Rivka Galchen
Little Labors
a new directions ebook
Children’s books
Books for young children rarely feature children. They feature animals, or monsters, or, occasionally, children behaving like animals or monsters. Books for adults almost invariably feature adults.
The crystal child
My mother tells me that people tell her, when she is out with the baby, that the baby is a crystal child. Some people ask for permission to touch the baby, because contact with crystal children is healing. “You should research what it is, crystal children,” my mother, who has a master’s degree in computer science and an undergraduate degree in mathematics, says more than once. From the moment my mother first met the baby, she found her to be an exceptional and superior creature; her ascribing of crystal child qualities to the baby is part of this ongoing story.
I finally go ahead and research crystal children. On the Web. I learn that, unlike rainbow children, crystal children have a difficult time because they believe they can change the way people think in order to heal the world; rainbow children by contrast understand that people cannot be changed, they can only be loved as they are; rainbow children are therefore less frustrated than crystal children. Crystal children were born, one site explains, mostly in the nineties, whereas rainbow children arrived, by and large, in the new millennium—prior to the generation of crystal children there was a generation of indigo children—and so maybe the puma is in fact a rainbow child, rather than a crystal child, or maybe she is part of an even newer generation, as yet uneponymized.
Maybe in the same way that children in the Middle Ages who were born with congenital hypothyroidism (as was common before salt was iodized because iodine is essential to thyroid development) had a certain look, and were mentally different from the mainstream, and were referred to as chrétiens—a term which unfortunately over time became cretins though all it meant at the time was Christians—crystal and rainbow and indigo children are terms used mostly if not prescriptively to refer to children who are unusual in ways most commonly associated with autism or Down’s syndrome.
Somehow I begin to believe in crystal children, and in the idea that my child has the special healing powers ascribed to crystal children. I start to believe this even though, unlike my mother, I don’t have a master’s degree in computer science, or an undergraduate degree in math. When I read one day that Isidor of Seville, back in the seventh century, was already saying that the world was round, he somehow knew so intuitively, I decide this is relevant.
But I still don’t understand why no one has ever stopped me on the street to talk about crystal children, why they have only stopped my mother. And I don’t understand why my mother, usually so suspicious of any comments made by “others,” is so open to these comments. Someone important to me says, “It sounds like a way to love and value children who are difficult.” Sure, I say, that sounds true. “Maybe your mother is telling you that she is a crystal child. Or that you are.”
A long, long time ago, in late August
In late August a baby was born, or, as it seemed to me, a puma moved into my apartment, a near-mute force, and then I noticed it was December, and a movie was coming out on what is sometimes called the day of the birth of our savior. If one was to accord respect to the tetraptych poster campaign, Forty-Seven Ronin featured one Keanu Reeves, one robot, one monster, and one young woman dressed in green and, for unclear reasons, upside-down. The poster I kept seeing was at the end of my block, below a dance studio, around the corner from a deli next door to a Japanese clothing shop that specializes in looks inspired by American streetwear, and across the street from a dollar-a-slice pizza place perennially playing Mexican pop music. I had melatonic madness at the time. Maybe for that reason the poster, as I passed it four or five times a day, always with the puma, began to seem to really mean something, something more than what was manifest. I felt this even though I knew the poster would soon enough be replaced by one for Vampire Academy or the newest remake of Robocop, and in fact it felt almost as if that randomness-revealing replacement had already happened, as if that was part of the poster’s message, that the accumulation of tomorrows was not—however lost to time I might be—going to cease producing its predictable melancholy. (However I, and I registered this as rare, I was myself at the time not melancholic. Not at all.) But the paradox was that as my life had become a day of unprecedented length, a day that I was calculating to now be almost three thousand hours long (in doing the math I realized that since the puma’s arrival I had not slept more than 2½ hours in a row) my thoughts had become unprecedentedly interrupted, as if every three minutes I had fallen asleep, curtailing any thought, morphing it into dream, which, when I woke, was lost altogether. What I mean to say is that I wasn’t working. This even though my plan had been to work. And to think. Even after the baby was born. I had imagined that I was going to meet, at birth, a very sophisticated form of plant life, a form that I would daily deliver to an offsite greenhouse; I would look forward to getting to know the life-form properly later, when she had moved into a sentient kingdom, maybe around age three. But instead, within hours of being born, the being—perhaps through chemicals the emotional-vision equivalent of smoke machines—appeared to me not like a plant at all, but instead like something much more powerfully moving than just another human being, she had appeared as an animal, a previously undiscovered old-world monkey, but one with whom I could communicate deeply: it was an unsettling, intoxicating, against-nature feeling. A feeling that felt like black magic. We were almost never apart.
