I never
I never especially cared for babies. When I heard about babies dying there was a part of myself that thought, At least it’s not a child! A child is someone that people know and who knows other people; was the loss of a baby really so different from the loss of a potential baby that happened every month? Once, at an elementary-school-age summer camp, they took us young campers to do rubbings of gravestones. My friend took several rubbings of the gravestones of babies, with the birth and death dates sometimes in the same month. Then she had written sad, short Blakean poems about the babies. After that, I thought that she was an odd girl, and melodramatic. I don’t feel that way now.
A Doll’s House
I once saw a production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in which all the characters except for Nora were played by small people, by a midget, a dwarf, a person with Williams syndrome . . . This made stark the power that the childlike Nora, the wife and mother, really did have. I can still hear the enormous woman asking her very small and angry husband for some chocolates.
However I have only heard of and seen one performance of A Doll’s House in which, at a certain moment, the audience literally gasped—and it was not at this version but at a straightforward performance. The gasp came when, in the second act, a real live baby was brought onto the stage. I don’t think even a live bear would have elicited as much of a reaction; I once saw a magic show in a theater and at the end of the show a live elephant showed up on stage, and I can report that the reaction to the elephant was considerably less than the reaction to the baby. Why was the baby on stage such a force? Because it might cry? Maybe it was the simple thrill of cameo: a baby seems indisputably from everyday life, and everyday life, though depicted on stage, also feels conspicuously absent from it. The actors other than the baby, if the baby can be termed an actor simply by context, seemed suddenly neon in their falseness, which in turn made them seem real, as if visible backstage, brushing their teeth, watching Mad Men on a laptop. In the original Ibsen script, there is no baby, there are just young children.
People who get along well with babies
Four women are having dinner together. One begins to tell of how well her mother gets along with her baby, her grandson. The woman’s mother, the grandmother, prepares Hungarian food for the baby, she prepares him chicken with walnuts and pomegranate in rice which is then stuffed into a pepper—he loves it. The mother’s mother also has things to say to the baby all day long, she is in a constant conversation with him, she doesn’t run out of spirit to talk to him, and he loves it, and, because she talks to him so much, and cares for him so much, she is also the best at getting him to laugh; he loves her; she loves him. “I even believe,” the friend says, “that when me and my sister were babies, she was also this good.” Another mother at the table (who is, naturally, also a daughter) has her mother living with her right now, for a few months, as she helps take care of her granddaughter, now a young girl, no longer a baby. The grandmother is good with the young girl, very good, but maybe she was even better with her when she was a baby. When she was a baby, she was amazing with her, and she was a difficult baby, a colicky baby. This grandmother is wonderful with babies, and with the very elderly, she is wonderful with the extremely vulnerable, it is observed, she cheerfully anticipates their needs, even as, with the not very vulnerable, she can be, actually, quite difficult. I then shared a story, about my own grandmother, a woman who is not noted for her sunny disposition, not at all, but who also, like these other noted women, is really wonderful with babies; she raised her grandchildren, and even helped raise her great-grandchildren, when they were tiny. Even now, her great-grandson, a toddler—his favorite activity is to bring his great-grandmother her cane. My mother also takes babies very seriously, loves them, and when I return home after having left the baby with her, I never find them separated, either the baby is asleep on my mother’s chest, or she is sitting right next to her on the sofa, gesturing. And so on.
Then I notice that somehow we speak suspiciously of people whom we describe as getting along unusually well with babies. As if they do not get along with adults. And I realize that I have become someone who gets along unusually well with babies too. And that I miss my baby, and am desperate to leave to return home to her.
The beginning of misunderstanding
I sometimes feel, as a mother, that there is no creature I better understand than my child. This is probably because she can’t really say anything. I am beginning to worry, as she is just beginning to speak, that we are entering the beginning of misunderstanding. (Though I understand that it is likely that before it was only a misunderstanding that led me to think I understood.) Her words are: bubble, ten, shoes, mama, papa, eyes, up, and encore. A writer once said to me of his two children, “I found that once they started to speak, my friends lost all interest in them. Before they spoke, it seemed like they might be thinking anything. Then they learned language and it turned out they just had a list of wants and dissatisfactions.” It’s as if babies don’t grow larger but instead smaller, at least in our perception. It’s striking that in the canonical Gospels, we meet Jesus as a baby and as an adult, but as a child and teenager, he is unserviceable.
A new citizen
When the puma was three weeks old, I brought her to the post office to apply for her passport. I brought along her birth certificate, her social security card, a photocopy of my passport, a photocopy of her dad’s passport, a notarized form signed by her dad indicating that he granted permission for his daughter to apply for a passport without his being present—I had done the research. For good measure, I brought along not one but two sets of passport photos that had been taken at a professional passport photo–taking location. Taking those photos had taken awhile. The puma had to appear in the photo alone, against a blank white wall, which sounds like a reasonable set of requirements. But the puma was not yet able to hold up her head, let alone sit, and she also did not excel at being awake, and her eyes needed to be open, and looking at the camera—these are the requirements of any passport photo—and, so, it took a while.
Then the line for the passport application window at the post office was also very long.
At the passport application teller window, the man in front of me was dismissed because, although he had a photocopy of the front of his driver’s license, he did not have a photocopy of the back.
I approached the teller window and passed our paperwork through the opening beneath the bulletproof shield. The puma and I had waited about forty-five minutes to get there. I felt very good about getting this essential task done. Our paperwork was immediately handed back; the teller impassively stated: “No, her hand is obstructing her chin, this photo is unusable.”
