After Birth (17 page)

So we go get our nails done, Sheryl and I, and then I don’t recognize my hands with their dumb little squares of perfect.

Late afternoon I have coffee with Marianne. She eyes my manicure.

She’d recommended Chodorow’s
The Reproduction of Mothering
; I’d found it to be a crock of shit. I talk Susun Weed and Ina May Gaskin and Maya Tiwari and Pema Chödrön.

Please not all that earth mother goddess shit, Ari.

Actually yeah all that earth mother goddess shit, Mari. Actually quite yeah.

I sit up straighter. Those are the feminist writers I consider important now. Feminism without focus on the body, the soul, the relationship between the two—biologically female bodies with distinctly female struggles—is of no interest to me. The body is the soul’s home and expression. The body is everything. To harm the female body is the original and only crime.

Her brows are raised so high, they look spring-loaded for escape. You have to be careful about how you tense your face, because however you tense your face is what your face slowly but surely becomes.

I don’t know about the wet-nursing as political act, Ari.

Well, hon, that might be kind of a massive failure of imagination on your part.

Her smile is both faint and rigid. I want to throttle her.

All right.
She shrugs.
Prove me wrong.

She glances at photos of Walker on my device. Bored smile. Lights another cigarette.

He’s very sweet.

You know what’s truly ridiculous? I had this idea that she’d be proud of Walker, that she’d love him because he is mine. That she’d want to mother him, too. That this new family would include her.

We part on the corner of Bleecker and Charles.

Be happy, Ari
, she says.

Then I run thirty blocks up Seventh Avenue to catch the train, my boobs full and hard and aching. I thought I could be gone the whole day from my nurselings. Wrong. Okay, body, got it, read you loud and clear. Abundantly.

So
, Bryan says.
Here’s the pitch. The year is 2115. Humanity has lost the ability to lactate. The government controls all baby formula, and it’s made under secretive circumstances, with, we suspect, mind-control additives. So babies won’t grow up to question authority or think independently. Only one woman can still breastfeed. She is an ignorant farm girl from a poisoned American backwater. The knowledge was passed down by her mother, and her mother’s mother, all the way back through a line of women who operated on pluck and principle back when these things were hotly debated or whatever. The government cannot allow this girl to nurse her babies, or anyone else’s babies. She is a threat to national security, not to mention massive corporate interests.

One and the same
, Mina interjects.

If she shares her knowledge with other women, there could within a generation rise up a rebel army to overturn the status quo. So they dispatch an assassin, and the farm girl, with her cohort, goes on the run.

He looks up at us with a grin.

Yes
, I say.

He does have good ideas sometimes. He just fails to follow through.

He frowns at her.

No, listen
, she says,
the problem is no one cares about babies. I mean, they care about babies like “oh look at the cute baby” or “oh, ha ha, funny-looking baby with an old-man voice-over,” but no one actually cares about babies. I mean, the details. It’s boring. If I may.
She gestures at the strewn coffee table.
Breast pumps, lecithin, nipple blisters, fenugreek, highchairs. I mean, who cares? I don’t even care.

Ask her who the father is
, Bryan says to me.

I don’t dare.

Virgin birth
, she says.

That’s all she’ll say.

Check this out
, she tells me. Footage of Kristin Hersh giving an interview in Denmark while breastfeeding her one-year-old.

All you bitches are the same
, Bryan says.

We look at him. One entity, her and me. One body. Boundaries are nothing but a refusal of life and love.

Oh I’m sorry; all you
ladies
are the same.

Better.

You agonize about wanting a baby not wanting a baby ambivalence about having a baby oh-time-is-running-out-and-I-want-a-baby and then you get a baby and you’re all fucked up about having a baby. I mean, you wanted a baby, you got a baby, chill out and enjoy the baby.

Do you think
, Mina wonders,
it might be a little more complicated than that?

I don’t know, people have only been having babies since, like, the start of time? Man up, ladies.