I felt suddenly older, even as the puma also, in her effect on me, made me more like a very young human in one particular way, which was that all the banal (or not) objects and experiences around me were reenchanted. The world seemed ludicrously, suspiciously, adverbially sodden with meaning. Which is to say that the puma made me again more like a writer (or at least a certain kind of writer) precisely as she was making me into someone who was, enduringly, not writing.
And I really wanted to see the new forty-seven ronin movie. Even though I had no time for movies. And even though I knew there was an old version of the movie—maybe more than one old version—to which more than one person in my life had been devoted, and I always feel, and felt then, as most people do, some vague obligation to be faithful to the old, and disdainful toward the new, just as a general rule, a general rule to which I’m not deeply (or generally) opposed, even though it is stupid. But any disdain toward the new forty-seven ronin would have been superfluous anyway, since I can now tell you from this distance in time and space, that the movie that I was so ready to find meaningful was out of theaters before I ever got to see it, that it failed unambiguously in the United States and ignominiously in Japan where, despite its budget of $175 million and its popular Japanese cast and its wide release in 693 theaters—I was researching—and even its additional last-minute 3D effects and furthermore despite the fact that the base story was one which its native audience has been interested in hearing told again and again for nearly two centuries now—in Japan, the story of the forty-seven ronin is such a seminal one that there’s even a special term, chushingura, just to describe its tellings—the movie’s box office return in Japan substantially trailed that of its competitors, Lupin the 3rd vs Detective Conan and The Tale of Princess Kaguya: A Princess “Crime and Punishment.”
But the poster had done its unplanned labor. A story of valiance and violence had reseeded itself into my mind and perhaps the minds of countless hungry people who had treated themselves to a slice of dollar pizza, gaze drifted to the new ronin advertised across the street.
What is a ronin? A ronin is an unemployed samurai. O
r a samurai without a master. A sword for hire. The term in its time had about it something of menace or disgrace. That is no longer the case. The story of the forty-seven ronin, a few centuries old and based on a historic event and told and retold in plays and movies and honorary temple garden plaques has changed all that. The original forty-seven men (some scholars say maybe there were only forty-six) served a master who was murdered, in court, over a matter of etiquette. The murdered man’s forty-seven (or forty-six) samurai were expected to avenge their master. But months passed, nothing happened. The samurai, now ronin, were said to have returned to domestic lives, or turned to drinking, or to both; it was considered shameful. But because the ronin are leading shamefully ordinary lives, the murderer of their master relaxes his guard; it appears there will be no revenge. But there will be. The ronin covertly gather, storm the compound of their master’s enemy, and present his severed head to the palace. The forty-seven (or forty-six) ronin then commit self-sentenced sepukku—they are murderers now, after all—which is how their own master was coerced into ending his life as well: a symmetry. All of this is understood to be heroic (as opposed to horrifying). Honor reveals itself. In a certain way samurai resembled the wives in those cultures where the widowed are expected to throw themselves on the funeral pyre.
The story of the ronin was especially popular in the Meiji era, when Japan’s isolation policy ended and power shifted from the military back to the emperor; the story was then again even more popular in the years after World War II, or so I’m told. The postwar government coerced the great filmmaker Mizoguchi, who usually made films about women in difficult circumstances, into making a movie of the forty-seven ronin, and the film’s part one failed terribly, but Mizoguchi himself then wanted to make part two and did. What made the story of the forty-seven ronin so popular at those particular moments? What is the story of the forty-seven really about? A story of men who appear to be defeated and shameful, but who have elected that appearance as an essential guise for a noble plan which will become manifest? A story of violence, patience, and outsized fidelity to the master who randomly is yours?
