After Birth (4 page)

Yet another, totally affectless, told of a constant numb tingling all up and down her right leg from the spinal and said
there’s nothing I can do about it at this point, so why do we keep having to
talk
about it?

I got lucky
, someone said.
They only had to use the vacuum extractor
.

Yeah, see, that’s why I’m glad we just went with the C
, said the drag queen’s mom.
I hear those things really mess up your vag
.

I asked them if they feel good about their birth experience. They examined me crossly. One giggled.

Birth Experience
, she said.
Sounds like a ride at Disney.

Feel good about it like, you mean, glad it’s over?

Feel good about it like, enjoyed it?

A few months later I tried another group, thirty minutes in a different direction.

I was to let Walker watch his father and me on the toilet, talk about the toilet, encourage familiarity with the toilet. I was to make sure he ate at least a cup of vegetables every day. There was the possibility of someday locking him in his room at night if he resisted sleep. There was pediatric dentistry to consider. There was early intervention for absolutely anything.

Imagine: I had dared to imagine that we would talk to one another, that the boring specifics of child rearing would be
incidental.

I mean, let’s pause to acknowledge that it’s possible to be a good mother while doing other things. You know: multitasking. Scouting the horizon for tigers. Gathering herbs. Stirring the pot. Reading a fucking newspaper.

Even the laid-back granola DIY homestead types were anal shrews about their laid-back-ness. Over email a fight broke out. A sippy-cup brand disagreement devolved into a fight in which one predicted a life of crime for the other’s child. Tireless. Just take care of business, ladies. Don’t make a fucking hobby out of it. Feed the kid, bathe the kid, help the kid to sleep, hug and kiss and smile and hug and kiss some more until they’re too old for that; then just try to model the best behavior you possibly can for the rest of your life, and do it again tomorrow; it’s not fucking science. Find some other things to think about.

I’m not going to pretend my kid is special, like other kids who starve and freeze and get raped and beaten and have to work in factories and get cancer from the fumes, too bad, so sad, but my kid is going to be warm and organic and toxin-free and safe and have everything he wants when he wants it and go to a good college and all is right with the world! Fuck that myopic bullshit. He’s going to suffer. He’s going to get mauled by some force I can’t pretend I can predict. We all live in the same fucked-up world.

Then there were stories about how this or that one just couldn’t breastfeed, her sister gave it up after two months or six months or a year because it hurt or she just didn’t have any milk or come on, enough was enough, or hey, isn’t there all sorts of unfair pressure on women to nurse and shouldn’t it be, like, a choice? Yes, ladies. Congratulations: you have choices.

A chore, trying to talk to these women. You saw them calcifying. You saw them race to this endpoint, then come to a stop and calcify, never to move again.

I practiced my blank stare. How noble of you to plug your kid with some processed milk-derivative shit marketed by the same people who brought the world Oreos, how very feminist of you, yes, every woman makes her choices, absolutely, what glorious freedom we enjoy. Way to stick it to the man. How empowered you are, subverting a basic function of your body. May I shake your hand? You show that body of yours who’s boss! You get on with your bad self. What shipshape shiny master’s tools you’ve got there. How’s the dismantling of the master’s house working out?

A Friday. My shift at the co-op. Box and bag groceries, sort recycled plastic, align merchandise on the shelves. (This last is called, amusingly, “fronting.”)

Naomi is my boss. Twenty-three, dropped out of SUNY sophomore year, lives in an abandoned nineteenth-century savings bank in Troy with three art students and fourteen stray cats. They throw massive dance parties that start at midnight on the last Friday of every month.

She is forever handing out flyers.

Coming Friday?
She’s adorable, and makes me feel old.

Gonna try
, I always lie.

My second friend was Jenny Jacobson, of the alliterative name and showbiz aspirations. She had an agent, went on constant auditions for commercials, eventually booked an ad for cereal, real big deal. She was a powerful force in the sixth grade, respected and feared in equal measure. Everything turned to shit for her by eighth grade (bulimia, Bellevue), but she was still in her prime when I knew her.

