“What?”
“Nothing,” he says, and then he kisses me on the lips, a big improvement over the lame forehead kiss from a moment ago. “You look pretty, that’s all.”
“Pretty?” What am I, a high school girl? I consider pointing out my leaking boobs, but no, this is sweet of him, he’s making an effort. It’s nice to know he can still see me that way. “Thanks,” I say, and I run a hand down his slightly stubbly cheek. “You’re not so bad yourself, Shulman.” He laughs before turning back to our girl.
The kiss lingers, though, reminding me that there had been a point when we kissed all the time, when we couldn’t keep our hands off each other, which kind of diminished when I felt too gross to hook up during my pregnancy and had totally gone away once Talia was born because I felt even more gross then. But I’m hoping things will change, even if it’s hard to imagine a sexy opportunity presenting itself anytime soon, what with Talia waking up every hour and Stas puttering about, though maybe we could exploit Stas for a night out when we’re feeling up to it, or when I am anyway.
Yuri sits down with the girl in his arms and she is fast asleep again, like magic; well of course she sleeps in his arms, there’s no scent of milk to put her on high alert. I sit next to him and watch her resting there, as still as a pile of stones by a riverbed.
But when Stas returns, she whimpers and opens her eyes, giving me her signature cranky face, like she smells something foul and is certain I’m the one responsible. Those are basically her two states for me, either annoyed or asleep. She saves all her heart-melting smiles for her papa.
“Sorry,” Stas says.
“No worries,” I say. “Girl’s gotta eat anyway.”
I take her in my arms and am about to whip out my tit when I see Yuri’s eyes get huge and I realize that this is because while I’ve been nursing Talia in front of Stas when Yuri’s at work, I’ve never actually whipped it out in front of the two of them. Maybe it’s weird to just have my tits on display for a guy I’m not married to. Or maybe this is deeply anti-feminist, maybe I have a right to do whatever I want with my fucking blown-out body, and actually I have, I’ve done it at every park all over town. But now I look at Stas and Yuri again, and both of them are noncommittally looking around like something weird isn’t happening and then I say, “Excuse me,” and take Talia into the bedroom and whip out my boob just for her. I’m kind of pissed Yuri acted all weird, but on the other hand, I see his point—his wife showing more of her body than he has seen in a while in front of some dude she’s not married to, fine, fine, fine. I’m just surprised he still sees me as a human woman at this point; after all, you wouldn’t tell a bag of Doritos or a porcupine or a shopping cart to cover up.
Tally clamps down on me, hard, and I wince, but then I feel a sweet relief, my engorged, leaking boobs finally releasing some of their weight. It still takes me a moment to understand this is my life now, that this is as normal for me as it used to be to put on my heels and walk five blocks to the Lair, the bar where I worked for years, where I would do a shot of Tito’s before starting my shift like clockwork. Who could have imagined it, even a few years ago? Me—somebody’s fucking mom. One of the reasons I never wanted a kid, beyond my general too-fucked-up-to-have-one state, my lack of higher degree or money or maternal feelings toward anybody except Sharik and all my beloved long-gone former pets, was that I wondered, by the drawn-out end of my poor bitchy mother’s life, whether she was glad she even had me at all.
What was the point? You spend all this time trying to get pregnant, and if you’re “lucky,” then actually getting pregnant. Then you feel like ass in a glass for nine months if you’re “lucky” enough to carry the baby to term, and then you push the little shit into the world, you give all your blood and sweat to the helpless thing and it saps your strength and resents you, makes you its enemy, doesn’t remember the nights you spent rocking it or holding it to your breast or changing its poopy diapers. Then you spend the next decade fighting, and if you’re “lucky,” you come out the other end with an understanding—but that’s like twenty years of work for a best-case scenario that doesn’t feel all that worth it to me. And in my mom’s case, she never got to the other end of it, because she fucking died, because the breasts that gave me life turned against her in the end, just like I did.
After Mama died and I dropped out of NYU, I lived with another actor for a while, kind of more of a mime-actor, then a not-funny comedian, then a guitarist, then a muralist who only painted bare feet, and then another actor-bartender who was really just a bartender. I gave these men everything, sometimes getting it back but most of the time not, spending hours fighting with them in the middle of the night, breaking mirrors and bottles and once, even a window. Then I’d flee their places to live with friends or my poor dad in Jersey City, but I’d always end up returning to them, drinking too much, having wild, sweaty sex in poorly air-conditioned studios as we’d take back everything we said and affirm how much we loved each other. Sometimes we’d even scrape together whatever money we had to take desperate vacations upstate to try to get away from it all when we were just trying to get away from each other. But then we’d come back defeated, starting the cycle all over again. On top of that, I kept bartending and auditioning and occasionally even acting, and when I thought about that lost decade after it was over, I wondered if those late-night glass-breaking sessions would have been better spent getting a bit of sleep, or even nursing a cute little baby. That was what I wanted when Yuri and I got together after my father died, well, maybe not the baby part, but just a bit of rest, and if the baby was a necessary component of that necessary peace, then so be it, I guess.
There was just one problem.
I never thought Talia’s arrival would solve my issues, but I thought at least there would be some indescribable bond the second she emerged, something wild and instinctive I couldn’t explain, not even to my husband. But she arrived after a disappointingly short natural birth and, well, when I held her in my arms, she was a pink, hairless, rat-faced little gremlin with enormous ears that made her look like a lost little space alien, her face angry right away, as if asking me, Why did you push me out—into this? Who could blame her for feeling that way? And who was I, her orphan mom, to give her an answer? The weeks wore on and moony-eyed Yuri and my too-old-to-really-help-out in-laws from Boston and various theater and bartending friends came over to coo at her, while all I could feel was exhausted from round-the-clock waking and holding the girl to my cracked and bloody nipples. I kept waiting for it, that feeling I had heard about, a crazy exhausted ecstasy that when described by other moms sounded like a good night onstage, when nothing else mattered, when I might as well have melted into the stage lights and exploded like a star.