The Seven Year Bitch

by Jennifer Belle

  “She sounds awful,” I said. “You did the right thing to leave her.”

  “I know,” he said bitterly, standing up. “You worry if you leave, you’ll be lonely. But there’s nothing lonelier than living with the wrong person. I gave her the apartment and some money.”

  “Ah, bailout money,” I said.

  “Right, I like that. Bailout money. Still, it’s hard to know if I’m doing the right thing.”

  “It all depends on your appetite for risk,” I said.

  He called to his son, “Come on, Em, let’s get you upstairs.”

  “You too, Duncan, let’s go for a walk.”

  When we got to Washington Square Park, I noticed that the fountain was gone. It had been completely ripped out. I had heard they were planning to move it, but I hadn’t imagined they would get rid of it altogether and put a new fountain in its place. Now, where my white fountain had been, there was an open grave. A terrible mastectomy had been performed.

  “Mommy, move!” Duncan said, pulling me toward the playground.

  But I couldn’t. I had spent my childhood playing in that fountain and the rest of my life brooding in it. In B School, I had studied at it. When I was pregnant with Duncan, I had walked by that fountain thinking, I’m walking by this fountain pregnant with a son. We had played there together just the month before. But I hadn’t taken his picture. I didn’t have a single picture of the fountain and now I never would. Panic overtook me. I was going to be forty and I didn’t want much. I didn’t want a Mercedes or a tattoo or a Cartier watch. My crisis didn’t even require an affair. I just wanted my same old fountain in its same old place. They were yanking my past from me and it was too late to protest. There wasn’t anything to chain myself to, no wrecking ball to stop; all that was there was dirt, an odd sort of light brown dirt, an espresso color. Maybe New York dirt was different from country dirt. Although this didn’t seem like New York. It seemed like Baghdad with the dirt and dirty headless snowmen all around.

  For some reason I thought of Shasthi. Was I, I wondered for a moment, no better than the Parks Commission, moving my bulldozer into Shasthi’s uterus? If she got pregnant, would it be the right thing? And if she didn’t, after going through all of this, would it destroy her?

  I went to the chain-link fence blocking off the construction, grasped it and started to rattle it. Duncan grasped it and shook it too with his little hands.

  “This is fun, Mommy,” he said.

  24

  A few weeks later, Shasthi took Duncan home with her to the Bronx to spend the night. Russell and I had had a wedding to go to. We drove through the Bronx to pick him up. It had been my first night away from him and I was anxious to get to him. And the wedding we’d gone to hadn’t been worth leaving him for.

  Shasthi had come the morning before and packed his little things and left with my son in her arms, duffel bag and folding stroller slung over her shoulder. “Here’s one more extra shirt for him,” I’d said, handing her the one that had “MOM” on it in a way that was meant to look like a tattoo. Her face had clouded over and I realized she didn’t want the shirt that said “MOM” on it. She didn’t want a reminder of “MOM.” Maybe for that day she was his mom.

  “I just think we should have checked out her apartment first,” I said to Russell, who was always a wreck driving in other boroughs for some reason. Once when we’d been lost in Brooklyn one sunny morning, he’d almost had a nervous breakdown, sweat shooting out of his temples, terrified of our surroundings, while I pointed to the fat old black ladies smiling in their Sunday hats and squat white shoes and the sounds of joyous choir music pouring out of every church.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “We’ll just make sure to see it now, so we know if it’s safe for next time. Jesus, we’re really in the middle of nowhere,” he said, practically shaking with fear as I watched two young children holding hands and running on the sidewalk while their mothers pushed their empty strollers leisurely behind them. “If it’s really bad, crawling with roaches or lead paint flakes everywhere, we won’t let it happen again.”

  When we pulled up in front of her building, an ugly brown brick monstrosity with small windows, Shasthi was waiting, radiant, with Duncan smiling in her arms, his little legs wrapped around her, koala-style.

  I looked at Russell. “Do you mind if I use your bathroom?” I asked Shasthi. I was determined to get upstairs to see where my son had spent the night.

  She loaded Duncan into his car seat and he cried when she said good-bye. Then I followed her into her building and up one flight of stairs to her apartment.

  When I walked in her door I couldn’t believe what I saw. To my right was a small kitchen the same size as mine at home, immaculate of course, with a Poland Spring water cooler that, like ours, dispensed both hot and cold water. In the living room there was a fifty-inch wall-mounted Sony Aquos flat-screen TV between windows lavishly draped in red brocade with tasseled sashes. Along another wall, behind a baroque mahogany table with eight upholstered chairs, was a breakfront with beveled glass doors protecting a full set of china and other treasures, including the ones I had given her from our wedding. In the center of the table was a huge china-flower arrangement, a Capidimonte sort of thing, and in the corner was a Roman-Greco-style statue of a naked woman with swans at her feet. Everywhere, on end tables, were vases of vast china-flower arrangements. I hadn’t seen anything so grand since we’d been to the Borghese Gardens in Rome on our honeymoon.

  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.

  25

  We 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.

  26

  The 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.”
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  “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.

  27

  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.