The Careful Undressing of Love

  To Frank

  with all my love

  DUTTON BOOKS

  AN IMPRINT OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE LLC

  375 HUDSON STREET

  NEW YORK, NY 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Corey Ann Haydu

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture.Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  CIP is available

  Ebook ISBN: 9780399186745

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket art by Antonio Rodrigues

  Jacket design by Theresa Evangelista

  Version_1

  contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I give you an onion.

  It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.

  It promises light

  like the careful undressing of love.

  —carol ann duffy, “valentine”

  prologue

  When the Minute of Silence hits, I have a glass vase in my hands and I almost drop it.

  We have been doing it for years, at 10:11 every Tuesday morning, but it takes me by surprise sometimes, still.

  We pause, the dozen of us who woke up early to finish our Christmas shopping. We lower our heads. We purse our lips. We try to still our muscles and bones and heads and hearts.

  I manage not to drop the vase. Mom, next to me, hangs on to the handle of a delicate teacup, her thumb and middle finger pressed together and lifting the thing to her lips, like she might take a sip.

  The weekly Minute of Silence has an absurdity to it, if you raise your head and peek at the paused world.

  The cashier is sneaking a look at his phone. The man in the ugly brown suit was lifting a bowl over his head to check the price and he’s stuck there. He’s sweating. On the street a mother is trying to keep her toddler still. I wonder at what age she’ll explain what this is all about.

  Someone’s phone beeps. Someone in the stopped traffic on Fifth Avenue must sigh and inwardly rage at the interruption. They have places to go. The memory is inconvenient.

  Traffic lights switch from red to green and back again.

  I look back at Mom and the teacup. It’s white with a gold rim and pink flowers. It’s every bit as tiny and pretty and fragile as the ones she once threw against the wall. Her face today doesn’t tell me much—I don’t see despair or memories or a flicker of grief flash in her blue eyes or tighten her thin lips.

  But I can hear her heart. I can always hear my mother’s heart, and it’s loud right now, in all this quiet. It’s as loud and fast as it was that Tuesday six and a half years ago.

  We didn’t pick up the pieces of the shattered teacups for weeks.

  We’re still picking up the pieces.

  A month after Dad died, Angelika finally swept the collection of broken china into a plastic bag. She zipped it up and labeled the whole mess BROKEN BITS WE MUST ALWAYS REMEMBER, instead of throwing it away like anyone else would have.

  All I’ve ever wanted is relief from the image of my mother, Dr. Emily Ryder, pajama-ed, her long hair knotted and alive, her face contorted in pain and confusion, flinging teacups at the wall, jagged pieces flying farther than I’d ever imagined they would, one nearly hitting me square in the nose.

  I remember.

  “Thank you,” the store owner says, signifying the end of the silence and stillness. New York City comes back to life. The first few seconds after the silence are always uneasy. We clear our throats. We don’t want to be the first ones to speak. We make gosh-this-is-hard grimaces and look up at the sky as if to say hello to the Victims. I shake my fingers and scrunch my toes like I always do when the Minute ends.

  “Pretty,” Mom says, putting down the teacup like the Minute never happened.

  “Maybe for Angelika?” I ask. “She can probably never have enough teacups.”

  Mom smooths her long, slicked-back hair, and I run a finger through my just-as-long, just-as-fine locks. When we aren’t on Devonairre Street, someone always comments on the silvery-white shade and the way it hangs all the way down the length of my spine.

  “I was thinking of buying them for us,” Mom says, not looking at me.

  “No.”

  Mom blushes with the remembering.

  Her heart skips a beat.

  Conversations around us have lit up again, and the traffic on the street is noisy and raging. There’s a line in front of the cashier now. I guess everyone took the Minute to decide what they wanted.

  Mom nods slowly and puts down the cup.

  Everyone else’s Minute of remembering is over, but ours stretches on and on.

  It doesn’t end.

  1.

  Angelika grabs my face, stares into my eyes, and looks for signs of love.

  Her hands are cool and stronger than I remember. It’s not the first time she has pressed them against my cheeks. She leans in so close I can smell leathery Aramis cologne on her neck. She wears it every day—says it reminds her of her late husband. It is a Devonairre Street smell. Like freshly watered mint and basil that I planted in the garden or just-smoked cigarettes on Charlotte’s stoop or my mother’s chemical hairspray.

  I keep my eyes open and on Angelika, but I’m aching to slide my sunglasses over my face and disappear.

  I don’t like the oversoft, worn texture of her hands or the way I can feel her wedding ring folded beneath her wrinkles.

