After Birth (20 page)

Eighteen years later she sticks her head in the oven. Amazing she made it that long.

The perfect baby girl, my mother, got a call on the Wellesley dorm hall phone.

A Survivor no more.

The girls in grad school hated me. They all wanted to be Marianne’s favorite, but only I was Marianne’s favorite.

At first I wanted to use feminist theory as a lens through which to read literature.

Marianne dismissed novels:
irrelevant, because they are forever going on and on about the things around
the
thing; if they actually attempted to
name
the thing, all that narrative would become immediately inconsequential. Novelists know this. It’s the bread and butter of storytelling. Stories are where people go when they don’t have the tenaciousness to go straight to the heart of the matter in a scientific manner. Stories are a rehearsal, an avoidance of politics and activism and rage and grief. A way for the writer to remove herself from the real problem.

So
. . .
you think I shouldn’t go for an MFA?

We’d have dinner, lots of wine. She had me to her house upstate. More wine. Her glamorous life, her many lovers. The most important of whom, a painter, had recently died. They hadn’t lived together; he’d had a wife, a grown family, the works. But they’d been involved on and off for years. She was vague about the details. I had a hunch he bought her the upstate house. So what.

She wasn’t the baby-having type. She was uninterested in baby having. She’d lost too many friends to baby having.

They were good women
, she’d say. More matter-of-fact than bitter.

Her work was about how we look at women, how we understand and own them by looking at them. The various ways a necessarily self-conscious woman appropriates this, to her benefit or detriment.

Yes, I thought when I read her in preparation for her seminar. Yesssssss. She’d made her name with that stuff in the eighties, though now it’s taken so for granted, she doesn’t really get her due. In her office I noticed a Barbara Kruger postcard tacked up over her desk.
Your gaze hits the side of my face.
She took it down and gave it to me. It’s on my fridge even now, yellowing.

She was riveting. Places she’d been, people she knew. I sat myself directly at her feet. What should I think? How should I feel?

When I finished my master’s, she gave me her grandfather’s pocket watch. When I published that first big-deal article, a garnet brooch of her grandmother’s.
I never had a daughter
, she wrote in a small note made from a three-inch-high thrift store black-and-white photograph of a blurry, bonneted baby.

No choice but to take it as a compliment when the other girls hate you: you must be hot shit. Still, they hated me. Also because their boyfriends wanted to fuck me.

One of the girls especially did not like me. She had it out for me. I found this hilarious. I was no threat! Not
really.
Not
actually.
What kind of moron did she have to be to imagine me a threat? At base I hate myself so much I can barely speak! Hate myself so much that to this very day I sometimes can’t manage to get dressed. So the fuck what if I fucked your stupid fucking boyfriend? Be mad at your mediocre boyfriend, sweetie-pants. But you had to kind of love that girl. You can always at least sort of love whatever you fully understand.

Then there was Anna, always a weird one. Just starting the program as I was on my way out. WASP. Cut off from something essential, earthy. Doing some best imitation of life. Anorectic’s anorectic. True hunger artist, to the bone. Never dated until a few years later, in her late twenties, when she was adjuncting in a midsized city in the South and took up with the vice president of a local bank. A man whose quirk was to insist she grow her nails extremely long and make sure they were perfectly manicured at all times. He was willing to pay for weekly manicures, he told her on their first or second date. She was fine with it, though more than a little sheepish.

I know how it sounds
, she told me.
He’s an interesting guy. But I know how it sounds.

Whatever
, I said.

I know.
I know. But he’s nice. I like him.

Last I saw her I was pregnant. We had dinner. (
I
had dinner.) She confessed a deep, abiding fear of pregnant bellies.

They disgust me, actually
, she said.

After the birth I never heard from her. Nothing. I called her in a sorry state with the stroller alone on a bench in the park one day, wanting to tell her everything, if only she’d pick up. She was smart, and smart ones aren’t easy to come by. She never called back.

I sat on that cold park bench for a while, couldn’t think of anyone else to call. Do you slowly lose everyone? Do you just get lonelier and lonelier until you die?

I tried again a few months later. She answered that time—
Heyyyyy! How are you?
—polite, distant.

I actually can’t talk right now
, she said,
but can I call you in, like, ten minutes?
Specious bitch!

Sure thing
, I said.

Still waiting for that call.

Anyway, no matter. It’s not personal. You don’t go to funerals because you can’t deal with going to funerals. Because you’re scared, inept, phobic. Shrink-wrapped in your own smallness. Because you can’t handle it. You might even be ashamed of yourself for failing to show up at the funeral. But sorry, you’re just not the kind of person who goes to funerals. Also known as an asshole.

When I broke the news to Marianne that I was pregnant, she gazed out her office window, took a drag off a cigarette, angled a long, graceful exhale.

Well. If that’s. What you think. You want.

Looking at some Firestone on the stoop for twenty minutes before it’s time to get Walker. Some second-wave bullshit about how biology isn’t destiny. Defeat the female body and be liberated from it.

I’d like to send around a paper on this with a long, involved academic title. The entirety of the piece would just read: Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!

It’s a clear day, and I’m sitting with my face to the sun. I can see my breath. But the sun, the sun, the sun!

Cat comes up the block pushing a stroller. Apparently the woman next door to her has a new baby.

She just needed a couple hours to herself
, Cat tells me authoritatively.

And you’re helping her out.

Her smile is beatific.

You’ve found yourself another friend, it conveys, and so, so, so have I, I, I.

Are you fucking joking? Are you kidding me right now?

What?

