TWELVE
Darley
Before I was born I had a tail,” Poppy said seriously, looking into Darley’s eyes. They were eating dinner at the little restaurant called Tutt’s on Hicks Street and Poppy had a large dollop of tomato sauce on her chin.
“You had a tail?” Darley asked, unsure if they were operating in the realm of fantasy or reality.
“I had a tail just like a tadpole.”
“We both had tails like tadpoles,” Hatcher agreed, carefully picking every olive and pepper out of his salad and placing them on the table.
“I could swim fast fast fast, and then I was an egg,” Poppy said.
Darley looked quizzically at Malcolm.
“You know you didn’t really have a tail, right? Humans don’t have tails,” Malcolm explained.
“I did! I had a tail like a tadpole and then I was an egg and then I grew in Mommy’s belly!” Poppy replied indignantly.
Darley started laughing. “Malcolm,” she whispered, “she means when she was a sperm.”
The school had sent home a note saying that they would begin talking about health and human sexuality in science class. The section must have started. Darley didn’t want to be an old lady about it, but back when she was a kid, they didn’t take sex ed until the fifth grade. Kindergarten seemed so young. But she supposed it was better they learn it at school than on the internet. She just hoped Poppy wouldn’t start talking about sperm at the racket club.
Ever since Darley was a student thirty years ago, the Henry Street School had hosted an annual auction in the fall to raise money for their scholarship fund. The parents dressed in their finest and crowded into the school gym to bid tens of thousands of dollars on meals prepared by celebrity chefs, courtside seats to the Knicks, boxes at concerts, weeks on yachts, and even once the chance to have a child taught to swim by an Olympic medalist who’d appeared on boxes of Wheaties. In years past, the Stocktons had won a ski trip, a hot-air balloon ride, a family photo session with a National Geographic photographer, and a frankly hideous painting made by Cord’s fifth-grade class that cost them four thousand dollars.
Families were encouraged to donate generously and bid competitively, and it was a chance to truly show off your best connections. If your son-in-law was in MLB management, you secured a meet-and-greet with the Yankees. If you were on the board of the Mark Morris Dance Group, you arranged a living-room performance with the premier dancers. Since most everyone had a second home either on Long Island or in Litchfield County, it wasn’t special enough to offer that up as a trip, but if you had a third home in Aspen, Nantucket, or St. John, then you best make that your annual gift. Even better if you lent out your plane to get there.
The Stocktons had figured out their go-to gift when Darley was in middle school and the family had bought more property along the waterfront. They would offer up a themed party in one of the unoccupied buildings—an Oscars party in the vacant Brooklyn Heights movie theater, a masquerade ball in the former home of Jane’s Carousel, a murder mystery evening in what was once part of the Navy Yard.
This year Tilda had outdone herself and arranged an Old Hollywood night at the former Hotel Bossert on Montague Street. The hotel had been one of the properties sold when the Jehovah’s Witnesses began to divest themselves of Brooklyn Heights real estate in 2008, and the Stockton family had participated in the five-year bidding war to secure the property. (Rumor had it that the total cost of the place was barely shy of a hundred million.) It was a stunning building, with a marble lobby, massive chandeliers, and a two-level restaurant on the roof where players for the Dodgers had famously celebrated a World Series win in the 1950s. The hotel hadn’t been open to the public in thirty years, and the neighborhood was quivering with curiosity about the place. It was clearly grand and smack in the middle of everything, and honestly Tilda probably could have donated an evening of eating peanut butter sandwiches on the floor of the lobby and people would have bid like crazy just to get in the door.
