by Paula Bomer
This prompts another long, nasty glare, and then the old woman opens her wrinkled mouth, and with a coarse, Brooklyn accent says, “You people think you rule the world. Pushing your strollers all over the place.”
“It was an accident! For God’s sake, you never pushed a stroller around? You were in a stroller at one point yourself, being pushed around by your mother! Have you no mercy? I’m pregnant, I don’t feel well! I’m doing the best I can …”
“You come here, you push the real estate market way up, my son has to move to Staten Island because he can’t afford it around here anymore, and then you push those strollers down the street like you own the place. This used to be a nice neighborhood.”
“Tom, Tom,” Sonia says.
Tom is standing quietly, watching his mother with big eyes.
“Ma’am? Your hamburger?”
“Tom, see this lady here? She’s got meat inside of her. And she’ll be dead soon. And then she’ll just be a piece of meat. Not a person anymore. A piece of old meat, rotting in the ground.”
“Ma’am?” The nice Italian man looks at her, with caution in his dark eyes. “Your hamburger is ready.”
Mike sleeps on and Sonia pushes the stroller, the bag of hamburger meat hanging from the handle. They are out of milk. She’ll get it at the corner deli on the way back to her apartment. This thought makes tears come to her eyes. She has to buy milk and she really doesn’t think she can do it. Tom is walking very carefully, deep in thought. Sonia peeks at Mike. A melted Popsicle stick remains clutched in his hand and his hand is curled against his chest. A bright red stain, in the shape of a circle, lies directly where his heart is. Oh, God. Sonia’ll never get out that stain. It looks as if he’s been shot. A man, an attractive man in a nice suit, carrying a briefcase, walks by and glances down at Mike in the stroller, giving Sonia a scornful look. And now, she can barely push the stroller anymore. She’s only three blocks from home, but God, she just can’t do it.
“Mommy, why are we walking so slowly?
“Because it’s hot, sweetie.”
She’s standing now. Not walking. She sits down, crossed-legged, the asphalt burning through her black-turning-green cotton pants from the Gap. She is not in the shade. She is in the middle of the sidewalk. It’s noon. It’s the hottest time of the day, in the hottest city in the world. Sonia is sitting in the hottest, most airless, most inconvenient spot. People walk around her. “Mommy, can we go home?”
“In just a minute. In just a minute.”
A young woman, Sonia can’t tell how old she is, maybe twenty, maybe thirty, God knows, she could be fifteen, walks by, slowly. She’s got big, perky tits, visible through her tight tank shirt. She’s wearing jeans, in this heat, tight ones, her flat stomach out for the world to see, her bellybutton small and round and dark. Why is it that Sonia can’t tell the difference between a fifteen-year-old and a twenty-five-year-old? Sonia’s babysitter, Carrie, is twenty-two, a college student at Brooklyn College, from Trinidad. But she could be thirty for all Sonia knows. She just can’t tell anything anymore. All she seems aware of is that her children are very young, she’s not, and old people suck shit. The girl, or woman, slows to a stop and says, “Is everything OK?”
But the problem is, she doesn’t care. She’s got a smug look on her face. Her voice is condescending, not caring. She has a hand on her exposed hip bone. She isn’t worried about Sonia. The girl-woman looks at the stain on Mike’s shirt. She cares not at all if everything isn’t OK. She’s lying. Her inquiry is about how she’s OK, very OK thank you, and Sonia’s not, and that is making her feel good, as she stands there, with her bellybutton winking at Sonia. No, she doesn’t care if Sonia is OK at all and this is a big problem.
“I am not really OK. I am pregnant. And I am about to throw up on your shoes.”
“You should get some help, lady.” She says this, and shifts from one long leg to another.
“Well, that’s pretty funny considering that you just asked me if I was OK, and I’m not, clearly, which you already knew. But you didn’t ask me if I were OK because you actually wanted to help me, did you? Why ask a question like that? Why mock me when you have no intention of helping me? Is your life that pathetic that you get off on rubbing other people’s weaknesses in their face? I am having a bad moment. You’re aware of that. And yet, you stand there, so superior. Can’t you just be happy with your big tits and be gone? Must you torture helpless, sick pregnant women?”
