The Seven Year Bitch (21 page)

“Mama, what happened?” Duncan asked.

“Daddy hit Mommy with the car, but I'm okay now,” I said.

“You're really overreacting.”

“I was just hit by a car,” I said. “I'm underreacting.”

“Okay then,” Russell said, looking at me and then at Duncan. “Is everyone in the car? Duncan?”

“I'm in the car,” Duncan giggled.

“Mom?”

Russell always called me “Mom,” and I really couldn't stand it. He made it into a two-syllable word and it always came out an octave higher than the other words he spoke. He said it the same way he said it when he called his mother every Sunday. “Hi Mo-om!” he said into the phone, his voice dripping with upbeat pain, like a puppy barking. I couldn't stand to be called the same thing his mother was called. Whenever Russell called me Mom, I said, “Don't call me Mom. I'm not your mother.”

“Don't call me Mom,” I said. “I'm not your mother.”

“Sorry,” Russell said.

“But I can call you Mom, right, Mama?” Duncan said.

“Yes, Duncan, you can call me Mom.”

 

 

“ What should we do
about Deirdre-Agnes?” I asked Russell in bed that night. “She's called five times for her crib.”

“What do you think we should do?”

“I don't know!” I said. “Duncan's still using it. And she gave it to me. I even said to her when she gave it to me, ‘Deirdre-Agnes, what happens if you have another child?' and she said, ʽOh, I'll never have another one,' and—”

“I know,” Russell said, interrupting me. “You've told me that a thousand times.”

“When she lent it to me, I mean . . .” I stopped, upset by my mistake. “No, not lent, gave. When she gave it to me . . .”

“Why don't we just give it back to her and we can buy another crib?” Russell said.

“Duncan is using that crib,” I said.

“So, offer her money.”

“But how much money? It's an expensive crib but it was used when she gave it to me. She got it used. There were like five babies in it before I got it.”

“So offer her two hundred bucks.”

“Maybe I could tell her it was stolen,” I said.

“Don't do that,” Russell said.

“Why not?”

“Who would steal it? Someone would break in and steal a crib?”

“Maybe it got stolen on the street when we were bringing it downstairs to put in our car to take to our country house.”

“That's ridiculous,” Russell said. “Oh yes, I've read about him in the papers—the masked crib bandit—he roams the streets until he finds an old used crib, then slinks off with it. He leaves the baby, thank God, just takes the crib.”

“I think someone could steal it,” I said. “Like an NYU student or a homeless person.”

“Sure, you see homeless people sleeping in cribs all the time, and NYU students.”

I lay there perfecting the crime in my mind until I realized Russell was right and there was no way someone would steal a crib.

T
he next day, the morning of Duncan's second birthday, he went for a walk in the woods with Russell while I got ready for his birthday party. We'd decided to have it in the country, with my parents and Russell's aunt and uncle coming up from the city and some of our local friends who had children. Fall was the nicest season for a party. We had an apple tree filled with apples. Gra was doing all the cooking and I'd hired a miserable pony named Hustle to give the children rides in a circle on our lawn.

We'd hired Charlie to run yards and yards of extension cords down to the stream and we'd strung a small part of the woods with fairy lights. Russell's only job was keeping Duncan away from that part of the woods so we could surprise him and his friends by telling them that fairies had decorated the woods for them. I had gathered sticks and tied them into neat bundles with ribbon so the children could throw the sticks into the stream in a kind of contest. From a tree hung a piñata filled with $287 worth of little toys I'd bought online from the Oriental Trading Company. There were tiny buckets of M&M's under mosquito netting, and Marilyn, Doris, and Gert had knitted little bunnies and pigs and bears for favors.

I was ecstatic. Duncan was two! I was the mother of a two-year-old. He wasn't a baby anymore. I had done it.

“Mama,” Duncan said, running into the house. “We found something!”

“What?” I asked, in that famous Mom-voice, as if my whole being depended on finding out what it—a leaf, or salamander, or bird's nest—was.

“Look!” Duncan said, glowing pink with excitement.

He handed me an old DVD with the title
Hairy and Over Forty
printed on its label. Below the title was a faded photo of a blackhaired woman with a proud expression on her face sitting with her legs spread on some kind of office swivel chair. She was pulling her panties aside to show off a healthy thatch of bushy black pubic hair.

“Isn't it beautiful?” Duncan asked.

“It certainly is,” I said, looking at Russell, who had come in behind him followed by a completely filthy Humbert.

“It was just lying there in the woods. What can I say, my son appreciates nature,” Russell said.

“For you, Mama,” Duncan said, holding it up to me, my first gift from him. I imagined I would keep
Hairy and Over Forty
in a special box to be eventually joined by collages and beaded necklaces and ashtrays made out of clay.

 

 

Later, when most of
the guests had left, Gra and I were cleaning up in the kitchen and Russell was serving drinks to a few of our friends who had driven up for the day. Duncan was asleep in his crib, his forehead covered in stickers, holding a dragon puppet he had received in one hand and the
Hairy and Over Forty
DVD in the other. I had taken idyllic photos of him, but I'd decided against a video after the one Russell had made the year before.

“I want you to sit down,” I told a very pregnant Gra. “It's not good for you to work like this.”

“I hate this so much,” she said.

“What?”

“This.” She made a sweeping gesture over her remarkably small stomach. “I want it out! I so uncomfortable.”

“It'll be over soon,” I said. “Here's what I owe you.” I handed her eight hundred dollars in an envelope.

She took the envelope but kept hold of my hand along with it. “Do me big favor. I tell Charlie I only make half this for this job.”

