by Robert Atwan
That night Benita appears on the eleven o’clock news, slurring her words and begging for the safe return of her baby. Her family—aunts, uncles, parents—all stand behind her with grim expressions on their faces. The girl’s story sounds plausible because terrible things happen to children in our town. Imagine a place of planetary misalignment, a celestial crisscross of weird energy. Imagine the Bermuda Triangle on dry land. Our town, home to the Pitchfork Killer and the Yosemite Killer, makes us believe that anything is possible.
Later that night, though, police find the empty, overturned stroller on the muddy embankment of the creek. In the flashlight’s white beam, they spot what looks like the baby’s body floating face-down in the black, stagnant water. (Bear Creek, a tributary of the Merced River, begins high in Yosemite backcountry; up there, it’s gorgeous and rugged and the water rushes across car-sized boulders, all framed by Douglas firs, sugar pines, and sequoias. Look up and see an impossibly blue sky with fast-moving wisps of vaporous clouds.) But here, far away from the creek’s source, the baby’s hooded sweatshirt is caught on some protruding branches next to an overturned shopping cart. (God only knows what else is down there.)
Eventually Benita confesses, though detectives observe that she is not very articulate; moreover, they say, she acts much younger than a girl of fifteen. Later, by piecing together her confession and forensic evidence, they’ll determine that Benita tried to drown the baby in the water fountain at Applegate Park. They’ll say that she then threw her baby into the creek and faked the kidnapping.
After this happened, we will always think of Benita’s dead baby when we go to Applegate Park, which functions as our town center; we go there most Sundays. Fragrant orange and pink rosebushes surround that fountain, and nearby children can visit a half-blind donkey at the petting zoo or an old bear that paces his enclosure for eighteen hours a day. If Benita’s baby boy had lived, surely she would have brought him to ride the miniature train that circles the perimeter of the same park in which she killed him.
But Benita won’t say more. She appears to be a broken girl. Detectives claim that because she appears to be mentally disturbed and because she functions below the level of an average fifteen-year-old, they might never get inside her head. What’s there to say when you have a baby at age fourteen and your seventeen-year-old boyfriend starts dating some other girl, some little slut from another high school, and now your whole life consists of Pampers and plastic baby bottles, milk-encrusted rubber nipples, and maybe once in a while your life gets supplemented by a Jerry Springer episode and an orange Popsicle?
I just went sort of crazy, she might have said. And, Having a baby is like really, really hard. Nobody understands. And if you can love babies when there’s nobody else to love, sometimes you hurt babies when there’s nobody else to hurt. You don’t mean to, exactly—you just can’t control it. Maybe it’s payback for all that’s ever been done to you.
9.
Our mothers tell us the story of La Llorona, which means the Wailing Woman. In the story, La Llorona’s husband leaves her for another woman. After being rejected and abandoned, La Llorona plots her revenge.
La Llorona decides to take her children on a picnic next to the river. She brings a quilt and a basket filled with strawberries, hard-boiled eggs, heart-shaped cakes, and honey water (because she really loves them). Imagine a spring day resplendent in all ways: the children play in the tall grass, they laugh, they tumble around.
But oh, what bad luck to have been born a child of La Llorona! (How many times, for how many hundreds of years, have these children had to endure the same fate with variations in details?) Soon she lures the children, one by one, through a low tunnel of shrubs to the river—probably across a raccoon or deer trail. The tunnel, enshrouded by eight-foot-tall reeds, leads to a waterside thicket; here frogs lounge on lily pads and dragonflies dive-bomb the water’s surface.
Then she drowns her children, one by one, and afterward she arranges their bodies side by side across the family quilt and kisses each of them in the middle of their cold foreheads. Later, when La Llorona’s husband finds the children, his screams can be heard for miles. She’s dragged away in chains and put into a dungeon, where she wakes up in shock and realizes what she’s done.
For all eternity she will cry out for her dead children. After she dies, her ghost will wander the riverbanks in search of new souls. Our mothers tell us that if we look carefully, we can see La Llorona crouching next to the water, furiously rubbing her hands with sand and gravel. They say that if we listen at night, we can hear moaning and rattling chains. If we’re not careful, they say, she might mistake us for her dead children.