  She turns my face this way and that, like love might be hiding under my chin or behind my ear. She brings her fingers close to my eyes, pulling at them from below so they open a little wider. I shift my gaze skyward. Someone tied balloons to the rusting garden gate for the Shared Birthday, which comes every year at the beginning of April, and a few of them have freed themselves and are floating up, up, and away.

  I think I wouldn’t mind being a red balloon against a
blue Brooklyn sky, looking down over Devonairre Street.

  Angelika moves a hand to my forehead. Beside me, Delilah sighs. She’s next. Angelika’s eyes close and her lips purse and she tilts her ear to the ground like she’s listening for an earthquake.

  When her eyes open, she’s beaming. From a certain angle she looks almost young, but most of the time she looks even older than her seventy-five years. That’s what a lifetime on Devonairre Street does to a person, I guess.

  I love it here in spite of Angelika and her minions and the crazy things they believe. Or maybe because of them.

  She pats my cheek. It’s almost a whack. There’s power behind it. “Good girl,” she says before looking over at my mother. “Lorna’s not in love.” Her Polish accent lilts on the word love so it sounds like luhf. The accent itself is a mystery—she was born on the street to a Polish mother and an American father, but her voice carries her mother’s history instead of her father’s or her own.

  When we ask her about it, Angelika only shrugs.

  “I am my mother’s daughter,” she says. “We are all our mothers’ daughters, are we not?”

  With Angelika, the only answer we are allowed is yes.

  And it’s true. Or it is for me. I look at my mother. She raises her eyebrows and lets her eyes laugh while the rest of her stays serious. I echo the look. I’m always a little bit scared and a little bit delighted during the Shared Birthday.

  “There is not even the littlest bit of love on your daughter,” Angelika says to my mother, who is across the garden, past the bench and the waterless fountain, by the opposite gate. My mother nods like it matters; Angelika nods back and pats the top of my head, telling me to step away so that the next girl can step forward.

  • • •

  Today is our birthday.

  It is not anyone’s birthday, but it’s the date Angelika chose as the day Cruz, Charlotte, Delilah, Isla, and I would celebrate our birthdays. Our parents’ generation goes without now. And the few kids younger than we are still have a couple more years of individual parties. Maybe the little kids look forward to them, but I barely remember my last real birthday, when I was nine. The Shared Birthday suits me. Devonairre Street suits me.

  The Shared Birthday is one of dozens of things we do for Angelika. Like Christmas trees and Easter egg hunts and the block party on the last day of summer, we do things because traditions feel cozy and safe. But more than that, we do things like the Shared Birthday because Angelika is the person who fed us baked zitis and perfectly undercooked brownies when our dads died and our moms were too sad to get out of bed. Angelika played an ancient, faded version of Life at the coffee table with me every afternoon for a month. She fed Delilah from a bottle like she was her own. She took Charlotte to her piano recital and clapped so hard it was embarrassing. Angelika is the one who shouted “Leave the young ones alone, dupki,” when reporters tried to take pictures of Cruz and Isla and me after the Bombing.

  They didn’t need to speak Polish to know she was calling them assholes.

  That’s why her scent—Aramis, lavender tea, celery breath, and the unidentifiable Something Else of getting old—makes me think of kindness and strength, safety and courage, all at once.

  That’s why I let her touch my face and determine my fate once a year in a garden full of my very best friends and the women who have watched me and warned me and asked me to be one of them.

  It’s easy to do ridiculous things for someone who bought you a stuffed rhino and a fairy-tale coloring book when your heart was breaking for the first time.

  • • •

  Isla misses her regular, on-her-own birthday. She’s always asking when we can stop with all the Devonairre Street traditions. For now, though, she’s wearing a tiara and eating an extra-large slice of honey cake. At fifteen, she’s the youngest of us, Cruz’s little sister, and we’re not quite ready for her to grow up. But here she is, growing up anyway, in a blue dress the same color as mine, except hers shows the light brown skin of her shoulders and the tops of the breasts that I keep forgetting she now has.

  “How’s the cake?” I ask her. She was declared free of love right before me and looks happy to be on the food-and-mingling side of the garden, her knee resting on the bench.

  She takes another huge bite of cake. Her fork is messy with lipstick and I try to pinpoint the day she went from little girl to something else, but I missed it, somehow.

  “It’s good, right?” I say, swooping in to take a bite from her fork.

  And it is good. So good. It was my year to make the cake and I poured in an extra shot of whiskey from the bottle my father left behind when he died.

  “We’ll drink it at your wedding,” he’d said.

  “I’m not supposed to get married,” I told him.

  “Don’t let them tell you that,” Dad said. He gave Mom a look, and Mom gave him a look back. She grew up visiting her grandmother on the street every summer, and when her grandmother died and left the apartment to Mom, there was no question that we were moving here.