There were two parts to the school auction: the live auction and the silent auction. In recent years they had migrated the silent auction to an app so that people could mingle and drink and simultaneously bid on their phones. Darley had looked over the catalog with her mother ahead of time, and they strategized about what they might bid on to be polite and what they might actually hope to win. They agreed that in the live auction Tilda would bid on the ten-course dinner with celebrity chef Tom Stork because Tom’s children were in Poppy’s class, and they sometimes saw him at drop-off. In the silent auction she would bid on the vacation home on Nashaun, the private island near Martha’s Vineyard, because they had friends in the Forbes family who also had a home there, and it would be fun to get together. (Nashaun had only thirty houses, and they all belonged to Forbes. Aside from marrying off one of her children to a Forbes, the auction was Tilda’s only chance for a house there.) Of course, to be polite they would bid on the artworks made by both Poppy’s and Hatcher’s classes—a quilt with the children’s faces silkscreened on the patches, and a canvas sling chair that the children had signed with their wobbly names. They hoped they wouldn’t win either of them, but it would hurt the feelings of their teachers if they didn’t sell for at least four figures.
Every year the auction opened with the sale of a small teddy bear wearing a Henry Street School shirt. Though it was worth about ten dollars, it was a show of good faith to bid it up and kick off the evening with a splash. The higher they could bid the bear the better the entire fundraiser might go. Chip and Tilda never jumped into that bidding war. The teddy bear was all about swagger, and they left that to the true heavy hitters at the school, the ones whose names were emblazoned on wings of the New York Public Library or athletic facilities at Harvard College.
The night of the auction Malcolm stayed home to watch the children, and Darley walked over to the school with her parents. Her mother looked gorgeous, her blond hair having been sprayed into a French twist and her makeup professionally applied. She was wearing a long green gown and carrying a purse so tiny Darley wondered if she’d even been able to squeeze her phone in there. Darley had bought an outfit for her cousin Archie’s wedding in a few weeks, high-waisted silk pants with a matching top, and since there would be no guest crossover, she had decided she could wear it twice. As long as nobody posted pictures from the night on social media, she could get away with it.
When they checked in at the school gate, a team of young party planners showed them how to download the app onto their phones, how to enter a bid, and how to set it so that you could automatically top any bid made. “That way if you really want something you don’t have to watch your phone all night to make sure nobody else gets it!” the woman explained.
“Should we do that for the house on Nashaun?” Tilda asked Darley.
“No, what if someone goes insane? We’ll just watch it closely for the last twenty minutes of the night,” Darley advised. It stressed her out to think of her parents spending all this money at an auction when there was a decent chance she’d be begging them to pay the kids’ tuition at the end of the semester.
“Let’s be reasonable about it.” Chip frowned. “If I see either of you slinging back the pinot grigio and poking away at your phones, I’m going to confiscate them.”
“Oh, Chip, don’t be ridiculous,” Tilda laughed. “You know I only drink chardonnay.”
A handful of other parents from Poppy’s and Hatcher’s classes were already there, and Darley, Chip, and Tilda joined them at the bar for a cocktail. So many families at the Henry Street School had also gone to either Grace Church or Plymouth for nursery, so they all already knew one another and had spent the past few years arranging playdates and potlucks and different school fundraisers.
As they waited for drinks and chatted with the crowd, Chip scrolled through the silent auction items on his phone and spotted something Darley had somehow missed. “Hey, Darley, did you see this?” He pointed to a listing: “High Flying Adventure—Join an experienced pilot in a Cirrus SR22 for an afternoon excursion. From Montauk to Hot Springs, the world is your oyster, four hours in the air with a decadent picnic for two.”
“I didn’t see that,” Darley said in surprise. “It must have been added today.”
“Who donated the item?” Tilda squinted at Chip’s phone.
“I don’t know, I can’t think of any lower-school parents with an SR22. I think most of the parents in Poppy’s class use corporate planes or just do NetJets.” Darley looked around the room curiously. “Okay if I go investigate?”
Chip nodded, and she headed off toward the cluster of women holding iPads near the stage. Sharon from the development office pointed her over to Cy Habib, a handsome man in an Hermès tie sitting at a high top with a group of upper school parents.
