by Paula Bomer
Because, frankly, Sonia and Dick still feel young. Sonia’s thirty-five and Dick’s thirty-eight. They wanted to learn tennis together. To go to museums. To wear stylish clothing that won’t get spit-up on it. Just not to bend over constantly! To not worry about their boys falling down the stairs or eating broken glass. They want a little bit of freedom. And they have been tasting it now for a few months, because when Mike turned two, things just started to feel easier. They’ve had the talk about how they specifically want only two children, so they can still afford to live in the city, still get by with a decently spacious two-bedroom apartment. No pressing need for a big house and yard. Yes, they’ve just started seeing a movie once a week. But Sonia wants to start painting again, too. She wants to stick Mike in preschool in the mornings in the fall (he was already signed up) and do whatever the fuck she wants to do, which is, primarily, to paint.
Before she moved to New York, before she met Dick, fell in love, got married and then, right away, pregnant (because face it, waiting until you’re forty to have a baby is stupid), before she became who she is now, a tired housewife with a bad haircut, before that, she painted. And nothing else really mattered to her. She lived in Boston, slept with lots of men, drank a lot, and painted constantly. Day and night. She painted until her soul ached, and then she painted some more. She painted until the painting was good, and then she kept painting until the painting sucked, and then she painted some more. She had what they called dedication. Or a calling. She made little time for socializing, but she did fuck a lot. She fucked not one, not two, but three of her professors at the Museum School in Boston. And all this, without being beautiful or having large breasts. Her professors fucked her because she knew how to paint and it turned them on, or so she believed and still believes. OK, being young helped. But would Philbert Rush, famous abstract painter extraordinaire, really have fucked her just because she was twenty-two? He fucked her because he thought she was talented, too. Sonia loves her boys, loves them more than anything, but she’s been patiently waiting for this time to come. The time of no babies. Children are one thing, babies another.
And Dick talked about quitting his job, doing something different. They felt, lately, perched on the edge of the next phase in life. The no-baby phase. They were excited, invigorated, planning, lounging, reading The New Yorker and Harper’s uninterrupted while Tom and Mike played happily by themselves. They would look up at each other from their respective magazines, the heartwarming, tinkling sound of the boys playing in their bedroom (they got along so well, for the most part, occasionally fighting over toys, but it was nothing big, nothing constant) drifting in to where they lay on the couch, and husband and wife would rub their toes against one another, smiling. This joy, this newness, this hopefulness for a future, damn it, made them swell with love for one another. And, ironically, this new love caused the particular problem Sonia is dealing with right now.
She wipes herself and stands and turns on the light. The evil little stick in her hand has grown a dark, bleeding pink line in the middle of it, as sure as can be. There is no mistaking it. For a fleeting moment she thinks, happily, well at least the hormones are strongly present, nearly ensuring that she won’t miscarry. Then, as quickly as the thought occurs to her, the feeling of horror returns. No more babies! No more crying, screaming, up-all-night babies! No more fucking babies!
Sonia places the stick on a high shelf in the bathroom, saving it to show to Dick later that night, when he returns from Denver, where he is away on a business trip. Barefoot, wearing an AC/DC concert T-shirt she’s had since the seventh grade, she pads quietly down the stairs from her loft bedroom, picking up a plastic dinosaur as she passes through the living room, and heads straight to the coffee machine in the kitchen. The kitchen is next to the boys’ room, and she wants them to keep sleeping. She needs a moment to herself. She needs some coffee first. Moving in an exaggeratedly careful way, she opens the freezer and gets the can of coffee, puts a filter in the coffeemaker, fills the pot with water, all the while eyeing the closed door where her children sleep.
She stopped drinking coffee altogether when she was pregnant with Tom. When she was pregnant with Tom, that first pregnancy, she stopped smoking, drinking booze and coffee, and she quit her job as a bartender in the East Village. And, lastly, painfully, she quit painting because oils and turpentine were potentially harmful to her unborn child and she hated acrylics. She had, indeed, stopped living life as she knew it when she was pregnant with Tom, and turned into a TV-watching, steak-and-ice-cream-eating, bored and terrified ghost of her former self. With Michael, she’d been a little more relaxed, although it never felt like a small thing, carrying a life inside her body, and the responsibility weighed on her during both pregnancies, really. It hadn’t been until recently that she felt less burdened, less fearful, that she laughed easily again. Ah, the recent changes. Her libido back, for one.
