Intimations (8 page)

With her gaze fixed on an empty corner, Karen adopted the flat facial expression of someone reading, though she had nothing to look at. She slid off her shoes. She just wanted to drink the sweet, tepid tea and think of nothing. But from the corner of her eye, she saw the older woman watching her between brief, performative glances at a magazine that had recently been rolled up into a small, tight tube. As it lay on the table, it curled slowly in on itself once again. Karen looked over at her, and looked away again too late.

“Did you borrow that shirt from someone?” the older woman asked, smiling toothily and leaning toward Karen.

“No,” Karen said. It was her own shirt. Karen turned to Lila and pretended that she was doing something involving and important with her. Taking a corner of Lila's soft yellow blanket, she dabbed the little face gently, over and over again.

“Well, it's very nice,” said the voice from behind her back.

Karen felt a tug on her sleeve and turned her head. The woman next to her was rubbing the fabric between her long finger and her thumb. The shirt was too big. It was a cotton blend, covered in a garish print of lilies and strawberries. In fact, Karen hated this shirt.

“Thank you,” she said stiffly, holding still.

“Has she started to say her words yet?” the woman asked, indicating Lila with a point of her fork. She leaned back and stabbed at her salad, making space for Karen to sit up straight in the seat.

“It's too early,” Karen admitted, “too early for babbling, even.”

“That's a lonely time. I know it. You two are together all
day long, and there's nobody even to say ‘mm-hmm.'” The woman laughed.

Karen nodded slowly.

“I'm Linda. How old are you, honey?” said Linda, holding out her hand.

“Thirty-two,” Karen answered, wiping her sweaty palm on her shorts and squeezing Linda's outstretched hand for an instant. Linda smiled and nodded as though she wasn't surprised. In her green silk blouse and pink patterned scarf, she was either somebody who understood colors very well or someone who didn't understand them at all.

“And you feel a million years old inside, am I right?” Linda smiled winningly, her teeth sharply white in the dim lighting. Linda reminded Karen of a TV mother, someone who always had good advice and probably had never been bored, anxious, or confused in her life.

“I don't know,” Karen said. “I feel
strange
.”

“Well, don't we all.” Linda shrugged as, wrapped in blankets at her side, a long, escalating cry began to break from the baby. “You live life one way for, what, thirty years, you've just finally, barely gotten used to the way life is, and then BAM!” Linda swiped her finger against wailing Lila's mouth. Lila quieted instantly. “They tell you that you gotta start learning life all over again. BAM! Isn't that right?” Linda winked at Karen, and wiped the front and back of her hand on a napkin.

“How did you
do
that?” Karen exclaimed, truly impressed.

“Oh, just an old family trick. Old, old trick,” Linda said, leaning in. “A teensy dab of butter on the lips. Tamps them
down like lambs.” Linda was different from other mothers Karen had met: when she gave advice, it wasn't stuffy. She was full of stories. For every frustration Karen named, Linda knew someone who in fact had gone through just that problem herself. Linda was a sort of freelance psychoanalyst, consultant, therapist, whatever you please. Diverse but well-respected people, she said, had sought her services for issues ranging from their child's learning disability to what type of second career they should take on. She had just got these great new business cards printed on 100 percent cotton paper, the real thing, only she didn't have any with her today.

As for Karen, what she was dealing with right now was completely natural. Linda pounded her fist on the table in a fun way, to make the point: “It's easy to lose yourself in a kid, even easier if you love them. Your husband comes back, he's tired, you're tired, in the end all you have time for is a little kiss on the mouth and a conversation about what the little baby ate that day. Nobody sees you as
yourself
anymore, only as the walking mouthpiece for that cute bud of flesh. But let me tell you, it gets easier. I know it.” Karen tried to think of what her identity-restoring ritual might be. Her feet ached, her shoes were sweaty. At her side, Lila reached out a small hand for the soiled napkin on the table, grasped it vaguely, let it slip back.

