And so it went. Each time I would go stand by the elevator, press the button, wait for the elevator’s arrival, listen to the gentle ringing open of the elevator door, I would be filled with suspense. I had wasted more headspace than I could ever have imagined possible responding to an imaginary Dynasty. Yet even in the continuing expanse of time, I found I still had nothing to say. Sometimes I would imagine saying to Dynasty that it was . . . interesting, what different people notice about a baby: obviously a baby is just a baby, and what people see in the baby is a reflection of themselves. Other times I would think, threateningly, My daughter is a baby now, but if you ever speak like that to my daughter when she is old enough to understand, I will destroy you. I actually think destroy, like in a bad movie, or middle school. Sometimes I imagine simply asking Dynasty if she has a job. She is the wife of a very wealthy man who owns and runs an advertising firm located across the street, they own the entire top floor of our building, among other things, and I feel intuitively that she could and should be ashamed of this. I know that to say any of these things would be both wrong and weak, and also that it is the weakness, rather than the wrongness, that prevents me from saying them, which only makes me more in the wrong, and more convinced that my being bothered by Dynasty at all is evidence only of my usually obscured lesser self being the real, true me.
Finally I confess to the neighbors across the hall that I have spent hours on such thoughts. Then I ask my neighbors—for some reason it matters to me—whether Dynasty has a job. They tell me that Dynasty’s husband dated her for years without marrying her, that she had kept on working as a shopgirl at Commes des Garçons, that her husband still wears only Commes des Garçons, that probably she does too, that he probably refused to have kids with her, and also that they have reason to believe that the couple never has sex. I say that I understand that they are trying to turn my cartoon villain into a real person, but I tell them that I don’t appreciate it, that I prefer her as a cartoon. She (not me) embodies, I decide, the evil in the world that leads to women being preoccupied by weight, fluent in cosmetics, and aspiring to be dumb muses or high-end products of choice. She is the evil beneath the cartoon Acme holes in the ground to which my daughter will be vulnerable.
But another problem with being the mother of a baby is loneliness. On many days I speak with only one adult. And for many months now, I have not seen Dynasty. Where is she? She had been so enlivening; she is so clever, and so pretty; now I am tired. I wait at the elevator, with my daughter who now walks, who pushes the button to call the elevator, who now understands the elevator, and never does the elevator door ring open to reveal our special upstairs neighbor. Each time my daughter and I are again in the hall waiting, I wait with hope. I would really like to see Dynasty again.
Cargo cult
The baby likes to stand near the toilet, tear off small pieces of paper from the toilet roll, toss them into the waters of immeasurable depth, and flush. Then repeat. A sacred ritual.
Mysteries of taste
In her ten-word Moby-Dick board book, she above all loves the page that says CAPTAIN. She loves to find a ball in a picture, especially a ball that is green or blue. Of the six animal notecards of black and white drawings, she exhibits a strong preference for Penguin. She has not yet encountered a quantity of olives that is sufficient. When she makes a scribble on paper, the result makes her giggle. When she finds herself trapped in her crib and wants out, she calls out to me; when I enter the room, she says, “Eyes?” If we come upon a square or round of metal on the sidewalk, she wants nothing more than to stand on it, and then to go on standing there. At other times, in the apartment, she’ll set down a book, also so as to stand on it. When she sees a bottle of milk being poured out for her, she laughs. Little holds more interest than a set of stairs, or a handicap-access ramp. Always she is the first to notice the moon.
Cravings
Despite having as a child refused tomatoes, refused olives, refused mushrooms, despite having as a child been unwilling to eat anything at Chinese restaurants save the white rice, and despite having as a child made a diet nearly entirely from couscous with butter and Pepperidge Farm Chessmen cookies, and for some reason, cauliflower—an achromatic diet—despite all that, I have historically had little tolerance for finicky children. I try not to judge such children, since they are children, but in the end I find I do judge the children and I judge the parents as well, even as it was through no effort on my part that I eventually became someone who will eat most anything.
But then I became pregnant and found I was a finicky eater all over again. I was nearly unable to bear the sight or taste of much of anything save potato chips, and lemonade, and occasionally, a slice of pizza. But only low-quality pizza, the kind of pizza where the cheese seems not to have a dairy component but instead to consist exclusively of partially hydrogenated somethings. All other foods seemed really gross. Oh, I thought, for the first time: children are pregnant with themselves.
Unfortunately, once my appetite returned so did my flair for being judgmental.
