Drifts

by Kate Zambreno

  Teary talks with John about our future. I think of giving in to his constant desire to quit everything and buy a cheap farmhouse upstate. So you could still be a thinking person, he says. But I would still have to commute hours to teach, more than I already do. And I keep envisioning myself alone in a Walmart with the baby in the grocery cart, stuck in some rural area, more isolated than ever. The Rilkes were miserable in their farmhouse, I keep reminding John. They worried about money constantly. That would be us. We don’t have enough money to stay here, or to leave, we are drained, depleted, the alienation of adjunct labor, the fear of actual labor. I sit here with my hard shell of a body and cannot be soothed.

  Sofia just taught Gabriel García Márquez’s story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” Her students complained that it was boring and had no point. Of course, Sofia writes, this made her want to champion strange, boring stories with no point. I read the story. A newborn sick baby. A very old angel stuck in the mud, then kept in a cage like an animal. I had just described to John, as we held each other, that I felt like a sore egg or a grotesque angel, some new hard-shell form I couldn’t recognize. As I write this, the baby keeps kicking my ribs.

  This morning, wearing a long-sleeved black-and-white-striped tee with my belly hanging out, I see the old woman. She asks us if it’s Monday. I smilingly tell her it is. She jokes, I have to ask my cat to check the calendar.

  For my notebook seminar, we read some of Virginia Woolf’s journals. In one entry, Woolf writes of having only fifteen minutes that day to write in her notebook. I write this fact to Sofia, overwhelmed by the semester. I wish I had written of the weekend, its fullness, softness, its privacy, how liminal this waiting period, there still is beauty in all of this.

  Constant communication all week from the Italian clown upstairs. Playing his new set of drums all day Sunday, when we needed space and silence to work on the layout for the mother book. On Tuesday, a belligerent email asking what times during the day he can practice drums. (Never!) Then, yesterday, a shipment of music equipment—to be delivered, he specifies in a note, to my unit, as I will be home to sign for it, which I refuse. Worst of all, his pacing upstairs. Just the two of us during the day. I feel cornered.

  The cat might be back. John takes a photograph of her on the porch. He keeps on seeing her. She’s looking for us! I exclaim.

  A gloomy, rainy, humid Saturday. In bed all afternoon, writing emails instead of notes in my journal. John came home at noon from tennis at the park and laid around on the bed with us, Genet basking in his body, licking his sweat all over him. How the dog luxuriates in John’s body when he’s home, how we both do—and how we luxuriate in the dog, scratching, cuddling, rubbing. I worry over him getting enough affection. Give him a kiss too! I tell John in the morning.

  The eternal mandatory hospital class. There is a Danish woman who shares my due date, yet she is so tall and slim, like we are not the same species. The doula leading the class, an Orthodox Jewish woman, says that we moms shouldn’t cook or clean for four weeks, when we’re not nursing we should lie around and watch Bravo for a month. When she says this word—moms—I flinch. It’s the first time I’ve thought of that term, applied to myself by a stranger. Also I appreciate thinking about the time the postpartum body needs to heal, but this is not always allowed under capitalism, I must return to teaching. And also, my soul would die watching only Bravo for a month, I need to watch trash and then also read something abstruse and email Sofia about it. Maggie Nelson writing of how the thinking pregnant woman is seen as an anomaly, an extension of the anomaly of the thinking woman, and this feels true. How I’ve never felt more overdetermined by my body, as a woman, than when I’ve been pregnant. How cute and normative pregnant people are seen to be. And yet, conversely, how totally goth pregnancy actually is. Sofia asks me if we’ve bought the stroller yet. I’m refusing to think about any of it. My ambivalences toward parenthood manifested by the prospect of the mammoth stroller—to have to navigate such a thing here.

  Thursday night on Metro-North heading home experiencing unbearable intestinal distress—I felt sure I would shit myself on the train, in the dark tunnel, sitting next to a businessman on his tablet—I ran to the toilet at Grand Central, holed up in there, exploded my insides while tearfully texting John. Contractions afterward from the spastic diarrhea.