We’re dumb cunts
, I explain.

You are. You are dumb cunts.

Dude, believe me.

You guys, oh my God, check it out.
She squeezes her right one, milks herself, sprays a foot in the air.

We clap and hoot and high-five.

At the co-op I have a new shift-mate. She’s recently a grandmother and has just returned from ten days in Oregon with her daughter and new granddaughter.

Wow
, I say.
Your daughter’s so lucky to have you.

Yeah
, she says.
She was really grateful.

Ten days, imagine that. Cooking, cleaning, laundry, getting up with the baby in the middle of the night. Saying okay, everything’s gonna be all right.

I’m shelving the fair-trade dark chocolate; new gram is working on the gourmet peanut brittle display. I break up a bar of the fair trade and put out samples.

This chocolate
, she says.
The best!

Amazing
, I agree.

Hard to go without every now and again.

What is it with women and chocolate?

I don’t know that it’s a woman thing, per se
, she says.

O-ho, the second-wave police are out. Heaven forbid it might be true that female bodies are different. Heaven forbid we admit that living in these female bodies is different. More terrible and more wonderful. Because, what? We might lose the vote? Because we might get veiled, imprisoned? Best deny it, deny it, make it to the Oval Office, win, win, win.

Oh, it’s most definitely a woman thing
, I say, then turn my back and work in silence for the remainder of the shift.

Naturally you’ll want to know how my grandmother survived.

My mother’s mother. Tormenter of my tormenter. I have all her letters. Sure you’re curious about how she got from Auschwitz all the way up to Park Avenue, to Westchester, to pay cash for the grand piano and the grandfather clock and bone china and the apartment and the house in which it all grew dusty. Exactly what primal torments did she endure and escape? Everyone always wants to know. They ask around it.

But you can’t un-know, okay?

She survived by sucking Nazi cock. Nineteen years old. Survived with her mouth full of throbbing Nazi sausage.

All righty?

I found letters from after the war at the bottom of my mother’s jewelry box.

She survived under a thorough coating of Nazi cum. Survived letting Nazis fuck her up the ass. Did you think these activities were new?

That’s how she survived. It wasn’t put exactly that way in the letters, but I got the message loud and clear.

Shocked? Appalled? Aroused? Please don’t act all upset. You think she survived because she believed in the triumph of the human spirit? Because of faith, hope, Transcendental Meditation?

Please.

She survived by giving herself over to all things you like to look at on the Internet. You. Spare me the histrionics and go erase your browser history.

All the things they wanted to do to her and all the things they wanted to watch one another do to her. She survived by fully accepting it. Fucked in every possible way, by every possible combination of them. For three years.

Now you know.

One time I fucked two guys. I kind of liked it, but soon after felt awful, and the awful feeling was itself like an exciting evil drug I wanted more of. There was great freedom in being an object. Letting them use me, my body a thing to be used. The feeling was vaguely superior. Not even vaguely, come to think of it. Like I had transcended my soul, left the troublesome thing behind once and for all, no need for it. Bothersome thing.

The Nazis weren’t all bad to her. A few were sort of sweet. Some went slow. One was a virgin. He cried, she said. Buried his head in her shoulder and wept like a child.

She got food, heat, a cot. The privilege of washing herself and her clothes. She didn’t freeze or starve or get typhus.

Okay? That’s how. Survival ain’t pretty. Bookish and musical country girl, her butcher father’s pride and joy, maiden no more. Beloved eldest, caretaker of the little ones. She had dreamt of attending conservatory in the big city where artists roam. Raped under the smoke, in the good old days before anyone had a cell phone with which to take pictures for the news outlets. Not that the news outlets cared. Her younger brothers and sisters weren’t half so lucky.

Scene: Deportation. Death camp. Cold. Fear.

