The Seven Year Bitch Read online

  “That’s dark, man,” I said out loud to myself. “That’s really fucking dark, man.”

  3

  The next night our neighbor Sherry’s daughter came over to babysit, and we went to a benefit gala at Capitale. As soon as we got there I realized that the word gala on the invitation was a bit of an exaggeration, but it still felt good to be out. I had been laid off but life still went on. I perused the silent-auction options. There were theater, sports, and concert tickets, dozens of country houses, Swiss chalets, and Italian villas, every kind of spa treatment, five private yoga classes, five couples therapy sessions, five dog training sessions, your portrait painted, your makeup done, your apartment designed, your event planned, your photograph taken by a million different photographers, LASIK surgery, one round of in vitro fertilization, a vasectomy, dinner with Philip Seymour Hoffman, dinner at Jean-Georges, Gramercy Tavern, and Rao’s, dinner with Gabriel Byrne served by Moby, and a scarf knitted for you by Uma Thurman.

  “Here’s mine,” I said. “’Asset allocation analysis by a chartered financial analyst. Are all your eggs in one basket? Let Isolde Brilliant help you to attain your dreams.’”

  They had punched up my copy with the “eggs in one basket” and “attain your dreams” part.

  The benefit was for the private school that I hoped Duncan would go to in four years when he was ready to start kindergarten, even though I had been rejected from it myself when I was four. When Russell told me on an early date that his aunt was actually the head of admissions at that very school, my heart almost stopped. I knew it was the closest you could come in New York to dating royalty. And to my utmost joy, on the day Duncan was born, she’d come to the hospital with a tiny school T-shirt and proclaimed him accepted.

  In a moment of madness, to show my enthusiasm, I’d called the benefit committee chair and offered my services. I’d thought of donating a week or two at our country house but when I started to think about its selling points—inflatable kiddie pool, wind chimes, tire swing—it didn’t seem like it would compete with the other houses that were being auctioned off with their twelve bedrooms, ocean views, and vineyard. I’d also thought of offering myself as a lactation consultant but then I couldn’t imagine putting another woman’s tit in another baby’s mouth or slathering lanolin on someone else’s nipple.

  The prizes were grouped in categories, and mine was on a table with a placard that said “Death and Taxes” with a little drawing of a coffin on it.

  Whenever I saw a coffin, I always thought about the Grim Reaper. I thought about the Grim Reaper a lot actually—black cloak, curved scythe, the whole nine yards. And whenever I thought about the Grim Reaper, for some inexplicable reason, I thought about fucking him.

  In a certain way it would be like fucking a cartoon character. I thought about the Grim Reaper like some men thought about Jessica Rabbit. I supposed Jessica Rabbit symbolized physical perfection that no real-life woman could come close to, but the Grim Reaper symbolized a kind of perfection too. Death was my idea of the most romantic love. He came to you, he chose you, and, no matter what the circumstances, you had to go with him, like being pulled down a wedding aisle on a black conveyer belt. There was no fighting him. It was what I always thought love would be, a man would know I was the one and prove it to me, until I had no choice but to love him back. He would fuck me from behind on the way to wherever it was he was taking me and I would grab his balls to see what he really had under the cloak.

  The printed card next to my prize stated there was a $150 minimum opening bid. The bid sheet attached to the clipboard on the table was blank.

  “You have to bid on me,” I told my husband.

  “What? Absolutely not. I’m not paying a hundred fifty dollars to have you manage your own portfolio. We should bid on that.”

  He pointed to a prize to have your last will and testament written. We had been putting that off because we couldn’t agree on who would take Duncan. “I don’t even know why you donated something,” Russell said. “I didn’t want to come here in the first place.”

  “You should have donated something,” I said. “You should have donated your filmmaking expertise. A unique video of your child’s birthday party slash suicide note by an amateur filmmaker.”

  “Will you drop that already, it was a joke. At least I remembered to charge the batteries, you didn’t even give me any credit for that.”

  I wrote Russell’s name and phone number on the first line of my bid sheet and listed his bid as $150.

