Once I Was Cool

by Megan Stielstra

  Now, a couple of lifetimes later, we were standing in the rotunda of the Chicago Symphony Center. The chandeliers were singing—a thousand cicadas around us; I could feel them in my veins, and my professor was saying, “John,” and pointing to himself.

  “John!” I repeated. “John!” I was stammering. You don’t want to stammer when you run into an ex. You want Be Articulate. And Look Hot. “What are you doing in Chicago?” I asked, relieved to have come up with an appropriate question. And that’s when he introduced me to his daughter, a freshman at Northwestern with his same eyes. I thought of saying, Oh! I saw your baby pictures on the fridge after your dad and I made out on his couch!—but instead, I marveled at her. She was eighteen, free, desperate to be an adult, and I wanted to yell across time to myself at that age: Enjoy it. Every fucking second.

  “So—” John said, and I physically lifted my focus from his daughter’s face to his; in his Fifties now, his skin a matrix of dips and slopes. “Did you ever sing with Zeppelin?” he asked, and we laughed, because—really—it was hilarious: him and me running into each other after all these years. I was standing at the symphony looking my past right in the eye.

  I thought of all I’d done between then and now: traveling to Florence and Thailand and Prague, living and studying enough to later write and teach, falling in love so hard that sometimes I can barely breathe, seeing my husband’s eyes in our son’s. And when I woke up one morning suddenly, surprisingly, a grown-up.

  What did you do when you realized you were lucky?

  The light turned on and off, signaling the beginning of the performance, and I said my goodbyes and found my seat. The crowd applauded as the conductor entered, settling himself in front of the orchestra. Then, silence—I’d never heard so loud a silence—and he lifted his arms. This is the moment when, back in my twenties, I’d sink and drown and hide, burying myself under all that sound. But now? Now I leaned forward, excited, anticipating the explosion of all those instruments. And then, for some reason, I turned away from the orchestra and, instead, looked at the line of audience next to me—this wide sea of people, all of us flying.

  CHANNEL B

  FOR THE FIRST FEW MONTHS after my son was born, I just called him “The Baby,” or sometimes “Him” with a capital H—huge proper nouns to illustrate how completely he took over my life. Is he eating, not eating? Pooping, not pooping? What color is the poop? How long ago was the poop? Did I mark the poop on the spreadsheet? I had spreadsheets. I had stuff—white noise CDs, magnetic blocks, and this super high-tech video monitor with a remote wireless screen and night vision, which made The Baby glow electric green in the dark like he was a C.I.A. target. It was a little unnerving, actually. It had two frequencies: an A channel and a B channel, in case you had two kids in separate rooms, and what’s interesting about this is that one of my neighbors must have owned this same monitor, because on Channel A, I saw my baby, and on channel B, I saw someone else’s.

  And if I could see someone else’s, then someone else could see mine.

  At the time, we lived in a third-floor walk-up in Uptown surrounded by other third-floor walk-ups. Jumping onto a neighbor’s Wi-Fi signal wasn’t much of a stretch, so perhaps the fact that I could toggle between babies shouldn’t have been so surprising. But it was. It was huge. I was obsessed. On one hand, it was totally creepy—stalking even—but later, after I got used to the idea… It became sort of magical, like walkie-talkies and CB radios when you’re a kid—connecting with someone across the void, adding your voice to the collective unconscious, feeling less alone in this crazy world, and who knows who might be listening?

  Who knows who’s in that Uptown condo on Channel B?

  A baby, to be a sure. But it wasn’t the baby I was obsessed with.

  It was the mother.

  My imagination went wild when I thought of the mother. Did she sit there, watching my kid in the dark? Did she question his bedtime? Wonder where I got his pajamas? How might she react if I left a sign in his crib that read: stop looking at my baby, you fucking voyeur!

  Or this one: yay new friends! do you want to meet up at the park?

  Or this one: i am terrified. i am so terrified that sometimes i can’t even breathe.

