Little Labors (6 page)

The oviraptor is one of the small Mongolian theropod dinosaurs. Its name means, more or less, “egg thief.” It turns out this name is unfair. The first oviraptor fossil was discovered near a nest, which is how the name came about. But years later it was decided that the oviraptor was most likely near its own nest when it died, that the eggs in the nest were most likely its own eggs.

I learn this from a label on a model of the original oviraptor fossil at a gift shop labeled Museum Gift Shop Information, located just outside of the Petrified National Forest. The gift shop has stones, fossils, mugs, moccasins, key chains, polished quartz, unpolished quartz, Navajo-style blankets for $10, and Navajo-style blankets for $400—it is about 4,000 square feet of floorspace organized like the attic of a nostalgic geologist. We are the only customers there on a bright, clear day. There are two people working there, a very thin woman wearing a thick blonde wig, and a young man who appears to be her son and who inspects my driver's license to coordinate it with my credit card for a very long time; though we came in for a map, we are buying a toddler-sized pair of red moccasins. When we ask how long the drive is through the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert, the thin woman says that we shouldn't miss the information booth, the official one, which is just inside the park. She says, So many people think that
this
is the information booth, because we have the word Information on our roof, but the information booth is just further in, and there you can find a map.

It's true what they say, that a baby gives you a reason to live. But also, a baby is a reason that it is not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.

In some sense,
The Tale of Genji
has no plot. Genji is born, then this happens and that happens and then he gets old and he dies and other people continue on, living their lives, in which further thises and thats happen.

But in another sense Genji has a perfectly rounded plot: it describes a simple triptych with the unavoidable ambiguity of paternity as its hinges. Genji is born to the most beloved of the emperor's consorts, but she dies shortly after Genji is born; because she was of low status, her son Genji is also of problematically low status. But the emperor then marries a woman who looks like Genji's deceased mother, and later Genji has an affair with that stepmother, and he and the stepmother then pretend that the resultant child is the emperor's. That child eventually becomes emperor. As emperor he grants status to Genji, his real father. Genji, by this time, has gone on to marry a woman he met when she was a young girl and whom he raised as if she were his daughter. Later Genji's third wife has a child with Genji's evil nephew and
they
pretend
that
child is Genji's. That child, who becomes a basically mediocre and evil man, lives on after Genji's death with the status of a son of Genji.

So twice major characters fall in love with people who are essentially, if not biologically, their children. And twice the ambiguity of paternity enables a radical shift of power: once it elevates Genji, via his secret son, and once it diminishes Genji, via his secretly not-son. That first shift is a revenge against inheritance, the second shift is a revenge upon that revenge. It is a wise child that knows its own father, goes the saying. And a wise mother who makes use of the mystery. The novel ends in midsentence, and no one really knows if the final words are those of Lady Murasaki, or if the last chapters were written not by Murasaki herself but instead, after her death, by her daughter.

Paternal ambiguity is age-old. Maternal ambiguity is pretty new. Of course babies could be switched, and stories of changelings were useful ways of understanding strange children, but still, carrying a child in one's body meant that even the most magical thoughts were alloyed with maternal certainty. In vitro fertilization has altered this.

Or, at least, I found myself, starting when the baby was about eleven days old, and then for months afterward, thinking in detail through the following problem: If it turned out I had carried someone else's child, what should I do? (The doctor had seemed a hasty, careless type.) What would constitute ethical behavior? Would it be wrong to flee the country with the baby, in order to stay together? We were already so in love—wasn't love its own validity? If I gave the baby over to her “real” mother, was I allowed to stay in touch, or was I required to let her go entirely? It was so obvious what the right thing to do was, and so obvious, also, that I would not do it. This was distressing even though I also knew that I would never be so called upon.

One could argue that this is a straightforward prefiguration of the difficulties of allowing a child to grow up and away. Or that it's evidence that even with insufficient sleep and no free time, a certain kind of mind will find its way toward an excess of immaterial quandaries. Or maybe I was just working through my problematic inability to hand the child over to another caretaker, even for just a few hours.

