The Seven Year Bitch Read online

  “You felt stuck,” Corinne said.

  “I had made a stupid mistake.”

  “Was marrying Russell a stupid mistake?” Corinne said.

  “I guess it was,” I said.

  “And would you like to tie him in a garbage bag and throw him in the back of a garbage truck?”

  I didn’t say anything. I just cried, feeling sorry for myself that a conversation like this one was what my marriage had come to.

  “You know this is going to take a lot of time,” she said. “He might never change. He might always come in here and burp and splay his legs all around.”

  I just sat there continuing to weep. As much as I hated this, I thought, couples therapy was much more helpful without Russell.

  “Well, our time is up,” she said. “I’ll see you next week.”

  For the next few days I noticed a lot of couples giving each other the finger. Men giving women the finger. Women giving men the finger right back. Spring was in the air, and couples were out, sitting on benches in the tiny little area of Washington Square Park that wasn’t being blasted. If you wanted romance in New York anymore, if you wanted Washington Square Park and the Twin Towers and couples saying nice, romantic things about each other, you had to watch When Harry Met Sally, because that’s the only place they were. My movie started with couples giving each other the finger—white, black, Asian, Muslim, Hispanic, young, old, fat, thin—everywhere you looked, a lot of fingers.

  I sat in the café and listened to Said talk about his mistress. I watched his wife slumped over her Irish coffee. She wasn’t a wife, I thought. She wasn’t in a marriage. How strange that she could think she was a wife, and I, a virtual stranger, could know that she wasn’t.

  Joy called and I told her I was going to couples therapy with Russell.

  “Don’t bother,” she said. “You should do what I’m doing.”

  “And what is that?” I asked.

  “You should come here with me to Kenya.”

  “What!” I said.

  “It’s true. I’m in Kenya. I’m buying a farm. I met a man. This is it, Izzy. I have finally met a good man. I’m going to live here half the year and I’m going to bring him back with me to LA for the other half. Today I bought a sheep because it looked like Chanel. I thought it was a goat, but when I got it home to the shamba they said it was a sheep.”

  “Home to the shamba?” I said. “How are the boys?” I asked, my voice quavering a little.

  “They’re here. I got PlayStation. They love the goat. Sheep.”

  “So tell me about him,” I said. “The man.”

  “His name is Chilemba. He’s twenty-two. He has a wife, of course they all do here, but he’s going to divorce her. You have no idea what fucking can be like,” she said. “We’re going to Egypt and Mombasa.”

  “Just be careful,” I said, thinking there was no way she was being careful.

  The next week Shasthi called and said she couldn’t come in to work that day because her cousin had died in Guyana. The family was gathering at the airport to see off the relatives who were able to leave the country and go to the funeral. Russell and I had our appointment with Corinne and nobody to leave Duncan with.

  “That’s fine,” Russell said, “because I can’t go anyway. I have a meeting.”

  All morning I intended to call and cancel but at two o’clock I found myself walking toward her loft with Duncan in his Bugaboo. I convinced the men in the pizza parlor next door to let me leave the stroller there, and walked up Corinne’s steps holding the heavy baby in my arms. Even carrying Duncan, I walked up stairs straighter than Russell.

  “So this is what a baby looks like,” Corinne said. “I don’t think there’s ever been a baby in this apartment. I don’t think the cat likes it too much,” she said. “He’s never seen one.”

  I put Duncan on the floor and for several minutes we watched the cat’s alien eyes follow the baby’s every move.

  “How are things this week with Russell?” Corinne asked.

  “Russell,” Duncan said. “Dada!”

  “I look at other people’s husbands and I wonder why I made the choice I made. He says ‘I love you’ all the time. ʽI love you. I love you. I love you.’ But he doesn’t notice that I don’t say it back.”

  “I love you,” Duncan said.

  “I love you,” I said and kissed him.

  “And do you love Russell?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Were there other men you could have married?” Corinne asked.