Nothing. That’s really nice of you. Good.

A house fell down on Main Street. A nineteenth-century brick row house. Most of the façade and the southeastern wall of the thing. Looks like a dollhouse now. All the rooms are visible from the front. There was work being done on the house next door, and you know how sometimes when they mess with the foundation of a two-hundred-year-old house the one next door decides to fall down? It’s like the house says oh great here we go again with another round of these jerks, another generation of assholes making noise; I think I’ll call it a day.

I stand across the street for a while with like thirty other people watching the trucks and the flashing lights. Walker asleep in the stroller.

I loved that dollhouse my father got me the first time my mother was sick. Getting to see inside the whole house, inside every room, all those private spaces that make up the life of a family. I was godlike, omniscient. I knew every corner of that house. All its goings-on were so, so small and so very manageable as compared with mine. No unknown rooms, no known but uninhabitable ones.

Agonizingly new baby at the co-op.

How old’s your baby?

Just about two weeks.

Tiniest person. The mom is not friendly. Does it cost her
money
to smile?

The baby’s big brother runs up and kisses her face, runs off again.

Her protector
, the dad says. I nod.

Lucky girl.

Naomi hands me a flyer when my shift’s over.

Gonna be amazeballs this month. Bunch of farmers from Germantown are joining up, gonna start a monthly CSA tie-in. How great is that? You can pick up your produce at the party!

In January the CSA consists exclusively of potatoes and onions and kohlrabi, but I do like it up here, in theory.

My lame book
, Mina says when I finally tell her how much I adore it.

It’s not lame. I really loved it.

Thank you. That’s nice to hear.

I mean, and it was kind of a big deal, wasn’t it?

To you, I guess.

We both know quite well her book’s a big deal. I’m pretending otherwise so she won’t think I’m a culture vulture. Only decent to make believe you don’t know how to use the Internet. Pretend you can’t find out all sorts of shit about people before you actually get to know them. Or in lieu of actually getting to know them.

She shrugs. She won’t trade on it. Not a trace of arrogance.

Maybe I’d feel better about it if it’d been less of a big deal. It just fucks with you, how people fall all over themselves being nice to you all of a sudden. They write you off as a crazy bitch for years, then suddenly they stop and pay attention and reward you for being a crazy bitch. Complete mindfuck. And speaking of mindfuck. Turns out we’re going to Brooklyn at the end of the month.

Like, to visit?

No.

I would rather she just hit me in the face.

Wait, you’re going to Brooklyn to live?

For now.

But. What? Why? Crisp and Jerry aren’t coming home for another six months.

The gig is over. And this town is kind of a shithole, and my sister’s being weirdly nice.

They already have sisters, the best girls. If you can find a girl to love, it’ll turn out she already has a sister.

So you’re going to Brooklyn. To live.

My sister has a lot of space.

Ooh, like a brownstone?

She has a lot of space.

But you have a community here.

By which I mean,
I
have a community here, and it’s
you.

This was always temporary.

I just thought.

Brooklyn’s not that far.

Seriously, though? Brooklyn?

What’s wrong with Brooklyn?
But she can’t even keep a straight face long enough to get past the “Brook.”

Wow, dude.

My sister’s been really amazing the last few weeks on the phone. Really supportive.

You’ll just love living among the bourgeoisie. Such good people. Salt of the earth.

She’s my sister.

I’m your sister, you fucking whore.

Don’t be weird.

Do you not understand what my life was like before you?

I do
, she says.

You are going to completely despise it there.

You’re probably right.

Whatever, no, go live a highly curated little life along with all the other highly curated little lifers.

My sister wants to help. I think she misses when her kids were little. And this way the kids get to know each other. And she lives in a giant house, and her marriage sounds like it’s just about over . . .

So what’d you put a fucking spell on me for?

You saved my life.

How nice for you.

Another one bites the dust. This house can’t be salvaged. Gonna have to tear it all down.

At pickup I am fleetingly overcome with wanting Nasreen’s stepson. Built, broad, twenty-five, tattoo sleeves in brilliant colors on both arms, radiates sex.

It takes me by surprise, the wanting, and I understand that in some way I am better.

I don’t need her.

Forget her.

You okay?
Paul wants to know in the thirty seconds before he’s asleep.

Don’t be one of those women who bitch to their husbands about other women all the time
, my mother advises in singsong.
Men do not care about the dramas of women and are exhausted by women who do.
She’s trying to be helpful. And she’s actually not wrong.

I’m fine.
I say.

What? What’s the matter?

My good Paul.

Spare him
, my mother croons.

But you can’t complain to the source of your complaint, so.

She’s leaving.

Who’s leaving?

He’s snoring before I can answer.

A night in the city again.

On the train down I’m sitting next to some fifteen-year-old texting texting texting the whole way. Hate these little girls because they never have to be alone with themselves. Life is going to be so fucking cruel to you, you prissy little bitch.

So it seems I’m the kind of old person who hates young people. This is a bad sign.

I’m crashing at Erica and Steve’s, because it’s free and luxe and huge and there are views and I figure I owe them a visit. It’s decorated like an expensive, of-the-moment hotel.

Hey wow your tits look semi-normal again. I got used to seeing them so freakishly huge
, Erica says before hello. She is wearing the scariest shoes I have ever seen.
What? What? I’m saying your tits look good! Don’t be so fucking touchy.

I’m fond of Steve, it turns out. He’s a shameless good time. Ribald, hilarious goofball undercover stoner with the most abhorrent politics you can possibly imagine. I can’t help it; I’m fond of the dude.