The Seven Year Bitch

by Jennifer Belle

  “Happy birthday, honey,” Russell said. “Duncan, it’s Mommy’s birthday. What do you want for your birthday, honey?”

  A little last-minute, didn’t he think? “All I want for my birthday is not to be stepped over,” I said. I was still angry about that.

  Angry, I got into the shower. Shasthi hadn’t so much as wished me a good morning. No Happy Birthday, no flowers, no soap. In fact we were out of soap.

  As over-dramatic as I’d been about turning forty and as upset as I’d pretended to be about it, it didn’t prepare me for how upsetting and traumatic it really was. All day long I had the feeling that the Grim Reaper was celebrating my birthday with me. At Aquacise, as I kicked in unison with the other old ladies, I thought he was the instructor standing at the edge of the pool looking down at us. And at lunch I could swear he was at the table with me.

  At four o’clock I went for my massage. It had been a gift from my father, my stepmother really, right after the baby was born. I’d bristled with anger when I opened the envelope containing the gift certificate. I’d just had a baby via emergency C-section. I hadn’t lain on my stomach in a year. The last thing I wanted to do was gallivant around a fancy dressing room in terry-cloth slippers, sit in a sauna, have my body touched by a stranger. But now, on my fortieth birthday, I was finally ready to give it a try.

  When I was twenty-one I got a massage once a week for forty bucks in a guy’s loft on the Bowery. Looking back, I wondered what I had to be so tense about. Over the years I’d gotten massages sporadically—in a hotel on vacation, or a Chinese place on the street, or some scary basement somewhere with hockeypuck Combat roach traps stuck to the walls—but it was the last thing I had wanted for a gift after Duncan was born.

  When I got there, I checked in at a sort of phony reception desk and was given flip-flops in a bag and a locker key. I tried to convince myself that putting on a strange robe and flip-flops was luxurious and I should be enjoying myself.

  I was shepherded into a waiting area where I sat on a couch next to a gigantic bowl of Gala apples. While I was waiting, I ate three, one after the other.

  Tony, my massage therapist, came into the waiting room to collect me.

  “Hi,” he said, looking at me. “How are you?”

  Maybe he was the Grim Reaper, I thought. Wouldn’t that be ironic if my appointment with Tony was an appointment for the ultimate Blissage, to be caressed by the hands of death. I had eaten apples, the fruit of knowledge, which were close enough to pomegranates, the fruit of death. At least, if he was Death, I could fuck him in the privacy of a massage room.

  “Is there anything I should know before we get started?” Tony said.

  “I don’t want much pressure on my lower back, but you can go very hard on my neck and shoulders. I had a C-section, so don’t touch my stomach,” I said. “I have carpel tunnel, bursitis, and tendinitis in both arms and arthritis in both hips and in my spine. My whole sacrum was pushed out of place by the baby.” I prattled on about my health problems, looking intently into his eyes. “I’d really rather not have creams or lotions put in my hair,” I instructed. I’d just had it blow-dried straight. “I’ve been having a lot of headaches lately. I really have a big knot right here.” I tried to show him where the big knot was through the enormous robe.

  “Anything else?” he said, smiling at me.

  I looked into his wide warm face, thinking he seemed pleasant enough. He seemed a little blissed-out but down to earth and handsome.

  I followed him into the massage room and he waited outside while I took off the robe and lay down on the table, arranging the towel over me and my breasts under me for a few minutes.

  I was starting to look forward to this. I just hoped he wouldn’t talk. I didn’t want to talk about the economy or my baby, or about what I did for a living or anything. And I certainly didn’t want to know anything about him.

  “Ready?” he asked through the door. He came in and folded the sheet down, so my back was exposed. Then he pressed his fingers into the middle of my back.

  In an instant my year of massages came back to me. His loft on the Bowery, his wife and newborn baby in the next room, his shiatsu mat and meditation cushion. My body remembered him, even though I hadn’t.

  “Tony?” I said. I twisted around to look up at him.

  “I wondered when you would figure out it was me,” he said.

