Intimations (7 page)

At the door Martin turned around.

“I have your phone number,” he said.

She nodded.

“I'll call you to come out on Thursday,” he said.

“Okay,” said Karen, and she closed the door behind him.

In the empty apartment, Karen sat on the chair by the kitchen table and shook silently. Her mother had a saying. Whenever you had given your all, she would tell you that it was time to “let the legumes grow.” This meant recognizing that you had nothing left to do because you had nothing left. You were a fallow field from which nothing more was going to come. Your task was to lay back and wait for the spring, when something might once again grow from you. Karen tried to sway back and forth, but it was not a sturdy chair. She sat still and closed her eyes. She had been doing okay at Ned Regan's farm until she saw how they separated the cows from their calves. A milk cow only lactates if she has recently given birth, and this means that each dairy cow must be bred back roughly once a year. Calving is continual, and crucial. At the same time, the calf must be displaced so that it does not consume the bulk of the milk that is to be collected and sold. Ned Regan's policy was to allow the cow and calf a week together, plenty of time to absorb the colostrum, an antibody-rich milk that mother cows produce in the first few days after birth. Most farmers only allowed three days, and industrial farms took the
babies within hours. In the first few days after birth, Ned allowed the mothers to lick their babies dry. He lifted the spindly calves up to their mothers' teats if they were too weak to find them themselves, he guided the teats into their wet mouths. But on the seventh day, Karen watched as Ned and his dairy hands set up a series of pens bounded by electrified wire. As the lot was herded through the pasture, the calves passed under a low-lying wire while their mothers remained on the other side. Once most of the calves had passed through, Ned and his helpers strung two more wires to close off the breach. The few calves that remained unsorted were sorted out by hand. They hauled them up into the back of a pickup and drove them away. The mothers cried out for their calves all through the night, and the night after, and the night after that. “Why don't the mothers fight when you take them away?” Karen asked Ned once he returned from dropping the calves off in town. “They feel safe in groups,” Ned answered. “That's why they don't spook when you walk them to the slaughterhouse.”

Karen saw a text message on her phone. It was from Martin. She could see the shadow he cast in the thin slit of light coming from under the front door. He was still there, pacing back and forth. She never wanted to see him again. Martin had experienced only one truly uncivil encounter in the history of his romantic life. In college, a girl he had been sleeping with and whom he liked very much had stopped calling him and then stopped talking to him in the halls. When he saw her in the university buildings, she walked by him not as though he were a stranger, but as though he were not there at all. Later a friend told him she had spread
the rumor that he cheated on her with someone from his economics class. This was not only false, but mystifyingly so. Martin knew nobody in his economics class. He couldn't even name one female who took the class with him. The situation was bizarre, the girl's behavior inexplicable. This experience impressed upon Martin the view that most women were unknowable. As he said: “Women will sometimes burn a thing just to watch it burn.” Although he was occasionally lonely, he tried not to be bitter. He thought there were good things in the world that he would encounter by chance. He was only thirty-five, and he believed it would happen whether or not he changed himself significantly.

Karen went back to her room and closed the door. There was very little light now coming in through the bedroom window. She climbed the ladder up to her bed and wrapped herself in the duvet. She slept in a lofted bed, like a child. She was always afraid that she would roll off it in the middle of the night and break her neck on her own bureau dresser. This fear woke her sometimes, and she'd stretch out her arm to feel for the end of the bed before rolling her body inward to where the mattress met the wall. A psychology graduate student that Karen had met at a party listened to her description of the milk calf weaning and became excited. “Don't you think it's so interesting,” said the graduate student from Austria, “that you say the cows ‘cried'? We project so much onto animals. You hear the sounds as crying, as if they were human beings with our emotions, when it was probably something different, more like a call.” Karen thought about Vanessa at her party the other night. She was loudly drunk, the Vanessa of college stories instead of the
one who spoke tautly about the people she competed with at work and got annoyed when it took too long for the check to come. “I just want to say that I'm sorry,” she said, placing her hand on Karen's back and then removing it. “For a long time I never knew you were dating Tim, or actually I never knew he was dating you. You know I like you. So I just never knew. You only became real once I saw you. And then after I met you I just wanted you to like me back, so I didn't want to say anything. It wasn't about you, I promise, or even Tim. It's just easy to keep doing a thing once you've already done it before.” Karen, already drunk on only two gin and tonics, was confused but understood that they were both engaged in an emotional interaction. “No,” she said, “it's okay. It's weird becoming friends through a guy, I really understand. You've always been great to me.”