Our mothers never talk about any moral of the story. They tell it because it’s a good story and they can alter the details as they please. But children are presented with the idea of mothers gone crazy, of mothers who use their children for revenge. Many children have nightmares about La Llorona, because all of our basic fears can be traced to our mothers, whether we realize it or not. During the day she combs our hair and kisses us. At night she’s the madwoman in the attic. It’s this duplicity that scares the hell out of us. All mothers have dual natures, and La Llorona’s pale face and leaf-strewn hair reminds us of this. So we dream about children floating beneath gentle currents, their faces obscured by the water, their small, icy hands floating to the surface. The simple lesson: Stay away from water! Don’t go out after dark! Be quiet and go to sleep! The deeper message: Do our mothers want to kill us? Is it not a question of if, but a question of when? And most importantly: If our fathers abandon our mothers for the “other woman,” should we opt out of the picnic next to the river? (We get these thoughts especially when walking next to creeks or canals or irrigation ditches.)
10.
Once a girl brought her infant to the final exam. She arrived late, all sweaty and exasperated, and I don’t remember exactly why she brought the baby—probably that her mother couldn’t babysit, so I said, Fine, fine, sit down, take the exam, don’t want you to fail on account of that, knowing these girls have enough problems as it is. So I offered to hold the baby throughout the exam; I jostled it about as I walked up and down the aisles patrolling for cheaters. It was weird, because suddenly I became a mother, teacher, grandmother all at once. I lost a little bit of my authority. I became a relative. A regular person.
Midway through the exam, when the baby started to fuss, I poked the baby’s mother on the arm and whispered, Do you have a bottle? She dug around in her backpack and (thank goodness) found one. I gave the bottle to the baby while students were bent over their exams. The baby sucked down its formula, making that gulping sound that babies make. They study you, their fat little fingers fondling the edges of the bottle, fondling your fingers, reaching for your nose, their bare toes. This one never took his eyes off me. Once he snapped the rubber nipple with his four teeth and then laughed loudly. The class heard this and then laughed too. The baby wanted us to love him, maybe to improve his chances of survival.
How quickly the border between classroom and home, personal and professional can dissolve! But it felt good to hold a baby in a classroom. I could breathe for a minute. A baby provides comic relief. A baby is funny and random and unscripted. But I could not fully enjoy the moment, because the whole time I was wrestling with ideas like Is this really a good message to be sending to students? Shouldn’t I send her away, saying “No children allowed,” because those are the rules? Will this baby distract the other students? How much do you bend the rules for these girls with their babies, these girls with the odds stacked so high against them?
11.
My teenage students have babies right in the middle of a semester. The San Joaquin Valley has the highest teen pregnancy rate of any region in the United States. My students call me up and say, “Miss, I just wanted to remind you that my baby is due in a couple days . . . so if you don’t see me in class . . . that’s why.” They disappear for a couple days and then reappear, their eyes s
lightly glazed. Back already? I say, because after my baby was born, I’d staggered around for two weeks feeling like I’d just completed the Bataan Death March. But for most teenagers, the body heals itself and springs back into shape almost immediately; life goes on. Evolutionarily speaking, a quick recovery makes sense. Biologically, humans can give birth at a relatively young age; consider that, on average, girls begin to menstruate at age twelve—sometimes as young as age eight. But to what advantage? Do species evolve to produce as many offspring as possible, even at the risk of mothers being socially and mentally immature? Is it better to throw our DNA into the mix as often as possible to improve the odds that at least some of our genetic material will survive? Consider, though, life within a tribe—all those hands, the elders to keep watch, to give advice, to admonish. Perhaps for some humans, the young-mother model works just fine. But without the tribe, without rules, who will watch over the girls in my town—these girls who often need mothering themselves—these girls with their babies in their low-rent apartments with boyfriends who sometimes marry them, most often do not?
After class one girl says proudly, “Look, Miss. I can already button my old jeans!” She holds up her blouse to reveal her small, swollen belly. Any evidence of her pregnancy has all but disappeared. Who would know that an eight-pound baby had recently been expelled from that same body?