  It was my body that had been the one to figure it out. Since I was twenty-one I’d had many massages and been touched by many men. I couldn’t help but wonder if my back would remember every touch it had ever felt, like shoe prints in wet cement, if everyone’s fingers had made as strong an impression or if it was only Tony it would remember.

  I just couldn’t get over it. I’d sat in the waiting area, clutching my key and my apple cores, talking to him for ten minutes. I’d looked into his eyes, been told his name, heard his voice, answered his questions, but I simply hadn’t remembered him until he’d touched me.

  For the rest of the seventy-five minutes he massaged me the way he used to, and we reminisced. He was divorced and I was married.

  “I’ve gained a little weight since then,” I said, cringing at the thought of it, and the list of ailments in my lament to him, and the scars from two surgeries. Since I’d last seen him I’d had an abortion, a miscarriage, and a baby. What did his fingers remember of my body? I wondered.

  “It happens,” he said. “You’re still totally beautiful.”

  For the rest of the hour I was twenty-one again. My body was lighter, took up less space on the table. My hair was enormously big and curly, the bonding on my teeth was white and new, my arms didn’t hurt at all. And my stomach! My stomach was round and smooth and untouched. I was perfect.

  “My body was so relaxed back then,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “I was in such great shape. Young and pain-free.”

  “Are you kidding me? You had an ulcer. You were constipated. You had headaches and insomnia and TMJ. Remember your jaw? I never saw a jaw as tight as yours. Remember you had hives and eczema and you were constantly throwing up? You were just as tense right here.” Again he touched the memory bank located between my shoulder blades.

  He pressed his thumb into a painful spot along my spine that he’d once told me was fear. I flinched.

  “So here we are after all these years,” Tony said.

  “It’s my fortieth birthday,” I said, my eyes filling with tears for the hundredth time that day.

  “And you came to me on your twenty-first. Well happy birthday, Izzy. You can turn over now,” he said.

  I turned over onto my back and he rearranged the towel. He pushed his fingers into my scalp, ruining my blow-dry. My back, my legs, my feet, my arms, my hands, my neck, my shoulders, my face. Even my hair remembered him.

  My body felt so good, I forgot about the Grim Reaper for a while. I left Tony with forty dollars folded into a tiny tip envelope, turned in my key and my flip-flops, and left. Then, at dusk, walking home past the playground on Thompson Street, I really saw him. He was sitting on a bench in his black hooded cloak with nothing but blackness where his face should be. I froze but then found my breath and continued walking. I wondered if I would kneel down on the ground in front of him and blow him right there on that bench.

  I thought of Duncan and let out a single sob from somewhere deep within me. As if I were being pulled in his direction, I approached him, blinking my eyes as if trying to wake up from a dream. That’s when I saw that he was just a black guy in a black sweatshirt.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I thought you were someone,” and I walked home to my family as fast as I possibly could.

  When I walked in the door, Duncan greeted me with a beautifully wrapped box. “Mama, Shasthi left something for you.” I opened it to find an Indian top in bright magenta embroidered with tiny silver beads and sequins. I put it on and admired myself in the mirror.

  “Now you look just like
her,” Russell said.

  We went to dinner at Chanterelle, where we had been married. Russell turned off his phone. We walked there with our arms linked, which was nice, even if Russell always did it wrong, holding on to my arm as if I were the man and sort of leaning all his weight on me.

  “Hey, isn’t that Jack?” Russell said. “Jack? Jack?” he yelled. Jack was the loud, moronic, drunken waiter at a pizza place we sometimes went to in the Village and before I knew it Russell had invited him to join us.

  At seven the next morning, I lay in bed picturing Shasthi. At this very moment she was checking into New York Presbyterian–Cornell Weill Medical Center with her husband. They would do blood work. Then her husband would be brought into a room with a TV and given a porno video. He would jerk off into something.

  I had taken five hundred dollars out of the bank every day for sixteen business days and I hadn’t mentioned it to Russell. Then I’d given her the money in two manila envelopes and her husband had picked her up from work.

