Nine Months

by Paula Bomer

  He sips his tea delicately perched on his stool. He has delicate but strong hands. He holds the teacup like an English society girl. “You’ve become stupid about art. Delusional. Maybe you need those delusions—you must. Pretend that you’ll get it all back, that drive, that need. The talent. Like talent isn’t something that needs so much nurturing.”

  “There are no rules, Phil. You taught me that. You’ve become stupid about art, because that is all you have. You are blinded to the rest of the world, you have no perspective.”

  “I have a life, you fool. I have more than my art. I have friends, I have lovers. I have this home and these woods that surround it. I have music to listen to, fine wine to drink. I have so much. But my life feeds my art, it doesn’t take away from it. That is the difference between you and me. My life is set up to inspire me. To accommodate my creativity. To nurture me. Who nurtures you? Who gives you anything? Don’t tell me your kids, the ones you’ve abandoned. They take and take and take. And what are you going to do with that? Suck the life out of them later? Mothers do that. They think they can get it all back later.”

  “You ass.”

  “You are so miserable I can barely stand to look at you. You are so full of lies. Your children, your children. The world doesn’t need your children. The world doesn’t want your children.”

  “Oh, and the world really needs your art. Your fucking paintings. That is what the world needs.” She is so angry at him. She used to think the world needed his art. Needed art period.

  “Ah, but here is the difference. Here is the truth, something you once knew something about, truth. I know what I do is a privilege, a construct. I don’t carry myself like a God or like a vessel of Nature. I don’t ever pretend that what I am doing is something sacrificial, something good. The good artist. The good mother. My life isn’t a lie.”

  Sonia starts crying a bit now and it feels good. “My life is not a lie.”

  “Your whole life must be a lie, or else you would be in jail for child abuse. You brought them here by fucking your husband. And that is something that you will lie to them about your whole life. You’ll pretend that you brought them here because you wanted them. That you, the mother, never committed some atrocious, mucousy, animal act and they were the accidental product of it. Unless, of course, you let them know that, and then, of course, you’d be a very sick woman indeed.”

  Confused, tears running down her face, Sonia feels like she’s being bathed in his hate. “We grow up, we realize our parents had sex. It doesn’t kill us.”

  “No, but pretending to be something we are not does kill us. You are the one who will be dead. You already are dead, in many ways.”

  “I will not die, Phil. I will live a double life. I do already. And that is the real truth. It is. It really is. Bothness. The love and the hate. The mucous fuck and the tender innocent cheek of the baby. I will have it all and it won’t kill me because I’ll know the truth. Even if I can’t walk around saying it as I buy diapers and cookies at the store. There is public life and private life. I didn’t create the two things. There is an inner life and an outer life. There are layers and layers of ourselves. To be one thing is not to not be another.”

  “What happened to the Sonia who couldn’t stand hypocrisy? Who felt she would burst if she pretended to like someone she didn’t like, who turned bright red and hyperventilated in the presence of all that social bullshit? Now you are a sorority girl, yes? And that is OK? It’s not going to kill your soul? Now that you can look like one thing and be another? What happened to your sensitivity? How do you think you’ll make art if you lost that?”

  Sonia’s hands still lay on her belly. The baby has settled. The sense of this person inside of her has become more real to her now than ever before. She runs her hands from the bottom of her belly to the top and then stretches them over her head.

  “A thicker skin won’t kill my soul. Maybe it’ll protect it. So I don’t walk around with my heart exposed to the world quite as much. I still have a heart. I do, I do.”

  “I haven’t noticed it. I don’t sense its presence.” He smiles wickedly at her. He puts the tea to his lips, and warm smoke from the cup rises in his face.

  “You didn’t offer me tea. You bastard. You make yourself tea and don’t offer me any.”

  He laughs a big, hearty laugh. The sound of it makes Sonia cry again, freshly, tears of joy. To hear his nasty laugh! The sound of it!

  “I didn’t invite you here. You show up at my doorstep, uninvited. And then you expect me to nurture you. You make yourself tea. And me some more, too. That’s how things work here.”

  SONIA LURCHES HER HUGE, unbalanced body out of the S-shaped chair and hurls herself out of Phil’s house. It’s dark now, but the moon is so intense, the stars too, that everything glows, everything is visible. There’s a light on in the outbuilding, the studio. She stumbles in the snow as she heads toward it. The snow is nearly knee deep and her feet get immediately wet and cold as she trudges through it. She falls forward and as she rights herself, she looks down and sees the imprint of her stomach in the snow. Her snow angel, a big round circle, space enough to put a dead baby deer. Huffing—just breathing is so hard now that the baby is so big and taking up so much space—she manages to get to the outbuilding, which on closer inspection is an old, small barn, lovingly restored and painted dark brown. Phil is coming behind her. He’s yelling, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? I don’t let just anybody in my studio!”

  And Sonia grabs for the door, trying to open it. But it’s locked with a padlock. The wind sears her face and Phil’s coming toward her now, a key in his hand. He’s grinning and his hair whips upward in a huge black spiral, like Medusa, like a band of snakes, as the wind threatens to blow them both down.

  “You want in there?” He yells over the noise of the wind. “You thief! You want to steal my soul. You would if it were possible. Anything, right? Anything to get what you want? You’d stop at nothing.”

  And he’s right. She needs to steal his soul, as she’s lost her own. And she lunges at him, her hand, for a moment, on his wrist. He’s all teeth and silent laughter now, his head thrown back, and she reaches and reaches again, but he’s quicker. He moves his hand up and then to the left and then to the right. She’s frantically grabbing, but he moves too fast. She falls again, sinking, knee-deep in the snow. She reaches, but he’s taller and more able. And he’s not pregnant.

