The Seven Year Bitch (16 page)

“Believe me, once you put your track shoes in there and a mini deodorant you'll see it doesn't solve anything.”

But it would. That padlock protected a whole other world. Even the combination was auspicious—19-21-23—which happened to be when I was at my most beautiful.

“I better go,” I said. “People are staring at me.”

“Where are you?”

“The locker room,” I said.

When I got home I read to Duncan and put him to bed.

“Daddy will be home tomorrow,” I told him.

Things were so much easier without Russell there to fight with. I didn't have to argue with him about who would do what, who would put him to bed, who would go to him in the night, I'd just do it all happily without thinking too much about it. I brought Duncan warm milk in a sippy cup, and I read him a book called
365 Penguins
, about a family whose uncle, in an effort to save the penguins, sends the family one penguin a day for 365 days. Duncan was asleep by the second penguin, but I finished reading the whole book, fascinated by the idea of these penguins arriving and wreaking their havoc. Those penguins represented the problems in marriage, I realized. Every day a problem arrived at the door, a stinking, slippery, black-and-white fish-eating bird. I really loved that book. How long had it been, I thought to myself, since I'd taken the time to just sit down and read a great book? Even if it was just a picture book for kids.

Our neighbor's daughter came over so I could walk Humbert, and we walked along Hudson Street, past Chanterelle, where Russell and I had our wedding reception. It was beautiful out and Humbert was so happy peeing on everything I kept going all the way to Broad Street and my old office building. I had gone to that building every day and now I would never go into it again. How had I left Duncan's huge open-mouthed kisses each morning and walked right through the open doors of what now seemed like the most unimportant place in the world? What the hell had I been thinking?

I'd done well and it had gotten me nowhere. My first job was covering the package/container industry, which basically meant I studied cardboard boxes, and which made finding an empty one on my desk waiting for me that much more ironic.

Later, after Humbert and I had walked happily back to Hubert Street and I was enjoying lying alone in bed, Russell called from Jamaica. “How was your day?”

“Bad,” I said.

“Anything happen?”

I smiled, imagining putting my sneakers in my new locker, how they'd just fit, happy as rats. No, not rats, I thought, rats held captive in a locker would eat each other. “It's just really hard doing everything myself while you're having a great time in Jamaica.”

“Well, you have to get used to that if we're going to get a divorce.”

Actually since he was away everything was so calm and easy. When Duncan had called out in his sleep a few moments before, instead of giving Russell dirty looks and wondering which of us should be the one to go to him, I had simply rushed into his room without giving it a thought and comforted him.

“How was it putting Duncan to bed and walking Humbert?”

“It was hard, but I managed.”

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“Not all of us can have a vacation in Jamaica.”

“I'm in Kingston, for Christ's sake, the worst place on earth. You make it sound like I'm lying on the beach at a Sandals or something.”

“Jamaica is Jamaica,” I said.

“Did Duncan ask for me?”

“No,” I said.

“How's the water cooler?” he asked, trying to change the subject to something happy.

“It's fine.”

“Did you have any water?”

“Not really,” I said.

“You should have some,” he said.

When we got off the phone I had the same thought I always had when he went away. I had no idea what his flight number was or what airport he'd be flying in to. If I saw on the news that a New York–bound plane from Jamaica had crashed, I wouldn't know if it was his or not. I would have to wait to hear from him. Or not.

I turned off the light and looked at the shadows the window guards cast around the room. Black bars slid along the ceiling and all four walls, like a cage. The morning we'd had the bars put up, I'd felt proud. “Put them all the way up,” I'd told the man. We had enormous windows that opened like doors and I wanted the baby to be completely safe. The man soldered metal to metal, and the dangerous burning construction smell filled the rooms. We'd bought the loft before Duncan, and now, somehow, as if by Grimm's magic, it had rumbled and swelled to hold a child. I felt like the apartment was smiling and the window guards were braces in its gaping happy mouth. The day the window guards went up, I thought they were the most beautiful things I had ever seen. Then night fell, and the shadows were cast, and Russell and I had stood looking at each other in the center of what was now a cage, wondering what we had gone and done.

I
n the morning the doorman buzzed up that I had a messenger. “It's probably for Russell,” I said. “Just hold it at the desk.”

“No, Izzy, it's for you,” Terry said.

“Okay,” I said.

I waited at the door in my nightgown after making sure my breasts weren't hanging out as usual. When I was nursing I was constantly accepting deliveries topless without realizing it. Every neighborhood delivery man had seen me at least once.

A UPS man wheeled a carton toward me.

“You gonna be here for a few minutes? 'Cause I've gotta get the rest of the boxes out of the truck.”

He hoisted the box into the entryway of my apartment. I examined the label:
Claire Contest Co. Box 1 of 12.
Twelve boxes would block the entryway! Russell already had so many stacked in front of the bookshelves there was no room for even one more box. I slit the packing tape with a kitchen knife and found the box to be filled with nothing but essays, thousands of pages of tiny essays, each taking up only a small portion of each page. When I'd called the name my mother's shrink had given me, they'd told me I would make a quarter for every essay I read, and it had sounded like nothing. I'd agreed to do it and signed something they'd faxed to me agreeing to be impartial and providing my Social Security number but I'd had no idea it would amount to anything.

Floating on top of the essays was an instruction sheet.

I scanned the rest of the rules and lifted the first essay out of the box.

There, I thought, twenty-five whole cents earned. That was twenty-five cents more than I'd had three seconds ago. I paid Shasthi twelve dollars an hour, which was forty-eight quarters. I just had to read forty-eight of these essays to cover a whole hour of her pay and eight times that to cover a whole day. My mother's shrink was right once again. While I stared down at the essay, the UPS man carried in eleven more boxes. When Russell returned from Jamaica he would think I was moving out.

This was great! At work we'd always joked about how nice it would be to have a job that was shoes optional and now I had one.

I lifted the second essay out of the first box.

Since originality and creativity accounted for fifty percent of the score, I started a “maybe” pile because I had to hand it to her for the acrostic form. Unfortunately, of the next seventy essays I read, at least two dozen of them used the equally creative and original acrostic form.

I used that to start a “yes” pile because she was trying to be funny, and so many of them had been so bad I didn't know if in all these boxes another one might be this good. I was supposed to give the company my top choices, ranked one through seventy.

This person sounded completely out of her mind.

I loved this one, but the contest was for a formula company.

“No” pile.

Yes.

I loved this one too, and I thought in a way it could be used as an advertisement for giving formula, but I put it with the noes.

I put this one in “maybe” in case there weren't any more like it. But in the next hundred I read, there were at least fifty like it. Autism, cancer, leukemia, GERD, allergies, Down's, wheelchairs and nebulizers and hospitals. And all these mothers—cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. I had never once associated scrubbing the toilet with having a son. I couldn't stop reading them. All these women who thought of themselves as a “mom” and knew what that meant. I studied each name and hometown for clues, the way I had stared at the missing posters after 9/11.

I put this in the “maybe” pile even though I preferred the one whose one word was
cow
. I forced myself to get up and walk around the apartment.