The Seven Year Bitch Page 2

  We’d been married for five years, and I couldn’t really remember those. I tried to imagine where I’d be in five more years, and I came up blank. I couldn’t imagine us on a trip or in a better apartment or even in the same apartment. I suddenly couldn’t even picture the apartment we lived in now. It was as if I were wiped out, an amnesiac from some Danielle Steel novel, a ghost.

  Joy was already seated at our table, furiously writing on note cards. I still hadn’t written a single thank-you note for all the presents I’d gotten for my son, Duncan, when he was born, even though he was almost one. The note cards had a photo of her three sons sitting with their backs to a fire that was burning in a slightly tacky modern fireplace.

  “You’re amazing,” I said. “Sending Christmas cards in November.”

  “They’re to my kids’ teachers. You know, Christmas thank-you notes and gift.”

  “Of course,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant but feeling that all-too-familiar panic that there was yet something else I didn’t know you had to do now that I was a mother. I had thought naively that one day getting my child into school, and to school every day except for weekends, would be enough, but now there were notes and gifts. You had to have a note card with your child’s photo on it, and I still hadn’t sent out a birth announcement. I couldn’t even imagine what the gift might have to be.

  “Right, of course, a gift,” I said, as if I knew all about it. “You mean like money?”

  “Money’s a little crass don’t you think? I usually go to the big Nike store on Wilshire and get everyone hundred-dollar gift certificates.” She stopped writing cards long enough to reach into her purse. “Here, I brought you something.”

  “Thank you!” I said, taking the small Chanel box from her.

  “I’m sorry I can’t be at Duncan’s birthday party.”

  “Me too,” I said. “And I’m sorry I couldn’t be at Ethan’s.” Ethan was her third son, who had just turned two, and I’d sent a tiny bathing suit to go with their new pool.

  By the size of the box Joy had handed me, I could tell it was a silver spoon or cup, and I loved things like that although I didn’t know Chanel made baby stuff. I opened the box and pulled out a large pot of cream. “Chanel Precision,” I read out loud.

  “Eye cream,” she said.

  “You mean wrinkle cream?” I asked. “Is this a new thing for diaper rash?”

  “It’s for you,” she said. “You dab. Morning and night.” She made a demented tapping motion, not around her own eyes but around mine.

  “You know this isn’t LA,” I said. “New Yorkers don’t use wrinkle cream.” I tried not to let the corners of my eyes move as I said that. I had never said the words “wrinkle cream” in my entire life.

  “Right,” she laughed. “And according to you, real New Yorkers don’t drive and no one in New York wears sunglasses.”

  “All true,” I said.

  “Well, I just thought I’d get something for you instead of the baby. After I had Ethan the last thing I wanted to look at was another burp cloth. How boring.”

  Most of the baby gifts, especially the clothes I’d received, were dog related for some reason that I couldn’t figure out. They were all fuzzy with little round ears on the hood or they had pictures of dogs and hydrants on them. Why did people want to dress up their babies as animals? I wanted my baby to look like a baby.

  “I left Harry,” she said.

  “What? When?” I asked, shocked.

  “Three weeks ago.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Are you okay? Are the boys . . .” I was so upset about her boys I couldn’t finish the sentence. I hadn’t gotten over my own parents’ divorce even though it happened when I was twenty-five and already out of business school.

  “We’re fine,” she said brightly. “I tried to tell you on the phone, but one of the boys always seemed to be with me and the timing just wasn’t right.” She looked cheerfully down at her menu. “Let’s see, is today jeudi or vendredi? Yay, lamb.”

  “Where’s he living?” I asked.

  “With his mother, if you can believe it.” We both took a moment to snicker at the thought of it.

  “What happened? Why did you do this?” I asked. I had a splitsecond image of trying to explain to Duncan why his father didn’t live with us and grimaced from the pain of it, which I was sure caused a lot of wrinkles. I could never have that conversation.

