Nanaville

by Anna Quindlen

  I remember setting up a nursery for Arthur at our house for grandchild visits. I was so proud of how pretty it looked. The patterned crib sheets, the harmonizing bumpers with those little bows to tie them to the crib slats, a velvety quilt, a pillow Nana had needlepointed of the three bears, a fluffy stuffed lamb: the whole deal was shelter magazine, if I do say so myself.

  Out went the bumpers, the quilt, the pillow, and the stuffed animal, because the current thinking is that for infants to sleep safely there should be nothing in the crib but…nothing. Well, the sheet stayed. The pillow went on the rocking chair. I had the obligatory moment of thinking, but not saying, that it looked so bare and sad.

  But I realized that the only thing in the crib that mattered at all was the baby.

  No bumpers for the second. I’m broken in now. That’s the job of the first, to teach you the ropes. That’s the trade-off: they get the kind of attention and focus that only a single child gets, that gathering of adults that can’t help but look like an audience. And in return they must become unwitting tutors: the baby who teaches you how to put on a onesie without bending him like a Gumby doll, the toddler who teaches you how to ignore opposition instead of engaging with it:

  But you love chicken!

  You’re going to have a bath whether you want it or not!

  Don’t you dare get out of that crib!

  This child will be different, too, an entirely distinct person. To begin with, she will be female, a sunnu, a granddaughter, not a sunzi, a grandson. Another new word to learn in Mandarin. Wo ai ni, sunnu. We had no idea of the sex of our own children until we met them in the birthing room, but because of the many diagnostic tests now available, this generation usually knows what is coming, at least in this regard. When she found out, our daughter-in-law immediately began to worry about how she could make certain she wasn’t gifted a lot of pink. Lynn is not a pink person. Neither am I. But her daughter may be. This is what we learn, that we imagine them and then they are different than our imaginings. I keep realizing that how I imagined Arthur didn’t come close to the thrill of the reality.

  This new baby’s father, my son, said what perhaps every good man under the sun has said, that he is concerned because he was once a boy, he understands what it means to be a boy becoming a man, but he doesn’t know what it’s like to be a girl. Luckily, his wife was once a girl, and so was I, and so was his sister. Even more luckily, he has always been so comfortable with women, especially strong women. So many of his friends have been female. He will be fine. He will be better than fine.

  I suppose the gender difference will help at least a little bit with our natural inclination to think of the second child as a sequel, when in fact the second child is a completely unique story. I will try to help make sure that number two never feels like number two, and the same with three or four if and when they arrive. But I will also try to make sure that number one never feels supplanted. Pop and Nana, eldest children both, clearly remember being pushed down the greasy pole of attention and up the steep stairs of responsibility. That will be a new part of our job, making sure Arthur understands that nothing has changed. Which, of course, isn’t true. Everything changes, including Nanaville.

  I am different now, because I know what I am and what I am not. I am not Santa. Someone told me not long ago that there is a new phenomenon abroad in the land, the grandmother baby shower. The notion is that, since your grandchildren will be spending a lot of time at your house, your friends can gift you those things that you may need to care for and entertain them. The problem is that it also suggests that this is all about you. And it’s not all about you. Grandmothers are important, but they must calibrate their places carefully, and under a bouquet of balloons surrounded by boxes of baby gear is not, as far as I’m concerned, my rightful place.

  I know my rightful place now.

  Science tells me, however, happily, that I am even more essential than the first time out. One anthropologist studied an African tribe of hunter-gatherers and found that the hunters, the men, were rarely successful. The tribe would have starved if it had relied on them alone, or even primarily, for sustenance. It was the gatherers, the women, who provided most of the food, by working the earth. A mother who dug successfully for tubers had a healthy child. But with a second child, the amount of food a grandmother gathered became important, as well. In other words, as families grow, grandparents become even more critical to their well-being. Nana may be called on to wrangle one while the other has alone time with the parents, or to wrangle two so the parents have alone time with one another, alone time that I know from experience they will mainly spend talking about the children. Out of sight but never out of mind.

  Families are crucibles of so much that shapes and steers and, sometimes, damages us. It’s odd when you look at animals and realize that once the puppies have been weaned and have grown, their mother doesn’t seem to recognize any trace relationship with them. That’s not true of humans, for good and for ill. Like those plastic monkeys I bought for the baby shower, because Arthur was going to be born in the Chinese year of the monkey, we link together in a chain that is undeniable even if we try to break it. I had one family, and it got bigger and bigger, and then it began to get smaller for a while, and then it grew again. We were the children, then the parents, now the grandparents.

  It will all be different this time, and in some ways it will all be the same. This baby’s birth date is in the Chinese year of the pig. Energetic, realistic, enthusiastic, a social butterfly, according to the zodiac site, as opposed to the older brother’s monkey sign, intelligent, logical, hot-tempered, a leader. The alchemy is yet uncertain, but alchemy there will be, as there always is. In the years to come, we may hear this again and again, and it will be different each and every time, but it will always be thrilling: we are having a baby.

