After Birth (18 page)

Anyway, Grandfather adores Grandmother no end, wants to take care of her, is extremely tender. They marry but barely touch for months. They head for Lady Liberty with her outstretched et cetera. Stand-up guy, my grandfather. Smart. Steady. Miraculously cheerful, despite it all. One of those
I believe people are really good at heart
types. And with quite a knack for real estate, turns out. He starts with a single tenement as soon as he can scrape together a down payment from managing a print shop, and within ten years he owns the printing business and two warehouse buildings in SoHo.

Then their problems begin.

I met my best best friend Molly at a party when we were both twenty-three. We had friends in common, don’t remember exactly. College grads in the big shitty. Adorable stupid depressed hilarious Molly.

Your basic shtetl sweetheart. Sturdy and symmetrical. Athletic. Cool, gray eyes. Prettiest girl at Jewish day school, hands down. Which is kind of like saying tallest guy at midget conference, but hey. Legs like tree trunks, which a lot of men, it turned out, against the dictates of the women’s magazines, did not mind At All. I’m talking no taper from thigh to foot, and she was kind of touchy about it.

She dressed like crap, had no interest in what to wear or how to wear it, no style to speak of, maintained this irritating coterie of vapid Jewish youth-group girlfriends she mocked constantly. Posed no threat to the Jewish youth cohort because of the absent style and tree-trunk legs and elaborate self-mocking, thus was universally adored.

Jesus, she was adorable.

Half-insane, undeniable sparkle in her eye. She was depressed, to be sure, but somehow still bubbly. How the hell do you manage to be both depressed
and
bubbly? Charm, it’s called. When she laughed the breath of life breezed through. And if you could make her giggle—which, I was ecstatic to discover, I could! Easily!—it was like a spring you stumble upon, parched.

Don’t remember what we talked about that night, only that we stuck together for hours, nursing weak drinks, agreeing that the party was lame, watching the others get progressively more fucked up. We laughed, I remember laughing. We focused single-mindedly on each other’s amusement. Which is a way of falling in love. Molly and I had the same sense of humor. This is comparatively rare, I understood with her, because it had never happened to me before. Crazy dorky depressed perverse goofball sluts, us two, vested with a taste for the absurd. I adored her. She was
smart.
Not smart as in has all the answers, smart as in funny and a downer and childlike and honest and enthusiastic. Smart as in asked the necessary questions. Couldn’t
lie
about herself, was not putting on a
show.
You looked in those pretty gray eyes, and there she was:
bam
, right there. No scrim, no filter, no bullshit. She wasn’t all bound up in there, gagged and furious and resentful beneath some high-pitched shrink-wrapped mess of pleasantry. Unlike the youth-group coterie. All her struggle and sorrow and absurdity, right up front. She wasn’t employing some manufactured version of herself as full-time press agent for the
real
self, the agoraphobic coward loner living in a deep psychic cave, see? This was a girl who could not lie about herself. I loved her immediately.

We were both living in terrible apartments, working our first “real” jobs. She had a two-hundred-square-foot basement studio in the East Village; I had a random roommate from Jew camp in Cobble Hill. Corpulent girl a year ahead of me who blew-dry her gel-stiff curls every morning at seven with a diffuser attachment the size of her head, then marched off to her administrative assistant job at NYU Hillel. She was not a bad girl, my roommate, just uninteresting. Almost interestingly uninteresting. Her big rebellion was in refusing to have her hair chemically straightened. She wore a shitload of perfume, whatever designer paperweight they were shilling at the department store that year. Her dad was paying her rent. As was mine, but it was different, because I did not diffuse my hair or wear perfume! Because I was not on the husband hunt! Because I was fucking anonymous men in bar bathrooms and doing any drug offered me and generally Living Life to the Fullest!! The excess of perfume made my skull throb. I wasn’t very nice to her.

Molly was fetching coffee on the set of a terrible TV show, but she dreamt of doing stand-up, becoming Tina Fey.

Her parents were career Jews, big
machers
in the suburban DC Jewish community, confounded by her sensibility.

