After Birth (15 page)

Well my God, imagine, the nerve to multitask like that!

Everyone looks at me.

No, seriously, you should bury her up to her neck and throw rocks at her until she dies. What a crazy lunatic, offering her child a normal, healthy mammalian childhood.
A woman in full bloom of health daring to use her body according to its biological design and function? Gross! When she could be purchasing from a multinational corporation a totally inferior product for the same purpose. That’s downright un-American. And to do so within full view of an intellectual such as yourself!? Tie her up and SET HER ON FUCKING FIRE.

Paul is stock-still. Betsy emits a nervous, high-pitched giggle, and Cat keeps taking these extraordinarily small bites of her food, and I think: I fucking hate you. I really fucking hate you all.

Then, oh great, just wonderful, of course, sure, my mother is resting an elbow on the mantel, nodding at me, mock impressed.

The doctor told me breastfeeding was “for the natives,”
she says.
They had these pills you could take so you wouldn’t make milk. The nurses were adamant about formula. I hardly saw you the first five days. It was absolute heaven.

Before anyone says anything else I gather up the baby and go out the front door with a tit still hanging out.

Slam
. I forgot my bag, which has my keys in it. I sit on our stoop for a while, heart pounding, tears a-rolling. Then I carry Walker down to Crisp and Jerry’s and sit on
their
steps for a few, trying to calm down, waiting for something. Can’t tell you what. A sign. Absolution. Grace. None shows, but when I knock, Mina opens up and I don’t have to explain a goddamn thing. She locks the door behind us.

Weeds or flowers
, Marianne told me the first time we had dinner. She singled me out early. I was terribly flattered.
Those are your options.
Are you hardy, do you have that sturdy beauty? Or are you a delicate cultivation? Nothing sadder than a weed hard at work to become a flower. Or a flower pretending she’s a weed.

Isn’t that kind of essentialist?

Weed or flower, sweetheart. Weed or flower.

On the last day, bleeding pretty much over, back to normal, I try to convince Paul it’s okay. “Safe,” as they say.

Please
, I say as we near the end. He’s on top, which despite the weight of history and religion is truly my favorite. Lately it feels like this is the only way I can get anywhere near him.

Baby
, I say to him,
it’s okay.

You sure?
He is unconvinced, but there is some willingness to be convinced.

Yes, baby, yes. Please. Yes.

You’re sure?

The thought of him coming inside me, just this once—like old times!—is itself almost enough to push me over the edge. I’m close. So close.

Please
, I beg him.
Please.

The uterus is a monster. Insatiable. It wants to eat my brain alive. The minute I begin to relax and really inhale, exhale, clear my head, look around, start to see the world again, recognize myself and the people around me, at that very moment there’s this malevolent whisper, this taunting
have another baby, have another one, c’mon, what’re you, chicken or something, when are you going to have another one, go for it do it do it do it come on come on you know you want it you want it, you know you do.

Before I had a baby it was all about are you going to have a baby? How many more years left until you can’t have a baby? What happens if time runs out and you’ve failed to have a baby? Will you have a baby? Will you, will you? What if you miss out and
don’t
have a baby? Tick tock, tick tock! (By the way, psssst! Don’t you
want
a baby? Does it matter?? Have one!)

Fine, great, okay, so it all worked out and you had a baby before the iron curtain of forty-whatever came down, and you didn’t even have to manufacture one out of questionable medical ethics, sheer will, and a suitcase of cash. High-five, you did it! Well done. Now: are you going to have another one? Don’t you want another one? And another? Are you going to have another? Are you? Are you?? Having the one, it turned out, wasn’t enough to get the world, or the world inside your body, off your back.

Paul finishes on my hip and I get myself a washcloth.

The final college roommate was Liz. Her father had killed himself. She was weirdly quiet and quite shitty at eye contact, sitting on a trash heap of anger, lying about it as hard as she possibly could. She was queen of the dykes, and I loved them all, my darling dykes, done with the defects of straight girls. It seemed to me at that point that one could not be a fully realized woman—nay, human—if one was not a lesbian. Or, distant second, a straight man. A person who is interested in women, in other words. A lover of women. A person for whom women are the focal point, the main intrigue.

I never had the cliché fag sidekick, dish about shopping and boys. Screw that. I had arrived at an understanding that straight women and gay men were uninteresting. Anyone interested in sex with men, no thanks.

Lesbians and straight dudes: so straightforward. It was all on the table. (Also they wanted to fuck me.)

I could not seem to be able to have sex with a girl, though; that was the only problem. I loved women, and loved women who loved women, but I remained stubbornly, fundamentally interested in the idea of dick. I liked being naked with women. Liked putting my mouth on girl skin. But I couldn’t get the love palsy with a woman. A few tried to convince me I was just not ready to admit the truth. That I should run headlong into the particular discomfort a woman provided. Much confusion.

Important lessons were learned, however. Stand up straight, stop smiling all the time, stop trying to make everyone like you. Call it feminist. Call it whatever you want. Relax your face. Don’t be so friendly and agreeable all the time, don’t put yourself last, worried about everyone else’s feelings first.

Liz and I criticized each other constantly and immediately after graduation had the most insane hate-fuck of all time, after which we happily never spoke again.

Pricing and stocking dairy at the co-op.

Walker’s at Nasreen’s. I can’t stop looking at pictures from last year on my device. I can’t deal with the child as he is today; I’ve just barely wrapped my head around the child as he was months ago. In a year I’ll be looking at pictures of him now, getting teary, wondering where the time went.

Back to work
,
deadbeat
, Naomi tells me.
You coming to New Year’s Eve? Gonna be amazing.

What happened when the band broke up?