Religious aspects of the baby
Her tossing and turning at night leadeth only to ascent, so that each morning she is head to the western border of the crib. Her pouring of sugar from cup to cup leadeth only to more sugar. When she unlinguines a box of linguine, then secrets away the pasta sticks into the bookshelves, within a zipper bag of pencils, under the pantry shelf, into a coat pocket, she revealeth the previously unconsidered negative spaces of the apartment. Her fear of the aloe plant at the neighbor’s home is unmoved by the plant’s persistently staying in place. Again and again she faces the challenge of the spoon, though its face turneth downwards and spilleth its contents, unless the contents of that spoon be yogurt, which hath imparted a false confidence, as it spilleth not, and in this way it deceiveth her, and yet even after repeated defeats with other-than-yogurt-substances, she returneth to the spoon with bright eyes and an open heart. When she desireth the opener of the cans, so as to turn the knob designed for arthritic hands with which she is happily acquainted, but the large person with whom she liveth denieth her the opener of the cans for the ancillary reason of the proximate rotating blade, she throws her head back and cries like a featherless bird.
Head shape
The puma was born with very little hair, giving all of us a clear view of the shape of her head. Or at least, giving a clear view of the shape of her head to anyone sensitive to head shape. What a beautifully shaped head she has! the baby’s grandmother said, and then said again, and then said even yet again. Yes, I would say, in response to each head-shape compliment. But I felt uneasy: I had no idea what she was talking about. I had no sense at all of the shape of the baby’s head. It seemed like a normal head. The baby’s grandmother would then again say, What a beautifully shaped head, and I would again say, Yes, and then I would look even again at the baby’s head—I would try to look dispassionately, in assessment—and would still not know what she was talking about. Yet the shape compliments kept coming in. One day, as if momentum had built up from the praise having been repeated so many times, it continued on into more detail: What a beautifully shaped head she has, it’s so lovely . . . it’s not at all like mine! And with that, the grandmother shook her own head slightly. I couldn’t perceive then, and still fail to perceive now, anything particularly distinguished or undistinguished or even distinguishable about either of the referenced head shapes, but I accepted and continue to accept that the baby’s grandmother must have been talking about something.
But what? I found myself relating this anecdote a number of times to a number of different people. I related the anecdote as if what interested me was the simple allegory of people noticing in babies whatever it is that preoccupies them about themselves. But that wasn’t my real motive behind sharing the anecdote. The reason I kept telling the anecdote was that I was hoping to learn something about head shape. I kept waiting for someone to say, oh, yes, I know what she is tal
king about, and then to tell me. But no one was telling me. Then one evening I found myself at a dinner with a former supermodel. (The supermodel was writing a novel, her second, which is perhaps why she was at a small dinner with writers.) The baby was also there at the dinner. The baby’s being there prompted the supermodel to say that she had never, never, never put her babies to sleep on their backs, that she knows that is what they do these days, but that she thinks it’s a terrible idea because, for one, they could choke—that was what she was told by doctors, when her babies were young—and two, because putting babies to sleep on their backs means they end up with flat-backed heads. The former supermodel said that she didn’t want to curse her babies with this problem, a problem that she herself had. A problem that she had long been embarrassed about, the weird flat-backed shape of her head. She demonstrated the back of her head. Which was, of course, like everything about her, beautiful. So I still didn’t understand. I continued and continue to put the baby to bed on her back, though now that she is old enough to turn over, she shapes her own destiny.
The romantic comedy
My life with the very young human resembles those romantic comedies in which two people who don’t speak the same language still somehow fall in love. Like say, that movie I saw on an airplane with the wide-eyed Brazilian woman and the doofy American man who end up together, despite not being able to communicate via words. Or that series of Louie episodes, where Louie falls in love with a woman who only speaks Hungarian; he even proposes to her. Yes, it was like those comedies, only without the upsetting gender dynamic of the effectively mute female. Though with the same believability. And arguably the dynamic might still be considered upsetting.
Wiped out
I used to sometimes find myself saying, “I’m wiped out.” After the puma was born I would very rarely, maybe never, say I was “wiped out.” Though I often thought to myself, It’s okay, I should just accept that I’m wiped out. Maybe the puma had a cold, which disturbed her sleep, and so it had been weeks since I had slept more than an hour without interruption—there was always something, but also it was nothing, or, at times, I was nothing. As the instances of thinking of myself as “wiped out” accrued, I became sensitive to the phrase’s hyperbolic overlap with, say, a species being “wiped out.” And also to the fact that if at any given moment I introspected, I was likely to discover that I felt “totally wiped out” and so the sense of wiped out being a state that was relative to some other non-wiped-out state had been lost; the meaning of “wiped out” had been wiped out. The phrase began to fade. Though I did, as if bartering, sometimes find myself imagining a woman continually wiping dry an irremediably damp table. Then one day recently I noticed I wasn’t that wiped out, and I noticed this because I saw that the puma had a dishtowel and she was using it to wipe at water she had poured onto the floor.
