The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky

by Jana Casale

  “I’m telling you, I just can’t stand these bigger smartphones. I like small purses,” Elle said.

  “All my purses contain at least one plastic horse. Salesclerks must think I’m crazy when I go to pay and pull out a Clydesdale,” Leda said.

  “Annabelle is so precious. Are you thinking of having any more?” Elle asked.

  “Probably one more. How about yourself?”

  “Oh god, no. Honestly, three is more than I wanted, but my husband insisted. His mom had three and so did his grandmother. It’s a thing for him. I mean, it doesn’t really bother me. What’s one more?”

  Leda figured that Sabrina might disagree with such an affirmation.

  “Well, you guys all make a beautiful family.”

  “I feel very blessed. Honestly, I look at my friends who work in publishing or whatever, and I just feel so sorry for them. Who really gives a shit about a promotion or publishing an article on Salon.com? Once you have kids you realize what a ridiculous fantasy that all is.” Elle sat up straight. “All I can say is we did it, Led. We won.”

  Leda didn’t agree with what Elle was saying. Even in the best of circumstances it would be impossible to agree with someone who was so blind to their own privilege, but she wasn’t about to argue. She thought about choices and her own choices and then about the inside of Annabelle’s room and its tiny desk and chair.

  “I miss smoking,” Elle said. “I wish I had a cigarette.”

  “Do you miss writing at all?” Leda asked. She thought of the story about the woman who sold combs.

  “Not at all,” Elle said, and without even a moment of reflection, as if unequivocally it was true, “Come on, let’s go have coffee.”

  They walked to Starbucks a few blocks away. Elle’s shoes were very loud on the pavement.

  “The thing is that it’s impossible to keep up with the trends when you have work done on your kitchen. Our counters were granite when we bought the house—embarrassing. I know. We switched to marble, but now I’m thinking of going to bamboo parquet.”

  “Bamboo parquet?”

  “Oh, it’s very sustainable. My worry, though, is that it doesn’t really go with the aesthetic of the rest of the house, which is more French colonial than modern. In retrospect that was a mistake as well.”

  Leda listened to Elle talk about decorating. She heard her voice click on words like backsplash and fabric swatch. At a certain point as they walked along she noticed a trail of blood spots on the sidewalk. She wondered what had happened and why someone would be dripping blood like this down the street. Nosebleed, she thought. Fight, she thought. Dog with a ripped paw pad, she thought. She didn’t say anything to Elle. You can’t just talk about blood spots like that. You can’t say, “Look, a trail of blood spots. Isn’t that disconcerting? Someone’s insides just dotting the pavement.” The trail of spots stopped seemingly without cause, and that was it.

  Elle ordered a soy macchiato with two shots and Leda ordered tea. They sat by the window and Elle bragged about something Declan could do.

  “But you know, Brooklyn read at five, so it doesn’t really sur-

  prise me.”

  “They’re so smart,” Leda said.

  About a half hour later Sabrina met them with the children. She looked tired and capable all at once as she directed them back to their mothers. I wonder what her dreams are, Leda thought. I wonder who it is she is trying to be.

  On the car ride home she asked Annabelle about her day.

  “So what did you think of Brooklyn, Declan, and Rowan? Did you like them?” she asked.

  Annabelle took a second to consider it.

  “No,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “They’re weird.” She paused thoughtfully again. “They’re weird and they’re mean.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Baby Number 2

  Leda became pregnant again, and she was happy. It was easier to be pregnant the second time around. She no longer feared she would be unable to handle all the late nights or that she’d never master swaddling. It was nearly wintertime. She was excited about Christmas and being pregnant for Christmas. She already bought an ornament to hang on the tree celebrating her new baby. It hadn’t snowed yet, but the air felt like it could at any minute. Most mornings she’d push Annabelle on a swing in the backyard and work on teaching her how to pump. They’d have lazy afternoons together reading books and making crafts. John got home from work and they’d eat dinner.

  “Let me tell you a story of when I was a little girl,” she’d say as she tucked her daughter into bed. The days were quiet and lovely.

  The night before it happened she’d had a strange feeling. John didn’t come home from work until very late. She’d tried calling him, but his phone was dead. Ever since the time he’d acted out so terribly during their engagement she’d get nervous if he’d be late and she couldn’t get ahold of him. She told herself that she was over the whole thing, but in times like these she knew she wasn’t. I’ll go to my parents’. I’ll just take Annabelle and go, she thought. It was nearly eleven by the time he got home. He’d gotten a flat tire and had left his phone charger at work.

  “You should have asked someone to borrow their phone. I was a nervous wreck.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t think of it,” he said.

  As she went to bed she felt a strange unease. It was like a dizzy feeling of a half-formed memory. Once when she was a child standing in the lunch line waiting for pizza she had this same sensation. She was holding her tray up and then a lunch lady motioned for the tray, and she put the tray up on the counter and then there was a piece of pizza on her tray, and she had this same uneasy feeling of a half-formed memory. It was as indescribable then as it was now.

