The Life of the Mind

by Christine Smallwood

  There were piles everywhere: papers, books, dry goods that hadn’t found their way into one of many cupboards, folded laundry leaning with the effort of waiting to be put away. Being rich did not make people tidy. In the kitchen Dorothy related how she had been groped on the subway after listening to her second therapist’s podcast and Gaby dug around to find the instructions the clinic had provided her.

  “Oh, I listened to it, too!” said Gaby. “I’ve been dying to talk about it with you.”

  It annoyed Dorothy that Gaby had listened to the podcast before she had, but she couldn’t deny that she welcomed the opportunity to pick it apart with someone. “What did you think?”

  Gaby pursed her lips like she was going to defer to Dorothy to speak first, and then charged headlong into opinion. “I didn’t like the intro music,” she said. “But I liked what she said about the stages of life. I don’t think I ever successfully navigated initiative versus guilt. I think that’s why I lack purpose in my career.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Dorothy.

  “Erik Erikson’s third stage of development?” said Gaby. “The first episode of the podcast?”

  “The first episode is a session with an obsessive-compulsive prepper,” said Dorothy.

  “Are you sure?” said Gaby.

  “I think you listened to the wrong podcast,” said Dorothy. “Do you even know my therapist’s name?”

  “How could I, when you never tell me,” said Gaby.

  A pause.

  “Will you tell me?”

  “Later,” Dorothy lied, not wanting to start a fight, considering what they were gathered to do.

  “We can listen to it together,” suggested Gaby. “While we’re waiting for the contractions to begin.”

  “I think you should just take the medication,” said Dorothy.

  “I took it an hour ago,” Gaby said. “It tasted like chalk.”

  It was like Gaby to not follow directions.

  “You’re supposed to put it in your vagina,” Dorothy said.

  Gaby shook her head. “Look at the picture,” she said, pointing to an illustration of an open mouth and a pill lodged under the tongue. Dorothy shrugged. Whatever authority she had in the situation was slipping away. “I guess you can do it both ways,” she said.

  A cry came from down the hall and Gaby excused herself. When she came back, she was holding Sherman. His face had gotten significantly fatter since Dorothy had last seen him—he was in a full-on Winston Churchill phase—and he was wearing a shirt with a collar and real buttons. Something about the buttons indicated to Dorothy that Gaby’s priorities were not in order, that whatever she might say about the good motherhood had done her, she was fundamentally spinning her wheels, playing dress-up with a doll, spending hours of each day buttoning and unbuttoning clothes for a creature who was preverbal, whose greatest happiness was a successful poop.

  “Jowly,” said Dorothy.

  “I swear he just winked at me,” Gaby said. “I think he knows.”

  She went over to the shelf of records, Sherman in arms. “I feel like we need to pick the music very carefully,” she said. “It’s like losing your virginity, or waiting for the acid to hit.” She scanned the shelf for a long time, at last selecting a Joni Mitchell album, then settled into the womb chair.

  “This music puts me in touch with our foremothers,” she said. “I bet this is what they listened to.”

  “They didn’t have record players in back alleys,” Dorothy said. The words sounded more pedantic than she had intended. She had intended to be arch.

  Bouncing Sherman on her knee, Gaby launched into a long story about a time her mother had taken her to a carousel at a park in Napa while they were visiting her grandparents. “It’s one of my earliest memories,” she said. “When the ride started, the music was so loud that I started crying, but the guy in charge of the ride wouldn’t stop it to let me get off. My mom went up to him after and just reamed him out. Yelling. Cursing. I remember feeling scared of her but also safe, like she was this lioness who was going to rip off the head of a rhino or whatever to protect me.

  “But when I was talking to her the other day,” Gaby went on, “she said that it never happened. That she took me to the carousel once, but that I didn’t cry at all. Then she sent me a photo of her and me on the carousel. And I’m laughing.”

  The other thing, Gaby went on to say, was that in the photo, she wasn’t wearing what she remembered. “In the photo I’m wearing this ridiculous pinafore,” she said, “but I remember wearing a sailor suit—also ridiculous, but not the same.”

  “Are you sure?” said Dorothy.

  Gaby put her glasses on top of her head and rubbed her face like she had an eraser in her hands. “Of course I’m not sure,” she said.

  “Maybe there was another time,” said Dorothy. “With a babysitter.”

  “You see what I’m saying,” said Gaby. “Either I’m not me, or my mom isn’t her. But one of us isn’t who I think she is.”

  They sat in silence, listening to Joni Mitchell follow an aimless melody. Dorothy had always hated Joni Mitchell. It always seemed like it took Joni Mitchell too long to get to wherever she was going.

  Gaby’s mother had been angry with Gaby for misremembering. “She said that this is why children shouldn’t complain about their parents,” Gaby said. “Because they don’t have all the facts.”

  Formerly Gaby would have been irate at such a statement, but since becoming a mother herself she had begun to identify with her mother, to see her past from her mother’s point of view rather than from her own. She said it was like seeing double. It annoyed Dorothy that Gaby had thrown over her own experience, and for such an obvious utility: By forgiving her mother so completely for whatever her mistakes had been, Gaby could preemptively excuse whatever ways she would fail Sherman. Reproduction, which advertised itself as remaking the future, instead had everything to do with revising and reconciling the past.