  Mid-October. The surprise of summer weather today. Genet and I are out on what will likely be one of our last porch times of the season. I feel melancholy lately, luxuriating in the dog. Everyone tells me I will feel differently for Genet once the baby comes, and while I don’t want to believe that, I mourn my time with him, our last solitude together. Will I even be able to sit on the porch, just the two of us, afterward? I feel I might be undergoing an immense hibernation, even from myself. He bathes in the sun and watches me, his amber eyes glowing. I read somewhere that your animal begins to stick close to you as labor approaches. Last night he laid himself across my back and nestled his chin into the small of my back as I slept. My body so large and heavy and slow yet needing pleasure—my animal, a hot shower, an orgasm. The other night John smoothed lotion all over my dry body and that too—a pleasure. But so often I feel chaotic, grotesque. I am stared at wherever I go. I am laboring more when walking. Even sitting at home, watching the dog sunbathe, drinking a glass of water—remembering the heat of last fall, how apocalyptic it felt—the return of the Halloween decorations—there is a pleasure and beauty to this, all of it both cyclical and fleeting. How changed my body is. The sky could not be more blue and the leaves more glowing and still green today.

  Genet is up, chasing a fly. I coo to him in the voice I use to calm him. We stare at each other. I am supposed to give over to an animal state—that’s what the books say, the ones I threw away.

  We are told that the dog spends so much time in the front room because he is on the lookout. A trainer charges us $150 to tell us that. The same trainer who can’t get Genet to stop humping her and tells us to give him cheese treats, which gives him severe gas. I am not managing to do much in the office, except take photos of myself on the computer in my ripped tank top at my desk, blank notebook page in front of me, and measure that photo against the portrait Paula Modersohn-Becker painted of herself gently pregnant, although she wasn’t yet, at the moment in Paris when she completed the painting, on the cusp of her potential. So I go into the room and sit in the chair, watch Genet sleeping with his chin propped up on the arm of the couch, smacking his lips, still opening his eyes to survey the garbage truck to make sure there are no intruders. It is 9:30 a.m. We’ve been up several hours. Stress dream last night: I was falling, falling, through a department store. Like Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo.

  A young man comes up to me on the day train as I’m heading uptown to the midwives’ for a pelvic exam, then the Agnes Martin show at the Guggenheim, where I will have to sit down or take a break after every circle around the spiraled floor. He introduces himself, tells me he is a fan. He is attractive. I am embarrassed by this fact, and that I am so hugely pregnant. I awkwardly give him my hand. My fingers so swollen I can no longer wear my rings. I’ll probably never see you again, he says, I needed to say hello. He gets off at the next stop. My face is red. A couple people were watching the interaction, and are looking at me curiously, as if wondering if I am someone. Their gaze goes quickly back to wherever they’d been looking before. How odd it felt that I can still be recognized. It’s the notebook, I think, that gave me away.

  There is a new cat, a large gray kitten, who hides behind the chair on the front porch, waiting for my striped cat to finish eating. The two cats coexist uneasily with each other. The little striped cat now comes twice a day to be fed. The gray kitten seems friendly, not feral. Perhaps abandoned. We study both of them—do they seem more lumpy, could they be pregnant or have worms? I scrolled through lost-cat forums yesterday, thought of putting up a flyer for the gray cat. I feel responsible for them. I can’t touch them because of my allergies. I won�
��t name them. I feel I can’t give them the shelter they need. I almost don’t want to see them sometimes, so that I won’t have to worry. Although, on the days I don’t see them, I still worry over them. I just looked out the window—it’s pouring out—and sure enough the gray cat is finishing the food in the shelter of the porch. I watch her go over to the corner behind the chair, where Genet hangs out on sunny days. At least she can be dry there. I pick the dog up from his surveillance perch and make him come to the couch with me. He scrambles up to the top of the couch, behind my shoulders, chin on my head. We watch the rain.

