt for Poppy, strawberry yogurt for Hatcher. She pulled on jeans, a loose gray T-shirt, and a baseball cap, snapped helmets under the kids’ chins, and carried both their backpacks as she half walked, half jogged down the sidewalk as they scootered to school. At the gate she checked them in with the security guard and parked their scooters along the wall, dozens and dozens of colorful Micro Minis lining the stone facade like decorations on a gingerbread house. There were plenty of neighborhoods in Brooklyn where you wouldn’t want to leave a scooter outside and unlocked for six hours, but in Darley’s little enclave of the Heights, she felt like she could probably lose her wallet every day for a week and still get it back each time.
At home she tried to rally for the gym, but nothing felt right. Her arms and legs hurt, her neck ached, and even walking from the front door to the kitchen felt like a march through snow or waist-deep slush. She sat down on the sofa and she must have slept, because suddenly she woke and ran to the bathroom and vomited. She lay on the floor, not caring that she was in the kids’ bathroom, that she was lying on top of a spiky Buzz Lightyear action figure, that the yellow bath mat clearly had some pee on it. For the next hour she intermittently vomited and lay dazed and feverish. When she gathered the strength, she hauled herself to her bedroom, where she stripped off her jeans and pulled a trash can next to the bed. At noon she called her mother.
“Darley, I’m just running out, can I call you back?” her mother answered.
“Mom, I think I have the stomach flu. Malcolm is traveling. Can you pick the kids up from school?”
“Oh sweetheart. We’ll figure it out. What time?”
“They get out at two forty-five.”
“Okay, darling, two forty-five.”
At three o’clock, Darley was dozing, sweating and freezing in her damp sheets, when she heard the front door open and close, heard backpacks hit the floor with matching thuds, heard the singing and yelling and clamor that always seemed to surround her children. Knowing they were safely home, Darley drifted back to sleep and dreamed she was in a strange house, walking through room after room, looking for someone, anyone. She woke and vomited again. The clock said seven thirty. As she wiped her mouth with a tissue and tried to decide if she had the strength to walk to the bathroom for water, there was a gentle knock on her bedroom door.
“Come in, Mom,” Darley called out weakly.
“Darley, it’s Berta,” her mother’s housekeeper called out tentatively. “I’m sorry, but I have to go home.”
“Oh, Berta!” Darley sat up, forgetting that she wasn’t wearing pants. “Thank you for being here. Where is my mom?”
“Mrs. Stockton had a crisis with one of her table arrangements. The birds’ nests they sent for her ‘Flights of Fancy’ dinner party had bugs in them, and they ruined all the fruit bowls, but it’s fine. I gave the children pasta and broccoli for dinner, but they are not tired for bed.”
“Thanks so much, Berta.” Darley tried to stand, but another wave of nausea overtook her.
“I’m sorry, but I have to go home for my grandkids.” Berta’s daughter was a nurse who often did late shifts and counted on her mother to fill in.
“Of course, Berta. I’ll call my brother or my sister. Thanks so much for coming over. Can you just turn on a movie before you leave?” Darley knew that if a movie was playing her kids would leave her alone for at least an hour and a half. She couldn’t face them, she worried she’d frighten them (their death obsession didn’t help), or worse, get them sick.
Berta nodded and closed the door softly. Darley shut her eyes. Georgiana had work in the morning. Cord and Sasha had work in the morning. Darley’s mother, well, Darley’s mother had already shown what she was willing to do. She picked up the phone.
“Soon-ja?”
“Darley, my love, how are you and my babies?”
“I’m not great, Soon-ja, I think I have the stomach flu. I’m vomiting and Malcolm is heading to Brazil for his deal . . .”
“I’ll be right there. I’m getting in the car now. I should be there by nine at the latest. You hang in there, my love, and don’t worry about a thing.”
Darley fell back against her pillow, the sound of cartoon characters singing in high creepy voices seeping into feverish dreams of birds’ nests and pigeons.
In the morning, Darley woke to see the sun already peeking through the blinds. She could hear Soon-ja in the kitchen making breakfast. Her stomach and throat were raw, her eyes felt scratchy with sand, and she was pretty sure she smelled worse than the class hamster they had taken for spring vacation. But she was better. Until she flipped her phone over on her nightstand and saw the text from Malcolm: I’ve been fired.
