The Babysitter at Rest

by Jen George

  Having a baby will open me up. The experience will make everything I’ve been through worth it. The gifts that are bestowed. The rewards and honors. The love. Yes, there’s a price, though I’m told you can’t know what it is until you’ve been through it, but that is life. Yes, I may become fat, but that’s because my body will be doing what it needs to do to carry the baby. I hear if you keep positive energy, that’s all that’s needed and you won’t get too fat. Also, a juice fast for six months after birth as well as prenatal ballet classes five days a week at two hundred and eighty-five dollars per class. I look into classes that accept credit cards. I put my finger in the ovulation machine: You will always live with demons—forever with certain monkeys on your back.

  My daughter will be beautiful, though her value will not be determined by her looks. She will look good in clothing and without. She will be adored but respected. She will follow a clear life path, free of too many obstructions, full of loving and successful friends who wear beautiful dresses, have lovely parties in the desert or at the beach, and who have about them an airy lightness. She’ll know how to go about getting what she wants. She will be capable. She will not have crying jags. She will not be burdened by the way the sun casts light midday or by the way some people walk. She’ll never have to purchase an ovulation machine. She’ll have a driver’s license and health insurance and a home free of trash. I put my finger in the ovulation machine: A fantasist’s delusions.

  I’d like to have a baby, but what if:

  1. They’re ugly

  2. They’re too needy or colicky or strong-willed

  3. They’re not my type of person

  4. I resent the time spent investing in someone else’s future as I myself have failed to develop in any area

  5. They resent me for my massive credit card debt

  Stress is a big factor in infertility. I’ll do yoga and deep breathing. I’ll move my body more and come several times a day using a baby-bottle-shaped vibrator in a gender-neutral color so as not to influence the sex of the future baby. Frequent sexual release also leads to fewer crying jags and helps to keep the mind free from dark visions of the future.

  I go to the crystal shop and charge six hundred dollars on my credit card for a piece of star sapphire that will align me with my higher purpose. The palm reader at the crystal shop tells me to talk to the stone, to confide in it. “I have eaten full-sized burritos with both guacamole and sour cream for lunch and dinner the past four days in a row. Each night I’ve made coconut mousse using the cream of coconut from a can of coconut milk containing two thousand calories,” I whisper to the star sapphire. “I am lost. SOS. Please send help. I spend most of my days watching old television shows or thinking of dessert, or both. The subjects of the programs I watch are cautionary tales about aging women with the inability to be truthful, even to themselves, about their age, forever engaged in dangerous and compulsive sexual behaviors to mask their extreme fear of death.”

  Though the ovulation machine has refused to tell me when I’ll be ovulating, I suspect I am at this moment, because of the viscosity of my vaginal mucus. I put my finger in the ovulation machine to see if it will be forced to do its job; the machine sends an electric shock through my body that feels something like a joke-shop hand buzzer: Hahahahaha.

  Tunnel vision, while useful for things like football, can be detrimental when seeking to have a baby. I read about it in Beginning to Fear Your Mortality: Have a Baby to Help Distract and Comfort You from Your Decline. From the book:

  The baby looks at you from the multiverse and thinks “There is a desperate, donkey-like person.” Who wants all that anxiety? Who wants to be born to a donkey-like person? The baby feels you are desperate. The baby sees your silent disappointments, everything you wanted to be that has not been, and your baby stays put, up in the multiverse, possibly somewhere within the Virgo cluster, but maybe not even that close.

  I research the Virgo Cluster; there are so many places my baby could be. I put my finger in the ovulation machine: Get outside and/or a life.

  I’d like to name him Horace. He will be a lyric poet and a Sagittarius. He will bat his eyelashes and men and women will swoon in the streets. He’ll write an autobiography dedicated to his loving mother who resides in a chalet in the Swiss Alps. I wave from the mountain as I ski down an expert slope while wearing top-of-the-line gear in the film about his life. I put my finger in the ovulation machine: A Horace is a horse of course of course. I do not want any son of mine resembling a horse facially.

