After Birth (21 page)

He’s gotten into fancy-cocktail making, simian brow all knotted in deep focus for the twenty minutes it takes him to mix us some drinks.

But the other thing about Steve is the sense that because I am a female he can’t immediately classify, I set him more or less on edge. Call it low-grade misogyny. It’s not extreme-porno misogyny, not I’m-gonna-rape-and-kill-you misogyny, just plain old run-of-the-mill semiconscious women-are-to-fuck-or-mother misogyny. Fear of the female. Menstrual cycle as mysterious sinister secret, et cetera. Women as doormats and/or commodities and/or hookers, the end. Intuition an absurdity. Life only and always about what we can touch/articulate/own. And me with my insistence on eye contact, my opinions! My candor! My always! Feeling! So! Much! Something about how these kinds of men would never dream of hanging out with a woman for fun, talking to a woman just because her perspective on life is inherently valuable. Not, at least, if he wasn’t also hoping to fuck her.

There’s this college-dropout friend of Paul’s. Professional jazz musician. We saw him play a few years ago. So talented. His wife had left him for another guy, and you got the sense he sort of blamed you for it, because you too were female. Or maybe it was that personhood was not a privilege granted a female automatically. You had to earn it, overcome the fact of your lips, your breasts, your cunt, your ass. Say something witty and smart, include some esoteric reference, prove you were not, at heart, a simple harlot, and thusly earn personhood. Women are foreign, unpredictable. Do not talk to a woman. Do not get caught in her web. Fundamentally she makes no sense. She will pull you under, fry up your cock in a pan and eat it for breakfast along with some eggs.

But Steve’s all right, especially stoned.
Really
loves his surround sound. He hands me my elaborate cocktail.

You guys aren’t drinking?

Erica grins. Steve grins.

Oh my God.

Yuuuuup!

Oh
, I say, tearing up.
Sweetheart.

I hold my glass out for a toast.

May you learn to mother yourself as you learn to mother your child
, I say.
May you trust and respect your body, and may others trust and respect your body, and may your body astound you.

What she said
, Steve says, pretending to knock one back.

That was hella deep, Ari, wow.

Later I meet Subeena for a drink. She talks at me for an hour about why now would be a good time for her to freeze her eggs because she’s getting promoted at the blog. She does not ask me a single question.

Return to Steve and Erica’s at midnight. All the lights are on.

You guys?

They’re asleep, sprawled across their gigantic bed. Erica’s wearing a silk eye mask, and their pug is gnawing ecstatically on a bone at the foot of the bed. The huge television is blaring a reality show about crazy sad enraged bejeweled old women with too much money.

Train home, I get a good seat on the river side. Sun is setting. Everyone sucks. The lady in the row ahead, sick and coughing and obviously contagious. The guy who takes my ticket, so swaggery and obviously a rapist.

Nina Simone is singing,
No use old girl / You might as well surrender
.

It wasn’t just Cat and the dead-eyed faculty wife. There was the competitive yoga instructor two towns over. There was the moms’ group and the whole
other
moms’ group. I’m telling you, I tried. I’d be friends with Hitler if he wanted to have a chill playdate. You have to find people, people with babies, and you might not technically like these people, but you’ll be so grateful for the shorthand, any blessed shorthand, that it won’t seem to matter. But it
will
matter, because you’ll be lonely, and come to feel terrifically fragmented, and death might come to seem like a relief.

A baby opens you up, is the problem. No way around it unless you want to pay someone else to have it for you. There’s before and there’s after. To live in your body before is one thing. To live in your body after is another. Some deal by attempting to micromanage; some go crazy; some zone right the hell on out. Or all of the above. A blessed few resist any of these, and when you meet her, you’ll know her immediately by the look in her eyes: weary, humbled, wobbly but still standing. Present, if faintly. You don’t meet her often.

