Outtakes from a Marriage Read Free Page B

body had stretched out onto my half of the bed and the wrath inspired by his trespassing genitals and limbs took me by surprise.
Get your disgusting ape legs off my side of the bed,
I thought. I sat down and drove my thumb into Joe’s hamstring, and when he mumbled in protest, I said, softly, “Move over, Joe. There’s no room.”
    Somehow I slept. I had closed my eyes and thought,
I’ll never get to sleep tonight, never,
and then it was six o’clock the next morning and I discovered that Sammy had crawled into bed beside me sometime during the night. Joe was gone—he’d had a five o’clock call—and now Sammy lay sprawled out, belly up, in his place. Sammy’s blond hair formed a feathery halo around his head, and his arms were thrown out to either side as if he had landed there after a long backward free fall. I wrapped my body around my son—a classic Sam (Dad never met one who couldn’t look you in the eye)—and the smell of his sweet, damp hair and his freshly laundered pajamas filled me with an aching sense of longing and regret. My youngest, my last child, was no longer a baby. I would never again hold my own sleeping newborn against my shoulder or feel the weighty, sensual anticipation of milk-heavy breasts. My children were getting older—someday they would leave. I was forty, my life was half over, and my husband had found somebody new.
    “He’s gonna grow up to be a serial killer, you know.”
    Ruby, our fourteen-year-old, was standing in the doorway in an oversized T-shirt, frowning at the sight of Sammy lying asleep in my bed.
    “Good morning, Ruby.” I sighed.
    “Mom, you have to stop letting him come into your bed every night or he’ll develop a narcissistic personality disorder and end up going on a killing spree when he’s older.”
    “Really?” I whispered, carefully climbing out of bed. “Well, you slept in our bed almost every night until you were at least Sammy’s age, and you don’t seem to be too terribly deranged.”
    “Um…Mom? Could you please stop telling me that? It’s really damaging for me to have to visualize myself in the same bed with you and Dad.”
    “I’ll damage you!” I said, and I aimed a fake karate kick at her. I was forcing a laugh now, trying to be fun, but Ruby just scooted out of the way, exhaling a weighty grunt of disapproval.
    “Mom! You almost kicked Sammy!”
    Ruby considers Sammy as much her child as Joe’s and mine, and she spends a great deal of time worrying about, and second-guessing, our behavior toward him. She seems to view herself as some sort of buffer, a human firewall that will, ideally, protect Sammy from the reckless parenting that she feels she has had to endure all these years. She goes to a progressive school that offers a course in psychology to eighth graders, and ever since she started taking the class, she has been telling us how just about everything we do is “damaging” or “undermining” or “demoralizing” to her or to Sammy.
    When people first meet our family they often comment on the age discrepancy between our two children. “Decided to start all over again, huh?” they’ll ask, as if suddenly, after ten years, we decided it was time to produce another child. It’s taken for granted that Sammy is an afterthought. That we almost forgot to have a second baby. In fact, we didn’t forget. In fact, after Ruby, there were three other pregnancies and three miscarriages and then, finally, there was Sammy, whom we didn’t really trust or believe in until I held him in my arms, all slimy, breathing, squalling seven pounds of him, delivered so quickly that we almost didn’t make it to the delivery room. “What a lucky mom,” Dr. Rajaman said as he casually slid him onto my belly. “Such a short labor!”
    And it’s true; we felt blessed and just dripping with luck that day at Lenox Hill Hospital. I still remember the way Joe wiped his teary eyes with the palm of his trembling hand when the nurse handed over