  How time is slowing and quickening at once. It is 5:30 a.m. The day before Halloween. I feel her kinetic force inside me. Every night lately it seems I have been up at 4 a.m. I can hear the buffoon stirring upstairs, having just come home—hyperaware that he hears me stirring, my movements, the bed constantly creaking under my weight. Lately I have not been able to bear it—I wake John up, ask him to touch my body, to hold my hand, to put his hands on me. The night before last I had lain down, completely naked, on top of all the covers. In bed, on my phone, I googled “can you feel your cervix efface?” Yesterday I was thirty-eight weeks. We took the train downtown. Men asking for change hollered at John Good job for impregnating me, asking if I was having twins or triplets. Always men on the street, the ones who used to tell me to smile, who now tell me how huge I am—some reverse form of catcalling. Everyone tells me how big I am. I’ve never seen a pregnant belly so large, a woman at the hair salon says to me. Why do you think you need to tell me that? I reply to her. It feels good to be snotty. You’re huge! Marie exclaims when she sees me.

  We go to the Pipilotti Rist show. What pure happiness being there. Walking through her Pixel Forest, the beauty and ecstasy of the saturated colors in her hanging light installation. How buoyant, to lie there in public on a bed, gazing at the ceiling screens, underneath a rotting leaf drifting by in the water, a lily pad. A naked body swimming. A close-up of a nipple. I feel lighter, being there.

  John is again talking of leaving, of us drifting somewhere else. I don’t want to move. I just want more time. I want him home, raising the baby with me, in some utopian and impossible arrangement I can’t imagine. Where we both can think and write and make things. I read that, when Pipilotti Rist found out she was pregnant, she and her partner went to raise their child on a beach somewhere. If only we had resources to do that. But I also worry what will happen to the gray stray with green eyes whom we feed twice a day, and who seems to have adopted us. And to my little striped cat of course.

  It is November now. Every night some sort of possible alarm. A contraction? Is this it? We watch the baby’s feet stick out, squirm across the surface of my abdomen. Staying up to watch the end of The Matrix on TV. (That scene where Neo rushes into the agent’s body, that’s what I feel like, without the explosion of white light.)

  I keep trying to capture the gray cat on the porch, to take her to the vet, who has agreed to foster her. She keeps scrambling to the top of the neighbor’s fence, where I can’t reach her.

  A bizarre occurrence on the 1 train yesterday. I sit in the corner seating, my bag on my lap. A man comes in, takes up two entire seats next to me, jostles me. I hold my arm firm, not allowing him to encroach on my space, trying to reclaim my seat. He then elbows me hard in the side. “You hit me, I hit you back,” he shouts at me. He repeats it, more calmly, happy with himself. A woman makes sympathetic eye contact but says nothing. I sit frozen next to the man the rest of the ride, not knowing what to do, whether to get up, fearing an encounter. His violence, his aggression, how pleased with himself. The tumor of this election.

  The baby is now five days overdue. The election. I am in bed with Genet, eating a turkey sandwich. John went to work, to try to store up as much of his unpaid leave as possible. Weeping this morning. How this waiting is wearing on me. I have been all hard, sore, contracting body for a week—for weeks. I am living in some other time. But outside of time as well. Yet I feel—also—the panic, horror, and dread. Like everything has turned upside down. A doubled sense of unreality. This hazy nightmare state. I wake up sweating.

  Today, needing to feel myself again, I attempt a few pages of Rings of Saturn. To trace the layered way time works in the novel—the narrator recollecting his walking tour from the year before, while recovering from surgery in the hospital. He looks at the grid of a window in his room and thinks about Gregor Samsa remembering when he found pleasure looking out the window when in human form. That’s how I feel now. My hard belly sticking out.

