The Seven Year Bitch (7 page)

“Thanks. Bye.”

“Sure. Good luck.”

And we had Shasthi.

I
n the night, Duncan cried and I went to him. I brought him to my bed and he curled into my lap and then put his lips on mine. I opened my mouth to say something comforting, when he suddenly vomited right into my open mouth. In my confusion, I accidentally swallowed it.

Then he gave his father a merciless shove and Russell woke up the way parents always wake up: annoyed, worried, guilty, angry.

“Your mother's going to take you back to bed.”

“I just swallowed vomit. Your father will take you.”

After Russell settled Duncan down in Deirdre-Agnes's crib and I brushed my teeth, Russell and I lay in bed. “I wonder why she doesn't have children,” I said. “She's forty, you know.”

In my mind, I could see the number 40 in the age column on the birth-defects chart in the pregnancy book. I could see the number 35 and the statistics next to it, and the statistics getting significantly worse as the age increased, 36, 37, 38, 39, and then—and this number was printed in an alarming red—40. Down syndrome: one in three. Or maybe it was one in thirty. Either way it wasn't good.

“I know, you've told me ten times. You've been talking about this all night. What's her name again?”

“Shasthi. Try to remember it,” I said.

“Why can't she have a nice name like Myrtle?” Russell had an almost perverted fantasy of having a nanny who was fat and over the age of eighty.

“But why do you think? I know she's married. She said her husband was going to drive her home after the interview. Oh, and she said what he does. Construction. He's one of those guys who hangs on the side of a building like a fly. But I wonder why she doesn't have children. She seems to genuinely like them.”

“Let's get some sleep.”

“Maybe we shouldn't have a nanny at all,” I said. “Actually, I think if it's part time you call her a babysitter. ʽSitter,'” I said, trying that out.

“Stop feeling guilty. You're probably going to find a new job. It's not like we've never had a nanny.”

I thought about the portfolio I was supposed to analyze for the man from the auction. I thought about leaving Duncan alone with a woman I had met for thirty minutes.

“I should be the one with him.”

“You can't wait to get away from him half the time. I've gotta go to sleep. Stop being obsessed with the nanny.”

“Sitter,” I said.

I lay in bed trying to sleep but the A. A. Milne poem I had recited to Duncan that night kept playing itself over and over in my head. That sometimes happened to me with a song lyric or something when I was overtired.

It was called
Buckingham Palace
and it was about Christopher Robin going to watch the changing of the guard with someone named Alice. The fact that Christopher Robin goes there with Alice is repeated over and over. Alice just babbles on about the soldier she is going to marry and what she thinks is going on inside the palace, talking to the little boy, and it suddenly hit me. Christopher Robin went down with Alice, not with
him.
A. A. Milne sat at his typewriter while his son was wandering around London with a virtual stranger—someone named Alice—just some girl involved in her own life, saying whatever she felt like to his son. I'd recited the poem a hundred times but I'd never realized before that it was about a nanny. Even the words “they're changing guard” were about being replaced by a nanny. My eyes filled with tears thinking of the fact that I should be the one to show Duncan the changing of the guard.

“You know A. A. Milne was as obsessed with his son's nanny as I am with mine,” I told Russell.

“You're crazy.”

“I'm his mother,” I said, sitting up in bed, still tasting his vomit in my mouth.

“You're a hedge fund manager,” Russell mumbled, half asleep.

That, in the end, was probably the real reason to be married, I thought. He still respected me as a hedge fund manager even though I had been wiped out in the blink of an eye. When he looked at me he still saw my unscarred prebirth body, the one I'd had when we met. He still got hard when I took off my clothes to get ready for bed.

“ We're really glad
you're here,” I said as soon as Shasthi came into the apartment.

“It's my pleasure,” she said. “Let me go to the bathroom to wash my hands.”

A professional nanny, or sitter, I thought, silently congratulating myself for making such a good choice.

I stood there and listened to her flush the toilet twice. When she came out Duncan cruised to her and took her hand.

She picked him up in her arms and started toward his room. I followed after them. “You and your husband don't want children?” I blurted.

She looked surprised and swallowed, as if answering my questions was a part of the job she'd clearly have to endure like vacuuming. “Yes, we do. We've been trying for four years and nothing has happened.”

“Have you seen a doctor?” I asked.

“No, it costs too much money.”

“No insurance?”

Then I felt like an idiot. Of course she didn't have insurance. She didn't even have a green card. Going to someone like my Dr. Heiffowitz would cost two or three weeks' salary just for the initial exam. A sonogram, day three blood work, progesterone series, a postcoital test to check the viability of her husband's sperm would be out of the question.

I saw the birth-defects age chart in my mind. I felt terrible. “I should get in the shower,” I said.

