After Birth (5 page)

Mina meets my eyes.
Bam
. Yes. Energy transfer. We smile.

Now poli-sci guy’s lecturing her about the influence of the Misogynists on a band he heard once in Brooklyn who
were kind of lame but it was interesting how they appropriated your ferocious textuality, like Le Tigre but less cerebral and more melodious than Sleater-Kinney
. She looks like she wants to stick a knife into her ear. Maybe I’m projecting. Poli-sci guy’s wife is riveted. Her wordless stare makes it look like she’s on acid.

Mina sticks out a hand to me.

Hey. Mina.

We emailed about Crispin and Jerry’s. Ari.

Oh, right. Hey.
Warm, genuine. Emanating the ballyhooed glow. I never get over the wild spectacle of pregnancy. It’s so outside of time. So elemental. So (fuck it) sacred. Who’d really think twice about those Manson kids murdering Sharon Tate? Yet another slashed-up chick: next. Poor thing was pregnant, though, so bona fide atrocity forever.

We’re gonna get some more drinks
, Poli-Sci says abruptly. The wife follows.

Jesus fuck
, Mina whispers when they’re gone.

I love her. Mellow people always seem slightly melancholic, don’t they? Whenever I stop grinning for five seconds in a social setting, someone always asks me what’s wrong.

Cat breaks the spell to ask if we’ve seen the highbrow TV of the moment.

Oh my God!
Betsy hollers from the kitchen.
I hear it’s amazing! Is it amazing? We just got Season One. I hear it’s amazing!

It’s amazing.

Okay, so I have to watch it. I’m really excited. Everyone says it’s amazing.

It is. It’s amazing.

This is as close as they ever come to talking about anything.

But Mina’s looking at me.

Is Ari short for something?

Ariella
, I say, with loathsome girly twist. In college, reading Plath, I unofficially changed it to Ariel, and felt immediately tougher, braver, like I might someday find the courage to kill myself. But the lie slid from grasp, as lies do. And I’ll never have remotely the courage to kill myself.

Pretty
, she says, and tries in vain to take a deep breath; no easy task what with fetus cutting into lung capacity.

You must be thinking about names?

She shrugs.

When are you due?

Last week.

Wow.

Yeah
. She holds up her right hand and turns it slowly around, marveling at swollen fingers.

I gulp wine, impatient to get where I’m going, wine-wise.

Such a mindfuck, right?
Can’t sleep? Weird dreams? Sciatica, indigestion? Peeing constantly, sick of being told to, like, “enjoy this time”? And people don’t seem to trust that you’ll let them know when you’ve had the baby, right?

Oh my God, it’s like, people: I will let you know when I’ve had the fucking baby. You don’t have to ask me every motherfucking day if I’ve had the baby.

I confess:
Mine just turned one.

Yeah, Crispin and Jerry told me. Midwife says I can try castor oil in the next couple of days.

A midwife! My throat catches. She’s no fool.

Listen, do you think I’ve done my duty here? I need to go home, like, ten minutes ago. My entire body is sort of throbbing. You know?

Totally.

She downs the last bit in her glass, beams at me.

What do you have? Boy or girl?

Boy.

What’s his name?

Walker.

That’s a good name.

I nod and sputter something about letting me know if she needs anything and
good luck
. Oh right, luck. Like you’d offer a mountaineer heading out into the Nepalese dawn, never to return.

Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid, another glass of wine might trumpet through me. Of course a midwife. No one’s going to cut Mina Morris open like a fucking lab-rat piece of trash; she’s not the type. She’s gonna do it like for real do it. The goddesses are with her! Hang tough, sister. No way out but through!

Like I know shit about the way through. I pour myself another to ease the burgeoning wine migraine. Lose patience with a few conversations. Close talker with pork breath, painter who cannot fucking remember my name even though we’ve met like a hundred times, French bitch in her Kabuki makeup and torture shoes, Jewish studies ass (
wonderful to see you, Ariella!
).

Go upstairs to find the bathroom, wander into the bedroom. Close the door, make myself at home. Nothing of note in Cam and Betsy’s drawers.

