Nine Months
Praise for Nine Months
“Paula Bomer is one of those scary-talented writers whose writing upsets and provokes in about equal measure, yet her work remains deeply funny and infused with a certain cock-eyed hopefulness. Nine Months is the best book I have read about the secret fears and sinister underbelly of becoming a parent, a satire which should be viewed not only as a stellar novel, bit as as a challenge to a literary scene mired in laziness, backslapping and lousy clichés.”
—Tony O’Neill, author of Sick City
“Bold, transgressive and overtly sexual. There have been countless road novels, but none about a hormonally driven pregnant mother in search of her soul. Eye-opening! Shocking! Satisfying!”
—Thelma Adams, author of Playdate
“Paul Bomer’s Nine Months is a daring look at motherhood, exploring the thoughts most women keep secret. Sonia’s journey begins with her dumping her sons’ two empty child’s car seats by the road in the dark in an attempt to flee a sense of being caged in, a sense that some part of herself and her dreams were pushed aside for too long, were pushed, in fact, to the brink. Bold, alarming, provocative! A page-turner that will tie your stomach in knots and stir up one hell of a debate.
—Susan Henderson, author of Up from the Blue
“Paula Bomer’s debut novel is so many things: shocking and engrossing, funny and sad. Nine Months begins with wholesome playdates in the park—and then goes deliciously, dangerously rogue. Sometimes, I wanted to shake pregnant Sonia, mother of two small children, and seemingly model citizen of Brooklyn. I always wanted to keep turning the pages, desperate to see what she would do next.”
—Marcy Dermansky, author of Bad Marie
“Nine Months is hilarious, fearless, and totally original. Paula Bomer holds nothing back in this page-turning account of love, sex, pregnancy, marriage and motherhood. Bomer could have titled this work What to REALLY Expect When You’re Expecting as there is more raw, honest truth in this novel than any parenting book I’ve ever read.”
—Jessica Anya Blau, author of Drinking Closer to Home
Praise for Paula Bomer
“Words like ‘tough’ and ‘honest’ don’t quite do justice to the fiction of Paula Bomer. These stories bleed, yes, but that’s because they brawl. The real housewives of Bomerworld break themselves and break your heart and yet never completely lose their soulful dignity.”
—Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask
“I love that Paula Bomer writes her characters into difficult situations and does terrible things to them. These stories contain a rare emotional honesty and brutality.”
—Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody
“[Bomer] lands firmly between Mary Gaitskill’s articulate, unflinching anhedonia and Kathy Acker … Amy Hempel with a twist of Grace Paley.”
—Bookforum
Copyright © 2012 by Paula Bomer
All rights reserved.
Portions of this novel appeared in altered form in Nerve and Dogzplot
Published by
Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bomer, Paula.
Nine months / Paula Bomer.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-61695-147-4
1. Pregnant women—Fiction. 2. Husband and wife—Ficiton. 3. Life change events—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.O653N56 2012
813′.6—dc23
2012010156
Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.
v3.1
for Mark Doten, the true believer,
and for Nick, my love
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
So squeezed, wince you I scream? I love you & hate
off with you. Ages! Useless. Below my waist
he has me in Hell’s vise.
Stalling. He let go. Come back: brace
me somewhere. No. No. Yes! everything down
hardens I press with horrible joy down
my back cracks like a wrist
shame I am voiding oh behind it is too late
hide me forever I work thrust I must free
now I all muscles & bones concentrate
what is living from dying?
Simon I must leave you so untidy
Monster you are killing me Be sure
I’ll have you later Women do endure
I can can no longer
and it passes the wretched trap whelming and I am me
drencht & powerful. I did it with my body!
—JOHN BERRYMAN
In my coat of many colors
I’m waiting for my child
I’m waiting for my journey
I’m waiting for my prize
My Lord, My Lord.
—PJ HARVEY, “Long Time Coming”
February 7
“I DID IT!” She screams, “I DID IT WITH MY OWN BODY!” Her voice is ungodly deep. The veins in her neck thick with blood. And it’s true. Her body, once more, did it. What’s left of it. Bleeding, bloated, bruised inside and out. Ripped and torn, the yellowish, green umbilical cord resembling some sort of proof that aliens do indeed exist, they exist inside of our very bodies. The slimy, luminescent cord is proof of universal mystery, this strange device that attached her to her daughter—it’s from inside of her body, just like her daughter, too, the red-faced infant screaming in the doctor’s arms. Her insides came out. It’s the end of the world.