  Any winter in Chicago is a force to be reckoned with, but 2008, if you recall, was like The Ice Planet of Hoth. Remember Hoth from Empire Strikes Back? Luke almost freezes to death, but Han Solo pushes him inside a dead tauntaun for body warmth? that Hoth, and The Baby was born right in the middle of it. My husband, Christopher, had to dig out our buried car, shovel the alley, and navigate Lakeshore Drive though a white-out blizzard. And that relentless, pounding snow stayed through January, February, March, and into April. I am part-time college teacher—no paid maternity leave—and since I’d taken the winter term off to be with The Baby, Christopher, a web designer, picked up extra projects to cover the difference. He worked all day, came home, and went back to work—sleeping three, maybe four hours a night—all while carrying the mortgage, the bills, The Baby—and me.

  “Christopher,” I’d whisper, middle of the night, night after night. “The baby’s not breathing.”

  We’d be in bed, Christopher lit from the blue glow of his laptop, building some website; me staring at my electric green, swaddled-up pretzel of a Baby. Ever since we’d moved him from our room to his own, that 5x5 inch screen was the center of my universe. Was The Baby sleeping? Was he moving? Was he breathing? He’s not breathing!

  “Honey,” Christopher would say. He was so tired. He was trying so hard to be patient. “The Baby is fine.”

  “The Baby is not fine.”

  “He is.”

  “He can’t breathe!”

  “Megan—you need to sleep,” he’d say, which was true, of course, but have you read the Internet lately? Do you know what can happen to an infant if its mother turns her head for even a fraction of a second? Somebody’s always getting crushed under a Bungo or a Bipbap, or being abducted from their own backyard—thank you every episode ever of Law & Order SVU—and did you know some kid in the UK just got dragged off by a jackal?

  I joke about it now, but the truth is this:

  I was scared to sleep—The Baby might suffocate.

  I was scared to go outside—The Baby might freeze.

  I was scared he wasn’t eating, wasn’t latching, wasn’t gaining, wasn’t doing what the books had said he would do, and one day, after a particularly awful bout of screaming—him—and crying—both of us—I looked in the mirror and wondered who that girl was looking back. I was unbrushed, unwashed, and wearing the same yoga pants and empire-waist shirt every day. We all have things about ourselves that we know to be true, and suddenly I couldn’t remember any of them. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t laugh. I couldn’t connect with my friends.

  I couldn’t see myself.

  At the time, my understanding of postpartum depression was primarily shaped by Brooke Shield’s memoir, Down Came the Rain: crippling depression and suicidal thoughts. But since what I was experiencing, while heavy, didn’t seem that heavy; dark, but not really that dark; scary, but not, you know, like that—it didn’t occur to me to ask for help. I mean, I wasn’t going to hurt my kid. I wasn’t going to hurt myself.

  Right?

  Now, four years later, I know that the symptoms and intensity of postpartum depression are as varied as the flowers in a greenhouse. I wish I’d told someone. I didn’t need to feel that alone; just me in the frozen Chicago winter with my tiny, fragile baby.

  And Channel B.

  Whenever The Baby would fall asleep, I’d stare at his DayGlo body on the monitor, making sure he wasn’t suffocating—or levitating, or being dragged away by jackals, or whatever horrible thing I’d imagine—and then, once assured of his safety, I’d flip the channel to see how that Other Mother was doing. Maybe her kid was eating. Maybe she changed clothes occasionally. Maybe, for her, snow wasn’t a terrifying apocalypse but rather a Hallmark-like sp
rinkling of picturesque flakes—“Walking in a Winter Wonderland,” if you will. And yes, I know, it was completely intrusive and unethical and above all, ridiculous. Why was I comparing myself to this woman? I never even saw her! Mostly, there was just an empty crib. Sometimes there was a baby, wiggling and doing baby things, but the mother was a total non-entity. Until one night, I flipped over to Channel B and heard crying. Not from the baby—he was fast asleep, an angel—but somewhere in his room, a woman was sobbing. Heavy, gaspy, gulpy sobs.

  They went on.

  They went on and on.

  I shouldn’t have listened.

  But it was the first time since my son was born that I didn’t feel alone.

