Mysteries of taste
In her ten-word Moby-Dick board book, she above all loves the page that says CAPTAIN. She loves to find a ball in a picture, especially a ball that is green or blue. Of the six animal notecards of black and white drawings, she exhibits a strong preference for Penguin. She has not yet encountered a quantity of olives that is sufficient. When she makes a scribble on paper, the result makes her giggle. When she finds herself trapped in her crib and wants out, she calls out to me; when I enter the room, she says, “Eyes?” If we come upon a square or round of metal on the sidewalk, she wants nothing more than to stand on it, and then to go on standing there. At other times, in the apartment, she’ll set down a book, also so as to stand on it. When she sees a bottle of milk being poured out for her, she laughs. Little holds more interest than a set of stairs, or a handicap-access ramp. Always she is the first to notice the moon.
Cravings
Despite having as a child refused tomatoes, refused olives, refused mushrooms, despite having as a child been unwilling to eat anything at Chinese restaurants save the white rice, and despite having as a child made a diet nearly entirely from couscous with butter and Pepperidge Farm Chessmen cookies, and for some reason, cauliflower — an achromatic diet — despite all that, I have historically had little tolerance for finicky children. I try not to judge such children, since they are children, but in the end I find I do judge the children and I judge the parents as well, even as it was through no effort on my part that I eventually became someone who will eat most anything.
But then I became pregnant and found I was a finicky eater all over again. I was nearly unable to bear the sight or taste of much of anything save potato chips, and lemonade, and occasionally, a slice of pizza. But only low-quality pizza, the kind of pizza where the cheese seems not to have a dairy component but instead to consist exclusively of partially hydrogenated somethings. All other foods seemed really gross. Oh, I thought, for the first time: children are pregnant with themselves.
Unfortunately, once my appetite returned so did my flair for being judgmental.
Religious aspects of the baby
Her tossing and turning at night leadeth only to ascent, so that each morning she is head to the western border of the crib. Her pouring of sugar from cup to cup leadeth only to more sugar. When she unlinguines a box of linguine, then secrets away the pasta sticks into the bookshelves, within a zipper bag of pencils, under the pantry shelf, into a coat pocket, she revealeth the previously unconsidered negative spaces of the apartment. Her fear of the aloe plant at the neighbor’s home is unmoved by the plant’s persistently staying in place. Again and again she faces the challenge of the spoon, though its face turneth downwards and spilleth its contents, unless the contents of that spoon be yogurt, which hath imparted a false confidence, as it spilleth not, and in this way it deceiveth her, and yet even after repeated defeats with other-than-yogurt-substances, she returneth to the spoon with bright eyes and an open heart. When she desireth the opener of the cans, so as to turn the knob designed for arthritic hands with which she is happily acquainted, but the large person with whom she liveth denieth her the opener of the cans for the ancillary reason of the proximate rotating blade, she throws her head back and cries like a featherless bird.
Head shape
The puma was born with very little hair, giving all of us a clear view of the shape of her head. Or at least, giving a clear view of the shape of her head to anyone sensitive to head shape. What a beautifully shaped head she has! the baby’s grandmother said, and then said again, and then said even yet again. Yes, I would say, in response to each head-shape compliment. But I felt uneasy: I had no idea what she was talking about. I had no sense at all of the shape of the baby’s head. It seemed like a normal head. The baby’s grandmother would then again say, What a beautifully shaped head, and I would again say, Yes, and then I would look even again at the baby’s head — I would try to look dispassionately, in assessment — and would still not know what she was talking about. Yet the shape compliments kept coming in. One day, as if momentum had built up from the praise having been repeated so many times, it continued on into more detaiclass="underline" What a beautifully shaped head she has, it’s so lovely… it’s not at all like mine! And with that, the grandmother shook her own head slightly. I couldn’t perceive then, and still fail to perceive now, anything particularly distinguished or undistinguished or even distinguishable about either of the referenced head shapes, but I accepted and continue to accept that the baby’s grandmother must have been talking about something.
But what? I found myself relating this anecdote a number of times to a number of different people. I related the anecdote as if what interested me was the simple allegory of people noticing in babies whatever it is that preoccupies them about themselves. But that wasn’t my real motive behind sharing the anecdote. The reason I kept telling the anecdote was that I was hoping to learn something about head shape. I kept waiting for someone to say, oh, yes, I know what she is talking about, and then to tell me. But no one was telling me. Then one evening I found myself at a dinner with a former supermodel. (The supermodel was writing a novel, her second, which is perhaps why she was at a small dinner with writers.) The baby was also there at the dinner. The baby’s being there prompted the supermodel to say that she had never, never, never put her babies to sleep on their backs, that she knows that is what they do these days, but that she thinks it’s a terrible idea because, for one, they could choke — that was what she was told by doctors, when her babies were young — and two, because putting babies to sleep on their backs means they end up with flat-backed heads. The former supermodel said that she didn’t want to curse her babies with this problem, a problem that she herself had. A problem that she had long been embarrassed about, the weird flat-backed shape of her head. She demonstrated the back of her head. Which was, of course, like everything about her, beautiful. So I still didn’t understand. I continued and continue to put the baby to bed on her back, though now that she is old enough to turn over, she shapes her own destiny.
The romantic comedy
My life with the very young human resembles those romantic comedies in which two people who don’t speak the same language still somehow fall in love. Like say, that movie I saw on an airplane with the wide-eyed Brazilian woman and the doofy American man who end up together, despite not being able to communicate via words. Or that series of Louie episodes, where Louie falls in love with a woman who only speaks Hungarian; he even proposes to her. Yes, it was like those comedies, only without the upsetting gender dynamic of the effectively mute female. Though with the same believability. And arguably the dynamic might still be considered upsetting.
Wiped out
I used to sometimes find myself saying, “I’m wiped out.” After the puma was born I would very rarely, maybe never, say I was “wiped out.” Though I often thought to myself, It’s okay, I should just accept that I’m wiped out. Maybe the puma had a cold, which disturbed her sleep, and so it had been weeks since I had slept more than an hour without interruption — there was always something, but also it was nothing, or, at times, I was nothing. As the instances of thinking of myself as “wiped out” accrued, I became sensitive to the phrase’s hyperbolic overlap with, say, a species being “wiped out.” And also to the fact that if at any given moment I introspected, I was likely to discover that I felt “totally wiped out” and so the sense of wiped out being a state that was relative to some other non-wiped-out state had been lost; the meaning of “wiped out” had been wiped out. The phrase began to fade. Though I did, as if bartering, sometimes find myself imagining a woman continually wiping dry an irremediably damp table. Then one day recently I noticed I wasn’t that wiped out, and I noticed this because I saw that the puma had a dishtowel and she was using it to wipe at water she had poured onto the floor.