  “No,” I said, thinking of Gabe Weinrib waiting for me at the airport.

  I put Duncan next to me on the couch and had what I decided was my last session with Corinne. I couldn’t keep coming week after week and complaining about Russell. There was nothing she could do for me. I had to figure this one out by myself.

  “How was couples therapy?” Russell asked when Duncan and I got home.

  “It was good,” I said. “Duncan and I worked out all our problems.”

  Russell bent down to kiss Duncan. “Did you like going to therapy?” he asked in baby talk.

  “Yes,” Duncan said, nodding and giving us his shy smile.

  16

  Since I paid good money for you and didn’t make use of your financial services, I think you should do me this one favor,” Gabe said.

  I smiled. He had called.

  “What favor is that?” I asked.

  “Come with me to get my hair cut,” he said. “I have an appointment tomorrow at four and I need your help. You can bring Duncan.”

  “I have a sitter at that time,” I said.

  “Then bring her too,” he said.

  “I really can’t,” I said. “I’m married, Gabe. I can’t go all over town watching you get your hair cut.” I’d never even gone with my own husband to get a haircut.

  “I’ll be at a place called Tomoko on East Thirteenth Street tomorrow at four. Please, please, please come.”

  The next day, walking along Thirteenth Street, I thought about a movie I had seen as a kid. It was called The Adventures of the Wilderness Family, and it was about a mother and father and sister and brother who leave the big city and move to the middle of the wilderness. As a child I had never seen anything so traumatic. There was no phone or television or games, just this family of four alone amongst grizzly bears in some kind of one-room cabin. Our family went to Cape Cod every summer, which was miserable enough, but this was inconceivable.

  I hadn’t thought about that movie since I was a kid, but now, walking to see a man who wasn’t my husband get his hair cut, I suddenly couldn’t get it out of my head. That’s what I should be doing, I thought, packing up my family and moving us somewhere like that away from all distractions. Dora the Explorer with her intolerable nasal whine was destroying us. The wilderness would be safe compared to that.

  Duncan should see me as a mother, cooking more than his oatmeal every morning, protecting him from a grizzly bear with a broom or something when his father was out hunting for our very survival.

  I was so involved with thinking about the Wilderness Family, it was a little shocking walking into the salon and seeing Gabe in a barber’s chair, wearing a black robe, his eyes closed, while a beautiful Japanese girl massaged his neck.

  Since his eyes were still closed, I could leave, I thought, but another beautiful Japanese woman brought me a cup of green tea and, bowing, indicated that I should sit in the chair next to him.

  I watched him in the mirror getting his neck massaged. He was so great looking, I thought, but vulnerable too. Watching him was somehow not unlike watching Duncan sleeping.

  The girl pounded on his back with her palms pressed together. Then he opened his eyes and saw me looking at him in the mirror.

  “Rieko, this is my friend Isolde,” he said. “She’s going to help us here today.”

  He smiled at me.

  “What do you think we should do?” she asked.

  “Maybe a little shorter
in the back, and some layers,” I said.

  “Here?” she asked.

  When it was over, Rieko helped him off with the black robe. He was wearing just a white undershirt until she took his button-down shirt from a hanger and he slid into it. I watched his fingers working the buttons.

  “Well, thank you,” he said, after he had paid and we were standing on the grungy street outside of Dolphin Gym. It was like my plane had just landed back in New York.

  “Should we have an early dinner or a drink? My treat,” he said.

  “I’ve got to go home,” I said.

  “You know, you could be Japanese,” he said. “Your black hair.” He reached out and touched the ends. Then he grabbed a handful and tugged on it slightly.

  I wanted him to kiss me. I looked away. He was a bear threatening my family, and instead of poking at him with a broom, I was praying for the bear to push me up against a building and kiss me.

  Maybe antidepressants would cure this. Or I should start taking Duncan to synagogue. Then I remembered Shasthi really had to leave at five, because she had an errand to run in Queens and she had to be home in time to watch American Idol.

