The Seven Year Bitch

by Jennifer Belle

  “So, Dr. Lichter,” I said, as if I were talking to a ghost. “What’s going to happen now?”

  “You’re going to be a wonderful mother to your two sons. Two makes everything twice as worthwhile. Everything you do for one will benefit the other. You are going to love it.”

  I beamed with happiness.

  “The Seven Stages of Motherhood only apply the first time. Now you should go back to work.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You have to work. I just don’t see you as a stay-at-home-mom type. Have you thought about who’s going to do the circumcision?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Doesn’t Dr. Sitbon do it?”

  “He’s gone now for a few days and it should really be done today or tomorrow.”

  “I want you to do it,” I said.

  Russell had suggested a bris, but for me that was out of the question. And according to the mohel Russell had talked to, the bris would have to take place exactly eight days after the birth, which would put us at Christmas, turning Christmas into Brismas.

  “I don’t think so, Izzy. I don’t think they’d take too kindly to my performing a procedure here.”

  “Please,” I begged. “If you couldn’t deliver him, the least you could do is give Rhys the same circumcision you gave Duncan. What if we bring him to New Paltz?”

  “You’re very sweet,” he said, stroking my hair for a minute. Then he took my hand and we just sat that way silently for a little while. My heart was pounding and I thought of the Fleetwood Mac song he had once sung to me.

  I started to cry with gratitude for this man who had helped me become a mother and was now here when I was becoming a mother again, but then I thought, it was Russell I should be grateful to.

  “You’re going to be fine,” he said, sitting on the side of my bed and putting his arm around me and sort of holding me. He was half-lying in bed with me and I felt incredibly comforted despite how strange it was.

  “I’ll do it,” he said after a few minutes. “Walk with me down the corridor.” He put out his hand and I struggled up out of bed. Then, pushing Rhys in his bassinet labeled Baby Brilliant, we walked inconspicuously down the hall and through one set of double doors and then another until we were in the NICU.

  “Wait here,” he told me, lifting Rhys into his arms, and several long minutes later he came out again with the baby screaming and tucked him back in his bassinet.

  More exciting even than my wedding had been the day Russell had driven me to Westchester to get our marriage license. It was raining, and I thought, I am sitting next to the man I love. We are going to be married. I got out of the car completely covered in Humbert’s fur. I had never been so happy.

  Now, when Russell was able to tear himself from his BlackBerry, we filled out our new son’s birth certificate: Rhys Samuel Trent.

  It was time to take him home. My mother was waiting with Duncan and we’d invited everyone over for deli sandwiches later.

  “Look what I got you,” Russell said, handing me a brown paper bag. I opened the bag to find a box of Extra Strength Tylenol.

  “See?” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine. Now, you ready?”

  Solemnly we walked out, Russell struggling with the bags. I held Rhys swaddled in the blanket we had taken Duncan home in and Russell’s mother had taken Russell home in.

  I waited in the lobby for Russell to get the car, and then, in the hospital’s circular driveway, we had our hugest fight. Russell’s only job had been to get the inside of the car cleaned and have the baby’s car seat installed. I had bought the seat. All he had to do was get Rashid to install it.

  Russell opened the back door of our car, and there was the seat. But it wasn’t installed, and the car was far from clean. We might as well have put the baby in the trunk.

  Aside from the fact that the seat wasn’t installed, there were old McDonald’s hamburgers on the floor, empty milk containers, old bottles, a million filthy toys. There was what might have been vomit crusted on the seat.

  “You couldn’t do that one thing!” I screamed, clutching my bundled-up baby to me as passers-by looked at us and shook their heads. “I married a moron. Stupid. Incompetent.”

  Another couple was also leaving with their baby girl in a pink furry snowsuit with dog ears on the hood. The father tucked the baby into her safely installed car seat in their gleaming SUV. The mother slid in next to her. There were family members, flowers, balloons. I could practically see a college fund bulging in the father’s pants.

