Paula Bomer - Nine Months

Clara says, slapping the table, “You’ve got to take your kids out of that preschool, Sonia. God knows what could be wrong with them. You’d never know. And early intervention is the most important thing.”

“You have no idea what it’s like to have a child with special needs,” Risa says. “It’s daunting. But thank goodness for all the resources available to us now. Henry gets his occupational therapy, speech therapy, play therapy. They have a whole host of specialists who can really cater to his needs.”

“He’s three! Three-year-olds aren’t supposed to have a wide range of interests!”

Risa says, very seriously now, “He’s four. You really, really need to take your boys out of that place. God knows what could be afflicting them.”

Suddenly, Sonia understood that she hated these women. How quickly they slumped themselves into sexless, materialistic gossips. How all of their ambitions became ruthlessly projected onto their defenseless children and husbands. How anything that threatened their idea of family — imperfect children, poor black people, Hispanic immigrants, tacky clothing, lack of social prowess — alarmed them into muteness. How bragging that their husbands never changed a diaper made them feel powerful. How truly so very little changed, unless, and only unless, you dreamed to live outside of their world. And then where did that leave you? Nowhere. Alone. Exactly where Sonia belonged. Perhaps what she hated most was their complete lack of doubt. Clara and Risa utterly believed in what they were; that the best private schools were what their children deserved, though children all around them went to crowded public schools and had no other choice.

Clara and Risa believed in their inheritances. They believed in staying at home and shopping. They believed that they were their husbands’ wives and their children’s mothers. And those who didn’t believe didn’t have the same God. Those who didn’t believe weren’t saved.

Sonia’s plate is clean. She thanks Clara and Risa, and tells them it’s time for the amnio.

“Good luck, Sonia” says Clara. “Call me if you need me! And call me anyway, because I want to know if it’s girl!”

Sonia tells Clara she’ll call her later.

As she walks out the door, Sonia thinks she just wants to move to the Midwest. To get away from this neurotic New York shit. But what does she know about the Midwest? She hasn’t been there in years. It could be just as bad as this place. Maybe the whole world has gone mad.

A FEW BLOCKS AWAY, a woman in a white coat sticks an abnormally large needle into her belly and pulls out a large vat of fluid. Sonia feels like a turkey. Her midwives don’t do amnios, so she’s at a clinic near her apartment. A doctor, or a technician, or someone official comes in with a chart. “You’ll hear from us soon with the results. How are things going in general?”

“Fine. I’m not throwing up anymore so I’m quite happy. Did you see if it’s a boy or a girl by any chance?”

“It’s a girl.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, it was a vagina. On a fetus, the genitals are quite swollen so there’s no mistaking it. It’s definitely a girl.” He flips some papers around on his chart. “Is that a good thing?”

“Uh, yeah. I guess so. Wow. A girl. I have two boys.”

“Well now you’ll get your girl.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” For some reason, Sonia is stunned.

The doctor says, “Go home and drink some wine and relax. Just a glass or two, but it can help prevent miscarriage.”

“All right, I’ll do that.” Sonia rubs the gooey gel on her stomach with a dry, nervous hand and then pulls her shirt over her belly, which suddenly seems larger than ever. She’ll need to buy maternity clothes. God help her, it’s a girl. It’s a girl. After picking up her boys from school, she heads home, drinks some wine. She lets them watch television. She waits. And when Dick arrives, she walks up to him where he stands in the door and hugs him and whispers into his neck, “It’s a girl, Dick, they say it’s a girl.”

The light in the apartment changes dramatically. The occasional heat and bright sun of the summer that lingers into September is gone for good. It’s darker now. The heat and light of the day have a faded quality, and orange and yellow leaves in the backyard contain more brightness than the sky itself. Sonia’s stomach is round, low in the cavern of her abdomen, as she always carries. She looks pregnant, but barely — she’s carrying very small this time. She’s officially with child. The baby moves and now there is no mistaking this for anything else, not for gas bubbles or cramps, although those things are starting in, too, as her digestive equipment is smushed upward into her lungs and throat. Her daughter is taking up room, leaving less space for her own insides.

The boys are happy in preschool and the ease which Sonia knew was coming her way, with her two kids gone three mornings a week, feels painful to her. This isn’t really happening , she thinks. This is just for a few months. (And then there is this strange emptiness. They don’t need me anymore. And then Sonia rubs the small mound of her stomach. A new excuse on the way.) A strange feeling of freedom, followed by fear of it — what would I ever do with myself? — followed by, it’s all ending soon. Very soon. Why bother trying to set up an easel? Why bother sketching, when there’s a new crib to be found, because they gave the old one away, because they weren’t going to have any more babies? When there are prenatal checkups to schedule? And where are they going to put that crib anyway? Where are they going to live?

The first week of October Sonia goes apartment hunting. This proves horribly depressing, as it always was. She looks out in Kensington, a solid forty minutes on the F train away from Cobble Hill. There, they could afford a three or even four bedroom house. With a parking space. The community is ethnically diverse, consisting of Russian and Mexican immigrants, the schools are good, but both she and Dick would miss the sophistication of Cobble Hill. The Manhattany vibe in Cobble Hill. Most people in Kensington live and work in Brooklyn. Most people in Cobble Hill work in Manhattan. This is a big difference. Really, it’s a matter of socioeconomic class: Sonia doesn’t want to be part of a serious minority. She doesn’t want Tom and Mike to be nearly the only kids from an English speaking, middle-class family. She’s ashamed of these feelings, but has them nonetheless. And then there’s Dick’s commute. He would have to leave so early in the morning that he’d barely see his kids for all of ten minutes. And he’d get back so late that he’d barely be able to kiss them goodnight before they passed out. And Sonia relies greatly on those few hours a day Dick now has with his sons.

Despite Sonia’s fear of the commute, she decides to look out in the super-leafy, more leafy than Brooklyn, suburbs of New Jersey. She gets Carrie to pick up the boys from school while she drives around with a middle-aged, forty-pounds-overweight broker in Maplewood. Here, the schools are dubbed as “excellent, truly excellent” but Sonia gets the idea that that really means all white, all middle class. And as much as she feared being a minority in Kensington, she fears even more being literally stranded among people who are supposedly just like her. She’s never felt that anyone was just like her, regardless of skin color or money — it’s just not a dream she could ever buy into. It doesn’t ring any bell for her. Everyone looks sour and scared to Sonia, as she leans slightly out of her window, letting the autumn breeze blow her hair straight up in weird tufts. The houses are expensive. They are lifelong projects. When would she ever paint? Never. She would be too busy worrying about gutters, the lawn and shopping to furnish the many rooms.