FOUR
Sasha
On birthdays and holidays, special occasions when the wine was flowing, the family would linger over dinner and reminisce, telling stories of bad behavior and shenanigans over the years. Cord would talk about the time he and his high school friends got drunk, then lost, in Paris while they were supposed to be sketching at the Louvre on a class trip. Georgiana would talk about sneaking out after dark down at their club in Florida. They delighted in their flirtations with deviant behavior and cackled away, even when they all knew the stories by heart after dozens of retellings. Sasha loved hearing them, even the ones that were familiar, and she laughed and laughed, but she never contributed her own. She knew better than that. It was because her family stories made their craziest misadventures seem like a night sipping O’Doul’s at math camp.
The truth was, Sasha came from a very wild family. Her cousins were infamous in the small beach town outside Providence where she grew up, and most of them had only avoided mile-long rap sheets because her uncle happened to be the chief of police. For the most part, their antics were met with slaps on the wrist or warnings. But her cousins drunkenly stole Boston Whalers for joyrides, they stayed up all night snorting coke on houseboats in the bay, they crashed weddings at the mansions in Newport, and they claimed to drive better drunk than sober, an assertion countered by their dented fenders and broken fence posts. While Cord may have suffered a broken arm from a ski accident, Sasha’s cousin Brandon suffered a broken arm from falling off a second-floor balcony wasted on Jameson and NoDoz. It was just a different level of bad behavior. On rich people these exploits looked funny, but on Sasha’s family she knew they just looked trashy.
After the disaster that was Sasha’s engagement party—her older brother, Nate, was thrown out of the Explorer’s Club for trying to feed the stuffed polar bear a leg of lamb—she made her father read the entire family the riot act before the wedding, reminding them that their uncle was not the chief of the New York City Police, and that while they should feel free to act like complete buffoons and degenerates in Providence, they would be embarrassing Sasha in front of her new family with that sort of behavior at her wedding. The lecture was greeted with general merriment among her cousins—they loved nothing more than being reminded of outrageous past transgressions—and they proceeded to be utter lunatics at her reception, dismantling a floral arrangement to drink champagne out of a giant vase.
In spite of her family’s behavior (or, truthfully, partially because of it), Sasha loved her wedding. It was grand, it was elegant, and it was just wild enough to make sure nobody would ever forget it. The celebration was held at the Down Town Association, a private club on Pine Street founded by J. P. Morgan as an all-men’s club for bankers. Cord had lunch there several days a week, and they had attended champagne tastings and lectures there in the evenings—once even an Italian-themed dinner with wine pairings that was so boring Sasha accidentally got hammered on Barolo just to survive. The club was three floors of old-fashioned New York glamour, with sky-blue ceilings, dark wooden railings, a walk-in cigar humidor, and a massive marble barbershop in the back of the men’s room, where they filmed the Jodie Foster movie Inside Man.
Cord and Sasha fed each other cake, he swung her delighted mother around the dance floor (all those cotillion lessons as a boy paid off), and Sasha gamely tried to keep up with her father-in-law, who led her in a waltz to Katy Perry’s “Firework.” Malcolm and Darley cut loose for once, Malcolm putting his tie around his forehead like a character in Animal House, and when a friend of the family got turned around on his way out of the men’s room and walked in on Cord’s business school roommate feeling up Sasha’s cousin in the barbershop, he laughed and told everyone it was the best party he’d been to in a decade.
Since Cord’s family paid for the wedding (a breach in tradition), Sasha insisted on paying for the honeymoon. She found a deal online for a resort in Turks and Caicos, a place right on the beach, where every suite had its own hot tub overlooking the ocean. She had briefly fantasized that they might get some kind of royal treatment as honeymooners, upgrades and rose petals on pillows, but when the resort van picked them up at the airport she quickly realized the entire place was full of couples like them. As they planned their wedding Cord had rolled his eyes at the “wedding factories,” complaining about the places that pumped through reception after reception, creating cookie-cutter celebrations that were no more special or individual than a suburban prom. Now she worried he would be turned off by a place that was so clearly a factory extension, but he was happily leafing through the resort booklet, planning tennis matches, bike rides, and dinner reservations.
