The Seven Year Bitch (18 page)

“Well, thank you,” he said, after he had paid and we were standing on the grungy street outside of Dolphin Gym. It was like my plane had just landed back in New York.

“Should we have an early dinner or a drink? My treat,” he said.

“I've got to go home,” I said.

“You know, you could be Japanese,” he said. “Your black hair.” He reached out and touched the ends. Then he grabbed a handful and tugged on it slightly.

I wanted him to kiss me. I looked away. He was a bear threatening my family, and instead of poking at him with a broom, I was praying for the bear to push me up against a building and kiss me.

Maybe antidepressants would cure this. Or I should start taking Duncan to synagogue. Then I remembered Shasthi really had to leave at five, because she had an errand to run in Queens and she had to be home in time to watch
American Idol
.

“I have to go,” I said. “Your hair looks great. Oh, here's a cab.” I jumped into the empty cab and headed back to the big city.

T
hat weekend, up in the country, we went to an antiques flea market, and, looking at metal lawn chairs, I was sure I saw my ob-gyn, Dr. Lichter, at another table looking at old fountain pens.

He was wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball cap, so I couldn't tell if the man I was looking at had Dr. Lichter's bald spot or not. Instead of a shirt and tie and white doctor's coat, he was wearing big, baggy mom jeans and a plaid shirt. Dr. Lichter hadn't been from Boston, I was almost certain, so maybe it wasn't him. But then I remembered he'd gone to Harvard and men were always so strange about sports.

Russell and the baby were several yards away looking at a painted wooden rocking duck.

“You know,” the owner of the booth I was at said, “these are called motel chairs. They're the real deal.”

I watched Dr. Lichter reach into his pocket and pull out money to pay for a pen.

“They can also be known as tulip chairs or shell chairs, I guess because the back here is shaped a little like a shell. Or a tulip for that matter.”

“Dr. Lichter?” I called, but he didn't hear me.

When I was pregnant with Duncan, I had been in love with Dr. Lichter.

“I ate too much ice cream this week,” I would say.

“Ice cream makes healthy babies,” he would answer, spending endless time with me while a dozen women waited in the waiting room.

“I don't know if I'm ready to be a mother.”

“Let me tell you about the Seven Stages of Motherhood,” he had said. “They're exactly the same as the Seven Stages of Grief.”

“The Seven Stages of Motherhood?” I flirted over the mountain of my stomach.

“Yes,” Dr. Lichter had said. “Stage One: Shock and Denial starts when you bring the baby home from the hospital. You're paying a baby nurse two hundred and fifty dollars a day, you think your life can go on as usual—dinner, movies, work. It lasts from two to four weeks. Stage Two: Pain and Guilt. Change is painful, and there is no bigger change. Your psyche is screaming. You feel guilt until you die, but it is never as intense as months two through six. At six months, your time with the baby starts to get a lot more fun.”

My psyche screaming didn't sound too good.

“Stage Three: Anger. This is directed at your husband. He's just not biologically wired to be as good with the baby as you. He can sleep through the night. He is feeling no pain, no guilt, not much change. Okay, where are we? Stage Four: Depression, Reflection, and Loneliness is where you lose touch with who you were before you were a mother. That lasts until the third birthday. Sometime shortly after the third birthday, you will have a sort of graduation. It's like getting out of business school or medical school. Then there's Five, Six, and Seven—the Upward Turn, Reconstruction, and Acceptance—and that's when you have another. Got it?” he said.

“Your psyche is screaming?”

“One day,” he said wistfully, “we'll discuss all this over a nice cup of tea—oolong tea perhaps.”

He was verbose and professorial and bragged that he'd had a part in inventing one of the fetal tests I was taking. He was short, maybe five foot five, and fat, with a big white bald spot and short, stubby fingers that touched me more gently than I had ever been touched. How I had longed to have that oolong tea with him!

I had fallen in love with him when I'd gone in to hear the baby's heartbeat for the first time. He knew I was nervous as he moved the sonogram wand over my stomach. Then I heard it. He turned up the volume on the machine until it sounded as strong and sure as a herd of elephants. Then, using the sonogram wand as a microphone, he started singing Fleetwood Mac to me:

I had laughed and cried with relief.

“I have always wanted to do that,” he said, and I opened up to him because I loved when men opened up to me like that.

I had a high-risk pregnancy, with low amniotic fluid, and one day when I was thirty-eight weeks pregnant, I'd gone in for my routine twice-weekly nonstress test, and the technician administering it said, “You're not going home. You're going to have the baby right now.”

I'd called Dr. Lichter and he'd come in the middle of a luncheon at which he was being given an award.

For nine months I'd imagined him fucking me on the examining table. I'd imagined it every way you could imagine it. And I'd imagined that he'd leave his wife, who was a labor-and-delivery nurse, and I'd leave Russell and we'd buy an apartment together and raise the baby he'd deliver in it.

While Russell waited just outside the operating room door in his scrubs, Dr. Lichter told me that the anesthesiologist was going to be giving me my spinal. I'd rounded my back the way I'd practiced in Pilates, and then I screamed bloody murder. “Motherfucker!” I screamed. “Motherfucker!” I had never felt pain like that.