Leaving my building,
I felt relieved. I was free. Duncan was in great hands. With nothing better to do, I started walking up West Broadway and then MacDougal Street until I got to the southwest corner of Washington Square Park. I walked into the park a few feet, past the chess tables, but was suddenly blocked by a high chain-link fence. I walked, almost running, back out the way I came and up the south side of the park, which was completely fenced off. The only point of entry came after the Indian guy who sold dosas from a cart and I had to enter by the bathrooms. Once I was in the park, the fence blocked my way again, and I was forced to walk on an odd dirt path around the playground like a squirrel. I felt strangely infuriated, the way I did when a block I was walking on suddenly became a film set and some punk with a clipboard told me that I had to cross to the other side of the street or, even worse, wait.

They were planning to move the fountain just a few feet so that it aligned perfectly with the arch, which seemed absurd to me, but I tried not to get too worked up about it. I hated people who lingered on things like that. My son was in great hands and I was free, despite the alarming chain-link fence.

Then I saw a mother pushing a Bugaboo and guilt detonated inside me like it had been hiding in my chest in someone else's luggage. I wanted to be that mother pushing her child in the Bugaboo. I wanted to rush over to her and tell her to take a hike, and take her place, pushing her child wherever they were going. But I
was
that mother, I told myself. All I had to do was go back home and pop my own child into my own Bugaboo. Instead I stood frozen staring at the dump trucks—and what kind of mother of a boy didn't know the names of the different kinds of trucks!—as if I were standing there with Duncan.

I felt guilty that I had a nanny when I was no longer working. I felt guilty that I wanted thirty hours a week to myself instead of enjoying my child enough to want to spend the whole 168 hours a week with him. I felt guilty that I had been fired even though I knew I had done nothing wrong. But when I thought of getting another job, I felt sick with guilt about the seventy hours a week it would require me to be away from Duncan. I felt guilty that I had hired an illegal immigrant as our nanny. Sitter. And the fact that she could never go home again and see her family, when I was free to flit all around the world, froze me with guilt. When I thought of what she must think of me, leaving Duncan with her when I went off to do nothing, I crumbled with guilt. She was in my home giving my child a bath.

How many times a day, I thought, had I sat at my desk and wished I was home with him? And how many times had I stood pushing him in a swing on the weekend, wishing I was at work?

I chose the way of the dirt path, and when I exited, I saw some old ladies from the senior center selling their wares—knitted scarves, crocheted baby blankets, and tiny booties.

After I'd married Russell and before I'd gotten pregnant with Duncan, I'd had a miscarriage. I'd bought a pair of booties just like these. “I'm pregnant,” I'd said and handed them to him. “That's terrible,” he had said. There was nothing worse, it seemed to me, than a reluctant father. I hadn't counted on his ambivalence. But before I could think too much about it, I had lost the baby.

I realized my problems with Russell had started when I'd handed him those booties.

I held up a beautiful baby blanket.

“That's exquisite. Doris made that,” the one who was the leader said. She had soft white hair molded into a helmet and nice blue eyes. She wore a huge rhinestone pin on her lapel, a wasp or a bumblebee or something. “You have excellent taste.”

Old ladies liked me. With the exception of my mother-in-law, I had never met a senior citizen I couldn't befriend. As a child, I always wondered why Dorothy couldn't win over the witch or why Snow White couldn't just make the Queen something nice at her school.

“How's business?” I asked.

“Doing nicely, thank you,” she said.

I had started at five, selling Kool-Aid on the street, and I'd probably end up just like this, I thought. Actually I kind of liked the idea. I'd be ninety, selling my knitting, and the Grim Reaper would walk up and buy a scarf—black of course—and we'd do it on the steps of the senior center before he took me with him.

“How much is the blanket?” I asked.

“Only thirty-five,” she said.

“That's a steal,” I said. “I'll take it.”

“Doris, you got a sale. That's Doris and Gert, and I'm Marilyn. And you are?”

“Isolde.”

“Isolde. You don't hear that name too often with young people. Hat and booties to go with it?”

“No, just the blanket,” I said.

She handed me the blanket in a Gristedes shopping bag and I had an incredible urge to pull up a beach chair and join them.

“We'll be here next Wednesday,” she called after me as I walked away.

T
he next day, when Shasthi came, before she had even set down her quilted gold fake-leather pocketbook, I said, “Do you know how to tell when you're most likely to get pregnant?”

I had meant to just say hello and tell her there were sweet potatoes on the counter for Duncan.

I was wrapped in a towel and hadn't gotten into the shower yet. My heart was pounding but I had no idea why. There was no reason to feel uncomfortable talking about this and I was practically an expert. Russell sat at his desk, talking to someone on the phone about a book jacket.

“Tell? No?” Shasthi said.

I indicated for her to follow me into the kitchen. “You know there's only about forty-eight hours a month, or maybe only twenty-four, when you're able to get pregnant. You know the . . .” I couldn't think of any possible word. “Mucus. That's in the vagina?”

“Yes?” Shasthi said. She seemed interested and open to this. “Let me just wash my hands.”

She went into the bathroom and I stood helpless in my yellow towel.

“Where is the baby?” she asked a little suspiciously when she came back in. She seemed to have approached with caution when she arrived, as if she wasn't sure what would have gone on the night before in her absence. It was the way, I realized, I had always entered the apartment when I came home after leaving Duncan with a nanny. Or with Russell.