  “I have this weird feeling,” she said to John.

  “What?”

  “I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s like something has already happened, but I don’t know what.”

  “I don’t get what you mean.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “You’re probably just tired.”

  “Maybe that’s it.”

  But as she lay in bed she knew she wasn’t all that tired.

  The next morning was simple and calm. Annabelle ate breakfast. They went outside and played in the yard. At around eleven they ran an errand at the post office. That’s when she first noticed some cramping.

  “It probably won’t get there until Thursday,” the man at the post office said.

  “That’s fine.” Leda tried to think of Thursday and whether it was fine, but her stomach was bothering her too much to really care.

  She gave Annabelle an early lunch and put her down for a nap just before one. Her stomach grew progressively worse, but she thought it was probably just the Chinese takeout she’d had the night before. It wasn’t uncommon for her to get sick on greasy food. She took a rest on her bed and tried to sleep but couldn’t really. She watched some TV for a while longer, but soon she felt like she would be sick. She got up and went to the bathroom, and when she pulled down her underwear it was all blood.

  “Oh my god,” she said. She looked at the toilet. There was already a good amount of blood there too. No, no, no, no, please, she thought. She tried to think of another situation that would yield this amount of blood, but she couldn’t think of anything.

  She cleaned herself up and went to the bedroom and called John. He didn’t answer so she went to text him.

  “Call me. It’s an emergency,” she typed. She was going to write, “I think I may have lost the baby,” but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  She called her doctor and got her answering service.

  “Hi, this is Dr. Wilson’s answering service; what is the nature of your emergency?” the woman said on the other end of the phone.

  “Hi, yes, I think I may be having
a miscarriage,” she said, the word sounding brittle as she said it, her own voice like a chamber echoing back to her.

  She held her phone as she waited to hear back from the doctor. Please call me quickly, she thought. Please tell me this is normal. Tell me every woman bleeds. She sat in the decorative chair in the hall by the bathroom. No one ever sat there, but it felt like the only place to sit during such a time. How lonely and dark her house felt. The days were getting shorter. By afternoon the sun was already going down. She held her stomach and said a prayer. She always prayed in these kinds of times, but she never knew exactly to whom. A few minutes later she could hear Annabelle stirring. She checked the time. It had been nearly two hours since she’d put her down. She knew that she was waking up, and what a cruel reality it was to know that in the midst of losing one child she’d have to mother another one.

  Annabelle walked into the hall clumsily and sleepy-eyed.

  “Hi, baby,” Leda said. “Did you have a nice nap?”

  She knew that Annabelle would want to be held and carried downstairs to the kitchen for her afternoon snack. It had been their routine nearly every day since she was born. She’d always had a hard time waking up and wanted to cuddle before being able to face the day.

  “Yeah,” Annabelle said, reaching up as Leda had anticipated.

  “Listen, baby, Mommy can’t hold you right now. Mommy’s tummy hurts. You need to be a big girl and walk with Mommy to get your snack. We can cuddle later but not right now. Can you do that for Mommy?”

  Annabelle considered this for a second and nodded complacently. Leda had expected more resistance, as in the past any other time that she’d tried to skip the cuddling routine the little girl had put up a monstrous fight. She was grateful and saddened by how seemingly aware her daughter was. Maybe she can sense my devastation. Maybe I’m damaging her too.

  Hand in hand, Leda carefully walked Annabelle down the stairs to the kitchen. It was so hard not to double over in pain. It was so hard not to cry and to scream.

  She sat her at the table in her booster seat and gave her some Goldfish. Annabelle ate them in silence.

  Dr. Wilson called back and advised her to come in.

  “I have my daughter right now.”

  “Isn’t there anyone you can ask to watch her as an emergency?”

  “No.” Leda knew her mom would do it, but she didn’t want to ask her. She just wanted to be sure that she’d lost the baby before she scared her mom over it. Now that she was a mother, she understood how powerfully devastating the role of a parent could be, and she wanted to spare her mom that pain if she could.

  “I’ll just bring her along. I’m sure my husband will meet me at your office and he can watch her.”

  After hanging up the phone she frantically began getting things in gear to head to the doctor. She filled a plastic sandwich bag with Goldfish and a sippy cup with juice.

  “Annabelle, we need to go to the doctor for Mommy’s tummy, so we’ll finish our snack in the car, okay?”

  “Okay,” Annabelle said.

  It was hard to know what exactly to pack for her doctor’s visit. She felt as though much could be dependent on her bringing the right things along. Would Annabelle need something to do in the waiting room? She brought a coloring book and crayons. Should she bring a change of clothes in case she bled through the pad? It seemed unlikely, but it was possible. What if it rained? Two days later she’d unpack the umbrella and crayons, and it would be the only evidence of an irrationality that would never be felt or understood again.

  John called on the drive over. He sounded terrified.

  “What emergency? Are you okay?”

  “I can’t talk much because I’m in the car with the little one.” She looked in her rearview mirror at Annabelle, who was quietly munching on Goldfish. “I’m B-L-E-E-D-I-N-G. Meet me at Dr. Wilson’s office.”