Postcard from Crispin.

hiya how r u booberoo, i miss our consciousness-raisings. R u being good 2 yrslf? we r in montepulciano and it is fucked up beautiful. Love you. XOXO

They’ve been together twenty years, Crisp and Jer. Crisp’s first partner died in the eighties, of the plague. Gorgeous photo of him in the living room. Jer doesn’t mind in the least. He saw me staring at the photo once.

What a beauty, huh?

Why didn’t Crisp get the plague, too? Freak luck. They have no idea. Rare mystery. He tries not to think about it.

It’s the covered-dish brigade!
I’d hear Jerry calling from our stoop, arms too full of food and wine to ring the bell.

They saved me.

You saved yourself, gorgeous
, Crisp said.
You just needed a little help laughing about it.

Two hundred years ago—hell, one hundred years ago—you’d have a child surrounded by other women: your mother, her mother, sisters, cousins, sisters-in-law, mother-in-law. And you’d be a teenager, too young to have had any kind of life yourself. You’d share childcare with a raft of women. They’d help you, keep you company, show you how. Then you’d do the same. Not just people to share in the work of raising children, but people to share in the loving of children.

Now maybe you make a living, maybe you get to know yourself on your own terms. Maybe you have adventures, heartbreak. Maybe you nurture ambition. Maybe you explore your sexuality. And then: unceremoniously sliced in fucking half, handed a newborn, home to your little isolation tank, get on with it, and don’t you dare post too many pictures. You don’t want to be one of
those
.

Paul meant well. Paul is the embodiment of decency. But Paul couldn’t help me. You have to know what people are capable of, and forgive them for whatever they’re not.

It’ll keep getting easier
, Jer assured me.

How do you know?
I asked him.

I had six older sisters, hon. I’m a Catholic faggot from Georgia. I stuttered so bad, I barely spoke until my late teens. I am intimately familiar with what women go through. My mother had seven children in nine years, one of whom died before his first birthday. I didn’t understand that she was catastrophically depressed until she was seventy-five years old traveling around the world on group tours and I saw a photo of her actually smiling for the first time in my life.

Yeah, public service announcement
, Crisp said.
If someone you love or just like a lot or just kind of know gives birth to a baby, GO OVER TO HER HOUSE WITH FOOD AND HANG OUT WITH HER on the regular for a while.

No need to call first
, I agreed.

It’s like when someone dies
, Jer said.

Do not fucking send flowers
.

It is exactly like when someone dies. Better get used to it.

We refilled our glasses.

Paul and I got married at Brooklyn Borough Hall and had dinner at our favorite restaurant after.

Molly was there. Erica. My father and Sheryl. Marianne made an appearance but left after one drink. The old jazz musician friend of Paul’s. We invited them a week beforehand:
getting married tuesday! dinner after.
It demanded to be downplayed.

I wore a gold, bias-cut, raw-silk dress made by a woman with a storefront on Atlantic, paired with classic cowboy boots and a vintage black lace bolero jacket. Had my hair up loosely with an enormous red orchid pinned on the left side. I was so proud that night, so self-possessed, standing tall, fully inhabited. I owned myself, felt fully mine to give. I stayed close to Paul, very much his wife. Nothing mattered so much as he and I mattered to each other. Marriage is simply realignment.

Sheryl’s wedding gift was a copy of a weird little joke book called
Nice Jewish Goy: Intermarriage and You.
Inscribed to us personally by the author.

Sheryl and Norman were obviously uncomfortable, but they bit their big Jew lips about it. Unlike my crazy aunt Ellen, who sent me that letter about
shame
and
cut off
and
disappointment
and
history
and
your grandparents
and
lost to us.
Real classic of the genre.

She’s such a lunatic
, Erica said of her mother.
I’m so sorry. She’s fucking crazy.

One of Paul’s cousins is married to a Jew. We visited them once, and they had a mezuzah hanging upside down on the wrong side of their front door.

Molly gave a toast. Drunk, needless to say. Something about
how amazing it is when you find the person you’re meant to be with, or so I’m told, not that I know anything whatsoever about that, but anyway thanksdaddyamiright?

