From the neighboring apartment came a noisy coughing, muffled by the wall between. The cougher was an unlikable retiree who the neighbors referred to by his last name, Puldron. Each day she watched through the sighthole in her door as he shuffled over to her stack of mail on the entryway table to paw piece by piece through her bills and catalogs, his blunt fingers pinching and creasing the flimsy photos of stylish outdoor furniture. Sometimes she heard the sound of a page being ripped out and folded over and over into a tight packet, and when she cross-referenced her mutilated catalog with the one on view online, she saw that hers was now missing an image of a picnic basket or an industrial-style upholstered coffee table with wheels. Was Puldron trying to keep her from buying those objects and putting them in her home to make her family complete?
The coughing continued, louder and more urgent. It grew and solidified simultaneously, like a skyscraper seen from an approaching car. Again and again Puldron emptied his throat of sound, and Karen could hear the wet clutch of the throat tube. A muscular gk shuddered at the edge of the sound, the snag of choking. He hacked at the thing trapped in him until she found herself standing up, still holding her baby, her body moving to do something it hadn’t decided on yet: she had never spoken to Puldron, had never wanted to, maybe he’d take it as some sort of aggression. She looked down at the small ears of her daughter, unavoidably open to the world, eagerly capturing the sounds of the choking man and turning them inward to shape her soft, growing mind.
Karen waited. The coughing turned to a wheeze, culminated in silence.
She went over to the wall and pushed her ear to it. Nothing stirred behind the white wall, no spasm of mouth or throat. It had only been a minute or two, or maybe a couple more, since the choking had started. She bumped her elbow weakly against the wall, arms full of daughter. “Are you choking?” she shouted.
If it was true that the smallest unit of stimuli could have a formative effect, then listening to the death of her neighbor only a few feet away in his apartment was bound to do horrible things to future Lila. There could be pyromania, cutting of the skin, morbid fascination with death. Teenage perils that Karen could hardly believe she had experienced herself, in her own past—thinking about it was like hearing a funny story about something you had done while you were drunk, an event you had to trust had been real but which now no longer lived even in your own mind. The worst part was, she had already let it happen: Lila had heard the whole grisly sound track. Karen needed to show her something beautiful immediately—a swan, a fountain. She propped the baby on the sofa and went around the apartment grabbing things and throwing them in an oversize, floppy bag. She put the bag on the stroller, buckled the little body into the seat, breathing in spurts. At the door she realized that she should have called an ambulance. She took the phone from her pocket. It was too late, wasn’t it?
Karen pulled the door open to escape and found Puldron, alive, standing by the mail table. Her reaction was relief, then irritation. The damage to Lila’s psyche had already been done.
Puldron exhaled wetly and continued his work as she pushed by him. He didn’t move; there was plenty of room for the frantic woman to get by with her ugly stroller. He flipped the page, flipped the page again, until he found something workable. With small fine movements he tugged at the paper, tearing along the crease buried in the booklet’s stapled spine. It was a picture of a complicated bowl, asymmetrical and made of iron: an object with gravity. The bowl had a vaguely birdlike shape, like it could glide from on high. At the same time, it was large and surely very heavy. In the trough of the bowl, some idiot had placed a couple of puny lemons, shattering the remarkable somberness of the piece. The salespeople behind these photos wanted to make you believe you could live a happy homemaker’s life with these objects, but in fact the best thing an object could do was to remove you from your life, offer you a portal into the world of pure form. When handling a truly well-balanced piece, you could feel its proportions in your body, in the rightness of your hands traveling its surface. But it was no use speaking of pure form with the people you came across. This was an age in which everything in the world emerged from the womb with a price already stamped upon it.