  “I have to go,” I said. “Your hair looks great. Oh, here’s a cab.” I jumped into the empty cab and headed back to the big city.

  17

  That weekend, up in the country, we went to an antiques flea market, and, looking at metal lawn chairs, I was sure I saw my ob-gyn, Dr. Lichter, at another table looking at old fountain pens.

  He was wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball cap, so I couldn’t tell if the man I was looking at had Dr. Lichter’s bald spot or not. Instead of a shirt and tie and white doctor’s coat, he was wearing big, baggy mom jeans and a plaid shirt. Dr. Lichter hadn’t been from Boston, I was almost certain, so maybe it wasn’t him. But then I remembered he’d gone to Harvard and men were always so strange about sports.

  Russell and the baby were several yards away looking at a painted wooden rocking duck.

  “You know,” the owner of the booth I was at said, “these are called motel chairs. They’re the real deal.”

  I watched Dr. Lichter reach into his pocket and pull out money to pay for a pen.

  “They can also be known as tulip chairs or shell chairs, I guess because the back here is shaped a little like a shell. Or a tulip for that matter.”

  “Dr. Lichter?” I called, but he didn’t hear me.

  When I was pregnant with Duncan, I had been in love with Dr. Lichter.

  “I ate too much ice cream this week,” I would say.

  “Ice cream makes healthy babies,” he would answer, spending endless time with me while a dozen women waited in the waiting room.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready to be a mother.”

  “Let me tell you about the Seven Stages of Motherhood,” he had said. “They’re exactly the same as the Seven Stages of Grief.”

  “The Seven Stages of Motherhood?” I flirted over the mountain of my stomach.

  “Yes,” Dr. Lichter had said. “Stage One: Shock and Denial starts when you bring the baby home from the hospital. You’re paying a baby nurse two hundred and fifty dollars a day, you think your life can go on as usual—dinner, movies, work. It lasts from two to four weeks. Stage Two: Pain and Guilt. Change is painful, and there is no bigger change. Your psyche is screaming. You feel guilt until you die, but it is never as intense as months two through six. At six months, your time with the baby starts to get a lot more fun.”

  My psyche screaming didn’t sound too good.

  “Stage Three: Anger. This is directed at your husband. He’s just not biologically wired to be as good with the baby as you. He can sleep through the night. He is feeling no pain, no guilt, not much change. Okay, where are we? Stage Four: Depression, Reflection, and Loneliness is where you lose touch with who you were before you were a mother. That lasts until the third birthday. Sometime shortly after the third birthday, you will have a sort of graduation. It’s like getting out of business school or medical school. Then there’s Five, Six, and Seven—the Upward Turn, Reconstruction, and Acceptance—and that’s when you have another. Got it?” he said.

  “Your psyche is screaming?”

  “One day,” he said wistfully, “we’ll discuss all this over a nice cup of tea—oolong tea perhaps.”

  He was verbose and professorial and bragged that he’d had a part in inventing one of the fetal tests I was taking. He was short, maybe five foot five, and fat, with a big white bald spot and short, stubby fingers that touched me more gently than I had ever been touched. How I had longed to have that oolong tea with him!

  I had fallen in love with him when I’d gone in to hear the baby’s heartbeat for the first time. He knew I was nervous as he moved the sonogram wand over my stomach. Then I heard it. He turned up the volume on the machine until it sounded as strong and sure as a herd of elephants. Then, using the sonogram wand as a microphone, he started singing Fleetwood Mac to me:Like a heartbeat drives you mad

  In the stillness of remembering . . .

  I had laughed and cried with relief.

  “I have always wanted to do that,” he said, and I opened up to him because I loved when men opened up to me like that.

  I had a high-risk pregnancy, with low amniotic fluid, and one day when I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant, I’d gone in for my routine twice-weekly nonstress test, and the technician administering it said, “You’re not going home. You’re going to have the baby right now.”

