Elisa Albert - After Birth

One of Paul’s cousins is married to a Jew. We visited them once, and they had a mezuzah hanging upside down on the wrong side of their front door.

Molly gave a toast. Drunk, needless to say. Something about how amazing it is when you find the person you’re meant to be with, or so I’m told, not that I know anything whatsoever about that, but anyway thanksdaddyamiright?

My father clinked a knife against a glass when the dinner was over. Dude waited until dessert was being cleared.

Ariella. You were the most wonderful surprise of our lives. It was the first time in years he’d come anywhere close to talking about my mother. I waited for more. What else? What about her? What about her??

Marriage , he went on, is incredibly easy if you’re married to the right person. He beamed at Sheryl and sat back down, speech over.

Well , that’s obviously total bullshit , I whispered to Paul. But I love you.

Get a room , Molly muttered around midnight. Only she and we were left in the flickering candlelight of that beautiful restaurant, our shoes kicked off, my feet in Paul’s lap.

Of course she disliked me when I felt most relaxed and strong. The talk show host had entered rehab and disappeared. My happiness was a betrayal.

She left to go to a party in Brooklyn Heights.

Realignment.

I gather my best materials on the subject, even the documentary I myself failed to watch, and put the package in the mail to Erica. Man is she lucky to have me. Wish I’d had me.

Now I zap her a link: “Top Ten Signs Your Doctor Is Planning an Unnecessary C-Section.”

invaluable resource! hope you’re feeling good! lots of love! p.s. watch the documentary!

Two seconds later her reply.

know it comes from place of love but I’m stressed enuff and you need to cease and desist, thanks!;)

Fucking winky face!?

Give me a break. I tap furiously:

Please educate yourself. Knowledge is good, promise.

I have a plan that works for me n steve & need you to respect that!

Oh, right, sure, cool, okay. A plan wherein you pretend it’s 1950 and get knocked the fuck out and come to with offspring and set about pretending the whole ordeal never happened. A plan.

I’m actually shaking with rage. Vapid twat! Shaking, I am! Amazing, what the body can do.

What is the worth of a person who chooses ignorance? Who indulges entirely in fear? What good can come of a person like that? Monkey no see, monkey no hear, monkey no speak.

I am actually shaking. I feel like how the especially crazy army people get about draft dodgers. Pussies. With pussies for pussies. Go away and leave this humanity business to those who can deal.

Every woman is afraid of childbirth , my mother recites, bored. Also her mother’s an idiot. The apple doesn’t fall far. You know what your problem is?

Fucking great, Janice. What’s my problem?

Your problem is that you love all these girls so much more than they love you. You only want a woman you can save. Or one who can save you.

Avoiding pain will get you nowhere. Avoiding pain multiplies pain exponentially.

Good luck arguing that case.

One of the high school Lindsays, now a TV executive, posts pictures of her new baby with the nanny. The nanny cuddling the baby, the nanny kissing the baby, the nanny keeping watch in an armchair three feet from the sleeping baby. Physicists say energy is never lost, only transferred, transformed. I send a virtual thumbs-up, do my part for peace.

And what else? Looks like Molly got married. Photos appear. Guy is good-looking in a symmetrical sort of way. Wearing a gold Rolex, however, which on a man under eighty-five is patently absurd. He doesn’t look very ironic. He looks like, here I am with my chosen bride; soon I will impregnate her and we will buy a lovely home and become more or less exactly like our parents, who are themselves quite marvelous. At least have the decency to be not quite so pleased with yourself, man.

Molly and her longed-for husband, into whose mouth she is here spooning wedding cake, here mocking the act of spooning wedding cake. It’s all nice and traditional. Hotel ballroom. Molly! Who once sucked off two guys at once for the email address of the head writer of a long-running sitcom.

My posture’s shitty, like I’m trying to get inside the screen. Then I really see her, right in front of my burning eyeballs.

She’s wearing a wedding getup precisely, to the detail the same as mine. Exactly the same kind of bias cut and exactly the same kind of bolero jacket and exactly the same hair arrangement, pinned loosely back with a big orchid behind the left ear. She is done up exactly like me. Only all in white, like a proper bride.

Fine, I do hate women.

How original , my mother says.

They’re so obedient, traitorous. Descendants of the ones who gave up other women as witches.

No argument here. She shrugs.

Women who choose friends more beautiful than they are, striving, basking in the glow. Women who seek out friends less beautiful than they are, to prop themselves up. The self-destructive ones, the ones who are even more self-destructive, the truly sick ones who the less self-destructive ones eventually abandon. The ones in hot pursuit, always, always, of a male, any male, that male, no, no, that one.

You have no trouble making friends. You make friends easy. It’s keeping them you can’t manage.

Because I don’t like women.

They don’t like you either, obviously.

The crazies trying to extend their fertility, taking hormones, slathering themselves with pureed money. It’s like, yo, ladies, actually, guess what? Amazing news. You’re pardoned! You’re free! The prison gates are wide open. Go! You made bail! Get out, you’ve served your time, your sentence is over! Wear comfy shoes and clothes you can move in and Be a Person! Run free! Put on elastic-waist pants, learn how to do some useful things, read books, explore, think for yourself, live your liiiiiiiiife!

The problem, sweetheart, is you.

But it’s like with animals raised in captivity, the ones that can’t ever acclimate back into nature? The ones who won’t run away no matter how wide open the cage door.

It’s true , my mother concedes. You’re not looking cute, ladies. Hair dye just makes you look like an old lady with dyed hair. Perfume makes you smell like you’re deathly afraid of your body. Let it go. Give it up. Be aged, bitches. Be a body. It’s happening anyway.

The whole get-fucked-by-the-system-and-take-pills-and-lie-about-the-truth-of-your-life-until-you-die thing doesn’t really appeal to me.

You just want to figure out how to wind up a happy old lady. That’s it. How do you wind up a happy cogent confident content old lady? Friendly with gravity. Friends with your body.

We’re all trying to outpace the same shit, but some of us won’t admit it, some of us can’t name it, and we call those women oppressed.

Why yes, Ariella , my mother says, prim and proper. Quite a mystery that you cannot seem to maintain a friendship with a woman.

You are the least dead dead person I’ve ever met.

I agree to accompany Mina to the co-op. Zev at six weeks old has plumped up real nice. He’s changed in just the few days since I’ve seen him.

We sit in the café not talking.

Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine.

Not much sleep last night , Mina says, finally. I hate the way her lower lip protrudes. She thinks she’s so great with her unwashed hair and her ancient boots and her mysterious absent baby daddy.