The Seven Year Bitch by Jennifer Belle Read Free Book Online

younger than it. “He told me his whole financial situation,” she said. “When he was in the hospital with prostate cancer an inexperienced broker refused to sell and he lost everything.”
    When men got to be seventy you really saw who they were and what they had become, and not until then. They’d either won a Nobel Peace Prize or they hadn’t. All those big deals they were working on when they couldn’t get off the phone or look up from their Barron’s and treated you like shit on dates had either panned out or they hadn’t. You knew whether they’d won or lost, and the ones on J-Date, the Internet dating service my mother used, had usually lost.
    My mother and her friends had divorced their husbands with confidence, only to find themselves desperately trying to date men who were either exactly the same or so much worse than their husbands had been.
    â€œMy shrink has someone who can find you a nanny,” my mother said.
    My mother always spent all of her therapy sessions talking about my problems instead of her own, and her shrink, I had to admit but not to my mother, actually did a pretty good job of analyzing my relationships, dreams, and problems. When my clothes didn’t fit after I had the baby, she sent me, via my mother, to a fantastic store in SoHo called Rosebud where I found great clothes. And when my back was constantly hurting, she sent me, via my mother, to an osteopath who cured me. And when I was feeling especially guilty about having so much babysitting at night, she assured me, via my mother, that there was absolutely nothing wrong with getting more help and I would be crazy not to.
    â€œYou shouldn’t waste your therapy talking about me,” I said.
    â€œBut you have so many problems,” my mother said. “My shrink gave me the number of a woman who she says is the queen of all the nannies. She can find someone for you. Apparently they all go to the same church.”
    Tchaikovsky was playing in the background and I could almost see her, the Nanny Queen, pirouetting in the center of all the nannies and one Italian greyhound in pink tulle.
    I called the Nanny Queen as soon as I got off the phone with my mother.
    â€œI have someone for you,” the Nanny Queen said. “Her name is Shasthi.”

5
    T hat night, I sat on the toilet with Duncan on my lap, the shower running hot. He’d been stricken with croup, and was coughing like a seal, crying and gasping for air. He didn’t look like himself.
    Babies, when they’re sick, are actually blurry, as if their cells are so new to each other they haven’t figured out how to hold their shape.
    Holding his hot, limp body in my arms like that at three thirty in the morning was the closest I had ever come to nirvana. No matter what bad things were ever to come in my life, at least I had done that. I had taken care of him. Love had coursed through me, like I was standing under the showerhead being pelted with it. I had never felt love like that, like I was in the thick glass walls of a blender set on “chop.” I was almost sad when the moment had to end. My phone vibrated on the edge of the tub—it was the doctor returning my call—and I reached to answer it.
    And when Duncan finally stopped coughing, and fell asleep in my arms, and I put him in his crib, I was almost sorry he was better.
    I wished he would cough again and I could call the doctor, and run the shower, and hold him in my arms. Afterward, I lay in my bed with my ears pricked like a mother wolf’s, my heart pounding, just listening for him in the New York City silence.
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    In the morning, Russell agreed to take care of Duncan for an hour or two and I walked all the way from our Tribeca apartment to the café I had been going to since business school. I had done all my studying there because it was a short walk from Stern and I loved the Moroccan tagines and couscous they served. I wrapped