Because each time it happens, she swears, never again, never again, even as she holds the tiny infant that, unbelievably, unfuckingbelievably, grew inside of her. She’s in awe of her daughter, in awe and also, not so oddly, rather unmoved by her. She feels no love, just wonder. No love surges forth, like it did with Mike her youngest (but not with Tom, it’s like it was with Tom, the confusion, the mystery). Funny, bluish, screamy wormlike thing. She puts her on her left breast and prods at the little baby’s mouth to take the nipple. The baby’s mouth roots around like a baby bird, unable to grasp on. So Sonia squeezes her nipple and colostrum comes out and the infant’s lips touch the pre-milk milk and then, it works—the baby tries to suck. First slowly, and then, as if something in her wired-for-survival brain clicks, she ferociously latches on to Sonia’s nipple and sucks on her like that’s what she’s been put on this earth to do. Which is, in fact, true. Her daughter is here to suck the life out of her, and leave her for the spent, middle-aged woman she soon will be. Nothing will be remotely the same again. No one has ever threatened Sonia as much as this unnamed infant. No one has ever made it clear how useless and spent she really is.
She grew her, like she grew Tom and Mike. Like a plant, but inside of her, and with a brain, too. Sonia stares at the doctor for a minute. How can someone do this for a living? How can they do this for a living, watch women turn themselves inside out, and not have nervous breakdowns? It’s not that different than being a gravedigger. It’s just not. And then, Sonia, still deflating like a balloon, as a large liver-like placenta hurtles out of her, starts shaking with pain. Her teeth chatter. Her vision blurs. Is this th
e part where she dies? That was supposed to be earlier, thinks Sonia. The nurse, Beatrice, who is once again a normal, nice nurse—this, after Sonia saw her with that hallucinatory vision, with rainbows surrounding her and light glowing around her head, she had a fucking halo, she did, Sonia was sure of it—now this nurse is just a nice, normal nurse and gives Sonia a shot of Demoral in her thigh to stop the shakes.
“Sometimes people shake real badly with the postbirth contractions,” Beatrice says. “The fluid leaving them so quickly sets the body off into convulsions. You’ll be fine. It’s nothing abnormal. Nothing to be worried about.”
Sonia was in love with this woman only a few hours ago. And she still likes her, but now she just likes her. The magic is gone. Nothing abnormal? Everything is abnormal. There is nothing normal about what Sonia just went through. There is no normal.
BUT THAT WAS LATER. First, there was more driving to be done. Sitting with her pregnant self in the black leather bucket seat of her Volkswagen Passat station wagon.
It just crept up on her. She was never so lucky, with any of her kids, as to have the drama of her water breaking. No, for about two weeks really, her lower body ached, and then hurt, really hurt, increasingly so. For two weeks, she felt so tired, so exhausted, with intermittent sharp headaches, that whenever she walked, even the littlest bit—from the hotel room to the car, from the front seat of the car to the McDonald’s, from the parking lot to the mall—she felt as if she couldn’t go on. Just physically moving her big body drained her utterly. She wanted to lie down. But then, as soon as she lay down, she wanted to move again. She was never comfortable.
Exhausted restlessness. Bothness. It was time. It was going to happen soon.
SHE’S BEEN DRIVING EAST for some time. She missed Christmas, which was the guiltiest pleasure of all, but the guilt almost ruined the pleasure. No wrapping presents. No buying presents for anyone. No in-laws. No decorating a tree. No goddamn cards to mail out. No having to do a million things at preschool. No singing. No special meals to prepare for her ungrateful family. No pretending that she lives for trying to make everyone happy, when no one noticed that she wasn’t happy herself, that she really didn’t give a fuck. She didn’t believe in Jesus Christ anyway. She didn’t believe that the son of God came and saved everyone’s souls, or just those who prayed to Him. Although, she did pray, just in case, because even though she didn’t believe in Jesus Christ, she didn’t believe there wasn’t anything out there. She prayed desperately to the random molecules to be kind to her. But Jesus? No. And yet, they were Christians in some vague, historical way, Dick and she, and they played the whole game. Told themselves it was about the kids. Every Christmas, they gave five hundred dollars to City Meals on Wheels and bought a ton of cheap plastic toys that made the boys freak out for about two days. It depressed her. It made her feel oddly guilty, an empty sort of false joy and yet the boys were genuinely happy, wasn’t that enough?
This Christmas she spent laying her fat butt down at a Ramada Inn in Nebraska, watching TV and eating bags of chips and boxes of créme-filled oatmeal cookies. She fell asleep with the TV on. For some reason, she didn’t feel depressed and guilty about that. She felt guilty because she did nothing that she was supposed to do anymore. Missing Christmas was like having her very own Christmas for the first time since Tom was born five years ago. But the guilt was a wicked tongue telling her that she really was the devil. Jesus held no sway with Sonia, but evil was a scary force one saw on a regular basis. And who’s to say it wasn’t inside of her? For weeks and weeks now, the guilt ate at her as she ate her way around America. Her conscience spoke to her, and it told her horrible stuff about herself. She’d listen, and then move on. She wasn’t a monster as long as her conscience spoke, she reasoned. As long as she had a conscience, she wasn’t actually the worst person on earth, she was just rebelling. Or so she told herself. But everyone knows a mother who leaves her children is the worst thing on earth; a sinner, a loser, a person whose life isn’t worth living.
She missed New Years. Happy New Year! On New Year’s Eve, she fell asleep at 10 P.M. in a Motel 6 in Illinois. But now, in the gloom of February, now she heads back. Because the baby is coming. And, guilt or no guilt, she has no control over what she has to do now. It was a relief, actually, the lack of responsibility. She has no choice in the matter. She has to push this baby out.