  “Don’t look at them,” Russell said when they’d driven cautiously and safely off. “We can get it installed,” he stuttered. “I, I, I, I, I thought it was in right.”

  “In right? Look at it!” I yelled. “It’s not in at all!”

  “Is there a problem here, folks?” a security guard said, walking over. “You can’t leave the car here.”

  “The car seat isn’t installed,” I told him.

  “Those things are tricky,” he said.

  “This is our second child,” I said to the guard. “He’s had plenty of time to figure it out. Taxi!” I yelled, holding my baby with one arm and sticking my other arm as far up as I could without screaming from the pain from my incision.

  “Don’t take a taxi,” Russell said.

  “Taxi!” I screamed, even though there were no taxis.

  “Do you want me to try to get you some help, sir?” the guard said.

  “Taxi! Taxi!”

  The guard looked at the car seat. “Those straps ain’t right. That baby’s way too big for those straps. You really have to move the car.”

  In a complete rage I got into the filthy backseat with the baby on my lap, and, with the vacant car seat next to me, Russell wordlessly drove us home.

  “I hope our son never asks what it was like when we brought him home from the hospital,” was all I could manage to say to Russell for the rest of the day.

  37

  On New Year’s Eve, with my newborn son in my arms, Duncan asleep in his big-boy bed, and Russell lying on the bed next to me watching New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, I pined for Gabe Weinrib like a red-hot teenager. I mooned over him. I looked out my bedroom window at the lights and glistening tinsel rain and New York’s signature black umbrellas. What time was it in Paris, I panicked. What was he doing and who was he sleeping with, and how did I get myself into this mess?

  If I couldn’t go to India, at least I could go to Paris, I thought, over and over again. But it wouldn’t be so easy now with the baby. And what about Duncan, I thought. He’d be jealous if I brought the new baby. And if I left the baby home, what about nursing, I thought bitterly, as the baby latched on to me. My cheeks burned because I knew I was a fool. But I couldn’t help it.

  The claustrophobia of nursing was getting to me. Rhys depended on me to feed him every hour. I couldn’t go to a movie, let alone Paris. And he was gigantic! I wouldn’t even be able to handle the Baby Bjorn.

  “What are your New Year’s resolutions?” Russell had the nerve to ask me, as if having a baby wasn’t enough and now I had to resolve to do something better.

  “Cows don’t make New Year’s resolutions,” I said.

  In the morning there was an e-mail from Gabe, written just after midnight: “I’m leaving for India on Jan 8th. You can still come with me if you want to.”

  I got in the shower, turning my stomach away from the water because my scar was swollen and sensitive. I grabbed the bar of Dove and scrubbed at the black surgical tape on my chest and arms and stomach. What was this! I wanted to scream. Why wouldn’t it come off?

  For fifteen minutes I scrubbed with a washcloth but the residue from the tape wouldn’t budge. I laughed and cried at the same time. What a joke! I was going to go to Mumbai with a man with my swollen stomach and black surgical tape and enormous milky tits and a baby. I was so fat, when I got out of the shower the towel wouldn’t even go around me.

  I was almost forty-one years old. I was married
. I had a three-year-old son and a newborn baby. And even all of that couldn’t ward off stupid lovesickness and heartache.

  I didn’t want to be forty-one, but I didn’t want to be thirteen again either! I was in pain. Was that how things were going to be for me? I’d be ninety-five years old, on my deathbed with my loving family all around me, and I’d be longing for some hot new eighty-year-old who’d checked into the home the week before. As I looked down at my baby, who Dr. Sitbon had proclaimed “the most gorgeous baby I have ever seen, madame,” I wondered what it would take for me to be happy with my life.

  When I talked to Joy about it she just harangued me to leave Russell and told me all the incredible things that were happening to her. She wrote me long, long e-mails describing her nights with Chili under the mango trees, or sometimes it was cashew trees, and her newfound orgasms, and I would shoot back a quick “Africa is Africa so you better use protection!” Frankly I was getting a little fed up with it. She didn’t have to send me these long e-mails when, as far as I was concerned, everything there was to say could be said in one hundred words or less.

