Read Online The Seven Year Bitch by Jennifer Belle - Free Book Online

your husband don’t want children?” I blurted.
    She looked surprised and swallowed, as if answering my questions was a part of the job she’d clearly have to endure like vacuuming. “Yes, we do. We’ve been trying for four years and nothing has happened.”
    â€œHave you seen a doctor?” I asked.
    â€œNo, it costs too much money.”
    â€œNo insurance?”
    Then I felt like an idiot. Of course she didn’t have insurance. She didn’t even have a green card. Going to someone like my Dr. Heiffowitz would cost two or three weeks’ salary just for the initial exam. A sonogram, day three blood work, progesterone series, a postcoital test to check the viability of her husband’s sperm would be out of the question.
    I saw the birth-defects age chart in my mind. I felt terrible. “I should get in the shower,” I said.

    Leaving my building, I felt relieved. I was free. Duncan was in great hands. With nothing better to do, I started walking up West Broadway and then MacDougal Street until I got to the southwest corner of Washington Square Park. I walked into the park a few feet, past the chess tables, but was suddenly blocked by a high chain-link fence. I walked, almost running, back out the way I came and up the south side of the park, which was completely fenced off. The only point of entry came after the Indian guy who sold dosas from a cart and I had to enter by the bathrooms. Once I was in the park, the fence blocked my way again, and I was forced to walk on an odd dirt path around the playground like a squirrel. I felt strangely infuriated, the way I did when a block I was walking on suddenly became a film set and some punk with a clipboard told me that I had to cross to the other side of the street or, even worse, wait.
    They were planning to move the fountain just a few feet so that it aligned perfectly with the arch, which seemed absurd to me, but I tried not to get too worked up about it. I hated people who lingered on things like that. My son was in great hands and I was free, despite the alarming chain-link fence.
    Then I saw a mother pushing a Bugaboo and guilt detonated inside me like it had been hiding in my chest in someone else’s luggage. I wanted to be that mother pushing her child in the Bugaboo. I wanted to rush over to her and tell her to take a hike, and take her place, pushing her child wherever they were going. But I was that mother, I told myself. All I had to do was go back home and pop my own child into my own Bugaboo. Instead I stood frozen staring at the dump trucks—and what kind of mother of a boy didn’t know the names of the different kinds of trucks!—as if I were standing there with Duncan.
    I felt guilty that I had a nanny when I was no longer working. I felt guilty that I wanted thirty hours a week to myself instead of enjoying my child enough to want to spend the whole 168 hours a week with him. I felt guilty that I had been fired even though I knew I had done nothing wrong. But when I thought of getting another job, I felt sick with guilt about the seventy hours a week it would require me to be away from Duncan. I felt guilty that I had hired an illegal immigrant as our nanny. Sitter. And the fact that she could never go home again and see her family, when I was free to flit all around the world, froze me with guilt. When I thought of what she must think of me, leaving Duncan with her when I went off to do nothing, I crumbled with guilt. She was in my home giving my child a bath.
    How many times a day, I thought, had I sat at my desk and wished I was home with him? And how many times had I stood pushing him in a swing on the weekend, wishing I was at work?
    I chose the way of the dirt path, and when I exited, I saw some old ladies from the senior center selling their wares—knitted scarves, crocheted baby blankets, and tiny booties.
    After I’d married Russell and before I’d gotten pregnant with Duncan,