The Seven Year Bitch Page 6

  “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.

  8

  The 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.

  “He’s asleep in his crib,” I said. “When a woman is ovulating the mucus is very thin like egg whites.”

  “Okay,” Shasthi said. She looked like she was concentrating, like I was giving her instructions for what to do in an emergency.

  “That’s how you know you are able to become pregnant.”

  “Okay. I will try that,” Shasthi said, as if it were a recipe for an omelet.

  “You should,” I said.

  I went to take my shower and then got dressed in what I was starting to think of as fatigues—my jeans from Rosebud and a long black jersey that I alternated with a long gray one.

  I went back out to the living room. Russell went to the post office and I watched Shasthi run the vacuum. She was tall and tubular, slightly barrel-shaped but not fat. Her legs and arms were thin, but she was thick in the middle, her midriff puffed out a little from her low-waisted jeans and high-waisted sequined shirt. I examined her from my perch at the dining-room table as thoroughly as a midwife. Why couldn’t she get pregnant? I wondered. I stared at the caramel strip of exposed flesh until I had practically given her a hysterosalpingogram with my eyes. Fibroids, I diagnosed. I bet she had fibroids.

  Three years before, I’d had to have a myomectomy to have my fibroids removed before I could get pregnant with Duncan. The doctor had shown me an enormous book of photos of different kinds of fibroids—not exactly what you’d want to have on your coffee table next to the Annie Leibovitz and Georgia O’Keeffe—but they were strangely beautiful planets, red and angry molten cratered moons in the uterus universe. I was sure that’s what she had and I suddenly had a violent urge to grab the vacuum cleaner hose out of her hands and vacuum the motherfuckers right out of her.

  I’d always felt a little bit guilty about the vacuum cleaner because I’d gotten it for free after 9/11. We lived on Hubert Street, not far from the World Trade Center, and everyone who lived within a certain radius of the towers got a free Eureka bagless provided by FEMA to vacuum up any asbestos or human remains that may have blown in through the window. I needed a new vacuum and I was very excited at the time, but every time there was a new world tragedy like the tsunami in Thailand or Hurricane Katrina and FEMA rolled in their insufficient trailers, I thought of that free vacuum cleaner in the linen closet.

  After the myomectomy, when I still couldn’t get pregnant, we filed papers to adopt from China. As intent on my mission as a twister on its course, we went to an adoption agency called Spence-Chapin on the Upper East Side and listened to a panel of adoptive parents talk about their experiences in China, Guatemala, Russia, and Korea. We had decided on China and eaten Chinese food every night for a month, while we labored over the essays in the application packet.

  I looked at what Russell had written:

  Our desire for a baby girl and China’s current laws in regard to such girls dovetail quite nicely.

  “Dovetail quite nicely? Dovetail! Who the hell uses the word dovetail,” I had screamed at him one night in Suzy’s Chinese restaurant on Bleecker Street where all the waiters already thought we were crazy. “What’s wrong with you!”

  Another time, at Wo Hop in Chinatown, a Chinese waiter in his sixties wearing the Wo Hop uniform of a formal red Mandarin jacket with epaulets and knotted buttons brought us our menus, and Russell said, “Why can’t we just adopt him? He could bring us tea in bed in the morning. Honey, our own little Chinese waiter. It would be so nice.”

  “That’s sick!” I had laughed in spite of myself.

  “Our son. I’m so proud,” Russell said, taking my hand across the table and looking lovingly at the waiter after he had brought us fortune cookies and bustled off.

  When we had finished our application and were eating Chinese takeout at our own dining-room table one night, I’d accidentally spilled my glass of red wine, soaking the application, and we’d laughed at how funny it was that we had worked so hard to make ourselves look like the perfect parents, claiming we’d never had therapy, taken any medications, and even knocked a few pounds off our weight, and in the end were shown for what we were, a couple of boozers.

  In the time it had taken to get a duplicate application from Spence- Chapin, I had gotten pregnant.

  I’d gone to Dr. Heiffowitz to regulate my thyroid, not to get pregnant, and he’d looked me over and said, “Your medication is wrong. If you cut your pill in half with a kitchen knife and take half every twelve hours instead of a whole one every twenty-four, I see no reason why you won’t get pregnant.”

  I’d been lying on his examination table and when he said those words, “I see no reason why you won’t get pregnant,” in his quiet Israeli accent, I’d had to fight the urge to spread my legs right then and there and beg him to be the father. Why wait all the way until the end of the day when Russell would finally come to bed, when I could get pregnant right now?

  “We’re in the process of adopting from China,” I said.

  “You have a beautiful follicle,” he had said and showed it to me on the sonogram screen. “You should ovulate tonight. I don’t want to be the one to tell anyone not to adopt a baby from China, but I see no reason why you wouldn’t get pregnant tonight.” And suddenly, just like that, when he saw no reason, I saw no reason. There was no reason. It was as if a lens cap had been covering my cervix and now it had been removed. I could see Russell’s sperm attach itself to my beautiful follicle. I could feel it.

  And that night it happened.

  Just thinking about the kind blue Israeli eyes of Dr. Heiffowitz, I was moved to tears and I had to turn and wipe my eyes so Shasthi wouldn’t see me.

  “I’m going now,” I said, but she just kept vacuuming, slowly and gracefully, her sequins glinting and rhinestone hair clip casting rays of blue light on the ceiling and on her cider-colored hair, like a statue of the goddess Kali had come to life in my living room and had decided to tidy up.

  As I was leaving the apartment my phone rang and I heard Deirdre-
Agnes’s voice on my answering machine. “Patrick and I are comin’ into the city this weekend and we’d like to swing by and pick up our crib.” I rushed out before I could hear the end of her message.

