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  Jason looked at me from across the playground, mortified.

  I delicately sauntered out of the park, explaining that I’d meet him back at the apartment. Instead of heading home, however, I ran directly to Esther and Yosi’s. If I was going to talk to Esther I had to act fast, before Jason had a chance to read his e-mail and guess where I was headed. After all, it wasn’t my idea anymore. I was merely following my co-op board’s suggestion.

  Beep, beep, beep.

  The buzzer rang three times before a woman answered.

  “Hello, I’m from next door. I was hoping I could talk to you,” I stuttered nervously.

  The door opened and I headed inside, unprepared for what was to come.

  When I reached the third floor, Esther was waiting for me.

  Her face was older than I expected, a stark contrast to the spiky gray Mohawk and wooden tribal earplugs I’d noticed from my window. She wore platform Doc Martens, a flowing purple skirt, and a colorful cotton shirt emblazoned with a screen print of Ganesh, the Indian elephant god of transitions. Her look was half punk rock, half yoga studio gift shop. She seemed like the type of person who’d shared needles with Basquiat in the eighties and had tantric sex with Sting in the nineties.

  “Hello, I’m Esther and this is my husband, Yosi,” she said, inviting me inside.

  Yosi looked at me guiltily. He tried to stay composed, knowing he’d been completely busted for lying to me about living on the sixth floor.

  The loft looked exactly the way it did on HGTV, only messier. A large Buddha statue sat on a coffee table littered with magazines and empty Marlboro cartons.

  “Please sit.” Yosi gestured toward a large chair adorned with cat hair and fancy silk pillows.

  “I’m actually allergic to cats,” I confessed, already getting off on a bad foot.

  I walked over to the cracked window, desperate for some fresh air, and propped myself on the ledge.

  “Okay. So how can we help you?” Yosi stared at me blankly.

  I thought about where to start. “So…I just moved here from Los Angeles and I haven’t lived in an apartment in many years. I obviously did when I was younger and never had any problems with my neighbors.” I waited for Esther to say something, but she just continued to stare. “Okay, I actually might have broken my lease once in my twenties because I slept with the guy upstairs, but other than that, it’s been smooth sailing.”

  “Very good,” Yosi chimed in awkwardly.

  “The point is, your smoking is coming into my apartment and hurting my baby.”

  Several seconds passed as Esther and Yosi translated what I’d just said in their heads. Finally, Esther spoke.

  “You moved into Manhattan with a baby? Aren’t people usually leaving the city with babies?”

  “Well, if you must know, I was trying to get away from a ghost, but there’s a small chance he might have followed me…The point is, until you stop smoking into my apartment I’m not really going to know where my real problems lie, because right now, all I can focus on is the air quality.” My voice cracked with desperation.

  “And you couldn’t just e-mail?” Esther looked at Yosi, then back at me.

  “I suggested that! But my husband told me I was being immature.” I gloated like a middle child who’d just won a debate at the dinner table.

  “Well, Yosi only smokes weed. The cigarettes are all me,” Esther confessed. “I wish I could tell you I’d quit. I did for twenty years. But ever since my youngest son left for the Israeli Army, I’ve been back at it. Do you have any idea how scary it feels as a mother to let your baby leave home?”

  I could feel my heart accelerating. The idea of Sid leaving me was perhaps the most gut-wrenching thought I could imagine. Whether I wanted to admit it or not, that’s how this was all going to end. Maybe he wasn’t going to run off to Israel, but eventually he was going to want to go somewhere—anywhere I wasn’t. Unexpected tears streamed down my cheeks.

  “It’s just so terrifying. You feel out of control. Like there is nothing in your power you can do to protect the one thing you are on this planet to look after.” Esther strung her words together slowly and eloquently as Yosi nodded and rolled a blunt.

  “I know! It’s horrible.”

  “I wish I could tell you it gets easier. But it does not. It gets harder. And you love harder. And it hurts…And then you die…The cigarettes are bad. They are terrible, but I’m just smoking because I can’t do anything else.” Esther shook her head, disappointed with herself.

