Outtakes from a Marriage (17 page)

“Do either of you have parents who live close by?” the attending nurse had asked me between contractions the night I had Ruby. It was small talk, meant to distract me, I knew. She had already asked me, in her crisp, lyrical Irish accent, if we knew the sex of the baby and whether we understood that our sleeping days were over. Now she wanted to know if any grandparents would be visiting soon.

“My parents are down in Florida,” Joe had answered. I had given him the job of chat deflector. After being in labor for several hours, the chatter of the various attendants was starting to get to me.

“What about you, Julia?” the nurse had asked. I was bracing myself for the next contraction.

“Where’s the anesthesiologist?” I whispered.

“He’ll be along soon. He’s coming.”

“That’s what you said an hour ago,” I said, and then, as I moaned through my pain, I heard her say, “I know it seems like hours, sweetheart, but it’s only been twenty minutes since you asked.”

“What if I die?”

“Honey!” said Joe.

“The doctor’s coming. So are your folks looking forward to being grandparents, then?”

“No,” I groaned, after a few seconds, when I could. “My dad’s not too well.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the nurse said.

Not as sorry as you’re about to be,
I thought, and I said, “My mom’s dead. She died when I was eight.”

“Oh,” the nurse said. “I am sorry, sweetheart. I lost my own mum, too…and this is the time I missed her most. When I had my first baby. After I brought him home. That’s when you want yer mum, sweetheart, I know. But you’ll do a grand job of it….”

I looked at the nurse then—I mean, really looked at her for the first time since she had come into the room. She was tall and slightly heavyset, with pale, blotchy skin and age spots on her hands, but when she said the word
mum,
I could see her as a little girl in some green place, some idyllic lace-windowed home, listening to the clicking noise her mother’s sandals made when they met her heels.

“You’ll be fine,” the nurse said. She patted my hand and then she left the room, and as I gazed longingly after her, Joe said, “How about a little TV? I know I saw a remote control around here someplace.”

The only birth I had ever witnessed prior to Ruby’s was the litter our cat Sable had when I was about five years old. My mother awoke Neil and me before dawn that morning to watch the birth, in the hopes that we’d learn something about the facts of life, and all those years later, as the anesthesiologist finally arrived and shot numbing agents into my back, I recalled the strange, metallic scent of blood in my parents’ closet—Sable’s chosen birthing space—and the furious purring of Sable as she licked the slimy, writhing kittens clean. When the doctor left and Joe and I waited for the epidural to kick in, I told Joe about watching the cat’s birth with a combination of wonder and disgust, and about the dried blood and umbilicus stuck to the shirt my father furiously held up in front of my mother later that morning. “You watched her have her kittens all over my best shirt?” Daddy had raged.

“I couldn’t move her,” my mother replied indignantly. “She had chosen that spot as her nesting place! That’s sacred!”

“Was he drunk?” Joe asked.

“No, of course not,” I answered angrily. “He never drank during the day then. I’ve told you that.”

“You’re having a contraction,” Joe had said.

“Get out,” I said, laughing with relief.

I hadn’t felt a thing.

[
fourteen
]

T
he last place I wanted to go that afternoon was the Multicultural Montessori School. I was sure that Judy and Vicki had already reported to Eileen that Joe had backed out of the auction and I feared an angry confrontation, but I wanted to pick up Sammy myself after what had happened the night before. When I arrived at the school, Judy and Vicki were nowhere in sight, much to my relief. I waited a few doors down from the school, not right in front, and I was just pulling my cell phone out of my bag when I heard a man say, “How’d your hair grow so fast?”

I turned toward the voice. It was Adam Heller. He was staring at my hair.

“Is it a wig?” he asked.

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re asking me if I’m wearing a wig?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. You don’t think that’s rude?”

“Why?”

“Because…Well, what if I was wearing a wig because all my hair had fallen out from chemotherapy treatments? Wouldn’t it be rude then?”

“I dunno. Did your hair fall out because of chemotherapy treatments?”

“Jesus Christ! They’re hair extensions, okay?”

“Oh.”

“I got them because I’m going to this…event.” Over the past twenty-four hours, I had made this coy reference to an “event” in response to comments about my hair, and everybody had followed with the question “What event?” to which I casually replied, “The Golden Globes. Joe was nominated and I got these extensions to wear that night. Just for fun.” It made me appear slightly less superficial, I thought.

Adam didn’t rise to the bait, so I said, “It’s a big, stupid Hollywood thing.”

“What is?”

“The event.”

“Oh.”

“It’s the Golden Globes. Joe was nominated.”

“Joe who?”

I looked at Adam then to see if he was joking. He wasn’t. It was clear he had no idea what I was talking about. I knew that Elizabeth, his wife, knew I was married to Joe. Apparently she hadn’t shared this with Adam.
Apparently,
I chided myself,
people have more interesting things to talk about.

“My husband. He’s Joe Ferraro.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s he, an actor?”

I laughed indignantly. “Yeah. He’s an actor.”

“Oh.”

Parents were starting to leave the school with their kids, so Adam and I walked toward the building.

