What We Have

by Amy Boesky

  I headed around the house, immaculate as always, to the backyard. For late January, it was warm, almost fifty degrees. The air smelled faintly of mud.

  Emily’s tree was still staked to the ground on all sides. One of the strips of cloth used to wrap the trunk had come loose. No buds yet, but the branches looked strong.

  “Good-bye, little tree,” I said. “Grow well.”

  The Interview

  FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, while Sacha napped, I alternated between working on my job talk and worrying about going to Boston.

  “I can’t believe I’m leaving her,” I told Annie when she called to see how things were going. “The books say if you miss too many feedings in a row, the baby may never nurse again.”

  “Forget the books,” Annie said. This, from the Ivy League.

  “I don’t know what I should give my talk on, either,” I told her. It felt like ages since I’d thought about anything other than bilirubin levels and Baby Heimlichs. When I went up to my study and flipped through what I’d written about early modern time, it seemed unfamiliar, like somebody else’s project. The manuscript had three sections: the first, on timepieces; the second, on calendars; and the third on temporal narratives—histories, chronologies, and horoscopes.

  “It’s February,” I pointed out. “Maybe I should talk about the history of Lent. About how people came to associate the month with giving things up, with punishing themselves.”

  “That sounds cheerful,” Annie said.

  I was actually warming to the idea. February has always been an in-between month. The Romans didn’t have a name for it; it was a lawless period, between winter and spring. A temporal wilderness, full of weather.

  In the Old Celtic calendar, they thought the last day of January divided winter from spring. The night between the two months was called Brigid’s Night—Brigid, one of the most beloved of all Celtic goddesses, was associated with fire, fertility, household arts, and poetry. Pregnant women prayed to her to guide them to a safe delivery. On February 1, people lit candles to summon Brigid, hoping to scare away the darkest part of winter.

  “Now all we have is Groundhog’s Day,” Annie commented.

  She didn’t sound convinced.

  “Talk about something from the first part. The stuff on watches and early clocks,” she suggested. Annie collects vintage watches. Her favorite part of my manuscript was the description of a gift Queen Elizabeth had received from a foreign official: a tiny gold watch-ring that she wore on her little finger. It had an ingenious alarm: A pointer popped out and scratched the queen’s finger to signal the hour had changed.

  I trusted Annie. She’d been writing grant proposals over winter break, sharpening her mind while I was learning to swaddle.

  “OK,” I said. “I’ll talk about timepieces.”

  While Sacha rocked in her carrier, I sifted through slides. Slides of watches shaped like death’s heads. A watch of Mary Queen of Scots carved with Latin mottos from Horace, warning that time is fleeting. Flesh is but grass. A seventeenth-century French enameled watch from Blois, painted with a woman baring large round breasts, an hour hand cradled in her cleavage. An hourglass set inside a frieze in which a bronze Eve offered an apple to a bronze Adam. Taste, and time begins.

  Hourglass figures, women. Bodies swelling out, then in, then out again. Holding within them the promise and penalty of generation. Next, and next, and next, and next: children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, time running through their bodies like so many grains of sand.

  Breast, cleavage, hand, hour.

  I looked at Sacha, who looked back at me, and suddenly it hit me, here in our living room miles from the Folger or the Library of Congress, that part of what these early timepieces were doing was borrowing metaphors from the body. Borrowing them, and giving them back again.

  Why do we talk about the hands of a clock? Or its face? Don’t we turn timepieces into symbols of our own bodies—holding time, measuring time, signaling time’s progress and decay?

  After an afternoon of reading and thinking, I decided to give my talk on second hands.

  Until late in the seventeenth century, mechanical clocks only had single hands, what we call “hour hands,” fashioned out of hammered metal. Late in the century, after the mechanisms improved and clocks could measure smaller increments of time reliably, watchmakers began adding second or “minute” hands. At first these new timepieces were called “physicians’ watches,” because they were often used to measure the rate of a patient’s pulse.

  It was imprecise at first, this counting of heartbeats. In fact, one professor of medicine in Padua told his students to practice by getting training in conductor’s tempo. People still believed the body set the standard, rather than the instrument that measured it.

