The Seven Year Bitch

by Jennifer Belle

  “How does it go in English?” I asked, completely sick of them speaking German in front of us like we weren’t even there.

  “Let’s see if I can say it in English,” Rolph said.

  Bumpety bump, rider,

  if he falls, then he cries out

  should he fall into the pond,

  no one will find him soon.

  Bumpety bump, rider ...

  Should he fall into the grave,

  then the ravens will eat him.

  Should he fall into the swamp,

  then the rider goes . . . splash!

  “I guess it’s not too cheerful,” Rolph said as Duncan managed to climb down from his leg and run to me.

  29

  Did you get your period?” I asked Shasthi when she walked in the door in the morning. The two weeks’ waiting time was up from her third round of artificial insemination. If this didn’t work we were going to have to decide whether or not to move on to in vitro fertilization, which would involve more daily hormone injections and general anesthesia and many more thousands of dollars. In which case, Dr. Heiffowitz had said, it would really make sense to consider having the myomectomy—the operation to remove her fibroids—first.

  “No,” she said.

  “So you could be pregnant!” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I went for the test this morning.”

  “So, next time,” I said. “It will work next time. Whatever we decide to do next.” I felt crushed. Like a Las Vegas gambler losing eight thousand dollars. A year’s tuition in preschool. How could Dr. Heiffowitz have failed me like this, I couldn’t help but think.

  “I worry I could be in menopause,” she said and burst into tears. “I told my husband I wish we had gone to the doctor sooner. I didn’t know this was happening to me.”

  “Wait,” I said. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Dr. Heiffowitz would have to do something. “Do you get hot flashes?”

  “Yes,” she cried. “Sometimes I get them.”

  “But you’re only forty-one,” I said, almost begging. My eyes had filled up with tears. I didn’t know what to do. “It’s still possible to get pregnant,” I said tentatively. I tried to think of people I knew who had gotten pregnant after menopause but I couldn’t think of anyone. It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t possible!

  “You don’t know if this is true,” I said. “We’ll ask the doctor. I’m so sorry. This is terrible.” I felt flattened. Menopause. I was sick. Here he was, Shasthi’s Grim Reaper, coming for her in my house. I wished I had left her alone and not gotten involved. Russell had been completely right. I had made it worse for her. This was my fault in some very real way. Having no blood was the bloodiest ending of all.

  All day I had the strange, clutching feeling of being abandoned. When I got home I felt relieved to see that Duncan was fine, lining up tiny animals in a long parade. Shasthi was still there. Life had somehow continued.

  “What are you going to do on your vacation?” I asked. We were going upstate for a week.

  “My husband and mother-in-law and brother and I are going to Niagara Falls,” she said.

  I didn’t know what I was expecting but I was surprised. Niagara Falls was where honeymooners went. It seemed like such a hopeful place. Such a long drive and for what? Just to have a lookylou. It seemed so pointless. “Oh that’s nice,” I said. “It’s beautiful there.”

  “Have you ever been?”

  “No,” I said.

  Shasthi took her envelope of cash from the table, zipped her pocketbook, and went to the door. “Okay, bye then.”

  I thought of her and her family, probably in her brother’s cab, singing songs and laughing, talking about cricket, sleeping in a cheap motel, eating delicious food they’d brought from home.

  I went to the door and opened it.

  “Have a good time. Don’t worry . . .” I started to say, but she was gone.

  I stood there fighting the urge to run to the door and beg her to take me to Niagara Falls with her. I felt panicked, like I was straining against something, grunting with effort, like Duncan trying to break through the straps of his car seat. “Take me with you,” I whispered.

  There were sequins everywhere because I still hadn’t gotten the vacuum fixed. I bent down and picked them up off the rug while Duncan watched me.

  30

  I can’t,” I said to Gabe Weinrib when he called and asked if we could meet the following week.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “I’m going to Miami.” Russell was going there on business and I’d told him there was no way I was going with him because I hated Miami and always regretted traveling with him because he acted so crazy in airports, and I’d just end up alone on the beach all day with Duncan and stuck in the hotel room all night while Russell was out with his client—but I didn’t think I should get together with Gabe again.

  “Well, I can meet with you there, m’dear,” he said. “I’m going to be visiting my uncle in Boca.”

  “I’ll be there with my son,” I said. “I won’t have any time—”

  “I’d love to meet your son. Dustin?”

  “Duncan.”

  “Duncan. It’ll be a nice change from the geriatric set of Boca. Call me when you get there.”

  I felt my face get hot. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t imagine it—me in a bathing suit? Me in a sundress? Jeans? How could I explain spending time with this man? Would he come back to my hotel room with me?

  When I got off the phone I lay on my bed and imagined his weight on top of me.

  The next day I had my own appointment with Dr. Heiffowitz. I’d had dozens of conversations with Russell that had gone nowhere about whether we should have another baby. Or not. And we always decided against it. We didn’t have the room or the money. We were on the verge of divorce. All the more reason, I thought, if we were going to get a divorce, to have another baby. So Duncan would have someone to be shuttled around with. He wouldn’t bear the whole burden. When we fought and I did my karate kicking, Duncan would have someone to cry and cower with, huddled together under blankets, big brother holding the flashlight.