  “Oh my god. What do you think it means? Does it mean we lost the baby?” he said.

  “Please, John, stop. I don’t want to get upset right now. Just meet me at the doctor’s.”

  When Dr. Wilson told her it was a miscarriage, it wasn’t a surprise. It was something she’d known the second she saw the blood. So many times in her life she would know things all along and tell herself that it wasn’t that thing or those things to spare herself the pain.

  When she got out to the waiting room, she shook her head at John and started to cry. She wished she’d called her mother.

  Suffering the loss of a miscarriage was a type of mourning that was unlike anything else. It felt like mourning the loss of a child in a certain way, but she knew that it couldn’t possibly be quite as painful as that. The thought of losing Annabelle seemed like a pain that she would not be able to survive, and so she would not allow herself to really mourn as if it were a child, even though most of the time that is what it felt like. Sometimes she’d try to think of what her baby would have looked like, but she never could imagine it in any real way. Sometimes there was a boy and sometimes a little girl just like Annabelle. Then there would be a bassinet by her bedside again. The toddling sound of baby toys that rolled in place or rattled out like coins in an empty can. But everything was clouded and distant. Like a memory that you weren’t sure of or the prospect of something wonderful that you know isn’t true. Very often she’d have dreams that she was still pregnant. She’d wake up and have to pee and she’d naturally reach down and touch her stomach and then she’d remember. How many mornings did she look in the mirror and see herself half asleep, waking up to the pain of remembering? John tried to be supportive, but she knew that to him the baby hadn’t been real in the way it had been to her. She was the one giving it air and food and water. She got sick for it and bled at its death. John was sad, but he could not suffer like that.

  The burden of motherhood was never felt more greatly than the year after she lost her baby. To be a mother is to bleed and to tell other women that you are okay when really part of you is dead. So too did she have to be there for Annabelle and read her bedtime stories about girls who were strong and who tamed dragons and won wars. Women don’t need to tame dragons, she’d thought one night. Dragons are meaningless. They are for men.

  John encouraged her about having another child, saying that things would be okay.

  “Whenever you’re ready we can try to have another baby. I know we’ll feel happy again,” he’d say.

  She rarely answered this with more than a nod, but she appreciated the thought.

  She went to counseling at one point when she felt that maybe she’d just become too depressed to handle it on her own.

  “Sometimes we blame ourselves for things that really aren’t our fault,” the counselor said. She was an older lady who sat in a floral chair. The session cost three hundred dollars. Leda imagined she must own a yacht or at least a very nice summer house.

  In time she started to feel better. She had mourned and had healed enough to feel like herself again. Every winter, though, as the leaves started to fall off the trees and the air felt like it could snow any minute, she’d feel a sense of sadness that was as real and fresh as it had been that day. She’d sit in the hall and listen to music, and on occasion when people were talking about happiness and limitless potential, she’d know the truth and wouldn’t say a word. She never did try to have any other children. John didn’t push for it. He knew better. And they were happy. As happy as anyone could be despite the sadness of it all.

  CHAPTER 42

  Annabelle Starts School

  At a certain point Leda preferred to apply makeup using the mirror from her bronzer compact, which was covered in a thin layer of powder and gave her reflection a generous, warm filter. It hid the lines on her face that had solemnly begun to appear and would allow for momentary escape from her neuroses about aging.

  “Oh for god’s sake,” her mother said, “if I hear you complain about wrinkles I’ll
open a vein. Get some face cream and forget about it. You young people never stop with obsessing about being young.”

  “But look, I have lines here, and look here.” She leaned up close to her mom to show her a line going from her nose to her mouth.

  “You’ve always had that.”

  “No, I haven’t. I’m really getting wrinkly.”

  “Wrinkly in the brain. Or maybe you don’t have enough wrinkles in your brain and that’s the problem,” her mom said.

  At about the same time that Leda switched from regular mirrors to powdered mirrors Annabelle started kindergarten. She was very excited about it and carried a My Little Pony lunch box around the house the weeks leading up to the start. On her first day Leda packed her more food than would be necessary to survive a weekend in the wilderness. When Annabelle got home Leda discovered that she only ate the cookies.

  “You only ate the cookies, Anna-B.”

  “I ate some of the sandwich.”

  The sandwich was pulled apart and the peanut butter had been licked off.

  “You have to eat more than cookies and peanut butter, honey. Weren’t you hungry all day?”

  “No, we had snack.”

  “Well, I’m not going to pack cookies anymore if you don’t eat your actual lunch too, okay?”

  “Okay, I will.”

  The next day the cookies were eaten and three bites of sandwich.

  During those first few months of kindergarten very often Leda found herself in total awe of her daughter. In five short years she’d turned from an infant unable to hold her head up to a little girl who kept a sticker collection and could count off jumping jacks. Her knees are just like a grown-up’s knees, she thought, seeing her daughter standing on a kitchen chair one morning.