  Gaby frowned while she chased the right words. “Waiting is not easy!” she finally said, laughing. “That’s the title of one of Sherman’s books. He’s too young for it.” Before Dorothy could say anything, Gaby grimaced. “I think I’m having a cramp,” she said.

  Dorothy had a strong urge to leave the apartment. “I can run to the drugstore and buy you a heating pad,” she offered. Gaby told her there was one in the bathroom cabinet. Dorothy retrieved it and untangled the long white cord and plugged it in. It got hot very fast. Then she fetched Gaby a glass of water.

  “Drink this,” she said.

  “Why?” asked Gaby.

  “I don’t know,” said Dorothy. “Water is good for you.”

  Gaby drank. “Water is life,” she said.

  “Seriously,” said Dorothy. “Can you think of one situation that wouldn’t be improved with a glass of water?”

  Gaby smiled but it was forced; Dorothy could see she wasn’t feeling well. Dorothy took the glass to the kitchen and refilled it and came back. Sherman had fallen asleep in Gaby’s arms and she handed him to Dorothy. He smelled delicious, like new bread. Dorothy had the strange sensation that she was a prince and Sherman a princess she wanted to carry across a threshold. She felt calm, but also frightened. Babies were so stupid. They had no judgment. They put their trust in anyone who came along.

  Gaby turned on the television—she was the only person Dorothy knew who paid for cable—and found an old movie. They watched in silence for a few minutes.

  “This doesn’t feel traumatic,” Gaby said.

  “I didn’t say it would be,” said Dorothy.

  “Shermie looks happy with you,” said Gaby. “Did I ever tell you what he would do when he was first born? He would be trying to nurse, but he would cover my nipple and then bash his face against his own hand in a panic, like, Where is it?”

 
“The human condition,” Dorothy said. Her shoulder was starting to hurt.

  “I think so, too,” said Gaby. She chewed her lip. Barbara Stanwyck had just appeared on the screen. “I miss that time. He was so tiny. Like a chicken, with his mouth always open.”

  Occasionally a grimace or look of consternation passed Gaby’s face. Her eyes were hollowed with blue and the skin around her mouth looked puffier than usual, though whether that was due to the pregnancy or the stress or the general fatigue of maternity, Dorothy couldn’t be sure. Then Gaby clutched the heating pad to her abdomen and breathed deeply and said, “I think it’s starting.” She went to the bathroom and came back. “No,” she said. “Nothing.”

  Dorothy made a noise to indicate solidarity. On the TV Barbara Stanwyck was boarding a train for Palm Beach. Sherman was heavy and some drool was collecting around the corner of his mouth and Dorothy gently used his collar to wipe it away. She felt an ache travel down from her neck to her shoulder and through her arm. His trust was pure deadweight. He breathed deeply, erupting occasionally into snores. He did sound like a seal. Gaby shuffled down the hall a little stooped over, exhaling through her mouth. Dorothy was gripped with the intense desire to look at her phone and find out what therapy podcast Gaby had stumbled across, but was afraid that if she got up Sherman would wake and see his mother doubled over in pain and be scarred for life and it would be her fault. So she sat there, not daring even to reach for the remote to lower the volume when the men on the train started shouting.

  “Shhh,” she whispered to Sherman. So consumed was she with shushing that she didn’t hear Gaby shuffle back in.

  “It got gnarly down there,” Gaby announced. “But I don’t have to tell you that.

  “It’s weird,” she added. “This is the same drug they gave me when Sherman was born to stop the bleeding.”

  Dorothy asked if she wanted a pain reliever, but Gaby said she didn’t need anything. “I can handle it,” she said. “You know I didn’t have an epidural.”

  Dorothy ignored this boast, which she had heard before, and asked if Gaby wanted to write down what time the bleeding had started.

  “Just in case,” she said.

  “It’s like you’re my doula,” Gaby joked. “But okay. Let’s write it down.”

  * * *

  —

  At some point Gaby asked for the baby back. Sherman stretched his fists overhead and yawned and resettled against Gaby’s body. She relaxed, like the air was going out of tires that had been close to popping.

  “I feel like I can finally call myself a feminist,” said Gaby, louder than Dorothy would have spoken with a baby in her arms.

  “Take a picture of me,” Gaby was saying, “I want to put my abortion on Instagram.”

  Dorothy looked over with a confused half-smile.

  “Just kidding,” Gaby said, moving Sherman from one arm to the other without disturbing his sleep, and rubbing her nose in his hair, “but it does sort of feel like the politics of having an abortion are lost if no one knows you had one.”

  Dorothy murmured something that could be taken for consent. She had thought Gaby would have more questions for her. She couldn’t decide if she was relieved not to be interrogated or disappointed that Gaby didn’t want to know more about what had happened to her. She knew this was inconsistent with her recent behavior and she did not care. She felt the need to be busier, to do something, to make herself indispensable rather than superfluous to the situation. She got up and went to the kitchen and came back with a bag of pretzels.

