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

for an omelet.
    â€œYou should,” I said.
    I went to take my shower and then got dressed in what I was starting to think of as fatigues—my jeans from Rosebud and a long black jersey that I alternated with a long gray one.
    I went back out to the living room. Russell went to the post office and I watched Shasthi run the vacuum. She was tall and tubular, slightly barrel-shaped but not fat. Her legs and arms were thin, but she was thick in the middle, her midriff puffed out a little from her low-waisted jeans and high-waisted sequined shirt. I examined her from my perch at the dining-room table as thoroughly as a midwife. Why couldn’t she get pregnant? I wondered. I stared at the caramel strip of exposed flesh until I had practically given her a hysterosalpingogram with my eyes. Fibroids, I diagnosed. I bet she had fibroids.
    Three years before, I’d had to have a myomectomy to have my fibroids removed before I could get pregnant with Duncan. The doctor had shown me an enormous book of photos of different kinds of fibroids—not exactly what you’d want to have on your coffee table next to the Annie Leibovitz and Georgia O’Keeffe—but they were strangely beautiful planets, red and angry molten cratered moons in the uterus universe. I was sure that’s what she had and I suddenly had a violent urge to grab the vacuum cleaner hose out of her hands and vacuum the motherfuckers right out of her.
    I’d always felt a little bit guilty about the vacuum cleaner because I’d gotten it for free after 9/11. We lived on Hubert Street, not far from the World Trade Center, and everyone who lived within a certain radius of the towers got a free Eureka bagless provided by FEMA to vacuum up any asbestos or human remains that may have blown in through the window. I needed a new vacuum and I was very excited at the time, but every time there was a new world tragedy like the tsunami in Thailand or Hurricane Katrina and FEMA rolled in their insufficient trailers, I thought of that free vacuum cleaner in the linen closet.
    After the myomectomy, when I still couldn’t get pregnant, we filed papers to adopt from China. As intent on my mission as a twister on its course, we went to an adoption agency called Spence-Chapin on the Upper East Side and listened to a panel of adoptive parents talk about their experiences in China, Guatemala, Russia, and Korea. We had decided on China and eaten Chinese food every night for a month, while we labored over the essays in the application packet.
    I looked at what Russell had written:
    Our desire for a baby girl and China’s current laws in regard to such girls dovetail quite nicely.
    â€œDovetail quite nicely? Dovetail! Who the hell uses the word dovetail ,” I had screamed at him one night in Suzy’s Chinese restaurant on Bleecker Street where all the waiters already thought we were crazy. “What’s wrong with you!”
    Another time, at Wo Hop in Chinatown, a Chinese waiter in his sixties wearing the Wo Hop uniform of a formal red Mandarin jacket with epaulets and knotted buttons brought us our menus, and Russell said, “Why can’t we just adopt him? He could bring us tea in bed in the morning. Honey, our own little Chinese waiter. It would be so nice.”
    â€œThat’s sick!” I had laughed in spite of myself.
    â€œOur son. I’m so proud,” Russell said, taking my hand across the table and looking lovingly at the waiter after he had brought us fortune cookies and bustled off.
    When we had finished our application and were eating Chinese takeout at our own dining-room table one night, I’d accidentally spilled my glass of red wine, soaking the application, and we’d laughed at how funny it was that we had worked so hard to make ourselves look like the perfect parents, claiming we’d never had therapy, taken any medications, and even knocked a few pounds off our weight, and in the end were shown for