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CHAPTER 1
NOVEMBER
The buildings are amazing in this shitbox town.
Late eighteenth-century row houses. Dirt-basement Colonial wonders. High-ceilinged Victorians. Clapboards. Wood stoves, crappy plumbing, gracious proportions. Faded grandeur, semi-rot. Clawfoot bathtubs with old brass fixtures rusty as hell. Here and there the odd sparkling restoration. Someone's nouveau riche marble kitchen.
Here's my favorite: four-story brick, three windows wide, with a Historical Society Landmark plaque. Built in 1868. Elaborate molding painted many shades of green. My friends Crispin and Jerry spent the better part of ten years rehabbing it. They're on sabbatical this year in Rome, those bastards. They sublet to this amazing poet with a visiting gig at the college. Mina Morris. I'm a little obsessed with her, by which I mean a lot, which I guess is what obsessed means.
The parlor curtains are open and the lights are off.
I drove Crisp and Jer to the airport, and Crisp handed me an estate-sale mother-of-pearl cigarette case perfectly filled with nine meticulously rolled joints.
I teared up.
Medicine man, please don't go.
Listen. He lifted my chin and met my eyes in this avuncular way he has. You've come a long way. You're going to be fine. He said it slowly, like I might be very old, very stupid, or both.
I have five joints left.
The baby's first birthday approaches. Still, there are bad days. Today's not so bad. Today I have fulfilled two imperatives: one, the baby is napping; two, we are out of doors, a few blocks from home.
Anyway, Mina Morris. Crisp gave me her contact info because we're supposed to be landlord proxy, Paul and I, take care of anything that comes up with the house while they're gone.
Mina Morris. Quasi known as the bass player from the Misogynists. Girl band, Oregon, late eighties. Lots of better-known girl bands talk about having been influenced by them.
Cold this week, and dark so early. Late afternoon and the light is dead. So it begins: months of early darkness and cold. November again, back around to another. Last November a nightmare blur of newborn stitches tears antibiotics awake constipation tears wound tears awake awake awake limping tears screaming tears screaming shit piss puke tears. My weeks structured around a very occasional trip to the drive-through donut place near the mall, baby dozing in the back. Idling in the crappy old Jewish cemetery across the highway, heat cranked, reading names on crooked headstones, sipping an enormous, too-sweet latte, tapping at the disappointing glow of my device.
Faint whistle. There goes a train. To the city, probably. Four fifteen. Too late for the baby's nap now, too close to bedtime. But I've given up trying to control this shit. If you have an agenda, any needs or desires of your own (like, for example, to take a shower, take a dump, be somewhere at a given time, sit and think), you're screwed. The trick is to surrender completely, take your moments when you get them, don't dare want for more.
Mina Morris: poet, erstwhile rock star. Here, in Crisp and Jerry's house. Gives me an obscure little thrill, it does. I want to be friends.
A third-floor light goes on, and simultaneously the baby starts up with the whimpers. I take my cue. Keep the stroller moving, always moving, my reflexive animal sway. Respite over. Maneuver down the block toward the river, up Chestnut, and on home. Put some cheese on crackers and call it dinner.
Another day gone, okay, and I get it, I got it: I'm over. I no longer exist. This is why there's that ancient stipulation about the childless being ineligible for the study of religious mysticism. This is why there's all that talk about kid having as express train to enlightenment. You can meditate, you can medicate, you can take peyote in the desert at sunrise, you can self-immolate, or you can have a baby, and disappear.
I'm not interested in anything.
Ari. Babe.
Which might make sense if I was all consumed with thoughts of baby-food making and craft projects and sleep-training philosophies and bouncy-chair brands, but I really can't get all that excited about any of that shit either. So basically I have no idea what to do with myself, Paul.
Babe. Give it some time.
Fine, I mean, great, but how much time? He's one, Paul.
Exactly, babe, he's one.
You should just send me away someplace. You should just take me out back and shoot me.