“Lady, do you want me to call someone?”
“Mommy, can we go cook our meat?”
“No, I don’t want you to call anyone. But help me stand up. Just give me your hand. That’s all. I can make it. I can make it home. I can.” And, awkwardly, not having intended to do so, the young woman stretches out one of her long, tan arms, scented with a sweet, vanilla perfume, and Sonia grabs it like it’s a life preserver and she’s drowning in the hot, Caribbean Sea, and pulls so hard that the woman nearly topples over. But she doesn’t, she braces herself, and Sonia climbs up her arm, all the way to standing, and marches the three blocks home.
THAT NIGHT, AFTER SONIA fries hamburger meat for her children and husband, after she herself eats part of a hamburger bun with a little bit of butter on it and drinks flat ginger ale, after the kids fall asleep, and the TV’s turned off, Dick and she go to bed. Sonia tries to read The New Yorker. This is one of the worst things about being pregnant. She can’t read. She can’t concentrate. She reads two sentences and then her mind wanders—was that a gas bubble or the baby? when I bumped into the counter tonight, did I hurt the baby? what will I cook for dinner tomorrow? my head hurts so much!—and then she forgets the two sentences she just read. So she tries to read them again. Soon, she’s just flipping to the cartoons. Dick puts his hand on her breast.
“It’s been months.”
“I think weeks. Months? I don’t know. You know I don’t feel well.”
“I’m starving.”
“Why don’t you fuck your secretary?”
“My secretary? You mean Alex? He’s a gay man and I like women.”
“I bet he gives a mean blowjob.”
“Feel this.” He takes her hand away from The New Yorker and puts it on his hard dick. He smiles at her, mischievously.
“I hate you right now.”
“I like you.” He looks at her gently. She’s got the upper hand right now. “Could you kiss it?”
“Kiss it?”
“You could start by just kissing it. A little kiss.”
“I hate my life. I almost had a nervous breakdown today. A woman at the butcher shop was mean to me. And I couldn’t control myself. I sort of freaked out on her. And now I feel like I can never go to the butcher’s again.”
“Please. Just one little kiss?”
“I’m going to cry, Dick. What if I cried?”
“Just for a few minutes? I won’t come in your mouth if you think that’ll make you feel sick.”
“I hate you. Did you not hear me say that? Are you listening to me at all? I hate you.”
“Please? Pretty please?”
I hate you, I hate you, thinks Sonia, her head being pushed down the fleshy expanse of her husband’s belly. I hate the smell of your cock, the feel of your pubes. I hate your white belly. I hate you, she thinks, as she heads south, and begins calculating what he’ll owe her for this pleasure.
GIVING ONLY ONE BLOWJOB every three months bestows on Sonia a kind of power over her husband that fucking him regularly doesn’t. He deeply appreciates the blowjob. He wakes up with the kids, which he’s been doing for months really, but this morning, the morning after the blowjob, he brings her coffee at eight thirty, just how she likes it, with milk and sugar, very warm, maybe he warmed the milk in a pan for her, and when she comes downstairs, the kids are dressed, their teeth brushed, their hair combed, and they’ve had scrambled eggs for breakfast. The toys are picked up, put away in their little toy bins. The swooshing sound of a load of laundry being washed can be heard f
rom the downstairs bathroom. Dick stands at the sink, scrubbing the pan in which he cooked the eggs. He smiles at her warmly. Wow, thinks Sonia. Wow. He could do this every morning. He doesn’t need me. No one needs me, really. So why doesn’t he do this every morning? Because he makes the money and I don’t, thinks Sonia? Because he makes the money then it’s OK for him to do as little as possible, as much as it takes to get by without completely alienating her. Where, where is the generosity? The apartment glistens at her and it fills her with rage. Why does he only do what it takes? Where is the love?
“Do you want some breakfast, honey?”
“No.”
He wants her to say something. He wants her to thank him. Thank you! Thank you for usually doing as little as possible! Thank you for taking advantage of me! For assuming I’ll do everything! Thanks for making it clear that when you do something, it’s a big fucking favor.
