The Late, Lamented Molly Marx (13 page)

“Bear, you there?”

Annabel begins to stamp her feet. “Stephanie, actually, maybe this isn’t a good time,” Barry says. “Call you later?”

She laughs. “Certainly Promise?”

“Promise,” he says as he clicks off, measured seduction replaced by exasperation.

“Dora needs to turn into a True Princess to wake Boots up,” Annabel says, dissolving into tears. “He
has
to wake up. He’s Dora’s best friend. He has to.”

“What happened to her friend, honey?” He pulls our daughter onto his lap.

“Daddy—you know!” she wails. “He ate a bad banana. Very, very bad.” As a new torrent of tears bursts, Annabel’s nose drips on her nightgown, a ribbon of mucus catching on one ear of Alfred the bunny. “We’re not going to the zoo, are we?”

“No, kitten, I don’t think that’s such a great idea,” Barry says, trying unsuccessfully to use his nylon poncho to wipe her nose. “Not today.”

“You lied!” Annabel says. “You always lie!” As she flies out the door, letting it slam behind her, I am seeing Lucy, circa four years old: my sister a powerhouse, especially next to me, as passive as a sugar cookie. I watch helplessly, in awe of Annabel’s will. How will Barry ever manage her alone?

“God damn it, Molly—what the fuck do I do now?” Barry says, clenching his fists. He puts his head down on the kitchen table and softly bangs his forehead several times. I see tears, though whether they are from grief or frustration I cannot say. “Molly, you weren’t supposed to die. You weren’t supposed to die.”

I forgot that someone could yell and cry simultaneously.

I hurt for my Annie-belle, who has lost her mommy. I hurt for my sister, Lucy, for how hard it must be to be her. I hurt for my parents, who have been forced to surrender half their heart. I hurt for all of them and I hurt for me, because I miss every one of these tortured people whom I love and whom I’ve left behind, broken and bleeding. I hurt for how much I miss my life. I would gladly go to the zoo in the rain and muck; I would stand in shit and sleep in wet straw and smell terrible smells, just to be alive for another day.

But what surprises me most is that I am feeling something new. The emotion is a foreign spice whose name I don’t even know and that I can’t decide if I like. I am feeling something for Barry.

I am so fixated, I barely notice Bob standing beside me. “Sometimes,” he says, “it’s best not to watch. Or listen.” But I wave him away. I can’t stop doing either.

eets?” Barry said. “Again?”

When I was pregnant, I had a fetish for beets, which until then I’d bought only in cans and only on sale. Barry started calling me “the Beet Queen,” which I took as a compliment, not so much because a novel by that name was one of my favorites, but because fresh beets suddenly struck me as the ultimate root vegetable, food my Middle European great-grandmother must have grown and cooked. I felt as if all the beets I was consuming were allowing me to reconnect with my ancestors. This, I guess, is what pregnancy does to some women.

“I found a new way to make them,” I assured Barry as I tied a starched white chef’s apron around my eight-and-a-half-months-pregnant girth. “From Nigella.” If I had had a girl crush, it would have been on a woman like Nigella Lawson, who, even though her last name is Brie’s, reminds me of Lucy, if my sister had a cultivated BBC accent instead of a Chicago honk. Freud would have a chuckle with that one, so forget the crush. But I’d made Nigella’s beet, dill, and mustard seed salad at least eight times.

Barry grabbed three big red onions and started juggling, which along with performing surgery and manual foreplay starred in his skill
set. After a two-minute routine, he parked the onions on the counter, came up behind me, and gave me a long hug, pressing his warm palms on the spot where our baby had, for the moment, stopped doing flip turns. His erection pressed against my behind.

“You’re in a good mood,” I said, not that such a mood was unusual lately. We were getting along exceedingly well. Throughout my pregnancy, Barry’s disposition had rarely dipped below good and occasionally spiked off the charts, and his sex drive seemed to increase as gestation progressed.