This story is about a baby, I thought of the bloody boyish tale one afternoon, I’m not sure which afternoon, just a bright one, passing the poster with the upside-down woman as I rounded the corner past the deli. Everything was about a baby, then, but still I thought, with conviction: a baby is what the story of the forty-seven ronin is really about. The sleeper cell, the latent power—it’s a parable about babies. They appear helpless, but they are puppetmasters. It makes so much sense. I was obviously wrong, more or less. I had been wanting, at the time of the forty-seven ronin haunting, to think on paper about, not quite coincidentally, two Japanese books: The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon and The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. They were two of my favorite books. It seemed mysterious to me that they both came from the same place and time, from the imperial court of early eleventh-century Japan. Both books were by women which also, I hated to admit, mattered to me. But I wasn’t managing to think about either book. The puma insisted otherwise. But I didn’t want to write about the puma. Mostly because I had never been interested in babies, or in mothers; in fact those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting; maybe I was even repelled by mothers and babies as subjects to write about; and so, after I had the baby, I found myself in the position (now interested in babies) of those political figures who come to insights others had reached decades ago only after their personal lives intersected with an “issue,” like, say, Dick Cheney, with his daughter, who married a woman. But I still didn’t want to write about babies, albeit now for a different reason. I had originally wanted to write about other things because I was interested in those other things. I then specifically wanted to write about other things because that then might mean I was really, covertly, learning something about the baby, or about babies, or about being near babies, and these were subjects about which, directly, I had so little to say. In the end, without consulting me much, a cabal of neuronal circuits, ronin of their own kind, organized against me and went about coordinating their own thoughts, fueled by dollar pizza, in a minor court on 38th Street.
A reason to apologize to friends
All of the items pertaining to the baby are kept in a three-shelved metal cabinet in the bathroom. The cabinet is a sturdy item ordered from an industrial products catalog that also sells Hazard labels in bulk. On the top shelf of the cabinet, still out of the baby’s reach, are diapers, crib sheets, and for no particular reason, the baby’s socks. On the middle shelf of the cabinet are the baby’s clothes, which are there in reasonably neatly folded piles of tops, bottoms, sweaters, and onesies. Then on the lowest shelf is whatever: hand-me-down shoes still too large, bibs never used, a swimsuit, a curling iron, too-small clothes not yet given away, and so on. But I keep the middle shelf orderly; a fair amount of effort goes into this; the orderliness of the middle shelf is a fragile, essential dam against the deluge. But the baby loves to disorder the shelves. She can’t yet walk or even crawl, instead she uses her arms to heave-ho her legs forward—we call this her wounded-deer maneuver—and whenever the bathroom door is left open, she hurries (in her way) over to the cabinet and then steadily and joyfully dedicates herself to unshelving all the reachable objects, into making heaps. She is so, so happy when she does this. So happy. It is more happiness, and stuff, than one thought the cabinet could contain.
I didn’t want to keep my wounded deer from her joy. But not keeping her from her joy meant that, at a later moment, usually during her rare naps, I had to go in and refold and reshelve the piles of clothes, a task that reminded me of an old Russian formalist text that baffled me when I was a college student, a text that I recall as being straightforward, and serious, and that argued for doing away with housework, since what was the point of housework, it produced nothing, it was done and then simply was started all over again, it should be abolished. Maybe that old Russian had a point. Why the shelf contained all these anxieties, I don’t know, but it did. For me, it was the most important and symbolic space in the home. I was still trying to work other nonhousework, non-young-person-care jobs, but these attempts to work were not going well. Occasionally these things not going well combined with my general sense of being trapped inside a space that the Russian formalist of days past would have described as producing nothing and I would feel like I was turning into sand and would soon be nothing but a dispersed irritant. And so one day I decide that I will at least try to talk things over with the still-wordless wounded deer. She makes her dash toward the cabinet. I follow her. I ask her if maybe she might consider leaving the second shelf of the cabinet, the shelf with all the folded clothes on it, alone; I ask her if she would consider unshelving items only from the lowest, already disorderly, shelf. I explain to her that if she could alter her behavior in this small way, it would mean not half as much reshelving work for me, but one-tenth as much. It would be really, really nice for me, I explain. And she understands! She begins to leave the second shelf of temptingly tidily folded stacks of clothing alone. Even when unsupervised! And after that I—I tell this anecdote to friends who will listen, as if it is interesting.
