“Hey, if you want to go back to bartending, I’ll stay home with the kids. We can live off the great salary you once made. Let’s try that out, huh, Sonia? If you want to role-reversal with me, I’ll do it. I wouldn’t mind the break. Work’s not fun you know. It’s not a picnic.”
“I realize that work is not always fun for you. I realize that. But you are lying when you say you’d quit your job and do what I do. You may have some bad times there, but when it comes down to it, you like what you do. You’re good at it. You like going to work, you like coming home and seeing your family, you like someone else doing all that comforting shit when you come home. The dinner. The couch dusted off. The whole shebang.”
“I’m sorry, are we supposed to pretend that we could live off of your bartending salary of yore? Is that what you want me to pretend right now?”
“You’re not admitting it. You’re not admitting what you get out of this deal. I, on the other hand, am taking a look at what I don’t get. Why don’t I get this? Why is this special? Why don’t you give me your best shot every morning? Why don’t you feel any obligation around here? All I can say is, I’m never sucking your fucking dick again. You got that? Never.”
“I’m calling your shrink. You need to go see your shrink.”
Sonia hasn’t seen her shrink in years! Not since Tom was born. Dr. Silver, in Brooklyn Heights. It’s not a bad idea really, and Sonia thinks she may call him herself. But instead she says, “I’m going to a clinic right now. I’m putting an end to this. I’m not being your wife anymore. Fuck you, you got that? Fuck you and your scrubbing a pan once a month around here shit.” Her voice is loud now. Tom and Mike run into the kitchen.
But it’s not Sonia who leaves, it’s Dick. And she stands mute as he slams the door behind him, the children grabbing onto her legs. Later, when another day is past, when Dick doesn’t come home for dinner, but purposefully comes home after the kids are down, Sonia hears him slink into the apartment. The lights are all off and the quiet he gets to come home to enrages Sonia even more. She gives him this, this quiet, but it’s not like she has a choice, or does she? She hears him piss downstairs in the bathroom off the boys’ room. He doesn’t come up to her. She hears him settle on the couch for the night. And then, exhausted, she falls asleep.
7
Carrie comes first thing in the morning and the kids are so happy to see her that Sonia gets depressed. Why do they like their babysitter better than her? Maybe because she takes them to McDonald’s? But she doesn’t do that every time she comes. Maybe because she entertains them, rather than just takes care of them, which is basically what Sonia does. She doesn’t make silly faces or play red light, green light. She just takes care of them.
She’s off to see her midwife, the woman who delivered Tom and Mike, for a prenatal checkup. It is so hot and humid outside that the minute Sonia steps outside of her building, she feels like she’s been hit with a brick of wetness.
And yet, she is childfree. She moves her legs, her arms sway beside her. Leg, then arm, leg then arm. She’s moving. Somewhat effortlessly. She’s not pushing anything. No one is holding her hand. She is … free. A smile comes on her face, a twitching smile. Her chin lifts. A noise — a giggle — escapes her mouth. Legs and arms, moving, toward the subway. It’s not so hard! It feels good.
And yet, she feels like an imposter. She’s not a childfree person. She’s pretending to be a childfree person. She is, in fact, paying someone so that she can pretend to be a childfree person. She sits on the F train and it’s cool on the train, the air conditioning doing its job. Her nipples get hard under her T-shirt, and she feels like telling the woman reading a book next to her that her kids are with a babysitter. That she isn’t what she appears. She’s not what she looks like. The woman, of course, doesn’t look up from her book, not that Sonia would really say anything to her. A book, now there’s an idea. Why doesn’t Sonia have a book with her? And then, just as quickly as the thought comes to her, she remembers — because she’s pregnant. And when she’s pregnant, she can’t read. When she’s pregnant, she can’t think, concentrate, or do anything, really, except sit there and let the fucking thing inside her suck the life out of her. She is deep in thought about how she can’t think, so deep, she almost misses switching to the C train. At the last minute, she rushes off the train and catches the other one. Suddenly, her heart hurts. The rushed movement causing a sharp pain. She settles into a spot on the nearly empty train and puts a hand over her heart. It is pumping madly. She can feel it.
The midwives are on the Upper West Side and they are a good lot. Midwives, yes; hippies, no. They believe in epidurals if you want them, they believe in delivering in a hospital, which they do. They are midwives in the European sense, in that they are trained to deliver babies, but they are not surgeons. They are not midwives in the home-birth sense. They are not midwives in the West Coast sense. They don’t do C-sections, but a doctor on call could. They are nice. They talk frankly with Sonia, and everyone else, and they’ve been doing it for twenty-five years now. Jenny is Sonia’s midwife. She is a big, round, kind-faced, bespectacled woman from Maine who seems ready to retire. She’s been doing this forever. She’s good at it, but tired.
“What are you doing back here so soon?” She says to Sonia, as she pulls up a chair.
“I’m pregnant. I’m here for a prenatal checkup.”
“You’re pregnant again? Didn’t I just see you a few months ago for your annual checkup? What happened to that cervical cap? What happened to ‘I just want to paint?’ ” Jenny is looking at her like she’s a crazy person and Sonia starts to think she’s crazy.
“That cervical cap doesn’t work so well.”
“I guess not. So why not terminate it?”
“After this Dick’s going to get his tubes tied.”
“Men don’t get their tubes tied.”
“You know what I mean. And why is everyone freaked out about me having another kid? Where’s the pro-choice attitude?”
“Hey, you were the one who said no more.”
“I’m deeply ambivalent about this baby. Is that what you want to hear? I was deeply ambivalent about the other two, too, you know that.”
“Anyone who says they’re not is lying. You know that. Love, hate! Love, hate! It’s starts in the womb and goes on forever. Anyway, I’ll take some blood and check you out and I guess we’ll be seeing more of you. How far along are you?”
“Almost done with the first trimester.”
“How are the boys?”
“Great.” Jenny sticks a needle in her.
“Ow! Jesus, not so rough on me!”
“You with the tattoo on your shoulder. Don’t give me that. Three kids! Wow, harking back to the old days.”
“Lots of people still have three kids, Jenny.”
“I don’t know about lots. Are you moving to the suburbs?”
“I don’t think so. Although I should look around for a bigger apartment.”
“Ha! In your neighborhood, not likely. Is this the trying-for-a-girl thing? Is that it?”
“I love my boys. You know that. I’m from a family of girls. I was so happy to have boys.”
“Yeah, but now that you have your boys, you want a girl? Is that it?”
“It was an accident and we’re just going with it. Dick would love a little girl. I don’t know how I feel about it. As long as the little thing is healthy, I’ll be happy.”
But as Sonia walks down Columbus, looking at the shops full of beautiful clothes she can’t wear because soon she’ll be as big as a cow, sweating out a particularly pungent sweat due to all the hormones raging in her body in the late summer heat, she thinks, do I want a girl? Is this what this is about? To be a mother to a daughter? To, then, relive her own life to a certain extent? To have a little Willa? A passive yet conniving thing? Or worse, to have a little one just like she was, a wild bitchy creature that acted like a boy, but disgraced the family like only a bad girl could?