  I looked at the clock. It could be now that the doctor was taking the sperm and putting it in her. I willed it up, past those fibroids, into her follicle.

  28

  Why don’t we share two panini?” Gerde said at lunch. It was the middle of May and we were sitting in a glassedin garden. “You will have the St. Lyons de Rosette and Gorgonzola splashed with grappa, and I will have the salume.”

  “Okay,” I said, even though I would rather have shared a pizza. “You should come to the country with us,” I said, wondering if they would. I wanted them to, but I wondered how it would work, all of us crammed into our little house. “It’s small. You and Rolph would have to sleep in the living room and Minerva could sleep in Duncan’s room, or the three of you could take Duncan’s room and Duncan could sleep in bed with us.” I wondered if they liked us enough to come.

  Since we’d had the house for the last few years, we’d invited people to come, but, with the exception of Duncan’s party, no one ever did, which proved my point that no one liked the country. When we’d bought the house, before Duncan was born, we’d imagined the bedrooms, the living room, even the hammock filled with friends, constant trips to buy more meat for the barbecue, and tours of the reservoir and local farm. We had come to understand that “Come to Kripplebush” was not exactly an invitation people couldn’t resist.

  “Ja, we would very much like to come,” Gerde said. “We will come next weekend. Don’t worry, we will be prepared to rough it.”

  “Great,” I said, a little let down. “We’ll rough it in Kripplebush.”

  “Kripplebush is a German name, so it must be great,” she said.

  On the day they were meeting us up there, I bought six pounds of meat for Hungarian goulash from Citarella packed in an insulated bag with ice. By the time we got there the meat was rotting. I slid it into the garbage, which we couldn’t bring to the dump until the next day.

  I was nervous. “Can you please bring in wood for the fire,” I commanded Russell.

  “You told me to change the sheets in our room,” he said.

  What if Russell and I couldn’t keep it together? I thought. What if we fought? We weren’t fit to be hosts, I suddenly realized.

  “I don’t know why you’re friends with Gerde,” Russell said.

  “Duncan and Minerva love each other,” I said, but I didn’t know either.

  They arrived late with apologies that they had been held up at their friend’s house in East Hampton because it was like heaven there. Duncan and Minerva immediately began to argue and then Minerva bit his face and he cried in pain.

  “It’s okay,” I said to Minerva.

  “Of course it’s okay! Oh, my baby,” Gerde said, scooping Minerva up and rocking her.

  Duncan’s face was bleeding and starting to bruise. I went into the house to get him an ice pack and when I came back Gerde was rocking Minerva in a lawn chair, saying something to her in German.

  “She always feels so bad when this happens. Every time she bites someone I feel so bad for her.”

  Grimly we walked into the house and I showed her around.

  “It would be better if we slept in here, so Minerva can sleep in bed with us,” Rolph said, standing in the doorway to our bedroom.

  “Okay,” I said.

  He hoisted their bags into my room and all gathered in there. Russell and I listened to heated German being spoken behind the closed door. Gerde was chanting something that sounded like a nursery rhyme.

  Hoppe hoppe, Reiter,

  wenn er fällt, dann schreit er,

  fällt er in den Teich,

  find’t ihn keiner gleich.

  Hoppe hoppe, Reiter,

  wenn er fällt, dann schreit er,

  fällt er in den Graben,

  fressen ihn die Raben.

  Hoppe hoppe, Reiter,

  wenn er fällt, dann schreit er,

  fällt er in den Sumpf,

  dann macht der Reiter . . . Plumps!

  “What do you think they’re saying?” I whispered to Russell. He had studied German at college.

  “I’m not sure. Graben means ‘grave’ and raben means ʽraven.’ Something about Jews falling into a grave and a raven swooping down I think,” Russell said. “Can I ask where we’re supposed to sleep?”

  “We’ll just sleep in the living room,” I told him.

  When they came out I told them we would have to go out to dinner.

  “I don’t want to do that,” Rolph said.