  “Eat something,” she said, handing one to Gaby.

  “Isn’t it amazing,” Gaby said, chewing the pretzel with her mouth open, insisting with her eyes that Dorothy agree, “that we have the power to choose?” Sure, she said, it had been exciting to be pregnant with Sherman, to be literally enormous with life and potentiality, and she had experienced the feminine capacity for reproduction in terms that can only be somewhat hokily characterized as a divine gift, but what she felt now, with her decision to terminate a pregnancy, was power, real, definite power—the power of choice. The choice to initiate something was not as meaningful, she said, as the choice to end it. Something beginning can mean anything. Something ending can only be what it’s been.

  “It’s hard to know when something ends,” Dorothy said.

  “It’s ending now,” said Gaby. “I’m going to wake up tomorrow and give so much money to Planned Parenthood.”

  Before Dorothy left that night the bleeding had slowed considerably, and Sherman had been settled in his crib, the tinkling lullabies leaking from his room like the gentle soundtrack to the first act of a horror movie. At the door she warned Gaby that the bleeding might last longer than she anticipated. “They say ten days,” she said, in her best performance of expertise, “but that’s only an average.”

  * * *

  —

  At home that night Dorothy had one more stack of final exams to grade. After the end-of-semester speech she always gave her students in class, grading the last paper felt like staying too long at the party—saying goodbye and then having to awkwardly say goodbye again. So few of them in years past had bothered to pick up their finals that she had developed a policy of writing comments only if they dropped off a self-addressed stamped envelope in her office; “where,” they had complained, “are we supposed to buy stamps?” This year she had adjusted the policy. So long as they dropped off a self-addressed envelope, she would take care of the stamps. She didn’t mind the post office. It put her in touch with an earlier phase of life: pen pals, lines, bells, and windows, Saturday morning errands with her mom. The post office was proof that you believed in the possibility of reaching someone, anyone. That a letter could arrive.

  In the last week she had graded all her papers except those for the Apocalypse. Saving the last for last, she joked to no one, as she took the top sheaf off the pile. It was a paper on Samuel Beckett titled, “I Can’t Go On, I Must Go On.” Not very imaginative, Dorothy thought, and its author had not provided a self-addressed envelope. She skimmed the paper quickly and gave it an A-, placing it carefully into the small plastic trash can that she used as a recycling bin. She checked the headlines, and her bank balance, and the weather, and her email, and the headlines again. She clicked on a story about the border and read half.

  The next paper in the pile was about Ulysses and the suitors. That, too, she skimmed, and gave an A-. Some professors railed against grade inflation, but Dorothy thought it was fine. No one was perfect, but near-perfection was the natural state of the human being. Made in the image of God, with some room to improve.

  Previously when she had taught the class, Dorothy had insisted that they write papers on cultural objects that were strictly apocalyptic—about the literal destruction of Earth. But this semester Dorothy had taken a wider view.

  “Every ending is an apocalypse,” she had said on the last day of class, then taken it back. “That’s not true.” But she had told them that they could write about any ending they wanted, anyway. Maybe the point of Writing Apocalypse was to get beyond the frame of the apocalyptic. Just make sure, she said, to explain how whatever ending you choose gives everything before it meaning.

  “Actually,” she said, glancing from the clock to their confused and insecure faces, “forget that.” The idea that an ending gives what preceded it meaning was old. Time didn’t work that way anymore. “Write about whatever you want,” she had told them, “so long as it has something to do with the end.”

  “The end of what?” one sweet, stupid boy had asked.

  “You tell me,” she had answered.

  He had chosen to write about the Paris Agreement, and included a self-addressed envelope. Dorothy put his work aside for tomorrow. Now was not a time for comments. It was a time for quick and dirty evaluation. Give them grades, move along. Render judgments. Send fires and floods and
rainbows.

  Next in the pile was a treatment of Freud’s “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.” It was good. A-. The next one was about the Puritans. It really deserved a B+, but Dorothy was in a groove: A-. The one underneath that was about Shiva. Enthusiastic A-! The one underneath that was about Banquo’s ghost. It, too, came with an envelope. It, too, she put aside for tomorrow. Then came papers on genocide, coral reefs, the extinction of the dinosaurs, and the Roman Empire. There were three papers on the plague, two on the death of God, and one on the death of the novel. She felt a thrill spread like hot milk throughout her body as all the endings that had ever been piled up before her, and she graded them all the same, all nearly perfect, before dumping each one carefully, respectfully, into the trash.

  For my friends

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Chris Parris-Lamb, Alexis Washam, Sarah Bolling, Jillian Buckley, and Alicia Tatone. Thanks to Mark Lotto and Abby Kluchin. Thanks to Benjamin Nugent, Dana Hammer, David Levine, Rose Lichter-Marck, and Claire Lehmann. Thanks to Charles Petersen and the editorial staff of n+1, where the story “The Keeper” first appeared.

  Thanks to my mother and father for everything, especially the babysitting.

  Thank you, Gabe, for everything else: right down the line.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Christine Smallwood is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University. The Life of the Mind is her first novel.

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