“But you can't let yourself get down about not feeling one hundred percent of the time like the new person you're supposed to be,” Linda added with a concerned tone to her voice, her bangs bobbing up and down as she spoke. “It's those expectations, honey. They'll drive you insane.”

Karen nodded. Then she remembered the stroller. She had been sitting in the café for more than an hour. Linda's salad was long gone.

“Oh god,” Karen said. “I have to go back.”

“Go back where?” Linda asked, distracted.

“For the stroller. Part of it broke, the wheel's off, I can't put the baby back in it. Someone's going to take it if I leave it there too long.” Karen didn't trust the people of this city, the city in which she lived. In her last city, she had smiled or waved when she saw strangers looking at her.

“Oh, don't worry about it! I'll watch the baby,” Linda said, waving her hands in the air to show it was no big deal.

Karen hesitated.

“Look, honey,” Linda said, “you haven't got a choice. Life's like that sometimes—you gotta take care of business. You're going to go do your business and come right back, and I'll be right here with the little one, reading my magazine. It's the only way.”

“You're sure?” Karen asked.

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Linda warmly. “Just go, I'll tend to her every need.”

“I'll just be fifteen minutes,” said Karen, embarrassed.

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Linda. “Get out of here.”

Karen picked up her tote and looked down at Lila, still reaching for the napkin, still failing. Karen took the napkin and folded it into a small square, which she slipped into the bag. “I'll be gone for a moment,” she said to the infant in an upbeat, gentle voice, “and then I'll be back.” She thought. “It means nothing,” she added, tenderly. As she stepped out the door, she looked back. She expected to see Linda smiling
toothily, holding Lila's little hand and waving it around in a semblance of good-bye. Instead, Linda was rooting around in her handbag for something. Linda and Lila: those names sounded better together than Karen and Lila. What would it signify if Lila chose to unfurl her first words in front of a kind stranger, rather than her own mother?

Outdoors the sun made her squint, and the air smelled of cars. In a similar situation, her husband would have found a way to reclaim the stroller without losing sight of the baby. He had always been good with logistics, one of those people who behave as though they have the instruction manual for the world. Since they had the baby, this quality in him had been exaggerated. Her husband seemed crisper and clearer as he took on his new role: his jaw was better defined, and when he moved around the kitchen, putting towel and coffee mugs back in their places, his gestures had mimelike precision. She was amazed to see him come into focus. These were days full of details to be cataloged, remembered. But sometimes she had the feeling that she had come into focus for her husband too, and what he saw puzzled him.

The night they brought Lila home, Karen had folded a soft striped blanket in half and then in half again, making a soft bed for Lila so she could sleep between their bodies at night. As she placed it on the mattress and pressed into it a baby-shaped depression, her husband walked in. He lunged toward the bed and grabbed the blanket from her as if it were a burning thing. “What do you think you're doing?” he asked, his voice rough. “Babies die that way,” he said, and hurled the blanket at the wall to make his point. After
they had turned out the lights, he rolled over and covered her in a slew of silent kisses before falling asleep. That night Lila woke from a dream that had made her cry. She wished that she had given birth to something that was impossible to injure, a stone or a stomachful of water. In the dark of the room, the striped blanket lay balled on the floor, its rounded shape full of inner folds and shadows.

As Karen walked back toward the corner where she had abandoned the stroller, she realized that, for all Linda's talk on mothering and its pressures, she had never said explicitly that she had children of her own. For all Karen knew, Linda was as bad at it as she was.