My “alternative lifestyle,”
she said, rolling those pretty gray eyes. Meaning disinclination to go to social work school and/or find a husband—any husband! Strike that: any rich Jewish husband!—ASAP.

Also there was the issue of her intermittent breakdowns, her abiding fondness for her shrink, her string of barely paying jobs. She confounded those
machers
. In theory they were supportive of her stand-up dreams, but she never let them come see her perform in the tiny comedy clubs where she got the worst time slots.

I was fetching coffee for a film producer, meanwhile. He’d had some success in the eighties with a blockbuster romantic comedy about a goofy guy who builds himself a clumsy, malfunctioning robot girlfriend. There were three (and counting) sequels. Straight-to-video stuff, but vast foreign markets were dying for more.

Maybe I’ll sleep with your boss so he’ll produce my one-woman show.

Is that how it works?

That, my friend, is precisely how it works.

My favorite bit she did was this one where the refrain was
omigod thanks daddy am I right?
First a description of some scrape she’d gotten into, your basic wacky sluttery in the big shitty—genital warts from a one-night stand with an investment banker, kicked out of her apartment for hosting a party during which someone OD’d in the hallway, fired from her job for talking shit about her boss in monitored email—and describe the way her semi-clueless dad had gotten her out of it while keeping it secret from her mom. The subtext was amazing—she was a hopeless daddy’s girl, and there was no way any other man could ever begin to compete. Hence the lovelorn angle. She had endless ways of changing up the lilt and intonation of it.

Omigod. Thanks daddy. Am I right? Ohhhhhhhhhmigod. Thanksdaddyami right? Omigodthanksdaddyamiright?

You’re so good
, I’d say. She didn’t believe me.

People dismissed her as a Sarah Silverman rip-off, but she was funny in her own right. More descendant than rip-off, to be sure.

Silverman’s a talentless cunt
, she’d say.
Fucked her way up.
Which was a sort of funny critique, as Molly was concurrently inviting the terrible talk-show host over Sunday nights to spank her and do some blow.

It’s not as if there’s only room for one adorable fucked-up Jewish girl comedian in the world
, I reminded her.

She’d get up there looking so pretty, so wholesome, so sweet and doe-eyed, you wanted to hold her hand and run through a field of wildflowers. There would be genuine fear in her eyes, she made no effort to disguise it, so you just loved her all the more. Proverbial deer in headlights. Then she’d say,
I’m so much happier with my appearance since I had my beard removed.

Or
Even if my ex-boyfriend
hadn’t
raped me, I’d probably say he did ’cause then you’d feel all bad for me. And when people feel bad for you, they’re really sweet and then they seriously leave you so very alone, no one bugs you at all. If you want some privacy, just get super depressed and wounded, it’s amazing, people just immediately drop you altogether and you can get some phenomenal peace and quiet . . . in which to contemplate how best to off yourself.

We were miserable, but miserable together. There were drinks and dinners, there were gatherings on weekends. There were friends of friends throwing parties, connections at fun restaurants and bars. There were shows and excursions. Brunch and brunch and brunch. There were lovers and love interests and a guy from the other night, no, no, the
other
other night, in endless supply.

But the years were not kind.

Her old cohort began to send out save-the-dates, plotted elaborate showers. Our twenties were on the wane, and it was assumed that after the stand-up silliness she’d find a nice (rich, Jewish) husband online and come back home to plan a wedding with her mom and have some babies. She owned her twenties, went the unspoken deal; they owned her after that. She loathed her mother and on occasion had no trouble telling her mother where to shove those vapid projections, but Daddy she couldn’t disappoint. She couldn’t break Daddy’s heart. She hated herself for being conventional, but the life-on-her-terms clock was running out. Tapped for bridesmaid duty by one after another of the cohort.

I applied to grad school and got in. Impressed with myself for kicking theoretical feminist ass, and on a fellowship to boot. I started hanging out with Marianne.

