The Seven Year Bitch (23 page)

I was happy her life was so nice—it was what I had wanted for her—but for one tiny moment I thought of the sixteen thousand dollars I'd spent for her to go to Heiffowitz.

I had always felt sorry for her when she lifted her Queen Helene hand cream out of her purse, cheap drugstore stuff in an ugly brown bottle, but now, in her bathroom, as I pumped some on my exfoliated hands I saw that it was the finest cream I had ever tried.

“Where did Duncan sleep?” I asked when I came out.

“In bed with us,” she said and showed me her room and its enormous king-size bed several feet off the ground covered in more brocade and tassels and a hundred perfect square pillows. An oval Rococo-style mirror faced the bed and a vanity held pots of creams and brushes and dozens of perfumes and eye shadow palettes. I could only imagine what splendors hid behind the closet doors; if I opened them skirts and scarves and sequined blouses would probably flutter out like parrots.

“He must have been very happy in there,” I said.

“Oh he was!” she said. “But I didn't sleep, because I was so afraid he'd fall off of it.”

“Well,” I said, laughing, when I got back into the car with Russell.

“How was it?” he asked.

“Let's just say I didn't see any roaches crawling around or lead paint chips.”

“Well, that's good news,” Russell said.

I sat in the backseat like a Hasidic woman, so I could hold Duncan's hand and look at him while he slept. It was hot in the car so I unzipped his sweatshirt and saw that he was wearing a new little T-shirt.

Written across him were the words “SOMEONE IN GUYANA LOVES ME.”

Guyana, I thought, looking at the shirt in its garish red and orange Kool-Aid hues. Guyana. Where the mass suicide took place at Jonestown. Someone in Guyana loves me.

W
e have to decide who would raise Duncan if something were to happen to us,” I said.

I was lying on the floor near the dining-room table, too tired to move. Russell was reading “Page Six” of the
New York Post
.

“Ummm hmmm,” Russell said.

“It's not a joke in a post-9/11 world.” I waited a moment and then said, “You're not listening to me.”

“We have to decide who would raise Duncan if something were to happen to us. It's not a joke in a post-9/11 world. I'm listening,” Russell said.

“Not your parents,” I said.

“Of course not,” Russell said, horrified at the thought. “Not yours either.”

Then Russell got up, stepped over me, and walked into the other room. He just stepped
over
me, like I wasn't even a person. Like I was a dog or laundry or garbage.

“You just stepped over me,” I screamed, still on the floor. Russell came back into the room.

“What? Sorry, you're just lying there. I had to go to the bathroom.”

“So you just step over me!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “You can't say, ʽExcuse me, honey,' or just walk around me. You could have walked there, or there, or there, but you had to just step over me.”

“I'm sorry, I don't know why you're getting so upset.”

“I'm getting so upset because you just walked over me like I don't even exist.”

I started weeping, in a heap on the floor. “I am a person,” I sobbed. “I am a person. I am a person.”

In just a few short weeks I was going to be forty. I couldn't believe it but it was true. Forty years old. And that sort of shone a spotlight on things, didn't it? At forty I didn't think I'd get walked over in my own home.

I remembered the essay that girl had written about the definition of
deserve
. How she said that she didn't know if anyone deserved anything. And I thought about how wise that was. I made a mental note to go through the enormous “no” pile and find her essay and put it at the top of the yesses.

I called my mother and told her what happened.

“I'm sure he didn't mean anything by it,” she said.

I started to cry again. “I wouldn't even do that to Humbie,” I said.

“Well maybe you should look for someone else,” my mother said.

“What do you mean ʽlook for someone else'?” I said, infuriated. I knew she was just giving me the same advice her mother had given her, but it was so unrealistic and old-fashioned. “You don't just look for someone else. I'm almost forty years old,” I told my own mother. “I had a C-section, Jesus! And I would never do that to Duncan.”