  When I talked to my mother she said, “Go to India.”

  “What!” I said, enraged. “I’m nursing!”

  I imagined the trousseau I would pack: nursing bras and pads, my jazzy Medela pump with plug adapter for India that was designed in a smart-looking shoulder bag, maternity pants and nursing tops with the unfortunate brand name of Boob that I had gotten at a store that was actually called the Upper Breast Side.

  “Just go,” she said. “This might be your chance for love.”

  “I have to get off the phone. The baby’s crying,” I practically screamed.

  I went to the crib and looked down at my son sleeping peacefully on his back in Duncan’s old footed pajamas and then I wrote back to Gabe Weinrib, “I’d love to next time,” and hit send.

  What would Shasthi have thought, when she came back from her maternity leave, to find me in India? I wondered. Her baby had been born the day after Rhys.

  I wanted to call a friend but I couldn’t think of anyone else I could confide in. I wished I could call my roommate from the hospital, but I didn’t even know her name. I wondered how old Stinky Mama was doing.

  There was someone, someone I could tell anything to, but I just couldn’t put my finger on who I was trying to think of. How can you forget your best friend? I wondered. And then I remembered who this best friend was. It was Russell. But I couldn’t very well tell Russell that I was depressed because I wanted to go to India with another man. Then I thought maybe I could.

  I went to him at his desk. “I’m depressed,” I said.

  “Why, honey? How can you be depressed with that beautiful baby in there?”

  “Because I want to go to India with Gabe Weinrib.”

  “What?” Russell said.

  “He invited me on a trip of a lifetime.”

  “I thought our honeymoon was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime. Aren’t we still paying it off on our credit cards?”

  “This is a better trip than that in a better lifetime.”

  I went back into the bedroom and lay on the bed and Russell actually left his desk and lay on the bed with me.

  “Oh honey,” he said. “It’s going to be okay.”

  “No it’s not,” I said. “I can’t get this stuff off me.” I showed him the black lines from the surgical tape. “How can I go to India with a man? Look at me!”

  “I think you look good enough to go,” he said. “I think you look beautiful. But you just remember one thing. Gabe Weinrib didn’t give you those two beautiful boys.”

  He held me in his arms and I cried on his chest.

  “Maybe you can go another time,” Russell said.

  And then I kind of laughed even though I was still crying.

  38

  I got to school for pick-up fifteen minutes early so I could slip in quickly and get Duncan all buckled into his stroller before Gerde showed up. She was always the last mother to arrive and my plan was to be blocks from the school already by the time she even showed up. But by the time I had helped Duncan into his sweater and signed out The Runaway Pickle from the book basket and signed up for what homemade snack I would be providing for the bake sale—bottled water—Gerde was standing there. “Shall we walk together?” she asked. “Can you wait for us?”

  I tried desperately to think of a way to get out of it but I couldn’t. If I tried to make up another errand, she’d just find a way to come with me. The only thing I could think to say to her was “No fucking way.”

  “Sure!” I said.

  I waited while she peeled Minerva from the reading rug, and got her into her sweater, and signed out a book from the book basket, and signed up to bring homemade “cupcakes” to the bake sale, which I knew, from the one I had purchased for three dollars at the Halloween fair, were sugar-free, flavor-free multigrain muffins.

  We began our walk home, two strollers side by side, the children in them arguing the whole way about which one of them was the rightful owner of something. “What toy are they fighting over?” I asked Gerde.

  “No,” Gerde said. “It is not a toy. They are arguing over the island of Manhattan. Minerva says New York belongs to her and Duncan is under the impression that New York is all for him.” Gerde said something to Minerva in German. “I just told her they can share the city.”

  No, they really can’t, I thought. “You certainly can,” I told them over their stroller canopies.

  Their argument continued, and at University Place and Twelfth Street they both struggled out of their restraints and ran into the lobby of a building.