Ari.
Utrecht, New York: the valiant but disgusting Bottomless Cup, the filthy antique shop with unpredictable hours, the burrito bar with blurry pane glass. Windowless Ozzy's, the diviest bar ever, embodiment of dive, hilarious exaggeration of dive: jaundiced, wispy-haired men in stonewashed denim smoking endless cigarettes and playing pool on a disintegrating table at eleven in the morning. The tiny cheesecake-burlesque joint run by kids (it's funny how you start calling them kids) who graduated a few years ago and are committed to local regeneration. They smoke weed and bake all day, act sort of put out when you come in wanting a slice of caramel toffee and some tea. Long-empty storefront, recently empty storefront, long-empty storefront.
Two hundred miles directly up the river on the east side, forty-five minutes past the sweet antiques, the second homes. A town, I guess you'd call it, a once-upon-a-time town, some blocks of cheap, amazing, mostly run-down houses crying out for restoration by the likes of us. We are happy to oblige them, the houses. We live like kings. When Paul got this job I was six months pregnant and we thought: okay, yeah, go fuck yourself, Brooklyn! We spent like a hundred dollars on an amazing 1872 four-bedroom Italianate with a killer porch and congratulated ourselves on the excellent aesthetic of it all, no "good" school district for miles, low volume of hyper-ambitious creative aspirants, stoic wide planks groaning wisely underfoot.
Our accountant works out of the creaky Albany townhouse where Herman Melville spent part of his childhood. There's an okay coffee roaster, a tiny wine bar, a tinier used-book store, and a shit-box convenience store. And the food co-op two towns over where I work Fridays like a good little citizen. Sometimes I even wear the baby around in a sling.
The college in town is pretty much its own thing — rich kids who didn't get into fill-in-the-blank — and the town, or quasi town, has been in varying stages of rot for a while. Some faculty live in this handful of blocks, in these amazing, intermittently neglected houses sloping down toward the overgrown banks of the river; others live in head-shakingly unattractive suburbs spreading out like rays from the sun of the mall. A stubborn few actually commute from the city, refuse to be separated from that fucking city, not even for wildly affordable pocket doors and stained glass and exquisite molding and antique tile and anti-glamorous/glamorous social annihilation.
In the early nineteenth century, Utrecht was the center of shirt-cuff manufacturing. Big bustling factory supported the entire town until a succession of patents changed shirt-cuff manufacturing forever, mass production, outsourcing, what have you, and Utrecht withered like a corpse. A dump, to be sure, but still, a kind of particularly sweet Hudson Valley dump. A shirt-cuff bigwig founded the college in 1845, purportedly because his son didn't get into Harvard.
Remnants of the shirt-cuff era abound. A leathery, delightful old girl band called the Cuffs. The empty shell of the mill downriver. Once in a while there's a spirited movement to turn it into some sort of performance space, a DIY community center they want to call "the Downriver," but local bureaucrats crush that regenerative shit time and again, dashing the hopes of our sweet, stoned cheesecake artistes.
Few blocks in any direction are desperate slums, and on Sundays you can't so much as buy a newspaper within a mile. But there's a tiny, unpretentious farmers' market in the courtyard of a vacant mini-mall on the edge of town, and a chain pharmacy just opened a ways down Main Street, in a long-empty storefront that was for a hundred years a jewelry store. BARLOW AND SONS, EST. 1893: you can still see remnants of the old gold lettering. The chain pharmacy didn't even bother to fully renovate. Just slapped a fluorescent sign over the door and drywalled the interior.
First official Mina Morris sighting. My heart did an Olympic dive. Bulk section at the co-op. Unwashed hair in loose knot, filling a bag with organic honey caramels. I watched her unwrap one and pop it into her mouth. Total insouciance. Gorgeous creature. And! She is way pregnant. Hard-not-to-stare pregnant.
