Primates of Park Avenue

by Martin,Wednesday

When Lily’s three-year-old daughter died—unexpectedly, quickly, essentially from a cold—we made keening noises and fell to the floor, all of us who loved her, all of us who loved our own children, everyone who heard. The ripples went outward from Lily to us, her girlfriends, first. And from us to all our closest friends, to all their friends and then to every single woman and man with a preschooler in Manhattan. We were stunned, with pinched faces and tight voices and red eyes, as we brought our children to school and talked in the hallways and over coffee and on the phone. We cried and cried. We are still crying. Even those who only knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew her. No. How did this happen? It can’t be. What happened, exactly? Why? What will her mother do?

  Flora was three and three-quarters years old. Her hair was wispy and blond and her eyes were huge and blue. She was a fussy eater and she didn’t like anyone to touch her head. She loved cooking and school and ballet. She was just becoming herself. One night, about week before she collapsed, she and her big sister came to our house to play with my sons, and while I was getting dressed to go out with Lily and my husband, there was a tiny knock on my door, and there was Flora, with a gift wrapped in white tissue paper and a gold bow. This is for you, she said shyly, smiling, looking at the floor and then daring for a moment to look directly into my eyes. I kneeled and kissed her. “Thank you, Flora,” I said. She had walked so far, all the way down the long hallway of our apartment, away from her mother and her big sister and the other kids and the warm, bright room with the television playing The Cat in the Hat, on her errand toward me. She helped me open the gift—a skirt that Lily had made—and then Flora headed back down the hall, all on her own. Later I told Lily this story and she made a choking noise and said, “She was getting so brave. She was doing more things like that.”

  She was here, and then she was gone. The mind understands it in pieces, the smallest bits. Not “she is gone” but She will not wear that tiny sweater with yellow flowers on it again, or those pink rain boots. Her small cubby at school, the one that held her pink backpack and whatever she made in art that week, is emptied out. I am holding her princess umbrella in my hand and she won’t, she can’t, do that again. How much time? How long to assemble all the pieces into a whole and take it in, the loss of her, the truth of her being gone?

  Gelada baboon, chimp, and mountain gorilla mothers have all been observed carrying, grooming, and cradling the bodies of their dead infants. Often, they do this for so long that their babies’ remains become mummified. In the case of the chimps and geladas, the mothers carry the corpses of their offspring in highly atypical ways—by the limbs, with one hand, or by mouth—suggesting that, even as they gently care for them, they realize their babies are no more. I felt connected to them whenever I thought of it, like an animal, dragging my deluded hope and heartbreak and instinct with me up and down the avenues, and I suspected Lily did, too. There was no comparing the loss of a toddler, a little person you had known and loved for almost four years, with losing a baby you never met. I was careful not to. But Lily would sometimes say, “I feel like you understand because something awful happened to you.” To all of us. But mostly, most awfully, to Lily. To Nisa. To so many others, singled out for singular, universal, unremarkable, remarkably unbearable sadness.

  It took a long time to realize, to really understand, that I was not pregnant anymore. One day I gathered up all the maternity clothes, and all the post-baby clothes—the nursing shirts and nursing bras and the soft sweaters with funny slits and for breastfeeding—and put them in a grocery bag and placed them out on the service landing, the place for garbage and recycling and things to be repurposed as well, in the owner–to-doorman-to-doorman’s-family-or-church cycle that happens in buildings here. There, I thought.

  That’s when a kind of fog came down, and I could never remember where my keys were and I answered emails four times, and I raged. I raged at myself for misplacing my wallet and throwing my shoes in the garbage can after taking them off, as if that were simply what one did. I raged when I realized I had put my cell phone in the refrigerator. I raged at my doctor for not understanding that I had Alzheimer’s. What else could account for this inability to remember what I had said and done and where I had been and what I had promised? I felt cold all the time. My older son drew a picture that I came across in his room: two stick figures, one with a huge belly and a tiny figure with Xs instead of eyes inside; the other with a box and lines coming out of it. What’s this? I asked and my son said, “It’s when the baby died. That’s the doctor and his machine.” He wrote letters, one to Daphne and one to Flora. I’m glad you’re my baby sister, even though you died, he wrote to Daphne. I miss you, please be in touch if you can, the one to Flora ended.