“Excuse me.” Darley approached and tapped his elbow. “I’m Darley Stockton and my kids are in the lower school. Did you donate the ride on the SR22?”
“I did, are you bidding?” He stood to shake her hand and grinned, revealing a beautiful white smile.
“I might bid! I had to meet the owner.”
“Guilty as charged. Insane I bought the thing. You know what they say: If it flies or floats, rent it.”
That was, in fact, not the expression. Darley had heard it a million times: “If it flies, floats, or fucks, rent it.” Paying for a plane, a boat, or a wife was a waste of money. She appreciated this stranger’s sense of decorum.
“It’s a beautiful plane. It’s so luxurious on the inside, like a sports car—all that leather,” Darley said.
“The first time I saw the gull wing doors I was a goner. And the avionics . . .” Cy shook his head.
“And the parachute. I love that the plane has its own parachute!”
“You know their slogan, ‘Chute Happens.’ ” They both laughed.
“Do you work in the industry, or are you a weekend warrior?”
“I work in airlines. Then I leave the office and go fly. What can I say? I wish I were a more well-rounded person, but my golf game is terrible.” Cy smiled and Darley grinned back. “What about you? Are you in the industry?”
“Oh, no,” Darley demurred. “My husband is, but I’m just an avgeek.”
“Half the people in this room have worse and more expensive habits. I think we’re doing okay.”
They chatted for a few more minutes before Cy gave her his card and invited her and Malcolm to join him on the plane anytime. Darley made her way back to her parents, glowing happily.
“So, who owns the plane?” Tilda asked conspiratorially. A Cirrus SR22 was worth at least a million dollars, and Tilda made it her business to know who had that kind of cash lying around for their hobbies.
“His name is Cy Habib. They live over on Gardner Place.”
“What kind of name is Habib?” Chip frowned.
“It’s Middle Eastern,” Darley answered.
“Ah,” Chip said, nodding, as if this confirmed a particularly clever suspicion.
Darley snorted in annoyance. But it wasn’t surprising to her that one of the other parents who flew planes was a person of color. This was something she and Malcolm had reflected on, how diverse the world of American aviation was. Sometimes it started young, because children of immigrants just had more exposure to long international flights as kids, heading to India or Singapore or South Africa to visit their grandparents. While Darley had just walked three blocks to see Pip and Pop, Malcolm was flying to South Korea, poking his head into the cockpit to meet the pilots, affixing plastic wings to his carefully pressed shirt. There was also something glamorous about flying overseas, and once you got jet fuel in your veins it was impossible to shake. People who loved to fly were hooked for life.
When the live auction began, Darley’s parents put down their cocktails and prepared their paddles. As the auctioneer introduced the Henry Street teddy bear and opened the bidding at a thousand, Darley felt a small thrill. Was it weird to get excited watching people spend money? She supposed it was no different from watching people who threw dollar bills in the air at a nightclub. Everyone liked watching cash splash about.
The NBA player and his wife raised their paddle over and over and ended up buying the teddy bear for eight thousand dollars, and the evening was off and running. They quickly sold a walk-on part on a soap opera, a guitar played by Bruce Springsteen, a 1959 Masters flag signed by Arnold Palmer, box seats to a Billie Eilish concert, and a kid’s Spider-Man costume signed by Stan Lee.
“Damn it, we should have bid on that for Hatcher,” Tilda whispered to Darley.
“You bought him one three years ago.” Darley rolled her eyes. “We have it in a box so he won’t try to wear it.”
When the auctioneer announced the private dinner cooked by Tom Stork, Tilda grabbed her paddle and stood up straight. Tom himself was stationed at a nearby table, and Tilda smiled broadly in his direction. Darley cringed as Tom downed the rest of his drink and left the room, ostensibly to go to the bar but clearly to avoid the awkwardness of everyone staring at him.