I always imagined faculty social politics as some intellectually deranged orgiastic laser show, everyone sleeping with everyone, forging strange alliances over years of close quarters, one big incestuous Machiavellian psychodrama. All these potent, messy minds reading Foucault on futons on the floor with other people’s spouses, lit by vintage modern paper lanterns in otherwise empty rooms. Maybe a jade plant, maybe a ficus. Talking through problems of philosophy, the meaning of life, the nature of morality, the
way things are
, dispensing with bullshit and superficiality. Like the moodiest, smartest, funniest, sexiest soap opera ever, with a
great
soundtrack. Enclaves of special beings, exempt from the rules of the workaday world, talking about things that
matter
, in so doing, mattering themselves. Like artists but better, because artists are ideally super-duper crazy and/or must die young.

But it’s nothing like that. No one’s having any sex whatsoever. It’s polite and competitive and stilted and pretentious and self-conscious and humorless, everyone blowing halfheartedly, protectively, on the tiny ember of whatever it was that originally sparked any actual interest or passion. All bitter about grading and meetings and students, talking about absolutely nothing. Bunch of insular self-styled martyrs, and to what?

Paul finds me a minute or an hour later, sprawled fast asleep on Cam and Betsy’s bed.
You think they fuck here?
I wonder aloud, rousing.

He doesn’t answer. I’m in trouble.

Most fun I’ve had in a while.

I was pretty much your big round regular happy pregnant lady. Do you realize how
nice
everyone is to pregnant ladies? (Mansons excluded.) Nothing ironic about it; no way to downplay the honest-to-goodness-ness. I grew big, full of life. No irony. Not an iota. Not an iota of an iota.

I mean, fine, there were one or two moments of acute oh-shit-this-is-really-happening. But those moments did not undermine the honest-to-goodness-ness, not one bit.

Got slow and uncomfortable and slower still and even more uncomfortable and eventually impatient. Started to think I’d be pregnant forever. Paul got on my nerves. Certainly it would’ve been nice to have a woman around. Sister, mother, aunt, cousin, friend. Perhaps the absence of any began to crackle and hum, low at first, barely audible static. Maybe I mistook it for the white noise of the womb, persistent reminder of the magic therein. By the time I realized things were not going well, things were so far from well.

Okay! All right. High time to call the baby by name. More than a year old and still I go on about “the baby.” He babbles agreeably to himself, holds an old toothbrush aloft. He likes to offer to brush your teeth for you. He’s obsessed with a book about a toothbrush cowboy named Charley. His chatter sounds like talk but is not quite talk. My father and stepmother Sheryl, our visitors, observe him closely.

Lot of autism these days
, Sheryl notes, forehead tensed where not in elective nerve paralysis.
Shouldn’t he be
[whatever the fuck all my friends’ grandchildren are doing]
by now?

Walker!
my dad shouts, holding up a cheese stick or a toy, or talking into a banana as if it were a phone.
Walker, come here! What is your name? Do you know your name?
Walker just grabs the bribe, disregards the crazy old man, cruises away. In this I am assured he is perfectly bright.

Sheryl calls us “artsy kids” because we live up here, wear functional shoes, are of reproductive age, ride bikes. She thinks I’m a real estate visionary because I moved into a shitty apartment in a shitty neighborhood in Brooklyn in 1999. She regularly directs my attention to media mention of Brooklyn.
Look, a new restaurant in BROOKLYN! It’s very HIP now, apparently
.

They relish grandparenthood, or some projection of grandparenthood, like they relish a shortlist of life’s offerings: fundraisers of every stripe, anything to do with the Holocaust, whatever’s showing at the Jewish Museum, grossly overdressing for rousing High Holiday sermons in which they are beseeched to solve world Jewry’s problems, past and present, by sending money to Israel and voting Republican if it comes down to it.

They have “forgiven” us for not having Walker circumcised, though Sheryl recoils from diaper changes as though in protest.

