After Birth (22 page)

Fine, I do hate women.

How original
, my mother says.

They’re so obedient, traitorous. Descendants of the ones who gave up other women as witches.

No argument here.
She shrugs.

Women who choose friends more beautiful than they are, striving, basking in the glow. Women who seek out friends less beautiful than they are, to prop themselves up. The self-destructive ones, the ones who are even more self-destructive, the truly sick ones who the less self-destructive ones eventually abandon. The ones in hot pursuit, always, always, of a male, any male, that male, no, no, that one.

You have no trouble making friends. You make friends easy. It’s keeping them you can’t manage.

Because I don’t like women.

They don’t like you either, obviously.

The crazies trying to extend their fertility, taking hormones, slathering themselves with pureed money. It’s like, yo, ladies, actually, guess what? Amazing news. You’re pardoned! You’re free! The prison gates are wide open. Go! You made bail! Get out, you’ve served your time, your sentence is over! Wear comfy shoes and clothes you can move in and Be a Person! Run free! Put on elastic-waist pants, learn how to do some useful things, read books, explore, think for yourself, live your liiiiiiiiife!

The problem, sweetheart, is you.

But it’s like with animals raised in captivity, the ones that can’t ever acclimate back into nature? The ones who won’t run away no matter how wide open the cage door.

It’s true
, my mother concedes.
You’re not looking cute, ladies. Hair dye just makes you look like an old lady with dyed hair. Perfume makes you smell like you’re deathly afraid of your body. Let it go. Give it up. Be aged, bitches. Be a body. It’s happening anyway.

The whole get-fucked-by-the-system-and-take-pills-and-lie-about-the-truth-of-your-life-until-you-die thing doesn’t really appeal to me.

You just want to figure out how to wind up a happy old lady. That’s it. How do you wind up a happy cogent confident content old lady? Friendly with gravity. Friends with your body.

We’re all trying to outpace the same shit, but some of us won’t admit it, some of us can’t name it, and we call those women oppressed.

Why yes, Ariella
, my mother says, prim and proper.
Quite a mystery that you cannot seem to maintain a friendship with a woman.

You are the least dead dead person I’ve ever met.

I agree to accompany Mina to the co-op. Zev at six weeks old has plumped up real nice. He’s changed in just the few days since I’ve seen him.

We sit in the café not talking.

Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine.

Not much sleep last night
, Mina says, finally. I hate the way her lower lip protrudes. She thinks she’s so great with her unwashed hair and her ancient boots and her mysterious absent baby daddy.

No ticky no laundry
, I say. What the fuck? I didn’t sleep so great either. A full moon, northeasterly blow. When you lose sleep, you lose your mind.

She is nursing Zev like gangbusters now, early snafu all cleared up. My services are no longer needed.

I don’t know how to thank you
, she keeps saying.
I just can’t thank you enough.

The more she says it, the more I hate her.

She hands me Zev and goes to the bathroom, and did you know it’s almost impossible to feel aggression when you’re holding an infant? A chemical thing. Farewell, little guy. This will be the last. I’m quick about it, just one last nip before she comes back. How calm it makes me.

Weirdly warm for January. All the snow from last week’s storm already melted.

Last summer a giant two-hundred-year-old tree in the park was declared dead of beetle infestation and had to be removed in a process that took several days and lots of men shouting and a few big trucks. The beetles had thrived especially well after a not-too-cold winter. Someday another summer. I can’t imagine sweating. Think of all the freshly dead trees there’ll be. And in the summer you can’t imagine shivering. In the dry years the people forget all about the wet years; in the wet years they forget all about the dry years. And Rose of Sharon, having given birth to a dead child, offers her full breasts to the starving man, who drinks and is saved.

Dear Marianne, I have decided once and for all to do my doctoral work on the interstices of traditional religion and worship of female power.

Mina reappears and takes Zev back.

She used you
, my mother says.

We got it
, Mina coos at him. He’s windmilling his arms, overjoyed.
Don’t we, baby? Don’t we got it? Oh yeah, we got it now, sweet boy. We got it all under control now. We’re good to go now.

So go
, I say.
Bye.

In the car in the Starbucks lot out by mall with sleeping Walker and Adrienne Rich. I’m not reading the Rich; I’m reading the Internet on my device, going blind and dumb. I have to pee.

Baby stirs. I panic. I should have taken off his coat and hat and gloves, but it was so cold when we got in. I watch him in the rearview. Fast asleep. Good. Crucial. The nap is everything. But oh my God do I have to pee.

Mina rings the bell. Nine thirty in the morning and I have no clue how I am going to fill my day.

I have something for you.

I stand in the doorway with hands on hips, scowling at her.

Can’t we just skip the small talk?

It’s an amber stone on a leather cord.

A nursing bead
, she explains, tying it around my neck. Traditionally worn through the child’s infancy, through teething, as a kind of attractive third nipple for the baby to play with, chew on, generally enjoy through its transitions.

We’re like war buddies
, she says.
We’re in the shit together.

Lives on the line. A gendered rite of passage.

The nursing bead is solid and strong in my palm. I squeeze it.
Thank you
, I croak.

You’re welcome
, she says.

I’m sorry
, I say.

I know
, she says.
C’mere. Poor baby.

I move toward her and she wraps me up tight.

I am forgiven. For now.

Paul found fresh animal feces in the attic.

You have got to be kidding me
, he says before falling into bed like a mighty felled tree.

I’ll call Will
, I say, secretly happy for the excuse.

Grrrrreat
, Paul says into the pillow.

Any fool can see that he needs some attention, so I blow him. His perspective improves immediately, and he’s out in seconds.