“The kids are dressed.”
“I noticed. Why don’t you always dress them? Why doesn’t the house always look like this before you go to work?”
“What do you mean? I thought you liked getting the kids dressed.”
“Fuck you!”
He walks up to her and puts his hand over her mouth, whispering, “Don’t talk like that in front of the kids. Just don’t.”
“I hate my life.”
“Man, I can’t wait until this part of the pregnancy is over. This is the worst part. You know it, too. You’re not rational. You’re not well. Your hormones are sending the wrong messages to your brain.”
“I hate that you don’t do this every morning, don’t you see? That this is some kind of favor to me for sucking your dick last night.” She’s talking quietly now, so the kids can’t hear her. But her voice is sharp. “I don’t want any favors from you, do you understand that? You either have responsibilities or not. You either give me your best around here, or you don’t. And clearly, you usually don’t. What makes you the king, huh? Your salary? That’s what makes you the king?”
“Hey, if you want to go back to bartending, I’ll stay home with the kids. We can live off the great salary you once made. Let’s try that out, huh, Sonia? If you want to role-reversal with me, I’ll do it. I wouldn’t mind the break. Work’s not fun you know. It’s not a picnic.”
“I realize that work is not always fun for you. I realize that. But you are lying when you say you’d quit your job and do what I do. You may have some bad times there, but when it comes down to it, you like what you do. You’re good at it. You like going to work, you like coming home and seeing your family, you like someone else doing all that comforting shit when you come home. The dinner. The couch dusted off. The whole shebang.”
“I’m sorry, are we supposed to pretend that we could live off of your bartending salary of yore? Is that what you want me to pretend right now?”
“You’re not admitting it. You’re not admitting what you get out of this deal. I, on the other hand, am taking a look at what I don’t get. Why don’t I get this? Why is this special? Why don’t you give me your best shot every morning? Why don’t you feel any obligation around here? All I can say is, I’m never sucking your fucking dick again. You got that? Never.”
“I’m calling your shrink. You need to go see your shrink.”
Sonia hasn’t seen her shrink in years! Not since Tom was born. Dr. Silver, in Brooklyn Heights. It’s not a bad idea really, and Sonia thinks she may call him herself. But instead she says, “I’m going to a clinic right now. I’m putting an end to this. I’m not being your wife anymore. Fuck you, you got that? Fuck you and your scrubbing a pan once a month around here shit.” Her voice is loud now. Tom and Mike run into the kitchen.
But it’s not Sonia who leaves, it’s Dick. And she stands mute as he slams the door behind him, the children grabbing onto her legs. Later, when another day is past, when Dick doesn’t come home for dinner, but purposefully comes home after the kids are down, Sonia hears him slink into the apartment. The lights are all off and the quiet he gets to come home to enrages Sonia even more. She gives him this, this quiet, but it’s not like she has a choice, or does she? She hears him piss downstairs in the bathroom off the boys’ room. He doesn’t come up to her. She hears him settle on the couch for the night. And then, exhausted, she falls asleep.
Carrie comes first thing in the morning and the kids are so happy to see her that Sonia gets depressed. Why do they like their babysitter better than her? Maybe because she takes them to McDonald’s? But she doesn’t do that every time she comes. Maybe because she entertains them, rather than just takes care of them, which is basically what Sonia does. She doesn’t make silly faces or play red light, green light. She just takes care of them.
She’s off to see her midwife, the woman who delivered Tom and Mike, for a prenatal checkup. It is so hot and humid outside that the minute Sonia steps outside of her building, she feels like she’s been hit with a brick of wetness.
And yet, she is childfree. She moves her legs, her arms sway beside her. Leg, then arm, leg then arm. She’s moving. Somewhat effortlessly. She’s not pushing anything. No one is holding her hand. She is … free. A smile comes on her face, a twitching smile. Her chin lifts. A noise—a giggle—escapes her mouth. Legs and arms, moving, toward the subway. It’s not so hard! It feels good.