Diapers. Changing them. Bottles. Cleaning them. Wraps. Baths. Sleeplessness. Cheerios. All these things exist, but rise to consciousness about as often as the apartment's electricity does.

Babies in art mostly look nothing like babies in life. This is especially true of the baby Jesus, but also of babies more broadly, and this is true even, and maybe most noticeably, in paintings and sculptures that are, apart from the oddly depicted babies, realistic. Often babies are depicted with the proportions of small adults: their limbs are relatively longer than baby limbs, and their heads are not as relatively large as baby heads; in real life babies have heads so large, and arms so short, that they can't reach their arms beyond their heads. But one almost never sees this in a museum. I am told, also, that a major problem through the centuries for artists depicting the baby Jesus has been the question of what to do about the Lord's penis.

Recently, though, the baby and I saw several realistic paintings of babies. One of these was by the seventeenth-century artist Jan Steen, who is most famous for his paintings of chaotic, messy households—households as they really were, one imagines. Also we saw a Jan de Bray painting titled
The Adoration of the Shepherds
, which depicted the infant Jesus looking like a real infant;
Adoration
was hung near
Still Life with Strawberries
by Adriaen Coorte. All the paintings were in the same room, which had, as the focal point of the gallery, a very large painting of a cow, by Paulus Potter. It had been radical at the time, the gallery copy noted, for a simple cow to be the subject of such attentive portraiture.

So there was a moment, in Dutch painting, when the problem of how to depict babies was solved by having them appear as they in fact are. But I think I've discovered a more pervasive and enduring realistic depiction of babies, though not in depictions of actual babies but instead in depictions of the virgin Mary. I had often wondered about the distinctive tilt of Mary's head in so many paintings and sculptures. It's a very particular, recognizable tilt, and you see it again and again, across time and geography. The tilt is usually coincident with Mary holding but not necessarily looking at the baby Jesus. In iconography, I imagine, the tilt has its own prescribed meaning. But that's an insufficient explanation of the tilt, of why it came to be, of why it makes sense. It's not a tilt I've ever observed in women in real life. But after I held my young baby again and again and again and again and again, I very clearly recognized the angle of the tilt of Mary's head; it is the tilt of the head of babies who are just beginning to develop the strength of their neck muscles. When I hold my baby, she holds her head at that exact same angle.

You love to touch metal, running over subway gratings, sidewalk cellar doors, manhole covers . . . you get very frustrated if you are denied the chance to run over these metals. I now understand Donkey Kong.

When the puma was about four months old, exiting the feline state and just beginning to move toward the sloth state, it was regularly cold enough outside that she traveled nearly everywhere in a bright-orange full-body puffy snowsuit. She looked especially helpless and magnificent in it. The snowsuit had been a gift, purchased for her from an online company devoted to baby things; the company's website also had, as its main marketing color, the same orange, a variety one might describe as safety orange, or avalanche-gear orange. Most objects on the website were available in pink, blue, and then also orange, or, sometimes, only orange.

Meanwhile, the snowsuit. On an elevator, a woman joked that she wanted to trade outfits with the baby. At a meeting with an editor, the editor said of the snowsuit: What brand is that, do they also make coats for adults? The coat elicited positive comments at a rate commensurate with that of positive comments about the baby herself, who had just begun to smile. Actually, in truth, there were more comments about the coat than about the baby. I myself found the coat/snowsuit magically beautiful too, I confess, even as I don't particularly love the color orange, but somehow in the case of the coat/snowsuit, it was the orangeness specifically that was compelling. It felt talismanic. How it comes to be that one year we are drawn to safety orange, another year to emerald green, another to heather gray, is inevitably difficult to untangle. But occasionally the influence can be persuasively traced: for example the brief emerald trend of a few years back I attribute specifically to a run of emerald Cornell t-shirts that said, in contrasting white,
Ithaca is Gorges
; they glittered briefly across the city; other emerald-colored items followed; then the green disappeared. The brief return, one spring, of skirts shorter in the front than in the back followed the release of a Diane Keaton memoir which included a photo of her in such a skirt; that old-fashioned cut of skirt returned for a few months and then, like a desert bloom, was again gone and likely won't be seen again for decades.