  Then all of this changed. There’s a well-known story about Galileo, bored in church, working out his theory of the pendulum’s motion by watching a lamp up near the pulpit swinging back and forth on a cord. At first, Galileo tested his theory by measuring the number of oscillations against his own heartbeat, assuming his pulse could provide the standard. Later, he flipped this around, realizing it was the pendulum that offered the reliable measure and not his heartbeat after all. This marked a major change in thinking: From this point, clocks began to provide the standard against which the body was measured, and the human pulse came to be recognized as erratic, susceptible to endless variations.

  What interested me most was the in-between period, while all of this was still in flux, when bodies and clocks became briefly (and closely) elided. There’s a great story about a servant of Pepys panicking when he heard a small clock chiming in his master’s bedroom—he thought the clock was alive. As clocks got decorated with human characters and faces, described in increasingly human terms (“grandfather clock,” for instance), people paradoxically began to see themselves in mechanistic terms. Were their bodies working? Were their hearts beating out time the way they should, or failing, winding down? Donne once tried to tell how sick he was by measuring his own pulse: “One hand asks the other by the pulse . . . how it does.”

  Two hands. One the physician, one the patient. One hand probing, measuring; the other quickening and slowing with fever, hunger, passion; the patient hoping the disease would pass, for now, and he might live. In Donne’s case, at least at this point, he did. He survived whatever awful thing he had—probably typhus—and went on to write twenty-three Devotions—one short of the number of hours in the day—all written in the present tense, as if in the very instant of facing death.

  There was no such thing in the seventeenth century as a “survivor story.” People didn’t think it was possible to triumph over disease back then. Instead, disease was seen as a constant and unshakable enemy, the body terrifyingly vulnerable. Rather than triumphing by the end of the Devotions, Donne ends with a fresh bout of terror, dreading what he sees as inevitable relapse.

  Awful, in many ways. Not many modern readers like this side of Donne—he seems so anxious, so gloomy. But there’s another aspect to this. Terror frees Donne from the necessity of “triumph.” It wasn’t, in the seventeenth century, a question of winning or losing, because people didn’t think they got to choose. All they could do was try to understand. One hand gauging how the other was doing: a kind of early modern self-exam.

  SOMETIMES, WITH SACHA, I FOUND myself thinking about the big questions. How we measure and understand time. Why we dread disease as much as we do. What we pass on from one generation to the next. Why we choose places only to leave them. I looked at Sacha’s crib, the blue-and-yellow border in her bedroom, the hovering presence of Pepys, the huge stuffed bear from Julie, with his peculiar, watchful eyes. This, I murmured to Sacha, walking her slowly back and forth in her room, is home. Why would we ever want to leave?

  With Jacques, I talked about breast milk.

  The plan was I’d take the first flight to Boston on Thursday morning, stay overnight, be back on campus th
e next day, and come home on the last flight Friday evening. We counted up the hours, divided by feedings, and I got to work.

  I loved storing milk. I made neat little bottles, labeling each with a Sharpie, lining them up in the freezer in glowing rows. It reminded me of those scenes in Little House in the Big Woods when Laura and Mary helped Ma prepare for winter, gathering in the squash and the pumpkins, hanging the herbs in the attic, stacking away the smoked meat for the cold days ahead. While Sacha nursed, I pumped, and before I knew it I was stepping up production, making a surplus, and while I expressed and bottled, Jacques and I laid out the plan. My mother was coming Wednesday and staying until Saturday, giving us a “buffer day” on either side of my trip. She’d take care of Sacha during the day, and Jacques would ride his bike back and forth to check on them, and before they knew it, I’d be back.

  The more bottles I made, the less I had to think about leaving Sacha. How would it feel to be in another state, eight hundred miles away? It was like one of those story problems from sixth-grade math. If a plane flies four hundred miles an hour and a baby is only nine weeks old and her mother is going four hundred and forty miles away and is only able to express thirty bottles of milk, will her baby even remember her when she gets home?