“Something is wrong,” the anesthesiologist said. “She has a difficult back.”

A machine sounded and a nurse said, “Doctor, it's dropping,” and then Dr. Lichter took me in his arms. Right there on the table he held me and he said, “Izzy, look right into my eyes. It's me. Just look at me, look at me.” He wrapped his arms around me and pressed his forehead into my forehead, and with his bald spot hidden under his surgical cap and his mouth and nose covered by his mask, all I could do was look into his blue eyes. We stayed like that for a long time, and finally I felt no pain, just his forehead pressed into mine and his arms around me, until he lay me down on the table and a nurse brought Russell in. Just a few minutes later I heard a cry, and he said, “Well, I've never had this happen. He's crying while he's still inside you. We haven't taken him out yet.” Then he said, “Now. Look at your son,” and he held my baby up over the paper curtain.

When I went for my six-week appointment to check my stitches, I was told that he'd left the hospital and was no longer practicing medicine. “I don't know for sure,” a nurse had told me, “but I heard a family member died and he had a nervous breakdown.”

And there, here, he was, in upstate New York.

“Dr. Lichter?” I called out again, but he still didn't seem to hear me. People around me had stopped what they were doing to look over at me. “Dr. Lichter?” He looked around nervously for a moment, lowered his baseball cap down over his eyes, and started walking quickly to the parking lot.

I walked as fast as I could after him, but I was holding Hum on his leash and I got tangled a couple of times and by the time I got to his car he had driven away. He disappeared into the upstate air like a bird I had been watching.

W
hat did you do today?” Russell asked the following week when we were in the car on our way to the country. Now that it was spring we were going up more and more.

“I had acupuncture,” I told him, even though I had taken Shasthi to have it and had waited for her in the waiting room while Duncan napped in his Bugaboo and I read essays. The waiting room had been filled with women all hoping to get pregnant and I read essay after essay about scrubbing toilets by women who were barely holding it together.

My mind was swimming a little bit. I had that half-there feeling, like a part of me was somewhere else, that feeling when you're in the middle of a good book you want to get back to. And then I realized what it was—the essays. I was dying to get back to them.

I took a stack of them out of the tote bag at my feet and a tiny flashlight I had bought, at my mother's shrink's suggestion, for reading in the car.

It was hard to read them in the car with Hum on my lap.

“How was Shasthi today?” Russell asked.

“I really think Heiffowitz can get her pregnant,” I said.

“Maybe so, but I'm telling you we shouldn't get involved. I think I should have a vasectomy,” Russell said. “I'm really thinking about it.”

“We might have another baby,” I informed him as if I were telling him to expect a delivery from Fresh Direct. According to Dr. Lichter's Seven Stages of Motherhood, I was almost twothirds to acceptance.

“Well, definitely after the next one,” he said. The way he talked about his vasectomy was the way I had talked, as a young teenager, about losing my virginity and getting my ears pierced, like it was a rite of passage he would undergo that all men before him had undergone. Like his Bar Mitzvah. The way he said it, he was like a soldier going off to war, but in this case it was the war of marriage. The war of sex. And in that way, as negative a statement as it was about fatherhood, it was a romantic one too about marriage. A vasectomy implied having sex with abandon. Lots of it, anytime, anywhere. But even more than that, it meant to me security for Duncan that he was enough, and even after we divorced and Russell married a much younger woman, he would not have children with her. It was a kind of vow of fidelity stronger than the bonds of marriage or the cut of divorce. Still, there had been the fatty-liver incident, so I didn't think he would ever do it.

“I want to help Shasthi get pregnant,” I said.

“You have to stop with this,” he said. “You're always trying to help everyone. You're not a social worker.”

“I don't help anyone,” I said. “I just don't think it's fair that we have so much and she has so little.”

“She doesn't have so little,” he said. “Between Shasthi and these inane essays you're really losing your mind.”

“They're not inane.”

“Yes, they are, I've read some of them. We can't afford to help her. And it's not our job to help her. And she might not even want our help. Maybe she doesn't even want a baby. Maybe she thinks she does, but deep down she's relieved she doesn't. Maybe she likes her life the way it is. This is really a lose-lose. If you get her started with this and she doesn't get pregnant, she'll be miserable. And if she does get pregnant, she won't make a very good nanny, now will she? You're going to find yourself helping your way right out of a nanny. If she really wanted one she would adopt.”

“She can't adopt. She's not here legally. She'd have to go back to her country to adopt.”

“Well there you go. If she really wanted a baby she would move back to Guyana and adopt. Believe it or not, not having a child is not the worst thing that could happen to someone.”

“Yes, it is,” I said, finally sure of something in this argument. “For a woman who wants one, it is the very worst thing that could happen.”

We pulled up at our house and unloaded everything, and then Charlie and Gra came over with an enormous container of noodles too spicy to eat. In just a few short weeks, Charlie had gotten Gra a Shih Tzu named Curry Puff and had also gotten her pregnant.

“You're pregnant?” I said. The last time we'd seen her she hadn't been able to speak one word of English. Now she told us perfectly clearly that she had gotten Charlie to agree to bring her mother over to live with them and be the nanny.

“I can't believe how much English you've learned,” I said. I remembered that my mother's shrink always said I said “I can't believe” too much.