I played with a few other bands for a while.
Sort of for hire, but none of them worked out. Energy wasn’t right. Not like the energy was right with Kelly and Stef and me either, though. At all. Stef was the worst. Most insecure girl you’ve ever met. Determined to make everyone else feel as bad as she did at all times.

Yeah, you can kind of tell.

Kelly was great, but so, so depressed. She just withdrew and withdrew. There was nothing anyone could do. The harder I tried, the more gone she was. She had her drug friends, and they had this, like, private language. She was already long gone when she died. It was kind of anticlimactic.

Yeah, so it’s not even exactly sad.

It’s just kind of this relief.

But you can’t explain that to people.

No. The sadness is kind of just incidental.

What’s this about Stef becoming a born-again Christian and starting some sort of Christian rock camp—is that true? And there’s a documentary about it?

Rocking Out: Badass Like Jesus.

So then what?

I did nothing for a long time. Fucked men who required my full attention, lived weird places, whatever. OD’d. Spent some time in the hospital. Wrote. Traveled a bunch. Just took off, no place to come back to.

Where?

Rome for a while. Frankfurt. After the worst and final guy. Maine. New Mexico. An artists’ colony in Wyoming for two months out of every year.
Life feels really full when you never stop moving. Until it doesn’t.

What was the hospital like?

Are you asking about ECT? It was not like in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Once was plenty. I don’t remember a lot of it.

Abruptly she picks up her device.

No one calls me anymore.

No one calls anybody anymore, I don’t think.

Six
A.M.
Walker’s howling. I get him, let Paul sleep in.

Thank you, babe
, he says from under the pillow.

Kitchen. Make oatmeal, fill the sippy. Assist with spoon. Invent a game with blocks, which buys me about six minutes of peace. When he tires of the blocks, he toddles over to me and buries his face in my leg, shrieks with joy, blows a raspberry, laughs his ass off.

Boobie? Boobie?

I’m not saying it happens every minute of every day, and I’m not saying it renders the other stuff unimportant, but there are moments of the most crazy all-encompassing joy. What a phenomenally beautiful kid. A funny, dear child. Kind and open and loving.
Love bug
, I call him.
Monkey. Shmoopee-doo.
If the world interferes with him, with what is loving and open and funny in him, I will rear up in full roar. I will break the world’s neck with a swipe of my mighty paw, no warning. Anything fucks with this kid, I will fucking kill it.

It’s the wildest thing: I really and truly love him more every day. I had no idea. You supposedly fall in love with them the moment they exit your body, but in the aftermath I was just like WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT. And I have to believe he was just as much like “what the fuck” as was I. And there we both were. The relationship develops, the getting to know each other. I mean, he’s completely and totally dependent, which is very intense, but it’s not love. Over time I have to let go of him. That’s love. That’s the work.

But what if
I
fuck with this kid? What if
I
interfere with what is loving and open and funny in him??

We watched a movie last night, me and Paul. One of those wacky road comedies in which a box of human cremains figures prominently. At the end, the devastated/hilarious widow scatters said cremains off a seaside cliff and winds up, thanks to the wind, covered in most of it herself. Whenever you see cremains used in the plotting of a comedy, you can be sure that no one involved knows anything whatsoever about death.

Paul could not understand what it was in that dumb-ass movie that I objected to. Sometimes I get lonely in my darkness. Marriage is tough. You have to try and be your best self at all times. The horrid, petty, lying sack of shit you know in yourself has to be daily wrestled to the ground. And it’s not like your heart curls up and dies; it continues to want and want and want. It, too, must be wrestled to the ground.

As soon as we turned off the movie we could hear a bat in the eaves.
Me me me me me. Me me me me.

When he was asleep I masturbated to a guy I loved for a few weeks once, our whole relationship naked in my apartment. I remember him in perfect detail. It never would have worked out between us but Oh My God.

The bats kept it up all night.
Meemeemeemeemee.

This house is a nineteenth-century mansion; I forget to see it sometimes. I sit in the living room and marvel. Vast space we’re growing to fill. I wonder if we’ll have another baby. So ripped apart. Like thrill seekers must feel when they jump out of planes. Broke me. Killed off the old self pretty thoroughly. That other woman is gone. That girl.

I think I expected to feel like Walker was some extension of ME, a little piece of ME. It’s not like that at all.

you know she had the baby in your whirlpool, right?

yeah she warned us. jer got all misty about it.

Cat wonders what I’m up to, wants to hang. I don’t need her anymore. I have a real friend now!

Little under the weather
, I lie.
Plague of day care.

Bat in the house
, I text Will.

Nothing you can do about it but chase them out with a broom. Usually they show up in the fall, but it’s been so warm the last few days, maybe it woke up confused. They say the next global pandemic will almost certainly come from a batborne pathogen.

Wonderful. Thanks.

New Year’s Eve.

Bryan’s back.

some party in troy . . .
he chimes.
wanna go?

Fo sho
, I reply, but autocorrect turns it into
Go who.

New Year’s isn’t Paul’s “thing.” I used to fight him on it, force festivity, but after a few years of winding up in tears while the rest of the world kisses and hugs and shouts and dances and sings, I decided to disregard him entirely, cranky old man. So far, so good.

I direct Bryan to Crisp’s top-shelf if stale ecstasy, which is in an industrial-sized pill bottle labeled Wellbutrin, over which there’s a purple permanent-marker happy face.

Gonna sit this one out, kids
, Mina says.

I take spontaneous pity and text Cat. She is dressed and on her stoop to meet us twenty minutes later.

This is Bryan
, I tell her.

Hey.

Hey, back.

The night is pure ice. Naomi’s savings bank is adorable, just me and Bryan and Cat and a few hundred Utrecht and Bennington and Bard and Vassar and Skidmore students dressed up like me in the ninth grade. Combat boots, Jessica McClintock dresses, glasses, the works.