Difficult Women Read online

  Ben sat, and pulled the baby out of her carrier. He started clapping her hands together and singing a silly song. I felt the scar across my stomach stretch tightly. I ran to the bathroom and reached the toilet just in time, heaving until my back ached.

  Ben appeared in the doorway. “Are you okay?”

  I stared at my breakfast, floating calmly on the surface of the toilet water.

  That night when my boyfriend came home from work, he was drunk. I heard him at the door trying to make sense of how his key fit into the lock and what he was supposed to do next. I didn’t try to help. The baby was already asleep in a small basket I bought for her at a baby store for people with too much money and no sense. The saleslady, who knew me from a different time, looked down at the baby and said, “He’s gotten so big,” because all babies look the same and all women with babies look the same. I bit through my tongue and nodded.

  I sat on the couch with the baby in her basket and we watched a reality show, one about famous people pretending to suffer from fake addictions.

  My boyfriend finally made his way into the apartment. “Woman, where are you? Goddamnit,” he said when he realized I was not alone. “That kid is still here?”

  He pulled me up from the couch and dragged me into the bedroom. I relaxed, made myself into meat for him. He threw me onto the bed and started unbuckling his belt. “Why are you always so damn quiet? It creeps me out.”

  I said nothing. He did not need my voice. He crawled onto the bed, spreading my legs, pulling my jeans down. He lay on top of me, his body so heavy I sank deeply into the mattress. He pressed his boozy lips against my neck, squeezing my breasts between his fingers, reshaping them. It hurt. I groaned. “Say something,” he said. I closed my eyes and hoped the baby couldn’t hear her father. He slapped me and my eyes watered; the bones in my forehead felt like they would splinter. I tuned my head slightly, offering him my face.

  “Seriously, say something or I will lose it.”

  I opened my eyes. “Don’t wake the baby. She had a long day.”

  He clasped my throat and squeezed harder and harder, leaving his mark. I held his gaze. I waited for him to punish me and when he did, it was perfect relief.

  My husband called the next day. “If you felt like coming by with that baby, I wouldn’t mind.”

  I looked for a long-sleeved shirt with a high neck but couldn’t find one so I covered myself with a hooded jacket and too much makeup. I talked to the baby in the rearview mirror as we drove. Ben was waiting on the front porch and he came out to the car when we pulled up, carefully removed the baby from her car seat, opened my door for me. “Just like old times,” he said, softly.

  I gritted my teeth as I sat on the couch, one of the first nice things we ever bought.

  Ben put the baby in the playpen that had been empty in the corner of our den for months. She began playing with the toys—plastic things that made noise. He sat next to me, pulled the hood of my jacket down. He slammed his fist into the coffee table. One of the books slid onto the floor. “I’m going to kill him.”

  I leaned into his shoulder, the warmth of it, and then I laid my head in his lap. “I’m really tired.”

  He pushed out a heavy burst of air, rubbed my arm softly. “You can rest here,” he said, and so I did and he watched over me.

  A few days later, the baby had a fever. She cried and cried, her face red with tiny, heated rage. I stripped her down to her diaper and stood with her near the open freezer while the air conditioner covered us in frigid air. She wouldn’t stop crying. She missed her mother, I decided. My boyfriend came out of the bedroom, his boxers hanging off his narrow hips at an awkward angle. I held the baby closer, whispering sweetly.

  He reached into the refrigerator for a beer and nodded toward us as he removed the cap. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “She has a fever.”

  He took a long swig of beer, wiped his lips. “Does she need a doctor or something?”

  “I don’t know yet.” I began bouncing around as the baby calmed a bit. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

  My boyfriend hopped onto the counter and sat, swinging his legs. “How do you know so much about babies?”

  I rubbed the baby’s back slowly. “We don’t ask each other those kinds of questions.”

  He spit into the sink and took another sip of beer. “Suit yourself.” When he grew bored, he wandered back to the bedroom. The baby stopped crying, her body trembling every few minutes as she hiccupped. I sat with her on the balcony because it was cool outside and the air was clean. I called Anna Lisa.

  She answered after seven rings. “Is everything okay?”