  “Well, once I got the idea to do it, it all spiraled very quickly. Come on, we’ve talked about this a hundred times. You should do it too,” she said, her voice filled with excitement.

  “Joy, I can’t leave Russell now.”

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t have the money for two households,” I said, surprising myself by saying something out loud I had actually thought through.

  “He could stay with Marlon.”

  “Marlon wouldn’t take him,” I said, again surprising myself. “He’s really sick.” Marlon was a bitter old man who had been something of a mentor to Russell ever since he was a kid. He was the father of Russell’s best friend since childhood, a sort of father to him too. Marlon had rented a one-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen after his wife had thrown him out of their Westchester home. He inexplicably had a set of twin beds in his bedroom and sometimes when I was at my angriest at Russell, I imagined the two of them sleeping in those beds Ernie and Bert–style.

  “He could live in your country house and commute into the city when he has to see a client.” I had thought that through too. “You should do it when you get home. You’ve been married for five years. You shouldn’t put this off another minute.”

  “I can’t leave Russell tonight! I’m having a huge party on Sunday to celebrate Duncan’s first birthday. And I got fired today.”

  “What!” she said. “Why?”

  “In case you haven’t heard, a few people are getting fired on Wall Street. They dissolved our entire department. Of course Russell and I were totally prepared for it. . . .”

  “You must feel terrible,” she said.

  But I felt euphoric and I didn’t know why. When Mark, the managing director, had called a meeting for everyone on the desk and told us what we had been expecting to hear every day for weeks, there were baskets of muffins and croissants on the conference table and the freshly baked, just-out-of-the-oven butter smell reminded me of something, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I sat there breathing in as deeply as possible, and then I realized it was just like the smell of my baby’s shit.

  Whenever I watch new parents on TV and in the movies gagging and cringing and protesting and avoiding the diapers, I don’t understand it. I love the smell of it. I press my face to the back of Duncan’s pajamas and breathe in, like a teenager sniffing glue.

  “I’m just not sure what I’m going to do,” I said. “When Careena shows up at eight on Monday, I suppose I should tell her we don’t need a nanny anymore.”

  “Well this is perfect,” Joy said. “You can come to LA with the baby and stay with me as long as you need to. We’ll get you on your feet again, teach you to drive, find you a place of your own. I have a lawyer who can help you, a hairstylist, everything you need. Even sunglasses.”

  She reached across the table and held my hand in her much softer one.

  “You can do this,” she said, with the seriousness of Harriet Tubman leading the Underground Railroad. “Two words: Jet Blue. New life. And you won’t have to take his abuse anymore.” Throwing out my Diet Coke hadn’t exactly been abuse. Forget wrinkle cream, the way she was talking was making me feel like I had two black eyes and a fat lip.

  “I’m not ready for that,” I said. I would never be ready to do that to Duncan, I thought, but I didn’t want to hurt Joy by saying that out loud.

  “You’ll see. I’m telling you. Once the idea occurs to you, and I know it has, then it all spirals quickly.”

  “But the boys,” I said. “Ethan and Jake and—”

  “The boys,” she s
aid, looking me straight in the eye, “are just fine. And yours will be just fine too.”

  I noticed she was doing a slight tapping motion around her eyes as she spoke. “Just.” Tap, tap. “Fine.” Tap, tap.

  At my wedding, right before she marched down the aisle just ahead of me, she’d whispered to me, “I have a car waiting in case you change your mind.” And now I imagined a new scenario, five years later at my son’s first birthday: a birthday cake with its one candle burning down while the birthday boy and his mother were thousands of miles away in a Jet Blue aircraft.

  “You’re going to be thirty-nine, Izzy. In four months you’re going to be thirty-nine. Which is forty, which is fifty. This is your chance.”

  “Wait, am I going to be thirty-nine or am I going to be fifty?” I said, beginning to get extremely annoyed.