  Yosi finished rolling his blunt and held it neatly between his fingers.

  I took a deep breath, then turned to Yosi, overcome with emotion.

  “I think I need a hit of that.”

  As much as I’d demonized Esther, I couldn’t avoid relating to her. As mothers, we shared the same anxieties. I wished we’d shared the same allergies, but maybe that was asking too much. I hated her smoking, and I’d told her as much, but at the end of the day, I couldn’t control how she lived her life. I could hardly control my own. Esther was sympathetic to my situation and vowed to smoke strictly off her front patio, killing the Chinese couple in the building to our left instead. For the time being, that was going to have to do.

  I released a deep, smoky sigh of relief and cast my bloodshot eyes up to my apartment.

  Staring back at me, through the large picture window, was Jason, his eyes squinted as if he didn’t believe what he was seeing. The cloud from my hit made it look like there was smoke coming out of his ears as he stood there, dumbfounded. There was nothing left to do but wave.

  7

  HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE’S

  CHILDREN

  “I kind of want to have a girl go down on me while I blow you.” I batted my eyes at Jason across the table, trying to spice up an overly planned date night. A skinny hipster in suspenders placed two menus in front of us and disappeared into the bustling bistro without a second glance.

  Jason picked up his menu and studied it like he was reading the Torah. “If we do the lottery for Washington Market, it still doesn’t guarantee we’ll even get an application. Don’t you have any mom friends you can ask? What do they say about Avenues?”

  Before I had time to throw an artisanal breadstick at his head, the waiter reappeared to take our drink orders. Jason looked at me, then at the waiter.

  “Can you tell your bartender to make me a fun mocktail? Something fizzy?”

  I stared at the waiter, who was at least a decade younger than me. It bothered me that people that young were old enough to join the workforce, and that girls born in 1997 were eighteen now, and that the guy who first introduced me to cocaine only drank mocktails.

  It wasn’t Jason’s sobriety that annoyed me, it’s what it represented. The party was over. It was time to be responsible—to start brushing my hair before I left the house, to take vitamins, to use dental floss, to listen to my voicemail, to write thank-you notes, to make holiday cards, to develop crow’s-feet, and to stop having sex with other people.

  “Baby. What the fuck? I just said I wanted to have another threesome. Aren’t sober guys supposed to turn into sex addicts? Don’t you at least want to fuck my head through a wall?”

  The truth was a threesome sounded exhausting. But at the very least it was something exciting to talk about. It’s important in long-term relationships to have common interests that aren’t just pedicures and documentaries on farm-to-table cooking.

  “Sure, yes, I wanna fuck you through a wall.” Jason yawned, sipping his Safe Sex on the Beach. “But I also wanna get Sid into the best nursery school. You need moms in your life that can give us these answers.”

  “Jason, I’ve never had a mom in my life with answers.”

  “Well, start looking.”

  In concept, I understood that there were cool moms in the world just waiting to be discovered, but for some reason I couldn’t seem to attract any. Every time I tried to put myself out there at a Mommy and Me, confessing to the cutest-dressed g
irl in the room that I hated the other fifteen women sitting around us, she would inevitably turn on me and, when I left her side, would tell the rest of the group all the horrible things I was saying about them. When it came to the mom world, I feared I’d always be a fish out of water, and Jason a fish out of vodka.

  I needed to find a mom like me who loved her child but also found time to work, work out, and post cute pics of herself on the Internet. I wanted someone who hated authority, who loved books (preferably mine), who didn’t use the “praise God” hands emoji, and who understood that the movie Clue was one of the greatest films of American cinema. She should be about two years older than me, slightly less cute, ideally ten pounds heavier. She should wear a size-eight shoe, have exquisite taste in clothes, live and work in my neighborhood, have an office with a printer that I could use, be able to take long lunch breaks, and know how to do makeup.

  Why was this woman so hard to find?

  I explained this very patiently to Jason as he gnawed the leg off his brioche-stuffed chicken.

  “That’s a lot to ask for,” he said, laughing at me. “How about you first just find someone who speaks English.”