  We were marooned together, our little family, it seemed, in our sadness. My husband didn’t understand the depth of my anguish and my anger—how could he?—and on the worst days I felt walled off even from him, as if he were someone who just came and went against the backdrop of what I had lost. I tried to work, thinking that writing might help, but my mind was unreliable and disobedient. I couldn’t remember words—some that anyone might forget, like ephemeral—but also words like that and also. I would call Candace or my friend Jeff, the English professor, and ask them to tell me what I meant, what I was trying to say. They tried to help me through the disorientation and bitterness, one word at a time.

  Sometimes, the world outside our home seemed to be ebbing away. The things I had cared about or focused on—not just my work, but the work of finding a place for me and my sons in a world that had gone from utterly alien and alienating to familiar to almost-normal—seemed ridiculous to me now, bent and refracted through the lens of loss. What was the point? Who cared about one more book? Who cared whether my kid was invited to a birthday party, or spurned for a playdate? Why had I ever cared so much? I was vulnerable and raw, but I was clear that now I had no patience for the pettier games of Manhattan motherhood. If anyone gave me the stink-eye, I thought, or said or did anything nasty to my kid, I would teach her a lesson, and take her down into the gloaming with me, and let her know a thing or two about what really mattered. I dared the Queen of the Queen Bees—who, it was said, had recently, in the school halls, grabbed and flipped down the collar on the coat of another mother who wouldn’t tell her where she had bought it, and then mocked it as “cheap”—to come anywhere near me. Luckily for us both, probably, she didn’t.

  But something else happened. Every day, without fail, I heard from some of the mothers I knew from my son’s school, and my younger son’s playgroup. “The amnio just kept coming back the same but we kept waiting, hoping. So I was really far along when . . . you know,” a woman who had struck me as preposterously rich and indifferent and vain told me over coffee. Now she looked at me and said, “I know what it’s like, and I’m really sorry.” I had been so wrung out and tired but she insisted that I meet her. We didn’t know each other well. Now I began to weep—about Daphne and about her baby, too—and she said, “I’ll help you.” She would. She did. She was part of this, and she knew it. They all did. Surprisingly, unexpectedly, the mothers, many of whom I had dismissed as unfriendly, self-involved, and shallow, showed me what they were made of, showed me what motherhood is.

  One by one, daily, day after day, they were in touch. They took me to lunch, and sent flowers and invited us to their summer homes. They emailed just to say hello. They told me their own stories. “I lost twins when I was twenty-two weeks along. Well, I mean, one was stillborn, and one lived for another two weeks, but then he died. And I just wanted to tell you I understand. I do.” Another woman from my son’s school told me how she had lost her baby at nineteen weeks and had nearly died of blood loss. She had transfusion after transfusion and dreamed of her other children. We walked up and down the bridle path in Central Park in our exercise clothes, and she listened to me and I listened to her and I wondered how many other women in the park just then, or in the bui
ldings around it, and how many mothers in wider and wider concentric circles across the city and the country and the world, were thinking about a similar loss just then, just as we rounded the corner and saw what my toddler called the “crooked tree,” a perfect place for someone tiny to sit, with the arm of someone who loved him propping him up from behind.

  Women told me stories of losing babies the week or the day before their due dates. A woman I had considered cold beyond comprehension, I learned, had walked into her baby girl’s room and found her dead, at nearly six months, of SIDS. One woman told me of her baby who died, apparently of nothing at all, eight months after she was born. She told me this story as if in passing, as if my own loss were the real point, and I reached out and touched her arm. “It won’t ever be okay, but it will,” she said with an apologetic smile as we stood there on the sidewalk.

