Elisa Albert - After Birth

We’re gonna get some more drinks , Poli-Sci says abruptly. The wife follows.

Jesus fuck , Mina whispers when they’re gone.

I love her. Mellow people always seem slightly melancholic, don’t they? Whenever I stop grinning for five seconds in a social setting, someone always asks me what’s wrong.

Cat breaks the spell to ask if we’ve seen the highbrow TV of the moment.

Oh my God! Betsy hollers from the kitchen. I hear it’s amazing! Is it amazing? We just got Season One. I hear it’s amazing!

It’s amazing.

Okay, so I have to watch it. I’m really excited. Everyone says it’s amazing.

It is. It’s amazing.

This is as close as they ever come to talking about anything.

But Mina’s looking at me.

Is Ari short for something?

Ariella , I say, with loathsome girly twist. In college, reading Plath, I unofficially changed it to Ariel, and felt immediately tougher, braver, like I might someday find the courage to kill myself. But the lie slid from grasp, as lies do. And I’ll never have remotely the courage to kill myself.

Pretty , she says, and tries in vain to take a deep breath; no easy task what with fetus cutting into lung capacity.

You must be thinking about names?

She shrugs.

When are you due?

Last week.

Wow.

Yeah . She holds up her right hand and turns it slowly around, marveling at swollen fingers.

I gulp wine, impatient to get where I’m going, wine-wise.

Such a mindfuck, right? Can’t sleep? Weird dreams? Sciatica, indigestion? Peeing constantly, sick of being told to, like, “enjoy this time”? And people don’t seem to trust that you’ll let them know when you’ve had the baby, right?

Oh my God, it’s like, people: I will let you know when I’ve had the fucking baby. You don’t have to ask me every motherfucking day if I’ve had the baby.

I confess: Mine just turned one.

Yeah, Crispin and Jerry told me. Midwife says I can try castor oil in the next couple of days.

A midwife! My throat catches. She’s no fool.

Listen, do you think I’ve done my duty here? I need to go home, like, ten minutes ago. My entire body is sort of throbbing. You know?

Totally.

She downs the last bit in her glass, beams at me.

What do you have? Boy or girl?

Boy.

What’s his name?

Walker.

That’s a good name.

I nod and sputter something about letting me know if she needs anything and good luck . Oh right, luck. Like you’d offer a mountaineer heading out into the Nepalese dawn, never to return.

Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid, another glass of wine might trumpet through me. Of course a midwife. No one’s going to cut Mina Morris open like a fucking lab-rat piece of trash; she’s not the type. She’s gonna do it like for real do it. The goddesses are with her! Hang tough, sister. No way out but through!

Like I know shit about the way through. I pour myself another to ease the burgeoning wine migraine. Lose patience with a few conversations. Close talker with pork breath, painter who cannot fucking remember my name even though we’ve met like a hundred times, French bitch in her Kabuki makeup and torture shoes, Jewish studies ass ( wonderful to see you, Ariella! ).

Go upstairs to find the bathroom, wander into the bedroom. Close the door, make myself at home. Nothing of note in Cam and Betsy’s drawers.

I always imagined faculty social politics as some intellectually deranged orgiastic laser show, everyone sleeping with everyone, forging strange alliances over years of close quarters, one big incestuous Machiavellian psychodrama. All these potent, messy minds reading Foucault on futons on the floor with other people’s spouses, lit by vintage modern paper lanterns in otherwise empty rooms. Maybe a jade plant, maybe a ficus. Talking through problems of philosophy, the meaning of life, the nature of morality, the way things are , dispensing with bullshit and superficiality. Like the moodiest, smartest, funniest, sexiest soap opera ever, with a great soundtrack. Enclaves of special beings, exempt from the rules of the workaday world, talking about things that matter , in so doing, mattering themselves. Like artists but better, because artists are ideally super-duper crazy and/or must die young.

But it’s nothing like that. No one’s having any sex whatsoever. It’s polite and competitive and stilted and pretentious and self-conscious and humorless, everyone blowing halfheartedly, protectively, on the tiny ember of whatever it was that originally sparked any actual interest or passion. All bitter about grading and meetings and students, talking about absolutely nothing. Bunch of insular self-styled martyrs, and to what?

Paul finds me a minute or an hour later, sprawled fast asleep on Cam and Betsy’s bed. You think they fuck here? I wonder aloud, rousing.

He doesn’t answer. I’m in trouble.

Most fun I’ve had in a while.

I was pretty much your big round regular happy pregnant lady. Do you realize how nice everyone is to pregnant ladies? (Mansons excluded.) Nothing ironic about it; no way to downplay the honest-to-goodness-ness. I grew big, full of life. No irony. Not an iota. Not an iota of an iota.

I mean, fine, there were one or two moments of acute oh-shit-this-is-really-happening. But those moments did not undermine the honest-to-goodness-ness, not one bit.

Got slow and uncomfortable and slower still and even more uncomfortable and eventually impatient. Started to think I’d be pregnant forever. Paul got on my nerves. Certainly it would’ve been nice to have a woman around. Sister, mother, aunt, cousin, friend. Perhaps the absence of any began to crackle and hum, low at first, barely audible static. Maybe I mistook it for the white noise of the womb, persistent reminder of the magic therein. By the time I realized things were not going well, things were so far from well.

Okay! All right. High time to call the baby by name. More than a year old and still I go on about “the baby.” He babbles agreeably to himself, holds an old toothbrush aloft. He likes to offer to brush your teeth for you. He’s obsessed with a book about a toothbrush cowboy named Charley. His chatter sounds like talk but is not quite talk. My father and stepmother Sheryl, our visitors, observe him closely.

Lot of autism these days , Sheryl notes, forehead tensed where not in elective nerve paralysis. Shouldn’t he be [whatever the fuck all my friends’ grandchildren are doing] by now?

Walker! my dad shouts, holding up a cheese stick or a toy, or talking into a banana as if it were a phone. Walker, come here! What is your name? Do you know your name? Walker just grabs the bribe, disregards the crazy old man, cruises away. In this I am assured he is perfectly bright.

Sheryl calls us “artsy kids” because we live up here, wear functional shoes, are of reproductive age, ride bikes. She thinks I’m a real estate visionary because I moved into a shitty apartment in a shitty neighborhood in Brooklyn in 1999. She regularly directs my attention to media mention of Brooklyn. Look, a new restaurant in BROOKLYN! It’s very HIP now, apparently .

They relish grandparenthood, or some projection of grandparenthood, like they relish a shortlist of life’s offerings: fundraisers of every stripe, anything to do with the Holocaust, whatever’s showing at the Jewish Museum, grossly overdressing for rousing High Holiday sermons in which they are beseeched to solve world Jewry’s problems, past and present, by sending money to Israel and voting Republican if it comes down to it.