The stroller was intact, its wheel still lying in a patch of marigolds several feet back. Nothing was missing from it except for a few energy bars and a handkerchief from the side pouch, which showed that somebody willing to steal had decided that the bulky vehicle was not worth the trouble. The blisters on Karen's feet had spread to the thick skin of the sole, and she knew she wouldn't make it back to the café unless she wrapped her foot up. Even so, she felt oddly good as she dragged the stroller behind her: a stranger watching from across the street might have described her as “full of purpose.” She felt as if Linda had said something that she herself had wished to say for some time. She had to find herself, inside herself, if she was ever going to feel connected again to the things she did all day. She thought about a friend she once had, who she no longer knew, and the long e-mails they used to write each other during their freshman year, describing at weekly intervals precisely
how they felt college was changing them, as though logging this data meticulously could keep it all within their control. “I'm leaving you this trail of crumbs so you can find me and return me to myself if I wander too far away.” She couldn't remember which one of them had written that junk line. Now her friend was living in Hollywood, a recovering heroin addict who never returned anybody's calls. Last year she had stolen a mutual acquaintance's car and tried to drive it out across state lines into Nevada to do who knows what. From the police station in the desert town she had used her one phone call to leave a message on Karen's voice mail. It said:
Hi, honey. Something wonderful's happened. I finally figured out who I'm supposed to be. I'm beautiful and wise, when I say something it opens people's hearts. The bad news is, I messed up, now I'm the wrong person. But still, I wish you could see me now! Peace and light!
Karen hadn't heard from her since.

She left the stroller outside, leaning on its empty titanium hub outside a drugstore, and limped inside. At the sound of the doors sliding open, the cashier at the counter looked up at her, then dismissed her immediately. The cashier was carving little marks into the checkout counter with a small, pointy pair of scissors in her hand. Karen limped past light-bulbs and window cleaner, full of possibility. Even here, in these boring and overlit aisles, her new good mood made it feel as though anything could happen: she could run into a friend or an ex-lover, she could receive an important phone call, she could have an important thought that would make her whole situation apparent to herself. She stood in front of the bandages and Band-Aids, taking in all their myriad
shapes and colors—clear, nude, cloth-covered, breathably plastic, patterned with race cars and cartoon dolphins. She read the backs of the boxes: all the energy and force she would next use to find herself she directed toward this first decision, a practice decision. To her right, a man watched her, his hands in his pockets. He had a nice face with big teeth and ears. When you looked at his face, you could see right through it to the one he had as a little boy. It was easy to imagine him hanging upside down on a swing or standing in front of a rosebush, swatting at it with a broken-off stick. Karen saw him staring at her. She thrust forward a package of Band-Aids.

“Are you looking for these?” she demanded.

“Ah, no, sorry,” he said. He paused. “It's just, I think I know you.” He had a look on his face like he was waiting for her to complete a sentence.

“From where?” Karen asked. She looked more closely at his whole person. He wore a white button-down shirt. She had always had trouble recognizing people she knew when they dressed up for work.

He named the college in Connecticut that she had gone to. He had been a film major—the film program had changed since he'd gone there, he told her, it used to deal in concrete skills, the mechanics of shooting and editing a film. Now it was mostly a place for people who liked movies to argue over the degree to which a given movie should be liked. Sometimes they invited him back to give a talk and he thought about refusing but in the end he did it anyway because if he could, in his brief thirty-minute talk, impart any advice on how one manipulates the substance of film,
he felt that it was his duty. Karen nodded. She relaxed. With his patronizing tone and his floppy brown hair, he was just the sort of person she used to listen to at parties, trying to think of intelligent, psychologically driven questions to ask while she took small sips from a cup of lukewarm beer. She had always been interested in this type of person: in their arrogance, they reminded her of the stylized, opinionated person she might have become if she had been a man.

“How about you?” he asked abruptly, as if she had vanished suddenly and just now reappeared.

“Well,” Karen said, “I'm still writing.”

“That's great. What do you write?” He had an interested but slightly lost expression on his face.

Like before, she wrote essays. She had written profiles of well-known people—actresses and an artist who sculpted glaciers out of man-made and toxic materials. She had written a long reported article on water sanitation. She had ghostwritten a book by a comedian whose awkward jokes about foreigners were obsolete; all that was left to him was to cash in on the stories he still had of performing with people whose more robust fame persisted to this day.