They get herded off the train into line. At the front of the line an officer sends most to the right and a very few to the left. My grandmother clings to her childhood friend Elsa. She’s already been separated from her younger siblings. They reach the front of the line. The officer looks them over. They are huddled together trying not to cry.

Who made that dress
, he barks at Elsa, who is wearing a gorgeous high-waisted wool blend with double seams and elaborate neckline with folds like flower petals. She was a masterful dressmaker from a long lineage.

She looks that officer square in the face.

I did
, she says. Her German is flawless.

You did?

Yes. That’s what I do.

You made that dress?

Yes.

You make dresses?

Yes.

To the left!

He appraises my grandmother next. A beauty, pale skin, bright eyes, nice tits.

Both of you! To the left.

A great story. There was going to be a movie about it, once. Two girls, best friends from girlhood, having lost their families, are saved by beauty and skill and friendship.

Well, Elsa worked her fingers to the bone creating fine garments for Nazi wives and children; my grandmother sucked cock. The movie people wanted to whitewash a bit. The screenwriter made it so that my grandmother was simply the romantic interest of a particular, tenderhearted Nazi officer. A love story, essentially. This infuriated my mother to such a degree that she nixed the entire thing.

They went ahead and made the movie about just Elsa anyway. There were Oscar nominations. A very stirring score.

You had to hand it to my mother.

Elsa lived to be forever and a half years old on a lake in Michigan with her voluminous family. Proud Survivor matriarch, classic breed.

The other whores showed my grandmother the way. Véronique from Paris and Helge from Berlin. They showed her how to hide a small part of herself. Those girls were her sisters, united in brutality and detachment. A fierce love developed between them. Practical girls, by necessity. No silliness, no games. Each specially selected at the trains by the commandant himself: only the most exotic and slender, with the blackest hair, the creamiest Jew skin, the darkest almondine Jew eyes, the highest Jew cheekbones.

Say this for the commandant: he had excellent taste. Some of the officers were genuinely fond of the girls, brought them gifts. Jam, a ribbon, music box, perfume. Part of the trick was to act so each man believed he was your one and only.

And when it’s all over the Red Cross comes in and hands out oatmeal. She meets my grandfather in a refugee camp. He is a kind and gentle man, a superlative man, not interested in fucking, much too destroyed by his own survival, of which no one knows—or has ever told—the details.

He was ancient by the time I knew him. He’d been married with a daughter already when the war happened. The war. Always a war, always some war. The wife and daughter obviously didn’t make it out.

He’s my password for everything:
IsaacRadnor36.
Lucky number. Chai times two. How old he was when the war was over.

He’d pat my head absently, slip me a quarter, load up his plate, shuffle to and from the buffet. He didn’t say much. I remember him laughing with me once about something silly, the two of us in brief lockstep. He felt like a very silly very elderly brother more than anything else. Funny little old man.
It’s your ever-loving grandpa
, he’d say in his thick accent.
It’s your ever-loving granddaughter
, I’d faithfully reply.

I do not like talking to the grown-ups
, he told me once.
The grown-ups are boring. You are not boring, bubbeleh.
Longest I ever heard him speak. He was dead before I was ten.

I liked how I got special treatment on Holocaust Remembrance Day at school. Me and Tricia Ginsburg and Daniel What-was-his-name, too. I liked how the facts of my family made me unimpeachable in small ways, socially. You just said Holocaust, you just said Survivor, and it was like
I have my period.
You got the equivalent of
poor thing, go lie down in the nurse’s office, take it easy.

But war has destroyed a lot of people in history
, I challenged my mother one day after a sixth-grade history unit on Vietnam. It wasn’t just the Jews. What about Hiroshima? What about every back-to-back war since forever? What about Palestine? This was meant to bait her.

You don’t know the horrors
, my mother said, lashing out, meaner the sicker she got, or maybe sicker the meaner she got.
You cannot begin to imagine the horrors. You have no idea. Absolutely none. So just keep your fucking mouth shut, why don’t you.