You join an internet support group for new parents and encounter reports from anguished moms and dads about children who have suffered heart-stopping catastrophes.
Your friends from Moscow drop by for dinner regularly but either fail to notice these adjustments or fail to mention them.
The snow turns back into rain.
One child becomes vegetative after drinking a bottle of his own baby oil.
The snow turns back into rain and you put away your skis.
One child drowns after the water from the leaking aquarium above her head collects on her mattress.
Your ponytail reaches your lower cervical vertebra.
The air turns moist and pine sweet.
The local news carries stories about the annual recovery of bodies from cars that skidded off winter roads, went over embankments, disappeared in snowdrifts like overturned turtles.
You pack a bag with a bathrobe, two night gowns that open in front for easy breast feeding, slippers, two nursing bras, underpants, sanitary pads, toothbrush, toothpaste, comb, hair brush, and a loose-fitting dress for Andi to wear home.
You keep the bag in the closet by the front door.
Grannam sends you a pink baby sweater with a large white furry bunny across it and cute pink matching cotton cap.
Tucked into the cap is a third very large check.
As you stand in the living room, examining these presents, the phone rings.
Shaking her head, Andi wanders into the kitchen to answer.
You try the cotton cap on your fist, contemplating your guilt.
You find yourself wondering how this thing has gotten so far and what it would take to call it off.
Using the cap as a puppet, you imagine phoning Grannam and explaining everything to her but have to shut your eyes at what you hear inside your head in reply.
When she wanders back, Andi is clearly agitated.
What? you ask.
Andi standing in the doorway, being clearly agitated.
Then she says:
Kysha and Thom.
Kysha and Thom? you say.
More old friends from Teaneck.
More old friends from Teaneck who are flying out next weekend.
For a visit, naturally.
Did you just see that statue? tourists ask each other tirelessly.
Did you just see that mosque?
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
EVERYTHING IN THIS PHOTOGRAPH is in focus, yet it makes no difference.
It stands to reason the subject is your wife.
But, then again, maybe not.
The answer is less clear than you might at first assume.
You unearth it in the same scrapbook at the bottom of the same box of memorabilia left behind for Andi by her mother.
The shot arrives sans comments: no marginalia, no caption, no date, no scrawled note on the back to place the person on the front in space and time.
You find it within an ambiguous formation of other photographs.
Next to it, for instance, is taped a portrait of Andi’s mother in maybe her early twenties, youthful face aware of making itself into an attractive mask.
Above, a group of people Andi says she has never seen before.
Smiling and squinting into flash-glare.
Sitting around a table at a fancy restaurant.
A fancy restaurant or, conceivably, a wedding banquet.
On the opposite page are four photos of babies who may or may not be the same baby.
Examining them, you realize just how interchangeable newborns are.
This is the case both in the sense that their distinguishing features are still unformed and that they do not find their photographic existence within a series of unique shots, interesting angles, or singular attributes.
They find their photographic existence within a generalized image-repertoire.
They do not exist as themselves, in other words.
They exist within a catalog of stock baby images.
They become themselves only to the extent that they join their stereotypes.
The viewer gains a sense of distinctiveness and pleasure by means of images that contain neither.
None of which happens to be as interesting as the question: What is making this particular baby, whoever it happens to be, smile?
Most childless adults would argue the answer is in the object of her gaze.
His or her gaze.
Most adults with children know better.
Most adults with children understand that this baby probably is not looking at anything whatsoever.
In all likelihood it is exhibiting a reflex reaction.
To a flish of unrecognizable sound, for instance.
She or he.
Successful peristalsis is another possibility.
This being difficult to ascertain without more information.
For argument’s sake, however, say it is a photograph of your wife.
What do you have to lose?
Say it is Andi and say Andi is smiling.
Smiling perhaps being too strong a word.
But still.
What effect do such assumptions have on how you read this shot?
How you might read this shot, the circumstances being what they are.
The circumstances seeming to be what they are.
Thinking is digestion.
For one, you notice Andi’s past happiness exists in direct proportion to her present melancholy.
If it is Andi.
If it is your wife.
Examining this snapshot, that is, you can think of nothing beyond how Andi’s disappointment in the world will grow, how it will travel like a spaceship of shadow-emotion through the succeeding decades.
From this photograph, Andi has nowhere else to go.
This is as good as it will get.
You did not say Thinking is digestion.
Someone else said Thinking is digestion, originally.
Originally perhaps also being too strong a word.
What you know now that she could not have known then is how she would blossom into awareness inside a white home with black trim on a leafy suburban street across from a hilly green park with a rose garden at its omphalos.
How she would learn certain important facts about her environment very quickly.
How every home involves a primary trope of disguise, for instance.
How under certain circumstances what you do not say is almost always more important than what you do say.
A short squat father in a blue sports coat and gray slacks.
An obstetrician-gynecologist.
OB-GYN, they call it.
They being used here as a very indefinite pronoun.
The kind of man, as an illustration, who actually could ask his daughter’s surprised first date in junior high when his daughter appeared dressed to the nines at the top of the staircase:
So why would you want to go out with a dumb jock like her?
Thinking he was making a joke, of course.
Not meaning any harm.
Or, alternatively, the kind of man who actually could wait for his daughter, following her first piano recital in college, to make sure she could see him throw out the cassette he had just made of her playing.
Thinking, one assumes, he had a really great sense of humor.
Subtle, urbane, refined.
The same man who must have stood in close proximity to the scene captured by this photograph.
His personality retroactively shading it like the physicist’s the outcome of his experiment.
The man who made your wife’s personality fold into itself.