  The week before I am to give birth, I get a letter from Sofia, still writing to me about literature, which is a relief to me, although I don’t respond. She sends me a quote from Barthes’s The Neutral—Kafka comparing himself to a “kavka,” a jackdaw, whose wings have atrophied. “I hop about bewildered among my fellow men. They regard me with deep suspicion. And indeed I am a dangerous bird, a thief, a jackdaw. But that is only an illusion. In fact, I lack all feeling for shining objects. For that reason I do not even have glossy black plumage. I am gray, like ash. A jackdaw who longs to disappear between the stones.”

  Relatives, friends email me wanting updates. Students wanting letters of recommendation. I don’t respond to anyone’s messages. It all feels in the distance. What do I see. Yellow leaves. A return, I remember, to last fall. I escape with John and the dog on a brisk walk to attempt to push through these contractions. The almost sublime palette of fall colors. I notice the trees again. Her head settles into my pelvis.

  I am in a wordless state, I write to Suzanne after I don’t respond to a cluster of her texts, annoyed and abjected, her ex having just won a major literary award.

  Genet now asleep on the dark gray blanket at the foot of the bed. I read today that dogs can smell time.

  I have had to write my editor that I cannot turn in Drifts before the baby comes, as I had hoped. I beg an extension until February. Perhaps when John is home, perhaps then I can work. . . .

  December 7

  I have only written down the date, and John and Genet have come into the bedroom. The baby is asleep on my lap. She is a week and a half old. I can address her little presence in front of me. As I was stoned and woozy on the pain days, I wrote in my mind delirious odes to her sweaty dark hair curling against her neck in a rattail, her dark eyes, mischievous and thoughtful, her chubby cheeks, the scarlet blotches that appear all over her tiny body, the dark fur on the delicate rolls of her back. She stirs and wiggles and belches and farts and groans on my lap. This babbling and cooing creature. She scratches at my breasts, leaving red marks. The pull of nursing, lying there in our diapers, bellies pressed against each other, feeling some electricity run through my body. She is wild—I didn’t realize that. How elegant and forceful the acrobatics of her body twisting and contorting, kicking me—like she did all those months inside me, with such insistency. Right now my major affect is only intense exhaustion from night feedings. I am grateful for that. She pecks at my chest and I must stop writing. She has her witching hour in the early evening—then she is bright red, inconsolable. We rock her and sing her songs. We are a household of shit, even more than before. My unbearable constipation and hemorrhoids, her explosions, the dog’s. We fart and shit and walk around barely clothed.

  I finally left the house today, after at least a week indoors. The baby cried in her over-huge bear suit. We all walked briskly around the block.

  That we will remember these days as beautiful in their urgency, I just realized. When did Rilke grow tired of it?

  I am beginning to repair. Now I feel only soreness, pain from the stitches, and exhaustion. Yet I don’t know how to acknowledge the raw sensation of my wound—the last month of prodromal labor, the trauma and medical intervention of the labor and delivery—how vulnerable and naked I have felt.

  How time worked at the end. How I would labor at night, and be up in the day. Every date began to take on a ghostly meaning. How I couldn’t read
or write anything, but John read out loud Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace to me on the train, in the days before being induced at the hospital, feeling my contractions as the train bounced. Simone Weil attempting to philosophize and endure her own personal suffering, her raging headaches, while floating away from the self into grace. “Grace is the law of the descending movement.”

  And then afterward. Alone in the hospital bed, in the middle of the night, the baby asleep. I felt so sure in that pain and abjection that I wouldn’t be able to write about Rilke anymore. That I wouldn’t be able to write of the self I had been before—and then who even was this shattered being?

  But here I am still, in my bedroom, balancing my notebook on my pulsating, red-faced, sleeping baby, propped up on a pillow. Staring at the window. Meditating on the pillows on the bed, Genet on another pillow next to me, on alert, my mind wandering to the sketches of pillows Dürer made on the verso of a self-portrait, alongside a disembodied drawing hand poised and floating over yet another pillow. These experiments in form.

  The first moment I wrote in my notebook again, I wrote of that fleeting feeling in the morning, of possibility. That’s what I want Drifts to be, my desire and longing for it.