While there was nothing exactly wrong with the park, there was not much right with it either. The light-colored grass was brittle to the touch and though it looked like it needed water, between bristly tufts the earth was soft and muddy. To her right and left loose bands of teenage boys and girls shoved one another, the girls letting out terrifying screams and then laughing at Karen when she turned to look at them. “That lady’s never seen someone have fun in her entire life,” one girl said to another. “She’s like, I’m scared!” the other girl replied. As she shoved the ugly red stroller over the chalky path Karen wondered what type of body language she was projecting to the surrounding world. When she had left the hospital with Lila in her arms it seemed as though she had stepped onto a different planet. People looked at her now only to get out of her way. If someone stopped to speak to her, linger on her, it was always a woman—a woman with advice on how to mother, a woman who wanted to know the baby’s name or age. She had emerged into a world made only of women, and although they used a friendly tone they spoke to her like a new employee whose incompetence was guaranteed.
Karen was surprised to see herself push past the fountain she had intended to show Lila. But what would they do with the fountain anyhow? Crouch alongside it, peer over its gray lip into the fake blue water at a smattering of pennies, twigs, the drifting body-casings of insects. Lift the baby up and dangle her over the surface so that she could swipe at the dirty water with her hand. In the larger sense, all of this would be forgotten by the child almost as it was happening. Even now, as something inside her mother unspooled nearby, Lila seemed unchanged. She didn’t cry, she let out only a prolonged gurgle as her body shook, propelled over gravel. Her blue eyes reached eagerly for the green grass, the rough stones. Karen took Lila’s silence as license to continue: the walk was loosening her, it erased the ugliness of Puldron’s mouth, the compacted feeling that came with being at home.
Instead of the fountain, she would take her baby to see the water. But there was no real water in this city, Karen thought to herself, water you could sink your body into to feel more alive. They left the park and passed the library, the grocery, an Italian restaurant that Karen hadn’t eaten at since she was in college, visiting a friend. They passed a bodega where a woman sat on a squat stool, arranging many attractive, brightly colored oranges so that they covered the misshapen yellowing ones beneath. The other mothers were envious of Lila’s personality: she scored very well on the rubrics for head-turning, object memory, and facial recognition, which indicated that she was in the process of developing a high IQ—but she rarely cried or complained, which allowed the other mothers to experience her as a being of pure adorability, a sponge for affection that asked nothing in return. But the daughter that Karen had wanted was a daughter who talked, who chattered, who would help her become more of a human being and who would remake the world for her in her own eyes, a daughter she hoped she would have in the future. “I love you just like you are,” she said out loud.
In Karen’s grip the stroller’s handlebar was shaking, twisting left and right and left, as though there were someone holding on to the front of the stroller, pulling it. Lila’s soft white face began to crumple, from its open center came a high wail as the contraption shook her body. Karen stopped and went to see what had gone wrong. As the apparatus tipped forward it drew a lazy arc in the air, moving slow and quick at the same time, making it look like the baby was diving forward. By falling onto her knees and thrusting her arms blindly out, Karen was just able to keep Lila from hitting the sidewalk.
Karen looked at the stroller, at the child. The inside of her head felt slow with panic, and the sound of her daughter crying muffled her thoughts. The wheel had come off, she could see it a few yards back, and who knew where the piece that held it on had been lost? The
stroller would have to be left behind; she couldn’t carry it and the baby both. At the same time, the stroller was so expensive she knew she would have to come back for it. It had been a high-quality model, brightly colored and flashy. It had a chassis of feather-light, heat-resistant titanium, and its parts had been manufactured in Germany by a company that made some of the less important parts of airplanes. She and her husband had agreed it was the best model, safe and firmly made. When she wheeled it around, with its geometric-patterned diaper bag and its plastic frame shiny as a fast food playground, she felt bumbling, cartoonish, gaudy like a clown.
Karen gathered Lila, red with tears, into her arms and began walking. It was only a few moments later that she remembered to think of a place to go.