Jenny’s parents were getting a divorce. She had been prepped for the apocalypse with books about little girls whose parents were getting divorced, and with her very own shrink, Henri. They lived in a glass-and-steel penthouse on lower Park Avenue, and her father had this interesting way of staring at me but then looking away when I looked at him. I could actually
feel
his eyes on my little pubescent ass. And I didn’t not enjoy it, either.

Henri says parents sometimes have to go separate ways in order to do the things they need to do to be happy and successful, and when my mom and dad are both doing the things they need to do separately all three of us are going to be much, much happier, so really it’s a good thing and we’re celebrating and I’m really glad they’re getting divorced because when all three of us are happier it will be even better than if we all stayed together and weren’t as happy or as successful. So we’re having a divorce party and everything.

I almost liked being with her, I disliked her so much. It had an addictive flavor, hating her. One of those bossy little bitches who find a way to twist things so that she’s always a winner, always triumphant, always in charge. Never screwed, never sad, never sorry, never at the mercy of others. One of those self-aggrandizing little bitches who refuse themselves any admission of weakness. Always play-acting that idiotic control. Jenny with her absurd mop of kinky orange curls, her freckles. The kind of girl who was going to spend her life demanding to be taken seriously. And no one takes those girls seriously.

She didn’t scare me one little bit, and boy did that scare
her
.

She did this thing about my mother with huge watery eyes, being So Very Sorry for me, to imply that my mother was very close to dying—which she was, it was true—and that therefore I was a pitiful wretch.

It must be so very difficult for you that your mom is so very ill
, she’d say reproachfully. The know-it-all tone, the superiority (her parents were just getting
divorced
, which was actually
great
news), the hierarchy of pain in which I was the winner, and so really the loser. She made me insane. I couldn’t get enough of her.

Yeah, I guess
, I said, incapable of spin. (We have lots of delicious Popsicles in our freezer ’cause she gets these huge mouth sores from the chemo, it’s great!) The lights in our house were always dim. My mother spent months dying. Weeks and weeks tiptoeing up to the very, very, very end. It seemed that it could be any day for an enormous number of days.

How traaaaagic
. Jenny gazed out her bedroom windows at the tops of other buildings.
What terrible circumstances. Such a difficult thing for a young girl
.

She’s gonna be fine
, I said, and almost had to laugh. She was not going to be fine. She was not going to be alive very much longer. She could be dead right then and I wouldn’t know it until I went home. But something about those self-aggrandizing bitches makes it impossible for
you
to be weak, and so you wind up sorta
becoming
one of them, at least temporarily, to deal with them, which is so goddamn sad. It’s a trap. You must avoid those bitches at all costs.

I don’t think so
, Jenny said.
And she’s only in her forties! And with such a young daughter! So, so sad
. She looked like she was trying to make herself cry, like it was some kind of acting exercise. She reached out to pat my shoulder, and what did I do? Why, I punched her in the face. With closed fist. So satisfying. I can just about feel the shameful, electric pleasure of it reverberating up my arm even now.

Faculty party at Cameron and Betsy’s tonight. An opportunity to put on decent clothes, something I don’t have to yank down or up for boob access. Maybe a piece of jewelry, maybe go totally nuts, dab something shiny on the lips. Feels downright like Halloween.

Well, well
, Cam bellows as we make our way up their stoop, three blocks away in a cold drizzle, the baby asleep under the care of a student babysitter. I pray she’s not as stupid as she dresses, this babysitter. With her obnoxious ringtones and hot-pink sweats,
COME HERE OFTEN
printed across the ass. I pray she’ll keep righteous watch.

Cam means well and wants to chill but doesn’t know how and so channels all this crap energy into an aggressive sense of humor, like a mean older brother. Psychology department, I think. I try to ignore the details. He’s a friend of Paul’s, which because they’re dudes seems to imply uncomplicated amiability from a remarkable distance, occasional scotch.