“A happy mother makes a happy child. All I'm saying is I wish I'd left your father when you were a baby.”

“That's because your father would have supported you!” I practically screamed. My parents and Russell's parents were always telling us what to do but would never dream of bailing us out even in an emergency, whereas
their
parents paid for every adult move they had made. Her father had sent her to Bennington and Cornell and Columbia and provided the down payment for her apartment. He would have sent her to Bennington a dozen times if she'd wanted. “We can't afford two households.”

“Well, we'll see what my shrink says about this,” my mother said. “She's still very worried that he hit you with the car.”

“But this is somehow even worse than that,” I said. “Somehow being stepped over is worse than being run over.”

“I completely agree,” my mother said.

I tried to explain what it felt like to be stepped over but it was one of those things you couldn't possibly know the pain of until you had experienced it.

“You wouldn't even step over a cockroach. You'd step on it,” I said, nonsensically. “The cockroach would probably rather be stepped on.”

“How do you figure?” my mother asked, agreeably continuing our conversation.

“Because it would mean it had been seen. It would imply some kind of passion.”

“Someone should step on
him
,” my mother said.

I lay on my side of the bed thinking of Gabe Weinrib and how he called me every few weeks when he was back in New York. He wanted to have dinner with me but I said no, stifling my appetite for risk. I hadn't given him the hat that Doris had made for him. I'd picked it up from her and brought it right to my locker, wondering if I would ever really see him again. And if I did see him again, I finally decided, I couldn't really give him this hat. I was married and shouldn't be going around giving men hats. But I thought about it every time I read Duncan a book he loved called
Caps for Sale
and finally I brought the hat home and gave it to him even though it was too big. He loved it.

T
he following weekend we drove to the country to see Gra and Charlie's new baby.

“Oh, he's so beautiful,” I said, looking at the baby asleep on his stomach on their bed.

Gra seemed to be in a very bad mood.

“You know you're not supposed to put him to sleep on his stomach,” I said.

“That is bunch of bullshit,” she said, continuing to astound me with her excellent English.

“Well, there were studies—”

“He will only sleep on his stomach! He sleep better that way!”

I suddenly wished I was the kind of mother who let my baby sleep on his stomach. Maybe if I ever had another one I would give that a try.

“How was your delivery?” I said.

Gra groaned.

“It wasn't good,” Charlie said. “She was in terrible pain. I mean, it really hurt her. And it just went on and on and on.”

“Was it twenty-four hours?” I asked, cringing. “Thirty?” I always acted extra sympathetic to anyone's labor story due to my C-section one.

“No,” Charlie said. “Maybe three or four.”

“Four?” I said. “Four isn't so bad.”

“It was awful,” Charlie said.

“I hate it so much!” Gra said.

“But you knew it would hurt. Didn't you?”

“I didn't know! No one tell me.”

In a country where they teach their daughters how to play Ping-Pong with their vaginas, they neglected to mention that childbirth was painful.

“Finally after four hours she asked for a C-section. So they gave her a C-section and when the baby came out she didn't want to hold it or even look at it,” Charlie said.

“No,” Gra agreed.

“And the nurses all acted so
horrified
. I told them, ‘Why should she hold it when it caused her so much pain?' They kept trying to shove the kid at her and finally I said, ʽWill you get that thing away from my wife, she doesn't want to deal with that right now. I don't know that kid. I know my wife. I love my wife. She doesn't want to hold some stranger we don't even know.' ”

I looked at him, completely shocked. There were many terrible things about motherhood, but seeing and holding your baby for the first time wasn't one of them.

“Why I have to have boy?” Gra asked me as if I had been the one to give him to her.

“Boys are wonderful,” I said. That morning Duncan had said to me, “Mama, I like my penis. Where'd you bought it?”

“How did you decide on the name Fisher?”

“We needed an F for my sister,” Charlie said.

“You're going to love having a boy.”

