After Birth (16 page)

Cat’s displeased with the crowd. She sets about getting us drinks like she’s on a cheesy scripted CIA drama. She is too cool for school. I don’t even want a drink.

She does not fuck around
, Bryan observes.

Indeed she does not.

I dance a little, slowly, takes time to get into it. Bryan dives right in with some self-conscious robot moves.

Lights turned off for maximum relief
, Naomi’s invites say at the bottom.

Just because they cut that kid out of me doesn’t mean my hips are good for nothing. I can still swing them okay. I’m not dead yet.

Bryan’s game. We’re getting into a bona fide groove when Cat returns.

You don’t have to be stoned or psychic to see that Cat is plainly shit-her-pants terrified of dancing. She just stands there holding three beers. She hands them to me and scurries off to find a bathroom. I hand one to Bryan and two to a passing undergraduate in fishnets.

Cheers
, Fishnet screams, keeps moving.

I’ve never actually laid eyes on your husband
, Bryan yells.

I’ve never actually laid eyes on your cock
, I yell back.

What’s the deal with you?

The deal?

Are you happy?

Am I “happy”?

Yeah. Happy.

Shrug. Let’s puzzle that one out, shall we? Happiness.

I dunno.

Is there someone else who would know?

Point taken.

There is the most adorable girl nearby, six feet tall with short hair, like nineteen. In love with herself, dancing. I study her, and begin to copy her.

How do you feel?

High!

Aside from that!

How does one know how one feels?

One feels and then observes one’s feelings.

What if one doesn’t know how one feels? What if one has no fucking idea what feeling is even fucking supposed to feel like?

Then one might not be happy.

I stop dancing, hold out my hand for his beer, and suck on it. Fresh, sweaty flesh moves all around us. They are so lovely, these girls. When the time comes I hope they will avail themselves of all the biological-feminist childbirth literature they can get their capable hands on. May they attend one another’s births in full bloom. I hope they worship the moon in sisterhood. Bryan is staring at me.

Do you think your husband’s happy?

Probably not.
I lean in real close so I don’t have to yell.
I’m kind of a bitch.

His smirk is the most genuine thing about him, the cutest. This is a terrible sign in a person, and most irresistible. Or used to be.

You’re beautiful
, he said.
You know that.

My response to that kind of thing has always been mortified disbelief and a pathetically thrilled
shut the fuck up.
But I let it stand. Who is he to me? Maybe I am beautiful. Maybe the scant light is hitting me right, maybe my hair is falling nicely. Maybe my shirt is draping well, maybe my ass angles high and round. Maybe some hint of lipstick still remains. Sure, that’s right: beautiful.

It’s a stupid dare, Bryan’s stare. Cat’s back and he’s still looking at me, but I’m out. Bye, little boy. I am a grown-ass woman. Faced down death and lived to tell the sorry shocked stitched-up tale, and here is an overgrown boy standing here trying to use me for some game. Who am I to him?

I disappear into the crowd, lose myself in all the sweaty young.

Omigod!
Naomi almost tackles me.
You
came!

On the car ride home Cat is in the front seat positively purring. Bryan has his hand on her thigh, and now that we’re out of the party she’s jumping around to the music from the radio. She’s been liberated. Maybe she got high. She is not herself. I’m stretched out in the back, still sweaty from all that dancing. I danced hard. Everything is dreamy.

Donut drive-through
, Bryan points out.

Omigod should we? SHOULD WE!?
Cat is out of her mind, and I kind of like her this way.

New Year’s Day. I make dinner for Mina and Bryan. Paul goes to the gym.

He’s good people
, Mina tells me.

I know
, I say, sounding defeated.

We have good chocolate and hot buttered rum and lentil stew, not in that order. We have a stack of recent tabloids, a vaporizer, Bryan as acting DJ, and two sleeping babies. We have a fire in the fireplace. Other than Bryan’s constant photographing and posting of everything, it’s nice.

I’m going to barf
, Mina says. She throws her tabloid at me. Cover story about a celebrity hospitalized after her fourth C-section in five years. All those incisions. Uterus covered in scar tissue. Placenta had nowhere to attach.

Don’t blame the victim
, I say.

Cool, let’s be victims and no one can ever blame us for anything.

Maybe you should try to, like, really stigmatize surgical birth
, Bryan says.
Like a guerilla PR campaign about how weird and dangerous it is to have your baby surgically removed. That’s good stuff
, he says, reaching for his machine.

You know why I hate women?

No, doll, tell us
, Bryan says to me.
Why do you hate women?

Because they didn’t prepare me. Because they didn’t help me. Because they let me do this alone. Because they avoided knowing, mostly, themselves. How could they let me fall down this rabbit hole? They knew what was going to happen. Every woman who’s ever lived is supposed to know.

Thank goodness we don’t have daughters
, Mina says.

Thank fucking God we don’t have daughters
, I agree.

Sheryl told me she played cards in labor. Reported it without affect. Beep went the machines. Beep beep beep.
And I said, oh look I must be having a contraction.
She giggled when she said it, like she was talking about someone else’s body, someone else’s birth.

Maybe having given birth, you don’t have to fear death anymore
, Mina says.

Bryan is typing. My mother leans over and squints at his screen, her arms crossed.

We’re as fearful of childbirth as we are of death
, I say.
Why else do we do everything to try and numb and control it? Why else does no one like to talk about it? Everyone’s scared. They’re so scared they don’t even understand they’re scared, that everything’s about fear.

That’s good
, Bryan says.
“Everyone’s so scared they don’t understand they’re scared.”

My mother rolls her eyes.

People have always feared childbirth
, she says.
And people have always feared death.
Since always and forever. There’s nothing new under the sun.

