Ривка Голчен – Little Labours (страница 3)

The story of the ronin was especially popular in the Meiji era, when Japan’s isolation policy ended and power shifted from the military back to the emperor; the story was then again even more popular in the years after World War II, or so I’m told. The postwar government coerced the great filmmaker Mizoguchi, who usually made films about women in difficult circumstances, into making a movie of the forty-seven ronin, and the film’s part one failed terribly, but Mizoguchi himself then wanted to make part two and did. What made the story of the forty-seven ronin so popular at those particular moments? What is the story of the forty-seven really about? A story of men who appear to be defeated and shameful, but who have elected that appearance as an essential guise for a noble plan which will become manifest? A story of violence, patience, and outsized fidelity to the master who randomly is yours?

This story is about a baby, I thought of the bloody boyish tale one afternoon, I’m not sure which afternoon, just a bright one, passing the poster with the upside-down woman as I rounded the corner past the deli. Everything was about a baby, then, but still I thought, with conviction: a baby is what the story of the forty-seven ronin is really about. The sleeper cell, the latent power—it’s a parable about babies. They appear helpless, but they are puppetmasters. It makes so much sense. I was obviously wrong, more or less. I had been wanting, at the time of the forty-seven ronin haunting, to think on paper about, not quite coincidentally, two Japanese books: The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon and The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. They were two of my favorite books. It seemed mysterious to me that they both came from the same place and time, from the imperial court of early eleventh-century Japan. Both books were by women which also, I hated to admit, mattered to me. But I wasn’t managing to think about either book. The puma insisted otherwise. But I didn’t want to write about the puma. Mostly because I had never been interested in babies, or in mothers; in fact those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting; maybe I was even repelled by mothers and babies as subjects to write about; and so, after I had the baby, I found myself in the position (now interested in babies) of those political figures who come to insights others had reached decades ago only after their personal lives intersected with an “issue,” like, say, Dick Cheney, with his daughter, who married a woman. But I still didn’t want to write about babies, albeit now for a different reason. I had originally wanted to write about other things because I was interested in those other things. I then specifically wanted to write about other things because that then might mean I was really, covertly, learning something about the baby, or about babies, or about being near babies, and these were subjects about which, directly, I had so little to say. In the end, without consulting me much, a cabal of neuronal circuits, ronin of their own kind, organized against me and went about coordinating their own thoughts, fueled by dollar pizza, in a minor court on 38th Street.

A reason to apologize to friends

All of the items pertaining to the baby are kept in a three-shelved metal cabinet in the bathroom. The cabinet is a sturdy item ordered from an industrial products catalog that also sells Hazard labels in bulk. On the top shelf of the cabinet, still out of the baby’s reach, are diapers, crib sheets, and for no particular reason, the baby’s socks. On the middle shelf of the cabinet are the baby’s clothes, which are there in reasonably neatly folded piles of tops, bottoms, sweaters, and onesies. Then on the lowest shelf is whatever: hand-me-down shoes still too large, bibs never used, a swimsuit, a curling iron, too-small clothes not yet given away, and so on. But I keep the middle shelf orderly; a fair amount of effort goes into this; the orderliness of the middle shelf is a fragile, essential dam against the deluge. But the baby loves to disorder the shelves. She can’t yet walk or even crawl, instead she uses her arms to heave-ho her legs forward—we call this her wounded-deer maneuver—and whenever the bathroom door is left open, she hurries (in her way) over to the cabinet and then steadily and joyfully dedicates herself to unshelving all the reachable objects, into making heaps. She is so, so happy when she does this. So happy. It is more happiness, and stuff, than one thought the cabinet could contain.