  WHEN THE DAY CAME (SLEET; windy gusts up to forty miles an hour) I felt like I was masquerading—stuffing myself into my work coat, riffling through files in my briefcase, snuffling sorrowfully over the pajama’d roll that was Sacha. Would she know me when I came back? Would she nurse again after so many straight feedings from a bottle?

  The taxi came, and I followed Jacques’s route to the letter. The Parkway to National. Terminal B. Long lines at ticketing, at security. The cold, muffled air of the plane. Ice pellets on the windows. When I was home with Sacha, watching Jacques disappear and waiting for him to come home, this orbit always looked so glamorous, the chance to order a cup of hot coffee and hold it in both hands. Uninterrupted time on the plane to read the newspaper, close my eyes. Doing it myself, it just felt lonely.

  I HAD ONE LONGING FOR this visit, and that was for an uninterrupted night of sleep. Guiltily, I’d fantasized about this ever since I agreed to come. I pictured the night beginning luxuriously early, maybe around nine, and slipping through the expansive darkness like a long, quiet train: the billowing fields of ten o’clock and eleven; the gray tunnel of midnight; the smoky mountains of one and two and three o’clock giving way to the golden plains of early morning. If nothing else, these two days away would be worth it just for one solid, solitary night of sleep.

  The hotel chosen by the university, set over a four-lane highway, had an unspecified historical theme: plush velvet ropes, period paintings. There were antique weapons in display cases and the front entrance was guarded by a man in a Beefeater costume. I signed in, got my room key, and rode the elevator up to the seventh floor. Room 712: small and beige, almost entirely filled by a queen-sized bed with a butterfly-shaped stain on the coverlet. A white paper sash proved the toilet hadn’t been used since the cleaners had been in. A radiator rattled, I called the department chair to check in, confirmed my schedule, and halfway through the phone call realized my breasts were beginning to ache. Almost four hours since I’d left home, and somewhere, hundreds of miles away, I pictured a thawed bottle of breast milk nudging its way into Sacha’s eager mouth. My breasts swelled, hard as bricks.

  Thursday afternoon was spent in back-to-back meetings with administrators (dean, provost, dean), punctuated by frantic trips to the bathroom where I closed the stall behind me, sweating and nauseated, wrenched open the buttons of my blouse, leaned over, and emptied breast milk into the toilet. My guide, a cheerful grad student working on Dickens, probably thought I was bulimic—I tried my hardest not to groan with relief as milk spewed out of me (wasted!) into the sewers of Boston. By the time dinner came, I barely cared what happened, I only wanted to be back home, clutching Sacha. Who knew being a mother could be so physical, so much more intense than any other kind of desire?

  Except, that is, the desire for sleep. Dinner, small talk, dessert, by eight thirty I started making the small fidgety motions of a person who has done her part and really needs to go back to the hotel, Beef-eaters and all.

  The small talk went on. Who wanted coffee? I tried not to look aghast as various people agreed that was a good idea.

  It was almost ten o’clock before I was in bed at last, staring gratefully up through the reflected light of the highway at the acoustic ceiling tiles, wondering why my breasts felt disturbingly normal (was I drying up?) or whether it had been rude to yawn when one of the department members suggested drinks after coffee (what did they think this was, a party?). I was embarrassed by the luxuriousness of this moment, the not-until-seven-AM of it all. It was like infidelity: I was cheating on Jacques alone in this Beefeater-themed hotel, and I rolled over and closed my eyes and waited for waves of sleep to wash over me. I curled to the right and then to the left, missing Sacha, missing Jacques, guilty that all this was mine, this whole empire of sleep, and rolled over again, what was that noise out there, was that really just the Mass Pike buzzing like that, don’t notice it, go to sleep, one more roll, another, was that little red light on the alarm going to glow like that all night? The sheets had a clammy slipperiness to them, the buzz intensified, I sat up and glared at the alarm clock, 10:47, and suddenly I was rigid with wakefulness.