In the café in the neighborhood where people came mostly to shop, there were only two other customers: a young man on a laptop, his large head squeezed between headphones, and an older woman eating a salad, who might have been a young grandmother. She sat down at the table farthest from both of them. Her arms ached, and she had blisters where heel and instep met the straps of her sandals. She felt guilty. She didn’t want to go back for the stroller, but to buy a new one would symbolize to her husband that she was unable to keep valuable objects in her possession. “Karen,” he’d said tenderly when she lost a good sweater that she’d just bought, “You’re a net with one big hole in it. Everything just slips through you.” When she got up from the sofa and prepared to leave the house with the new stroller, certain to be similarly ugly and large, she knew she’d feel his eyes on her, showing and stifling concern at the same time.
With her gaze fixed on an empty corner, Karen adopted the flat facial expression of someone reading, though she had nothing to look at. She slid off her shoes. She just wanted to drink the sweet, tepid tea and think of nothing. But from the corner of her eye, she saw the older woman watching her between brief, performative glances at a magazine that had recently been rolled up into a small, tight tube. As it lay on the table, it curled slowly in on itself once again. Karen looked over at her, and looked away again too late.
“Did you borrow that shirt from someone?” the older woman asked, smiling toothily and leaning toward Karen.
“No,” Karen said. It was her own shirt. Karen turned to Lila and pretended that she was doing something involving and important with her. Taking a corner of Lila’s soft yellow blanket, she dabbed the little face gently, over and over again.
“Well, it’s very nice,” said the voice from behind her back.
Karen felt a tug on her sleeve and turned her head. The woman next to her was rubbing the fabric between her long finger and her thumb. The shirt was too big. It was a cotton blend, covered in a garish print of lilies and strawberries. In fact, Karen hated this shirt.
“Thank you,” she said stiffly, holding still.
“Has she started to say her words yet?” the woman asked, indicating Lila with a point of her fork. She leaned back and stabbed at her salad, making space for Karen to sit up straight in the seat.
“It’s too early,” Karen admitted, “too early for babbling, even.”
“That’s a lonely time. I know it. You two are together all day long, and there’s nobody even to say ‘mm-hmm.’” The woman laughed.
Karen nodded slowly.
“I’m Linda. How old are you, honey?” said Linda, holding out her hand.
“Thirty-two,” Karen answered, wiping her sweaty palm on her shorts and squeezing Linda’s outstretched hand for an instant. Linda smiled and nodded as though she wasn’t surprised. In her green silk blouse and pink patterned scarf, she was either somebody who understood colors very well or someone who didn’t understand them at all.
“And you feel a million years old inside, am I right?” Linda smiled winningly, her teeth sharply white in the dim lighting. Linda reminded Karen of a TV mother, someone who always had good advice and probably had never been bored, anxious, or confused in her life.
“I don’t know,” Karen said. “I feel strange.”
“Well, don’t we all.” Linda shrugged as, wrapped in blankets at her side, a long, escalating cry began to break from the baby. “You live life one way for, what, thirty years, you’ve just finally, barely gotten used to the way life is, and then BAM!” Linda swiped her finger against wailing Lila’s mouth. Lila quieted instantly. “They tell you that you gotta start learning life all over again. BAM! Isn’t that right?” Linda winked at Karen, and wiped the front and back of her hand on a napkin.
“How did you do that?” Karen exclaimed, truly impressed.
“Oh, just an old family trick. Old, old trick,” Linda said, leaning in. “A teensy dab of butter on the lips. Tamps them down like lambs.” Linda was different from other mothers Karen had met: when she gave advice, it wasn’t stuffy. She was full of stories. For every frustration Karen named, Linda knew someone who in fact had gone through just that problem herself. Linda was a sort of freelance psychoanalyst, consultant, therapist, whatever you please. Diverse but well-respected people, she said, had sought her services for issues ranging from their child’s learning disability to what type of second career they should take on. She had just got these great new business cards printed on 100 percent cotton paper, the real thing, only she didn’t have any with her today.
