The Seven Year Bitch (9 page)

“ Did you get the
vacuum cleaner part?” Shasthi asked me when I came home.

“No. I got something else,” I said.

I handed her the Kmart bag. “It's an ovulation predictor kit,” I said. Actually it was five boxes of them, each one costing twice her hourly wage.

I took the bag back from her, ripped open one of the boxes, and unfolded the instructions. I read the instructions to her even though I could have recited them by heart. For at least a year I didn't pee unless it was on one of these sticks. “You hold it under your urine stream,” I told her. “When did you get your last period?”

“On the fourth,” she said tentatively.

I took my tiny red-leather date book out of my pocketbook and circled the first day of her period. “Start testing first thing in the morning, right away. Don't listen to what the instructions say about waiting fourteen days after your period. Everyone's always telling you to wait. Never wait. That's the first rule of in—” I was going to say
infertility
but luckily I stopped myself. “In getting pregnant.”

“Okay,” Shasthi whispered, taking serious note of the first rule of getting pregnant.

My heart raced with excitement.

I picked up Duncan and kissed him a hundred times. I realized I had been shy to hold him or kiss him too much in front of Shasthi because I hadn't wanted to flaunt that I had what she wanted. “Bye bye,” he said and kissed his own palm passionately. It was his way of blowing a kiss, except he didn't blow; he just kept it all to himself.

 

 

When I got home
at the end of the day, I went into my bedroom and I noticed my bed was made.

Sometimes she made my bed and sometimes she didn't. At first I had thought it was a matter of free time—perhaps the baby had napped a little longer in the afternoon—but then I started to realize that she granted me this favor if I had pleased her in some small way, if I let her go an hour early or washed the bottles myself.

Sometimes my bed stayed in a rumpled mess for days, and I stayed up wondering what I had done wrong. Had she said we were out of Dreft and I'd forgotten to pick some up at the store? Had I eaten her yogurt in the fridge?

I didn't know why it mattered so much what she thought of me, but it did. I felt like the groom in an arranged marriage who had lucked out. Big time. And was now wooing after the fact.

Sharing a baby was more intimate than sharing a bed. “I love you,” I said to both of them when Shasthi and Duncan left the house to go to the park. I may not have picked the perfect father for my son, but at least I had picked the perfect nanny. Sitter.

 

 

That night I'd asked
Shasthi to stay late so that Russell and I could go to a fund-raiser for a documentary film a friend of mine was editing about a homeless crazy woman who lived in Central Park.

The movie was called
Begging Naked
and I'd actually seen the woman it was about in Central Park a few times. A woman who was her sometime benefactor was being interviewed in her dining room with her big silver coffee set behind her. The homeless woman peeled off her filthy clothes in the woman's house. She was letting her take a shower.

Sitting in the dark theater next to Russell, I suddenly regretted the ovulation kits. It wouldn't work and it would give Shasthi false hope. It was all too much, watching this homeless woman and thinking of Shasthi peeing on those awful sticks, with no chance in hell of having a baby without Heiffowitz.

“Maybe I'll take her to Dr. Heiffowitz,” I whispered to Russell. “But what if she gets pregnant? Would she be given Medicare or Medicaid, and, if so, would it cover amniocentesis? Or what if she refused amnio out of fear or for religious purposes? She's forty. What if she has a Down's baby?”

“You'd probably want us to pay for it to go to a special school for eighteen years and then an adult special-needs living environment,” Russell whispered back.

 

 

That night I dreamt
I was feeding Duncan on the stoop of the building where I used to live. I was feeding him my milk from a teacup, and when I turned away for a moment, a Siamese cat lifted her leg and pissed in it. I brought the cup to my nose to smell if the milk was still okay, but of course it was spoiled, putrid. I woke with a terrible, foreboding feeling.

“Did you do the ovulation test?” I asked Shasthi, who was taking off her coat the next morning.

“Yes, I got two lines!”

I beamed with excitement. “Did you have sex?” I asked, making my eyes very wide as if that would somehow help make this an acceptable question.

“Yes, we did do it,” she said.

“Good!” I said. “That's really good!”

The phone had rung and Deirdre-Agnes's angry voice had come through on the machine. “Look, Izzy, I'm pregnant and I need my crib.” I couldn't help think of it as a good omen.

T
he next night Russell and I loaded the baby into the car and headed to our country house.

Russell turned on Howard Stern, who said the word
fuck
about ten times in a row.

“Fuck!” Duncan said from the backseat.

I wasn't too upset, because
fuck
seemed to be Duncan's word for
fire truck
, but I pushed his favorite CD into the CD player and we listened to a song called “Daddy Daddy” by Joe the Singing School Bus Driver.

“Okay, he's sleeping,” Russell said, putting Howard back on.

“No, he's not,” I said, putting Joe the Singing School Bus Driver back in.

“I can't take this anymore,” Russell said.

“Why?” I said. “Joe the Singing School Bus Driver is great. Duncan loves it.” He put Howard back on again and we had a huge fight right in front of Duncan. My father had always sung kids' songs in the car. It was what all good fathers did.

I turned off the CD and we rode for a long time in silence.

We'd bought the house right after we got married. We had been spending weekends at Marlon's country house but he screamed at us the whole time we were there and then said, “Bless you for your company,” when we left. One morning Marlon was at his kitchen table enjoying his coffee and suddenly brown water dripped from the ceiling onto his head and right into his cup. Russell was shitting in the toilet upstairs and had no idea he had caused the flood. “Get out and take your New York City asshole with you,” Marlon yelled when Russell came out of the bathroom completely bewildered. I didn't know if by “New York City asshole” he meant me, a native New Yorker, but after that we had no choice but to buy our own house. Still, our house was too close to Marlon's and we always ended up doing favors for him. He had cancer and the doctors had given him one summer to live, three summers ago.