My father clinked a knife against a glass when the dinner was over. Dude waited until
dessert
was being cleared.

Ariella. You were the most wonderful surprise of our lives.
It was the first time in years he’d come anywhere close to talking about my mother. I waited for more. What else? What about
her?
What
about
her??

Marriage
, he went on,
is incredibly easy if you’re married to the right person.
He beamed at Sheryl and sat back down, speech over.

Well
, that’s
obviously total bullshit
, I whispered to Paul.
But I love you.

Get a room
, Molly muttered around midnight. Only she and we were left in the flickering candlelight of that beautiful restaurant, our shoes kicked off, my feet in Paul’s lap.

Of course she disliked me when I felt most relaxed and strong. The talk show host had entered rehab and disappeared. My happiness was a betrayal.

She left to go to a party in Brooklyn Heights.

Realignment.

I gather my best materials on the subject, even the documentary I myself failed to watch, and put the package in the mail to Erica. Man is she lucky to have me. Wish
I’d
had me.

Now I zap her a link: “Top Ten Signs Your Doctor Is Planning an Unnecessary C-Section.”

invaluable resource! hope you’re feeling good! lots of love! p.s. watch the documentary!

Two seconds later her reply.

know it comes from place of love but I’m stressed enuff and you need to cease and desist, thanks! ;)

Fucking
winky
face!?

Give me a break. I tap furiously:

Please educate yourself. Knowledge is good, promise.

I have a plan that works for me n steve & need you to respect that!

Oh, right, sure, cool, okay. A plan wherein you pretend it’s 1950 and get knocked the fuck out and come to with offspring and set about pretending the whole ordeal never happened. A
plan.

I’m actually shaking with rage. Vapid twat! Shaking, I am! Amazing, what the body can do.

What is the worth of a person who chooses ignorance? Who indulges entirely in fear? What good can come of a person like that? Monkey no see, monkey no hear, monkey no speak.

I am actually shaking. I feel like how the especially crazy army people get about draft dodgers. Pussies. With pussies for pussies. Go away and leave this humanity business to those who can deal.

Every woman is afraid of childbirth
, my mother recites, bored.
Also her mother’s an idiot. The apple doesn’t fall far.
You know what your problem is?

Fucking great, Janice. What’s my problem?

Your problem is that you love all these girls so much more than they love you. You only want a woman you can save. Or one who can save you.

Avoiding pain will get you nowhere. Avoiding pain multiplies pain exponentially.

Good luck arguing that case.

One of the high school Lindsays, now a TV executive, posts pictures of her new baby with the nanny. The nanny cuddling the baby, the nanny kissing the baby, the nanny keeping watch in an armchair three feet from the sleeping baby. Physicists say energy is never lost, only transferred, transformed. I send a virtual thumbs-up, do my part for peace.

And what else? Looks like Molly got married. Photos appear. Guy is good-looking in a symmetrical sort of way. Wearing a gold Rolex, however, which on a man under eighty-five is patently absurd. He doesn’t look very ironic. He looks like, here I am with my chosen bride; soon I will impregnate her and we will buy a lovely home and become more or less exactly like our parents, who are themselves quite marvelous. At least have the decency to be not quite so pleased with yourself, man.

Molly and her longed-for husband, into whose mouth she is here spooning wedding cake, here mocking the act of spooning wedding cake. It’s all nice and traditional. Hotel ballroom. Molly! Who once sucked off two guys at once for the email address of the head writer of a long-running sitcom.

My posture’s shitty, like I’m trying to get inside the screen. Then I really see her, right in front of my burning eyeballs.

She’s wearing a wedding getup precisely, to the detail the same as mine. Exactly the same kind of bias cut and exactly the same kind of bolero jacket and exactly the same hair arrangement, pinned loosely back with a big orchid behind the left ear. She is done up exactly like me. Only all in white, like a proper bride.