And Sonia loves it. She feels inspired. Sex and painting were always connected for her and now that she’s fucking again, now that she’s getting seriously fucked again, she wants to paint. Underneath the back terrace, where bluestone lines the small, sheltered part of their little, Brooklyn yard, Sonia imagines her easel. The raggedy tree that’s too big for the yard, the lovely drooping grape vines, littering the yard with purple berries. It would be a lovely place to paint. She’d need a good, sturdy cabinet with high shelves, just in case Mike gets curious. A stool, although she’ll stand and move around. She lies in bed at night, her cunt all drippy and her muscles really relaxed from all that pummeling Dick just gave her, and she imagines what she’ll paint. What colors she’ll start with. How she’ll turn the canvas upside down, to mess with herself, to get herself to think. How she’ll turn the canvas around and paint on the back of it. How she’ll push herself to not do what is expected of her in her art, because all day long she does what is expected of her at home. And while she stays up in the dark thinking these things, Dick snores, delicately, next to her.
Oh, the wild fucking, the loud groans and heavy panting, the skin slapping against each other, “oh yeah, oh yeah,” up in their loft bedroom, on a regular basis. Sonia’s feet flung over her head, Dick’s hand coming down powerfully on her ass, slapping her, “smack,” both drunk from three glasses of wine at dinner. They love fucking each other. No, it isn’t anything new, fucking the same person for ten years, but that is OK with both of them. And now that they have their energy back, now that they feel emotionally less ruined by the constant demands of babies, now they just want each other, really. After the kids go to sleep, they pour that extra glass of wine, play some Miles Davis, and talk. The comfort of familiarity, mixed with their belief that they can possibly be someone else, be what they really want to be, what they were destined to be before they got sidetracked by the births of their children. Sonia decided to let her hair grow to her shoulders, even though she may be a little old for long hair. Dick grew a small, trim, well-groomed beard.
And now she’s pregnant. After being so careful, using condoms or her cervical cap or sometimes both. But no birth control is perfect, except for maybe the pill, which gave her anxiety attacks, so she couldn’t really take it.
Curling up with her coffee on the couch in the living room, she looks down from her third-floor walk-up apartment, out the windows and into the back yards and trees of her neighbors. The sun begins to creep up through the green canopy. A certain tension leaves her as she realizes that she had managed to make coffee without waking the kids.
HER SOPHOMORE YEAR OF high school, in South Bend, Indiana, where she grew up, she’d had a pretty serious boyfriend, a guy by the name of Bruce Rogers. It was to him she’d lost her virginity. There’d been some sex education then, in the late seventies and early eighties, but mostly she learned from talking with friends. Her best friend Larissa had been having sex with her boyfriend, and boys before that, and talked about it all the time. As a younger girl, a junior high school student, Sonia would curl up in her parent’s closets and rifle through her father’s Playboys. Afterward, she’d pull up her T-shirt, staring at her pink budded nipples in dismay. Would she ever have breasts? She wanted desperately to be desirable. She never grew breasts in junior high, nor high school, really. She hadn’t grown a decent pair of breasts until her milk came in, after Tom was born. But, in high school, she learned how to wear padded bras, tight pants, and black eyeliner, and that seemed to work well enough.
Bruce Rogers desired her, more or less. He would fuck her, gently for the most part, earnestly and quickly, without ever making eye contact. Sonia, staring off to the side while he humped her, was always amazed that someone else’s body part was inside her. It felt big. It felt like a big deal. And, truthfully, Bruce liked her. They were “going together.” They held hands in public. They made out passionately at football games and at the Taco Bell, licking each other’s faces and the insides of each others’ mouths with a tongue-thrusting abandon. He thought she was funny and smart and real. They both loved AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and Van Halen. So when a condom fell off inside of her after fucking in the backseat of his Chevy Chevette one Friday night, Bruce seemed concerned. He wasn’t a dick about it, like her friend Larissa’s eighth grade boyfriend had been. He didn’t stop talking to her, in other words.