  SMALL MOMENTS (IMAGINED)

  I am sitting in one of the rockers on the front porch, trying to decide whether to stay or go. It’s raining slightly, but it will soon stop and when it does I will continue talking to myself about this—not aloud, mind you, I try not to do it aloud—as I walk around the pond. How many times have I walked around this pond, rocked in these chairs? Too many to count. It is all the same as ever, but I am different. My knees ache a bit. My hips, too. It all makes sense since I am over eighty now, an age I never imagined when I was in my teens and twenties. It seemed like another country, getting old, when I was that age. The future seemed very far away. Now it seems very close and very narrow, the darker swath of sand on the pale beach where the water laps.

  My grandchildren are that age now, and they have sent a message that they would like to come for the weekend with some friends. So I am trying to decide whether I should stay or go. They have been just like their parents in their feelings about this place. When they were little they searched for frogs in the frog pond, stalked snakes in the old stump, screamed as the dogs killed groundhogs, slept the drugged sleep of the exhausted child in their twin beds. When the fantail goldfish in the frog pond and the grass carp in the big pond died, I replaced them, hoping they would not notice, the same way I had once swapped out the old version of my eldest’s ragged comfort object for a new one. (They noticed, all of them.) Sometimes in summer they stayed here for weeks at a time. Those were some of the most exhausting, and happiest, days of my life.

  But then they reached middle school and their interest waned. It was so booooorring here. There was noooooothing to do. Their parents were annoyed, but I had seen it all before. There were years when our children were in high school when we came here only one weekend a month. They had a choice: Saturday night in the city, or sitting in these old rockers looking out at the lawn and the lightning bugs. At sixteen that was no choice at all. Some parents told us that we should just leave them alone in town while we came out here, but we thought that unwise. Actually, we thought that borderline criminal.

  And then
, slowly, they circled back, brought friends from college, spent a few days here before going back to school. The older they got, the more they gravitated to this old house. It is happening again. Everything happens again, over and over. Life is a continuous loop. Until one day it’s not.

  The rain has stopped.

  They will bring bags full of groceries and beer. They will bring books and bathing suits. Some of them will hike up the mountain and see evidence of bear but not the bear itself. Some of them will lie by the pool and forget to reapply sunscreen and ask for aloe later. They will leave towels on the floor, some of them, and forget to strip the beds, and put something in the fridge that should be in the freezer, leaving me to track down a funny smell midweek. Depending on the friends, there may be an undercurrent of intrigue, or animus, or sexual tension. I will be more aware of this than any of them imagine. They think when you are old your senses dull, when they only sharpen.

  I could go and spend the weekend in the city while they are here. Give them their privacy. Get out of their hair. They might be more likely to appreciate us at a distance: Oh, our grandparents, they’re great. Yeah, we see them all the time.

  That’s not precisely true. They are all busy, busy in the way I was when I was their age. Me, not so much. But I feel lucky. They respond to my messages, stop by when they can. One of the differences between grandchildren and grandparents is that grandchildren think they have all the time in the world, and grandparents only wish they had.

  I love them so, but it is an undemanding love. Through them I found myself capable of that.

  Maybe I will stay; I will make myself scarce but soak up that feeling of being part of something so much larger than myself. In sixth grade one of them made a family tree, as so many sixth-graders have before, and there I was, below the trunk, right at the roots. If I live another decade or so, I might be a great-grandmother, the tree growing, expanding, flowering. That would be something, wouldn’t it? That would really be something. If I were a great-grandmother, I wonder what I would call myself. I will have to think.

  For

  Arthur Krovatin

  Wo ai ni, sunzi

  By Anna Quindlen

  FICTION

  Alternate Side

  Miller’s Valley

  Still Life with Bread Crumbs

  Every Last One

  Rise and Shine

  Blessings

  Black and Blue

  One True Thing

  Object Lessons

  NONFICTION

  Nanaville

  Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

  Good Dog. Stay.

  Being Perfect

  Loud and Clear

  A Short Guide to a Happy Life

  How Reading Changed My Life

  Thinking Out Loud

  Living Out Loud

  BOOKS FOR CHILDREN

  Happily Ever After

  The Tree That Came to Stay

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ANNA QUINDLEN is a novelist and journalist whose work has appeared on fiction, nonfiction, and self-help bestseller lists. She is the author of nine novels: Object Lessons, One True Thing, Black and Blue, Blessings, Rise and Shine, Every Last One, Still Life with Bread Crumbs, Miller’s Valley, and Alternate Side. Her memoir Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, published in 2012, was a #1 New York Times bestseller. Her book A Short Guide to a Happy Life has sold more than a million copies. While a columnist at The New York Times, she won the Pulitzer Prize and published two collections, Living Out Loud and Thinking Out Loud. Her Newsweek columns were collected in Loud and Clear.

  AnnaQuindlen.net

  Facebook.com/​AnnaQuindlen

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