When I confided to Gloria my mystical symptom, she diagnosed simply a drop in blood pressure and prescribed water for me. She herself tried to drink eight eight-ounce glasses of water a day. “Drink and tink” was a beauty tip from one of her bawdy Calpurnia Club friends. It kept the skin hydrated from within, moist as a baby’s, went the theory. I must say, baby Jennifer’s skin is so delicious that I cannot restrain myself from pushing my cracked old lips against her semi-liquid cheeks, her solemn great smooth brow, her fuzzy pate fragrant of shapeless, powdery thoughts. It is enough to make one laugh and even scream with delight, these infantile textures and aromas. I feel dizzyingly swept along by the whirl of life. I think that when my own children were infants I was too distracted by the world’s business-by the unstoppable, fortune-forming bull market that persisted through my thirties-to inhale. Not until the Crash of 2000, when the addled computers deleted billions and billions from the world economy, did I look up at my children, who were teenagers by then.
Jennifer is a charmer; we all tell her so. Her brother and eight male cousins, all of whom she has met, reinforce her power. She is a sacred larva being stuffed with royal jelly. It is she who will take the male magic into herself and carry the Turnbull DNA, diluted by half with some O’Brien stuff, toward eternity. Solemn in the authority of her slate-blue stare, the electric fuzz of her hair as yet colorless, she is a unitary person, with the full regalia of human interaction at her command. When she closes her mouth on the liquefied carrots and untidily smiles, I am pleased; I was hurt and offended when, at the beginning of the visit, she hid her face in her mother’s shoulder at the strange sight of me. We vie for her approval; I have an unworthy urge to tear her from her father’s thick arms and murmur in the velvety folds of her ear how his contracting business teeters on the edge of debt, how his creditors would have torn the shelter from over her head but for my discreet financial interventions. I am jealous of the young married life Tony leads, here in the pastel tract houses of Lynnfield, with my dear daughter as his chattel. Roberta stands in their little kitchen over the electric stove, and from the graceful, drifting way she turns, plastic spoon in hand, to attend to a gruff and complaining remark of Tony’s (“This kid smells like she needs a diaper change”), it could be Perdita of thirty-five years ago in the corner of my eye. Her elliptical physical style lives on in her daughters, who choose husbands, I am repeatedly assured, who resemble me. The resemblance eludes me.
Little sulky Keith and I are alike in this household: we are insider-outsiders, inside but not altogether in, excluded from the holy triangle of father-mother-infant. Keith and I are outer layers being shed, helpless neglected witnesses as Jennifer powerfully wields her spell, rewarding or dismissing those who court her favor. Roberta tells me that in the early mornings, or during the baby’s afternoon nap, Keith would make his silent way into her room and heap his toys- teddy bears, wooden trains, plastic telephones, metal dump trucks-into the baby’s crib, piling them on experimentally until her entire body, including her head, was covered. Tony has installed a lock on the door too high for Keith to reach.
They feed me well on these visits, and invite me to carve the roast chicken or pot roast as tribute to my seniority, my chiefdom; but I am always relieved to be off, out the door into my car with its heater and radio, as if escaping a discreditable past or removing my variable from an equation intricate enough without me.
Crocuses are up in the driveway circle, at a spot in the bed where sunlight reflected from the granite outcropping warms the earth. Their colors, purple and white, seem a bit vulgar and trite-determinedly Easterish-compared with the pristine and demure ivory of the drooping snowdrop heads, an especially large cluster of which still glows in the otherwise lifeless woods. The earth in Gloria’s beds looks friable, developing fissures as frost works out of the soil; a giant is heaving from underneath. The daylilies in the bed that I pass along the driveway are enough out of the earth to show a trifoliate, heraldic silhouette-pale-green fleurs-de-lys. The forsythia wands are lined with symmetrical buds, like saw teeth, but in this slow gray spring have not yet unsheathed their signal yellow flowers. Yesterday I spotted my first robin, strutting along the driveway’s gravel shoulder in his familiar dusty uniform, gawkily startled into flight by my approach: a stuffy bird, faintly pompous in its portly movements, spoiled by the too many songs and poems unaccountably devoted to him. I was more interested, returning up the driveway with my Globe, in two small tan birds, one with a faintly rosy head, whose names I didn’t know. They revolved in the net of the maple-leaf viburnum’s pale and brittle branches, performing a kind of leapfrog, one perching on a twig lower than the other and then the other flicking to take a place above the first: some kind of courtship dance, carried on with a diagrammatic rigor.
Nature’s background noise picks up: making the bed after tumbling a half-willing Deirdre in its sheets, and opening the window and its storm window a crack to let out our body smells, I heard a muffled thrumming that sounded too mechanical to be even a woodpecker’s bill attacking rotten wood. Purely inorganic creatures exist on this planet, as yet a mere underbrush to the flesh-and-blood, oxygen-breathing fauna but indisputably existent and evolving, biding their time as did our own mammalian ancestors during the long age of the dinosaurs. The microscopic first forms, it is conjectured, arose in city dumps, or more likely dumps attached to the perimeter of vast army bases or nuclear-fuel plants wherein a soup of spilled chemical and petroleum by-products was energized by low-level leaks of radioactivity. Metal particles smaller than iron filings fused, propelled into a self-sustaining reaction perhaps by the chemical activity of oxidation accidentally placed adjacent to a fortuitous mix of chemical influences. These tiny resultant creatures, with an anatomy much simpler than their organic equivalents, still possessed complexity enough for reproduction, in the soup of industrial waste. A ghost of intentionality, as it were, within their already refined and processed constituents enabled the metallobioforms to experiment with varieties of anatomy much more prolifically than the essentially conservative, ateleological DNA-dominated organisms. Within two centuries of their first lowly, unwitnessed emergence- which could scarcely have taken place before the Industrial Revolution and the invention of combustion-powered engines-there were metal species the size and weight of tree shrews and field mice, and two distinct phyla.
One phylum, the “oil-eaters,” “lives” off the traces of petroleum to be found on roadways, in asphalt and in natural upwellings of tar, and on beaches, both rocky and sandy, heavily affected by oil spills. The other, the “spark-eaters,” takes energy from electricity itself, as found in still functioning electric fences and cables, whether overhead or underground; like arachnid ticks, they penetrate the insulation and cling until sated. These metallic pests never need to sleep or mate; they are free to devote all their days to consumption, which includes the search for oils, natural and artificial, whereby their parts can be protected from corrosion, rust, and friction. The spread of their population seems limited only by the amount of material which mankind has used and discarded. Where a territory needs to be cleared for their access to some chemical resource, they quite mercilessly exterminate the local organic wildlife, leaving the shredded bodies to rot and attract organic predators, who are then themselves slain, from the feet up. The heads of some trilobite-sized species-resembling giant wood lice-are miniature chain saws.
Television commentators go through spells of alarm over the threat of these “pseudozoans,” since science predicts the evolution of ever larger and more voracious forms; this development seems remote, however, among the many more urgent issues of survival on our blasted, depopulated planet. The pseudozoans, or metallobioforms, or in popular parlance “trinkets,” seldom venture out of hiding in daylight. They keep to the dumps that fostered them and the oily, electricity-rich underground realms of cities, but lately have been spotted farther afield, in wilder areas. So perhaps it was a pseudozoan whose mechanical thrumming I heard, mistaking it for a sign of spring.