The Seven Year Bitch

by Jennifer Belle

  Every weekend we drove to the country and stopped by Marlon’s house to bring him groceries for what was again supposed to be his final summer. Every weekend I was amazed that the bird was still there.

  Shasthi had her first cycle of artificial insemination and had not gotten pregnant, but we had both remained upbeat although the two-week wait to find out the results had been almost unbearable.

  Her period had become irregular due to stress, so the doctor was insisting we wait a few months before trying again.

  “Do you think we’re going to get a divorce?” I asked Russell at night when we were lying in bed after a fight. I had put down my sandwich to help Duncan with something for a second, and he had thrown it out. If I had been one of the authors he was publishing, he would have saved the sandwich for a lifetime, fed it to me bit by bit if I liked, but because I was just me, his wife, he couldn’t throw it out fast enough.

  “No,” he said. “We are never, ever getting a divorce. But you’ve got to stop with these essays!” He was half-asleep, in his glasses, a manuscript butterflied on his chest.

  “Just a few more,” I said.

  “I can’t stand living with these things. God, I hate this. They’re everywhere.”

  “You’re one to talk,” I said, pointing to the leaning tower of remaindered books by his bed. “I live with the lost Collyer brother.”

  “Why do you judge these contests?” Russell asked.

  “Because I love doing it,” I said.

  “I suddenly feel like making love to you,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I have to finish this stack.”

  “You can read essays while we do it. Come on. We didn’t even get to do it for our anniversary.” We’d been upstate for our sixth wedding anniversary, went to the Bear for dinner in Woodstock with Duncan, and then he had crawled into our bed with us. “So we have to do it. Happy anniversary.”

  He pulled my nightgown up around my neck and then got up and fished around in my sock drawer looking for a condom.

  “I can’t believe we’re all out of them,” he said.

  “Well I guess we can’t do it,” I said, pulling my nightgown back down and straightening my “yes” pile.

  “Wait, I got one at the Jamaica book fair—it was in a gift bag. Here it is,” Russell said. I heard the wrapper being torn open. Russell slid it on with his back to me, and when he turned around, a big black cock was coming at me.

  “Sorry, this black one is the only one we had,” Russell said.

  I had never seen anything so black against Russell’s blindingly white skin.

  “Why do I suddenly hear blues music playing in the background?” I said.

  “Very funny,” he said. “Just spread your legs.”

  I was laughing so hard, I couldn’t even move. My whole face was screwed up in hysterics. I couldn’t breathe. I was like an animal, gasping and snorting. I was helpless. And when it was over, I realized I hadn’t had a release like that in a long time.

  Part Two

  100 Words or Less

  20

  In the cab on the way to meet Joy for dinner, I thought about the fight I’d just had with Russell. We’d taken Duncan to the Natural History Museum that day, and as we were leaving through the revolving door, Russell had one of his breakdowns. He couldn’t fold the stroller so he started trying to jam it into the revolving door, his head bent way down, unseeing, blinded by insanity. I had already gone through the door with Duncan when I saw the people start to gather and the security guard approach.

  I pushed back into the revolving door with Duncan and back into the museum, where, despite the security guard and the crowd, Russell was still trying to jam the stroller in and banging it over and over again on the marble floor.

  “Is everything okay, ma’am?” the security guard said to Russell from behind us. This happened to Russell all the time because he was short and had longish hair. It had happened on our second date—the waiter had said, “Can I get you ladies a drink?”—and I had almost died laughing.

  “Ma’am?” Russell said, looking up to show the guard his Saturday and Sunday beard.

  “Oh, sorry. Sir. Are you having a problem here?”

  “No, no, no, no, no, no problem,” Russell sputtered hysterically, like a balloon with its air escaping.

  I took the stroller from Russell and folded it in two seconds. A perfectly good time ruined.

  We’d fought about it all the way home, right in front of Duncan, completely defeating the point of the day, which was to show Duncan what a happy, functional, cultured New York City family we were, as my parents had shown me, at least until I was twenty-five.

  “Why does every day have to end with being stopped by security?” I screamed in the car. “Duncan is almost two years old. Why can’t you learn how to fold the stroller? Every other father can fold the stroller. It’s a folding stroller. It’s an umbrella stroller. Do you even know how to work an umbrella?”

  I thought about the father I liked in Duncan’s new class who was always picking his son, Leo, up at school and videotaping him coming out of the school’s blue door with the flowers painted on it. I was starting to think a video camera was the most attractive quality in a man. The world-famous photographer Annie Leibovitz had photographed the class for the school calendar, which was the kind of thing that happened at these fancy preschools—our class was August and had a gardening theme—and he had sent me an e-mail saying how cute Duncan had looked holding his little rake. “Good-looking boy you have there. So cute,” the e-mail had said. Why was Leo’s father writing to me? I wondered over and over. Was this how married people with children flirted?

  All I did was spend my time thinking about other people’s husbands. They were so relaxed and happy, working their strollers and video cameras. I remembered when I’d bought my Baby Bjorn. I’d stood in Buy Buy Baby and stared at the picture on the box of a gorgeous man and woman and their baby. In the picture, the man was the one with the baby strapped to his chest and I’d laughed to myself, knowing that the man I was having my baby with could never walk and carry a baby at the same time.