We drove in silence most of the way over the George Washington Bridge and up the highway. When we turned off on 18, Russell said, “I'm going to stop at the Dunkin' Donuts. We should pick up something for Marlon.”

Every time I heard the words “Dunkin' Donuts” I thought of a time when, nine months pregnant, I'd been forced to go to La Goulue for lunch alone with Russell's mother. She was interrogating me on the subject of names. What, she had insisted, was wrong with her father's name, Gene?

“We like Duncan,” I had said.

“Duncan!” she said. “You have to be kidding. You can't do that.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Dunkin' Donuts! You can't call him Dunkin' Donuts. I never thought I'd have a grandson named Dunkin' Donuts.”

I hadn't even thought of that.

“I guess he can always change his name when he's of majority,” Russell's mother said. “He only has to be saddled with the name Duncan for eighteen years. That's not so bad. You can lie and tell people Duncan is your maiden name.”

Waiting for Russell in the Dunkin' Donuts parking lot, I looked out the car window at two men standing near the entrance talking. They were both gorgeous in different ways. Which one would I want, I thought, if I could choose, as if I were catalogue shopping. One was tall with gray hair. He looked like an academic, replete with faded jeans and sport jacket and leather bag presumably filled with books and students' papers. I pick him, I thought, despite the fact that his thighs were just a little thin in his jeans. The other man was also tall, exactly equally tall, sportier, and had a more boring or familiar look. But then I wondered if he might be the better man. Maybe he was funnier or great in bed. I went back and forth between the two, trying to choose, in a mild panic because they were both so great-looking and it was hard to tell, from such a distance, without even hearing them speak, who was the better man for me. I imagined myself fucking each of them, underneath the brownhaired man, on top of the gray-haired one, having breakfast with them afterward.

I watched as the gray-haired man took out a cigarette and lit it, which should have ruled him out but didn't for some reason. I stared at his just slightly too-skinny legs and then brought my gaze back up to his face. I had looked at his lips and then at the other's and that's when I realized that their lips were very close together and that they were in fact kissing.

Then I watched Russell, through the plate-glass window, carefully pouring what I knew was whole milk into my Earl Grey tea even though I had asked for skim, his face frozen in concentration, a wax bag of chocolate doughnuts for Marlon tucked under his arm.

 

 

When we pulled up
in front of Marlon's house, I saw something hanging from the eaves. “What is that?” I asked Russell.

“I don't know.”

“It looks like a dead bird.”

“It can't be,” Russell said. “It must be a clump of leaves or a branch or something.”

I got out of the car and moved toward it. I looked up at it and gasped. Its talons were sharp and knotted and shockingly red. Its black wings were spread. It was headless, yet it seemed to be suspended at the neck. When I looked closely I saw that its head must be stuck inside the eaves, but it seemed impossible, as if the only way that could have happened was if they'd built the house around the bird.

“How could that have happened?” I asked Russell, who was now standing next to me looking up at the bird. I normally would have yelled at him for leaving Duncan alone in the car asleep in his car seat, but we were standing just a few feet away and the passenger-side door was still open.

“Its head must have gotten stuck, but I don't see how,” Russell said.

It was an omen—a gruesome symbol outside the home of a dying man.

“Should we tell him?” I asked.

“I don't know,” Russell said.

What would he do about it if we did? I wondered. He was much too weak from his chemo treatment to climb a ladder. And if he could climb up, what then? If you pulled the bird down, you would have to just tear its body away from its head or even cut it with a knife. There seemed no other way.

“We could show it to Anya. Maybe she could call someone to take care of it,” Russell said.

Anya was Marlon's live-in nurse who had agreed to stay with him in the country for what was supposed to be his last summer (again) in exchange for him paying extra to send her son to a nearby day camp. “I think Anya's been through enough,” I said. I couldn't think of a worse fate than being locked up with Marlon in that house with a dead bird as its bowsprit. “I'm not going in.”

I got back in the car. A few minutes later, Russell came out still holding the doughnuts and got back in the car. He looked sick to his stomach. Marlon was dead, I thought. I remembered my black suit was at the cleaners, abandoned there since my layoff.

Russell turned the key in the ignition and backed out of the driveway. “Is everything . . . okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, it's fine,” Russell said. “If you call walking in on Marlon having sex with Anya fine.”

We ate the doughnuts in silence for the rest of the trip.

We pulled up to
our house, and, as much as I hated it, I was relieved to see it still standing. It was dark now and Russell always went in first to turn on the lights, check the mousetraps, and check Duncan's room for spiders.

He got out of the car and I watched him sinking deep into the snow with each step. As he walked in the dark toward the house, I couldn't help but wonder what would happen if he were attacked by a grizzly bear.

There were bears in the area; we'd seen them once, a family of three lumbering across the road. There had been a horrifying story in the newspaper about a Hasidic family who filled their baby daughter full of milk and put her out on the porch in a bassinet and a bear came and carried her away. It was winter now, and they would be hibernating, but there had also been an article about their not having gathered enough food and coming out of hibernation early, or maybe it said they weren't hibernating at all. I imagined Russell's piss-pants fear when he saw the bear coming right at him, nosing him, sliding his claws down Russell's face as he looked to the car, to me, for help.