I didn’t want to keep my wounded deer from her joy. But not keeping her from her joy meant that, at a later moment, usually during her rare naps, I had to go in and refold and reshelve the piles of clothes, a task that reminded me of an old Russian formalist text that baffled me when I was a college student, a text that I recall as being straightforward, and serious, and that argued for doing away with housework, since what was the point of housework, it produced nothing, it was done and then simply was started all over again, it should be abolished. Maybe that old Russian had a point. Why the shelf contained all these anxieties, I don’t know, but it did. For me, it was the most important and symbolic space in the home. I was still trying to work other nonhousework, non-young-person-care jobs, but these attempts to work were not going well. Occasionally these things not going well combined with my general sense of being trapped inside a space that the Russian formalist of days past would have described as producing nothing and I would feel like I was turning into sand and would soon be nothing but a dispersed irritant. And so one day I decide that I will at least try to talk things over with the still-wordless wounded deer. She makes her dash toward the cabinet. I follow her. I ask her if maybe she might consider leaving the second shelf of the cabinet, the shelf with all the folded clothes on it, alone; I ask her if she would consider unshelving items only from the lowest, already disorderly, shelf. I explain to her that if she could alter her behavior in this small way, it would mean not half as much reshelving work for me, but one-tenth as much. It would be really, really nice for me, I explain. And she understands! She begins to leave the second shelf of temptingly tidily folded stacks of clothing alone. Even when unsupervised! And after that I—I tell this anecdote to friends who will listen, as if it is interesting.

What drug is a baby?

On many days I think of the baby as a drug. But what kind of a drug? One day I decide that she is an opiate: she suffuses me with a profound sense of well-being, a sense not attached to any accomplishment or attribute, and that sense of well-being is so intoxicating that I find myself willing to let my life fall apart completely in continued pursuit of this feeling. On another day, the baby calls to mind a different set and prevalence of neurotransmitters. I recall the mother of twins who said to me that, yes, she loved her girls, but one afternoon she found herself thinking with easy understanding of the woman who had drowned her five children, and she, my friend, after having that feeling decided to call for help. She called her mother. Her mother said to her, The human baby is useless, the human baby is like no other baby animal, the animals can at least walk, while the human baby is a nothing.

Dynasty

I sometimes share the elevator with a woman who is very cheerful and mean. She lives three floors above me, and so when I wait for a down elevator, I always know there is a chance she will already be on it. When we then together descend ten floors down to the lobby, she has already descended three floors—she makes one feel that. Part of what is so impressive about this neighbor of mine is that in that small box in space and time, she consistently manages to find something apt and brightly unkind to say. When I was pregnant, she said simply, “You’re enormous.” Another time she said, “You must be so much taller than your husband.” She has a name that would have made sense for a character from Dynasty. She wears black almost exclusively, but a variety of blacks, blacks with such subtle variations in tactility, luminosity, and fall that one assumes they could be sold on eBay for more money than most people’s rent.

When the puma arrived, Dynasty’s comments shifted. “Whoa, that’s a huge baby,” she said, “I mean, you must be so happy.” Another time, “I mean really, that’s not normal, is it? Why is she so big?” This was her refrain for awhile and so I knew, more or less, what she would say before she said it, and yet still I never knew what to say back. One day I said, maybe because I was pretty sure she did not have children, and because I was not in a happy mood, “Wow, you seem to know a lot about what size babies are at what age. You know so much.” It was immediately obvious that it was a defeat for me to say that, but there it was, I had already said it. Another day, I remember this was when the puma was seven months old, Dynasty said: “But she is big for her age, isn’t she?” “Like me,” I said. “She will be a tall person like me.” Dynasty herself is not tall. Nor is she thin. I am taller and thinner than her. Yet obviously she was still winning. I had long prided myself on never being in antagonistic or competitive situations regarding size, or reproduction, or anything else really, with other women, and now here I was, I had become what I myself called the worst kind of woman, a woman who engaged with and assessed other women specifically on the level of things that had kept nearly all women down in the muck of a deforming sexual competition. Dynasty’s hair has such a beautiful deep-conditioned look to it, and is very long, and though it is a mixture of gray and black, this also seems to speak only of luxury, and historic sexual power. After the tall comment, she again said of the baby’s father that he was short. Another day she saw me holding a milk bottle, but without the baby, and she said, “Shouldn’t they only be breastfed? Isn’t that bad for them? I mean, there must be some explanation for why she’s so huge. Maybe this is it.” And on another day, when I had in my hand takeout from the Japanese ramen place around the corner, she said, “My god, what is that smell? Whoa, is that your food?” This was especially indicative of her sense of invincibility vis-à-vis me, as she herself is Japanese. Or maybe Chinese, or Korean; it is a private aggression on my part that I do not know, and I was devoted to continuing to not know. Not that Dynasty noticed that I didn’t know.