Sheryl runs an organization that promotes Jewish books. Books about Jewish mothers, daughters, fathers, sons, reclaiming Yiddish, moving to Israel. Bread-and-butter books about the one and only genocide, my favorite of which is, I kid you not even a little,
The Holocaust Survivors’ Cookbook
. Books about children of Survivors and books wondering at the emotional well-being of children of children of Survivors. Books about Jews who marry non-Jews, Jews who abhor the marrying of non-Jews, Jews ambivalent about being Jewish, people or entities accused of not liking Jews and/or Israel. Humor books about Jews who undereat/overeat, Jews who date online. Swoony debut novels of mystical redress for gassed lovers. Literary doorstops in which unlikely entities—bowling, Zionism—are united in metaphor. Post-apocalyptic sagas in which there is Only! One! Jew! Left! In! The! World!

It’s all a little up its own butthole. And the thing is, Sheryl hasn’t read a whole lot of like anything else. I mean, lady’s not so well acquainted with Malamud or Bellow. She doesn’t know who Gertrude Stein is. She’s never heard of Paul Celan. She often gets fiction and nonfiction confused. When Philip Roth won the Pulitzer, she shook her head vehemently:
self-hater
.

My father is Ophthalmologist to the Stars. Immediately (and I do mean immediately) after my mother died he married a social-climbing German émigré ten years his junior with a thing for Jews (o-ho, they love us now, don’t you know), but that ended within a year when he realized he had married a social-climbing German émigré fourteen years his junior with a thing for Jews. And of course it turned out Astrid wanted to have children, whereas I guess old Norman felt he was done with the having of children. Astrid spoke of converting to Judaism but made no progress toward this end. She had the sharpest jawline I’ve ever seen. We didn’t have much in common, Astrid and I, though she was given to offering me stagy hugs when my father was around. My father, the blind ophthalmologist.

She hates me
, I once heard Astrid say, weeping, through the wall.

Give it some time, darling.

No, Norman. She hates me, Norman. She hates me.

I was fifteen, glad my mother’s whole dying rigmarole was over with, ready to move on, ready for life to begin. I didn’t hate Astrid. Hate requires love. Also, hello, classic stepparent mistake: it’s not about
you
.

Then,
bam
, a matter of months after Astrid disappears, Norman runs into a woman he remembers vaguely from high school in the Bronx, and wow, they’ve reconnected and hey, isn’t it amazing how life brings you back around to people and Arlene’s separated with a sixteen-year-old daughter, Lindsay. They took us to lunch at Rumpelmayer’s in the spring. Seriously, I shit you not at all:
Rumpelmayer’s
. For ice cream sundaes with cherries on top, though we were both already wearing tampons, and Lindsay was rehearsing her first fellatio.

I like your sweatshirt
, she said.

The translation of which, if you aren’t fluent in Girl, is: I won’t try to ruin your life if you won’t try to ruin mine.

Thanks. Cool shoes.

Deal.

Arlene and Norman beamed, pretended to examine their menus. That love story lasted about six months before Arlene decided to get back together with her husband, Lindsay’s father. Lindsay said they pretend the whole thing never happened.

Then came a few years of the saddest dating you’ve ever seen. Then the Internet came along and at last he found Sheryl. The Internet! Palace of miracles. They seem happy. I’m glad. She’s got two greasy forty-something sons in Westchester I’ve met like three times total; I get their wives and kids mixed up. One’s Lauren, one’s Fiona. And they have little Cayden Hayden Jaden Braedons.

Sheryl insists they get on the road before dark. Sheryl hates coming up here, hates driving, is convinced that driving in the dark is akin to putting a loaded gun in your mouth.

Love you, Daddy.

Think about Thanksgiving.

I will.

Maybe we’ll come up next weekend.

No, Norm, dinner with Jody and Harry next weekend.

Tomorrow, incidentally, is seventeen years since we buried my mother. My father doesn’t mention it. I can’t tell if he thinks about it and won’t talk about it or if in fact he doesn’t think about it at all. And I don’t say anything about it either, so.

You okay?
Paul asks. Unspooling floss. He knows he’s required to ask when he senses that I am, in fact, not. It’s sort of cute, how jumpy and tentative he gets when he has to inquire about my emotional state, like I’m the possible explosive device and he’s the military German shepherd.

I spit toothpaste into the sink.
Anniversary.