by Julia Fine
In the following pages, I will argue that authors like Alvin Tresselt, Margaret Wise Brown, and Dorothy Kunhardt combined modernist aesthetics and new educational philosophies with an updated brand of whimsy, resulting in—
5
Margaret Wise Brown lived upstairs.
I found my house keys in Solly’s water bowl, my sneakers in the shower. I said to myself, I am tired. I watched a documentary about mid-century American clothiers. I said to myself, I am having lucid dreams that reshape my reality. I heard someone sawing wood; I smelled cigarette smoke through our air vents. I considered climbing back up to the door, and felt afraid. I said to myself, This is your life.
“You will miss these days,” said the message-board mothers, the baby books, the women who’d been through it all, who knew. These days and endless nights with Clara at my breast, the three a.m. television glow, the fuzzy bathroom fan and lullabies—supposedly someday I’d miss them as I now missed long afternoons drinking beers on the patio, dinner dates, and cab rides. People had told me that the first weeks of motherhood would be hard, but they hadn’t told me how hard: how difficult it would be to contort myself into what Clara needed, how much she would need, how much time I would spend sleepless and thirsty and tied to the couch, nipples aching. How she would grunt and snort and sniffle in her bassinet, tongue dancing as she smelled my milk. How she would cry, and I would not always be able to console her—how deeply I would feel this as my failure. I watched the furrow of her dreaming brow while she slept on my chest. As I sank into my own sleep, I tried not to feel it as a free fall but an open pair of arms. Don’t wish the time away, they said. Don’t ever wish the time away.
I’d thought things might be easier with Ben gone: no one to snipe at, no one to begrudge for sleeping soundly on the futon in the living room while I pinched myself awake at four a.m., no one to roll his eyes when I mentioned the noises upstairs. Of course it was harder without him. I had only myself to talk to, I had to be up whenever Clara was, I had to take Solly for all of her walks.
“Maybe you’ll be nicer to him when he gets back, now you’ve realized that you need him,” said Annie over the phone. It was the end of my second full day solo, and I hadn’t gotten my umbrella or Clara’s stroller cover ready in time for a sudden downpour. I’d been soaking wet, with Clara soaking wet, and a soaking wet Solly shaking herself dry in the front hall. Who was to blame here? I blamed Clara. Without her, I could have run inside. Solly and I never got caught in the rain, before.
“I am nice to him,” I said. I’d very nicely FaceTimed Ben twice that day so Clara could see him, so she wouldn’t forget him. I dreaded night, when I knew Ben was asleep and wouldn’t hear his phone. I could handle Clara’s round-the-clock nursing in the daytime, in the sunlight. I could handle the exhaustion if I had a ready tether to the world. Alone in the dark, the weight was impossible. Just thinking about night made my throat swell.
“Mom said she would stay with you,” Annie reminded me. “At this point maybe take her up on it. Or at least let me do a night shift.”
But as harrowing as the thought of those midnight feeds was, even worse was the idea that someone else would take them over. That Clara would wake up and whimper and not find Mommy there. That she would realize she’d be just fine with Grandma, or Aunt Annie. That I was extraneous. Already, my daughter didn’t need me.
“It’s fine,” I said to Annie. “I’ve got it.”
TIME OPENED UP, minutes bleeding into hours, day and night both the same gaping wound. I had never been so tired, and Clara seemed always awake. I walked her around our condo, singing softly. Once or twice I took her out into the hallway, contemplated bringing her upstairs for a change of scene, for another look at Margaret. I didn’t, because it all felt too intimate. It was too early to introduce Clara to such raw emotion. I was afraid to expose her to that melting door, that heat.
