The Seven Year Bitch Read Online Free

to fill with my belongings and somehow carry downstairs to the chauffeured car waiting to take me home. Layoffs had been inevitable for months, so anyone in finance who hadn’t already cleared out her desk was a fool. In the weeks prior, anyone you saw disappearing into the Wall Street and Rector subway stations was carrying increasingly bulging briefcases. My files and contacts were safe at home with my photos of Duncan and my dog, Humbert, and enough tape, markers, Post-its, and paper to get us through elementary school.
    At my exit interview, I’d sat across from Mark, and Flavin, an executive vice president in charge of special projects, and Merry, a horrible HR drone who was there to make sure I wouldn’t sue the company.
    â€œNow you can spend some time with your baby,” Mark had the nerve to say to me.
    â€œAnd you too,” I said because he was every bit as laid off as I was and had his own baby.
    â€œYou have a good package,” he said. It was good. Enough so that Russell and I wouldn’t have to worry for a long time.
    â€œI’m sure you have a good package too,” I said.
    I was forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement and listen to Merry tell me how my benefits were continuing and that I should make good use of the outplacement counseling they were providing for an entire year.
    I had floated out of the exit interview, completely free, except for the security guard. And I thought about what someone had told me about the people who jumped from the towers on 9/11. They’d had so much adrenaline coursing through them, they may have even thought that they could fly.

2
    O n Sunday I woke up more excited than I had ever been. Duncan was one. I had survived the hardest year of my life. Duncan was still alive. We had made it. I nursed him for what was supposed to be the last time. I ran all around the apartment setting everything up, accepting deliveries, helping the caterer, opening stacks of plastic cups and the first dozen bottles of wine.
    Russell’s only job was to make sure the batteries in the video camera were charged so we could capture Duncan tasting his first cake.
    I had never understood the word “congratulations.” At my graduation from business school when people said it, I shrugged, thinking I had done what hundreds of others had done right along with me, and it hadn’t even been that hard. At my wedding and after Duncan’s birth I couldn’t understand why people were congratulating me. Getting married and having a baby didn’t seem like my achievement; it required no skill; anyone could do it; most people did. I’d found those acts almost embarrassing really—banal, bourgeois, clichéd. Getting married was like posting a public announcement to the world that you were going to be having sex with this one person for the rest of your life, and having a baby was like an announcement that the sex had been had. But now, as the mother of a one-year-old, I understood. I deserved all the congratulations I could get. I had never felt more proud or happy in my entire life.
    I took Duncan’s outfit from Makie out of its black tissue paper and put him on his changing table. I peeled off his shit-filled diaper and breathed it in. It would never smell like this again, I realized. Now he would no longer have breast milk. He would have regular milk, and birthday cake, and more and more regular food, and things like little boxes of raisins and juice boxes and grilled cheese sandwiches and Chef Boy-ar-dee and I would never smell this same smell again.
    Then I flung open my front door and let all the congratulations come pouring in.
    When the party was over and Duncan was passed out in his crib, still in his clothes like a frat boy, I turned on the video camera to replay some of the day’s big moments. The tape started with Duncan, still unable to walk on his own, cruising around the coffee table grasping a balloon. Not since Albert