  I nodded even though she couldn’t see me. “I thought you might want to know how the baby is doing.”

  She was silent for a moment, coughed. “Yeah, that’d be good.”

  The baby held on to my T-shirt, her tiny fingers curling around the cotton. I told her mother about the fever and how Ben and I played with her and took a long walk. I told Anna Lisa how the baby enjoyed bathing in the kitchen sink. I told her about the new outfits.

  “Does she miss me?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Why the hell are you with him?”

  “I’ll call you next week.”

  I hung up and stared into the night sky, dark and heavy and still.

  The baby was still fussy in the morning, wouldn’t rest easy in my arms, sweaty and squirming. She barely slept. I barely slept. My boyfriend got mad because she kept making this sound, a high-pitched whimpering, and she wouldn’t stop and it got on his nerves. I lay next to him, waiting for him to explode. He would. He did. I went slack and hoped he would beat me until my bones finally softened.

  When he was done, he said, “There’s something wrong with you.”

  Later, Ben called as the baby wailed lustily like an old sorrowful woman. I admired her for it. “I want to see your face,” he said.

  I smiled. “I want to see your face, too.”

  “That kid has one hell of a mouth on her.”

  I bounced the baby on my hip. “That she does.”

  In the bedroom, my boyfriend sprawled across the bed on his stomach wearing only a pair of jeans. I asked if he planned on going to work and he grunted something unintelligible. At Ben’s house, I had to force myself to think of it like that, he was once again waiting in the driveway for us. He took the baby and jogged slowly toward the house. I leaned back as I watched him. He paused on the porch, waved. I nodded and closed my eyes.

  Seven months ago, we were in a parking lot at a grocery store, the kind where everything is organic and artisanal and overpriced. For the first time in our marriage, we could afford to shop wherever we wanted. We bought lots of olives in those days because there was an olive bar at the fancy grocery store. The absurdity was irresistible. We made a lot of tapenades. We were adults. We had a boy, who shared his father’s name. He was fourteen months old, still getting used to how his legs moved him, his chubby thighs rolling around each other with each awkward step. He always held his hands in front of him when he walked. We called him BZ or Baby Zombie and sometimes, a lot of the time, we gelled his hair so it stood on end. We took a hundred thousand pictures, the excesses of parents of only children, capturing how he curled his fingers when he neared us and how his nose wrinkled just before he laughed and his eyelashes, they were so long, you could see each one like some perfect extension of his beauty. Our parents thought the zombie nickname was crude. It was funny.

  Ben and I were flirting as we put the groceries in the trunk. There was a bottle of wine, some organic merlot such-and-such, and a promise of what we were going to do after we drank that wine. I said we didn’t need to wait and he said something about blindfolding the baby for the drive home and we laughed and leaned into each other over the cart to kiss, wet-tongue sloppy. Ben Jr. started smacking the handle of the grocery cart, shouting da da da da da. He wanted out so I lifted him, enjoying the weight of his body against the curves bet
ween my thumbs and forefingers. I kissed both of his cheeks and his forehead and his father rubbed the baby’s back as I set our boy on the ground. I pulled his hand to my jeans and told him to hold on to me or he’d have to stay in the cart. He nodded and grinned, his dimples deep and winking as he hugged my leg. I looked at that boy and the man who helped me make him as we stood in the center of a perfect life. The heat of that joy could have burned us all.

  A young guy walking some shitty little dog passed by. Ben Jr. loved dogs, called them doshi. We have no idea where that came from but it was his word so it became our word. Doshi doshi doshi. He shouted, “Doshi,” and let go of me and when he let go, when I no longer felt that tug, I was so cold and hollow. There was nothing holding me to the ground. Ben Jr. started running and both Ben and I leapt after him but those tiny, chubby legs of his, when they wanted to, they moved real fast and we were still happy so it was hard to make sense of the urgency. Our son chased the doshi, his arms in front of him like he intended to make that dog undead. An eighty-four-year-old woman, Helen McGuigan, came barreling through the parking lot. She couldn’t see my little boy over the hood of her 1974 Grand Prix, a real tank of a car. Ben and I screamed. Ben Jr. stopped and turned to look at us, was so startled by the pitch of our voices, he cried. The last thing my child did was cry because he was scared. He held his arms higher, the way he does, the way he did, when he wanted to be held. The curves between my thumbs and forefingers throbbed violently. When the car ran him over, I did not look away. I saw what happened to my boy’s body. I saw everything, all of him, everywhere.