WHEN SHE WALKS AROUND the malls that she haunts, she walks so slowly, like the baby’s head is right there, right above her vagina, like there is a bowling ball between her legs. She positively waddles. And it feels like a bowling ball is leaning on her crotch. It fucking hurts. How much does a bowling ball weigh? How much does this baby, the placenta, the extra pints and pints of blood and fluid weigh? The same as a bowling ball? Probably more. Sometimes, a sharp stabbing pain. Other times, just a dull throbbing that becomes like some horrible white noise; at first she ignores the pain and then it’s the only thing she can think of. So she sits down on a bench across from the indoor fountains at the mall—throb, throb, throb.
She’s due. And, like the other two times, she’s in denial. Because, who after all wants to deal with that pain? Who wants to welcome the horror that is birth? Who joyfully embraces the thought of their body cleaving in two? Vague, nightmarish memories of the other births startle her, flash at her, as she does her thing, the driving, the walking around malls, the walking from her car to a gas station and then back again, the lying around hotel rooms. Meanwhile, she pretends this isn’t her labor very slowly starting. But it is. At a mall in Michigan, after eating an enormous steak and a baked potato for dinner—she never eats the potato, why now?—she waddles out to her station wagon and gets in the car and heads toward New York. Not vaguely east. No, now she drives straight for New York City, straight for Brooklyn. She drives eighty miles an hour most of the time. She’s anxious. She wants to get there. She’s heading back to her boys. To her man. The father of this baby.
But she doesn’t quite make it. She’s not a confident driver to begin with. When her stomach hardens up, it becomes hard to focus on the road. She can still see the road. In fact, morning’s pushing through, hazy and dark, a dark February morning, and she knows she’s been sitting in this car for that long now—and she’s been in Pennsylvania for a long time. God, she’s close, but the hardening of her stomach, the contraction—the word actually presents itself to her—is telling her to pull over and ask where the nearest hospital is.
“Twenty minutes to downtown Philadelphia,” the man at the gas station tells her. Twenty minutes. She can do it. They are coming faster now, the contractions, regularly, too. Her first labor was eleven hours, not bad. Her second was eight hours long. How long would this one be? She has more than twenty minutes before the baby forces herself out, she must. She says to herself, “I’ve got at least a few hours. I’ve got time. Drive slow, breathe,” and she talks to herself like this until she enters Philly, a city she’s only been to once or twice with her family, long ago. Once, they stayed in a hotel and went swimming in the indoor pool and then walked around, sightseeing. What was the second time? She can’t remember now, the pain during her contractions distracting her memory for the most part. She does remember where the man told her to go and she makes the turns and there’s the hospital.
She is the only white person in the waiting area. After talking to the triage nurse, she’s sent out to give her insurance card to the person at the desk and then she’s ushered out of the emergency waiting room into another room right away. Ahead of all the dark-skinned people. She wishes this was because she’s about to have a baby, but she knows it’s because she has a good insurance card. Once, when Mike had a horrible ear infection, she took him to the emergency room in a downtown Brooklyn hospital and the look on their faces when she produced her insurance card! It was as if she were holding out a bar of gold for payment.
They have a room in their maternity ward. The nurse Beatrice comes in, a West Indian woman by her accent. She checks her pulse. She
listens to the baby’s heartbeat with a long corded thing. She times her contractions. “They’re three minutes apart, but they’re not lasting very long. They don’t feel that powerful, do they?”
“No, not really.”
“The doctor will be here soon to see how dilated you are.”
A handsome, middle-aged white woman appears. She looks tired, but she smiles. She introduces herself as Dr. Lumiere and then says, “Let’s take a look at you then.”
She puts her hand deep inside of Sonia’s crotch. This hurts. She moves her hand around and Sonia can feel the hand twisting inside of her and she can see the doctor’s arm from the elbow up, moving this way and that. The doctor’s face held in concentration. Seeing with her fingers. “Where are you from?”
“Brooklyn.”
“Your husband’s not here?”
“He’s in Brooklyn.”
“You’ve had two other deliveries, I noticed from your chart.”
“I have two kids, yes.”
“And where are they?”
“They’re in Brooklyn. With their father.”
Suddenly, the hospital gown held loosely over her breasts and enormous stomach feels incredibly inadequate. Sonia feels ashamed. “I was heading back to Brooklyn from a business trip and didn’t quite make it.” She smiles. She’s a horrible liar. She fruitlessly tries to pull the crinkly gown over her body to hide her shame, but it doesn’t work.
“Have you called them? They could make it here on time.” The doctor finally pulls her hand out of Sonia.
“How dilated am I?”
“You’re only three centimeters dilated, but you’re completely effaced. This being your third birth, it shouldn’t be that long. I’ll get the anesthesiologist on call.”
“I don’t want an epidural. I didn’t get one with my other kids.”
The doctor looks at her critically.