While they had gone to a zillion friends’ weddings together, they hadn’t actually traveled much, and Sasha quickly realized they had entirely different views of what it meant to be on vacation. For Sasha, vacation meant putting on her swimsuit at dawn, walking to the beach, and moving only to get the occasional cold drink or salty snack. Cord apparently felt that vacation meant moving constantly, like a human Roomba, bouncing from one activity to the next. He chartered a boat to Middle Caicos so they could stomp through dark and gummy caves full of bats. He hired a pilot to take them for a noisy loop above the island in a helicopter. He drove them to the famous conch fritter restaurant and they downed the chewy fried lumps with icy bottles of Turk’s Head beer. On the last full day, Sasha begged Cord for the chance to just lie on the beach, and while he brought a mask and snorkel and explored the tiny reef out beyond the sand, she flopped on a warm towel and did absolutely nothing, letting her mind clear until it felt baked clean by the sun.
They had two bottles of champagne chilling in their suite and meant to drink them before they left. After roasting on the beach until sunset, they made their way back to the room, and on their way they stopped in each of the half dozen hotel pools for a dip. They were taking their final soak in a warm-water pool, an oversize Jacuzzi surrounded by hot pink bougainvillea, when another couple appeared through the flowers. They nodded hello and slipped into the water at the other end. They had just gotten married (of course) and were visiting from Boston. After five days alone, Sasha and Cord were feeling sociable, and soon it was dark and they were having so much fun talking that they invited the other couple back to their suite for drinks. They dripped their way from the giant resort Jacuzzi to the smaller one on the screened-in porch off their bedroom. Cord popped the champagne with a knife, a party trick he’d learned to do with a saber, and they all experienced the rapturous head high that comes from drinking bubbly on an empty stomach with borderline sunstroke. It was somewhere toward the end of the second bottle that the guy from Boston removed his wife’s bikini top and everything got weird. How had Sasha not realized what they had done? They had invited another couple to hang out, drunk and near naked, in their hotel suite and somehow not realized they were initiating a sex party? Cord, who possessed a mastery of handling awkward social situations rivaling that of a foreign diplomat, hastily mentioned dinner reservations, provided the topless wife with a bathrobe, and whisked them out into the warm evening. Alone, Sasha and Cord fell down laughing and swore to tell any friends who asked that they had survived their honeymoon with their marital vows intact, and no one need know more than that.
* * *
Sasha understood that Cord loved her, but he didn’t need her, and that might have been the most attractive thing about him. He was restrained in his expressions of affection—sure, he loved sex and he was unfailingly kind—but he didn’t say “I love you” every time they hung up the phone, he didn’t bring her flowers or presents without occasion, he didn’t tell her that she was the best thing that had ever happened to him. And that was the way Sasha wanted it. After all the heartache of her first love, she was done with grand romantic gestures. She had seen the tumultuous underbelly of such passion.
Sasha had fallen in love in high school. His name was Jake Mullin but everyone just called him Mullin. They had known each other since they were eleven, placed in the same gifted and talented program at their public school, a classroom in a trailer near the parking lot. He made her nervous, and she spent years giving him a wide berth. It seemed like he was barely looked after. He never wore a jacket, and even in the snowy winter she remembered seeing him standing on the edge of the playground wearing a black Metallica T-shirt. His family lived across from the wharf in a peeling green house with iron railings, and while Sasha’s own mother packed her lunches with hearts drawn on napkins and plastic baggies full of popcorn made in the air popper, Mullin never seemed to have anything. He didn’t even carry a backpack. Sasha was older before she realized he ate the free lunch, lining up at the cafeteria turnstile holding the small, laminated card at his side.
Mullin could draw. She’d never noticed, never paid attention, but one day in high school she walked by his desk and saw a bird so realistic she gasped. Though Sasha could draw almost as well, it was because she took art seriously, spent all her free time in the school’s art studio, built all her electives around painting and ceramics classes. Mullin would spend English class carefully shading the detailed veins of a leaf and its stem and then, at the end of the period, crumple the paper in the trash.
They got together the summer before junior year. There was a reservoir someone had discovered in the next town at the end of a long dirt road just before the highway. The gate was locked, but if you parked, then hiked ten minutes along shady paths, you came to a breathtaking lake with a stone tower at the center. Sasha and her friends spent the whole summer with a big gang of kids, drinking beer and smoking pot on the edge of the water, skinny-dipping and jumping off the tower. She didn’t know exactly how it started, but over the course of two hot months she became increasingly aware of when he was swimming, when he was stretched out on a rock in the sun, and she wanted to be wherever he was. Their first kiss was out by the tower as they were treading water. When he pulled away, he laughed and said, “I’m probably going to drown if we don’t move this to the shore.”