  I don’t allow myself to be around dogs anymore. I could kill them all, every last one of those dirty animals with their wagging tails and long hanging tongues. I cannot stand the stink of them.

  Ben and I did not go to the funeral. After the viewing, after seeing the impossible size of that coffin, we had nothing left. Our families could not understand. During the funeral we sat on the floor of Ben’s nursery, waiting for him to come home. We are still sitting there.

  Ben called my name. He stood on the porch, handsome, his hair wild and curly, the baby strapped to his chest. I swallowed hard as I got out of the car. In the corner of the yard, I saw a red plastic bat. Acid burned my throat and before I could stop myself, I puked over the hedges lining the house. We used to trim them together. We’d wake up on Saturday mornings and say, “We are doing yard work today.” We’d giggle because our fathers do yard work, raking their yards in sandals and knee-high socks. Ben rushed to me and rubbed my back. He said soft, soothing things. He led me into the house and gave me water. I drank but my lips remained parched.

  As I leaned over the kitchen sink, my shirt rode up. My head was splitting so I forgot to pull the shirt down.

  My husband rolled it up farther, hissing. My heart sank. I had no energy for pretending he couldn’t see what was there. “What the fuck is this? Seriously, babe, what the fuck is this?” He pulled my shirt up around my shoulders and slowly turned me around. I couldn’t look him in the eye. He traced an angry, spreading bruise along my rib cage, dark purple, almost black around the edges. I winced. “That’s it,” Ben said. “That really is it, Natasha.” He unstrapped the baby from his chest and handed her to me. “Stay here.”

  “Don’t,” I said, grabbing his arm.

  He shook his head and ran out of the house. He kicked the car door before he opened it, kept kicking the door until it caved. I’ve never seen him so angry. He pointed at me. “Don’t you dare leave.”

  I watched as he sped away. I took the baby into our bedroom and lay on my side, holding the baby to my chest, inhaling her warm, milky breath. She finally stopped fussing and we fell asleep. When I woke up, Ben was sitting in the reading chair near the foot of the bed. I sat slowly and pulled my knees to my chest. There was a bruise on his chin and his knuckles were red raw like meat.

  “Enough,” he said. “You’ve broken yourself enough. You’re coming home.”

  I pressed my forehead against my knees. My chest was empty. It was nice for someone to tell me what to do. Ben stood and took the baby, still asleep. He disappeared with her and was alone when he returned. He set a baby monitor on the end table and crawled into the bed next to me. It is hard to breathe in a house with no air but I tried. I stretched myself against him and when he started to undress me I let him. My desire for him was unabated. My tongue could not forget the taste of his skin, his mouth. Pale evening light filled the room, enough light for us to see each other plainly. He kissed the bruises along my collarbone, around my navel, the dark spreads of purple on my upper arms, my thighs, in the small of my back. It had been a long time since a man touched me gently—such luxury. I had almost forgotten. Ben held my face in his hands as he kissed me, and then I fell into him and I fell into us, his tongue in my mouth, his mouth on my breasts, his fingers between my thighs. He filled me in a way that let me know he was taking me back. I opened myself to let him. I kissed his red raw meat knuckles and his chin and wrapped my arms around him. I said, “Hold me to the ground.”

  It was late, crying from another room. I lay on my back, Ben’s body half covering mine as he slept. I covered my chest with my hand, rubbed softly like that might move my heart back to its proper place. Still there was crying from another room. I tried to remember when I was. My mouth was dry and sorrow, my lips still parched, my eyes dry. Everything was dry. I ran my fingers through Ben’s hair. The crying grew louder so I kissed my husband’s head and slipped out of bed, tried to remember the geography of the room I had not slept in for months. My breasts ached, engorged with the milk of sweetly spoiled fruit. Ben’s shirt lay on the floor and I pulled it on, then held my hand to the wall as I walked to the nursery. When I turned on the light, the baby rolled over and blinked. The room still smelled like my son. He was there even though he was not there. I could feel him in my fingers. I picked the baby up and cradled her along the length of my arm, the weight of her nearly tearing my heart out of me. We went outside for fresh air, sat on the patio Ben and I built ourselves, all brick, more yard work. I called Anna Lisa. She answered again after seven rings.