At times I’m baffled by the lack of impact motherhood seems to have upon many of my students. Many girls don’t appear to be visibly moved by the event of childbirth. Or at least they don’t know how to express their feelings about it. Afterward they return to class; I search, but cannot discern any real change in their eyes. So? Well? I say. How did it go? The girls often shrug. “He weighed nine pounds,” they might say, or, “He’s already sleeping through the night, Miss.” They’ll tell me details that they’ve heard other mothers say, common quips that you hear on TV or in doctors’ waiting rooms—bland, unrevealing details that seem scripted. Many of these same girls want to write essays about the births of their babies, but they almost always lack the language to express anything more than a basic plot outline. Example:
My water bag broke right in the middle of the grocery store. It felt so weird. My mom drove me to the hospital. They put me in bed and got me all hooked up to the machines and then the pain got really bad. It went on for hours. They ended up doing a C-section, thank god. The labor lasted over twenty hours but then the baby was born healthy and now I am so happy. I love my baby so much!
In the margins of their papers, I’ll press for specific details and analysis: Describe the pain! Describe the baby! Do you feel any different? What obstacles do you face now?
12.
My cousin X. and I practically grew up together. Sometimes she’d stay at our house for seven, eight, nine days, and then I’d stop talking to her. I’d give her the cold shoulder. I just wouldn’t talk anymore. She’d say, “Are you mad at me?” I’d shrug. “Are you sick of me?” she’d say. “A little,” I’d say. I didn’t know how to articulate that I needed my bedroom back. I needed to close the door and read and think. I was that kind of kid. I needed solitude to feel normal. Sometimes I would just lock my door and stay in there the whole day. I’d stare at the ceiling. I remember saying, “I just need to think,” not really knowing what I needed to think about. Then she’d say, “Okay, I’d better go home then. I guess I’ll call my mom.” I loved X. the way only cousins can love other cousins, kids who are thrown together in this world by way of shared mothers, mothers who sometimes turn parenting into an informal commune, the philosophy being You take them today, I’ll take them tomorrow, the mission statement being Together we will keep these children alive. X.’s mother had gotten pregnant when she was eighteen. The guy ended up marrying her and then a couple years later he dumped two-year-old X. and my aunt onto Grandma’s front lawn. He tossed their clothes out of the car and all over the grass. Then he drove away. End of story.
So we understood why X. got pregnant at age eighteen. She started looking for love in all the wrong places—love with surfer guys with names like Travis and Dave. One day she got herself knocked up and her stepfather kicked her out of the house and she moved in with us. “I just can’t have an abortion again,” she told me. “I won’t do it.” The born-again Christians had gotten ahold of her, pressing antiabortion pamphlets into her hands, pamphlets that contained gruesome pictures of dead fetuses, their tiny hands awash in fresh blood. She’d convinced herself that her dead baby was waiting for her in heaven and for the time being the baby was being cared for by angels, who had it gently by the hand, and that one day it would be reunited with its mommy-on-earth, but only if mommy-on-earth was willing to call herself a sinner and change her wanton ways. “I’m having this baby,” she said defiantly. It was a common trope back then.
But babies get annoying real fast. They get bigger and then they squirm away from you and then they call you names like butthead and they take off their shoes and hurl them at you and as soon as you get the shoes laced up again, they pry them off and toss them behind the dresser, and inevitably you lose that shoe and now you’ve got four mismatched shoes without mates. Toddlers can be hard to take, especially when they start saying NO all the time and that’s the only word they know. They poke you in the eyes when you’re sleeping and you’re dead tired and they always have runny noses and the snot runs into their mouths and they lick at it with the edges of their tongues or smear it onto damp encrusted sleeves. They jump on you when you don’t expect it, knees and elbows jamming into your ribs, into your chest, into your cheekbones, and the more you try to wrench them off, the more they want to jump on you again; sometimes you want to shove them off and maybe pinch their little arms or yank a clump of hair or leave them in the crib even if they’re crying and calling you so pitifully, and you know this borders on child abuse, but it’s really hard when there’s no father and you are it—the kid’s sun and moon.