  Mom used to say it was the only place she felt she belonged, and I feel the same. Even the worst things about Devonairre Street are better than the rest of the city. I like being tethered to people and rituals and bakeries with flaky chocolate croissants and fresh herbs next to cracked sidewalks, and old ladies who knew my father.

  I like knowing how to make good honey cake.

  Mom stopped making honey cake recently. Sometimes she talks about selling our building and moving to Paris or Canada or California.

  “This cake is my best friend,” Isla says now, licking crumbs from her fingers and lips. “You should make it every birthday. Charlotte’s was gross last year.”

  “It’s your turn next year,” I say.

  “Maybe I want to make chocolate cake instead,” Isla says. She straightens her back. Pushes a waterfall of black curls behind her shoulders. “Maybe I want to make birthday cookies.”

  “Oh, come on, honey cake’s not so bad. It’s tradition.”

  “Couldn’t there be a new tradition, where we eat things we actually like?”

  “Don’t be a brat,” I say with a smile and a poke. Isla trills her lips but doesn’t push it.

  We look back across the garden to Angelika, who is still holding Delilah’s brown face in her hands. They are opposites: young and old, dark and pale, a black cloud of an Afro growing high from Delilah’s head, spools of bright white hair weighing Angelika down. Delilah could float away, she’s so happy lately. Angelika’s feet dig in and she stays right here.

  “What’s taking so long?” Mom whispers, her heart speeding up. “Angelika isn’t letting her go.” She makes a fist with one hand and flutters the fingers of the other. Her heart beats even faster, louder. “I wish she wouldn’t put you girls through this. It puts everyone on edge. You know you can say no to her, right?” She looks at me hard, like the message isn’t getting through. “We don’t have to keep letting Angelika dictate all this craziness, if it’s upsetting you.”

  I nod. Sometimes when I can’t sleep I put on Frank Sinatra, because in the weeks after my father died, that’s what Angelika played late at night. I’d be up in my lofted bedroom and she’d be downstairs, holding down the fort, sipping lavender tea in my kitchen, and waiting for our pain to ease.

  “Why won’t she let go of Delilah’s face?” Mom asks. “Honestly, she’s going to scare the girl.”

  I try to catch Delilah’s gaze, to make sure she’s okay, but she’s not looking at this side of the garden. She’s looking at her feet. Her shoulders slump forward in an unfamiliar shape and I wish I could get closer to her, so I could see the tiny details of her face that let me know exactly what she’s feeling.

  Angelika must tighten her grip on Delilah’s face because she winces, shutting her eyes for longer than a blink. It’s almost over, I try to telegraph to her across ros
emary and dandelions and splintered picnic tables, from one side of the gated garden to the other.

  “What’s this, now?” Betty, one of the grandmother generation, calls out.

  “Do we have a problem?” her sister Dolly says. They both cross their arms and straighten their backs, readying themselves for something.

  “Why is she putting her through this?” Mom mumbles.

  No one’s smiling anymore. No one’s eating honey cake. Another balloon has untied itself from the gate and is leaving us.

  Delilah doesn’t look up from her shoes, doesn’t watch it escape.

  Isla adjusts her tiara.

  Mom clasps her hands in front of her. Nearby, Charlotte squeezes Cruz’s arm.

  It’s warmer than it should be in April, warmer than it’s ever been on our Shared Birthday, and even that starts to feel ominous.

  All of Devonairre Street watches Angelika grab Delilah’s shoulders. They’re bare and sweating. I can see the shimmer from here. I like the way sweat can be ugly or beautiful, depending on the particular way it pools. It’s beautiful on Delilah’s skin right now.

  “What have you done?” Angelika says. She drops her head, and Delilah finally raises hers. I take a step closer to her side, but it’s not close enough to matter.

  I stand back like a coward and protect myself instead of my best friend.

  It’s never gone this way before. Mom’s heart is louder than ever, and the widows move in on Delilah and Angelika. Soon there are five of them breathing on Delilah, then five more. Delilah’s hands find her face and she hides behind them.

  For seconds that could be hours, I let it happen. Cruz and Charlotte and Isla let it happen.

  Maybe we always knew this possibility was here—waiting for us. There’s something fun about long hair and skeleton keys tied around our necks. We’ve liked being a little strange and a little untouchable. We’ve liked honey cake and Angelika’s Polish accent and the way the street name sounds coming out of our mouths, like a secret or a bedtime story.

  I’d forgotten about the hunch in my dad’s back when we talked about the Curse or the way he always told me to be wary of Angelika and careful about getting too sucked into the ways of the street.