“I’m enjoying this new domestic you,” he said, scanning the recipe in the opened cookbook. As he started to chop fresh mint, I breathed in the picnicky fragrance and had a sudden yen for a tall glass of lemonade. Had it not been past eight on a Saturday night, I might have begged Barry to run out and buy enough lemons to fill a jug with a homemade brew, but I was hungry. The table was set with rustic pottery, chunky amber goblets just right for his wine and my water, and beeswax candles, waiting to be lit. I still had to finish our pasta, a simple recipe heavily reliant on pecorino Romano.

As peak experiences go, there are some women who find pregnancy overrated. Seeing your butt, once hard and high, swell into a beach ball you know will deflate and sink; finding your nose spread across your face; watching tributaries fan out from bulging varicose veins—I was determined not to notice such things happening to me. I was too distracted by the good stuff, like my brand-new, God-given cleavage, which I showcased at all hours in deep V-neck clothes so clingy they literally stretched the boundaries of good taste and should have been labeled Slut Mommy.

During the winter, as my bump grew, it felt cozy and efficient to be a baby-making machine. I was awed by the knowledge of cells multiplying inside of me like disciplined Marines, and I indulged in cup after cup of steaming cocoa, ignoring the verboten caffeine, reminding myself I required the calcium. Every weekend, I settled on the couch wrapped in cuddly cashmere with grilled cheese sandwiches, spending long afternoons watching Turner Classic Movies and memorizing name books.

Barry wanted a boy. He was sure it was a boy. Kitty analyzed my body—the baby bulge staying relatively narrow—and declared that yes,
it would definitely be another Marx heir, since I looked like she did while pregnant with Barry. I interpreted this to mean that I was one of those rare attractive pregnant ladies, since when Kitty favorably compares your appearance to hers it is the highest form of flattery.

Barry insisted on a strapping name, a manly name, a name like a power drill. He tossed off my suggestions—Dylan, Devin, Jesse, Sebastian, Nicholas, Eliah, Raphael, Oliver, Graham, Kieran—like small, twee doilies in favor of Hank, Jake, Cal, Kurt, Max, Nat, Bart, Tom, Abe, and Zack, stopping just short of Thor. I let him know I thought his choices were the kind of names wit-challenged pet owners bestow on Chihuahuas. We ultimately agreed on Alexander William, but when I suggested that Master Marx could be Sasha for short, Barry made a unilateral decision: if the baby was a boy, we would go with William Alexander. Given the remote possibility that we would produce a girl, Barry, marinating in his testosterone, graciously said I could pick whatever name I wanted for this unlikely female offspring.

William Alexander
. It was a solid, multitasking name. William Alexander Marx, spelling bee king, bar mitzvah boy, Phi Beta Kappa, juris doctor, and Supreme Court justice. Will Marx, captain of the squash team, not a pimple in sight. Wild Willy Marx, starting pitcher for the Yankees. Billy Marx, renegade indie film director, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes. William A. Marx, Ph.D., curer of AIDS or cancer, possibly both. President William Alexander Marx, the first Jew in the White House.

I sometimes let my mind wander to William Alexander’s future sibling: Daniel James.

They’d be the Marx brothers, just as wicked, only gorgeous. But living with a sextet of balls—what would that be like? How do you change a boy’s diaper without getting a squirt of pee in the eye? Would a small male and I have anything to chat about? What if he was one of those perpetually moving children who start downing Ritalin before solid food? For a number of weeks I felt uniquely unqualified to be the mother of even one son. I warmed to the idea of having a boy, though, when I considered that he might be as attentive to me as Barry is to Kitty, calling at least once a day.

I never focused much on the reality of there being an actual person inside my body, and I learned to keep visions at bay of future projectile
vomiting. I was shocked when people expected to hear me opine on points I’d never considered, like whether I’d let the baby watch the Wiggles, a quartet whose popularity I learned rivaled that of the Beatles, despite the fact—or maybe because of the fact—that they perform “Hava Nagila” in Bavarian folk costume.

I wasn’t in a hurry for my pregnancy to end. It was a contentment zone I’d never before imagined or visited. Tonight I sang “I’m a Woman” as I finished cooking our meal—“W-O-M-A-N”—putting the pasta in a big white bowl, snowing the top with even more cheese. I could picture the calcium going straight to my baby’s tiny, precious bones, making them hard as diamonds.