13.
My daughter and my fourteen-year-old roommate’s daughter—born on the same night, the same hour—are now thirteen years old. When I look at my own daughter I cannot believe that a girl of roughly her age and temperament could be a mother. She slams doors. She stomps around. She throws up her hands and says, “Are you kidding me?” She sketches pictures of horses and then crumples them up. She announces, “I’ll take animals over people any day” (and she means it). And although her fingers are now longer than mine—her hands more graceful—I cannot, no matter how hard I try, imagine those hands changing a diaper.
Would our daughters have anything in common? My roommate’s daughter, according to county statistics (based on her mother’s age and ethnicity), will very likely have a baby before she turns eighteen. Then the girl will most likely drop out of school and struggle to care for her child in this place of leached soil turned to clay. My roommate’s daughter may never know about the migratory waterfowl such as Canadian geese and whistling swans that once stopped off in our valley marshlands—most of which have been drained to rechannel water for irrigation. And maybe the babies, in some weird way, reflect our need to find beauty once again in this landscape. In any case, I suspect our connection to the land runs deeper than we know.
As for our daughters, the fortuneteller might peer into her crystal ball or examine our girls’ palms and see a whole web of alternate realities. Anything can happen, she might say. For all of us, the road is wide open.
ZADIE SMITH
Some Notes on Attunement
FROM The New Yorker
THE FIRST TIME I heard her I didn’t hear her at all. My parents did not prepare me. (The natural thing in these situations is to blame the parents.) She was nowhere to be found on their four-foot-tall wood-veneer hi-fi. Given the variety of voices you got to hear on that contraption, her absence was a little strange. Burning Spear and the Beatles; Marley, naturally, and Chaka Khan; Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and James Taylor; Luther Vandross, Anita Baker, Alexander O’Neal. And Dylan, always Dy
lan. Yet nothing of the Canadian with the open-tuned guitar. I don’t see how she could have been unknown to them—it was her peculiar curse to never really be unknown. Though maybe they had heard her and simply misunderstood.
My parents loved music, as I love music, but you couldn’t call any of us whatever the plural of muso is. The Smiths owned no rare tracks, no fascinating B-sides (and no records by the Smiths). We wanted songs that made us dance, laugh, or cry. The only thing that was in any way unusual about the collection was the manner in which it combined, in one crate, the taste of a young black woman and an old white man. It had at least that much eclecticism to it. However, we did not tend to listen to white women singing very often. Those particular voices were surplus to requirements, somehow, having no natural demographic within the household. A singer like Elkie Brooks (really Elaine Bookbinder—a Jewish girl, from Salford) was the closest we got, though Elkie had that telltale rasp in her throat, linking her, in the Smith mind, to Tina Turner or Della Reese. We had no Kate Bush records, or even the slightest hint of Stevie Nicks, raspy though she may be. The first time I was aware of Debbie Harry’s existence, I was in college. We had Joan Armatrading and Aretha and Billie and Ella. What did we need with white women?
It was the kind of college gathering where I kept sneaking Blackstreet and Aaliyah albums into the CD drawer, and friends kept replacing them with other things. And then there she was, suddenly: a piercing sound, a sort of wailing—a white woman, wailing, picking out notes in a nonsequence. Out of tune—or out of anything I understood at the time as tune. I picked up the CD cover and frowned at it: a skinny blonde with heavy bangs, covered in blue. My good friend Tamara—a real singer, serious about music—looked over at me, confused. You don’t like Joni? I turned the CD over disdainfully, squinted at the track list. Oh, was that Joni? And very likely went on to say something facetious about white-girl music, the kind of comment I had heard, inverted, when I found myself called upon to defend black men swearing into a microphone. Another friend, Jessica, pressed me again: You don’t like Joni? She closed her eyes and sang a few lines of what I now know to be “California.” That is, she sang pleasing, not uninteresting words, but in a strange, strangulated falsetto—a kind of Kafkaesque “piping”—which I considered odd, coming out of Jess, whom I knew to have, ordinarily, a beautiful, black voice. A soul voice. You don’t like Joni?