  I couldn’t believe it had been exactly a year since I had been laid off. Labor Day weekend had come and gone, and another 9/11, and the anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. I’d made no use of the outplacement services offered in my package or even called a single contact and really I missed work less and less. I took Duncan to classes with Gerde and planned his upcoming birthday party. I got Marilyn and Doris and Gert to take Aquacise with me at my gym and we always went to the University Diner after. Duncan had forty-five hand-knitted sweaters. Deirdre-Agnes had had her baby and I still hadn’t given her back her crib.

  I walked into La Lunchonette and saw Joy already at our table making notes in a diary. She was in town for the perfume expo at the Jacob Javits Center and had so many meetings booked, this had been her only opening.

  “So tell me about him,” Joy said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think it must all be in my imagination.”

  “He bids on you at an auction after thinking about you for eight years. He’s been calling you for a year. You look beautiful,” Joy said. “This is good for you. You should sleep with him.”

  “No,” I said, wishing we could stop talking about it. The more we talked, the less likely it all seemed. “Tell me about Africa.”

  “Chili and I are going to have a love that’s deep and real,” she said.

  “What do you mean going to have?” I hadn’t thought of love in the future tense like that since junior high school. I remembered that Chili was the name of one of the penguins that arrived at the family’s house in the children’s book I read to Duncan.

  She checked her BlackBerry and then checked it again a moment later.

  “He hasn’t called or e-mailed in three days. But sometimes there’s no wireless connection there, so I’m not going to worry. And his wife is fat,” she said, “and just gets fatter and fatter. Da
rk, heavy, unattractive. She squawks like a raven. We go to this restaurant in the town to hear music—he makes us sit behind the restaurant so she won’t see us—but she and her friends walked by, and it was like a black storm setting in. You should come there. Bring Duncan. You’re not still breast-feeding are you?”

  She gave my breasts a suspicious sideways glance, like they were plastic bottles I had discarded on the side of the road instead of putting them in the recycle bin.

  Joy was very against breast-feeding. “Oh bullshit,” she had said when I’d tried to explain the benefits to the baby.

  “He’s about to turn two, Joy, I stopped a year ago. His birthday is Monday. We’re having his party on Sunday.”

  The waiter came and asked if we wanted to see a dessert menu.

  “No,” Joy practically screamed. He should have known better than to even ask after she’d shoved the bread basket back in his gut when he tried to put it on our table.

  When I got home I took off my clothes and stood in front of the full-length mirror. The scar from my C-section was purple and jagged and numb to the touch. My breasts were lower than I had remembered them. Lately I’d blamed my bras rather than the breasts themselves but now I was staring right at the source. I had always hated the tedious jokes vulgar comediennes made about their southwardly pointing breasts—making miming gestures of picking them up off the floor and tossing them over a shoulder like a scarf—but now I was practically standing next to them at the microphone. My nipples looked tired and pale and inviting only to a baby.

  But Gabe Weinrib liked me, I reminded myself. Even Joy had agreed.

  Russell had been the only man to see me since my scars, and for the first time I wondered if I could really show myself to another man. Of course you could, I said to the mirror. Of course you could.

  Ever since childhood, I’d always been able to see myself with a certain healthy amount of suspension of disbelief and optimism. Well into my twenties I still expected to grow taller. But now all I could do was turn my head away and do something I had never done before: put on a bathrobe.

  When Russell came home I asked him to change the Poland Spring water bottle and he said, “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you just call me sir?” I asked. I had always hated being called “ma’am,” but being called “sir” was another thing altogether. I didn’t need to be insulted like that, and in a fury, I spun around in my robe—a long robe made of African cloth striped in greens and orange and pink that Joy had brought back to me from her Kenyan shamba—and took a fake swing at him. He flinched. And I did it again, swinging my arms and karate chopping at him but not really coming near him. I felt like I could pick him up and squeeze his puny body through the child safety bars and throw him out the window. “Hi-ya,” I said, kicking the air around him over and over again and snapping my arms all around like a lunatic.

  “Stop it,” he said. “I won’t take this abuse.”

  “Hi-ya!” I kicked.

  “Izzy, stop it!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said to him.

  Then I went into the bedroom and cried because I had become a monster. Joy was right. He had turned me into one.

  21

  I’m going to throw up,” Duncan said from the backseat, when we drove upstate the next day for his big birthday weekend.

  “He shouldn’t have had all those pumpkin seeds,” Russell said.

  Then we heard the retching and the brave little sigh at the end.

  “Stop the car,” I said.

  “I’m doing my best,” Russell said.

  Finally he stopped and I got up and sponged up the vomit with an old blue golf shirt that had belonged to Russell’s grandfather before he died and some McDonald’s napkins.

  “There’s a garbage can,” I said, noticing one outside some strange deserted business. I balled up the dripping mess and got out of the car, and as I passed behind the car, Russell backed the car up and hit me. I screamed and fell, twisting and sliding with my right arm stretched out in front of me. I lay in the gravel too stunned to move. Russell had stopped the car but it seemed like minutes before he bothered to get out and see if I was all right.

