Karen pulled the door open to escape and found Puldron, alive, standing by the mail table. Her reaction was relief, then irritation. The damage to Lila’s psyche had already been done.
Puldron exhaled wetly and continued his work as she pushed by him. He didn’t move; there was plenty of room for the frantic woman to get by with her ugly stroller. He flipped the page, flipped the page again, until he found something workable. With small fine movements he tugged at the paper, tearing along the crease buried in the booklet’s stapled spine. It was a picture of a complicated bowl, asymmetrical and made of iron: an object with gravity. The bowl had a vaguely birdlike shape, like it could glide from on high. At the same time, it was large and surely very heavy. In the trough of the bowl, some idiot had placed a couple of puny lemons, shattering the remarkable somberness of the piece. The salespeople behind these photos wanted to make you believe you could live a happy homemaker’s life with these objects, but in fact the best thing an object could do was to remove you from your life, offer you a portal into the world of pure form. When handling a truly well-balanced piece, you could feel its proportions in your body, in the rightness of your hands traveling its surface. But it was no use speaking of pure form with the people you came across. This was an age in which everything in the world emerged from the womb with a price already stamped upon it.
While there was nothing exactly wrong with the park, there was not much right with it either. The light-colored grass was brittle to the touch and though it looked like it needed water, between bristly tufts the earth was soft and muddy. To her right and left loose bands of teenage boys and girls shoved one another, the girls letting out terrifying screams and then laughing at Karen when she turned to look at them. “That lady’s never seen someone have fun in her entire life,” one girl said to another. “She’s like, I’m scared!” the other girl replied. As she shoved the ugly red stroller over the chalky path Karen wondered what type of body language she was projecting to the surrounding world. When she had left the hospital with Lila in her arms it seemed as though she had stepped onto a different planet. People looked at her now only to get out of her way. If someone stopped to speak to her, linger on her, it was always a woman — a woman with advice on how to mother, a woman who wanted to know the baby’s name or age. She had emerged into a world made only of women, and although they used a friendly tone they spoke to her like a new employee whose incompetence was guaranteed.
Karen was surprised to see herself push past the fountain she had intended to show Lila. But what would they do with the fountain anyhow? Crouch alongside it, peer over its gray lip into the fake blue water at a smattering of pennies, twigs, the drifting body-casings of insects. Lift the baby up and dangle her over the surface so that she could swipe at the dirty water with her hand. In the larger sense, all of this would be forgotten by the child almost as it was happening. Even now, as something inside her mother unspooled nearby, Lila seemed unchanged. She didn’t cry, she let out only a prolonged gurgle as her body shook, propelled over gravel. Her blue eyes reached eagerly for the green grass, the rough stones. Karen took Lila’s silence as license to continue: the walk was loosening her, it erased the ugliness of Puldron’s mouth, the compacted feeling that came with being at home.
Instead of the fountain, she would take her baby to see the water. But there was no real water in this city, Karen thought to herself, water you could sink your body into to feel more alive. They left the park and passed the library, the grocery, an Italian restaurant that Karen hadn’t eaten at since she was in college, visiting a friend. They passed a bodega where a woman sat on a squat stool, arranging many attractive, brightly colored oranges so that they covered the misshapen yellowing ones beneath. The other mothers were envious of Lila’s personality: she scored very well on the rubrics for head-turning, object memory, and facial recognition, which indicated that she was in the process of developing a high IQ — but she rarely cried or complained, which allowed the other mothers to experience her as a being of pure adorability, a sponge for affection that asked nothing in return. But the daughter that Karen had wanted was a daughter who talked, who chattered, who would help her become more of a human being and who would remake the world for her in her own eyes, a daughter she hoped she would have in the future. “I love you just like you are,” she said out loud.
In Karen’s grip the stroller’s handlebar was shaking, twisting left and right and left, as though there were someone holding on to the front of the stroller, pulling it. Lila’s soft white face began to crumple, from its open center came a high wail as the contraption shook her body. Karen stopped and went to see what had gone wrong. As the apparatus tipped forward it drew a lazy arc in the air, moving slow and quick at the same time, making it look like the baby was diving forward. By falling onto her knees and thrusting her arms blindly out, Karen was just able to keep Lila from hitting the sidewalk.
Karen looked at the stroller, at the child. The inside of her head felt slow with panic, and the sound of her daughter crying muffled her thoughts. The wheel had come off, she could see it a few yards back, and who knew where the piece that held it on had been lost? The stroller would have to be left behind; she couldn’t carry it and the baby both. At the same time, the stroller was so expensive she knew she would have to come back for it. It had been a high-quality model, brightly colored and flashy. It had a chassis of feather-light, heat-resistant titanium, and its parts had been manufactured in Germany by a company that made some of the less important parts of airplanes. She and her husband had agreed it was the best model, safe and firmly made. When she wheeled it around, with its geometric-patterned diaper bag and its plastic frame shiny as a fast food playground, she felt bumbling, cartoonish, gaudy like a clown.
Karen gathered Lila, red with tears, into her arms and began walking. It was only a few moments later that she remembered to think of a place to go.
In the café in the neighborhood where people came mostly to shop, there were only two other customers: a young man on a laptop, his large head squeezed between headphones, and an older woman eating a salad, who might have been a young grandmother. She sat down at the table farthest from both of them. Her arms ached, and she had blisters where heel and instep met the straps of her sandals. She felt guilty. She didn’t want to go back for the stroller, but to buy a new one would symbolize to her husband that she was unable to keep valuable objects in her possession. “Karen,” he’d said tenderly when she lost a good sweater that she’d just bought, “You’re a net with one big hole in it. Everything just slips through you.” When she got up from the sofa and prepared to leave the house with the new stroller, certain to be similarly ugly and large, she knew she’d feel his eyes on her, showing and stifling concern at the same time.
With her gaze fixed on an empty corner, Karen adopted the flat facial expression of someone reading, though she had nothing to look at. She slid off her shoes. She just wanted to drink the sweet, tepid tea and think of nothing. But from the corner of her eye, she saw the older woman watching her between brief, performative glances at a magazine that had recently been rolled up into a small, tight tube. As it lay on the table, it curled slowly in on itself once again. Karen looked over at her, and looked away again too late.
“Did you borrow that shirt from someone?” the older woman asked, smiling toothily and leaning toward Karen.
“No,” Karen said. It was her own shirt. Karen turned to Lila and pretended that she was doing something involving and important with her. Taking a corner of Lila’s soft yellow blanket, she dabbed the little face gently, over and over again.