The species
The baby loves to look at photos of babies. And at drawings of babies. And although she doesn’t play with other babies often, she observes them on the street with an especial interest, with much more interest than she gives to a similarly aloof adult. Albeit with less attention than she would give to a dog. It’s a very particular kind of interest, a mirror interest, I am guessing. She doesn’t know yet that she is going to get bigger. She doesn’t yet know that she will become one of us. We are of the large species; she is of the small species.
Literature has more dogs than babies
Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions. Most babies who appear in literature are, by paragraph three, already children, if not even adults. But there are a few exceptions. In Beloved by Toni Morrison, a two-year-old baby is murdered by her mother so as to protect the child from a life of slavery, or from life at all, and the baby returns (it seems) as a ghost to haunt her family. A baby is an important character in Margaret Drabble’s 1965 novel of a single mother in academia, The Millstone, albeit the baby appears more as a heavy pendant than as a being. And in Kenzaburo Oe’s A Personal Matter, the narrator’s baby is born with a seemingly deformed brain, extruded from his skull, and the narrator then travels around town with the baby, considers letting the baby die, but doesn’t, considers sailing to Africa, but doesn’t, and finally the narrator returns to the hospital and it turns out that the baby’s deformity was only superficial and easily fixed, the baby is not a monster after all—so who is deformed? and who is a monster?—and the father, there in post–World War II Japan, is celebrated by his in-laws as if the good fortune is a reflection of his good moral character just as earlier his bad fortune was seen to be a reflection of his bad moral character. The novel The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing tells of a family with four children, and the whole family is pretty happy and ideal, even smug, until the catastrophically devilish fifth child is born, who, even as a baby, is terrifying. (Although one begins to notice that nobody other than his family seems to find the fifth child so difficult, or strange, and really the child seems simply not loved, and his only real fault as he grows up seems to be that he is more at ease in a class lower than that of the posh family who can no longer really afford the fantasy of the great house they inhabit.) In some of Lydia Davis’s short stories, a baby often interrupts a thought, or is a thought. In Raymond Carver’s “Feathers,” a couple goes over for dinner to the house of another couple they don’t know well, the house is a mess, there’s a peacock wandering around, indoors, and then the visitors meet the host couple’s baby, a baby about which the couple seem beatifically proud, and a baby who to the narrator is just enormously fat, the ugliest baby he has ever seen; and after witnessing the parents’ love for their ugly baby, that same night the narrator and his wife go home and decide to have a baby themselves, and in the very end of the story we speed forward in time and find out that the man is upset that his wife cut her hair short and his life feels, with the baby, pressed and plain. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy makes vivid and real both Anna’s and Kitty’s babies. (Tolstoy has also written about the inner life of a dying tree.) In Judy Budnitz’s short-story collection Nice Big American Baby, several of the stories feature babies: one gestated for four years; another dark black though his parents are pale; many, many made by soldiers who are there and then gone. Maybe the most fully realized baby I have ever read appears in the Lorrie Moore story “People Like that Are the Only People Here,” in which the baby is Baby and the father is Husband and the mother is Mother and the oncologist is Oncologist. In Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation we find a colicky and cherished baby and a breakdown (at least for a bit) of a marriage. I can think of no baby in Shakespeare, unless we count Caliban, which maybe we should. One might say that most babies in literature, when they appear for more than a moment, tend to be catalysts of decay or despair, as surely babies now and again in real life actually are (though literature is always only a convex looking glass, and not even a regularly convex one, more like an especially old and unshined spoon (and definitely a silver one)). So many of the modern written babies seem to have more in common with what are termed in Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale “unbabies” rather than “keepers.” In their monstrous burdensomeness, these babies resemble my very favorite of all depicted babies, that nineteenth-century creature denied even the luxury of an infancy, that poor solitary wretch who on the first day of his life was already over six feet tall, and about whom his creator said, as if in repentance, “The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine.” We’re not to know. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is not the infant joy of Coleridge or Blake, instead it is the story of an infant angry about being born at all, a half-rhyme emotionally with the book itself being termed by its mother/author to be her “hideous progeny”—a phrase more sad than flip, as Mary Shelley knew herself to be the progeny whose arrival led to the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the vindicator of the rights of women. (And Mary Shelley then had to watch, after writing her book, her first, second, and third child die in infancy.) But if I seem to be wandering into an apprai
sal of babies—so underrepresented!—as in need of their own subaltern studies then I have wandered too far. We know babies are the only ones among us in alliance with time. They are the only incontestable accessors to power, or, at least, they are immeasurably more well-placed than their elder co-unequals. The way a baby, in a stroller, briefly resembles a fat potentate, for a moment unlovable, has something in it of the premonition. Even as to see a baby raise its chubby hand—to bow down before that random emperor can feel very right.
Little Labors Page 2