Dick and she were fucking again, like they did back when they first met, like so many couples fuck when they first meet. Granted, they’ve had other short-lived sexual bursts in their marriage—during that middle trimester of pregnancy, particularly the first pregnancy, and when the babies were four months old or so, and her breasts were large with milk but her body was otherwise slimmed down again. But then the baby’s teeth came in, keeping them up all night, pacing the living room with a crying baby. Then the lack of sleep crept up on Dick and Sonia, and then the fucking went away, far away. Now it was back. And no teeth were coming in. All teeth were in already. Every last goddamn two-year-old molar was in little Mike’s mouth. Now, they weren’t tired anymore, not tired like they used to be. Now it was her body he’s been fucking, not the strange, temporary lushness of her reproducing self. No, Dick, balding, aging, pale-faced Dick, with his freckles and large shoulders, has been reaching for her, for her skinny, long, angular self.
And Sonia loves it. She feels inspired. Sex and painting were always connected for her and now that she’s fucking again, now that she’s getting seriously fucked again, she wants to paint. Underneath the back terrace, where bluestone lines the small, sheltered part of their little, Brooklyn yard, Sonia imagines her easel. The raggedy tree that’s too big for the yard, the lovely drooping grape vines, littering the yard with purple berries. It would be a lovely place to paint. She’d need a good, sturdy cabinet with high shelves, just in case Mike gets curious. A stool, although she’ll stand and move around. She lies in bed at night, her cunt all drippy and her muscles really relaxed from all that pummeling Dick just gave her, and she imagines what she’ll paint. What colors she’ll start with. How she’ll turn the canvas upside down, to mess with herself, to get herself to think. How she’ll turn the canvas around and paint on the back of it. How she’ll push herself to not do what is expected of her in her art, because all day long she does what is expected of her at home. And while she stays up in the dark thinking these things, Dick snores, delicately, next to her.
Oh, the wild fucking, the loud groans and heavy panting, the skin slapping against each other, “oh yeah, oh yeah,” up in their loft bedroom, on a regular basis. Sonia’s feet flung over her head, Dick’s hand coming down powerfully on her ass, slapping her, “smack,” both drunk from three glasses of wine at dinner. They love fucking each other. No, it isn’t anything new, fucking the same person for ten years, but that is OK with both of them. And now that they have their energy back, now that they feel emotionally less ruined by the constant demands of babies, now they just want each other, really. After the kids go to sleep, they pour that extra glass of wine, play some Miles Davis, and talk. The comfort of familiarity, mixed with their belief that they can possibly be someone else, be what they really want to be, what they were destined to be before they got sidetracked by the births of their children. Sonia decided to let her hair grow to her shoulders, even though she may be a little old for long hair. Dick grew a small, trim, well-groomed beard.
And now she’s pregnant. After being so careful, using condoms or her cerv
ical cap or sometimes both. But no birth control is perfect, except for maybe the pill, which gave her anxiety attacks, so she couldn’t really take it.
Curling up with her coffee on the couch in the living room, she looks down from her third-floor walk-up apartment, out the windows and into the back yards and trees of her neighbors. The sun begins to creep up through the green canopy. A certain tension leaves her as she realizes that she had managed to make coffee without waking the kids.
HER SOPHOMORE YEAR OF high school, in South Bend, Indiana, where she grew up, she’d had a pretty serious boyfriend, a guy by the name of Bruce Rogers. It was to him she’d lost her virginity. There’d been some sex education then, in the late seventies and early eighties, but mostly she learned from talking with friends. Her best friend Larissa had been having sex with her boyfriend, and boys before that, and talked about it all the time. As a younger girl, a junior high school student, Sonia would curl up in her parent’s closets and rifle through her father’s Playboys. Afterward, she’d pull up her T-shirt, staring at her pink budded nipples in dismay. Would she ever have breasts? She wanted desperately to be desirable. She never grew breasts in junior high, nor high school, really. She hadn’t grown a decent pair of breasts until her milk came in, after Tom was born. But, in high school, she learned how to wear padded bras, tight pants, and black eyeliner, and that seemed to work well enough.