When she wouldn’t sleep, I drove her through adjacent neighborhoods, remarking to myself that such and such house was a nice one, that those window trims were pretty, wondering how I would feel if that semitruck one lane over lost control and smashed into our SUV. Would the guilt be of a different texture if the accident were not while on our way to the pediatrician, or even the store, rather on one such joyride? When the ambulance got to the scene and the EMTs asked me why I had my newborn baby in the car on such an icy day, I wasn’t sure what I would tell them. I imagined them whispering together and wagging a literal finger, and I thought perhaps I was more worried about being judged as a bad mother than actually being one. At fourteen years old, Annie went through a phase in which she judged the Prius owners and the fair-trade coffee drinkers far more harshly than she did those driving Hummers. She said that it was better to love a bad thing well than to love a good thing badly.
“It’s performative,” she said.
But wasn’t everything performative? What were we if not constantly refashioning ourselves into what we wanted the world to see? The interactive archives of an October car crash: the tortured metal frame, the drive-through Taco Bell wrappers, the pacifier sewn into the plush monkey. Attendees would stroll through and wonder if all three Crunchwrap Supremes had been eaten in one sitting.
This is what I considered while looking back at Clara, reflected infinitely between the rearview and car seat mirrors. She was asleep, the pacifier fallen from her mouth, her small nose twitching. I decided I should probably seek out some more serious adult company.
One of the reasons I’d given Ben for wanting to move to the city instead of the suburbs was the classes I could take with Clara—the mommy-and-me’s and the music and the yoga—where I’d find her friends and meet other new moms. I scrolled through the listings for something appealing, something that would make me feel like a person and not just a mother. An exercise class where you brought your own jogging stroller, a meetup at a place known for its decaf, a session of soft lights and early movement targeting the under-six-month crowd. I didn’t think I’d done any of these things as a baby—no playgroups or toddler art or jogs on the lake—but perhaps if my mother had tried harder, had given me just such a community, I’d have turned out better. I feared that parenting was a cycle in which your aptitude depended entirely on how much work your own parents had put in for you, which meant that I was predisposed to be lackluster and distant, and Ben was predisposed to be overly involved. I bet he’d been to all the classes. I bet Linda had hosted all the classes in her home and cooked gourmet lunches and never once turned on the television.
It had never been easier to feel both small and indispensable at once.
I picked a stroller workout class, doubled up my sports bras, pulled back my hair. I drove to the field house and parked the car, and then I sat nursing Clara in the back seat for forty-three minutes, at which point the class was over, so I buckled her into her car seat and drove home.
WHENEVER CLARA CRIED, my whole body needed her to stop, my shoulders tightening, stomach dropping. I wasn’t sure if it was my need or her need affecting me, if it was her unhappiness or mine. I didn’t want to be caught up in her need, I didn’t want to be entangled. To be beholden to anything but myself, to be beholden to even myself.
I could pick Clara up and smash her. I could drop her on the bathroom tile. What would happen then? Solly might come to clean her up. I pictured rabbits being eaten by dogs. Splotchy hounds in a line, noses to the ground, finding prey and bursting bodies open. A rabbit with an open wound, a little kitten lapping up its leaking brain.
Milk from my right breast let down, staining my T-shirt. The thing to do was to feed Clara. I did, and she stopped crying.
The Visionaries and Their Mentors
Over the course of her life, Margaret Wise Brown was greatly impacted by relationships with women in positions of authority. Biographers have suggested that this deference to women who “knew more” stemmed from her tumultuous relationship with her mother, Maude Johnson Brown.1 At Hollins College in Roanoke, which Brown attended from 19
28 to 1932, she relied on her English professor, Marguerite Hearsey, for philosophical advice. By the time Brown began work at the Bank Street College of Education, she had surpassed her college mentor and was ripe for Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s influence.
Mitchell found Brown’s natural inclinations too “precious,” and hoped to guide her toward a more practical approach to writing for children. But Brown subscribed to T. S. Eliot’s explanation of the new “mythical method” of art creation that bypassed traditional narrative as “a way . . . of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”2 She was also deeply influenced by the actress and poet Michael Strange, whose mentorship began in 1940 and led her to develop a more spiritual approach to her work.