  Gerde and I stood helplessly with grimaced smiles on our faces. What fun! Walking our children home from school! A few minutes later Minerva came running out of the lobby talking wildly in German.

  “There is poop,” Gerde said.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “They were playing a bathroom game apparently and Duncan pooped on the floor.”

  “What!” I said, totally shocked. Duncan had been pooping in the potty for a year. There had never been an accident. I left Gerde with both strollers and ran into the lobby, where Duncan was standing frozen in a sea of liquid shit. There was shit covering every inch of the white tile floor, from the door to the elevators. I had never seen anything like this. His little chinos had a small wet spot in the front but there wasn’t any shit on them. He must have pulled down his pants and then managed to pull them up again.

  “Did you do this?” I asked, confused.

  “Yes,” he said. He looked like he was going to cry.

  “It’s okay, everyone has accidents.”

  A man got off the elevator and said, “Jesus Christ,” as he hopped on the few stepping-stones of clean white tile to get through the shit storm to the front door. He stood just outside the doorway to see what I was going to do, as did a driver who had been leaning against a limousine but now had come to the door of the lobby. “Oh yeah, he did it all right,” the driver said. “Look at his pants. They’re all wet.”

  I took Duncan by the hand and we traipsed through the shit and out onto the street. Gerde stood her ground with the smile grimace plastered on her face. “I’ll get napkins,” I said and brought Duncan into the Vietnamese restaurant next door.

  “We’ve had an accident,” I said to the woman who greeted us with menus. “May we have some napkins?”

  The Vietnamese woman pretended not to understand what I was asking but I persisted until I emerged from the restaurant with a small stack of white napkins that were not much bigger than playing cards.

  “Look at his pants, they’re soaking wet,” the driver said to the man from the lobby. With Duncan next to me, I walked back into the lobby and sopped up the wet shit with each napkin. Shit got on the tips of my fingers.

  “Did you do this?” I asked Duncan again, suddenly realizing this was like no shit that had ever come out of him before. It was slowly dawning on me t
hat if this wasn’t his shit, I could at this very moment in my life be mopping up the shit of a homeless person with tiny napkins.

  Duncan nodded miserably. “I did it,” he said, like George Washington.

  When I had soaked up what I could with the last of the napkins, we left the lobby even though the job wasn’t nearly done. It had been nothing more than a token effort.

  I carried the yellow napkins for a whole block to deposit them in a garbage can and then walked back to Gerde, Duncan, and Minerva at the strollers.

  “Done!” I said brightly. There was shit on the bottom of my skirt.

  “Okay, good!” Gerde said even more brightly.

  “Wait. What’s that?” I asked, seeing a beige smudge on Minerva’s leg. “How did Duncan’s poop get on Minerva’s leg?”

  “I don’t know!” Gerde said.

  Minerva was wearing an angelic Bu and the Duck dress in sage and white.

  “Shall we go?” Gerde said.

  “Wait. What happened exactly?” I said, more to Minerva than to Gerde. Minerva just looked at her mother. “A bathroom game?” I persisted.

  “I don’t even want to know,” Gerde said. “Best not to even ask.”

  A piece of newspaper blew by and I spread it on the stroller seat so Duncan could sit on it. We walked to our building silently, no longer fighting over whose New York this was.

  As soon as we got upstairs I brought Duncan into the bathroom and carefully peeled off his pants, afraid of what I would find in his Claesen’s pirate underpants. But what I found was nothing. Just the little damp spot and nothing else. It wasn’t his shit.

  “Duncan, you weren’t the one who pooped in the lobby,” I said.

  “Yes, I was,” he said. “Minerva said we should both do it.”

  That night I checked repeatedly for an e-mail from Gerde apologizing—Oh my goodness, it wasn’t Duncan. It was Minerva. I’m so sorry you cleaned it up!—but none came. I imagined her getting Minerva to the bathroom and discovering the mess.

  In bed, I told Russell what had happened.