“Now it’s like the Eisenhower era all over again. They all want to be ‘mommies.’” Her mouth slack with disgust, she gestured toward Vicky and her clan. “And, of course, big business likes it that way, ’cause they can sell them more stuff. There’s, like, the whole mommy industry. You’re not a real mom unless you have a four-hundred-dollar diaper bag and you go to Mommy and Me yoga at Jivamukti and you read ‘mommy lit’ and nurse your kid in a two-thousand-dollar ersatz midcentury modern rocking chair. You’ve seen all this, right?” Caitlin gave her a challenging look.
“Hmmm,” said Sadie, rising and depositing Jack in the stroller. He immediately began to wail. “You know,” she called to Caitlin, before she could think better of it, as she handed Jack his favorite toy, a wooden figurine of a Victorian policeman, found in the basement of their building and washed in hot water. “You should write a book.”
“I should,” said Caitlin, with such an air of entitlement—Of course I should write a book, seeing as my thoughts are so profoundly original and penetrating—that Sadie immediately regretted giving her mouth over to the still-active editorial section of her brain.
“Read book,” Jack called now, calmer. “Take nap.”
“I’ve really got to get him home,” said Sadie, turning to Caitlin, who sat, still, on the bench. “He’s exhausted.”
“We’ll walk with you. Where do you guys live?”
“In Hillman,” Sadie told her. “On Columbia Street.”
“You’re kidding.” Caitlin stood and fell in step beside Sadie. “I’m right across the street. In the Amalgamated.”
“Really? How funny that we’ve never seen each other before!”
“I usually walk up to Tompkins Square Park,” Caitlin explained.
Ahead of Sadie and Caitlin, on the winding concrete path, the Orthodox mothers streamed out through the gate, their kids skipping alongside them, and turned east on Grand.
“How long have you lived here?” Caitlin asked as the gate clanged shut behind them. From the corner of her eye, Sadie could see Vicky waving. She was nice, really. Sadie waved back.
“Two years. A little less.”
“We just got here in January. It’s cheaper than Brooklyn now.” Sadie was not sure that this was true, but she said nothing. “Do you have a two-bedroom? Or a three?” The layouts of the apartments in the area’s buildings were all roughly the same—having been built by the same cooperative organization immediately before and after the war.
“Two,” Sadie told her, again having the feeling that Caitlin already possessed this information, through Lil, and that these banal questions were leading somewhere, somewhere Sadie might not want to go. “What about you?”
“Our place is, like, a combined space. It’s four one-bedrooms.”
“That sounds great,” said Sadie, fighting a discomfiting wave of jealousy.
“Yeah, it’s a lot of space. And, you know, the apartments in the Amalgamated are so much nicer than in the other buildings—”
“Really,” said Sadie. No, Caitlin had not changed.
“Yeah, I mean, because it’s prewar. So the ceilings are higher and the windows are larger and we have great moldings. The other buildings, the apartments are so boxy. We looked at some when we were trying to buy.”
“We like to think of it as Modernist,” said Sadie, with a smile. She, of course, lived in one of those boxy apartments.
“But the guy who combined the places had the worst taste. It was like Boca, circa 1983. White leather couches. Pink tile floor. Mirrored doors on the closets.”
“Bleh.” Such decor was common in their buildings.
“Yeah,” said Caitlin. “Really bad. We’re ripping everything out. Knocking down all the walls. It’s been going on forever.”
Their apartment, Sadie realized, must be the one she’d heard everyone talking about: it was the first in the neighborhood to sell for more than a million dollars. The real estate section had done a story on it.
“Do you miss Williamsburg?” she asked suddenly. She herself still missed Brooklyn even after two years, though her old neighborhood was rapidly being invaded by hedge fund managers and suchlike, exactly the sort of people she’d moved there to avoid. Still, Dave and Emily and Beth were all there, and it would be nice to be around the corner from them again, especially now that Beth had Emma. But they couldn’t afford it, not now, not yet. Everything that came in seemed to flow right back out again. They were still making huge payments each month on the credit cards Ed had used, in part, to finance his film. The money from the distribution deal—which had not been insubstantial—had gone right into his company, into the new film. The thing was: it didn’t have to be this way. After Sundance, he’d been offered development deals with Fox and Paramount, but he’d—to Sadie’s shock—turned them down. He didn’t want, he explained, another Boom Time scenario. “That was a bad, bad time,” he told her. “I woke up feeling like shit and it just got worse as the day went on.” I know, she told him. I understand. And she did. He wanted control over his work. “I don’t care about the money,” he said. “If you do things right, the money will come.” Thinking of this—his earnestness, the sound of his voice—she felt, suddenly, the weight of his absence. Maybe, she thought suddenly, I should just pack us up and meet him in Sarajevo.
Caitlin was talking about Williamsburg. Sadie had missed the answer to her own question. “But I was also glad to get out. By the time I left it had changed so much. It used to be a real neighborhood. Everyone was an artist. Now it’s, like, filled with trust-fund kids and lawyers. Starbucks is trying to open a branch on Bedford.”
“No!” Sadie shouted.
“Seriously,” Caitlin nodded. “A Starbucks on Bedford.” She sighed. “And the new people in the neighborhood are excited about it. That’s the thing.”
“But I’m sure the old-timers are protesting. Rob must be planning something, right?” Sadie was pleased she remembered the name of Caitlin’s husband, though he hadn’t ever bothered to remember hers.
“Rob,” Caitlin scoffed, rolling her eyes, “is in North Carolina solving the problems of displaced migrant farmworkers.”
“North Carolina!” said Sadie, stunned—and strangely pleased—that she and Caitlin had somehow wound up in this same corner of Manhattan, their husbands off in distant regions, their babies cleaving to them alone. “But what about his prison project? What was it called?”
“PrisonBreak,” Caitlin told her. “His old assistant took over for him. It’s huge now. They have a staff of, like, twenty. And they’re running Crown into the ground.” She paused. “Lil didn’t tell you? We’re divorced.”
“Oh,” said Sadie, glancing down at Ismael, who, she saw, looked nothing, of course, like the pale, wormy Rob. She had heard this news, hadn’t she, maybe? From Emily? Perhaps. “I’m so sorry.”
“Ismael’s not his,” she said, following Sadie’s glance. “He’s Osman’s. My partner.”
“Oh,” said Sadie, who had stopped short when she realized that—miracle of miracles—Jack had fallen asleep in his stroller.
“It’s so funny,” Caitlin went on. “When I married Rob I thought I was rebelling against my parents’ bourgeois values, marrying an activist, you know? But I was really just buying into them. Marrying a rich Jew, just like they wanted. Not that they’d ever said so.”