Born Blanche Marie Louise Oelrichs in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1890, Michael Strange spent her youth as a Gilded Age socialite before coming to literature. She published several books of poetry and plays between 1916 and 1928, and gained notoriety for her second marriage to the actor John Barrymore. During her third marriage to prominent lawyer Harrison Tweed, Strange released an autobiography, to limited success. She was introduced to Margaret by mutual friends and immediately took to the younger woman, acting first as writing mentor and then lover.
As Brown’s career flourished, Strange’s was waning, and biographers have noted the insidious influence the women had upon each other’s work. Brown’s most commercially and critically unsuccessful picture book, The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds, a purported allegory of the artistic process, was dedicated to Michael Strange. Its illustrator, Leonard Weisgard, confessed he never understood the book’s conceit, and a Kirkus review said it had “gone too far into the rarefied atmosphere remote from child interest” (June 1, 1950). The book exemplifies the difficulties of combining theory and narrative, and serves to highlight the success Brown found when distilling theory, rather than obscuring it.3
The book begins—
6
I thought, If I could only take my body back. If I could just find some space between myself and my child, then I could find my way out of this between where I was always attached, constantly ravished. The books called that back-and-forth Clara did when she sought my breasts “rooting.” The word came from the Old Norse rut: the origin. I was the cause of Clara, the seed and the soil, she the plant draining nutrients, rearranging my established composition. Using me to push up and up and up.
She was two weeks old, and still so desperate. If I just had some space, could just stretch out, even a little. If I didn’t have to lean forward, crook my neck, squeeze my nipple, every time Clara wanted to eat. I kept ruining my pumped milk—germ-ridden Solly coming to investigate whenever I turned on the machine, my hands too full to shoo her. But each of the major formula brands had sent samples in the mail after we moved, their new baby tracking system honing in on Clara’s approach. Since I planned to nurse, we were going to donate them; the boxes were still sitting on a shelf in the garage. Surely no one would know if I skipped one breastfeeding session, if I mixed Clara some formula and sat her in her bouncer and held her bottle away from my body for just twenty minutes to feel something close to free.
I put her in the baby wrap to go down to the garage. After a few false starts I managed to knock the nearest box down from storage. Then I brought the powder back upstairs and mixed it. I knew I wasn’t supposed to use the microwave, that Ben never microwaved my pumped milk—always ran the bottle under hot water and then tested the milk on his wrist. But it was frigid outside and our water heater was finicky; it would take forever for the pipes to run hot. Clara was crying.
I moved the warmed bottle from the microwave to the counter, slammed the microwave door shut, heard it click. And then the suction swish of the door opening. I frowned, slammed it again. Swish, again. Slam.
The bottle smelled funny, felt like maybe the plastic was melting. The milk was too hot. I shook it. Clara wrinkled her nose, judging me. Another swish. The condo, fucking judging me. I stuck the bottle in the freezer and closed the microwave, went over to replace Clara’s sock, which had slipped. When I went back to check on the bottle, it fell out of the freezer and onto the floor, formula splattering everywhere. Solly padded over to lap up the spill. I took Clara to the armchair and unfastened my bra.
Swish. When open, the microwave emitted a weak orange light. From where we sat in the living room, it looked like an alien ship had landed in the kitchen, dark but for that glow. I’d never been one to buy into extraterrestrials. I’d spent several drunken evenings debating the issue with Ben, who was certain not only that life was sustainable on Mars but that somewhere out there in some galaxy was a world of creatures more advanced than humans: an equal consciousness not as petty, more rational, better equipped to handle crises. It was enough for me to know that I existed in a world of other people, as a point in a line of human consciousness that might not be infinite but stretched centuries forward and back. I didn’t need nebulae and solar systems and extra dimensions. Thinking about other galaxies made me dizzy, made me think too hard about how much our own planet was spinning, how impossible it was to ever hold on or stay put.
Clara was latched now, but the television remote was all the way across the room. I leaned over for my phone and immediately noticed an alert from Mrs. What-to-Expect’s message board. I had never been alerted before—I only scrolled through, an observer, leaving no trace of myself but the thumbprint on the screen of my phone.
