The Seven Year Bitch by Jennifer Belle Read Free Book Online Page A

my hands around my cappuccino like a strangler. The morning news had warnings that tea tree oil shampoo, which I happened to have used to wash the baby’s hair every day for the last eight months at the doctor’s insistence, was found to cause breasts to grow in baby boys. Duncan didn’t have breasts yet, thank God, but I had taken the bottle right out to the garbage room on my way out of the apartment.
    â€œHow is my wife?” the cook at the café said, putting a bowl of soup on the table in front of me and taking the seat across from me. His name was Said and I always pronounced it Sigheed, which I believed to be correct, even though everyone at the café seemed to say it many different ways, and he always called me “wife,” which was a little uncomfortable and off-putting, but I had never stopped him. Now that it had been about eighteen years, it seemed too late to try. It was especially awkward because he had a wife, a bleak, clunky Russian woman who had been his cleaning lady and was still his cleaning lady but now didn’t get paid for it.
    â€œI haven’t seen you for a long time. No work today?” Said asked.
    â€œNo more job,” I said.
    â€œThis is shit!” he said. He had a thick Turkish accent and when he got excited, which was about half the time, I couldn’t understand him at all, but that hadn’t seemed to matter in all these years. I just smiled or laughed at what I hoped were the right times, or said, “Hilarious!” and that had always worked. My cell phone rang and I excused myself and answered it. It was Russell saying Duncan had a fever and he needed Tylenol. I told him the Tylenol was right on the bathroom sink and went back to my conversation with Said.
    â€œDelicious,” I said about the soup even though it scared me a little. He always gave me free food in addition to whatever I ordered, and sometimes it was something he had improvised that wasn’t on the menu.
    â€œThose are meatballs,” he said. “You like?”
    â€œ Ummm , delicious,” I said.
    â€œWhy I am tired?” Said asked, reaching across the table to poke my shoulder.
    I just nodded, unsure of what to say.
    â€œI ask you, ʽWhy I am tired?’”
    â€œYou work hard,” I said.
    â€œNo, not work! The woman don’t leave me alone.”
    I laughed uncomfortably. “Right,” I said. “Hilarious!”
    â€œI am be serious, Isolde. I spend the night with a woman. It is magic, this hotel. Fourteenth Street and the West Side Highway. One hundred dollars for three hours, Jacuzzi, beautiful, clean, magic.”
    Again I laughed and said, “Hilarious.” We passed that hotel in the car on the way to the country. It would have to be magic to make that hotel clean and beautiful.
    â€œI am not joking. You think I do nothing every year when Cecylia goes?”
    His wife went to Russia to live with her mother every summer for four months. The rest of the year, whenever I stopped in she was sitting hunched over an Irish coffee with a very sad, bloated look on her face, saying things like “New York, she is so durr-ty, how can I stand this, Isolde? Tell me, I beg of you.” Each year, I couldn’t wait for her to go away. And neither could Said apparently.
    â€œYou know Cecylia and me, we don’t have nothing, no sex,” he said.
    â€œ Hmmm ,” I said.
    â€œShe say I am too big. She told me when we have the sex it hurt her too much. She feel it in her throat.”
    I had just taken a swallow of coffee as he said it and was about to clear my throat but forced myself not to. My cell phone rang. It was Russell again saying that the baby Tylenol was not on the bathroom sink.
    â€œIt has to be,” I said. I had given Duncan a dropperful the night before.
    â€œI’m standing right here,” Russell said, “and there’s no Tylenol.”
    â€œI’m sure it’s