Betsy’s chipper, constantly compensating for Cam. They have this whole act, these roles they play in their own little mutually agreed upon lifelong theatrical production. I fear that this is what long-term relationships are all about, at base: full-time role-playing, memorized and inhabited. They’re always guzzling coffee, these two, as though trying to fortify themselves for another curtain.

Looks like Paul and Ari made it!

Looks that way, Bets. Looks that way.

Welcome! Come in, come in! How are you guys? What’s up? Welcome!
I like Betsy, really I do, but she is jittery as fuck, and she says everything twice.

They don’t have kids, and they’re closer to fifty than forty, some years past the point when they might have had kids but chose, or were chosen, not to.

Fairly badass on the one hand
not
to do this main thing we’re forever exhorted to do, say
no thanks
, decline to buy an embryo from some God complex in a lab coat, decline to hire a hooker to cook it up. But the too-late-ness, on the other hand, the vanished possibility. The empty space. A lot to live with. A lot to live with either way, actually. Good title for a memoir! Fuck my dissertation. Life: It’s a Lot to Live With.

Couple dozen people standing around. There’s the French-theory bitch in Kabuki makeup, the sad divorced English department dude and his townie girlfriend. Art department stoner, hot sociopathic sculptor-in-band, insanely tense history couple, Cat. Jewish studies guy who’s been extra special sweet to me since he found out about Grandma surviving the last Big Euro Jew Purge.

And oh, oh, oh: Mina.

Here she is, in the flesh. Leaning on the newel post talking to condescending poli-sci guy and his dead-eyed wife.

Go get her, tiger
, Paul whispers.

Cam hands him a tumbler and turns to me.

Nothing for you, Ari? Still doing that whole
—he waves a hand in the direction of my chest like he’s trying to shake off something sticky—
baby . . . thing?

It’s not very hard to take Cam down: just flirt a little and he crumples instantly.

A demure smile, slide the shoulders down, tits out, reach calmly for a glass of wine, tall and proud, let the lips melt into repose, hold his gaze. Hold it . . . hold it . . . until he turns red and looks away and starts to perspire. And, done. Offer up the glass for a
clink
and walk away nice and slow.

I’ve always had a hard time differentiating between people who hate me and people who want to fuck me. Usually because, I finally realized, there’s often a great deal of overlap.

I move toward the familiar disappointment of Cat, who’s on the fringe of the Mina conversation. She takes me in (down, up) with that mysterious mixture of approval and disapproval, envy and superiority.

Hey
, she says in her tight way. Cat was hired last year having only just barely lost out on a plum job in Seattle. We immediately became friends, and about five minutes later realized we didn’t really like each other all that much. But you pretty much take what you can get around here.

Hey
. I give her an awkward hug.

Mina looks more or less the same as in pictures, but older, realer, breathing. Very pregnant.

Condescending poli-sci guy is talking about a political candidate.

It’s just so fucking predictable.

People nod.

I hide my face behind my wineglass. Talking politics is so stupid. You either agree or you don’t; either way you’re no closer to a human exchange.

Mina’s gone crinkly around the mouth and eyes. Amazing laugh lines. Still those full cheeks. Hair half-silver, maybe three-quarters. Soft, ragged old man jeans, none of the Lycra butt-crack prefaded grotesquerie. Ancient brown boots. Asymmetrical navy poncho in a low-key cotton/cashmere blend—unmistakably quality but appropriately pilled and loved. It’d look prissy new, and that right there’s the thing most women don’t understand about style: clothing must be worn, lived in, assimilated into uniform. Otherwise it’s mere costume.

Six feet tall, I’d guess. Tattoos all up both arms, nose ring. Careworn. Hair in her eyes. Messy, artless, doesn’t give a shit. Not like
trying to look like
she doesn’t give a shit, actually does not give a shit. Probably the only comfortable woman in the room.

I wore my dumb punishing pointy boots from way, way back when they were in style. Cat’s hair is dyed and shellacked a deep, awful magenta; Betsy’s panty lines have panty lines. In the kitchen the French-theory bitch with the Kabuki face teeters on idiotic spike-heel contraptions resembling staplers. Someone should offer her bunions a glass of wine.