At first, when she was late, she didn’t worry about it. She wasn’t that regular anyway. But then, at the Taco Bell one night, when she was a solid two weeks late, she became very dizzy and threw up her entire dinner. That worried her and she and Bruce discussed it and he knew a doctor on the other side of town who could give her a test and anything else she needed.
Dr. Federshneider was a nice man. His office smelled a little unclean but when Sonia returned to hear the results of the blood test — he wouldn’t tell her over the phone — she knew she wanted him to be the one to “take care of things.” He smiled at her warmly, with real concern. So what if his hair was dirty? The worst was waiting for “the time to be right,” as Dr. Federshneider put it.
“Right now,” he said, holding his fingers together to demonstrate, “the cluster of cells are so small, that I could miss some of them and that would cause trouble. You need to be at least six weeks along.”
This was not an easy waiting time. It was only another week or so. But her mother seemed to notice that the bathroom garbage wasn’t full of pads and discarded tampons. Sonia was throwing up all the time now, not just after eating at Taco Bell. At the dinner table during this time — dinner being a family affair in their household — her mother Marie, who’d been raised Catholic as her Spanish ancestors before her, sermonized on the evils of premarital sex and abortion. Sometimes she talked about other things, but it was pretty normal dinner conversation. She didn’t picket abortion clinics, but she did love talking about the evils of it.
Sonia flung herself out of the chair and into the bathroom where she promptly threw up the meatloaf she’d just eaten, bits of onion and ground beef clinging to the inside of her nostrils. Her mother knocked on the door, alarmed, asking, “Are you OK? Sonia, are you OK?”
“I’m fine!” She screamed at her mother. “You just make me sick!”
“Young woman …” but Sonia was pushing past her now, running up into her own room, where she slammed her door shut and turned on her stereo. She had a lock on the inside of her door. Her mother banged and banged for a while, and then gave up.
It was all over soon enough. The Saturday came when she had an appointment. Bruce came with her, but couldn’t hold her hand throughout the procedure. It hurt, the vacuuming out of her womb. Drugged and not feeling well, Bruce drove her to Larissa’s house where she was conveniently having a sleepover, rubbing her shoulders as they drove.
“Do you think it had a soul?” Sonia asked him.
“I don’t know, Sonia. I don’t know if anyone has a soul.”
That night, they watched TV nonstop, Sonia getting up carefully to go change her pads every hour or so. Larissa’s mother was a cocktail waitress, and divorced and never around. Not that she would have cared that Sonia was convalescing at her house, or judged her for having an abortion. Sonia healed quickly. And she never doubted, for a minute, that she’d done the right thing. But doing the right thing wasn’t always pleasant or easy. It didn’t always make you feel good about yourself.
SONIA HEARS STIRRING IN the boys’ room. Quietly, the door opens and there they stand, sleepy and disoriented. Tom with his dirty blonde hair and blue eyes, just like Sonia, even the shape of his face, slightly round and chinny. And Mike, still a baby, but a more mysterious genetic creature, very fair hair and long-faced, reminding Sonia of her father one minute and her husband the next. When they first wake in the morning, her love for them surges through her, warming the top of her head, making her hands feel tingly. They are hers! It’s unbelievable! Vulnerable, fresh, a look in their eyes that says: each day is a new universe. For a split second, Sonia feels inspired. What could be more important than taking care of these creatures that came from her womb? What could be more delicious, more pleasurable? They run up to her, both of them, and jump into her lap, rubbing their eyes. Tom, in an effort to throw his arms around his mother’s neck, knocks her cup of coffee. Coffee spills on the blue couch, and the caffeine is now what surges in her veins, strong and chemical, erasing all effects of warmth and calm and love, and Sonia says “shit!” pushing Tom off of her, immediately regretting her language — but she can’t always control everything, right? — and then, sharply, “Can’t you be more careful?”