  For the rest of the evening I checked back to see if anyone else had bid, and finally there was another name on the second line: Gabe Weinrib, $500.

  I rushed back to my husband. “Someone bid on me,” I said.

  “That’s great,” he said.

  “You have to outbid him.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to analyze this man’s assets!”

  “You have to,” he said like a pimp. “That would be a ridiculous waste of money. I’m not going to bid on my own wife.”

  “Your own wife is exactly who you should bid on.” We went back to our table. “I don’t have an office anymore. Where am I supposed to meet with him, at Starbucks?”

  “Have him come to the house.”

  “I don’t know this person. You want me to be with him in our apartment?”

  “It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” my husband said.

  I wished I had never done this.

  I looked around nervously, wondering who in this sea of people was Gabe Weinrib. Every man there suddenly seemed so sleazy, even if they were all perfectly nice fathers. An announcement was made that the silent auction had come to an end, and I noticed that all the clipboards had been removed. Why had I done this to myself? I wondered.

  “I wonder where we pay for our prize,” Russell said.

  “What prize?” I asked.

  “I bid on the five couples therapy sessions. One hundred and fifty dollars. Not bad, thirty dollars a time. That’s less than we paid for ballroom dancing.”

  The reason he’d probably brought up the ballroom dancing classes we’d taken before our wedding was because it had been like couples therapy. We’d had terrible fights during each class, and Lou, our instructor, had to mediate and say things like “She wants to dance with you, man. That’s why she’s marrying you.” If it hadn’t been for Lou we might not have gotten married.

  “I’m not going to go to some quack from an auction,” I said, realizing of course that I was being slightly hypocritical as this Gabe Weinrib guy was probably right now handing over his credit card.

  “I will not be attacked!” Russell said. “You always complain that I don’t take the initiative and here’s something positive that I did for us.”

  “Bidding on the romantic weekend in the Hamptons or on dinner at Jean-Georges would have been positive for us, tickets to David Letterman at least, not bargain-basement couples therapy.”

  “I can never do anything right in your eyes.”

  “You should have bid on the vasectomy.”

  “You’re right about that,” Russell said.

  We went home and paid our neighbor Sherry’s daughter ninety dollars.

  4

  I had put off telling Careena that I had lost my job because Russell and I hadn’t decided what we were going to do, but just when I was getting ready to make a decision, she quit. I didn’t know she had quit until it became clear she wasn’t showing up and I called her on her cell. “Are you going to make it here today?” I asked her.

  “Sure,” she said. There was silence on her end.

  “You sure you’re coming in?” I asked.

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  “When will you be here?” I asked, trying to keep my voice upbeat.

  “I’m leaving now,” she said.

  “Because if you’re not coming in you should just tell me.”

  “Well,” she said. “I no gonna work for you no more.”

  “Why
?” I asked, alarmed but resigned like when I used to be out there trying to date. Dating had actually prepared me quite nicely for the misery of having a nanny.

  “I had a dream about you,” she said.

  “All right, Careena,” I said, knowing from the stories she’d told me about her life that once she had a dream about a person that was it. “But this isn’t nice to do to me with no notice.”

  “You didn’t give me no notice when you gave me that dream,” she said.

  As soon as I got off the phone I put Duncan in his stroller and walked all the way to Washington Square Park. Some boring community activist type tried to hand me a flyer and get me to sign a petition to fight changes they were making to the park, and as much as I disapproved of anything about the park changing, I kept walking because I hated community activists just as much.

  I swung open the gate to the big playground, which had always daunted me even though any four-year-old could work its latch. Then I wheeled over to a bench and sat there for a while. Duncan had fallen asleep in the stroller, so the whole exercise seemed suddenly pointless. I could have just stayed home. But staying at home suddenly seemed just as pointless.

  This wasn’t so hard, I told myself, and I did it all the time. Careena had worked fifty hours a week, Mondays through Fridays, but I was alone with Duncan plenty. I didn’t need any help. I was out of work, and—I looked at him sleeping there—he even slept part of the time. Being a full-time mom was going to be easy.