Sure, there had been morning sickness, when I’d catapulted from cabs to lose my breakfast in the gutter while enduring withering stares from fellow New Yorkers. Nighttime leg cramps woke me, and my shrieks scared the bejesus out of Barry, although, as a doctor, he was able to massage away the cramps, for which I was grateful. Nor was I immune to belching, backaches, or cravings for mashed potatoes laden with the caramelized goop that KFC calls gravy. Twice I dreamt that my baby was Satan’s child, with translucent skin and beady, marble eyes. I also grew sensitive to odors. Barry’s oral hygiene could win a national competition, yet his night breath made me gag. But it was all part of the grand pregnancy experience, along with learning to smile benevolently when strangers patted my stomach and asked me if I knew the sex of the baby.

I did not. Pregnancy’s mystery was much of its power.

That Saturday, Barry and I lingered over dinner. The beet salad was tangy; the whole-wheat baguette, crusty; the pasta, sensuous; and the candlelight, flattering.

“Dessert?” I asked Barry. “I bought that lemon tart you like.”

“Just a sliver,” he said. “You’re going to drop thirty pounds, bingo, but mine will still be here.” He’d gained a pound for each of my ten, but hearing him, you’d think he was now classified as morbidly obese.

I carried the dishes into the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher before I cut the tart, which I’d transferred to my favorite cake stand, heavy turquoise glass with swirls shaped like sperm. If New Year’s Eve were a plate, it would look like this. I was wiping the big wooden salad bowl when I heard Barry answer his cell phone.

It wasn’t unusual for him to be phoned at all hours, especially on Saturday, since Friday is popular for surgery. Every patient thinks she’ll be the lucky ducky who won’t bruise like an overmatched prizefighter. Such a woman is deluded enough to imagine that if she grabs a Friday slot, she’ll be back at work on Monday, her colleagues none the wiser, despite heavy spackling and the fact that Barry has reengineered her nose inside and out.

“Not now,” he said to the caller.

My husband wasn’t speaking in his soothing, practiced Barry Marx, M.D., demeanor. I wouldn’t even have noticed the conversation if he didn’t seem perturbed. “I will call you tomorrow,” he said, clipping each word. “
Promise
.”

It was the whisper of “promise” that gave him away.

The cake knife in my hand hovered above the plate as my insides twirled. I’d convinced myself that Barry had become Old Faithful. Just the day before, when Brie and I were layette-shopping, I’d said, “I think my leopard has changed his spots. I practically want to remind him he’s still married to me, Molly Never-Gets-It-Quite-Right.”

“Are you suggesting this change includes fidelity?” Brie had asked, putting down a sweet green jammie as soon as she saw the whopping price tag for what amounted to less fabric than a dish towel. Brie forced me, as she so often did, to visit a dark street in the fluorescently lit megalopolis of Denial. I turned over the question in my mind.

“I think I do,” I’d said, twice. The second time was out loud.

“Not a moment too soon,” she’d said, giving my hand a firm squeeze.

I’d always kept Brie informed of what I suspected were Barry’s dalliances. I was long on intuition and short on hard evidence, but every six months or so I’d get a psychic whiff of adultery and report in. Brie would then declare that my suspicions qualified only as paranoia and that if I was going to be this pathetically insecure, I would doom my marriage all by myself. Once she’d ruled, it allowed me to relax and concentrate on my congenial, manageable life: work, home, family, friendships and, lately, Baby Marx.

I had been going through a cycle—every three to six months—when I ruminated, complained, and ultimately put my worries to rest. Never once did I confront Barry. But that night’s “promise” ricocheted off the
kitchen walls, and as Barry walked in, carrying the empty bottle of pinot noir, my face must have registered panic.

“Molly, what’s wrong?” he said. “Are you feeling something?” His voice sounded no less solicitous than it had three minutes before.

“Oh yeah, I’m feeling something,” I said. Fury. Malice. The desire to shoot a gun.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” he said.