This hard-earned, long-awaited breather. Her children are too small to cause real trouble, being past the crying, run-into-traffic, eat-crap-off the-floor, constantly teething stage. The green, tree-lined streets of Brooklyn produce an air that smells sweeter than ever, as she can now bring a magazine to the playgrounds and relax, really relax, while her two boys play nicely on the low, super safely designed, modern jungle gyms. Her legs look good again, the bulging pregnancy veins having mostly receded. She’s been feeling hopeful. She isn’t drowning in laundry. And now it’s all going away? Now this?
Because, frankly, Sonia and Dick still feel young. Sonia’s thirty-five and Dick’s thirty-eight. They wanted to learn tennis together. To go to museums. To wear stylish clothing that won’t get spit-up on it. Just not to bend over constantly! To not worry about their boys falling down the stairs or eating broken glass. They want a little bit of freedom. And they have been tasting it now for a few months, because when Mike turned two, things just started to feel easier. They’ve had the talk about how they specifically want only two children, so they can still afford to live in the city, still get by with a decently spacious two-bedroom apartment. No pressing need for a big house and yard. Yes, they’ve just started seeing a movie once a week. But Sonia wants to start painting again, too. She wants to stick Mike in preschool in the mornings in the fall (he was already signed up) and do whatever the fuck she wants to do, which is, primarily, to paint.
Before she moved to New York, before she met Dick, fell in love, got married and then, right away, pregnant (because face it, waiting until you’re forty to have a baby is stupid), before she became who she is now, a tired housewife with a bad haircut, before that, she painted. And nothing else really mattered to her. She lived in Boston, slept with lots of men, drank a lot, and painted constantly. Day and night. She painted until her soul ached, and then she painted some more. She painted until the painting was good, and then she kept painting until the painting sucked, and then she painted some more. She had what they called dedication. Or a calling. She made little time for socializing, but she did fuck a lot. She fucked not one, not two, but three of her professors at the Museum School in Boston. And all this, without being beautiful or having large breasts. Her professors fucked her because she knew how to paint and it turned them on, or so she believed and still believes. OK, being young helped. But would Philbert Rush, famous abstract painter extraordinaire, really have fucked her just because she was twenty-two? He fucked her because he thought she was talented, too. Sonia loves her boys, loves them more than anything, but she’s been patiently waiting for this time to come. The time of no babies. Children are one thing, babies another.
And Dick talked about quitting his job, doing something different. They felt, lately, perched on the edge of the next phase in life. The no-baby phase. They were excited, invigorated, planning, lounging, reading The New Yorker and Harper’s uninterrupted while Tom and Mike played happily by themselves. They would look up at each other from their respective magazines, the heartwarming, tinkling sound of the boys playing in their bedroom (they got along so well, for the most part, occasionally fighting over toys, but it was nothing big, nothing constant) drifting in to where they lay on the couch, and husband and wife would rub their toes against one another, smiling. This joy, this newness, this hopefulness for a future, damn it, made them swell with love for one another. And, ironically, this new love caused the particular problem Sonia is dealing with right now.
She wipes herself and stands and turns on the light. The evil little stick in her hand has grown a dark, bleeding pink line in the middle of it, as sure as can be. There is no mistaking it. For a fleeting moment she thinks, happily, well at least the hormones are strongly present, nearly ensuring that she won’t miscarry. Then, as quickly as the thought occurs to her, the feeling of horror returns. No more babies! No more crying, screaming, up-all-night babies! No more fucking babies!
Sonia places the stick on a high shelf in the bathroom, saving it to show to Dick later that night, when he returns from Denver, where he is away on a business trip. Barefoot, wearing an AC/DC concert T-shirt she’s had since the seventh grade, she pads quietly down the stairs from her loft bedroom, picking up a plastic dinosaur as she passes through the living room, and heads straight to the coffee machine in the kitchen. The kitchen is next to the boys’ room, and she wants them to keep sleeping. She needs a moment to herself. She needs some coffee first. Moving in an exaggeratedly careful way, she opens the freezer and gets the can of coffee, puts a filter in the coffeemaker, fills the pot with water, all the while eyeing the closed door where her children sleep.
She stopped drinking coffee altogether when she was pregnant with Tom. When she was pregnant with Tom, that first pregnancy, she stopped smoking, drinking booze and coffee, and she quit her job as a bartender in the East Village. And, lastly, painfully, she quit painting because oils and turpentine were potentially harmful to her unborn child and she hated acrylics. She had, indeed, stopped living life as she knew it when she was pregnant with Tom, and turned into a TV-watching, steak-and-ice-cream-eating, bored and terrified ghost of her former self. With Michael, she’d been a little more relaxed, although it never felt like a small thing, carrying a life inside her body, and the responsibility weighed on her during both pregnancies, really. It hadn’t been until recently that she felt less burdened, less fearful, that she laughed easily again. Ah, the recent changes. Her libido back, for one.
Dick and she were fucking again, like they did back when they first met, like so many couples fuck when they first meet. Granted, they’ve had other short-lived sexual bursts in their marriage — during that middle trimester of pregnancy, particularly the first pregnancy, and when the babies were four months old or so, and her breasts were large with milk but her body was otherwise slimmed down again. But then the baby’s teeth came in, keeping them up all night, pacing the living room with a crying baby. Then the lack of sleep crept up on Dick and Sonia, and then the fucking went away, far away. Now it was back. And no teeth were coming in. All teeth were in already. Every last goddamn two-year-old molar was in little Mike’s mouth. Now, they weren’t tired anymore, not tired like they used to be. Now it was her body he’s been fucking, not the strange, temporary lushness of her reproducing self. No, Dick, balding, aging, pale-faced Dick, with his freckles and large shoulders, has been reaching for her, for her skinny, long, angular self.