The Seven Year Bitch Page 7

  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.

  10

  The 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 coul
dn’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.

  I could survive trapped in the car for at least three days, I figured, if the bear wouldn’t leave. We’d already eaten the doughnuts but there was one bottle of water in the car and a few nuts on the floor. I regretted weaning. If I hadn’t stopped breast-feeding, I could have made enough milk for the baby to survive for days, or until someone in a passing car saw the bear circling the parked car and Russell’s carcass lying on the blood-stained snow, and called for help.

  I could hold the funeral at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home on the East Side and afterward, at home, lie curled up on my bed, our bed, as visitors came to sit beside me to comfort me. We had life insurance, now that I thought about it, and I could sell this house if I could find it without Russell. I had never learned how to drive. The Second Avenue Deli had moved but I was pretty sure they would still deliver sandwich platters for the shivah. How many people would come to pay their respects to Russell? I wondered. All those authors would show up and gorge themselves on the free food. I could probably tell the Second Avenue Deli to cater for two hundred hungry mourners.

  I felt a shock of cold and realized that all that thinking about nursing had made my milk come back. Even though I hadn’t breast-fed Duncan since November and it was now February, milk was soaking through my bra. It was as if to show me that I was right, Duncan and I would be fine.

  The next day we had no choice but to invite Charlie Cheney, our neighbor who had just returned from Thailand, over for lunch. He kept an eye on our house when we weren’t there. We paid him to mow and plow and we called him from the city regularly with requests to remove the peaches we’d accidentally left on the kitchen table or to find Duncan’s blankie and ship it to us overnight express. He was an ex-pat Manhattanite who had lost it after 9/11 and left his job as an upholsterer to live in the country full-time and plant a garden containing fifty kinds of garlic. He had various conspiracy theories about the Bush administrations and he was a cousin of Vice President Dick Cheney, but he pronounced his name Chee-ney to disassociate himself.

  In the country you were always so happy to see another person, it didn’t really matter who it was. I’d always bought Charlie awkward Christmas presents of multiple shirts from Patagonia or multiple pairs of wool socks until I figured out that multiple bottles of Tanqueray and Ketel One were much more to his liking.

  I eyed the shower before getting in. Even though it was my shower, in my house, it still wasn’t my shower in the city, and I didn’t like getting into it. The water smelled of sulfur. The knobs turned the wrong way. Stepping into it I felt as if I were joining the lesbians who had owned the house before us. I hated being naked in the country, which was ironic because we’d bought the house for the same reason all New Yorkers bought country houses—to be naked outside.

  When I got out of the shower I heard Russell already talking to Charlie in the kitchen. I got dressed quickly and went downstairs.

  “I got you a souvenir from Thailand,” Charlie was telling Duncan. He handed him a carved wooden elephant.

  Next to him was another souvenir. A young Thai girl, wearing a strange pantsuit as if she had come for some kind of job interview, stood next to him clutching his arm. She had too-short hair that was begging to be longer and a beanstalk neck that led to a hilly enchanted kingdom of cheeks and lips. Despite her jetblack hair and Asian skin, she had the big round rust freckles of a redhead. She wasn’t beautiful and yet she was so much more beautiful than anything in upstate New York and so much more beautiful than anyone who should be standing next to Charlie.

  “I’d like you to meet my wife,” Charlie said. “This is Gra. She cuts my toenails,” he said by way of introduction. “She actually cuts and files them.”

  “Why don’t you do that for me?” Russell asked me.

  “You want her to do yours?” Charlie said to Russell. “She’ll do it. She doesn’t mind.”

  “Hi, Gra is it?” I said. “Did you say ʽwife’?”

  “Her name isn’t Gra but I call her Gra because that’s the Thai word for freckles. Her name is too hard to pronounce for Americans.”

  Every time Charlie said the word Gra, the woman flashed a look like she was a prisoner desperately trying to tell us something.

  “What’s your real name?” I asked her.

  “She doesn’t speak any English!” Charlie said.

  Although I didn’t speak any foreign languages, I prided myself on having an excellent ear and the ability to pronounce foreign words correctly.

  “What’s her name?” I asked Charlie. “I want to try to learn it.”

  He made some strange combination of sounds and Gra shook her head. “I’m telling you, stick with Gra. She likes it. We’re very happy.”

  Gra suddenly knelt on my kitchen floor and for a moment I was afraid she was really ready to cut Russell’s toenails, which had always been a source of many fights between us, but then I saw she was petting Hum. Her black eyes were welling up with tears.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “She’s fine, she just misses her dog,” Charlie said. “She had to leave her dog with her mother. It was a Pomeranian. One of those fluffy little rat dogs.”

  “You can get a dog,” I told her.

  “She say: You. Can. Get. Dog,” Charlie translated in a strange exaggerated fake Thai accent.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m learning Thai,” Charlie said.

  “That wasn’t Thai. That was English spoken in a racist accent.”

  “I didn’t speak Thai just now?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I don’t even know the difference anymore. It’s called Thanglish. Dog ao te. Pomeranian mai mai. I told her we could get a dog, but not a Pomeranian. I hate that kind.”

  She stood up and looked at him as if she had no idea what he was saying. She pointed at Hum and smiled.

  “That’s Hum,” I told Gra.

  “Hum,” she tried. “Hum. Hum.”

  “Yes,” I said, as excited as Annie Sullivan talking to Helen Keller. It might not be the most useful English word she would learn, but it was a start. As soon as possible, I would teach her important American phrases like “Cut your own disgusting toenails.”

  “Humdog,” she said.

  “Come on, Charlie, you ca
n get her a Pomeranian,” I said. I could tell my kidding tone hadn’t masked my anger. I couldn’t stand the thought of her missing her dog like that. Of her long slim fingers touching Charlie’s gross cracked toes. I couldn’t stop the horrifying graphic thoughts in my head of various Kama Sutra positions—Gra on top, riding his cock, facing away from him and stretching down to cut his toenails with an enormous metal clipper.

  Until this moment I had never really looked at Charlie. He had gray hair and lines on the back of his neck like an argyle sweater. He had brown eyes and a raggedy mustache that looked like it’d been around since the seventies. I thought of a report I had just seen on CNN that girls as young as three were used as sex slaves in Cambodia and China. They called oral sex “yum yum”—the same thing I called Hum’s food when we gave it to him in his dish—and it showed footage of two little Chinese girls saying, “We do yum yum.”

  “I’m not getting one of those fur balls.”

  “She has to live with your big turtle, the least you could do is get her the dog she likes.”

  “She likes the turtle.”

  “You hold out for the Pomeranian,” I barked at Gra like an agent. I didn’t want her to take this deal.

  “Well, this is great,” Russell said, shooting me a look. “Can I get anyone a drink?”

  “She don’t need a Pomeranian. She’ll have a Jack, Russell,” Charlie said, giving Gra a taste of the humor she would be stuck with for the rest of her life. He laughed until we were forced to laugh to stop him. “And yes, I will have a drink. Vodka if you have it. This is a celebration.”

  “So are you two actually married?” I asked, trying to sound as enthusiastic as a bridesmaid.

  “We have to wait for the paperwork to come. And then we want to have a wedding, and we really want you to be there.”

  “Of course, thank you! We wouldn’t miss it,” I said. There was no way I was going, but I would give a gift, a Pomeranian perhaps.

  Gra stood and started talking excitedly and Charlie seemed to understand her.