Little Labors (3 page)

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 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, 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 appraisal 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.

Frankenstein isn't the name of the monster, it is only the name of the creator of the monster, and the monster himself is never given a name, which contributes to the productive confusion that leads most people, even those who know better, to think of and speak of the creature as “Frankenstein.”

Dr. Frankenstein, the father (and mother) in a sense, notices the creature, shortly after creation, peering over the edge of a bed, like a toddler in his parents' room. Dr. Frankenstein flees in terror from the sight. The creature is then left on his own. For awhile he hangs out around the house of a family he dreams of belonging to; the head of that family is a blind man; the creature one day gathers the courage to present himself to the kind, blind man; the man listens, sensitively, to the creature's story; then the man's children return, scream in terror, and fight the “monster” off, even as said monster cries and clings to the knees of the blind father, as would a very young child.

After that, the creature becomes angry, and violent—also like a young child.

The creature eats only fruits and berries, and never meat.

Most people report that when seeing babies they have a desire to eat them.

So babies do appear in literature maybe more than we might first notice.

Among the things commonly noted about the original
Godzilla
movie is that it came out in 1954 and was the first movie to acknowledge the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though it acknowledges it obliquely. Godzilla is said to have been awoken by nuclear testing, his footprints are radioactive, and the only English words in the movie are
Geiger counter
and
oxygen destroyer
. Also a woman on a commuter train says, of Godzilla, “First the acid rain, and now Godzilla.”

But Godzilla doesn't necessarily mean to do harm; malice isn't a fundamental aspect of his character. In a sense he has no malice at all, only rage. My favorite scene in
Godzilla
is the brief one in which we see Godzilla underwater, in his (or maybe her) natural setting. Underwater Godzilla is played by an obviously small toy. The toy is a much less detailed special-effects creature than aboveground Godzilla. Underwater Godzilla seahorses around on the ocean floor as extra-diegetic classical music plays; his gentle pulsing movements almost make it seem as if the underwater Godzilla has himself put the delicate music on, on an unseen underwater stereo. These “bad” special effects contribute, perfectly, to the overall effect: Godzilla is a childlike creature, innocent of his destructions. Even aboveground Godzilla walks widely, like a toddler. I read once of studies looking into the question of when it was that violent criminals became violent; the studies concluded that it wasn't that violence suddenly appeared, it was that in some people more than others, for whatever reasons, the natural violence of youth was never extinguished.

The baby seems younger today, her hand reaching out, grasping and ungrasping like a sea anemone. I pick up something I have read before, something especially short; I have the baby bound and burritoed in a thin blanket next to me, I position her on her side, so she can stare at the black-and-white notecards slotted between the sofa cushions, and she seems content, and I read the story again; the story,
The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter
, is based on a Japanese myth at least 1,200 years old
.

The tale tells of an elderly bamboo cutter who one day comes across a glowing stalk of bamboo. Inside the stalk, he finds a tiny, tiny baby girl. He brings the girl home and he and his wife raise her as their own. The previously poor and childless couple now find gold each time they go out to cut more bamboo. The girl grows quickly into the most beautiful girl in the land, drawing the notice even of the Emperor. But the girl is moody. She has no interest in suitors. She spends a lot of time looking at the night sky. One day, a spaceship arrives; it turns out the girl is from another planet! The gold in the bamboo was a gift in thanks to her adoptive parents for keeping her safe; there had been war on her planet, but now it was time for her to return to where she truly belonged. The girl boards the spaceship and leaves, forever.

Suddenly the strange old myth seems to be just a straightforward and basically realistic tale about babies: their arrival feels supernatural, they seem to come from another world, life near them takes on a certain unaccountable richness, and they are certain, eventually, to leave you. A more “realistic” description of a baby—e.g., “born after a seventeen-hour labor . . . at 7 pounds 11 ounces . . . nursing every two hours . . . smiling at eight weeks, grasping at twelve weeks . . .”—misses most everything. Only the supernatural gets at the actual. Or so it can seem to a mother on a good day, at least to the mother of a relatively easy baby, who is lying on her side, looking at a picture of an owl.

Rumpelstiltskin is a small man with the exuberance and temper of a two-year-old child. He helps the miller's daughter spin straw into gold. He helps her in this way not once, not twice, but three times! His help saves both the miller's daughter and the miller. In some versions of the story, this even leads to the miller's daughter's marriage to the king. But Rumpelstiltskin doesn't do this for nothing; the third time he spins straw into gold, he does so in exchange for the miller's daughter's future as yet unconceived firstborn.

Still, Rumpelstiltskin isn't too bad a guy. When the miller's daughter doesn't want to hand over her firstborn, Rumpelstiltskin offers her an out. He doesn't have to offer her an out, but he does. That's why he's kind of sweet. The famous out that he offers her—if she can guess his name within three tries then she doesn't have to give over her baby—wasn't part of their original deal. Why does he offer her an out at all?

Maybe naming a newborn baby isn't all that different from guessing the name of Rumpelstiltskin: any name is possible, but only one name proves to be right. It almost seems as if what Rumpelstiltskin is trying to do is to get the miller's daughter to remember that she is his mother. Rumpelstiltskin's name, in all the versions, in all the languages, translates into something like, “dear little goblin who makes noise with a stilt.”
He
is the firstborn,
he
is the original source of gold; he's ambivalent about having a sibling.

A friend has two children with a woman to whom he is no longer married and he is now with a woman who has no children, and who probably wants to have children, though none of this has been openly discussed with me, I am surmising. The two children of the friend are now teenagers, and they themselves have a half sibling already, from their mother's side, their mother who is known to be appealing but unreliable, able to land, say, in Chicago, before beginning to make phone calls to arrange for babysitting for her children in New York. My friend pays the half sibling's college expenses. One gets the sense that he fears raising children again with someone who may reveal themselves to be not necessarily internally outfitted in a way suitable for the care of children, but again all of this is surmising, and my friend never mentions thoughts about maybe, or maybe not, having another baby, and knowing him as I do, it is reasonable to guess that he has also maybe not mentioned these thoughts to himself.