I wrote to her months ago, hey and if you need anything and welcome to our shithole and please don't hesitate, blah blah, and an elaborately casual offer of tea or something anytime. Spent like half an hour trying to make it sound casual, cut down from the volumes in my head. Embarrassing. I have zero friends here.
She responded immediately, in full: cool thanks.
Meanwhile I devoured her book. Weird beautiful bewildered little prose poems about the summer of 1990, mostly, just after the Misogynists broke up. Roaming Europe, shooting up, regularly letting a disgusting man named Ivan pay to fuck her up the ass, pining for some nameless bastard with a wife in Paris. Then her family brings her home and puts her away. Electroshock. And the best part is how she just kind of leaves you there, wondering if she'll make it out all right. Which, I mean, to whatever degree, it appears she has, but Jesus. Makes my own fucked-up shit seem downright housewifely.
I held the book close when I finished, actually embraced the thing. Had the inclination to rip out and ingest a page, for the same reason you might get a tattoo, so it'll stay a part of you, edify you forever.
Paul has no idea who the Misogynists are. That's Paul in a nutshell. He can tell you what foods gave Whitman gas, though.
They sound familiar, I think, he said in the spring, when the department announced Mina was coming. It was a nice night, almost warm, the worst of winter receding.
Paul's colleague Cat was over. She sat bolt upright, set her wineglass on the floor.
Nuh-uh, don't even. You don't know the Misogynists? "Eat Me While I Decide"? "Can't Stop Wanting"? "Who the Fuck Are You"?
Paul shrugged. Cat is always really appalled when other people don't share her precise cultural context. Crispin once described it that way. He meant it as an insult, I'm pretty sure, but it's one of the things I actually like about Cat: the way she wants us all on the same page, the way she seems sort of angry, betrayed, when it appears that we are not all on the same page.
Wait, she said, tapping at her device. Wait, wait. Here.
Promptly we hooked up the speakers and were joyously assaulted by a Misogynists number. Na na na hey hey hey suck my clit and we'll call it a day.
Subtle, Paul said.
I saw them at the Paradise in 1989, Cat said. Right before they broke up and Kelly died.
Cat needs you to know that she's seen things, knows people, has been in the right place at the right time even if she's currently in the wrong place all the time.
Paul went up to bed. Have fun, ladies.
If we get drunk or high enough, we can usually rally some sort of good time, Cat and I, at least a little sliver of fun, but sometimes we try and try and only end up morose and drunk/high, side by side. Then we don't hang out for a while and it's like we've never hung out next time we hang out and I get inexplicably mad at Paul, like how could you do this to me, make me this desperate isolated hausfrau scrounging for simpaticos in this backwater shitbox?
The first girl I ever loved was Nora Pulaski. Adorable athletic little doe-eyed cutie. First day of kindergarten she sits down next to me with all the assurance of her almost six years, gives me this knowing look, and informs me that we are going to be best friends.
Thrilling. She chose me. I don't think I even wondered why.
We played with Barbies and rearranged the furniture in the elaborate dollhouse my father bought me the first time my mother was sick. Moved through all the levels of cat's cradle, practiced cartwheels in the unfurnished living room of Nora's rental on East Fifty-Seventh, coauthored a pamphlet of appreciation for the third-grade boy we both loved, a skinny, freckled redhead. Strange choice, that kid, but wow did we love him. We drew his name in bubble letters so many times.
Nora was confident, at home in herself. Her mom was calm and made us muffins. Once I heard Nora call her Mommy, which surprised me, because mine was strictly Janice. "Mommy" sounded so fond, so assumptive. I would no sooner call mine Mommy than throw myself into the arms of a stranger on the subway.
Around fifth grade we had this game in which I was Hugo and Nora was Nancy. Hugo would return home from a day of work "horny," and Nancy would be waiting for him on the bed, and we would grind for a while.