What drug is a baby?
On many days I think of the baby as a drug. But what kind of a drug? One day I decide that she is an opiate: she suffuses me with a profound sense of well-being, a sense not attached to any accomplishment or attribute, and that sense of well-being is so intoxicating that I find myself willing to let my life fall apart completely in continued pursuit of this feeling. On another day, the baby calls to mind a different set and prevalence of neurotransmitters. I recall the mother of twins who said to me that, yes, she loved her girls, but one afternoon she found herself thinking with easy understanding of the woman who had drowned her five children, and she, my friend, after having that feeling decided to call for help. She called her mother. Her mother said to her, The human baby is useless, the human baby is like no other baby animal, the animals can at
least walk, while the human baby is a nothing.
Dynasty
I sometimes share the elevator with a woman who is very cheerful and mean. She lives three floors above me, and so when I wait for a down elevator, I always know there is a chance she will already be on it. When we then together descend ten floors down to the lobby, she has already descended three floors—she makes one feel that. Part of what is so impressive about this neighbor of mine is that in that small box in space and time, she consistently manages to find something apt and brightly unkind to say. When I was pregnant, she said simply, “You’re enormous.” Another time she said, “You must be so much taller than your husband.” She has a name that would have made sense for a character from Dynasty. She wears black almost exclusively, but a variety of blacks, blacks with such subtle variations in tactility, luminosity, and fall that one assumes they could be sold on eBay for more money than most people’s rent.
When the puma arrived, Dynasty’s comments shifted. “Whoa, that’s a huge baby,” she said, “I mean, you must be so happy.” Another time, “I mean really, that’s not normal, is it? Why is she so big?” This was her refrain for awhile and so I knew, more or less, what she would say before she said it, and yet still I never knew what to say back. One day I said, maybe because I was pretty sure she did not have children, and because I was not in a happy mood, “Wow, you seem to know a lot about what size babies are at what age. You know so much.” It was immediately obvious that it was a defeat for me to say that, but there it was, I had already said it. Another day, I remember this was when the puma was seven months old, Dynasty said: “But she is big for her age, isn’t she?” “Like me,” I said. “She will be a tall person like me.” Dynasty herself is not tall. Nor is she thin. I am taller and thinner than her. Yet obviously she was still winning. I had long prided myself on never being in antagonistic or competitive situations regarding size, or reproduction, or anything else really, with other women, and now here I was, I had become what I myself called the worst kind of woman, a woman who engaged with and assessed other women specifically on the level of things that had kept nearly all women down in the muck of a deforming sexual competition. Dynasty’s hair has such a beautiful deep-conditioned look to it, and is very long, and though it is a mixture of gray and black, this also seems to speak only of luxury, and historic sexual power. After the tall comment, she again said of the baby’s father that he was short. Another day she saw me holding a milk bottle, but without the baby, and she said, “Shouldn’t they only be breastfed? Isn’t that bad for them? I mean, there must be some explanation for why she’s so huge. Maybe this is it.” And on another day, when I had in my hand takeout from the Japanese ramen place around the corner, she said, “My god, what is that smell? Whoa, is that your food?” This was especially indicative of her sense of invincibility vis-à-vis me, as she herself is Japanese. Or maybe Chinese, or Korean; it is a private aggression on my part that I do not know, and I was devoted to continuing to not know. Not that Dynasty noticed that I didn’t know.
Little Labors Page 1