The local NPR affiliate is replaying some
Gifts of the Magi
special.
Think only of what you have
, booms a beautifully deep and frayed male voice,
and give no thought to what you lack.

Hey
, Bryan says later, before I go up to bed. Mina is passed out on the couch, Zev on her chest. The fire embers are still crackling.
Level with me here. Do you think she’s, like, depressed?

Uh . . . yeah.

Do you think she’s, like, okay? Because I said I’d come back, but I can’t stay forever.

I think it’s not normal to have a baby and be by yourself.

She’s not by herself. She has you! What am I supposed to do!?

You’re supposed to hang with her. You’re supposed to marvel at how nuts it is. Be indulgent. It takes time. That’s it. Keep her company. Feed her.

I
am
indulgent.
All I
do
is support her.
Yesterday she starts in crying out of nowhere, tells me she’s exhausted and she needs to find a humane way to kill them both. It’s bananas. And I don’t know if this whole thing—
he grabs his own tit as if to offer it to me
—is really helping. Why not give the kid some formula and get on with it.

That’s not what she wants.

She’s lost her mind.

She’s not the first.

Are you some kind of witch?

Yup
, I reply, and stare him down.

3

JANUARY

Waddling through the final days of pregnancy, exhorted to take long walks, I stumbled upon the Utrecht Historical Society Archive, which is a warehouse next door to the Utrecht Architectural Parts Archive, which is an even bigger warehouse, where you can find all manner of the most incredible old doors and windows and decorative ironwork and stained glass and lighting fixtures and clawfoot tubs and plumbing accessories and mantels and fireplaces and radiators and spindles, stair rails, newel posts, moldings, woodwork, and flooring. The kind of place where sensitive grad students imagine the quirky antiheroes of their dreams hang out. In a dusty pile of old periodicals I found a guide to breastfeeding, circa 1941.

Nurse your baby for one minute on the first day. Then nurse your child for two minutes on the second day, and three on the third, moving in this way toward fifteen minutes by two weeks, which is the most time your child should ever be at the breast. Crying is good for their lung development.

I paid five cents for it and waddled on.

Bryan is watching me nurse Zev. Mina is taking a nap.

Does Paul suck on your tits?

If I say yes, I’m kinky and disloyal, but if I say no, I’m a prude.

Do you want to suck on my tits?

Sure!

Sorry.

Come on. You have the prettiest little nipples.

I bare them at him, pleased.

Jew nips. The most delicious.

I sing a soft Misogynists refrain to baby Zev, who’s got all kinds of fascinating new expressions:
not shy and won’t apologize.

It’s fantastic, these babies and my boobs.

People don’t want to hear about that, don’t want to entertain it. Vast numbers will watch two naked girls online shit in a cup then eat it, but babies enjoying the living hell out of breasts as supreme source of endless free nourishment and good health for all remains taboo. Explain that to me in a way that does not skirt the historical imperative of misogyny. Go ahead. Try.

I’m good at this. Look at me, nursing two babies in tandem. I’m a damn fine nurse. I am way more than enough. I am everything. Give me a third. Give me a fourth. I am a font. Plenty to go around. Let me sit here, life all around me, in me, through me, down the front of my oversized shirt, forever and ever, amen.

Mina comes in, groggy.

Did you just nurse him?

Yeah.

But now I’m ready.

So nurse Walker.

Okay.
She seems a little miffed. Which in turn makes me kind of miffed.

I turn back to Bryan.

So.

Yeah.

Are you going to tell us what happened with you and Cat on New Year’s?

It’s not very exciting.

I’ll be the judge of that.

She was not at all into hurting me and could not for the life of her articulate anything interesting she might want me to do to her. And she kept, like, gazing at me trying to make out, and I was like, no, listen, I want you to squeeze my balls until I puke.

You should write a story about a world in which everyone has to have a baby
, I tell him suddenly.

Like, it’s enforced?

Yeah
, I say.
Think of all the crazy shit people would do.

No crazier than the crazy shit people already do, probably
, Mina says.
Anyway, you can’t tell a writer what to write.

Sheryl suggests I come down to the city for a “day of fun.” Paul’s all for it. Practically pushes me out the door.

Baby, go.
We’ll be fine.

Sheryl wants to get our nails done. She’s consumed with the idea that we get our nails done. I don’t want to get my nails done. It smells like toxic death in there.

Oh lighten up, Ari, for God’s sake. What do
you
want to do, then?

I can’t think of anything. Or, rather, I can’t narrow it down. I want an empty five-hundred-square-foot studio in Chelsea with someone else’s name on the buzzer. I want to sit by a window in a café with a book and a pen while it rains. I want to take the train uptown to see someone at a party. I want to wear a hat without looking ridiculous. I want to get stoned and try on sumptuous clothes at boutiques. I want to spend an hour at a good secondhand store in Brooklyn. I want to wear something gorgeous and singular to a museum, and meet up with a bad-news lover. Toward the end of dinner (appetizers and a lot of wine) I want him to put his hand lightly on my breast until I begin to get feverish and we have to get out of there immediately, right now, pay, let’s just go, it’s okay that’s a huge tip it’s okay who cares c’mon let’s go. I want to wake up the next day at noon in the beautiful light of his uncluttered space, kiss him goodbye, promise to see him again soon, maybe mean it. I want to go for a walk, to the farmers’ market, sit all afternoon again with a strong latte and again a book, again a pen, aftershocks from last night’s rash of orgasms. I want to see a movie with a girlfriend, talk about what we’re working on, what we’re trying to accomplish, what we’re thinking. I want to laugh. I want a little house in the Catskills where I can lay a futon, burn some sage, shave my head like a penitent, spend my days reading and napping and writing and stretching and cooking in silence. Almost certainly I chose the nunnery in a former life.