Little Labors (2 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 talking 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.

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.