The Seven Year Bitch (33 page)

“Actually she had more men,” I said. “I just had one, she had two.”

“You had yo' husband and now him. That's two. We tied, two fo' two,” my roommate said.

She had a point, I thought. I was no different from her. We were up to exactly the same thing.

“Whatchu mean you had two men? You had another man here, bitch?”

“Okay, take it easy,” Gabe said.

“You take it easy,” the man said.

Luckily, the nurse came in and handed me two white pills in a paper cup. “Time for your Percocet,” she said. “I'll give you all a few more minutes, and then you really should be leaving. Husbands aren't allowed to stay overnight in a semi-private room.”

“That's not/ain't her husband,” Stinky Mama's mother and I both said at the same time.

The nurse frowned. “Well gentlemen, two minutes and everyone out.”

“I'll let you get some sleep,” Gabe said. “I think it's an incredible thing you've done and I respect you for it. Bringing two children into the world. Mother of two.”

“You gonna give that baby yo' tittie and let me watch?” the man said on the other side of the curtain.

“Gentlemen,” the nurse said.

“I brought you something to eat,” Gabe said.

“She's only allowed clear liquids until she passes gas,” the nurse said.

“Whoo, I don't want to be here when that shit happens,” Stinky's visitor said.

My cheeks burned with embarrassment.

“It's clear chicken consommé. Jean-Georges made it for you himself. But keep me posted about the gas.”

He took my hand and kissed it.

“You have a beautiful son,” he said, grabbing his coat. And then he left.

A few minutes later the nurse came back in. “You're changing rooms,” she said to me.

“Why!” I said, not wanting to. I hated my roommate but I had grown to love her too. We had already been through so much together and now I would never know what happened tomorrow, who would show up, who would be Stinky Mama's daddy. Tomorrow they were going to make me stand up and walk, and I would be able to drag my IV past her bed and see through the gaps in the curtains. Now I wouldn't even get to see Stinky.

“Why does she get to change rooms?” Stinky's mama said.

“Don't be hating,” I said. “Ask them to move you to the window side.”

Two more nurses came and shifted me onto a gurney and transported me, clutching my soup and my baby, to a private corner room with its own bathroom and refrigerator and windows looking out at the river.

“Why do I get this room?” I asked.

“Because your boyfriend just handed over a ton of cash. Now I've really seen everything,” she said.

If I were to write an essay in one hundred words or less giving my best tip if you're about to have a baby, it would be: Spring for a private room.

 

 

The next morning was
blissful despite the pain. I was alone with the baby until Russell showed up. I held him and nursed him, and I thought, This isn't so bad. I could get used to feeling this much love. My mother came with Duncan, and Duncan ran all around the private room and then settled in a big chair to hold his baby brother for the first time. “I've decided to call him Pubba,” he said. The nurse got me up out of bed and it wasn't as painful as the last C-section. Walking hunched over, I wheeled my IV all around. I visited the snack cart several times and carried my own pink plastic pitcher over to the crushed-ice dispenser and Poland Spring water cooler.

Russell and I decided it would be better, despite the chair in the private room that opened into a bed, for him to be home with Duncan, and I was enjoying being alone with Rhys.

I breathed in his faint smell of burning sugar. I had read somewhere that Buddhists believe that our cremation began at birth and that we spend our life slowly burning.

Dr. Sitbon came to visit me. “Madame?” he said. “How are you feeling?”

I wished more than anything it could be Dr. Lichter there instead, in his suit and tie that he wore for rounds, with his interns trailing him like an ermine cape. I missed the way he held my hand, looked at my scar and called it art. I missed his advice about parenthood.

I told Dr. Sitbon I was feeling fine.

“You looked disappointed to see me. Perhaps you were expecting someone else? The nurses told me you had a visitor late into the night,” he said, which sounded even more clandestine in his French accent.

“Would it be safe, Doctor,” I said, “to travel with the baby right away?”

“You have a trip planned?”

“No. I was just wondering if a trip to a place like India would be safe.”

“Well, I certainly would not advise it,” he said. “Can it wait a while?”

I smiled and shrugged, and he examined me in the politest of ways. “This doctor you married,” I said. “What's her name?”

“
His
name is Steven,” he said. “He's a man actually.”

Then I laughed, thinking about how I had lusted after him for nine months. I laughed so hard I hurt my incision and had to be given more Percocet.

With my baby in the crook of my elbow, I lay back and closed my eyes.

“Izzy,” a man's voice said.

I opened my eyes and, to my complete astonishment, found Dr. Lichter standing over my bed, looking right down at me.

“Dr. Lichter,” I said, practically jumping up, forgetting my baby and my incision.

“I couldn't let you have a baby without coming to say hello. I looked at your chart. Everything seems perfect.”

He took the baby from me and held him up, the way he had once held Duncan. “You make beautiful babies,” he said.

I was overjoyed. He had come.

“Are you working here again?” I asked. He wasn't wearing a lab coat or a suit and tie for that matter. He was dressed the way I had seen him in Kripplebush, in jeans and a Red Sox hat.

“No, I'm practicing upstate in New Paltz now. Let's just say I came to clean out my locker.”

I thought of my locker with its beautiful earrings and vasectomy gift certificate in it.

“So, Dr. Lichter,” I said, as if I were talking to a ghost. “What's going to happen now?”

“You're going to be a wonderful mother to your two sons. Two makes everything twice as worthwhile. Everything you do for one will benefit the other. You are going to love it.”

I beamed with happiness.

“The Seven Stages of Motherhood only apply the first time. Now you should go back to work.”

“I don't know,” I said.

“You have to work. I just don't see you as a stay-at-home-mom type. Have you thought about who's going to do the circumcision?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Doesn't Dr. Sitbon do it?”