Bruce Rogers desired her, more or less. He would fuck her, gently for the most part, earnestly and quickly, without ever making eye contact. Sonia, staring off to the side while he humped her, was always amazed that someone else’s body part was inside her. It felt big. It felt like a big deal. And, truthfully, Bruce liked her. They were “going together.” They held hands in public. They made out passionately at football games and at the Taco Bell, licking each other’s faces and the insides of each others’ mouths with a tongue-thrusting abandon. He thought she was funny and smart and real. They both loved AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and Van Halen. So when a condom fell off inside of her after fucking in the backseat of his Chevy Chevette one Friday night, Bruce seemed concerned. He wasn’t a dick about it, like her friend Larissa’s eighth grade boyfriend had been. He didn’t stop talking to her, in other words.
At first, when she was late, she didn’t worry about it. She wasn’t that regular anyway. But then, at the Taco Bell one night, when she was a solid two weeks late, she became very dizzy and threw up her entire dinner. That worried her and she and Bruce discussed it and he knew a doctor on the other side of town who could give her a test and anything else she needed.
Dr. Federshneider was a nice man. His office smelled a little unclean but when Sonia returned to hear the results of the blood test—he wouldn’t tell her over the phone—she knew she wanted him to be the one to “take care of things.” He smiled at her warmly, with real concern. So what if his hair was dirty? The worst was waiting for “the time to be right,” as Dr. Federshneider put it.
“Right now,” he said, holding his fingers together to demonstrate, “the cluster of cells are so small, that I could miss some of them and that would cause trouble. You need to be at least six weeks along.”
This was not an easy waiting time. It was only another week or so. But her mother seemed to notice that the bathroom garbage wasn’t full of pads and discarded tampons. Sonia was throwing up all the time now, not just after eating at Taco Bell. At the dinner table during this time—dinner being a family affair in their household—her mother Marie, who’d been raised Catholic as her Spanish ancestors before her, sermonized on the evils of premarital sex and abortion. Sometimes she talked about other things, but it was pretty normal dinner conversation. She didn’t picket abortion clinics, but she did love talking about the evils of it.
Sonia flung herself out of the chair and into the bathroom where she promptly threw up the meatloaf she’d just eaten, bits of onion and ground beef clinging to the inside of her nostrils. Her mother knocked on the door, alarmed, asking, “Are you OK? Sonia, are you OK?”
“I’m fine!” She screamed at her mother. “You just make me sick!”
“Young woman …” but Sonia was pushing past her now, running up into her own room, where she slammed her door shut and turned on her stereo. She had a lock on the inside of her door. Her mother banged and banged for a while, and then gave up.
It was all over soon enough. The Saturday came when she had an appointment. Bruce came with her, but couldn’t hold her hand throughout the procedure. It hurt, the vacuuming out of her womb. Drugged and not feeling well, Bruce drove her to Larissa’s house where she was conveniently having a sleepover, rubbing her shoulders as they drove.
“Do you think it had a soul?” Sonia asked him.
“I don’t know, Sonia. I don’t know if anyone has a soul.”
That night, they watched TV nonstop, Sonia getting up carefully to go change her pads every hour or so. Larissa’s mother was a cocktail waitress, and divorced and never around. Not that she would have cared that Sonia was convalescing at her house, or judged her for having an abortion. Sonia healed quickly. And she never doubted, for a minute, that she’d done the right thing. But doing the right thing wasn’t always pleasant or easy. It didn’t always make you feel good about yourself.