  What finally changed things was spring. Birds! Green things! Grilling on the porch! Frozen blender drinks! Short skirts! Outdoor seating! Lemonade! Which you can get any time of year, but it tastes better in the sunshine! Sunshine! My God, how desperately I’d needed it! I’d wager most Chicagoans feel this way in spring, but for me, May 2008 was a Godsend; a great, mammoth hand reaching down out of the clouds and pulling me to my feet.

  That May, The Baby became Caleb—smiling, laughing, responding; four months old and learning about the world outside my lap. I’d strap him in a backpack and walk through Uptown: Broadway to Argyle, down to the beach and back up Montrose, finding magic in everyday things. Plastic grocery bags: amazing. Tapping a glass with a spoon: kick-ass! Water in a dish: fun for hours! One morning he reached for a yellow street cleaning sign stapled to a tree, and suddenly I saw yellow as if I’d been blind to it for years:

  Brake lights!

  Parking lanes!

  Taxis!

  Flowers in a yard!

  Lady in a yellow shirt pushing a stroller!

  I stopped. She was pretty—early thirties, wearing yoga pants, and the yellow shirt had an empire-waist. She looked tired. And interesting, like there were all sorts of secret things about her that were set on pause for the time being.

  She looked like how I saw myself.

  We nodded at each other in solidarity. This, I had newly discovered, is the way moms do it: acknowledging the fact that even though you don’t know each other, you’re still a part of this great cosmic team—and then you check out each other’s kid. Hers was grabbing his toes in the stroller—so sweet. So adorable. So…familiar. I looked closer: yes, I knew this kid, and suddenly I saw him not all face-to-face on Lawrence Avenue, but electric green on a tiny hand-held screen.

  I looked back at the mother.

  “You know—” I started, then stopped, because, really, what would I have said?

  stop looking at my baby?

  you want to meet up at the park?

  How about the truth: you helped save me.

  “Your baby is beautiful,” she said.

  “So’s yours,” I said.

  We stood there.

  We stood there long past what is appropriate for strangers. I like to think it’s because she was thinking the same thing I was. That maybe she, too, had flipped channels in the middle of the night, trying to connect with someone across the void or feel less alone in this crazy world. Maybe she’d overheard me crying in Caleb’s bedroom, months ago when everything still seemed so cold.

  “How are you?” I asked her. I wasn’t just saying it; I really, really wanted to know.

  She smiled. “I’m getting better.”

  “Me too,” I said. “I’m getting better.”

  It was something about myself that I knew was true.

  UNDER YOUR FEET THEY GO ON GROWING

  IN HIGH SCHOOL, a guy in my English class told me he was having recurring dreams about waking up as a giant cockroach. I thought that was really fascinating, so I made out with him in the prop room after play practice. A couple months later, we read “The Metamorphosis,” and I realized he’d used Kafka to get in my pants. This was, of course, not the first time in history that literature has been used for such purposes, and it certainly won’t be the last. But it is my first memory of Kafka, his starting point on the line of my life.

  My first year of college, we read “The Metamorphosis,” The Trial, and several critical essays. I remember thinking that the sentences were too long. There was too much description. And what’s the bug supposed to mean, anyhow? Is the bug God? I thought the whale from that other book was God. How come everything is God?

  I transferred to an American school in Florence, Italy, because why not? I worked as a figure model for drawing classes and read Dante (really long sentences. Lots of description. Does God really mean God?). One day, in an English bookstore, I found a used copy of Kafka’s The Complete Stories. I can’t tell you how many times I read it, but sometime during that book, I decided I didn’t want to study literature anymore. I wanted to write it.

  I transferred to an art school in Chicago that had a Fiction Writing Department—a place committed to treating writing as an art form, same as dance and painting and theater. For one of my first papers—on Kafka’s “The Bucket Rider”—I wrote about historical context, global poverty, and why I thought the story sucked. My teacher handed the paper back, asking me to instead consider place, point-of-view, movement, and how these aspects of craft informed my own work.

  It was the first time I’d thought about how a story was crafted.