“Okay. I don't tell Russell what I do with my money either,” I said, thinking of all I had spent on Shasthi against his will. “That's very American.”

“I send rest of money to my father in Thailand. I own a orchard there. I allow him live there even if I hate him.”

“Why do you hate him?”

“He held gun to my head when I was young.”

I couldn't believe how good her English had gotten and she was already using everyday American expressions like “held a gun to my head.”

“He put gun right here,” she said, pointing to her temple.

“He tried to kill you?” I said, hoping Duncan couldn't hear from his crib.

“He held gun to my head and I say to him go ahead and kill me please, kill me, because you are nothing, and I come from you, so I am nothing.”

“Why are you going to send him this money?” I said. She should be saving up for a one-way ticket back to Thailand, maybe go on some more chaperoned dates and start again with another husband, or for a studio apartment in Queens.

I thought of my nice father asleep on the couch in the other room with Curry Puff and Humbert asleep on his chest and feet, exhausted from building forts with Duncan, his biggest crime not paying for my third year of business school. My father had brought a Nerf football and spent an hour with him on the lawn throwing it to him and saying things like, “Good arm, son!” and “Yup, I think we've got another leftie.” Now that was a role model for a boy, I thought, not a man who sat hunched over the
New Yorker
literally crying over a bad review.

I thought of Shasthi, constantly sending money home to Guyana.

“You have nice father,” she said. “If father nice, you nice. If father scum, you scum.”

I was so impressed she already knew words like
scum
.

“Actually that's not how it works here in America,” I said. “It's the first thing you learn in therapy. Your parents are absolutely no reflection on you. That's how I was able to marry my husband. I have the worst mother-in-law on earth. I mean, she never held a gun to my head, but her voice is like a gun. But Russell is not his mother. He is not his parents. You are not your father.”

“I think Izzy teach me a lot,” Gra said.

I always loved a house after a party. I loved the exhausted feeling and the mess. I didn't want to clean it up. On the coffee table were enormous phalluses made out of Play-Doh that were handmade by Russell's friend Ben, the exalted author of the great novel
Shoes and Socks
, the one who had filmed last year's suicide video. The balls were huge and rainbow-hued; he must have spent quite a bit of time forming them.

I picked up my digital camera and started looking at some of the photos. I had captured Duncan's face when he saw the fairyland, marveling in awe. I stood there looking at photos on the tiny screen, and then I stopped and stared at one.

It was of Russell, my husband, sitting on Ben's lap with his arms around his neck. The next five photos were all of Russell sitting on Ben's lap in a loving embrace. Ben was a good six inches taller than Russell and much bigger and more muscular. Russell, on his lap, looked like a girl. I felt disgusted. Why would he want his son to see him this way?

What would he do at Duncan's next birthday, I wondered, give Ben a blow job while shooting himself in the head on the national news?

Gabe Weinrib, I couldn't help think, would never sit on a man's lap.

I walked out onto the deck where they were sitting, giggling like schoolgirls, obviously drunk on scotch again.

“Why did you sit on Ben's lap?” I asked.

“I didn't sit on Ben's lap,” he said.

“Yes you did.”

“No, I didn't,” Russell said.

“Yes, you did.”

“No, I didn't.”

Not only was he now gay, he was stupid. “I have the evidence! Someone took pictures of it!” I said. “Is this what you want in the family album?”

“It was just a joke,” he said.

“Why did you feel the need to sit on his lap? On your son's birthday?”

I could hear Charlie Cheney talking loudly now to my father in the living room about how Gra wouldn't mind cutting his toenails right now if he wanted her to. Russell had managed to make Gra and Charlie's marriage look like Ward and June Cleaver's. They were happy compared to us! Gra was fulfilled, learning a language, starting a business. And so what if she had to cut Charlie's toenails? There were women who came to this country who had to cut a hundred toenails a day for less than minimum wage and she only had to cut his probably once a month at the most. And what was so wrong with Charlie asking her to? I myself hadn't cut my own toenails since business school. But why, the question still remained, would Russell actually sit on a man's lap and then lie about it? How would I ever, for instance, erase the image from my mind and, say, have sex with him
ever again
? How was I going to forgive this one? I thought. How was I ever going to forgive this one?

 

 

I went into my
room and sat on my bed with a pile of essays. I had just judged a contest—In 100 Words or Less Tell Us Your Most Positive Aha Moment—for
O, The Oprah Magazine.
The winner got $100,000 and an all-expense-paid trip to Chicago to appear on Oprah's show. I'd gotten a hundred boxes of essays, earned $40,000, and gotten a call from a member of Oprah's staff who said that Oprah personally wanted to give me a bonus for doing such a great job. I'd waited anxiously for my “bonus” (what could it be—$5,000, $10,000, $25,000?—I wondered) until it arrived: a copy of the book
Live Your Best Life: A Treasury of Wisdom, Wit, Advice, Interviews, and Inspiration from
O, The Oprah Magazine
.
Shasthi loved it, even if I was less than thrilled.

And before that I judged Iron Baby Organic Formula—In 100 Words or Less Give Us Your Best Good New Mom Tip for Exhausted Moms. The $25,000 grand prize went to a woman whose husband was in Iraq and who suggested taking a “Babymoon” when your baby was born—an at-home vacation where you take two weeks for just you and your baby. The first-prize winner's tip was to string lights in the woods behind your house for your child's birthday party and tell your child fairies had done it. Her husband was also in Iraq.

The new contest that had arrived in fourteen boxes was Lavish Cosmetics: In 100 Words or Less Tell Us Why You Want to Stay Forever Young.

I couldn't wait to lose myself in the essays.