  When my parents got divorced I would have died without my brother, and I was twenty-five and he was twenty-one. We didn’t huddle under blankets, but we did go out for sushi and toast the end of an era and that had been an enormous comfort.

  Duncan needed a sibling.

  Either way there was the matter of the medication I was supposed to be taking for my thyroid that I had stopped taking while I was nursing and I had to go to Dr. Heiffowitz to find out if I should start taking it again.

  Seeing him made my heart pound. His white-blond hair and icy blue eyes looking sensitively at me over his rimless glasses made me close my eyes for a moment.

  I loved Dr. Heiffowitz. There was no other way to describe it. He had given me my son. He was more powerful to me than God or the Grim Reaper. He had listened to me and figured out what was wrong. He had shown me my follicle when a lesser doctor wouldn’t have bothered. He was a genius and he loved me too.

  If I took off all my clothes, I thought, it would not surprise him. It would almost be the only thing to do, to climb on his lap and wrap my arms around his neck.

  “So,” he said, in that beautiful Israeli accent. “You had twins in September.”

  I laughed but he didn’t laugh.

  “No,” I said.

  He looked down at my chart.

  “Yes, you had twins in September.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Are you being some kind of a joker?” he asked.

  “No, I wouldn’t joke about a horrible thing like twins. I had one son two years ago in November.”

  “That’s not possible,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He looked at the chart. “Your name is Isabelle Brilliant?”

  “Isolde Brilliant,” I said.

  “Your husband is David?”

  “Russell.”

  He go
t up and stormed out of the room yelling for Scottie.

  Five minutes later he came back with my chart.

  “You had one son, two years ago in November.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Without the medication, half a pill in the morning and half at night, you cannot get pregnant. It would not be possible. With the medication you can get pregnant, but you would have to give it a few weeks. Your levels are all wrong now. To put it in medical terms, you’re all out of whack. So I want you to start taking the medication, regardless of whether you’re planning to get pregnant. We have to get you back to normal.”

  “So you’re sure I can’t get pregnant right now?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “By the way,” I said, “do you know what happened to Dr. Lichter?”

  “Not really. I don’t know for sure. I heard his mother died and he had a nervous breakdown,” Dr. Heiffowitz said.

  “His mother?” I’d heard it was a family member, but I had assumed it was his child or wife, not mother.

  Reluctantly, I got up to go.

  “Do you think I should have another child?” I asked. I looked at him meaningfully in case he would want it to be with him. “My husband and I are probably going to get a divorce and then we might have to live in two small apartments.”

  “My brothers and I shared a room,” Dr. Heiffowitz said.

  “How many children do you have?” I asked.

  “Three,” he said, writing something on a prescription pad. “But I wish we had had more.”

  When I left his office I looked down at the prescription he’d handed me, thinking it would say “Have 1 child a year for 3 years.” But it was a prescription for the thyroid medication—half in the morning and half at night.

  I stood on the street trying to decide what to do next. I hated myself when I did that, just stood there frozen, and I always noticed when other people did it. Duncan was with Shasthi. I had the rest of the afternoon to myself.

  I hailed a cab and told the driver to take me to Fifty-sixth between Fifth and Sixth and then got out in front of the Norma Kamali store.

  Standing in the dressing room, I examined myself in the mirror in a red ruched bathing suit. I imagined Gabe Weinrib looking back at me, wondering what he would be thinking when he saw me in it in Miami. The bathing suit was a size large, which seemed to mean that I must be a size large, something I had certainly never been before. But it really wasn’t so bad. I had the same shape, just a little bit bigger. My hair looked great, maybe a little wild, my legs, my shoulders.

  I’m not buying this bathing suit for Gabe Weinrib, I told myself. I’m buying this for the pool at the gym. But when I handed my credit card to the salesgirl, I knew I really had bought it for Gabe, because you don’t spend $280 on a bathing suit to wear for six old ladies at the gym.

  Afterward, with my Norma Kamali shopping bag on the seat facing me, I had lunch at La Bonne Soupe. I noticed a miserablelooking couple at the next table. The woman was in her fifties, with a nose and boob job, dressed in a suit with a hint of Goth to it. The man, well past his prime, looked uncomfortable, handsome, dumb.

  “You’re disgusting,” the woman said to the man. “You’re a reprehensible piece of shit.”

  “So then don’t marry me,” he said.

  “Oh believe me, there’s no way in hell I would marry you. Why would I marry you? So you can take all my money? I don’t think so.”

  “Fine,” the man said, as if this were the most normal conversation. He took several bites of his soup with interest.

  “You’re a reprehensible piece of shit.”

  The woman caught my eye and I tried to give her a sympathetic smile, to show we were sisters in the war of love.

  “Everywhere we go, people laugh at us,” the woman said to the man.

  He just ate and grunted. “God you’re an insufferable cunt.”

  “What kind of man goes to his accountant and asks if you will save money on taxes if you marry me?” the woman said. “You know what kind of man? A piece of shit. A reprehensible piece of shit. What must he have thought of you when you asked that question? He must have just thought, What a reprehensible piece of shit.”