  I left every class wanting to run home and write.

  Sometimes, you have to read a story ten, twenty times before you really get it. I was on the L, on my way to a bartending job I hated, reading “The Metamorphosis” yet again, and I had an epiphany—light bulbs appearing overhead, choir of angels coming forth from the Heavens; the whole nine yards—Gregor doesn’t want to go to work, either! So he turns into a bug! I spent the whole day imagining everything I could turn into instead of working at that bar: a dragon, a British spy, a tidal wave of molten lava.

  I’ve since read “The Metamorphosis” about a thousand times, and I always get it in a different way.

  Not long after, I wrote my very first story that I ever considered good. It happened all in one sitting, late at night and into the early morning, in a very similar way to how Kafka wrote “The Judgment”:

  “The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water” (Diaries 212).

  My story was about a woman who woke up in bed with The Incredible Hulk. I figured, hell, if Kafka could wake up as a bug…

  It was eerie: I’m sitting in a coffee shop, reading “In the Penal Colony,” thinking, Kafka, What the hell even is this? The ‘Harrow’? What the eff is a ‘Harrow’? And as soon as the words ran through my head, I got to the next sentence in the story: “‘The Harrow?’ asked the explorer. He had not been listening very attentively” (The Complete Stories 142).

  I looked up to see if Kafka was watching me.

  He wrote that story in 1914, and here he was in my head nearly a century later.

  I kept reading, and every time I was confused or lost or questioned the action, the explorer character would jump off the page and ask exactly what I was thinking.

  “‘And how does the sentence run?’ asked the explorer” (142).

  “’But he must have had some chance of defending himself,’ said the explorer” (145).

  “‘I do not approve of your procedure,’ said the explorer” (159).

  At the time, I had no idea how Kafka pulled that shit off, but since I’ve started paying attention, I see the technique used everywhere: books, TV shows, pretty much every cop movie ever made. The older, jaded detective (usually played by Morgan Freeman) is showing the hot-headed, dead-sexy rookie (who in my day was played by Brad Pitt, but maybe it’s someone else now. I am old) around the precinct, explaining who’s who and what cases are still unsolved, and the dead-sexy rookie asks all sorts of questions that are meant for us, the audience.

  I’ve ripped this off many times in my own work, plus a hundred other things I’ve seen Kafka pull off on the p
age. It’s mind-blowing, what his work has taught me.

  What’s that line?

  When the student is ready, the master appears.

  Tell me if this sounds familiar: I was in my mid-twenties. I was lonely. The writing wasn’t going well. I probably drank too much and went home with people I shouldn’t have gone home with. Then, one day, I’m minding my own business, reading Kafka’s “Wedding Preparations in the Country,” and I get to this line: “And so long as you say ‘one’ instead of ‘I,’ there’s nothing in it and one can easily tell the story; but as soon as you admit that it is you yourself, you feel as though transfixed and are horrified” (The Complete Stories 76).

  Let’s try it out, shall we?

  Last night, I went to the bar and did something dumb.

  You know when you go to the bar and you end up doing something dumb?

  Occasionally, when one goes out to the bar, one might do something less than intelligent.

  I realized then how often I’d been speaking about myself in the third person, how much I tried to distance myself from my own actions.

  Fuckin’ Kafka.

  For anyone reading this who is, right now, at this very moment, obsessing over someone in a less than healthy sort of way, I invite you to sit down with Kafka’s Letters To Felice and immediately feel better about yourself.

  When I started teaching, I assigned Kafka—The Complete Stories, The Trial, and the Diaries. “I’m already taking a Kafka class,” a student said, and I asked to see her reading list. Out of twelve required texts, not one was anything Kafka himself had written; they were all criticism of what he’d written. Twelve—twelve—books of criticism.

  “This wall is number one,” I tell my students, “and the opposite wall is number ten. Imagine two, three, four, five, etc., written on the floor between them. So let’s say number one is ‘My work is political,’ and number ten is ‘My work doesn’t have anything to do with politics.’ Move to wherever you stand.” This first time I played this game, I was backed against the Not Political wall.