How the puma affects others, two
We live at the intersection of Penn Station, the Port Authority, and the Lincoln Tunnel. Very few babies make their home in this area, while a relatively high number of men without homes make their homes here. Between the front door of our building and the butcher shop at the corner there lives a very slim Hispanic man who sometimes sweeps the sidewalk, and who sometimes helps the catering company next door move their boxes, and who sometimes just stands around. Once I saw him directing buses out of the nearby bus parking lot. He is sometimes well, and smoking a cigarette and making conversation with the catering and food cart and garment guys on the block, and he is at other times not well, and half-asleep on the sidewalk. When I first moved to the neighborhood, one afternoon when I walked by him, and he was sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against the wall of the butcher shop, he spat on me and shouted, “Ugly!” After he spat on me a second time, I took to crossing the street to avoid him, especially when I was pregnant, and generally more cautious than usual.
But in those first couple months at home with the puma, the environment around me blurred, like in those photos taken with the f-stop set just so, and one day I didn’t notice this man who lives on our block, and so I didn’t cross the street to avoid him, I instead walked right by him, and I heard someone shouting at me — it was him shouting at me—“God bless you! What a beautiful baby boy. Take care of that boy.” This has consistently been his response to our passing ever since. Even though the puma now occasionally wears a dress. Now, when we walk by, he and the little girl invariably exchange a high five. But not really invariably. When he is smoking, he suggests that she not come too near.
Notes on some twentieth-century writers
Flannery O’Connor: No children.
Eudora Welty: No children. One children’s book.
Hilary Mantel, Janet Frame, Willa Cather, Jane Bowles, Patricia Highsmith, Elizabeth Bishop, Hannah Arendt, Iris Murdoch, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Mavis Gallant, Simone de Beauvoir, Barbara Pym: No children.
Helen Gurley Brown, author of Having It All: no children.
Katherine Anne Porter: No children, many husbands.
Alice Munro: Three children. Two husbands. First story collection at age thirty-seven.
Toni Morrison: Two children. First novel at age thirty-nine.
Penelope Fitzgerald: Three children. First novel age sixty. Then eight more novels.
John Updike: Many children. Many books. First book age twenty-five.
Saul Bellow: Many children. Many wives. Many books. First at age twenty-nine.
Doris Lessing: Left two of her three children to be raised by her father. Later semiadopted a teenage girl, a peer of one of her sons. Said, and had to repeatedly handle questions about having said, that there was “nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.” Many books.
Muriel Spark: One child, born in Southern Rhodesia during her marriage to Sydney Oswald Spark, who suffered from manic depression. She moved to London alone, leaving behind her husband. Her young son, also left behind, ended up in the care of some fruit sellers down the road, before he eventually moved to Scotland to live with his maternal grandparents. The child was later disinherited by his mother, who was annoyed, it is said, that he went around complaining that his mother wouldn’t admit that she was Jewish. Among other things. Many books.
Rebecca West: Had one child with H. G. Wells, to whom she was not married. Tried to convince the child that she was his aunt and not his mother (arguably for his own good). In 1955, the child wrote a roman à clef, Heritage, about the son of two world-famous parents; the mother does not come off well. For twenty-nine years, West successfully blocked publication. In 1984, when the novel was finally released, the child, aged sixty-nine, wrote an introduction to the book that further condemned his mother. The same year, the child published a laudatory biography of his mostly absent father.
Shirley Jackson: Four children.
J. G. Ballard: Widowed with three young children. Drank every day, was very productive, and called all of his children, in his autobiography of the same name, “miracles of life.” In describing seeing his children newly born, he wrote, “Far from being young, as young as a human being can be, they seemed immensely old, their foreheads and features streamlined by time, as archaic and smooth as the heads of pharaohs in Egyptian sculpture, as if they had traveled an immense distance to find their parents. Then, in a second, they became young.” Ballard also wrote with fondness about his time as a child in the internment camps of Shanghai.
Other people’s babies
Are often noted to not be of interest.
Other people’s babies, two
Every hour, about 14,500 babies are born.
Other people’s babies, three
When Lucille Ball was pregnant, her character on television was also pregnant, though the word pregnant, like a swear word, could not, at the time, be said on television; Lucy was, instead, expecting. She carried bags, and stood behind chairs and sofas, so as to protect viewers from a full visual sense of what was expected. Lucille’s husband on the show, Ricky Ricardo, was played by her actual husband, Desi Arnaz. In real life, Lucille Ball turned down show-business offers until someone was willing to also employ Desi Arnaz, who, probably because he was Cuban, was mostly denied employment. This dynamic is reversed in I Love Lucy. Ricky Ricardo is a successful bandleader at a nightclub, and a regular plot point is Lucy’s desperate attempts to be part of his show. The episode of I Love Lucy in which Little Ricky is born was watched by forty-four million Americans, in three out of every four homes that had a television, and was titled, simply, Lucy Goes to the Hospital.
Other people’s babies, four
For the first photos of the twins of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, People paid fourteen million dollars.
Reversals
Murasaki Shikibu, of The Tale of Genji, and Sei Shonagon, of The Pillow Book, knew one another. They weren’t fond of one another. Shikibu was reserved and retiring, and more well-placed politically; Shonagon was witty and conversationally brilliant, and had a less stable position at court. Tutored by their fathers, both women knew Chinese, which was then the language of power and of politics (and of serious literature), and it was a language that women were not taught; women were supposed to speak and write only in Japanese; both women wrote their masterworks in Japanese, the insignificant language of women and gossip.
After The Pillow Book and The Tale of Genji, the third most noted and enduring book from the Heian period is The Tosa Nikki. It is a sort of travelogue, written in Japanese, by a male author writing under a female pseudonym, and its opening line is, “I hear that diaries are things that men make but let’s see what a woman can do.”