When Karen finally realized what it was that Vanessa had been trying to tell her, she rolled onto her side and pretended she was asleep. It was difficult to feel as though any of this had really happened. It was as though she had opened up a magazine and were reading about it all. She felt sympathy for those involved, but ultimately these were people that she would never meet in real life. When she began feeling again, mostly she felt dumb. She was definitely not the smartest person in any group of people. She was a creature. That night on Ned Regan's farm, she had lain awake listening to the sounds of the mother cattle out calling in the fields. They moaned for their young, for the beasts that they had pushed out of their bodies, hooves and hard parts and all. Their voices were low, round, masculine. They sounded like trains, urgent trains, calling out for a place that they
would not reach. Deep into the night she heard a knock on her door. Ned Regan eased it open. Some light from a far-off room leaked into her guest bedroom with the small cot and the nightstand. He stood there looking at her in bed.

“Hello?” Karen said, asking.

“I'm just checking to see,” said Ned Regan.

“Is everything okay?” Karen asked.

“Everything's okay,” said Ned. “I just wanted to see if you needed something.”

There was silence.

“Are you sure there's nothing you need?” Ned asked again.

“No, really, no,” she said, and she tried to sound like it was all settled. After Ned closed the door and she heard his footsteps moving farther and farther away, she looked out the window. It was a brilliant moon with a painfully white halo. The surface of the moon was disfigured with a gray shape that looked like a broken flower.

Karen lay on her side in her own bed with her eyes closed, facing the wall. She thought about Tim's body and Vanessa's body locked together while she existed someplace else, knowing and feeling things about Tim. She thought about the first year dating Tim, when he had been sleeping with Vanessa and at the same time telling Karen about the intercourse map they had drawn of her freshman year. She wanted to call him ten times in a row and yell at him, but her phone was in the other room. She felt sad, but she hadn't cried all day. She thought that crying would actually be a good thing right now. It seemed normal to react. Whoever Martin had been, he had probably been a normal person. He
was probably having the normal reaction right now, and she had caused it. She felt bad for confusing him. She thought it might be fair to cry for him. But it wasn't until she thought of the mother cows in the pasture the day after the weaning, wandering around singly in the naked sunshine, still trying to call out in their hoarse, broken voices for the young ones that were still missing, that she was finally able to make herself cry—a little bit for all of the calves, but mostly for herself.

When she was younger she could be alone for weeks and never realize that it was time to miss another person, time to call another person on the phone. Now she found herself missing anybody she could think of. Nobody had warned her that watching her husband hold her baby with such care, their faces opened wordlessly onto one another in admiration, would make her feel so clumsy. She climbed the staircase up to the bed and lay on her side, her gut and womb positioned directly above the space where the two of them took their alone time together. They might be in love with one another, but her body was the causal link. Mentally she was older than ever, tired in the morning as though it were already the end of the day, but this longing for others was a smooth pink patch where she felt as raw as a child.

Her name was Karen and she was thirty-two years old, but she had a much younger face. She had hair to her shoulders and a body like a girl's, with knobby joints. When she pushed her baby through the park in a bulky red stroller, people watched her with curiosity and pity. In her plain but adult clothes she looked like a teenage nanny, someone from another country who was underpaid and exploited. She was always being mistaken for a foreigner.

For the next two weeks her husband would be in China, watching over the construction of a large new building, a government library built directly above a portion of the local river. Once the building was complete, the most beautiful and formerly accessible part of the river would be hidden away from the view of ordinary citizens. She felt lonelier without him around, but while he was away she could have her own time alone with her daughter. In the hot patch of sunlight on the sofa she drew the soft baby toward her. She rested the small, heavy body on her lap and turned it so that the head lay in the cup of her hand. She examined its face, an abbreviation of her own. Where the eye area and mouth area met was a strange new nose unlike any she had seen in her own family or her husband's. They had named the baby Lila, a name that was impossible for an infant to occupy, hoping that she would grow into it.