“We're getting to know him slowly over time. I'm doing all the work. Feeding, changing—which let me tell you is the most disgusting thing I have ever done in my life—holding. We couldn't be happier.”

“You do all work?” Gra said. “You have C-section or me have C-section?”

“My wife is a little angry,” Charlie said. I hated when men called women “my wife” when they were standing right there next to them.

“Anger is the first stage of motherhood,” I said. “So you're not nursing?” I asked Gra.

“Nursing?” she asked.

“Breast-feeding?”

She pointed to her breasts. “From here?” she asked, completely affronted as if she'd never even heard of that and I had been the one to invent it. “No!”

“You're going to feel better,” I told her, thinking she must be the worst mother I had ever seen or heard of in my entire life. “You're doing a great job. He's so beautiful.”

I sat down on the edge of her bed and reached over to pat her back. She burst into tears and crawled into my lap like a cat. “Where my scar is hurt so much. You know you wake up in the morning you want stretch. I can't even put my arm up.”

“I have a scar too. It will feel better.”

“Really?” she asked, looking up into my eyes.

“Really,” I said.

I looked down at the baby boy, the only Asian baby in Kripplebush, New York, or probably all of upstate for that matter. If he even survived all that sleeping on his stomach, what would become of him? I wondered.

I
'm going to be forty,” I told Shasthi.

“Really, Izzy?” she said, as if such a thing were impossible. I loved her for it.

“Next week. It's going to be my birthday on Friday.”

“Happy birthday,” she said.

I wondered what she was going to get me. She had a cousin who worked at Victoria's Secret, so maybe something from there or something modest, like a soap or flowers.

“I think we should get you a cell phone,” I announced grandly.

“I told you, Izzy, I can't afford—”

“No, Russell and I talked about it and we want to put you on our family plan. You'll have to keep your minutes down but there're unlimited nights and weekends.” Russell had said no to this, but I really thought he was wrong. It was for Duncan's safety. I had to be able to reach her in an emergency. I had to know where Duncan was at all times. And if I couldn't get her a baby, the least I could do was get her a phone.

“Okay,” she said. “Thank you.”

We walked together with the stroller to a phone store on Broadway and she chose the phone she wanted. I added her to our family plan.

“My own phone,” she said, tucking it into its little case and then into her purse.

For a moment I hoped she wouldn't be one of those nannies who talked on it all the time while the child languished. But I shook the thought out of my head. I had done a nice thing. It wasn't that expensive. Shasthi had her own phone.

 

 

On my fortieth birthday
I woke up depressed out of my mind. The phone was ringing off the hook, with its merry ring, but it wasn't mine. It was Shasthi's.

She was in the kitchen making a pancake and an egg for Duncan. I walked out of my bedroom shyly wrapped in my usual towel.

“Happy birthday, honey,” Russell said. “Duncan, it's Mommy's birthday. What do you want for your birthday, honey?”

A little last-minute, didn't he think? “All I want for my birthday is not to be stepped over,” I said. I was still angry about that.

Angry, I got into the shower. Shasthi hadn't so much as wished me a good morning. No Happy Birthday, no flowers, no soap. In fact we were out of soap.

As over-dramatic as I'd been about turning forty and as upset as I'd pretended to be about it, it didn't prepare me for how upsetting and traumatic it really was. All day long I had the feeling that the Grim Reaper was celebrating my birthday with me. At Aquacise, as I kicked in unison with the other old ladies, I thought he was the instructor standing at the edge of the pool looking down at us. And at lunch I could swear he was at the table with me.

At four o'clock I went for my massage. It had been a gift from my father, my stepmother really, right after the baby was born. I'd bristled with anger when I opened the envelope containing the gift certificate. I'd just had a baby via emergency C-section. I hadn't lain on my stomach in a year. The last thing I wanted to do was gallivant around a fancy dressing room in terry-cloth slippers, sit in a sauna, have my body touched by a stranger. But now, on my fortieth birthday, I was finally ready to give it a try.