Free The Seven Year Bitch by Jennifer Belle Page B

was able to leave a very perfunctory message that I was leaving for the airport to fly home to New York but that he should certainly give me a call when he was back. Then I said, “Au revoir,” hung up, and turned off my cell phone.

9
    A few weeks later I was standing in Kmart filled with excitement. The vacuum cleaner had broken. I had crouched in front of it, feeling like a farmer with a cow. There was a tumbleweed of black hair and sequins in the canister. To show Shasthi I wasn’t wasteful, I’d called a number and talked to a man who’d asked me if I remembered when I’d gotten it.
    â€œSeptember 2001,” I’d said guiltily, wishing I had just thrown it out in the first place. In New York there is no better feeling on earth than dragging something out of your apartment into the incinerator room.
    In Kmart, I reached in my pocket for the scrap of paper I’d written the model number on and pulled out a pacifier instead. I looked at it in desperate wonder that I was walking around with something as precious as that. I’d had a baby and there was the beautiful proof. My pockets were like other women’s pockets; I was complete. I just stood there weeping for joy right in the middle of Kmart.

    â€œ Did you get the vacuum cleaner part?” Shasthi asked me when I came home.
    â€œNo. I got something else,” I said.
    I handed her the Kmart bag. “It’s an ovulation predictor kit,” I said. Actually it was five boxes of them, each one costing twice her hourly wage.
    I took the bag back from her, ripped open one of the boxes, and unfolded the instructions. I read the instructions to her even though I could have recited them by heart. For at least a year I didn’t pee unless it was on one of these sticks. “You hold it under your urine stream,” I told her. “When did you get your last period?”
    â€œOn the fourth,” she said tentatively.
    I took my tiny red-leather date book out of my pocketbook and circled the first day of her period. “Start testing first thing in the morning, right away. Don’t listen to what the instructions say about waiting fourteen days after your period. Everyone’s always telling you to wait. Never wait. That’s the first rule of in—” I was going to say infertility but luckily I stopped myself. “In getting pregnant.”
    â€œOkay,” Shasthi whispered, taking serious note of the first rule of getting pregnant.
    My heart raced with excitement.
    I picked up Duncan and kissed him a hundred times. I realized I had been shy to hold him or kiss him too much in front of Shasthi because I hadn’t wanted to flaunt that I had what she wanted. “Bye bye,” he said and kissed his own palm passionately. It was his way of blowing a kiss, except he didn’t blow; he just kept it all to himself.
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    When I got home at the end of the day, I went into my bedroom and I noticed my bed was made.
    Sometimes she made my bed and sometimes she didn’t. At first I had thought it was a matter of free time—perhaps the baby had napped a little longer in the afternoon—but then I started to realize that she granted me this favor if I had pleased her in some small way, if I let her go an hour early or washed the bottles myself.
    Sometimes my bed stayed in a rumpled mess for days, and I stayed up wondering what I had done wrong. Had she said we were out of Dreft and I’d forgotten to pick some up at the store? Had I eaten her yogurt in the fridge?
    I didn’t know why it mattered so much what she thought of me, but it did. I felt like the groom in an arranged marriage who had lucked out. Big time. And was now wooing after the fact.
    Sharing a baby was more intimate than sharing a bed. “I love you,” I said to both of them when Shasthi and Duncan left the house to go to the park. I may not have picked the perfect father for my son, but at least I had picked