The Seven Year Bitch (10 page)

I could survive trapped in the car for at least three days, I figured, if the bear wouldn't leave. We'd already eaten the doughnuts but there was one bottle of water in the car and a few nuts on the floor. I regretted weaning. If I hadn't stopped breast-feeding, I could have made enough milk for the baby to survive for days, or until someone in a passing car saw the bear circling the parked car and Russell's carcass lying on the blood-stained snow, and called for help.

I could hold the funeral at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home on the East Side and afterward, at home, lie curled up on my bed, our bed, as visitors came to sit beside me to comfort me. We had life insurance, now that I thought about it, and I could sell this house if I could find it without Russell. I had never learned how to drive. The Second Avenue Deli had moved but I was pretty sure they would still deliver sandwich platters for the shivah. How many people would come to pay their respects to Russell? I wondered. All those authors would show up and gorge themselves on the free food. I could probably tell the Second Avenue Deli to cater for two hundred hungry mourners.

I felt a shock of cold and realized that all that thinking about nursing had made my milk come back. Even though I hadn't breast-fed Duncan since November and it was now February, milk was soaking through my bra. It was as if to show me that I was right, Duncan and I would be fine.

 

 

The next day we
had no choice but to invite Charlie Cheney, our neighbor who had just returned from Thailand, over for lunch. He kept an eye on our house when we weren't there. We paid him to mow and plow and we called him from the city regularly with requests to remove the peaches we'd accidentally left on the kitchen table or to find Duncan's blankie and ship it to us overnight express. He was an ex-pat Manhattanite who had lost it after 9/11 and left his job as an upholsterer to live in the country full-time and plant a garden containing fifty kinds of garlic. He had various conspiracy theories about the Bush administrations and he was a cousin of Vice President Dick Cheney, but he pronounced his name Chee-ney to disassociate himself.

In the country you were always so happy to see another person, it didn't really matter who it was. I'd always bought Charlie awkward Christmas presents of multiple shirts from Patagonia or multiple pairs of wool socks until I figured out that multiple bottles of Tanqueray and Ketel One were much more to his liking.

I eyed the shower before getting in. Even though it was my shower, in my house, it still wasn't my shower in the city, and I didn't like getting into it. The water smelled of sulfur. The knobs turned the wrong way. Stepping into it I felt as if I were joining the lesbians who had owned the house before us. I hated being naked in the country, which was ironic because we'd bought the house for the same reason all New Yorkers bought country houses—to be naked outside.

When I got out of the shower I heard Russell already talking to Charlie in the kitchen. I got dressed quickly and went downstairs.

“I got you a souvenir from Thailand,” Charlie was telling Duncan. He handed him a carved wooden elephant.

Next to him was another souvenir. A young Thai girl, wearing a strange pantsuit as if she had come for some kind of job interview, stood next to him clutching his arm. She had too-short hair that was begging to be longer and a beanstalk neck that led to a hilly enchanted kingdom of cheeks and lips. Despite her jetblack hair and Asian skin, she had the big round rust freckles of a redhead. She wasn't beautiful and yet she was so much more beautiful than anything in upstate New York and so much more beautiful than anyone who should be standing next to Charlie.

“I'd like you to meet my wife,” Charlie said. “This is Gra. She cuts my toenails,” he said by way of introduction. “She actually cuts and files them.”

“Why don't you do that for me?” Russell asked me.

“You want her to do yours?” Charlie said to Russell. “She'll do it. She doesn't mind.”

“Hi, Gra is it?” I said. “Did you say ʽwife'?”

“Her name isn't Gra but I call her Gra because that's the Thai word for
freckles
. Her name is too hard to pronounce for Americans.”

Every time Charlie said the word
Gra
, the woman flashed a look like she was a prisoner desperately trying to tell us something.

“What's your real name?” I asked her.

“She doesn't speak any English!” Charlie said.

Although I didn't speak any foreign languages, I prided myself on having an excellent ear and the ability to pronounce foreign words correctly.