As for Karen, what she was dealing with right now was completely natural. Linda pounded her fist on the table in a fun way, to make the point: “It’s easy to lose yourself in a kid, even easier if you love them. Your husband comes back, he’s tired, you’re tired, in the end all you have time for is a little kiss on the mouth and a conversation about what the little baby ate that day. Nobody sees you as yourself anymore, only as the walking mouthpiece for that cute bud of flesh. But let me tell you, it gets easier. I know it.” Karen tried to think of what her identity-restoring ritual might be. Her feet ached, her shoes were sweaty. At her side, Lila reached out a small hand for the soiled napkin on the table, grasped it vaguely, let it slip back.
“But you can’t let yourself get down about not feeling one hundred percent of the time like the new person you’re supposed to be,” Linda added with a concerned tone to her voice, her bangs bobbing up and down as she spoke. “It’s those expectations, honey. They’ll drive you insane.”
Karen nodded. Then she remembered the stroller. She had been sitting in the café for more than an hour. Linda’s salad was long gone.
“Oh god,” Karen said. “I have to go back.”
“Go back where?” Linda asked, distracted.
“For the stroller. Part of it broke, the wheel’s off, I can’t put the baby back in it. Someone’s going to take it if I leave it there too long.” Karen didn’t trust the people of this city, the city in which she lived. In her last city, she had smiled or waved when she saw strangers looking at her.
“Oh, don’t worry about it! I’ll watch the baby,” Linda said, waving her hands in the air to show it was no big deal.
Karen hesitated.
“Look, honey,” Linda said, “you haven’t got a choice. Life’s like that sometimes—you gotta take care of business. You’re going to go do your business and come right back, and I’ll be right here with the little one, reading my magazine. It’s the only way.”
“You’re sure?” Karen asked.
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Linda warmly. “Just go, I’ll tend to her every need.”
“I’ll just be fifteen minutes,” said Karen, embarrassed.
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Linda. “Get out of here.”
Karen picked up her tote and looked down at Lila, still reaching for the napkin, still failing. Karen took the napkin and folded it into a small square, which she slipped into the bag. “I’ll be gone for a moment,” she said to the infant in an upbeat, gentle voice, “and then I’ll be back.” She thought. “It means nothing,” she added, tenderly. As she stepped out the door, she looked back. She expected to see Linda smiling toothily, holding Lila’s little hand and waving it around in a semblance o
f good-bye. Instead, Linda was rooting around in her handbag for something. Linda and Lila: those names sounded better together than Karen and Lila. What would it signify if Lila chose to unfurl her first words in front of a kind stranger, rather than her own mother?
Outdoors the sun made her squint, and the air smelled of cars. In a similar situation, her husband would have found a way to reclaim the stroller without losing sight of the baby. He had always been good with logistics, one of those people who behave as though they have the instruction manual for the world. Since they had the baby, this quality in him had been exaggerated. Her husband seemed crisper and clearer as he took on his new role: his jaw was better defined, and when he moved around the kitchen, putting towel and coffee mugs back in their places, his gestures had mimelike precision. She was amazed to see him come into focus. These were days full of details to be cataloged, remembered. But sometimes she had the feeling that she had come into focus for her husband too, and what he saw puzzled him.
The night they brought Lila home, Karen had folded a soft striped blanket in half and then in half again, making a soft bed for Lila so she could sleep between their bodies at night. As she placed it on the mattress and pressed into it a baby-shaped depression, her husband walked in. He lunged toward the bed and grabbed the blanket from her as if it were a burning thing. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked, his voice rough. “Babies die that way,” he said, and hurled the blanket at the wall to make his point. After they had turned out the lights, he rolled over and covered her in a slew of silent kisses before falling asleep. That night Lila woke from a dream that had made her cry. She wished that she had given birth to something that was impossible to injure, a stone or a stomachful of water. In the dark of the room, the striped blanket lay balled on the floor, its rounded shape full of inner folds and shadows.
Intimations Page 8