Throughout my pregnancy I’d dabbled with several apps and online communities, evaluating each on interface and how often it crashed. They were all similar in content. Women posted Is it normal to be growing hair on my nipples or Pls take a look at this discharge and let me know if its rly my bloody show. Mrs. What-to-Expect’s app was my favorite, both because of its lavender titles and for the validity afforded by its association with her best-selling book. The October board was a group of over ten thousand women, all over the world, our only commonality the window of time in which sperm met our eggs. I didn’t track everyone—that would have been impossible, and besides some of the women spelled love L-U-V or had handles like GunPacknMama or wrote lengthy posts complaining about their night nannies. These were clearly not my people. Nor were the women who commented with photos of themselves with tired eyes and neon lipstick, posing with their swaddled, smush-faced babies. The whole point of the message board was anonymity—I didn’t want these actual women, but their avatars. I wanted them the way the audience of a Greek play wants its chorus, masked and hovering, commentating on the action, passing judgment on the players on the stage, not on me, safe in my seat.
Ah, Megan, silly Megan. The audience and players are one and the same.
I opened the app, clicked on the little speech bubble. The heading of the post I was tagged in: MICROWAVE.
Megan, it began. I didn’t use my name anywhere on the app. Megan, did you mean to put the bottle in the microwave?
“What the fuck.”
Clara whimpered. She was falling asleep still attached to me, her mouth a vise on my left nipple. She had a small bit of dried snot stuck to her nostril that fluttered with each breath.
Had Ben set up a nanny cam to keep an eye on me? Had Annie? My head swiveled toward the curtains: all shut. We hadn’t yet installed the baby monitor. My laptop was closed. How were they watching me? Who were they, and why did they care? And what was with the passive aggression?
The author was Anon987, and Mrs. What-to-Expect didn’t let you click to see what else she had posted on the site. I could, however, follow the thread to get alerts whenever somebody responded. Clara made one of her high-pitched dolphin sleep sounds. My finger hovered.
Before I could smear my thumb across the screen, the app refreshed itself, and three responses followed.
Anon987: She came because she was called.
The message read like a horoscope, the perfect ratio of particular to vague. Of course there was a she—there was Margaret. The
re was Clara. There was the anger emanating from the turquoise door, the heat.
Anon988: Don’t let her in, and don’t upset her. You wouldn’t want to upset her. You wouldn’t want her to come in.
Some other message-board mother had heard the hammering, smelled the smoke. They knew about the upstairs house and Margaret’s dog; they knew my microwave was broken. They knew I was drowning.
Anon989: Megan, don’t upset her.
The situation with Margaret hadn’t yet been frightening. Strange, unexpected, frustrating in its opacity, but never yet frightening. This warning was frightening.
And then:
Clara363: It hurts.
My twinge of fear became full-body terror. Clara was fully asleep now, her mouth slack, a little blister forming on her top lip from the friction between our two bodies. I thought I might vomit. I thought I might scream. My stomach swirled, my vision invaded by dark, dilating stars. Moving Clara to her bouncer, I went to the bathroom to dry-heave over the toilet, then doused my face in cold sink water when I realized it was to no effect. My whole body itched with heat—with the knowledge that something was coming—and I knew I couldn’t face it, couldn’t stand it, whatever it might be. I ran out the sliding doors onto the balcony, to face instead the thrilling cold of November predawn.
Frozen concrete. Quiet street. City-dark, with dim-lit street-lamps. I was vastly underdressed, and the temperature was bordering on freezing, but at least I’d put some distance between myself and Clara, between myself and that message board, the house. At least I could breathe.
Beyond the alley, the boulevards were silent. A light was on in the house across the way, and I could see a television flicker and the shadow of a woman standing at the shadow of her kitchen island. My breasts hurt from the cold, from Clara leaving neither empty. There was a blanket just inside, but I couldn’t bring myself to step beyond the threshold of protection, the glass door keeping me outside my own life, maintaining my status as passerby, observer.