  He had a point. Not having the confidence to approach other moms in TriBeCa, I’d taken to befriending their nannies. I had a list of names in my phone that I couldn’t pronounce and at least a dozen playdates I’d committed to without realizing. My friend Gretchen had two older kids she’d raised in the city and suggested I join a group called Hudson River Mamas, but just the name annoyed me. I pictured the members wearing matching leather jackets with their last names embroidered on the back. They probably spent their days trolling the local playgrounds looking to fight other mom groups who’d made the mistake of wandering down from Chelsea. According to their website, the application process required a letter of recommendation and an in-person interview, where I was certain I’d be asked to choose my favorite Honest Diaper pattern. (The anchors.)

  There was no world in which I was going to join a club to make friends. The idea was downright insulting. I was a successful, fun-loving free spirit (with a famous husband that I can force to emcee your kid’s Bar Mitzvah). Women should have been clamoring to hang out with me. But alas, they weren’t. The one girlfriend I had living in my area was the one girlfriend I’d always had.

  Even though she was just as boy-crazy as my mom, I’d always felt safe with Crystal Fontaine. That was because I knew all of her relationships were doomed from the start. Though she was always claiming that this time she’d found a good guy, Crystal never liked anyone who liked her back. She was in a constant state of waiting the requisite two days after sleeping with someone to see if she was ever going to hear from them again. And she always did. But only so they could sleep with her again and then go back to never calling her. Crystal didn’t believe in confrontation. She preferred to end her relationships by firing off a series of psychotic texts and then throwing her phone into the back of a cab and watching it disappear along with her entire contact list. “I needed a new phone anyway,” she’d claim.

  I’d met Crystal when we were kids and had managed to stay in her life because I, too, was a self-involved, unavailable asshole who could never completely commit. I kept her at arm’s length, where I kept most women. But unlike most women, Crystal loved the distance. I was drawn to Crystal because she was smarter than she wanted to be, funnier than she realized, and because trying to fix her obsession with men allowed me to pretend I was actually fixing my mother’s.

  When Crystal wasn’t busy flirting with dirty clubrats, she flirted with the idea of one day moving to Manhattan. She worked in fashion magazines and New York City was indisputably the epicenter of her industry. Eight months earlier I’d encouraged her to pack up her life in Manhattan Beach and follow her dream. I forget if I was mad at her or just exhausted, but for whatever reason I was compelled to tell her that she was going to end up getting gang-banged on a pinball machine unless she left town fast. I knew Jason, Sid, and I would be relocating to New York for a few months for Jason’s play, and I thought it’d be fun to have a friend I could drag with me to Century 21 while he was busy working. But it occurred to me that at the end of those few months, we’d fly back to our life in Los Angeles and Crystal Fontaine would be left on her own in Gotham City. Deep down I didn’t want to part with Crystal. But just like her relationships with men, I never really took any of her plans seriously. I assumed she’d try out the East Coast for about as long as I was there, then follow me back to Los Angeles, bitching about how she hated cold weather and ethnic guys. Surprisingly, however, Crystal committed to her new life in the city wholeheartedly. She’d snuggled into a small walk-up in Greenwich Village and had become the mayor of her block on Foursquare.

  “I’m never going back. I hate Los Angeles!” Crystal whipped back her platinum-blond bob and wagged her finger “no” into the brisk September air. With an overly confident sashay and a bubble butt filled with silicone, she looked like the Kim Kardashian emoji you’d send your sorority sisters when you finalized your divorce.

  “Help peas, help peas…” Sid said, struggling to break free from his stroller. I pushed him along the boardwalk to the park as Crystal followed, stalking herself on Facebook.

  “Nien, Kinder. Sit back, please,” I said, like I was giving a command to one of the dogs.