  At last she stops herself. Grunting, she tries to stand, but can’t. She has fallen. The snow, the cold, her huge body. She lies there in the dark and the white. He looms above her, the man she most wanted to be.

  She can barely make out his face. But it’s him.

  February 8

  “Were you here in this hospital the whole time? Why were you here?” Tom asks Sonia, a look of perplexed wonder on his beautiful face. She can’t believe how much she missed her boys. And how much he seems to have grown.

  “No, sweetie,” Sonia says, “I wasn’t here the whole time. Do you want to hold your baby sister?”

  “Ok!” Tom says. Sonia passes the baby to her older boy and she remembers doing the same thing when Mike was born and what a moment it was, one of those you take with you to your grave. He’s too little to do this on his own, really, and Dick supervises next to him on the couch, making sure he holds his sister’s head upright. She feels and sees the emotion brimming in Dick and it’s so different than when her sons were born, so much more complicated, his hurt mixed in with the rest of it. He looks exhausted and she’s the one who just gave birth. But he looks exhausted on some cellular level that a week of good night sleeps probably won’t help. And there she is staring at her husband, her son, her newborn daughter. The absolute richness of life floors her and she has to look away.

  “She’s ugly, Mommy,” Tom says, apologetic, sort of whispering.

  “She’s just brand new. She’ll get prettier, I promise.”

  “Daddy said you were on a long vacation. It was t
oo long, Mommy.”

  “I know. I got lost on my way back. I’m sorry. But I’m back now,” Sonia says. She tries to make eye contact with Dick, looking for some support, some idea of what he’s thinking. She’s not even sure what she’s thinking, how much damage she’s done. She just wants to be all together, at home. The thought of another hotel room, even this hospital, she can’t bear it. And she can’t do this on her own. She needs Dick. Dick avoids her eyes and Sonia thinks that’s OK, that at least he’s here, he came to Philadelphia when she called. Regardless: shame, remorse, and a general confusion flood her, and she leans back on the hospital bed and closes her eyes.

  “Don’t go to sleep, Mommy.” Mike says, who grew so much in just two months, crawling up in the bed with her. She can barely look at him. She trembles. Will they ever forgive her? Or will they barely remember the time their mother left them and came back with a baby? She hopes for the latter. Hell, she only remembers things like getting her finger slammed in the car door or the time her dad accidentally ran over a cat. Big events. Maybe her absence was a sort of a nonevent, maybe not. It wasn’t the bloody kind of painful. People used to leave their children all the time. If they had to. And they still do. Sonia thinks of all those Tibetan nannies she met once, whose children remained in India while they took care of white people’s children in Park Slope, not seeing their own children for years. Of course, they had few choices. Whereas Sonia’s whole life was one choice after another, some she knew to be bad at the time, some that felt good, but, looking back, were really bad. And then there were the good choices, she thinks, looking at her newborn daughter, feeling the warmth of Mike’s skin against her, his little bones poking into her still delicate, ripped-open body. He’s hurting her a bit, but she can’t push him away.

  “I’m not sleeping, just closing my eyes for a minute. Soon Daddy’s going to take you two to get something to eat and then soon after that, we’ll drive back home. Won’t that be nice?”

  Later, in the car, driving back to Brooklyn, the boys buckled up and falling asleep, not in car seats (which thankfully Dick hasn’t said anything about), their sister in a new infant car seat between them, Sonia reminding herself that for a million years no one used car seats, that Dick was a good, safe driver, and, trying not to think of the other bad drivers out in the world, she turns to Dick. She says, awkwardly—or forcing herself to put the awkwardness in her voice, because, in spite of her anxieties, she feels quite natural saying what she’s about to say, as though, somehow, everything is back as before—“Thanks for coming to get me.”

  “I came to get my daughter, too.”

  “I suppose you’re going to be an asshole too, for some time.”

  Dick still doesn’t look at her. “I suppose.”

  “Well, that probably can’t be helped.”

  “Probably not.”

  Then a silence. And her feeling of naturalness crumbles. What does she expect? A warm welcome? Hugs and kisses? She abandoned her family. She’s an idiot in so many ways but she’s not delusional. The warmth of other bodies. Intimacy. Life seems so meaningless without them.

  Sonia says, “She’s beautiful, the little girl. We have to name her.” She thinks she sees tears in Dick’s eyes. They have a baby, a new baby and nothing in the entire world is more remarkable.

  “Was it worth it, Sonia?” he says quietly. She checks that the boys are still sleeping. She says, “I have no fucking idea, Dick. No idea. But it’s over. And to me, that’s all that matters. I’m where I belong even if I don’t feel like I belong. But I’m done fighting it. Believe me.”

  “I don’t believe you. I can’t trust you.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to muddle through. I mean, do you want to move out, or have me move out?”

  “I’m tired. I don’t know. No. I asked you to come home, remember. I’m”—he looks so hurt, Sonia has to look away—“just really angry at you.”

  “I’m happy to see you,” Sonia says. And she is: his thinning hair, his narrow jaw, his broad shoulders. All of it. Everything about him warms her right now. He’s her husband, the father of her three children. They’re together now, as they should be. “I just lost it. I’m better now. Now that she’s outside of me. Or something. And I need you, Dick.”

  “I hate you when you’re pregnant.”

  “Well maybe you should be grateful I left you then!” Sonia is only sort of joking. “I hate me when I’m pregnant, too. Or at least, it changes me. And not all for the better. But it’s over now, Dick. And she’s so beautiful.” Sonia looks back at her baby girl. She couldn’t be any prouder, any more in awe, any more high with exhaustion.

  Dick says nothing. And they drive home like that, silently, until the baby starts to cry.