“I’m taking Katie over to the diner for a hot chocolate. Do you want to come with Sammy?”

I normally would have said no, but I knew that Sammy would consider it a treat. Also, I was intrigued by Adam, to say the least. He was either very dull and stupid or very quirky and intelligent, and I wanted to find out which, so I said, “Okay.”

To my great relief, Sammy ran into my arms when I arrived at his classroom. I kissed him tenderly on his cheek, which didn’t reveal a red outline of my hand, as I had feared. He was fine.

“I’m a little worried about Sammy,” his teacher, Lauren, said to me quietly while Sammy removed his belongings from his cubby.

“Why? What happened?” I asked.
He was fine!

“We’re worried about his behavior. He’s very distractible and it has us concerned.”

“When you say ‘us,’ you mean…”

“I mean me, my assistant teacher, Dina, and Joanna, the school psychologist.”

“This school has a psychologist? The oldest kids in the school are what, five?”

Lauren smiled at me patiently. “He has a hard time sitting quietly in group. At this age, children are constantly experimenting with the ways that they move their bodies through the space around them, but they should also be able to control their bodies for short periods of time and focus on external information so that they can process it appropriately.”

“He’s bored,” I said. “Group is boring the way you run it. I watched you on Parents’ Day, and
I
had a hard time sitting still.” I said it impulsively, the words moving through space like Sammy’s active limbs, wild and uninhibited.

Lauren opened her mouth to speak but was having a hard time forming the right words. It occurred to me that she was having a hard time “processing” what I was saying to her, so I decided to put it in other words. “He’s a boy. He has a lot of physical energy that he isn’t able to exert in your crowded classroom. He’s bored and frustrated, and that’s why he has a hard time sitting still.”

It took a moment but Lauren managed to recover her impassive, indulgently condescending expression and said, “I’m hearing that you have issues with my teaching methods. It would be more appropriate to discuss this in a meeting. Next Friday, if that’s okay.”

“Next Friday I’m going to Los Angeles.”

“Oh. Well, this is pretty important. We’re only trying to do what’s best for Sammy, and Joanna is only here on Fridays.”

“I’m Sammy’s mother. I know what’s best for him. I’ll meet with you when I get back from L.A. In the meantime, I’m going to have Catalina pick him up every morning before group next week. There’s no reason he should have to bear another week of it if he’s as restless as you’re describing.”

“Fine,” said Lauren, blinking furiously.

When Sammy and I exited the building, we found Katie and Adam waiting for us. Katie and Sammy ran ahead to the corner while Adam and I walked along behind them. My heart was pounding and I was aware that the adrenaline that was pumping through my veins, causing me to clench and unclench my fists, wasn’t anger or rage but rather a sense of victory and triumph. I realized, suddenly, that I had always regretted giving in so readily to the suggestions about having Sammy see a speech therapist. I knew him better than anyone. I was his mother. What a sense of power I suddenly felt, knowing this.

“Wait, Sammy!” I called.

“I know!” Sammy called back.

At the diner, Adam and I drank coffee and the kids drank hot chocolates. Sammy wanted to drink his cocoa with a spoon, and after arguing this with him for a few minutes, his voice growing increasingly whiney and loud, I gave in and let him—something I never would have done with Ruby. “Never negotiate with terrorists,” was my mantra then, knowing that if I gave in once, I’d pay the price later. Now I was too tired and I still had lingering guilt from the slap. I had slapped my small child in the face. “Go ahead,” I said to Sammy, and when he smiled up at me, I had to blink back tears.

“So when is this big event of yours?” Adam asked, stirring his coffee.

“It’s a week from Sunday. We leave next Friday for L.A.”

“Oh, so the Golden Globes are in L.A.?”

“I can’t tell if you’re making fun of me, or if you really don’t know anything about the entertainment business.”

“Why should I know anything about the entertainment business? I’m a writer. What do you know about the publishing business?”

“Well, a little, actually. I was a journalism major at NYU and I worked at the
Village Voice,
then I worked at the
Daily News
for a while before I had Ruby.”

“Oh, yeah? As a writer? Editor?”

“I had two pieces published in the
Voice
…well,
pieces
might be too grand a term—they were small, paragraph-long reviews of bands. And I was basically a gofer at the
Daily News.
I did some research work for Jimmy Breslin.”

“Wow. Cool,” said Adam. He actually seemed semi-impressed.

“What kind of writing do you do?”

“Essays—science writing mostly. I’m working on a book about climate change and how it affects various animal species. Otherwise I write for magazines. Probably the only thing you would have ever seen is a thing I wrote for
New York
magazine about the city’s rat population last year. It got a lot of attention.”

“Oh my God. Yes, I remember that. The part about the mother finding the rat licking the baby’s bottle in the gazillion-dollar penthouse—that really got me.”

“Yeah, I know. Disgusting.”

“And the thing about rats squeezing their way into the plumbing fixtures…getting into people’s tubs. You know, we lived in this really neglected building in the East Village for years and we never had a rat in the apartment. We used to see them on the streets all the time, but I never saw one inside.”