  I swipe my credit card through the ovulation machine in an attempt to bribe it into telling me something useful. Insufficient funds, it reads.

  Studies have found that the Omega-3’s in fish oil can ease tension, irritability, tantrums, and wild mood swings in women. Studies have also shown that prolonged consumption of Omega-3’s in fish oil make women who are prone to flakiness more likely to follow through with things like writing résumés and returning texts and emails. I charge a nine hundred dollar drum of fish oil to my credit card. I notice few if any changes as I start taking it, but maybe by the time the gallon is consumed, in five hundred and thirty days, there will be a difference. I’ve started to keep a fish oil diary:

  Day 1: Took it

  Day 2: Took it

  Day 3: Took it again

  Day 14: Haven’t taken it in a couple days, but took it today

  Day 17: Took it. Back on track

  Day 18: Took it, burping somewhat

  I’m hopeful.

  I switch my ovulation machine to the futures-in-child-rearing mode, which I’ve been somewhat afraid to do up to this point, and stick my hand in the machine. Child A, it reads across the screen, Post-partum depression followed by inability to lose baby weight. An unceasing tension in your body and a pain in your head as you hold your child, who can only fall asleep while clutching your hair too tightly and biting your nipple with the intention of violence. I remove my right hand from the machine and place my left hand inside. Child B: Possible sociopathic or narcissistic personality disorder apparent from birth. A discontented boy prone to histrionics, tantrums, purposeful bed wetting, wrecking shit out of boredom, and not being able to wipe his own ass until he is twelve years old. Damien-like. Obnoxious. Manipulative in the extreme. Egotistical in the extreme. Lazy in the extreme. Complainer in the extreme. Delusions of grandeur. Sits on his duff and demands very particular homemade sandwiches. Frequently strangles domestic animals. I switch back to my right hand. Child C: As an adult will work at Best Buy.

  I’d like to name him Rueben Remus, but I fear he’d be a hypnotist and fancy talker. I put my finger in the ovulation machine: Ain’t no doctor. I think every mother would like the potential for her son to be a doctor, but as I’m not a mother, I can’t speak to that.

  You’re OK is a good name because I always liked when people said that to me. There is reassurance in that name. She’d reassure herself and others in instances of injury such as falling down the stairs, getting hit in the head by a soccer ball traveling at high speed, slipping on ice and hitting her tailbone so hard she would like to cry but doesn’t, or being knocked down by a rogue wave while wading in the ocean. On the other hand, there may be an element of mediocrity associated with the name, because of the “OK,” that I’m unwilling to accept.

  Atta Girl is a sweet name. She will always receive encouragement, especially in softball; people will support her, cheer her on, be kind to her. She’ll have a sense of pride and accomplishment. I put my hand in the ovulation machine: This is torture, it says on the screen. I knock the ovulation machine from the special hexagonal mosaic-tile pedestal, made especially for ovulation machines, which cost me four hundred dollars on my credit card. The ovulation machine begins to print receipts of all of our transactions, every response it’s ever given me. It prints a tally of my credit card purchases, including the ten thousand dollars I charged for the machine in the first place. I rip up the receipts and give the machine a swift stomp. The ovulat
ion machine prints out the secrets I’ve been telling the star sapphire. Through the receipts, I see the reality of how bad my burrito and coconut mousse eating habits have become, how my meals are the only thing I’ve been whispering into the stone that is meant to align me with my higher purpose. I collapse on the floor and cry for several jags. Once I collect myself I pick up the pedestal, from which many mirrored mosaic tiles have broken off, and I place the ovulation machine back upon it. There’s a dent in the machine from where I stomped it. The screen lights up: Due to recent damage, potential used retail value for this OM has gone down considerably.

  INSTRUCTION

  Origins of action

  I was sexually attractive, which is highly valued in college and art circles, as well as other hierarchal scenes mimicking the structure of capitalism wherein older men with large hands finger younger women who read novels and possibly write or paint or play an instrument and make declarative statements such as, “If I had to work at an office in midtown nine-to-five I’d jump off the George Washington Bridge” or “I’ve never been out of the country.”