I get it, Ari
, Will tells me in the morning, flat on his back with a flashlight in a corner of the attic. A flash of skin above his belt. His muscular belly, dusted with fine dark hair.
You know? I totally get it.
I get not being interested in what’s expected of you.

Oh.

I mean, do you have any idea what a fuck-you to my father it was, becoming a fucking carpenter? To a man who wrote books about books about books? He was so disappointed. He was so let down.

Well, screw that. Putting your own ambition on your children. That sucks.

He sat up and grinned.

Walker’s a lucky kid.

I roll my eyes.

Why can’t we fall in love—true and deep—without it being some huge threat to the working order of things? In another life Will and I might rip each other’s clothes off with our teeth and make a whole new world out of entirely different problems. But this is not that life, and I get that.

Falling in love often is crucial. You just have to let it nourish you without giving in to it. Why turn it off entirely? Why deaden any part of yourself? Won’t death do that for you, and soon enough?

Jewish summer camp Jess once told me that hair holds a lot of energy.

I spread newspaper under me and sit before the floor-length mirror.

I hesitate. I am brave. I go at it. All of it.

Shorter than it’s ever been. Feels amazing for about an hour. Gone, all of it. Walker claps and laughs and points and plays with the trimmings until the mess gets to be too much.

I love it
, Paul says. All night I can’t stop touching it. Walker keeps pointing at me, giggling madly.
Mama?
he says, looking around for me like I’ve disappeared, a game.
Mama? Mama! Mama!

He’s found me. I’m new.

By the time I wake up the next day it’s completely awful, exposes my whole horrible face, nothing to hide behind, nothing pretty about me anymore, a disaster. Paul laughs.

I’m getting to know her better, this complicated ecosystem. I ply her with teas and aromas and offerings of peace, placate her, beseech her to leave me alone, leave me in peace. I’m scared of my power sometimes. Distinctly female. I should shave my legs one of these days. It’s been months. I’m starting to look like I live in a cave. Not that Paul cares. Or will admit caring. Paul’s wanting does not hinge on anything other than the fact of me. This is an excellent trait in a man. The bad haircut, for instance, changes things not a whit. The hideous scar, the changes Walker hath wrought. He does not demand manicures. I love Paul. One of the great pleasures of my life, he is.

Tonight I sing Walker the lullaby from
Three Men and a Baby.
It’s the only lullaby I can think of. He fusses. Was I sung to? Surely I was. Must have been. Some anonymous Caribbean dirge, some South American love song. Some anonymous singer, her fat lips at my brow. Someone must have loved me, way back. Some unknown employee, holding me close. Away from her own children, loving me instead.

Good night, sweetheart, well, it’s time to go (Do do do do).
I looked it up once, and there’s not much more to it than that.
Do do de do do de do do de do do.
Seems to work okay, given that he’s asleep when I’m done.

Adrienne Rich had it right. No one gives a crap about motherhood unless they can profit off it. Women are expendable and the work of childbearing, done fully, done consciously, is all-consuming. So who’s gonna write about it if everyone doing it is lost forever within it? You want adventures, you want poetry and art, you want to salon it up over at Gertrude and Alice’s, you’d best leave the messy all-consuming baby stuff to someone else. Birthing and nursing and rocking and distracting and socializing and cooking and washing and gardening and mending: what’s that compared with bullets whizzing overhead, dazzling destructive heroics, headlines, parties, glory, all that Martha Gellhorn stuff, all that Zelda Fitzgerald stuff, drugs and gutters and music and poetry pretty dresses more parties and fucking and fucking and parties?

Destroy yourself
, says my mother.
Live it up.
That’s what makes for good stories.

She should know.

Nurturance, on the other hand . . .

The time it takes to grow something . . .

BORING.

Crisp and Jer hosted a party for last year’s visiting writer, a Dutch poet.

Come
, Jer said.
Mothers need to party, too.
So I brought my tiny Walker bundle, and Paul helped me limp over there. What a gift: invited somewhere nice with my terrifying appendage.

The Dutch writer was sweet but standoffish. He spoke to me just once.

In Holland we have a saying
, he said, gesturing at my bundle.
The Tropical Years.
When the Dutch colonized Indonesia, you see, military service there counted for double time. Because you must understand it was terribly hot. And the malaria and the disease, and so forth. So it was that one year of military service in the tropics counted for two. Tropical years, it was called. This is what it is to have small children, you understand?

We order pizza for her farewell dinner, open some red. I light candles, put on Dinosaur Jr.

Will declined my invitation. It occurs to me way too late: Will and Mina! She’ll come visit. Brooklyn isn’t far. Her sister will drive her bonkers, she’ll come stay with us, she’ll fall in love with Will, our little commune will be set.

Damn, girl
, Mina says about my hair.
Damn.

So sexuality’s a continuum
, says Bryan when we’re eating.

Right.
I’m game.

In the middle you have perfectly bisexual, on either end you have perfectly straight and perfectly gay.

Most of us are in the middle somewhere
, Mina says.

Obviously. But my theory is that women have to be at the exact same place on the bisexuality continuum in order to be friends.

Say more.

If you veer toward gay but your friend veers toward straight, you’re always going to want a more intense level of relationship, and she won’t be that interested.

Yeah
, Mina says,
like they’re terrified you might just jump them and chow down on their pussy.

I can’t stop laughing. I’m good and tipsy. Paul goes up to bed. He can only take so much. It’s only nine o’clock, but Paul is Paul and I love him and I get him and it’s fine.

So wait. How gay am I?

Probably you’re at, like, about seventy percent, and you
—he turns to me—
are closer to fifty. Just off the top of my head.

You wait until I have butch hair to tell me this?

Naw, me and Ari are the exact same amount of queer
, Mina says.
The exact same. And we’re in love.

She’s blushing. Look at her.

You guys. They just found a giant squid
, I say.