And yet, she feels like an imposter. She’s not a childfree person. She’s pretending to be a childfree person. She is, in fact, paying someone so that she can pretend to be a childfree person. She sits on the F train and it’s cool on the train, the air conditioning doing its job. Her nipples get hard under her T-shirt, and she feels like telling the woman reading a book next to her that her kids are with a babysitter. That she isn’t what she appears. She’s not what she looks like. The woman, of course, doesn’t look up from her book, not that Sonia would really say anything to her. A book, now there’s an idea. Why doesn’t Sonia have a book with her? And then, just as quickly as the thought comes to her, she remembers—because she’s pregnant. And when she’s pregnant, she can’t read. When she’s pregnant, she can’t think, concentrate, or do anything, really, except sit there and let the fucking thing inside her suck the life out of her. She is deep in thought about how she can’t think, so deep, she almost misses switching to the C train. At the last minute, she rushes off the train and catches the other one. Suddenly, her heart hurts. The rushed movement causing a sharp pain. She settles into a spot on the nearly empty train and puts a hand over her heart. It is pumping madly. She can feel it.
The midwives are on the Upper West Side and they are a good lot. Midwives, yes; hippies, no. They believe in epidurals if you want them, they believe in delivering in a hospital, which they do. They are midwives in the European sense, in that they are trained to deliver babies, but they are not surgeons. They are not midwives in the home-birth sense. They are not midwives in the West Coast sense. They don’t do C-sections, but a doctor on call could. They are nice. They talk frankly with Sonia, and everyone else, and they’ve been doing it for twenty-five years now. Jenny is Sonia’s midwife. She is a big, round, kind-faced, bespectacled woman from Maine who seems ready to retire. She’s been doing this forever. She’s good at it, but tired.
“What are you doing back here so soon?” She says to Sonia, as she pulls up a chair.
“I’m pregnant. I’m here for a prenatal checkup.”
“You’re pregnant again? Didn’t I just see you a few months ago for your annual checkup? What happened to that cervical cap? What happened to ‘I just want to paint?’ ” Jenny is looking at her like she’s a crazy person and Sonia starts to think she’s crazy.
“That cervical cap doesn’t work so well.”
“I guess not. So why not terminate it?”
“After this Dick’s going to get his tubes tied.”
“Men don’t get their tubes tied.”
“You know what I mean. And why is everyone freaked out about me having another kid? Where’s the pro-choice attitude?”
“Hey,
you were the one who said no more.”
“I’m deeply ambivalent about this baby. Is that what you want to hear? I was deeply ambivalent about the other two, too, you know that.”
“Anyone who says they’re not is lying. You know that. Love, hate! Love, hate! It’s starts in the womb and goes on forever. Anyway, I’ll take some blood and check you out and I guess we’ll be seeing more of you. How far along are you?”
“Almost done with the first trimester.”
“How are the boys?”
“Great.” Jenny sticks a needle in her.
“Ow! Jesus, not so rough on me!”
“You with the tattoo on your shoulder. Don’t give me that. Three kids! Wow, harking back to the old days.”
“Lots of people still have three kids, Jenny.”
“I don’t know about lots. Are you moving to the suburbs?”
“I don’t think so. Although I should look around for a bigger apartment.”
“Ha! In your neighborhood, not likely. Is this the trying-for-a-girl thing? Is that it?”
“I love my boys. You know that. I’m from a family of girls. I was so happy to have boys.”
“Yeah, but now that you have your boys, you want a girl? Is that it?”
“It was an accident and we’re just going with it. Dick would love a little girl. I don’t know how I feel about it. As long as the little thing is healthy, I’ll be happy.”
But as Sonia walks down Columbus, looking at the shops full of beautiful clothes she can’t wear because soon she’ll be as big as a cow, sweating out a particularly pungent sweat due to all the hormones raging in her body in the late summer heat, she thinks, do I want a girl? Is this what this is about? To be a mother to a daughter? To, then, relive her own life to a certain extent? To have a little Willa? A passive yet conniving thing? Or worse, to have a little one just like she was, a wild bitchy creature that acted like a boy, but disgraced the family like only a bad girl could?
Another female in the house. Is this what she wants?