She did have her hand near her mouth. Triumphantly, I indicated that there were two sets of photos, that her hand was not on her chin in the other set.
“No, we can see the mother’s hand in these photos.”
“But of course my hand is there, I had to hold her up against the background.”
We were dismissed.
The next week there was a shutdown of the government.
I was trying to get the passport done in time for travel I had to do for work.
I then took many photos of the puma with my iPhone, having read online that this could be done: all one needed was to then find a place that could print the photos passport-sized. So I took the modern technology object to a Staples, but they were unable to help, and then to a Kinko’s but they were unable to help, and so then I went back to the original FedEx office where the unacceptable passport photos had been taken; their passport photo camera equipment was broken. We then went to a souvenir and electronics and passport-photos-taken-here storefront. Working there was one immigrant from Bangladesh, one from Mexico, and one from Pakistan. They knew all about the issue of not having a parent’s hand or arm visible in the passport photo. They hid my hand behind a scarf and had me kneel down on the floor and then hold u
p the baby like a puppet in front of the white backdrop. I and the puma were both very hungry by this time. But the passport window was only open until 2:30 p.m., so we headed right over to the line.
The woman behind the bulletproof glass said she was going to lunch.
“But the sign says this window is open from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.”
The woman said she had already waited an hour longer than she had intended to go to lunch and now she was going to go to lunch.
We continued on to a second post office. No one was available who had the training to handle passports.
At a third post office, again, no one was available, we were told. Then a woman emerged from a back room with a sandwich in her hand; she said she was available until 3:00 p.m.; it was 2:50 p.m. She forsook her sandwich to help us out. She went through our paperwork piece by piece. She got to the photos. She took out a ruler and began taking measurements of the likeness of the puma’s face. “Her head is too small,” she said. “Way too small.” It was, she specified, two millimeters too small. “Listen, since September 11, they are very careful with these passport applications, this will never pass.”
We went, so hungry, to a CVS on 42nd Street and 10th Avenue. A woman in line in front of us was discussing with the teller how she had five sets of visa photos taken, she was trying to get her visa to China, but she had doubts about this newest set of photos, too. I felt I was about to lose it, standing in line, listening to the conversation whose end was not yet imaginable, and I probably would have gotten angry, or wept, had my mood not been preempted by the puma getting angry, and weeping. Finally a screen was pulled down. The puma’s photo was taken, a face of resigned despair. We paid double, so as to get two sets of photos, one with the puma’s head on the larger side, one on the smaller. We returned to the original post office. The fluorescent lighting seemed to have turned to sound. We handed over the paperwork. The photo was fine! The xerox of my mother’s passport was fine. The xerox of the father’s passport was fine. The social security card was more than was needed. The notarized form signed by the father was fine. The form was notarized with a driver’s license, not with a passport. Did we have that driver’s license with us? We were sent away.
Her passport didn’t make it through in time for her first meager trip at eight weeks old, across the border to Canada. We just argued her way across the border. Then returning was trickier. Border patrol was unimpressed with our birth certificate and social security card. “There are no photos here,” the woman at the booth said. “How can I know if this baby is the baby you say she is if there’s not a photo of her to confirm her identity?” We looked at her. Eventually her supervisor let us through. It had to be acknowledged, that picture or no picture, no one could identify the baby, except for us.
Money and babies
My mother takes the chicken—when she began to locomote, she ceased being a puma and became a chicken—out with her one evening. The two of them attend a dinner held at my mother’s synagogue, in the basement, one of these organized-by-age dinners, this is the over-forty social group, which means that most of the people who attend are over sixty. The chicken walks around the table, carrying her winter pants here and there, offering them to diners, rescinding her offer, and more. After the dinner, my mother tells me that she should charge $1,000 a day to bring the chicken to a nursing home, because a baby offers so much happiness and healing, being near a baby is good for one’s health, it is much better than blue algae or Prozac—it is amazing.
The chicken’s dad then said to my mom that Yes, he agrees. In fact, that is his take on babysitting. That you charge people $20 an hour for the privilege of being with the baby. A baby is a goldmine.
Everything they said was true, and yet also, we know, not the case.
Contents
The crystal child
A long, long time ago, in late August
A reason to apologize to friends
What drug is a baby?
Dynasty
Cargo cult
Mysteries of taste
Cravings
Religious aspects of the baby
Head shape
The romantic comedy
Wiped out
The species
Literature has more dogs than babies
More Frankenstein
And movies
Princess Kaguya
Rumpelstiltskin
How the puma affects others, one
How the puma affects others, two
Notes on some twentieth-century writers
Other people’s babies
Other people’s babies, two
Other people’s babies, three
Other people’s babies, four
Reversals
Mother writers
When the baby came home
When the empress moved
Screens
iPhone footage
Lots of writers have children
In Flagstaff, one
In Flagstaff, two
New variety of depression
A baby is an ideal vector for a revenge plot
A modern anxiety
Things that one was misleadingly told were a big part of having a baby
Babies in art
Video games
Orange
More babies in art
Sometimes it can seem like many hours with a baby
Stranger danger
How the puma affects others, three
Most of the great women writers of the twentieth century
Women writers
Baby girls and men
A friend who is not a close friend
I never
A Doll’s House
People who get along well with babies
The beginning of misunderstanding
A new citizen
Money and babies
Copyright © 2016 by Rivka Galchen
All rights reserved.
Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system swithout permission in writing from the Publisher.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
“Notes on Some Twentieth-Century Writers” originally appeared
in Harper’s Magazine.
Manufactured in the United States of America
New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper
First published as a New Directions Book in 2016
Design by Erik Rieselbach
eISBN: 9780811222976
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
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