  The Teacher/older man with large hands lives for the young woman saying things like this. It reminds him of something long-lost. Inside the office, after the first Teacher/Student conference, fingering and ass play commence because The Teacher/older man with large hands assumes that, being young, the young woman has not, as yet, had good ass play. Afterwards, the young woman watches The Teacher as he sits at his desk. She regards him with something like love.

  The young woman before

  A small screen plays hundreds of videos in succession. Books lay open, partially skimmed through. The young woman looks in the mirror, talks on the telephone, changes outfits/costumes: Individual, Careless, New Mexican, French, The Moon, The Sun, The Cosmos, 19th-Century European Gone Sufi, Focused, Alone, Heavy, Light, Hills Old, Baby New. A costume/persona is decided upon and worn 2–3 months at a time. A party. The arrival of guests. The departure of everyone. The lights go out. The young woman waits. The books collect dust. Roaches and mice move in. Gray hairs begin to sprout upon her head and she thinks maybe her face is sagging prematurely. The apartment is dark for days, then weeks and months. The young woman sits inside, waiting. She stays perfectly still, waiting.

  Orientation

  For five days we are to lie below the raised office on black trash bags without moving, without eating or drinking. Hunger goes easily. We are to piss and shit ourselves, get bedsores, the bedsores are to be infected by fecal matter. We are to become ill and vomit and to let The Warehouse rats crawl upon us, allow the racehorse ghosts to haunt us. We are to realize the smallness of things, become desensitized to personal relationships, no longer care, regard one another with disgust, remember every awful sexual experience in vivid detail, remember every wrong that has been committed against us, recall every rejection and disappointment, feel all unrequited love, our unrealized possibility, we are to conjure all the waiting we have ever done, all the time that has passed. We are to feel the immense guilt of wasted time, we are to forget our families, we are to think of our parents dying if they’ve not already and if they have to remember our first knowledge of their death. We are to leave memory behind, we are to abandon sentimentality, we are to understand that the construct of the individual does not exist, that greatness exists only outside the self. We are to believe that the time beneath the office is eternity.

  On the second day a guy called Rick gets up, says, “Fuck this,” walks out the door. Later the same day, a girl named Marlene gets up and stands below the middle of the office, says, “This is abusive. Or illegal. Let’s get out of here.” She waits for what seems like a very long time, then exits alone. Some people leave on the third day, they crawl out of The Warehouse laughing or in tears or like they just woke up from a nap. They will not be allowed back.

  At the end of fifth day, The Teacher comes down the stairs from the office and calls time. Everyone gets up. No one speaks. I remain on the ground. Bill kicks me.

  “The Teacher called time,” Bill says.

  “What are you trying to do?” Alice asks.

  I stay on the ground.

  “You can all go. I’ll see you in the morning,” The Teacher says. Everyone leaves. I stay on the ground. The Teacher stands over me for an hour. It may be longer, but I’ve lost sense of time. “Now it is really time,” The Teacher says. “You may get up.”

  “I can stay,” I say.

  “I know,” The Teacher says. “But getting up is what’s required.”

  The Warehouse/course work

  The Warehouse is a temporary structure with a mirrored exterior, built by admitted students prior to orientation, located on the infield of the Aqueduct racetrack in Queens, off-season. Inside The Warehouse, various materials and tools: sheetrock; plywood; Plexiglas; table saws; welders; cement mixers; glue; epoxy; caulk; a first aid kit; a table upon which to draw doodles or scratch names, butts, or penises in butts; old calendars defiled by butt and penis drawings; drywall; fiberglass; ropes; whips; hooks; horseshoes; shovels; latex gloves; etc.; and a thin-walled bathroom in which everyone knows you are taking a shit.