“What's her name?” I asked Charlie. “I want to try to learn it.”

He made some strange combination of sounds and Gra shook her head. “I'm telling you, stick with Gra. She likes it. We're very happy.”

Gra suddenly knelt on my kitchen floor and for a moment I was afraid she was really ready to cut Russell's toenails, which had always been a source of many fights between us, but then I saw she was petting Hum. Her black eyes were welling up with tears.

“What is it?” I asked.

“She's fine, she just misses her dog,” Charlie said. “She had to leave her dog with her mother. It was a Pomeranian. One of those fluffy little rat dogs.”

“You can get a dog,” I told her.

“She say: You. Can. Get. Dog,” Charlie translated in a strange exaggerated fake Thai accent.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I'm learning Thai,” Charlie said.

“That wasn't Thai. That was English spoken in a racist accent.”

“I didn't speak Thai just now?”

“No,” I said.

“I don't even know the difference anymore. It's called Thanglish.
Dog ao te. Pomeranian mai mai
. I told her we could get a dog, but not a Pomeranian. I hate that kind.”

She stood up and looked at him as if she had no idea what he was saying. She pointed at Hum and smiled.

“That's Hum,” I told Gra.

“Hum,” she tried. “Hum. Hum.”

“Yes,” I said, as excited as Annie Sullivan talking to Helen Keller. It might not be the most useful English word she would learn, but it was a start. As soon as possible, I would teach her important American phrases like “Cut your own disgusting toenails.”

“Humdog,” she said.

“Come on, Charlie, you can get her a Pomeranian,” I said. I could tell my kidding tone hadn't masked my anger. I couldn't stand the thought of her missing her dog like that. Of her long slim fingers touching Charlie's gross cracked toes. I couldn't stop the horrifying graphic thoughts in my head of various Kama Sutra positions—Gra on top, riding his cock, facing away from him and stretching down to cut his toenails with an enormous metal clipper.

Until this moment I had never really looked at Charlie. He had gray hair and lines on the back of his neck like an argyle sweater. He had brown eyes and a raggedy mustache that looked like it'd been around since the seventies. I thought of a report I had just seen on CNN that girls as young as three were used as sex slaves in Cambodia and China. They called oral sex “yum yum”—the same thing I called Hum's food when we gave it to him in his dish—and it showed footage of two little Chinese girls saying, “We do yum yum.”

“I'm not getting one of those fur balls.”

“She has to live with your big turtle, the least you could do is get her the dog she likes.”

“She likes the turtle.”

“You hold out for the Pomeranian,” I barked at Gra like an agent. I didn't want her to take this deal.

“Well, this is great,” Russell said, shooting me a look. “Can I get anyone a drink?”

“She don't need a Pomeranian. She'll have a Jack, Russell,” Charlie said, giving Gra a taste of the humor she would be stuck with for the rest of her life. He laughed until we were forced to laugh to stop him. “And yes, I will have a drink. Vodka if you have it. This is a celebration.”

“So are you two actually married?” I asked, trying to sound as enthusiastic as a bridesmaid.

“We have to wait for the paperwork to come. And then we want to have a wedding, and we really want you to be there.”

“Of course, thank you! We wouldn't miss it,” I said. There was no way I was going, but I would give a gift, a Pomeranian perhaps.

Gra stood and started talking excitedly and Charlie seemed to understand her.

“What's she saying?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” Charlie said. “Wait, I think she wants to cook for you. You. Want. Cook. For. Izzy. And. Russell? She's a great cook. She wants to start a Thai catering company here in Woodstock.”

I always got a kick out of everyone in our little town, including Russell, thinking they lived in Woodstock. We were at least thirty minutes from Woodstock. Maybe it was because if we really were in Woodstock our house would be worth a hell of a lot more. Or maybe it was because our town was called Kripplebush, which didn't exactly sound auspicious.

