Elisa Albert: After Birth

There’s this college-dropout friend of Paul’s. Professional jazz musician. We saw him play a few years ago. So talented. His wife had left him for another guy, and you got the sense he sort of blamed you for it, because you too were female. Or maybe it was that personhood was not a privilege granted a female automatically. You had to earn it, overcome the fact of your lips, your breasts, your cunt, your ass. Say something witty and smart, include some esoteric reference, prove you were not, at heart, a simple harlot, and thusly earn personhood. Women are foreign, unpredictable. Do not talk to a woman. Do not get caught in her web. Fundamentally she makes no sense. She will pull you under, fry up your cock in a pan and eat it for breakfast along with some eggs.

But Steve’s all right, especially stoned. Really loves his surround sound. He hands me my elaborate cocktail.

You guys aren’t drinking?

Erica grins. Steve grins.

Oh my God.

Yuuuuup!

Oh , I say, tearing up. Sweetheart.

I hold my glass out for a toast.

May you learn to mother yourself as you learn to mother your child , I say. May you trust and respect your body, and may others trust and respect your body, and may your body astound you.

What she said , Steve says, pretending to knock one back.

That was hella deep, Ari, wow.

Later I meet Subeena for a drink. She talks at me for an hour about why now would be a good time for her to freeze her eggs because she’s getting promoted at the blog. She does not ask me a single question.

Return to Steve and Erica’s at midnight. All the lights are on.

You guys?

They’re asleep, sprawled across their gigantic bed. Erica’s wearing a silk eye mask, and their pug is gnawing ecstatically on a bone at the foot of the bed. The huge television is blaring a reality show about crazy sad enraged bejeweled old women with too much money.

Train home, I get a good seat on the river side. Sun is setting. Everyone sucks. The lady in the row ahead, sick and coughing and obviously contagious. The guy who takes my ticket, so swaggery and obviously a rapist.

Nina Simone is singing, No use old girl / You might as well surrender .

It wasn’t just Cat and the dead-eyed faculty wife. There was the competitive yoga instructor two towns over. There was the moms’ group and the whole other moms’ group. I’m telling you, I tried. I’d be friends with Hitler if he wanted to have a chill playdate. You have to find people, people with babies, and you might not technically like these people, but you’ll be so grateful for the shorthand, any blessed shorthand, that it won’t seem to matter. But it will matter, because you’ll be lonely, and come to feel terrifically fragmented, and death might come to seem like a relief.

A baby opens you up, is the problem. No way around it unless you want to pay someone else to have it for you. There’s before and there’s after. To live in your body before is one thing. To live in your body after is another. Some deal by attempting to micromanage; some go crazy; some zone right the hell on out. Or all of the above. A blessed few resist any of these, and when you meet her, you’ll know her immediately by the look in her eyes: weary, humbled, wobbly but still standing. Present, if faintly. You don’t meet her often.

Postcard from Crispin.

hiya how r u booberoo, i miss our consciousness-raisings. R u being good 2 yrslf? we r in montepulciano and it is fucked up beautiful. Love you. XOXO

They’ve been together twenty years, Crisp and Jer. Crisp’s first partner died in the eighties, of the plague. Gorgeous photo of him in the living room. Jer doesn’t mind in the least. He saw me staring at the photo once.

What a beauty, huh?

Why didn’t Crisp get the plague, too? Freak luck. They have no idea. Rare mystery. He tries not to think about it.

It’s the covered-dish brigade! I’d hear Jerry calling from our stoop, arms too full of food and wine to ring the bell.

They saved me.

You saved yourself, gorgeous , Crisp said. You just needed a little help laughing about it.

Two hundred years ago — hell, one hundred years ago — you’d have a child surrounded by other women: your mother, her mother, sisters, cousins, sisters-in-law, mother-in-law. And you’d be a teenager, too young to have had any kind of life yourself. You’d share childcare with a raft of women. They’d help you, keep you company, show you how. Then you’d do the same. Not just people to share in the work of raising children, but people to share in the loving of children.

Now maybe you make a living, maybe you get to know yourself on your own terms. Maybe you have adventures, heartbreak. Maybe you nurture ambition. Maybe you explore your sexuality. And then: unceremoniously sliced in fucking half, handed a newborn, home to your little isolation tank, get on with it, and don’t you dare post too many pictures. You don’t want to be one of those .

Paul meant well. Paul is the embodiment of decency. But Paul couldn’t help me. You have to know what people are capable of, and forgive them for whatever they’re not.

It’ll keep getting easier , Jer assured me.

How do you know? I asked him.

I had six older sisters, hon. I’m a Catholic faggot from Georgia. I stuttered so bad, I barely spoke until my late teens. I am intimately familiar with what women go through. My mother had seven children in nine years, one of whom died before his first birthday. I didn’t understand that she was catastrophically depressed until she was seventy-five years old traveling around the world on group tours and I saw a photo of her actually smiling for the first time in my life.

Yeah, public service announcement , Crisp said. If someone you love or just like a lot or just kind of know gives birth to a baby, GO OVER TO HER HOUSE WITH FOOD AND HANG OUT WITH HER on the regular for a while.

No need to call first , I agreed.

It’s like when someone dies , Jer said.

Do not fucking send flowers .

It is exactly like when someone dies. Better get used to it.

We refilled our glasses.

Paul and I got married at Brooklyn Borough Hall and had dinner at our favorite restaurant after.

Molly was there. Erica. My father and Sheryl. Marianne made an appearance but left after one drink. The old jazz musician friend of Paul’s. We invited them a week beforehand: getting married tuesday! dinner after. It demanded to be downplayed.

I wore a gold, bias-cut, raw-silk dress made by a woman with a storefront on Atlantic, paired with classic cowboy boots and a vintage black lace bolero jacket. Had my hair up loosely with an enormous red orchid pinned on the left side. I was so proud that night, so self-possessed, standing tall, fully inhabited. I owned myself, felt fully mine to give. I stayed close to Paul, very much his wife. Nothing mattered so much as he and I mattered to each other. Marriage is simply realignment.

Sheryl’s wedding gift was a copy of a weird little joke book called Nice Jewish Goy: Intermarriage and You. Inscribed to us personally by the author.

Sheryl and Norman were obviously uncomfortable, but they bit their big Jew lips about it. Unlike my crazy aunt Ellen, who sent me that letter about shame and cut off and disappointment and history and your grandparents and lost to us. Real classic of the genre.

She’s such a lunatic , Erica said of her mother. I’m so sorry. She’s fucking crazy.