  “I think that a happy mother is the greatest gift I can give my kids,” Joy said. “Instead of someone who’s always yelling at their father. Having children raises the stakes, Izzy. You’ll see. It’s cute that they’re dopey and forgetful when you get married, but it stops being cute when they don’t pick the kid up when they say they’re going to and put their shoes on the wrong feet. Duncan’s going to be one, but wait until he’s two and then three. I had to remind him to kiss them good night! He turned me into something I didn’t want to be,” she said. “Seven years of having to nag, and scream, and fight, and be a policeman in my own home was enough for me. It’s not that you get a seven year itch. It’s that they turn you into a seven year bitch. After seven years you can’t take it anymore. I’ll never let anyone do that to me again!”

  Had he really turned her into that, or had she been like that already? I wondered. And then I wondered, Had I?

  I watched her tap herself for the rest of the meal. There was a smile in her fingertips. Each tap was filled with love and urgency as if she were resuscitating a tiny heart. But despite that, or maybe because of it, I couldn’t help but notice how radiant she looked. She had lost at least thirty pounds. Not five or ten, but thirty. She was wearing some kind of incredible garment from Africa and the newest Vivienne Westwood bag. In fact everything she was wearing was incredible, no secret spreading milk stains hidden under her jacket every day. “Are you going to live your life in captivity?” she asked me.

  There had to be something to this freedom trail, I realized. I just had to board Jet Blue and I’d look like her—thin, happy, wrinkle/husband-free.

  “ Joy and Harry are divorcing,” I told Russell when I got home.

  “But she just had a baby?” he said.

  “Two years ago.”

  He sat at his desk even though it was after midnight, contemplating a manuscript.

  “Where’s Harry living?” he asked.

  “At his parents’.”

  “I guess if it happened to us, I would live at Marlon’s.”

  He said “happened to us” as if it were something that required flood insurance, like an act of God. His voice was somber. We were used to finding our mailbox jammed with oversized wedding invitations, thank-you notes with photos of the bride and groom, save-the-dates. We weren’t used to being faced with news of divorce.

  Joy’s announcement startled us to our senses. Instead of inspiring me to leave that night, I clung to Russell, who put both his arms around me, and we lay very close to each other until morning.

  I couldn’t sleep, thinking of the exit interview I’d had to endure, walking to my office afterward, escorted by security, to find a cardboard box on my desk that I was supposed to fill with my belongings and somehow carry downstairs to the chauffeured car waiting to take me home. Layoffs had been inevitable for months, so anyone in finance who hadn’t already cleared out her desk was a fool. In the weeks prior, anyone you saw disappearing into the Wall Street and Rector subway stations was carrying increasingly bulging briefcases. My files and contacts were safe at home with my photos of Duncan and my dog, Humbert, and enough tape, markers, Post-its, and paper to get us through elementary school.

  At my exit interview, I’d sat across from Mark, and Flavin, an executive vice president in charge of special projects, and Merry, a horrible HR drone who was there to make sure I wouldn’t sue the company.

  “Now you can spend some time with your baby,” Mark had the nerve to say to me.

  “And you too,” I said because he was every bit as laid off as I was and had his own baby.

  “You have a good package,” he said. It was good. Enough so that Russell and I wouldn’t have to worry for a long time.

  “I’m sure you have a good package too,” I said.

  I was forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement and listen to Merry tell me how my benefits were continuing and that I should make good use of the outplacement counseling they were providing for an entire year.

  I had floated out of the exit interview, completely free, except for the security guard. And I thought about what someone had told me about the people who jumped from the towers on 9/11. They’d had so much adrenaline coursing through them, they may have even thought that they could fly.

  2

  On Sunday I woke up more excited than I had ever been. Duncan was one. I had survived the hardest year of my life. Duncan was still alive. We had made it. I nursed him for what was supposed to be the last time. I ran all around the apartment setting everything up, accepting deliveries, helping the caterer, opening stacks of plastic cups and the first dozen bottles of wine.