“What’s the point of bidding if he can’t see it?” Tilda lamented. She raised her paddle up to five thousand dollars and then dropped out, letting it go to a couple on the other side of the room. “I do hope his wife tells him we bid.” Tilda pouted and pulled her phone out of her handbag. “God, Darley, I can’t see a thing on this app. How much is the Nashaun house up to on the silent auction?”
“Do you have your reading glasses?” Darley asked, looking over her mother’s shoulder.
“No, they don’t fit in my handbag.” She held the phone as far away from her face as she could and lifted her chin, tapping away.
The rest of the party passed in a blur of cheek kisses and slightly sloppy conversations with the teachers and heads of school. Darley felt sorry for them, resigned to sipping single glasses of warm white wine so they could stay sober enough to remember all the parents’ names. As the nine o’clock bell for the final auction bids approached, the Stocktons made their way over to the class donations to see the quilt and chair in person. A few familiar parents were hanging out by the kindergarten auction items, and an enormously pregnant woman was sitting in the canvas chair with the signatures on it.
“I’ve claimed this!” the woman laughed as they approached. “It is literally the only thing that has made my back stop hurting in nine months, so I have my husband obsessively bidding!”
“You deserve it!” Darley said, privately thrilled they wouldn’t have to end up with it. She hoped someone would grow similarly attached to the quilt. As the minutes ticked ever closer to the bell, the guests became increasingly attuned to their phones, wanting to make sure nobody swooped in to steal their auction items at the buzzer.
“I think we’re going to get Nashaun,” Tilda whispered excitedly in Darley’s ear.
“Someone is coming after me on this chair,” the pregnant women’s husband muttered.
“Who would do that when you’re sitting right here?” Darley asked, looking around. She half expected to see another pregnant lady glowering at them.
The clock struck nine and the room erupted in cheers and groans. “We got Nashaun!” Tilda waved her phone happily in the air, teetering on her heels.
“Nooooo, I lost the chair!” the man lamented.
“What?” The pregnant woman looked like she was about to cry. “I have to get up?”
Chip helped her husband gently pull her from the soft canvas sling. She was wearing flats, and Darley could see that her pregnant ankles were swollen. Darley checked the app and clocked that her mother’s party at the Hotel Bossert had sold for forty-four hundred dollars, a terrific price. Tilda went to collect her certificate for the Nashaun vacation from the desk but came back five minutes later biting her lip. “We should go,” she whispered to Chip.
“Why? Did you get the certificate for the house? Did you give them the credit card?” Chip frowned.
“Yes, but we also won the chair.”
“What? How?”
“I had ticked off the box to automatically outbid. We paid thirty-two hundred dollars.”
“For a canvas chair with writing all over it?” Chip asked, turning red.
“We can give it to Cord and Sasha.” Tilda shrugged. Darley looked at her dad sympathetically, but Tilda cut her off. “Don’t be like that, Chip. It’s all for a good cause.” Done feeling remorseful, Tilda clicked ahead of them, out the door and home, followed by Darley and Chip carrying the flimsy, graffiti-covered chair.
When Darley read that Bill Gates was giving his children less than 1 percent of his fortune, a mere ten million dollars each, her first thought was That’s still too much. Inheritance had a way of ruining people. Obviously being born into poverty was incomparably worse, but since both Darley’s mother and father had come from great wealth, she had scads of first and second cousins who demonstrated just how badly money could fuck you up. She had cousins who had gone into law, politics, and medicine, sure, but she also had cousins who did absolutely nothing. Cousins who traveled and partied, cousins who pretended to work, masking their interest in shopping with careers as “collectors,” day-trading their money nine to five while gambling it away at night playing online poker. One cousin married an artist and spent her days watching him work, referring to herself unironically as “his muse.” Another cousin had used all his money to fund a start-up making trampolines for yachts.
