I fed the birds outside my window. Sparrows, I believed them to be.
Q. Is the sparrow a native of this country?
A. It is now, but not long ago there were no sparrows in America.
Q. Why were the sparrows brought to this country?
A. Because the insects were killing so many trees that the sparrows were needed to destroy the insects.
Q. Did the sparrows save the trees?
A. Yes, the trees were saved.
Q. In wintertime when there are no insects and snow is on the ground, does not the sparrow have a hard time?
A. Yes, he has a very hard time, and many die of hunger.
The woman with the white hair and the mustache always held up the line at Rite Aid. Sometimes I waited fifteen minutes just to buy my antacids. Ever since I’d gotten pregnant again, I’d gobbled up a pack a day. But my big belly never swayed her. She would not be hurried. One afternoon I watched as she presented her items one by one to the handsome young clerk.
“You’re lucky,” she said to him. “You still have it all ahead of you. My sister and I both have genius IQs. I went to Cornell. Do you know what that is?”
The clerk smiled but shook his head no.
“It’s an Ivy League school. But it doesn’t matter. It all comes to nothing in the end.”
Carefully, he bagged her groceries. Toothpaste, itching cream, off-brand candy. “Take care of yourself,” he told her when she left, but she lingered in the doorway. “When are you working again?” she asked him. “Do you have your schedule yet?”
7
The baby’s eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she’d stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she’d washed up on.
The Manicheans believed the world was filled with imprisoned light, fragments of a God who destroyed himself because he no longer wished to exist. This light could be found trapped inside man and animals and plants, and the Manichean mission was to try to release it. Because of this, they abstained from sex, viewing babies as fresh prisons of entrapped light.
I remember the first time I said the word to a stranger. “It’s for my daughter,” I said. My heart was beating too fast, as if I might be arrested.
In the early days, I only ventured out of the house with her when we were desperate for food or diapers, and then I went only as far as Rite Aid. Rite Aid was a block from our apartment. It was exactly the distance I could make in the freezing cold, carrying the baby in my arms. Also the farthest distance I could sprint if she started screaming again and I had to go home. These calculations were important because she screamed a lot in those days. Enough that our neighbors averted their eyes when they saw us, enough that it felt like a car alarm was perpetually going off in my head.
After you left for work, I would stare at the door as if it might open again.
My love for her seemed doomed, hopelessly unrequited. There should be songs for this, I thought, but if there were I didn’t know them.
She was small enough then to still fall asleep on your chest. Sometimes I fed you dinner with a spoon so you wouldn’t have to raise your arms and wake her.
What the baby liked best was speed. If I took her outside, I had to walk quickly, even trot a little. If I slowed down or stopped, she would start wailing again. It was the dead of winter and some days I walked or trotted for hours, softly singing.
What did you do today, you’d say when you got home from work, and I’d try my best to craft an anecdote for you out of nothing.
I read a study once about sleep deprivation. The researchers made cat-sized islands of sand in the middle of a pool of water, then placed very tired cats on top of them. At first, the cats curled up perfectly on the sand and slept, but eventually they’d sprawl out and wake up in water. I can’t remember what they were trying to prove exactly. All I took away was that the cats went crazy.
The days with the baby felt long but there was nothing expansive about them. Caring for her required me to repeat a series of tasks that had the peculiar quality of seeming both urgent and tedious. They cut the day up into little scraps.
And that phrase—“sleeping like a baby.” Some blonde said it blithely on the subway the other day. I wanted to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear.
But the smell of her hair. The way she clasped her hand around my fingers. This was like medicine. For once, I didn’t have to think. The animal was ascendant.
I ordered a CD online that promised to put even the most colicky baby to sleep. It sounded like a giant heart beating. As if you had been forced to live inside such a heart with no possibility of escape.
Our friend R stopped by one night to see us while it was playing. “Wow. That is some bad techno music,” he said. He sat on the couch and drank beer while I paced with the baby. R’s job involved traveling around the world, talking about the future and how we might rush towards it. I walked up and down the hall, listening to him talk to you about the end of everything. The invention of the ship is also the invention of the shipwreck, he was saying. Twenty steps forward, then twenty steps back again. Thump, thump, thump, thump went the music. But the heartbeat song only enraged the baby. On and on she screamed. “This is intense,” R said after an hour or two. R who is not our friend anymore and began not to be on the night in question.
8
Then one day I discovered something that surprised me. The baby was calm at Rite Aid. She seemed to like the harsh light of it, the shelves of plenty. For fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, she’d suspend her fierce judgment of the world and fall silent there. And when she did, a tiny space would clear in my head and I could think again. So I began to go there with her every day, wandering up and down the narrow aisles while the terrible drugstore music played. I’d stare at the lightbulbs and the cold medicine and the mousetraps and everything looked strange and useless to me. The last time I’d felt that way I was sixteen and lived in Savannah, Georgia. I wore moth-eaten dresses and fancied myself an existentialist. The days were long then too.
We ran into the dog-walking neighbor once on our way there. He seemed to hate everything except my baby. “Serious expression,” he said approvingly. “Won’t suffer fools gladly.” The baby gave him her thousand-yard stare. She made a little sound like a growl maybe. He wanted her to pet his dog, a giant brooding mastiff with a spiked collar. “He’s a good dog,” he told me. “He hates drunks and blacks and he’s not too crazy about Spanish either.”
Sleep when the baby sleeps, people said. Don’t go to bed angry.
If I knew telekinesis, I would send this spoon over there to feed that baby.
My best friend came to visit from far away. She took two planes and a train to get to Brooklyn. We met at a bar near my apartment and drank in a hurry as the babysitter’s meter ticked. In the past, we’d talked about books and other people, but now we talked only of our respective babies, hers sweet-faced and docile, mine at war with the world. We applied our muzzy intellects to a theory of light. That all are born radiating light but that this light diminished slowly (if one was lucky) or abruptly (if one was not). The most charismatic people — the poets, the mystics, the explorers — were that way because they had somehow managed to keep a bit of this light that was meant to have dimmed. But the shocking thing, the unbearable thing it seemed, was that the natural order was for this light to vanish. It hung on sometimes through the twenties, a glint here or there in the thirties, and then almost always the eyes went dark.