Molly began to watch the comics with whom she’d started out get somewhere, one an assistant in the writers’ room at
Saturday Night Live
, another opening on a huge college tour, a third recently cast in the ensemble of a new TV show.

I took up with Paul; Molly switched to a new antidepressant cocktail on which she was forbidden to drink. She drank anyway. She’d fuck someone and be depressed for days when he didn’t call. She’d pore over the Sunday
Times
wedding announcements and threaten suicide whenever one of her former classmates turned up. She couldn’t manage to finish the spec script she needed to land a proper entry-level writing gig, and so she floundered in the shitty gopher pool as a fresh new wave of people showed up from the Ivy League. She drank and drank. She was broke. Her parents wanted her to go to grad school. It didn’t matter what kind. They wanted her to pick a kind of grad school and go to it. There she’d meet her husband. And turn into her mother, who did not stop talking for literally five minutes the first time I met her. Daddy was quiet, charged with power and authority. Kind of hot.

She called weeping over the wedding announcements one June Sunday.

It’s never going to happen for me.

What
is never going to happen for you, honey?

Paul was naked in my sheets, casually holding my right foot in his armpit while he read the automotive section. Never before or since have I seen anyone read the automotive section.

Molly whimpered.

Look
, I said. Way past bored.
It’s your life, babe. Do what you want or do what they want, but don’t torture yourself.
I had been repeating some version of this for months. The depressed are such a bore!

I pulled away, I guess. Guilty. I ignored her calls. She’d whine about her parents and the latest insulting bridal shower and the inferior comic who sold a script and the other inferior comic who had a show in development and the current destination-wedding invitation and the guy who didn’t call when he said he’d call.

When she wasn’t blackout drinking and sucking dick for a better time slot, she biked (sans helmet) all over the city. Her long hair would fly behind her, and you’d think: that girl is amazing. If only that girl had the first clue how amazing she is.

Everything in
your
life seems to be working out just swell
, she said. Like I was the enemy. Like I hadn’t suffered. Slowly then suddenly I saw that she had only liked me because I was as miserable as she was.

She finally did move to LA and we didn’t speak for a year and then she moved back from LA and didn’t call me and then I saw her somewhere and she ignored me and so I ignored her.

Then there was nothing between us anymore.

No us.

Paul kept the mood light waiting around for labor to begin, waiting and waiting and waiting, with our giant old thesaurus. I was not simply huge. I was arched, bellied, biconvex, bloated, bold, bombous, bossed, bosselated, bossy, bowed, bulbiform, bulbous, clavated, corniform, cornute, gibbous, hemispheric, hummocky, in relief, lenticular, lentiform, maniform, nodular, odontoid, papulous, projecting, prominent, protuberant, raised, salient, tuberculous, tuberous, timorous.

He got out his guitar and made up a song. I took issue with
bossy
, and somewhere between
bulbiform
and
odontoid
the whole thing began to sound kind of obnoxious. You get sort of oversensitive toward the end.

My due date passed, and officially we were behind schedule. They ordered a sonogram, looked for problems, told us about possibilities of problems. Made concerned faces and laid out the unacceptable possibilities.

Standard practice.

You hear enough
monitor, low-fluid, toxicity
,
big, proactive, posterior, count kicks, strip membranes
, and you think, Jesus, okay, fuck, do whatever you have to do, whatever you people
say
, just make it okay.

Even though I had told that goddamn OB I wanted to “try” for a normal birth.

Sure
, he’d said. Nothing bad was going to happen to me with
this
guy on duty. G
ive it a try. I’m all for that. That’s great. So you’re a tough girl. Gonna muscle through.

I played along, practically batted my lashes.

I’d like to try.

Good for you.
He turned to Paul.
I like that. Tough cookie.

And fine: I had failed to watch the documentaries. I was superstitious. I didn’t want to jinx things. I was overwhelmed. I never got around to it.

(
Lazy
, my mother says.
Always were.
)

Folks.
Here’s the husky OB, dude I had once, just one time, early on, imagined bending me over his desk and fucking me graduate school style. (Ode to the pregnant libido.)