  I wondered what would happen if I turned to them and said, “I don’t think it’s so bad that he asked that question.” But then I thought better of it and ten reprehensible piece of shits later, I realized something. They were still both sitting there. They were eating their meals with relish. Neither one of them was going anywhere. That was marriage. Theirs would be a more solid marriage than most.

  Do you—Isolde Pearl Brilliant—take this reprehensible piece of shit—Russell Ellis Trent—to be your lawful wedded husband?

  I do.

  And do you—Russell Ellis Trent—take this insufferable cunt—Isolde Pearl Brilliant—to be your lawful wedded wife?

  I do.

  I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may now give each other the finger.

  When I got home I told Russell the good news that I couldn’t get pregnant, and that night, with Hum by our side, we made love. Sex for sex’s sake. At least for that night, not having a second child was not an issue. He didn’t have to dig around in my underwear drawer for a condom, rip it open and put it on, and then carefully dispose of it afterward, so that Shasthi wouldn’t see it.

  31

  Russell was not good at getting on planes. He wasn’t afraid to fly, but something about the transition from being in the airport to being on the plane was too much for him. He couldn’t handle taking off his shoes and going through the metal detector. Anyone who saw it would think he was harboring a bomb up his ass. “I’m doing the best I can,” he yelled at the man behind him.

  “Will you calm down!” I screamed at him. “You’re acting like a lunatic.”

  “Just stop it. Leave me alone. I will not be attacked like this!” he screamed back, one shoe on, one shoe off, a hole in his fruity striped Paul Smith sock revealing his big toe. Where was Gra when you needed her?

  “Is everything okay here?” the security guard said, approaching us with caution, the way he was trained to do.

  It seemed being stopped by security was becoming a regular thing for us.

  “You have to be married to understand,” Russell said.

  “Do you need my assistance here, sir?” the guard asked.

  I imagined Gabe Weinrib easily sliding off his Gucci loafers, folding the stroller with one hand and scooping up Duncan with the other, taking off Duncan’s shoes with David Copperfield finesse and putting them back on, all the while handling his carry-on bag and mine, and all of our millions effortlessly.

  Duncan ran over to a garbage can and threw his new Oscar the Grouch doll, which I had just purchased for him, right into it. “That’s very bad,” I scolded Duncan, although when you thought about it, it was really very clever, putting Oscar the Grouch, who lives in a garbage can, into a garbage can.

  “What’s your name?” the woman who took our tickets asked.

  “Duncan Trent,” he said.

  “And how old are you?” she asked. We had lied and said he was under two so we wouldn’t have to pay for his ticket.

  “I’m two, except when I go on an airplane, then I’m only one,” he said.

  “ We’re in Miami,” I told Duncan.

  “I like Mommy’s Ami,” Duncan said.

  “No, not Mommy’s Ami,” Russell said. “Miami.”

  “Daddy’s Ami,” Duncan said.

  “Not Daddy’s Ami,” I said. “Miami.”

  “Mommy and Daddy’s Ami,” he said, already a little expert at solving our fights, I worried.

  We checked into our hotel room at the Raleigh with its colorful batik pillows. Thinking of Shasthi, I showed Duncan the ocean for the first time. I felt terrible that we hadn’t brought her, but it was supposed to be a family trip, my time to spend with Duncan. And, I thought, Gabe Weinrib.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “I’m surprised you ag
reed to come here,” Russell said. He knew how much I hated South Beach, with its boob jobs everywhere you looked. Driving along parts of Collins Avenue was no different from driving along Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills.

  “So what are you going to do when I’m working all day?” Russell asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Beach, pool. Maybe I’ll have the hotel arrange a car service and I’ll take Duncan to Parrot Jungle or something.”

  “I have a few hours,” Russell said. “I’m going to take him down to the beach.”

  I changed Duncan into his blue bathing suit, with a bright orange pattern of starfish. Russell took off his pants and his striped socks and put on his bathing suit.

  “I’m dex-cited,” Duncan said, and they headed out together holding hands. “I want to push the button,” I heard Duncan, fading, down the hallway.

  I walked around the hotel room, noticing all the mirrors it had in it. I looked at myself in each one and I thought how few mirrors I had in my apartment. Just one, now that I thought about it, on the inside of a closet door, and around the fireplace was some old mirror, and over the fireplace, but that was too high to see yourself in, and of course the medicine chest in the bathroom. I made a mental note to buy a few and put them around the house. It was important to see yourself. It had a grounding effect to see yourself every minute. I found it comforting.

  I called Gabe Weinrib and got his voice mail.

  “I’m in Miami,” I said. “Or Mommy’s Ami as Duncan calls it’cause he thinks when I’m saying Miami it’s really My Ami.” Why was I mentioning Duncan? I wondered.

  A beep interrupted me and a woman’s recorded voice said, “To accept and send this message press one. To erase and rerecord this message press two.”

  I pressed two with the relief of a convict being released from death row.

  “Hi Gabe it’s Izzy, I’m here in Miami at the Raleigh, call me on my cell, bye.”

  I hung up and put on my red Norma Kamali bathing suit and looked at myself in one of the mirrors.