Dressed in lavender stripes, the baby looked up at her calmly and shut her mouth. By six months, infants were supposed to babble freely—but hers had said almost nothing. A traumatic or hostile home environment could obstruct an infant's development, but Karen was confident that she and her husband weren't guilty of that. They got along well, and when they fought it was in the style that he preferred—sentences clipped, reasonable but with a harsh and colorless tone. There was nothing there that could harm a baby, Karen told herself, especially one that didn't even understand words. Karen and her husband had met when they were young and working in a bigger city. One of the best things about him had been his face, which was handsome but not overly so. It
was a healthy, normal face, and when you looked at it you could imagine the person it belonged to doing any number of harmless things—pedaling on a stationary bicycle, assembling a sandwich, listening to music while driving a car. Just looking at that face was enough to make Karen feel that she had peered into every crevice of his personality. But when he was away for too long, she found it difficult to remember how the different parts of his face fit together, even though they had been married for almost five years now.

Outside the window, men walked past berating faceless, bodiless voices on their phones. Cars rolled by so slowly that she could hear the engine whine in the deep center of the machine. It was time to begin speaking to your baby, the parenting books warned. At all moments of the day she should be describing the world and linking objects with the words that identified them. Without a steady stream of well-articulated adult speech an infant might lag in its development, not only in language use but also in its understanding of objects, concepts, and reasoning. Her daughter would essentially remain an animal. Karen wanted to begin speaking a steady stream of well-articulated language to her baby, but it was difficult to articulate. Sometimes when she sat still and listened to the inside of her mind she became distracted by the sound of a gentle rushing, like water from a faucet.

From the neighboring apartment came a noisy coughing, muffled by the wall between. The cougher was an unlikable retiree who the neighbors referred to by his last name, Puldron. Each day she watched through the sighthole in her door as he shuffled over to her stack of mail on the entryway table to paw piece by piece through her bills and catalogs,
his blunt fingers pinching and creasing the flimsy photos of stylish outdoor furniture. Sometimes she heard the sound of a page being ripped out and folded over and over into a tight packet, and when she cross-referenced her mutilated catalog with the one on view online, she saw that hers was now missing an image of a picnic basket or an industrial-style upholstered coffee table with wheels. Was Puldron trying to keep her from buying those objects and putting them in her home to make her family complete?

The coughing continued, louder and more urgent. It grew and solidified simultaneously, like a skyscraper seen from an approaching car. Again and again Puldron emptied his throat of sound, and Karen could hear the wet clutch of the throat tube. A muscular
gk
shuddered at the edge of the sound, the snag of choking. He hacked at the thing trapped in him until she found herself standing up, still holding her baby, her body moving to do something it hadn't decided on yet: she had never spoken to Puldron, had never wanted to, maybe he'd take it as some sort of aggression. She looked down at the small ears of her daughter, unavoidably open to the world, eagerly capturing the sounds of the choking man and turning them inward to shape her soft, growing mind.

Karen waited. The coughing turned to a wheeze, culminated in silence.

She went over to the wall and pushed her ear to it. Nothing stirred behind the white wall, no spasm of mouth or throat. It had only been a minute or two, or maybe a couple more, since the choking had started. She bumped her elbow weakly against the wall, arms full of daughter. “Are you choking?” she shouted.

If it was true that the smallest unit of stimuli could have a formative effect, then listening to the death of her neighbor only a few feet away in his apartment was bound to do horrible things to future Lila. There could be pyromania, cutting of the skin, morbid fascination with death. Teenage perils that Karen could hardly believe she had experienced herself, in her own past—thinking about it was like hearing a funny story about something you had done while you were drunk, an event you had to trust had been real but which now no longer lived even in your own mind. The worst part was, she had already let it happen: Lila had heard the whole grisly sound track. Karen needed to show her something beautiful immediately—a swan, a fountain. She propped the baby on the sofa and went around the apartment grabbing things and throwing them in an oversize, floppy bag. She put the bag on the stroller, buckled the little body into the seat, breathing in spurts. At the door she realized that she should have called an ambulance. She took the phone from her pocket. It was too late, wasn't it?

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.