  “What happened?” he said, rushing slowly to my side.

  “You ran me over!” I screamed.

  “I didn’t run you over. I tapped you.”

  “You just ran over me with our own car,” I said.

  “I thought you were sitting in the backseat with the baby,” he said.

  “But the door was open. You just back up without looking?”

  “I’m sorry, honey, I thought you were in the car. Oh my God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He was doing this fake-crying thing he did when he knew I was really going to be mad at him.

  “Stop crying.”

  “I’m not crying.”

  He tried to help me up, but I didn’t really want to be touched by my murderer. “Don’t touch me,” I said. My right arm was badly hurt. I stood up and walked with survivor’s determination over to the garbage can and threw out the vomit. I walked slowly back to the car and got in.

  “Mama, what happened?” Duncan asked.

  “Daddy hit Mommy with the car, but I’m okay now,” I said.

  “You’re really overreacting.”

  “I was just hit by a car,” I said. “I’m underreacting.”

  “Okay then,” Russell said, looking at me and then at Duncan. “Is everyone in the car? Duncan?”

  “I’m in the car,” Duncan giggled.

  “Mom?”

  Russell always called me “Mom,” and I really couldn’t stand it. He made it into a two-syllable word and it always came out an octave higher than the other words he spoke. He said it the same way he said it when he called his mother every Sunday. “Hi Mo-om!” he said into the phone, his voice dripping with upbeat pain, like a puppy barking. I couldn’t stand to be called the same thing his mother was called. Whenever Russell called me Mom, I said, “Don’t call me Mom. I’m not your mother.”

  “Don’t call me Mom,” I said. “I’m not your mother.”

  “Sorry,” Russell said.

  “But I can call you Mom, right, Mama?” Duncan said.

  “Yes, Duncan, you can call me Mom.”

  “ What should we do about Deirdre-Agnes?” I asked Russell in bed that night. “She’s called five times for her crib.”

  “What do you think we should do?”

  “I don’t know!” I said. “Duncan’s still using it. And she gave it to me. I even said to her when she gave it to me, ‘Deirdre-Agnes, what happens if you have another child?’ and she said, ʽOh, I’ll never have another one,’ and—”

  “I know,” Russell said, interrupting me. “You’ve told me that a thousand times.”

  “When she lent it to me, I mean . . .” I stopped, upset by my mistake. “No, not lent, gave. When she gave it to me . . .”

  “Why don’t we just give it back to her and we can buy another crib?” Russell said.

  “Duncan is using that crib,” I said.

  “So, offer her money.”

  “But how much money? It’s an expensive crib but it was used when she gave it to me. She got it used. There were like five babies in it before I got it.”

  “So offer her two hundred bucks.”

  “Maybe I could tell her it was stolen,” I said.

  “Don’t do that,” Russell said.

  “Why not?”

  “Who would steal it? Someone would break in and steal a crib?”

  “Maybe it got stolen on the street when we were bringing it downstairs to put in our car to take to our country house.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Russell said. “Oh yes, I’ve read about him in the papers—the masked crib bandit—he roams the streets until he finds an old used crib, then slinks off with it. He leaves the baby, thank God, just takes the crib.”

  “I think someone could steal it,” I said. “Like an NYU student or a homeless person.”

  “Sure, you see homeless
people sleeping in cribs all the time, and NYU students.”

  I lay there perfecting the crime in my mind until I realized Russell was right and there was no way someone would steal a crib.

  22

  The next day, the morning of Duncan’s second birthday, he went for a walk in the woods with Russell while I got ready for his birthday party. We’d decided to have it in the country, with my parents and Russell’s aunt and uncle coming up from the city and some of our local friends who had children. Fall was the nicest season for a party. We had an apple tree filled with apples. Gra was doing all the cooking and I’d hired a miserable pony named Hustle to give the children rides in a circle on our lawn.

  We’d hired Charlie to run yards and yards of extension cords down to the stream and we’d strung a small part of the woods with fairy lights. Russell’s only job was keeping Duncan away from that part of the woods so we could surprise him and his friends by telling them that fairies had decorated the woods for them. I had gathered sticks and tied them into neat bundles with ribbon so the children could throw the sticks into the stream in a kind of contest. From a tree hung a piñata filled with $287 worth of little toys I’d bought online from the Oriental Trading Company. There were tiny buckets of M&M’s under mosquito netting, and Marilyn, Doris, and Gert had knitted little bunnies and pigs and bears for favors.

  I was ecstatic. Duncan was two! I was the mother of a two-year-old. He wasn’t a baby anymore. I had done it.

  “Mama,” Duncan said, running into the house. “We found something!”

  “What?” I asked, in that famous Mom-voice, as if my whole being depended on finding out what it—a leaf, or salamander, or bird’s nest—was.

  “Look!” Duncan said, glowing pink with excitement.

  He handed me an old DVD with the title Hairy and Over Forty printed on its label. Below the title was a faded photo of a blackhaired woman with a proud expression on her face sitting with her legs spread on some kind of office swivel chair. She was pulling her panties aside to show off a healthy thatch of bushy black pubic hair.