Darley’s nuclear family had dealt with their great privilege in mostly respectable ways, Cord joining her at Yale and then Stanford business school, Georgiana attending Brown and studying Russian literature at Columbia, for a master’s. Darley hated to think of her own expensive education being squandered, hated to think she was using her exceptional advantages to while away days in the apartment arranging pediatric dentist appointments and looking after her husband’s dry cleaning. But the problem was, having kids so close together was career killing.
The first pregnancy and return from maternity leave were brutal. Darley had debilitating morning sickness. She was an associate at Goldman Sachs and was expected to be at her desk by seven each morning. Like Malcolm, she was in the Investment Banking division. She was working like a dog in the associates pool, logging long hours, begging to be assigned as many projects as she could, desperate to differentiate herself from the pack and find her way into the Sector Coverage Group to focus on airlines. Her pregnancy with Poppy was a surprise and she was determined not to let it derail her. She got too carsick to ride in a taxi, so she took the subway to the office each morning, but the long stretch from High Street on the A train made her feel so woozy she had to get off at Canal Street and throw up in a platform trash can. She would arrive at work pale and sweaty, her mouth tasting of vomit and gum. The only way she could quell her nausea was to suck on little sour candies, which she carried in the leather pocket of her phone case, quietly slipping them into her mouth when none of the analysts or associates were looking. Once she started showing, her male colleagues seemed visibly alarmed and disgusted. “Are you sure you’re not having twins?” Or worse, “Isn’t stress bad for the baby? I would never let my wife pull all-nighters if she were pregnant.” She was so afraid her water would break at work that she kept spare towels and underwear in a gym bag under her desk.
After Poppy was born, Darley returned to work six weeks later. Her colleagues asked her if she’d enjoyed her “vacation,” they complained relentlessly about the extra work they’d picked up on her behalf, and when she tried to go to the nurse’s office to use the breast pump they would all laugh and clench their fists, pretending to milk a cow while making squirting noises with their mouths.
Darley stuck it out for six months. She pumped in airplane bathrooms on cross-country flights. She left Poppy with Soon-ja and stored her expressed breast milk behind the valet desk at hotels and then FedExed it home. She missed bedtime and bath time and the first time Poppy crawled. She learned to keep cotton discs in her bra so that she wouldn’t stain her silk blouses when meetings went long and she missed her scheduled pumping time. If she was honest with herself, she wanted to get pregnant again. She was falling apart at work. It wasn’t a life. She couldn’t do it anymore. She was just broken, and another baby gave her an off-ramp. Everyone would understand why she quit.
Malcolm was great about it when she revealed she was pregnant with Hatcher. She could stop working and raise the kids. This meant that for the foreseeable future they would be a one-income family. It occurred to Darley late in the game that when she gave up her trust fund, she didn’t fully consider what that meant for her as a woman. While she had spent her childhood asking her parents for money to go on ski trips, to buy clothing, to pay for dinners and sunglasses and haircuts, she had begun to draw from her account in business school, leasing a car, buying a new laptop, joining the expensive gym that had a steam room. Once she got married, that access was gone, the money disappeared in a puff of cedar-scented steam, and her only bank account was the one she shared with Malcolm.
While she had read an article in The New York Times about how the happiest couples had “yours, mine, ours” accounts, that felt silly to Darley when Malcolm was the only one getting paychecks. So instead, they just had matching American Express cards linked to the same line of credit—Malcolm’s. Now every time she charged eight hundred dollars at the dermatologist, a thousand dollars at Bergdorf’s, four hundred at the SoHo hair salon, Malcolm saw it. She felt it was like peeing with the door open: something some couples did, but that was dangerously unsexy.
Still, it had worked. They had a beautiful apartment, they took nice vacations, the kids were being educated, and on the nights that Darley and Malcolm slept in the same bed they tucked themselves together like two silver spoons in a drawer. But with Malcolm unemployed, their life was too expensive. He needed a job. She needed a job. Or she needed to tell her parents she had been wrong all along.