  I was ashamed and confused and relieved in equal parts when I realized that many of the other mothers I had written off, whose reserve or downright tribal clubbiness I had been hurt by, intimated by, I had dismissed far too quickly. A good number of the women I had found so bitchy and off-putting would now not let me put them off. They offered to host my older son for a sleepover, or take him to the movies. They sent over dinner. And when people invited us away for the weekend, we went. We ate and talked and we swam with our children and their children in their pools. We called it the Dead Baby Tour. I thought my loss would widen the chasm between me and them, but it closed it. They had lost, too. We joked, the other mothers who had lost and I, that we should make T-shirts that said, “I threw up for six months . . . and all I got was this T-shirt.” I had okay days and worse days and much worse days. But the other mothers, some of them the sidewalk chargers and the Birkin wielders, the ones who had made me feel that my sons and I were playdate pariahs, did not give up on me. Some of the very ones who had hazed and harassed me came over for a glass of wine. They sat and they listened and they showed an amazing and impressive ability to just be there with my pain and rage, and to care. For weeks and months and in some cases, for years.

  One of the biggest shifts in the last decade of anthropology, one of the discoveries in the field that has changed everything, is the realization that we evolved as cooperative breeders. Bringing up kids in a nuclear family is a novelty, a blip on the screen of human family life. We never did child rearing alone, isolated and shut off from others, or with just one other person, the child’s father. It is arduous and anomalous and it’s not the way it “should” be. Indeed, for as long as we have been, we have relied on other females—kin and the kindly disposed—to help us raise our offspring. Mostly we lived as Nisa did—in rangy, multifamily bands that looked out for one another, took care of one another, and raised each other’s children. You still see it in parts of the Caribbean today, where any adult in a small town can tell any kid to toe the line, and does, and the kids listen. Or in Hawaii, where kids and parents alike depend on hanai relationships—aunties and uncles, indispensible honorary relations who take a real interest in an unrelated child’s well-being and education. No, it wasn’t fire or hunting or the heterosexual dyad that gave us a leg up, anthropologists now largely concur: it was our female Homo ancestors holding and handling and caring for and even nursing the babies of other females. That is in large part why Homo sapiens flourished and flourish still, while other early hominins and pre-hominins bit the dust. This shared history of interdependence, of tending and caring, might explain the unique capacity women have for deep friendship with other women. We have counted on each other for child care, sanity, and survival literally forever. The loss of your child weighs heavily on me in this web of connectedness, because he or she is a little bit my own.

  I knew that. I had learned about cooperative breeding and communal nursing in school and in my research. I had thought about it and written about it. But now I felt it.

  What had happened to me must have been terrifying for the mothers who hadn’t experienced it, and a nearly unbearable reminder for those who had. But they did not stop asking me how I was, and they did not stop wanting to know. There is frequently astonishing competition and aggression between women with children in Manhattan—the sartorial showdowns and calculating once-overs in school elevators. But there is also, I learned after I lost Daphne, extraordinary cooperation and support when it comes to looking out for one another by looking out for one another’s children. Just like mothers in a small town, just like mothers long ago, women with children on the Upper East Side form tight relational networks that function in part as emotional support and in part as surrogate child care. They did not give up on me, because they couldn’t.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Summary Fieldnotes

  After some six years of fieldwork on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, among a group of approximately 150 mothers of young children living in an area of roughly 250 acres, my immersion in and identification with the tribe I studied was comprehensive. Nothing would have suggested such an outcome. I was initially a new transfer to this particular troop of higher order primates: I had dispersed at sexual maturity from a geographically and culturally distant group, then lived in the southern corner of the island for many years, embracing the practices and ways of being that prevailed there before migrating to their far-northern habitat, a niche of superabundance, in search of opportunities for myself and my offspring. I did not practice the religion of the tribe I studied; I undertook distinct personal adornment and costuming practices and ablutions until learning their ways, and then frequently continued to avoid conforming to those; my seasonal voluntary migration patterns were distinct from theirs; and I had diminished resources in relative terms. It was no surprise that I, like many other new female transfers to human and nonhuman primate groups the world over, had low status and was hazed, even harassed, by higher-ranking troop members—who had usually inherited their status, generally from their fathers and their husbands—for many, many months after my arrival. Sometimes I suspected it would go on forever.