The color of the baby's crib, as it happened, was also a bright accent orange, like her snowsuit. It was the “debut color”—the first thing not brown or white or gray—for the “Alma Urban Mini Crib” that was bought for her, and set up against the dark-blue wall of her parents' bedroom. As with the snowsuit, one visitor after another commented on the crib. It was, it was said, so beautiful. Also orange through no particular orange affinity (or disaffinity) of the baby's mother (or father) were the lids of the baby's bottles, as well as the trim on her washcloths, and on her towel. Same orange for her small stuffed fox. The baby had an orange plastic baby spoon, and on the mixer for her food there was an orange splash cover, and an orange implement for lifting the basket of steamed food safely out. All these items were purchased fairly thoughtlessly, just in searching for “plain.” Then I noticed the same orange as the trim accent color on the blue-and-white striped onesie she had received at birth and was finally growing into, and the same orange for the safety guard case around the iPhone 4 without Siri which her mother had bought post-Siri for $69.95 and had then on the first day of ownership cracked the screen of and so had unthinkingly chosen the accent color orange for the “protector.” It eventually began to be difficult to not be bothered by how nice and how orange the baby's objects were. And yet also it was difficult to not want to surround the baby with objects that had been deemed, by my wedge of the zeitgeist, nice. As if taste culture could keep the baby safe. Which in some ways it could: people would subconsciously recognize that the baby belonged to the class of people to whom good things come easily, and so they would subconsciously continue to easily hand over to her the good things, like interesting jobs and educational opportunities and appealing mates, that would seem the baby's natural birthright, though of course this was an illusion. Something like that. It was an evil norm, but, again, one that it was difficult to not want to work in favor of rather than against one's own child. I would say you can see where this is going, but I feel it insufficiently gets at how much orange was arriving into the home, and how much warmth and approval these orange objects were received with by the well-educated fortunate people who encountered them. (Notably, my mother was charmed by none of it.) I at first attributed the orange overwhelm primarily to the gender-neutral color phenomenon spreading among the bohemian-brooklyn-bourgeoisie to whose taste culture I apparently belonged, though I would have wanted to maintain otherwise (a sentiment also common among that set). Orange was “modern” and “clean” and “alternative.” At one point I was about to order a basic bib set for the baby and then I decided not to, because the orange was starting to feel dictatorial—the basic bibs are trimmed in orange!—and more insidious in its dictatorialness than all the pink and Disney-decorated objects selling at BuyBuy Baby and Babies R Us, all those “poor taste” objects that I was trained to treat with suspicion.

A few days after the nonbuying of the clean and modern in appearance bibs, I brought the snowsuited baby up to my institution of occasional employment, and as often happens, her snowsuit—and also her, though she was still so quiet, and I think her gray eyes seemed to strangers mostly like a screen saver on a device whose password has not yet been guessed, or a device they're not too interested in anyhow, an old model—invited comment, and someone said, as others had said, Wow I would love to have a coat like that. I had by this point become reflexively uncomfortable with how much people liked the snowsuit, though I didn't know why, and I responded with my canned comment of the coat being avalanche orange, or hunting-cap orange, to which a third person then said, No, no, it's Guantanamo orange. Everyone laughed. It was a joke. But within a second, the joke-comment seemed immediately and absolutely true, truer than the speaker had probably intended. Spring 2014 fashion in general had also been reported to have “orange as the new black,” a trend most often attributed to the television show of the same name. And the timing of the orange baby object marketing, and orange as the ideal accent color, and orange as the only new color added to a line of designer home paints, followed plot-perfectly close on the wide distribution of photos of detainees at Guantanamo. And those images, instead of being straightforwardly repressed, or avoided, or addressed, had been emotionally laundered in plain sight, so that any bright vision of a radical excess of American power was hidden by being visible everywhere, among what we collectively deemed most innocent and sweet (babies) or most superfluous, a brief season of fashion, a folly. Another afternoon I see the same orange used as the detailing at a beautiful new bakery. And the new and prestigious specialized public high school being built five blocks from me has the orange color on the window frames: the accent color gives the building a clean, modern look.