  Near the concrete turtles was a row of benches filled only with nannies. I had, without thinking, sat near the gate on the benches occupied by mothers—old mothers like myself who looked as dry and brittle as hay.

  When Duncan was twelve weeks old and it was time for me to go back to work, I had sat on this bench with him all bundled up and cried my eyes out. A nanny had approached me gingerly and said, “You need help don’t you?” I’d been crying too hard to do anything but nod. She was a total stranger, but I’d looked up into her kind face and said, “Can you help me?,” practically ready to hand the baby to her. “No,” she had said, “but my cousin can.” And that was how I’d come to leave Duncan with not just a total stranger but the cousin of a total stranger. But that had only been for an afternoon before I’d come to my senses.

  Since it was pointless to stay in the playground I left through the gate and headed to the café I’d been going to since business school and ordered an iced cappuccino.

  I loved Duncan and I loved being his mother but I wasn’t sure I was prepared to be only his mother. Before we were even married, when Russell and I had gotten our dog, Humbert, I had walked him early one morning, and as I stood on a line for coffee, someone had offered him a dog treat. “I always ask the mommy first,” she said, looking at me expectantly. “Oh I’m not his mother,” I said, “I’m just his . . . friend,” and she looked at me with complete contempt. “You’re his mother,” she had scolded. “Poor dog.”

  I loved being a mother now, but I wasn’t ready for it to be my entire identity. “I’m a mom now,” I tried to convince myself. “A SAHM.” Many women would kill for this.

  Maybe, I thought, I’d wheel over to the Container Store and buy those plastic bags I’d seen on TV that you could fill with clothes and then vacuum all the air out to make them flat as a pancake. I’d stuff them with my Armani suits and Balenciaga and Michael Kors and lay them to rest like a corpse at the back of the coat closet, making all kinds of room for things I could wear in a sandbox.

  I had launched a hedge fund, for Christ’s sake. I was a CFA. An MBA. Duncan was over a year old. I still hadn’t stopped nursing, as I’d planned on his birthday, but I was going to stop one day very soon, and I was, I decided right then, going to find another job. Of course I needed help.

  I went to the newsstand to get the Irish Echo, where all the nannies advertised. I’d never heard of the Irish Echo until a mother at Duncan’s Baby Time class had told me that was the best place to look. I couldn’t wait until I was home; I opened the paper right on the street like a pervert and read the ads. My heart pounded with expectation like I was reading ads for swingers instead of Irish nannies with apple cheeks and plump arms made for hugging. And of course light cleaning. I went back to the café, circled forty ads, and started dialing.

  As soon as I’d left the first message my phone rang and a woman with a thick Irish brogue said, “Is that Isolde Brilliant?” I’d never heard a voice more lovely and motherly and Irish in my life.

  “Aye it ’tis,” I said, already getting into the spirit of it.

  “Hi, Izzy, it’s me, Deirdre-Agnes callin’ ya,” she said.

  “Oh, hi, Deirdre-Agnes,” I said, disappointed that it wasn’t a nanny. Deirdre-Agnes was my friend Edgar’s cousin. She had given me her crib before Duncan was born and before I’d ended my friendship with Edgar. It was a beautiful mahogany sleigh spindle crib—she’d insisted we take it—and I was so grateful to Deirdre-Agnes for giving it to us, not for the money saved so much as for the fact that it made me feel that I had a sister. After our building’s handyman, Rashid, had assembled it and I’d Lemon-Pledged five years of dust off of it from her basement and made it up with the bumper and sheets from Shabby Chic, I’d suddenly called her, paranoid that she might want it back. “What if you want it back?” I had asked. “Oh, I’ll never want it back,” she had said. “I’m through with having children, believe me. It’s yours forever. It held Patrick Junior, and before him my sister Sorcha’s three children, and before that all of Aunt Eileen’s boys. And ya know what they say?” she’d said. “A crib that holds an Irish babe is lucky for all babes that follow.”