  “What about this great goulash I have heard so much about?” Gerde said. I explained that the meat had spoiled.

  “What other foods do you have? Gerde could cook a casserole,” Rolph said.

  “Actually our oven doesn’t work,” I said.

  “Maybe I can fix it,” Rolph said.

  “Jews don’t usually let Germans go near their ovens,” I said.

  Everyone laughed, horrified.

  It was like a children’s book I had read to Duncan where a tiny mouse couple—a dentist and his wife—have to work on the cavity of a fox.

  “Then perhaps we can eat something cold,” Rolph said. He and Gerde discussed something in German, ignoring the fact that we were there. “Don’t you have anything we can eat?”

  Gerde made a pasta sauce with the vegetables that were meant for the goulash and half a bottle of ketchup and I made a salad, and we ate and drank in our screened-in gazebo. I began to relax. It was everything Russell and I had imagined.

  “So are you two going to have another baby?” Rolph asked.

  “One’s just fine for me,” Russell said.

  “We are already trying,” Rolph said.

  I wondered what it said about our marriages that they were and we weren’t.

  “I’ll get another bottle of wine,” I said, as if that was going to help them try right now. I went into the kitchen. They were moving on in life, expanding, proliferating if that was a word, and we the Trents were withering up. I was happy for them. I didn’t know why I felt so shaken up. It had just taken me so much by surprise. I wasn’t expecting it. But I couldn’t expect my friend to consult with me before trying to get pregnant, like we were making a plan for tea.

  “I don’t know if a sibling is such a great thing in the after all,” Rolph said. “My brother and I shared a room and I always hated him.”

  “I love my brother,” I said. I even loved his wife. They lived in Seattle, so I almost never got to see them.

  “I could do without my sister,” Russell said.

  “How did you come up with the name Duncan?” Rolph asked. “Are you great fans of the doughnut?”

  “I wanted Duncan to be named Otto,” Russell said, ignoring the insult. “Otto Trent.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I had said no to Otto, because to me it sounded like the name of a Nazi guard. “No way I was going for Otto,” I said. “Unless I was giving birth to a Nazi guard.”

  “Ja,” Rolph said. “Exactly. My grandfather was named Otto.”r />
  “Did he ever kill any Jews?” I asked.

  “Jesus, Izzy,” Russell said.

  “Ja, of course. He killed lots of Jews, thousands, of course. He was a Nazi Geschwader in the Luftwaffe,” Rolph said.

  Russell and I looked at each other. I was thinking about my relatives in their graves in the Jewish cemetery and, I was almost certain, Russell was too.

  Later that night, with Rolph and Gerde and Minerva snuggled up in our bed, Russell and I lay in an L shape on the couches in the living room. In a romantic moment, Russell had suggested we lie head to head instead of feet to feet.

  “Why aren’t we in our own bed?” he whispered.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “It all happened quickly.”

  “Did you notice they didn’t bring anything, not even a bottle of wine?” Russell said.

  “I know!” I whispered.

  “Can you imagine spending the weekend at someone’s house and not bringing a bottle of wine? And people think Jews are cheap.”

  This was one thing I really loved about Russell, the negative spin he put on things. It gave me such a cozy, familial feeling, like I was a child talking to my mother after one of her dinner parties.

  “Gerde did make the pasta sauce,” I said.

  “God, it was just awful. And I’ll tell you why they didn’t want to go out to dinner. They were afraid they might have to offer to pick up the check.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, thinking how I felt closer to him than I had in a long time.

  “Well I know. It’s great you’re trying to make friends with the other mothers and all that, but did you have to bring home a couple of Nazis? I mean this is just god-awful. I’ll sell the house if I have to. No danke. Never again!”

  I smiled.

  “And I’ll tell you another thing,” he said. “The name Otto is out. If we ever have another son, I can assure you, he won’t be named Otto.”

  In the morning Minerva bit Duncan again and again Gerde comforted her. Then Rolph bounced Duncan on his long leg and again said the German nursery rhyme.