  At The Warehouse, the students must produce one painting, sculpture, piece of music, film, or proposal for a performance piece per week, a larger project in any discipline each month, and a final project at the end of the program. Students must attend interviews for menial jobs of their own choosing via Craigslist Classified ads at the rate of four interviews per week. Students must do carpentry, maintenance work, and heavy manual labor to improve the Aqueduct field and stadium for the coming season: building and installing new spectator seats, painting Carvel and Nathan’s hotdog signs, replacing betting windows, repairing the roof, disposing of all losing tickets, oiling the horse turnstiles, repairing the stables, cleaning all bathrooms in the vicinity in detail, landscaping, etc. Students are also required to bury the dead horses from the previous racing season at the center of the track’s infield, just outside The Warehouse, at the rate of one horse per week.

  Notes

  I’m a good pupil. I’m decent with tools but I’m a slow learner when it comes to physical labor, especially digging horse graves, though it’s widely agreed that I paint the Carvel signs best. I get the tip of the ice cream cone just right.

  Suggested reading

  Students are assigned a reading list: the Craigslist New York jobs page (to be read daily), Hegel (all), Schopenhauer (all), Kierkegaard (all), Weil (all). Additionally, the classics (all).

  Early work

  I paint Your Unceasing Fantasy Will Not Conjure the Desired into Being, a series of one hundred watercolors depicting women in various states of longing/desire/dreaming/despair with their eyes slightly crossed, mouths mostly open, vaginas reluctantly dry, in the first month at school. It’s hailed by The Teacher/older man with large hands as “sexy as hell while being totally amateur and bad.” I’ll admit that the praise went straight to my head.

  Office hours

  Sitting at an Irish bar in Queens, the young woman drinks a second whiskey and makes an announcement to The Teacher/older man with large hands: “Maybe I’ll do my next project on the female orgasm as the resonating shock waves of asteroids colliding in space to form the universe. Residual ‘cosmic’ orgasms are attained when the exact frequency/energetic level of the initial cosmic collision and subsequent reverberation resulting in the world’s birth is reached; female orgasm as the genesis of worlds. Or one world, at least.”

  The Teacher/older man with large hands has difficulty stifling laughter and turns his face into his work jacket. Tears come out of his eyes from the strain of trying not to laugh. He lets out a snort and then pretends to cough, drinks whiskey. “Ooh, my throat. This weather,” The Teacher says. “Welp, cool idea. Really neat.” He succeeds in stifling laughter.

  “How about a shoulder massage?” The Teacher/older man with large hands commences shoulder massage on the young woman. The Teacher pulls out an envelope of photogr
aphs. “This is me as a baby. This is me and my aunt, the one I was in love with, at Coney Island. This is me at twelve, with my younger brother, in our shared room. This is me at sixteen with my friend Bud who once gave me a hand job when we were drunk; he later killed two people in California. This is me in New Mexico with my ex-girlfriend, you remind me of her, but you are newer. This is me with my Teacher.”

  The young woman and The Teacher/older man with large hands continue to drink whiskey at the Irish bar in which a large-breasted woman with a shit stain on the ass of her yellowed dress weeps while watching Wheel of Fortune and eating french fries. It is winter.

  The Warehouse office

  Stairs lead up to a large office structure located in the center of The Warehouse. The office contains an eight thousand dollar espresso machine; a hardback first edition copy of the Combined Collected Works of Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht with a 3D cover made up of two enormous dueling phalli, powered by a microscopic battery, worth 3.8 million dollars; Fingers in Buttholes: A Visual History by Guys Into Buttholes; The Communist Manifesto printed with ink from a giant squid on gold leaf pages, with a ruby-and-blood diamond (blood intact for tone effect) studded cover; Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, 278th Edition (Signet); and The Collected Works of The Teacher/Older Man With Large Hands—essays, memoir, rants, fictions, videotaped performances, letters, business emails, imaginings, musings, manifestos, predictions, apologies, sexual fantasies, doodles, photo booth pictures, photographs, sculptures, constructions, paintings.