  “How are you?” I asked. “How’s Edgar?” Edgar had been my best friend in business school and for a moment I wondered if she was calling to tell me he was dead. He had been doing heroin in LA, and I’d had to end our friendship after Duncan was born when he’d stolen Russell’s grandfather’s Emmy award from our apartment. He was always calling the firm and harassing my secretary. But really it was he who had ended our friendship because he couldn’t tolerate that I was the mother of someone other than him. A good fag hag didn’t lactate apparently. You didn’t see Wendy—whom I had always considered the ultimate fag hag—from Peter Pan nursing a baby, flying high over London Town on her way to Neverland. You didn’t see Wendy grab her Medela breast pump before she flew out the window. I was no use to him anymore.

  “I have great news,” Deirdre-Agnes said. “I’m pregnant.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said.

  There was a silence as if she was expecting me to say more.

  “Are you happy about it?” I said softly, only because she had made that whole speech about not wanting another one.

  “Of course! I’m thrilled! So I wanted to make arrangements to get my crib back.”

  “I thought you said you were through having children,” I said, feeling a sense of panic. It was just a crib, I told myself. An old, scratched, squeaky crib.

  “What!” she said, her voice darkening. “I would never say a terrible thing like that.”

  “Well, you did.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “How pregnant are you?”

  “Two weeks. My due date is the end of August,” she said, her voice sounding almost threatening. “But of course I need to have everything all set up before then.”

  “Deirdre-Agnes, I’m in the middle of something here. Can I call you back?”

  I hung up and called Russell even though I knew he was in the middle of a lunch meeting with an important agent.

  “It’s an emergency,” I said. I had lost my job and my nanny and I really didn’t want to lose that crib.

  “What? Oh my God, what happened? Where’s Duncan?”

  “Deirdre-Agnes is having a baby.”

  “Now?” he said.

  “In August.”

  “So?”

  “She wants her crib back.”

  “Jesus, you really scared the hell out of me,” he
said. “I’m in a restaurant with someone, can we discuss this later?”

  I didn’t even have a chance to tell him about Careena and my new plans to try to find another job, although I knew it wouldn’t be easy.

  By the end of the day I’d scheduled fifteen interviews for Saturday and fifteen interviews for Sunday. The best ads were the ones written not by the nanny herself but by her employer. These sounded like modern-day slave-trading posts: Our legal, loyal & reliable nanny of 12 years sks new family. Our loss, your gain. Not a single nanny, I quickly discovered, was Irish. Or even English. Or even Welsh.

  On Saturday, I set a plate of mint Milanos on the coffee table. I unwrapped a new package of legal pads I’d taken from the office, ready to take careful notes about each candidate.

  I sat on the couch before the first one arrived, looking at my list of questions, but each question seemed to conjure up a past nanny. Suddenly it was almost as if they were with me, my three former nannies. The three C’s—Careena, Carella, and Carellis—or the ghosts of them, like the three witches in Macbeth, squeezed onto the couch, talking on their cell phones, each with its own annoying ring tone, waiting for the parade of new nannies.

  The first nanny showed up right on time and took her seat across from me in my best Ligne Roset Moël chair. I asked her my first question: “Do you cook?”

  “You want me to cook!” she said, making her eyes so wide it was as if I had asked her to take off her blouse. I crossed her off the list.

  I crossed the next two off my list right away because one brought her baby with her to the interview and the other had long, decorated nails with pastel stripes.

  “You speak excellent English!” I told one enthusiastically.

  “I’m from Trinidad,” she said.

  “Yes, but your English is excellent,” I said, nodding my head like a crazy person.

  “We only speak English there.” She looked at me with unmasked disgust.

  I crossed her off my list.

  One had an almost contagious case of mush mouth. “Yesh, yesh, thatch nicesh,” was her answer to all my questions. I croshed her off my lisht. One, I could have sworn, answered, “Double, double toil and trouble. Fire burn, and caldron bubble,” when I asked her how she liked to handle playdates. I crossed her off.