  It was eleven, then eleven thirty, then midnight, and I couldn’t sleep. I rearranged the pillows. I adjusted the blinds, turned the alarm clock to the wall, tried more covers, then fewer covers, snatched a pillow from the closet, and finally sat straight up, staring balefully out the window at the Mass Pike. Cars were streaming in four feverish lanes, headlights boring into the night, a dull roar below me. The noise, I decided. It was the noise. Who in their right mind built a hotel on a highway? I dimly remembered my Lonely Planet guidebook recommending earplugs for times like this, but I didn’t have any—just nursing pads, cotton discs the size of makeup sponges. It was after one AM by now, my continent of sleep precipitously eroded, but I still had six hours left! I folded up the breast pads, origami-style, wedging one in each ear. Back to the pillow rearranging, the Kama Sutra of sleeplessness, the underdoggy, the overdoggy, the knee tuck, the back dive, the swan. It was one thirty and two and finally I was in tears, breast pads shredding in my fingers as I called the Beefeater on duty at the front desk and begged—demanded—a quieter room. I could hear him tapping away at his computer. Tap tap tap, quiet room, quiet room, was there a keyword to search for this? Did they put people in noisy rooms first just to see if they noticed? “Ma’am,” he said nasally—when did I stop being Miss and start being Ma’am? Did having a baby do that?—“We have a room on the fourteenth floor but that room also has the highway, and then of course there’s the elevator nearby . . .” There was no point changing rooms now. It was two thirty, then three, this was the hour when Sacha would be waking up, rubbing her fists across her lips that way she did when she was hungry, like she was playing a harmonica, looking for me, and there’d only be eight bottles of milk left by morning, and somehow, between three and four, I must have finally drifted off, because the next thing I knew the alarm was ringing—no, it was the phone, the phone, it was Jacques, was something wrong? Was it Sacha?—and I was grabbing the receiver, gasping his name, it was six thirty and he was so sorry he’d woken me. He wanted to wish me luck. He wanted to make sure I was OK. He wanted to tell me Sacha was awake. “And guess what,” he said adoringly. “You’ll never believe it. Last night, she slept through the night for the first time.”

  The House with the Green Shag Carpet

  IT’S FUNNY HOW OFTEN PEOPLE refer to place when what they’re really thinking about is time. “Remember Charlevoix?” my sisters and I sometimes asked one another. Charlevoix is the lakeside town in northern Michigan where we went on vacation every year until Sara went to college and we began to go our separate ways as a family. We hadn’t been back in almost fifteen
years. My mother, angling for a reunion, was trying to get all three of our families to join them there next Labor Day weekend.

  “When? ” Jacques asked, nonplussed.

  “You have to plan early to get so many people together,” I said defensively, not wanting to hear my mother and her calendar lampooned.

  Charlevoix. I loved the idea of going back there with Sacha. When I thought about Charlevoix now, I imagined the fossilized time of summer childhood: a white beach, a bucket of Petoskey stones, the low horn of the Beaver Islander—all associated for me with a time when we were young, intact, our parents in good spirits, summer flapping in front of us like a white sail.

  We talk about things being “far off,” “distant,” and that winter, thinking about moving back to Boston, I realized that what I was picturing wasn’t a change in geography, but a move back in time. “Boston” to me didn’t really mean a new department or a new neighborhood, but Harvard Square, circa 1989: my favorite café on JFK Street, which used to be called Boylston Street (and before that—before my time—something else); running the bridges with Annie along the Charles; browsing on my hands and knees through shelves in secondhand bookstores. It was 1989 I was picturing more than Harvard Square, which had already gone through several separate waves of construction since we’d moved away. In 1989, there were no cell phones, or Internet cafés, and in every last area of my life, from romance to work, I’d been floating in an ether of anxious potential.

  I used to read science fiction as a break from Donne and Milton, and there was one point that always got to people when they speculated about time travel. They called it the “grandmother question.” Suppose you could go back in time, two generations. You showed up in an earlier era, wore different clothes, spoke differently. You did various things, met people, life happened—and along the way you happened (completely by coincidence) to meet your own grandmother. Suppose one thing led to another, and you were the sort of person who did this kind of thing and you got in a terrible fight with her—maybe there was an antique revolver involved—and you ended up killing her. Then what? What would happen to your own mother—or to you? Could either of you still be born?