  When I got out on the street my cell phone rang.

  “Did she come?” my mother asked. “How is she?”

  “I love her,” I said.

  “It’s a miracle. You should always listen to my shrink. I just came from therapy.”

  “How was it?” I asked, with a perfunctory tone to my voice because I didn’t want her to know I was really interested.

  “I told her you just got laid off and you’re conflicted about doing nothing all day and she had a fantastic idea for you. It’s a job.”

  “I managed a hedge fund,” I told my mother, since she seemed to have forgotten. “And staying home with Duncan is not doing nothing all day.”

  “This is something you can do part time from home. It turns out my shrink does it for extra money.”

  “Give me a break,” I said. I definitely had to go back to work if this was the kind of conversation I was going to be having.

  “You judge contests,” my mother continued. “Essay contests. Companies advertise essay contests and you read all the essays and pick the winner. My shrink judges them in the car on the way up to her country house while her husband drives, and she thought you could do the same thing. She said it would pay for the nanny.”

  “Sitter.”

  “So you wouldn’t have to feel guilty.”

  “If it’s so great why doesn’t she do more of them?” I asked.

  “There are some she just doesn’t want to do, like motherhood ones. You know, because she can’t have a baby.”

  “I’m actually already working,” I said. “I have to analyze a portfolio for someone.” The man—Gabe Weinrib—from the auction hadn’t called me yet but I supposed he eventually would since he’d paid good money for me. “And why would they hire someone in finance? I’m not a teacher or an editor.”

  “She said they would hire you. They’re hiring ex–Wall Streeters. I suggested Russell should do it, being in publishing, but they only hire women. At least take down the number,” my mother said.

  “No,” I said, taking a pen and my little date book out of my bag. “I don’t have a pen.” My mother recited the number anyway and I wrote it down. “I’m not writing it down.”

  Then I got off the phone and went to my gym.

  I’d joined the New York Health and Racquet Club on Thirteenth Street between University Place and Fifth Avenue years before when I was at Stern, and I’d never wanted to make the switch despite the fact that it was so inconvenient. I could use any location, and they’d just built a new one with top-of-the-line equipment right near me, but I preferred the one on Thirteenth Street because I was by far the youngest and thinnest member. It had a tiny pool and Jacuzzi and as soon as I saw it, escorted by a peppy salesman, I felt like I had walked into Boca Raton, 1970.

  A dozen old wrinkled bosoms floated at the top of the Jacuzzi. Rolls of fat and folds of skin paraded without shame above forests of veins. Pale gray hair glistened in tufted armpits and all around bikini lines. And it was the only hair showing, because faces beamed under every manner of pastel bathing cap—the old-fashioned kind with giant yellow flower fringe, rubber appliqués, under-chin straps.

  “You know, we uh have a newer location,” the salesman said nervously when he’d signed me up. “They have spinning, kickboxing, Pilates, funk, masala bhangra, capoeira, pole dancing for strippers . . .”

  “That’s okay,” I’d said. “I like it here.”

  “That’s a lovely suit, dear,” a woman said to me as I headed downstairs from the locker room to the pool. “Where did you get something like that?”

  “SoHo,” I said.

  It was a one-piece (obviously) white suit with blue ticking and a slight iridescent shine. I looked like I had just come from performing in a production of South Pacific.

  “Your figure looks wonderful in it.”

  “I just had a baby,” I said, not even bothering to hold in my stomach as I slid into the Jacuzzi. Working out with old people was the best-kept beauty secret in New York.

  When I got home, there were two messages on the answering machine. The first was from Deirdre-Agnes wanting her crib—the crib she had given me—and the second was the call I had been dreading.

  “Hi, this is Gabe Weinrib calling for Isolde Brilliant,” a man’s voice said. “I’m the lucky man who won you at the auction. I’m calling to set up a time to meet.” He left his number and I wrote it down on the box of Cheerios in the kitchen. He sounded like the kind of man I usually couldn’t stand—lurid, a little goofy, possibly a Wall Streeter, his voice half an octave too high—the kind of man who had strict weight requirements for women. I did not want to sit with this man and give him investment advice.

  I called him back from my cell phone and got his voicemail. “Hi, Gabe,” I said. “This is Izzy Brilliant calling you back. I’m so sorry but I’m away in Paris for a few weeks. I’ll call you when I’m back in New York.”

  I hung up, relieved that I had put that off for a while. Then my cell phone rang and I didn’t answer it in case it was him again. It was him again, and he left a message that he was actually in Paris and we should meet there.

  I stared at the phone wondering if I was actually going to have to fly to Paris now to meet with this guy.

  I called back and miraculously he didn’t pick up and I was able to leave a very perfunctory message that I was leaving for the airport to fly home to New York but that he should certainly give me a call when he was back. Then I said, “Au revoir,” hung up, and turned off my cell phone.

  9

  A few weeks later I was standing in Kmart filled with excitement. The vacuum cleaner had broken. I had crouched in front of it, feeling like a farmer with a cow. There was a tumbleweed of black hair and sequins in the canister. To show Shasthi I wasn’t wasteful, I’d called a number and talked to a man who’d asked me if I remembered when I’d gotten it.

  “September 2001,” I’d said guiltily, wishing I had just thrown it out in the first place. In New York there is no better feeling on earth than dragging something out of your apartment into the incinerator room.

  In Kmart, I reached in my pocket for the scrap of paper I’d written the model number on and pulled out a pacifier instead. I looked at it in desperate wonder that I was walking around with something as precious as that. I’d had a baby and there was the beautiful proof. My pockets were like other women’s pockets; I was complete. I just stood there weeping for joy right in the middle of Kmart.

  “ 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.