The county fair was approaching and Chris had reserved a booth to show off his new line of zero-turn mowers. This meant that he would be working from 8:00 a.m. to midnight all week. He wouldn’t have time to pick me up in Brooklyn. Instead, my brother agreed to drive me back upstate and spend a few days.
The temperature was hovering at just above one hundred degrees when Mark pulled up in my mother’s old Corolla, which he borrowed so he wouldn’t have to drive his colossal minivan. I stood on the curb watching as he loaded the car with the new car seat and the plaid pack ’n’ play—items I considered precious cargo. In my hormonal end-of-pregnancy haze, the condition of these items was directly linked to the safety of my child.
Before we could get on the road, my brother had to stop at his kids’ Hebrew school for a conference. When we found a place to park, Mark rolled down the car windows partway and shut the car off. “Ready?” he said.
“I’m not leaving this stuff in the car with the windows open.”
We were in Park Slope, an upscale neighborhood and very safe, but I still remembered when crime here was rampant. My grandmother had lived in the vicinity for forty years and as children we visited often. Back then, one didn’t simply stroll around Park Slope. Hipsters had since slowly infiltrated the area; window boxes replaced graffiti and covered up bullet holes, but old habits die hard. I grew up in a Brooklyn where the safest places were the ones the mafia controlled. When my girlfriends and I walked alone at night, we held our house keys between our fingers so we could stab someone if they tried to push us into an unmarked van. What could possibly make my brother think I would leave valuable merchandise unattended in a car with the windows cracked? It felt like he was asking me to leave my actual baby.
“Get out of the car,” Mark said.
“Roll up the windows.” I refused to move.
“The car will get too hot if I roll up the windows.”
“You grew up in Brooklyn. Why is this suddenly okay?”
“Fine, stay.” He walked off and then turned, throwing the car keys in the middle of the sidewalk. I got out and picked them up. I got back in the car, rolled up the windows, and sat there until I was so hot my thighs turned red and cleavage sweat soaked through my blouse. I don’t know why I stayed in that car. Irrational? Maybe. I was thirty-four weeks pregnant and had been in bed for four months. My marriage was falling apart, and it was a hundred degrees outside. My brain had melted. It never occurred to me to roll down the windows or lock up the car and find a cooler place to sit and wait. My only mission was to keep the car seat and the pack ’n’ play safe, as if my life, and my baby’s, depended on it.
Tears streamed down my face. A man wearing clogs and a white T-shirt stared as he went by, but when I made eye contact, he pretended not to notice me.
I called Chris in between mournful heaves. “I’ve been abandoned in Park Slope! He just left me here.”
“It’s okay.”
“I don’t even know where the subway is!” I blubbered. I thought about stealing the car and driving it all the way upstate myself. A good plan, but let’s face it, I couldn’t even drive to the supermarket without a map, let alone figure out where the hell the highway was.
“I’ll come get you,” Chris said.
“Really?”
“Yeah, really. Just tell me where you are.”
No matter the space that had grown between us, I knew then that Chris would not let me die of heatstroke. I had said only a few perfunctory words to him over the last two weeks, but he hadn’t hesitated to come to my rescue. The man was going to get in his car and drive two hours to Park Slope right now!
“Give it a few more minutes. See if he comes back,” he said.
I turned on the air conditioner, but it was an old car, and only the fan worked. Still wilting, I opened the car door so I could breathe, but there was no breeze. And then I called my mother.
When I told her where I was, the pitch of her response was so high only bats could decipher her words. The worst had happened. I was unsafe, alone on the streets of Brooklyn. In her mind, I was already in the last stages of labor, the baby was falling out, and I was hemorrhaging all over the stoop of a fine nineteenth-century brownstone. She had to find me.
“Just stay put! I’m coming for you!” She hung up, but she hadn’t asked me what street I was on. Brooklyn is a pretty big place. It might be a while.
Twenty-five minutes later I saw Mark in the side-view mirror strutting down the street toward the car.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“You left me!”
“Why didn’t you just lock up the car and come into the synagogue? You know, where it’s air-conditioned?” I paused mid-sob. I looked up at him, and then down again at the wet, crumpled tissue in my hand. “That’s why I threw the keys at you, stupid. Didn’t you realize that?”
“No,” I laugh-cried.
“Don’t be mad. Come on, let’s find a place to eat.” We drove around the block to a restaurant and sat in a booth, rolling up the windows and locking the car door, this time without incident. I called Chris to cancel the emergency, but as we were ordering, I had a feeling that I had forgotten something.
“Mom!” I shouted.
“No. I’m Mark. You’re Aileen. That’s how it works. Mom is that woman with all the energy.”
“No. Mom. I called Mom. She’s looking for me.”
“Right now?”
“She’s wandering the streets. We have to find her. She’s going to knock your block off.”
“What does that even mean, ‘knock your block off’?”
“I don’t know, but it scared the shit out of me when Dad said it.”
“Like, really, the whole block had to suffer because we were idiots?”
I looked out the restaurant window to see a blur of a woman in a long brown flair skirt flying by, pointing a black umbrella straight ahead as though charging. Mark and I looked at each other. She was heading down the avenue toward the synagogue where Mark just had his meeting.
“You’d better do something,” I said. “I’m carrying her grandchild. She’s not going to touch me.”
He raised an eyebrow, pointing to himself. “You want me to go out there?” But he headed toward the door.
“God be with you!” I shouted.
They started arguing, my mother’s mouth moving furiously as my brother grinned. She smacked him across his chest with the umbrella. They came back into the restaurant, and if I could have hidden under the table, I would have.
“We worked it out,” my brother said, putting his arm around my mother. Then he gave her a big kiss on the cheek.
“You’re going to put me in my grave, the two of you. Move over,” she said, falling into the seat next to Mark.
“Why do you have an umbrella? There’s not a single cloud,” I said.
“To hit your brother,” she replied, and then we all sat down and had a nice lunch.