“He's gone now for a few days and it should really be done today or tomorrow.”

“I want you to do it,” I said.

Russell had suggested a bris, but for me that was out of the question. And according to the mohel Russell had talked to, the bris would have to take place exactly eight days after the birth, which would put us at Christmas, turning Christmas into Brismas.

“I don't think so, Izzy. I don't think they'd take too kindly to my performing a procedure here.”

“Please,” I begged. “If you couldn't deliver him, the least you could do is give Rhys the same circumcision you gave Duncan. What if we bring him to New Paltz?”

“You're very sweet,” he said, stroking my hair for a minute. Then he took my hand and we just sat that way silently for a little while. My heart was pounding and I thought of the Fleetwood Mac song he had once sung to me.

I started to cry with gratitude for this man who had helped me become a mother and was now here when I was becoming a mother again, but then I thought, it was Russell I should be grateful to.

“You're going to be fine,” he said, sitting on the side of my bed and putting his arm around me and sort of holding me. He was half-lying in bed with me and I felt incredibly comforted despite how strange it was.

“I'll do it,” he said after a few minutes. “Walk with me down the corridor.” He put out his hand and I struggled up out of bed. Then, pushing Rhys in his bassinet labeled
Baby Brilliant
, we walked inconspicuously down the hall and through one set of double doors and then another until we were in the NICU.

“Wait here,” he told me, lifting Rhys into his arms, and several long minutes later he came out again with the baby screaming and tucked him back in his bassinet.

 

 

More exciting even than
my wedding had been the day Russell had driven me to Westchester to get our marriage license. It was raining, and I thought, I am sitting next to the man I love. We are going to be married. I got out of the car completely covered in Humbert's fur. I had never been so happy.

Now, when Russell was able to tear himself from his BlackBerry, we filled out our new son's birth certificate: Rhys Samuel Trent.

It was time to take him home. My mother was waiting with Duncan and we'd invited everyone over for deli sandwiches later.

“Look what I got you,” Russell said, handing me a brown paper bag. I opened the bag to find a box of Extra Strength Tylenol.

“See?” he said. “Everything's going to be fine. Now, you ready?”

Solemnly we walked out, Russell struggling with the bags. I held Rhys swaddled in the blanket we had taken Duncan home in and Russell's mother had taken Russell home in.

I waited in the lobby for Russell to get the car, and then, in the hospital's circular driveway, we had our hugest fight. Russell's only job had been to get the inside of the car cleaned and have the baby's car seat installed. I had bought the seat. All he had to do was get Rashid to install it.

Russell opened the back door of our car, and there was the seat. But it wasn't installed, and the car was far from clean. We might as well have put the baby in the trunk.

Aside from the fact that the seat wasn't installed, there were old McDonald's hamburgers on the floor, empty milk containers, old bottles, a million filthy toys. There was what might have been vomit crusted on the seat.

“You couldn't do that one thing!” I screamed, clutching my bundled-up baby to me as passers-by looked at us and shook their heads. “I married a moron. Stupid. Incompetent.”

Another couple was also leaving with their baby girl in a pink furry snowsuit with dog ears on the hood. The father tucked the baby into her safely installed car seat in their gleaming SUV. The mother slid in next to her. There were family members, flowers, balloons. I could practically see a college fund bulging in the father's pants.

“Don't look at them,” Russell said when they'd driven cautiously and safely off. “We can get it installed,” he stuttered. “I, I, I, I, I thought it was in right.”

“In right? Look at it!” I yelled. “It's not in at all!”

“Is there a problem here, folks?” a security guard said, walking over. “You can't leave the car here.”

“The car seat isn't installed,” I told him.

“Those things are tricky,” he said.

“This is our second child,” I said to the guard. “He's had plenty of time to figure it out. Taxi!” I yelled, holding my baby with one arm and sticking my other arm as far up as I could without screaming from the pain from my incision.

“Don't take a taxi,” Russell said.

“Taxi!” I screamed, even though there were no taxis.

“Do you want me to try to get you some help, sir?” the guard said.

“Taxi! Taxi!”

The guard looked at the car seat. “Those straps ain't right. That baby's way too big for those straps. You really have to move the car.”

In a complete rage I got into the filthy backseat with the baby on my lap, and, with the vacant car seat next to me, Russell wordlessly drove us home.

“I hope our son never asks what it was like when we brought him home from the hospital,” was all I could manage to say to Russell for the rest of the day.

O
n New Year's Eve, with my newborn son in my arms, Duncan asleep in his big-boy bed, and Russell lying on the bed next to me watching
New Year's Rockin' Eve
, I pined for Gabe Weinrib like a red-hot teenager. I mooned over him. I looked out my bedroom window at the lights and glistening tinsel rain and New York's signature black umbrellas. What time was it in Paris, I panicked. What was he doing and who was he sleeping with, and how did I get myself into this mess?

If I couldn't go to India, at least I could go to Paris, I thought, over and over again. But it wouldn't be so easy now with the baby. And what about Duncan, I thought. He'd be jealous if I brought the new baby. And if I left the baby home, what about nursing, I thought bitterly, as the baby latched on to me. My cheeks burned because I knew I was a fool. But I couldn't help it.

The claustrophobia of nursing was getting to me. Rhys depended on me to feed him every hour. I couldn't go to a movie, let alone Paris. And he was gigantic! I wouldn't even be able to handle the Baby Bjorn.

“What are your New Year's resolutions?” Russell had the nerve to ask me, as if having a baby wasn't enough and now I had to resolve to do something better.

“Cows don't make New Year's resolutions,” I said.

 

 

In the morning there
was an e-mail from Gabe, written just after midnight: “I'm leaving for India on Jan 8th. You can still come with me if you want to.”