  Russell’s only job was to make sure the batteries in the video camera were charged so we could capture Duncan tasting his first cake.

  I had never understood the word “congratulations.” At my graduation from business school when people said it, I shrugged, thinking I had done what hundreds of others had done right along with me, and it hadn’t even been that hard. At my wedding and after Duncan’s birth I couldn’t understand why people were congratulating me. Getting married and having a baby didn’t seem like my achievement; it required no skill; anyone could do it; most people did. I’d found those acts almost embarrassing really—banal, bourgeois, clichéd. Getting married was like posting a public announcement to the world that you were going to be having sex with this one person for the rest of your life, and having a baby was like an announcement that the sex had been had. But now, as the mother of a one-year-old, I understood. I deserved all the congratulations I could get. I had never felt more proud or happy in my entire life.

  I took Duncan’s outfit from Makie out of its black tissue paper and put him on his changing table. I peeled off his shit-filled diaper and breathed it in. It would never smell like this again, I realized. Now he would no longer have breast milk. He would have regular milk, and birthday cake, and more and more regular food, and things like little boxes of raisins and juice boxes and grilled cheese sandwiches and Chef Boy-ar-dee and I would never smell this same smell again.

  Then I flung open my front door and let all the congratulations come pouring in.

  When the party was over and Duncan was passed out in his crib, still in his clothes like a frat boy, I turned on the video camera to replay some of the day’s big moments. The tape started with Duncan, still unable to walk on his own, cruising around the coffee table grasping a balloon. Not since Albert Lamorisse made The Red Balloon had there been anything as perfect captured on film. Then there I was guiltily nursing Duncan because when I’d refused him for the first time ever he’d cried and banged on my breast like it was a TV he was trying to get to work, turning my nipple like it was the knob on an old, broken-down black-and-white. Then I appeared with the gigantic cake and everyone sang and then . . .

  Suddenly, the scene cut to a close-up of Russell in our bedroom, drinking from a plastic cup. “Make sure you don’t tape over anything. Izzy will kill me,” he said.

  “I won’t,” I heard his friend Ben say. “So how does it feel to be the father of a one-year-old?”

  “I actually think having a child was a big mistake,” Russell said. “Irresponsible
really. If you want to have a happy marriage, don’t ever have a kid. Actually, don’t ever get married.”

  “Come on, man, it’s your kid’s birthday,” Ben said off-camera. The camera was still close in on Russell’s face.

  “Well this is what I have to drink to get through the day.” Russell held up his cup and the camera zoomed in on what looked like scotch. I knew it was scotch because Russell’s voice went up several octaves when he drank scotch, so he sounded like a woman. I begged him not to drink it in front of anyone.

  “So this is the day I’m going to kill myself.” The camera zoomed in on Russell’s face. “This is the window I’m going to jump out of.” The camera zoomed in on the window and then out the window and down six floors to the street below. I heard Ben cackle and the sound of clinking ice.

  Then Ben said, “That’s really dark, man,” and suddenly we were back to Duncan with cake all over his face licking frosting from my fingertip, my cheeks lit with pleasure.

  I’d hired two belly dancers for the entertainment because Duncan’s favorite things were long hair and big breasts, and as they shimmied and undulated on the videotape, I shimmied and undulated too, with rage. As one threw her spangled scarf around my totally embarrassed father and the guests cheered and sipped champagne, I wondered how I would possibly avenge Russell’s turning my child’s first birthday video into a live suicide note.

  As the other danced with Duncan in her arms and he tried desperately to free her left breast from her sequined bra, I wondered if my other birthday gift to him might be a broken home. How could a day that was so joyous for me be so traumatic for Russell? He’d been joking, I was almost probably certain. But what if he hadn’t been and I really did find his body splattered on the sidewalk one morning, answer the buzzer to find Rashid, the handyman, complaining that there had been a mess from my apartment? And, even worse, what if I hadn’t watched the video, just set it aside and played it for Duncan one day?