  I’d called Dr. Lichter and he’d come in the middle of a luncheon at which he was being given an award.

  For nine months I’d imagined him fucking me on the examining table. I’d imagined it every way you could imagine it. And I’d imagined that he’d leave his wife, who was a labor-and-delivery nurse, and I’d leave Russell and we’d buy an apartment together and raise the baby he’d deliver in it.

  While Russell waited just outside the operating room door in his scrubs, Dr. Lichter told me that the anesthesiologist was going to be giving me my spinal. I’d rounded my back the way I’d practiced in Pilates, and then I screamed bloody murder. “Motherfucker!” I screamed. “Motherfucker!” I had never felt pain like that.

  “Something is wrong,” the anesthesiologist said. “She has a difficult back.”

  A machine sounded and a nurse said, “Doctor, it’s dropping,” and then Dr. Lichter took me in his arms. Right there on the table he held me and he said, “Izzy, look right into my eyes. It’s me. Just look at me, look at me.” He wrapped his arms around me and pressed his forehead into my forehead, and with his bald spot hidden under his surgical cap and his mouth and nose covered by his mask, all I could do was look into his blue eyes. We stayed like that for a long time, and finally I felt no pain, just his forehead pressed into mine and his arms around me, until he lay me down on the table and a nurse brought Russell in. Just a few minutes later I heard a cry, and he said, “Well, I’ve never had this happen. He’s crying while he’s still inside you. We haven’t taken him out yet.” Then he said, “Now. Look at your son,” and he held my baby up over the paper curtain.

  When I went for my six-week appointment to check my stitches, I was told that he’d left the hospital and was no longer practicing medicine. “I don’t know for sure,” a nurse had told me, “but I heard a family member died and he had a nervous breakdown.”

  And there, here, he was, in upstate New York.

  “Dr. Lichter?” I called out again, but he still didn’t seem to hear me. People around me had stopped what they were doing to look over at me. “Dr. Lichter?” He looked around nervously for a moment, lowered his baseball cap down over his eyes, and started walking quickly to the parking lot.

  I walked as fast as I could after him, but I was holding Hum on his leash and I got tangled a couple of times and by the time I got to his car he had driven away. He disappeared into the upstate air like a bird I had been watching.

  18

  What did you do today?” Russell asked the fo
llowing week when we were in the car on our way to the country. Now that it was spring we were going up more and more.

  “I had acupuncture,” I told him, even though I had taken Shasthi to have it and had waited for her in the waiting room while Duncan napped in his Bugaboo and I read essays. The waiting room had been filled with women all hoping to get pregnant and I read essay after essay about scrubbing toilets by women who were barely holding it together.

  My mind was swimming a little bit. I had that half-there feeling, like a part of me was somewhere else, that feeling when you’re in the middle of a good book you want to get back to. And then I realized what it was—the essays. I was dying to get back to them.

  I took a stack of them out of the tote bag at my feet and a tiny flashlight I had bought, at my mother’s shrink’s suggestion, for reading in the car.

  Jessica Horowitz

  Charleston, SC

  My husband is in Iraq and has never met our daughter. My mother in law helps but when I lie in bed at night and listen to her cry I sometimes don’t think I can handle my new “job”. I don’t have much money to buy an excersaucer or a swing so I end up holding her most of the time. Feed, change, dress, hold, go grocery shopping, send pictures to her daddy, and pray that we don’t get that knock on the door.

  Hope Greenspan

  Jasper, WY

  I tried everything to have a baby. Acupuncture, the Atkins Diet, three rounds of artificial insemination, four rounds of invitro fertilization, and three adoptions that fell through because the birth mothers changed their minds. I have also had nine miscarriages. Then a woman who is my hero allowed me to adopt my beautiful son. Her name is Jamie so I named him James. My job as a mom is to make James know how much I love him and how much Jamie did too to give him to me. It’s definitely the best job I’ve ever had.