  But primatologist Robert Sapolsky and others have observed, based on years of fieldwork among non- primates, that while low status can create stress and high status is inherited and confers all types of benefits, rank is perhaps more flexible and less static among primates than many field scientists initially believed. For example, a low-ranking baboon may, through shrewd coalition building (via grooming, forming alliances during skirmishes, food sharing, and infant care), engineer agreeable life circumstances and outcomes for him- or herself and his or her offspring. Sapolsky and others also further suggest that betas may have lower stress levels than alphas in nonhuman primate groups. Life might just be better when you’re not at the very top, constantly fending off the envy and coup attempts of others.

  While the implications of these discoveries for humans are unclear, after months of assiduous work to find allies and build coalitions, I was ultimately content with my rank, friendships, and, most important for a primate, my offspring’s prospects, after several years of living among what I eventually came to think of as my tribe. In part the improvement of my lot could be attributed to my social “work”—cultivating attachments and affiliations for myself and my sons, doggedly (and arguably, pathetically) persisting in attempts to build alliances while ignoring being ignored, and thus not losing face, and the brief attentions of an alpha male. But the precipitating event of the transformation in my status may well have been the loss of a pregnancy at an advanced stage, which elicited unexpected compassion from my conspecifics. This event likely activated deep tendencies of generosity, care, and empathy among a group of women who evolved as cooperative breeders, and whose ancestors regularly cared for the children of their kin and fellow band members. While this practice no longer prevails in utterly changed ecological and environmental conditions, it is clear that when it comes to cooperative breeding, communal caretaking, and simply caring, in the words of anthropologist Steve Josephson, “the software is still in there.”
r />   IN HIS Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, the personal underside of his official ethnography of life among the Trobriand Islanders off the coast of New Guinea called Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1917), we see anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski unravel. Having moved to a remote archipelago in the name of a burgeoning social “science” whose practitioners struggled to distinguish themselves from missionaries, traders, and colonial administrators, Malinowski frequently offers a portrait of himself as “lost.” This eminent founding father of anthropology experiences rage at his informants, who sometimes walk away after he gives them tobacco, ignoring their “obligation” to offer, in turn, truths about themselves and their culture. He expresses all matter of personal and professional insecurity, and even a kind of emotional and psychological free fall, as he adjusts to bewildering surroundings—living in a hut, the sweltering sun, a foreign language and entirely alien way of life. He imagines, again and again, that he is deathly ill. He feels anxious, lonely, and sexually frustrated.

  I had often thought of Malinowski, about whom I had written in my doctoral dissertation, as I went through my days on the Upper East Side. I thought of his searing honesty about a conundrum beyond his control, yet essentially of his own making. I thought of how flawed and resentful and petty and unscientific he sometimes seemed, how shallow and biased he could come across as in his personal, private writing, versus the cool, analytic, distant professional voice of Argonauts. Malinowski, along with a handful of others, basically “invented” anthropology, a discipline I have always loved for its powerful blending of storytelling and insight, its uneasy but undeniable juxtaposition of one individual outsider’s personal experience and the overarching narrative of a culture. I am not an academic anthropologist—I did not major in anthropology, even as I studied it and later made a career of understanding it and writing about it and teaching its history in my cultural studies courses. Nor did I ever go anywhere remote and observe and record the behavior of chimps, apes, baboons, or monkeys as primatologists do. Anthropology and primatology were simply disciplines and ways of seeing I studied and fell in love with, and then applied to my own experience of moving to and adjusting to life in a foreign culture, a society whose unfamiliar rites, beliefs, and rituals initially left me feeling baffled and alienated.