SONIA HEARS STIRRING IN the boys’ room. Quietly, the door opens and there they stand, sleepy and disoriented. Tom with his dirty blonde hair and blue eyes, just like Sonia, even the shape of his face, slightly round and chinny. And Mike, still a baby, but a more mysterious genetic creature, very fair hair and long-faced, reminding Sonia of her father one minute and her husband the next. When they first wake in the morning, her love for them surges through her, warming the top of her head, making her hands feel tingly. They are hers! It’s unbelievable! Vulnerable, fresh, a look in their eyes that says: each day is a new universe. For a split second, Sonia feels inspired. What could be more important than taking care of these creatures that came from her womb? What could be more delicious, more pleasurable? They run up to her, both of them, and jump into her lap, rubbing their eyes. Tom, in an effort to throw his arms around his mother’s neck, knocks her cup of coffee. Coffee spills on the blue couch, and the caffeine is now what surges in her veins, strong and chemical, erasing all effects of warmth and calm and love, and Sonia says “shit!” pushing Tom off of her, immediately regretting her language—but she can’t always control everything, right?—and then, sharply, “Can’t you be more careful?”
The moment of bliss, of purpose, is broken. By her own stupidity. Because coffee on the couch is nothing, but being nasty to her four-year-old, a common occurrence, really, feels unforgivable, particularly first thing in the morning. The shame, the guilt, the desire to be away from herself, away from her flawed mothering, is now the current pulling her under. The speed with which her emotions turn upside down. The alarmingly fast exchange of happiness and gratitude for self-disgust and impatience. She tries to right things. “Don’t worry, Tom. I’m sorry I yelled. I’ll get a towel, it’s no big deal.”
“Shit is a bad word, mommy.”
Sonia ignores him and fetches a towel. Her day has begun. She can’t stand it. She can’t stand to be in her apartment, the children clawing at her. Out. She needs out.
“Let’s go, let’s get out of here, let’s go to the park,” she says, bending over to fruitlessly wipe at the brown stain on the couch. The boys stand, watching her. “We can get ice creams.”
“Ice cream!” Tom squeals and starts running randomly—to the TV set, to the kitchen, “Ice cream! Ice cream, yeah, yeah!” Mike, too, starts running in circles, saying, “Ice cream! Ice cream!”
It’s not yet eight in the morning and Sonia’s already promised them ice cream. What is wrong with her? Is she that desperate? She’s pregnant, she remembers, relieved that something besides herself is to blame. That’s why she’s behaving so badly! She consoles herself with this thought, but really, she often resorts to strange, needy bribes to get through the day.
After s
ticking them in front of the TV, she showers and dresses. She pulls on the same elastic waist, black-turning-greyish-green cotton pants from the Gap that she wears, quite literally, every day. Her bra has brown stains under the armpits. She fastens it hastily, pulling her loose-skinned, now small again, breasts around a bit to fit them in properly. Her breasts will grow again, as her pregnancy continues, and this excites her. She loves her breasts when she’s pregnant, even more when she’s nursing.
The phone rings. It’s Dick. “Hi, honey. I’m getting on a plane after the meeting this morning. I shouldn’t be home too late.”
“I’m pregnant.”
“What?”
“You heard me, I’m pregnant.” Sonia shakes her foot anxiously. She hunches over the phone. “I’m fucking pregnant. I just took a test.” There’s a pause. “Well, say something, asshole.”
“Listen, I’m just a little shocked. Maybe it’s a mistake. I mean, we’ve been really careful …”
“It’s not a fucking mistake. Fuck you. It’s not my fault, either, Dick. What do you mean we’ve been really careful? And someone’s not been careful? I’m not fucking anyone else, for your information, and I resent—”
“My god! You are pregnant! I know it! Because you are already being a psychotic cunt!”
Sonia slams the phone down. “Let’s go, boys! Let’s go get ice cream,” she hollers, as she heads down the steps from her loft into the living room, where they sit glued to cartoons. “It’s beautiful out! Let’s go to the park!”
“Yeah, yeah, ice cream! The park! Yeah!” The boys follow her out the door and down the walk-up steps. She grabs her stroller, shoved in a closet in the entranceway, and she swiftly belts Mike into it. Tom grabs a hold of the stroller and out they go, the three of them, in search of fake milk products glittering with food coloring and a bench in a shady spot at one of the parks, where Sonia will plant her exhausted and already sickly self as her children pretend to be dinosaurs and other ungodly creatures, destroying all that is around them with their special powers.