“They were in the building for sure,” replied Adam, “but there was so much garbage on the streets in those days, they didn’t have to find their way into people’s kitchens the way they do now. Plus, there probably wasn’t a lot of construction going on when you lived down there.”

“No, that was all starting up when we moved.”

“Well, that’s what stirs up the rats. When everybody starts trying to make everything look better.”

I nodded, twisting a strand of fake hair around my finger. “I suppose you sort of got used to them, when you went in the sewers with those sanitation guys.”

“Not really. One ran across my foot down there and I screamed like a schoolgirl.”

I laughed, shivering.

“Do you still write?” Adam asked.

“No. I was working on a children’s book, but I let that drop. I just never got around to finishing it.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess it seemed really lame after Madonna and Fergie and everybody started writing children’s books.”

“It’s not lame. And I think you’d have a good chance of getting it published, having a famous husband and everything.”

“That’s what made it seem lame.” I was eager to change the subject, so I asked Sammy how he liked his hot chocolate and he gave me two thumbs-up. Katie copied him and they both jammed their thumbs in the air, laughing fitfully, then Sammy went back to drinking his cocoa from a spoon.

“Your hair…it looks so real,” Adam said.

I smiled and then started laughing. “Wow, that’s just not a compliment I ever thought I’d hear.”

Katie had decided to imitate Sammy some more, and started using the spoon to drink her cocoa. That only worked for a few moments, both of them giggling and slurping their drinks, until Katie managed to knock her cup over with her spoon. Adam lifted Katie from her side of the booth just before the drink cascaded onto her lap, and I grabbed a pile of napkins from the dispenser on the table and started mopping up the mess.

Katie looked at the spoon in her hand and started to cry. Adam held her on his lap and kissed her brusquely, then told her to stop crying, and she did. I wondered then what it would be like to be married to Adam. This is how I had begun to assess men after I had children, even Dr. James (no doubt a perfect father). Before I had children, whenever I met interesting guys, usually through work or sometimes just in the neighborhood, I would wonder what they were like in bed. Now I wondered what they were like in a car when the wife was driving. Or what they were like at three in the morning when a baby was sick. Was Adam a man who hollered when he was angry at his wife, punching walls and slamming doors, or did he silently stew? Did he leave globs of spat-out toothpaste in the sink without a thought about who would have to chisel them off later? Did he hog the remote? These were the real issues. I knew that now.

I had a boyfriend in high school who once told me that I was an ideal girlfriend because I was practically a guy when it came to just hanging around. I told this to Joe early on in our relationship, and he concurred. He thinks it’s because I was raised in a house with just a father and a brother, after my mom died. Basically, I follow sports and I’m not prone to excessive chatter. I’ve told Beth and other single friends that just working these two little traits into one’s personality can make such a difference when dating a guy. Now I supposed my stock as a relationship guru had fallen. Apparently having a wife who watches ESPN loses its appeal after a while.

On the way home I thought about what it would be like to be single now. I had thought about this quite a bit over the past several days, actually imagining various dramatic scenarios surrounding my divorce from Joe. First there would be the confrontation with Jenna. Even though Joe was too obtuse to realize this, I knew she was only after his money and status. She wanted to be a celebrity wife. She was working her little ass off for a role that was basically just handed to me. I wasn’t looking to marry a celebrity when I met Joe, and his chances of making it in show business back then were as good as anyone else’s—not very good. No, I married him for a nobler reason, I told myself—for love. But now I was a little riled. If I was going to leave the marriage, it was going to be with the money and status that Horny Jenna so greedily desired. I imagined Aaron Spelling-esque confrontations with Jenna. Perhaps we would meet at a party. Somebody would introduce us and I would say, “I know who you are. I know
exactly
who you are.” She would feign ignorance and I would sidle up to her and whisper into her ear, “He’s still my husband. Keep your filthy paws off him.” Then I’d say, “You can have what’s left of him…after the divorce.”

But that was about as far as I could get with the divorce fantasies, because once I got beyond handing Jenna the comeuppance she so richly deserved, there wasn’t much else to look forward to, and there was a lot to dread. Of course, all our friends would side with Joe. He was the one who could get anybody house seats to anything. Who could, if you were with him, get you whisked past security lines in airports and invited aboard yachts and onto private jets. I’d have to date and eventually reveal my body to another man. The breasts that had shrunken after nursing Joe’s babies, the loose skin on the belly that had expanded to accommodate Joe’s offspring—what kind of offerings were these to a man who had no claim on the children who marked me, forever, as the former estate of another?

When Sammy and I arrived home, Ruby and Catalina were sitting together on the living-room couch watching MTV. Over the years, Ruby had gotten Catalina hooked on all her shows and favorite bands, and Catalina, as a result, was the hippest sixty-year-old on the Upper West Side. She watched
TRL
and
The Real World.
She hated Eminem, but loved Shakira, of course, and also Muse, Kanye West, and the Arctic Monkeys, and would drop anything if a Gorillaz video came on TV. Now they were watching
Cribs
and knitting. Catalina had taught Ruby to knit when she was quite young, so Ruby knit compulsively, whenever she watched TV.