  “I am leaving him,” I said. “You should know that.”

  “I left my baby with you.”

  “You can’t be serious. I can’t be trusted with a child. This isn’t legal.”

  “I know what happened to your son, saw on the news,” Anna Lisa said. “It was not your fault.”

  “This is not the answer to whatever you or I have going on.”

  “I don’t know anyone else who can help me.”

  “We can’t stay here, especially not with her. We are leaving.”

  “Don’t tell me where you’re going,” Anna Lisa said. She hung up.

  The baby shifted in my arms. I traced her little lips with my finger. “What am I going to do with you?” I asked. She cooed and grabbed my finger, wouldn’t let go, so we sat like that for a long time, her grip growing tighter and tighter. I thought she might break me, too. Damp circles spread across Ben’s shirt. No matter what I did, my milk refused to dry. My body needed something to feed. When I went inside, Ben was holding his phone and car keys. His hair stood on end. He looked so young, like when we first met. We were freshmen in college and he chased me across a quad because he liked the pink streak in my hair. He said he always knew he would love a woman with a three-syllable name. I wasn’t sure which Ben I was looking at and then he came to me and pressed his nose in my hair and told me I smelled like the night air.

  “I thought you left.”

  “I thought you said I couldn’t.”

  His face stretched into what has become his smile.

  “We can’t live in this house.”

  Ben nodded.

  “We can’t live in this city, nowhere near.”

  “I know.”

  I looked down at the baby. “She’s coming with us. For now. Until her mom can take her. The baby won’t fix what’s wrong. I’m not crazy the way everyone thinks. I know who this
baby is and who she isn’t.”

  “You can say his name.” Ben’s eyes met mine. Our son had his eyes. There was a time when I wondered if I could stand to look at my husband for the rest of my life. “Say his name,” Ben said.

  I held my hands open and shook my head.

  When Ben Jr. was born, we had been married for seven years. We were both only children. We were still young but our parents had resigned themselves to not having grandchildren and then this bright, beautiful boy found his way to all of us. After the accident, I called my mother to tell her what happened. I told her while sitting on the front porch because I couldn’t be in the house, where there was no air. Ben sat next to me. We held the phone between our cheeks. My mother moaned when I explained to her that my son was a bloody stretch on the hot pavement of a parking lot, that he was driven out of his shoes, that he was lying somewhere, alone and cold.

  I tried to stay in the morgue with Ben Jr. the day he died but it was against regulations. A stranger with cold hands kept saying, we’re so sorry but you have to leave. Eventually, two police officers escorted us to the parking lot. I made a wild, messy scene. I’m proud of that. One of the officers said, “We don’t want to have to take you into custody,” and I shouted, “Are you fucking kidding me?” People walking into and out of the police station stared, pointed, shook their heads. The officer grabbed my elbow, pulled me close enough that I could smell coffee on his breath. He leaned closer, said, “I’ve got four of my own but you have to leave,” and again I shouted, “Are you fucking kidding me?” My throat was raw. All of me was raw. I didn’t give a damn. I would not leave my child alone. Finally, Ben snapped out of his trance and dragged me away. I fought him hard. When he finally got me in the car, he stood by my door. He pointed and said, “Stay, baby,” then ran around to his side of the car. Sweat trickled down his face and neck. There were damp arcs of sweat around my neck and below my armpits. We were rotten, filthy with grief. He turned and looked at me. “You’re stronger than I thought.” I pressed my hand against the car window as we pulled away. I said, “You have no idea.” Later, we drove back to the station, parked a few blocks away, and sat silently near the morgue window in the back until Ben Jr.’s body could be released to us in the morning.