One time Nora's mom stretched out on the couch with us while we watched TV. She smoothed my hair, murmured how's your mom, sweetheart, and I froze. Couldn't speak for fear I'd lose it (lose what?), shake out some highly embarrassing primal wail.
By middle school, when my mom was dead, Nora got new friends. Smart girls. Confident girls. Girls with good mothers. Girls who were going to work from within the system and kick ass in college. She still said hi to me, wasn't ever mean or anything, but we weren't friends anymore.
I love fucking Paul.
Sometimes it's like being on a floating dock in a breeze; sometimes it's like saying goodbye aboard a failing airplane. Tonight it's like a firm handshake to seal a deal.
I was with a series of angry fuckers up til Paul, real flip-you-over-try-to-hurt-you types, not a lot of eye contact. Thought I was having fun.
Such sweet beginnings we had, me and Paul. The delicious, clandestine smell of him on my sheets. Nothing intellectual about it, just wanted to bury my face in his skin, breathe him. Gave me the shivers. He's the kind of guy who'll fuck you nice and slow. But sweet beginnings are not the challenge, now, are they.
We kept it secret for almost a year. There was the whiff of scandal: he an associate professor and I a grad student fifteen years his junior. Apparently they still frown on that sort of thing. Ridiculous, besides which he already had tenure. But there was also the issue of his long-term, long-distance girlfriend, a theory-of-theory-of-theory type stuck on the tenure track in some godforsaken corner of Indiana.
Commitment-phobe, my bitchiest friend, Subeena, warned me. He's how old? They've been together how long?
We have an agreement, Paul told me. We live our own lives.
But when he finally broke it off with her, she was livid, absolutely devastated, and he could not wrap his head around why.
We had an agreement, he pointed out.
I gave up having children for you, she said, and wept.
You said you didn't even want kids, he told her.
Don't you love those women who ignore every imperative of time and biology then act all super-duper tragic at forty? Come on, now.
Tonight we huddle naked under the down, laughing about funny things the baby's doing lately. He is cool, we agree. Cracks us up. Of this much we are certain: he is a sweet boy, a funny sunny love of a boy. He has this way of smiling at us, this sly little grin. We adore him. Oh, do we ever. We're happy. We're blessed. We are we are we are we are. Knock wood, spit three times, wave garlic, throw a pinch of salt, whatever you got.
You keep saying how happy you are, my favorite professor, Marianne, said over coffee last year when we were supposed to be talking about my dissertation. You keep saying that. You just told me four times how happy you are. I am happy for you that you are so happy.
A minute or hour later I'm awake from a dream, sweaty: my cousin Jason brought a prostitute to my father's old family house in the Berkshires and woke everybody up with their humping. I hadn't seen everyone in a long time, all together. My grandparents, Aunt Ellen, cousins Jason and Erica. Even my mother was there, spectral but healthy. The prostitute was Mina Morris twenty years ago: stringy hair, dark lipstick, addicted, wild-eyed, half-crazy.
I was sleeping! my mother screamed at no one in particular, stomping around in a thin pink nightgown. I could see her heavy breasts in shadow. You woke me up, you inconsiderate little shits! She used to call me that, like a term of endearment.
Shut the fuck up, bitch, Mina Morris told her coldly, and my mother was shocked silent for once.
My father sold that house in the Berkshires years ago. Aunt Ellen has barely spoken to me since I married Paul, though she did send a handwritten letter, lot of disappointed and history and our people and suffered enough, which I pretended to disregard but later tore up in a rage and flushed down the toilet. Cousin Jason is highly religious, lives in Arizona, works "for the government," and wants further proof that President Obama was born in the United States. In his profile picture he is wearing a novelty Israeli Army T-shirt, stone-cold serious. Erica lives in the city working wholeheartedly the kind of fashion rag you read if your highest aspiration is Best Dressed at cosmetology school. We used to go out for drinks when we were in our twenties. She sent a very fancy onesie for the baby.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "After Birth"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Elisa Albert.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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