  “I sent this to Princeton last night.” Crystal looked at me diabolically, then flashed me a full-frontal shot of herself lying in bed. Crystal never called anyone she was involved with by his name; it made her feel too vulnerable. She preferred instead to give each player in her life an alias. So if White Tank Top, for example, suddenly got back together with his girlfriend, it was no big deal. If she accidentally drunk-texted Black Dildo, she’d live. In Crystal’s mind, the only way to stay immune to heartbreak was to never humanize anyone. She claimed she was open to the idea of love—but so does everybody who’s actually trying to avoid it. Crystal didn’t love herself; there was no way she was going to accept the love of a Black Dildo.

  “He replied saying that I was the nicest person he’s ever met. What do you think that means?” Crystal asked in a tone that said “Lie to me or I will cut you out of my life indefinitely.”

  “That he’s not into you,” I said bluntly.

  By the time we’d reached the park, Sid’s upper body was completely free from his seat belt and Crystal was giving me the silent treatment. I tipped Sid’s stroller toward me, sending him backward into his seat, before opening the wrought-iron gate and rolling inside. Children of all ages flew around the rubber-surfaced playground like kamikaze pilots. Hunched-over schoolmarms doled out handfuls of animal crackers from giant Costco tubs to a line of toddlers strung together on a walking rope like chubby paper dolls. A herd of older moms in wedge sneakers and diamond studs bigger than their earlobes huddled together in the shade with their iced soy lattes, whispering about their Hamptons homes and the accidental orgasms they were having in SoulCycle. On the far side of the park sat a row of Jamaican nannies texting on their cell phones, comparing salaries and paid vacation days.

  “But he’s the one who wrote me immediately after our date thanking me for a lovely time. That was very sweet!” Crystal was unable to let the Princeton thing go.

  “Why are we rewarding people for being normal?” I asked, distracted.

  My ears perked up when an androgynous mom with no boobs and intentionally distressed jeans walked past, holding hands with a little boy in checkered Vans. I don’t like to judge a book by its cover, but I do believe in judging a kid based on how hot his mom is. Sadly, No Boobs’s kid looked about five, too old for Sid. I’d learned early on not to hit on a potential mom friend unless our kids were in the exact same developmental place. In the first twelve to twenty-four months of your kid’s life, every week makes a difference. So if, for instance, I tried to start a conversation with the mom of a three-year-old, she might be polite and give me her number, but what she’d really be thinking was Get the fuc
k away from me, you don’t know my life. Our kids would have nothing in common. Her child was able to form complete sentences. Sid was still calling Jason “Mommy” and shitting on the bathroom floor.

  I helped Sid down from his stroller and sidled up next to a girl in sweatpants pushing a two-year-old John Candy look-alike on the swings.

  “How old is he?” I asked, trying to make conversation.

  The girl looked at me like I was a pedophile who’d just offered her son a pack of Starburst before answering curtly, “He’s a she.”

  “Mo, mo, mo,” Sid said, demanding that I push him higher.

  I turned to Crystal, who was scoping out a silver-haired banker drowning in the sandbox with his son. His eyes glazed over, daydreaming about his life one month prior when school wasn’t back in session and his wife was living full-time in Bridgehampton.

  “What is everyone’s problem here?” I shook my head, flummoxed.

  “This park sucks. There are no hot dads.” Still furious that I wasn’t being a good enough friend to let her drive her life off a cliff, Crystal got back on her phone, refusing to make eye contact. “Have you heard of Raya?”

  “Is it a place I can meet cool moms?”

  “It’s like Tinder for hot people. Like, you have to be super-hot to be accepted…or Matthew Perry. We have plans.” She smirked proudly. “Remember when I was on that site Beautiful People and I met the Gyno?”

  “Wait, that’s your code name for him?”

  “No. This guy really is my gyno. He’s a smokehouse…and he has a big dick.”

  “How do you know that?” I looked at her, concerned.

  “It’s unimportant. Anyway, online is basically the only way I date. I’ve given up trying to meet people in the real world. I just don’t trust someone when I don’t know right off the bat what mutual friends we have. It’s creepy.”

  Maybe Crystal was right. Maybe meeting people face-to-face was passé. But everyone I was friends with online was either a stranger or a celebrity French bulldog. Waylaid by a new prospect, Crystal forgot why she was mad at me and again started showing me pictures of her tits.