“Girls would take the train out there, with little baskets of boiled eggs and bottles of white wine, and I was right there with them. The clouds were like wedding veils that had been whipped off the heads of brides.
“We were still so young that it was exciting just to be riding the train alone, to have the wind in our hair and no parents around. Once you had a baby of your own, no one would ever tell you what to do again. You forgot about working at the factory. You forgot about not being pretty, or not being able to type quickly enough, or how much you hated all the household chores. We thought this was what being an adult was like. It was going to be all wine and roses and making babies.
“But in truth, the train ride was the last time we would ever be so carefree. Everyone had warned us before we went down that being a mother was really, really difficult, and some of the older mothers knew it from experience. But when you thought about it on the train, you could only imagine the baby with little rain boots, playing at the beach and saying it loved you.”
“Although you rode on the train alone, the proper thing to do was to have a fellow waiting back at home for you. Some girls chose wisely when it came to picking fathers, paying attention to what a man did for a living and what his character was like; but other girls were complete fools, choosing a man because he was good at pool, or looked good in a fedora, or because other people liked to be around him because he laughed and made jokes. That he was temporarily out of work and had a criminal record was of no immediate concern.
“Sometimes a girl got so excited about meeting a bloke she particularly liked that she rushed off to the beach to get a baby before she was even married. There were a couple of these girls on the train when I went. They hadn’t packed any lunch or made any preparations for the journey. All they had were the hickeys on their necks and their heads full of dreams. They wandered the shore, kicking up water, with stars in their eyes.
“There were a couple of girls riding up front in first class who’d married really well and wore fancy shoes and expensive tailored dresses. And they had nannies with them who were going to help with the babies the minute they got them out of the water. But still, in spite of all this, they were going to have to take off their shoes and tights and get their feet wet in the sand like all of us.
“I remember one girl, just having found her baby, suddenly starting to cry because she realized that one day her little baby was going to die. Another girl started crying because her baby was going to be raised in a world where there was war. One girl was worried that her little boy would fall in love with someone who didn’t love him back.
“There was a mother who didn’t even seem to really want a kid. Her mother-in-law had to come with her and kept nudging her to go on. She would look back and claim that the water was too cold, that there were no more babies in there. She would get distracted and start collecting seashells and disappear behind the rocks, claiming to see some baby bottoms over there. When her mother-in-law went to check on her, she found her sitting on a rock and reading a paperback novel.
“In the end she found one in the moonlight. A baby with dark, dark, dark brown eyes. The baby looked at her suspiciously and she felt as if neither of them particularly wanted to belong to one another. She didn’t especially want to be a mother and he didn’t particularly want to be a child. He hadn’t asked to be born, yet there they were, all together, a new family boarding the last train of the night back home.”
“Wait,” I said, interrupting her. “You could still find babies at night?”
“Yes,” said Grandmother. “These were the night babies. You see, although some girls didn’t want babies, most of us did, and some of the unlucky ones who hadn’t found one yet grew desperate and refused to go home empty-handed. And that’s how they found them, by stepping out farther and farther into the water, looking and looking, knowing that there had to be a baby out there somewhere; but the only babies you could catch at that point were the babies swimming around in the ocean.
“People often said that it was better sometimes to leave the children alone in the water after a certain point. Once they had had a taste of the sea, it was hard for them to ever really adapt to ordinary life.”
“But what’s so different about night babies?” I asked.
“Well, after a whole day of swimming in the night ocean, they had had too many extra hours of dreaming, perhaps. They had already got it into their heads that they weren’t going to be discovered, that they were going to be absolutely alone in the world, left to sleep with the fishes and be sealed up inside a clamshell forever — to never have to work or weep or be married or pay the rent, or look for children themselves.
“The first people these children saw were the riff-raff who haunted the beach at night: drunken men cursing on the boardwalk, teenagers writing dirty poems in the sand with black paint, indiscreet couples making love against the rocks, and forsaken lovers with stones in their pockets, wandering out to sea.
“And in the sea, the little colourful fish flitted around these babies as if a piñata had been split open in front of their faces and there were candies falling from the sky. The fish whispered their secrets to these babies, telling them tales about drowning sailors and women who fell overboard in lovely dresses that opened like umbrellas — how the women sank to the bottom of the sea with their eyes closed and their mouths open, as if waiting for kisses.
“As the babies floated through the water, the octopuses reached out and put their arms around them. That feeling of being wrapped up in eight arms could never be duplicated, and once they’d been rescued, when they were full grown, these babies could never be satisfied by only two arms. They always wanted more when they were hugged and so they were always lonely. When they went out dancing, they held their partners too tightly and wept.
“They had a tendency to drink too much at weddings and birthdays as well. They liked that feeling of the room rocking back and forth and of losing control and tumbling over. Being under the sea was like always falling down the stairs except that you didn’t get hurt. They stayed out late, for there was no morning or night under the deep, deep sea. They were always trying to convey that which can’t be conveyed. They chose to do things like play the trumpet for eight hours at a stretch and name their dogs Baudelaire.
“Looking back, I realize that I myself was too young to be going down looking for babies. I was married at nineteen, you know, and completely clueless about everything.” Then Grandmother sighed. “Maybe that’s why I ended up with a night baby.”
My brother and I leaped off the couch.
“You had a night baby?” we yelled. “Mother was a night baby?”
My brother and I jumped around with a million questions.
“Did you ever regret getting a baby later than the other girls?” I asked.
“Never!” Grandmother said. “I liked having a little brown-eyed girl who was obviously a poet. And that’s why your mother weeps when she hears music she likes on the radio, and why she waters flowers in the middle of the night and is always doodling stars on the margins of her paper!”
“Is it a bad thing?” my brother asked nervously.
“Oh no. Whether your baby was found during the day or at night, you loved it just the same. You see, all mothers think they’ve magically found the perfect baby, and they are all convinced that their baby is more beautiful than all the others. And they give them their very favourite names. They name them after grandfathers and mothers and saints and movie actors and lovely flowers and military generals. All sorts of new names for all sorts of new people. Most of the fathers, like the mothers, fall in love with their babies at first sight. They weep and love them madly with a love that lasts the rest of their lives. It’s amazing, when you think about it, how much love a single soul requires.”