Gra reached into a shopping bag, pulled out a photo album, and laid it out on the kitchen table next to the uninspired ham and Brie, lettuce, and bread I had set out for sandwiches.

“Is this your family?” I asked.

“No, it's food,” Charlie said. On each page was a glossy photo of a different noodle dish.

“Yum yum,” Gra said, and I cringed.

“Maybe Gra can teach Izzy to cook,” Russell suggested.

Maybe Gra could cater Russell's funeral instead of the Second Avenue Deli.

“Sure,” Charlie said. “Gra doesn't mind. She can cook, garden, clean. I'm the luckiest man in the world.”

He knocked back his drink and then another one.

“That's great,” Russell said. “I highly recommend married life.”

We assembled sandwiches and brought them to the living room to sit in front of the fireplace.

“So how did you two, uh, meet?” Russell asked.

“Well I went there to get a wife and she was the last one I got to interview. She was the
only one
,” Charlie emphasized vigorously, “who
insisted
on having a chaperone. I had sex with all the others but not with her. It just wasn't allowed.”

“Really!” Russell said. “So you two haven't even . . .”

“Oh no, we had sex right after, but not when her mother was with us.”

And what happens when she stops cutting your toenails, I wanted to scream. Or opening Coke bottles and smoking cigarettes with her vagina, or whatever I'd heard about all those girls who did sex shows out there. Then the joke's on you, I thought. Because you'll be married.

“Very good,” Russell said.

“You know it was my third trip there,” Charlie said. “It was what I promised my sister right before she died.” Charlie's sister had died in a car crash while he was talking to her on her cell phone. He was complaining about a woman he was trying to date, and she had said, “You're impossible, Charlie. Why don't you just go to Thailand to get a wife. It's the only way you'll get one to put up with you,” and that was the last thing she had ever said to him.

“You guys are very sweet to look out for me like this,” Charlie said. “But don't worry, I'm not being stupid. I'm waiting a few weeks before the wedding. And I can get out of it for like a whole year if I don't like what I see before she gets her green card. We're really very much in love. I mean she was a little surprised because I told her we lived in New York and she didn't know I didn't mean the city.”

“Well Izzy and I are very happy for you,” Russell said. “Welcome to Kripplebush.”

I don't think I had ever heard anything more depressing.

 

 

Sunday night we drove
home to the city. Before going to bed, I brought Thursday's pizza box out to the garbage room so that Shasthi wouldn't see it there in the morning, and I startled our neighbor Sherry as she was throwing out a stack of newspapers. Sherry was embarrassed to be caught in the hall in her nightgown, a short white cotton girlie thing covered in green fireflies.

“I'm throwing out everything I can. There's one of those giant water bugs in my loft,” Sherry said, her voice filled with the particular guttural rage all New Yorkers felt when this happened to them.

“Oh no,” I said, my whole body tensing at the thought of it but also flooding with relief that it was in her apartment and not mine, although our apartments were only separated by a wall, a stairwell, and an elevator. I really couldn't stand water bugs. It was a challenge I hadn't been faced with yet as a mother. If I saw one, I would normally scream at the top of my lungs and leave the apartment for several days like a prehistoric woman surrendering her cave, but I knew I shouldn't do that now that I was a mother.

“I'm tired of having to deal with everything alone,” Sherry said. She was a single mother of a teenage daughter. “I want to get married if for no other reason than this.”

“That's the only reason
to
get married,” I said.

“How am I going to sleep with that
thing
in my house?” Sherry said.

“Maybe you shouldn't wear that nightgown,” I said, pointing to the fireflies. “Maybe he was attracted to you.” I immediately regretted saying something so stupid when she hadn't had a date in two years. I had to find a way to help. “Russell will kill it,” I said.

I got Russell out of bed and he dutifully went into battle, wearing only his boxer shorts and carrying a rolled-up
New York Post
for a club. Sherry and I stood in the hall waiting. Moments later Russell came out. “I got it,” he said. “I hit it with your scale.”