String, mozzarella. Parmesan. Marshmallow, plural. Hotdog. Vodka. Bacon egg bagel. Spaghetti. Fudgesicle. Coffee, innumerable. Banana bread. Pickle. Vodka, plural. Cuticle. Fingernail. Toenail. Plant-based meat. Candy, plural. Carrot. Celery. Pizza, fresh. Pizza, frozen. Ice cream sandwich. Champagne. Brownie. Wine. Birthday cake. Granola. French fry, plural. Salad. Salt. Avocado. Quesadilla. Fruit snack. Peanut butter, jelly. Potato variation. Milkshake. Apple. Organic pear. Watermelon margarita. Chocolate éclair. Raspberry, plural. Sausage link. Burrito. Grapefruit vodka complement. Cranberry vodka complement. Lemon vodka complement. Day, plural. Week, plural, Month, plural.
Garden party
The flowers should all be dead. Their bright orange petals are out of season, kind of spooky in their flourishing. The parents recognize this, but the children don’t, so they toddle about the garden picking at blossoms that shouldn’t exist.
My friend and I sit on our picnic blanket, watching uncomfortably as small hands dismantle the flowers. Our own children seem more sensitive to the miracle—or the plight—of the garden. They stay close to us, little sprouts on good behavior. Eating, fussing, having their faces wiped.
A tight-lipped lady marches toward us. She’d emerged through the back doors of the museum as if she’d been watching malevolently from a castle’s high tower. She goes straight for the children.
“Don’t pick the flowers,” she says to the young gardeners. “Why on earth would you do that?” She grabs for the petals in their hands. The startled children look around for their parents.
“They’re living things,” scolds the museum lady as she drops to her knees and begins scouring the grass for more petals. My friend and I draw our children close, not wanting to implicate them and further pollinate the lady’s anger.
The food truckers, the bluegrass musicians, the other museum personnel at the party, they do not seem to notice the drama unfolding here at the edge of the petunias. They’re all baking in the sun, even though it’s October, even though it should be sweater weather, even though this flower garden should be trimmed back and barren.
Someone needs to tell this lady that it’s our own fault these flowers grew in the first place. The grownups are responsible for confusing Mother Nature. We fucked up. The moms and dads. If petunias are going to make themselves an attractive nuisance at fall parties, we’ve only got ourselves to blame. If the world were as it should be, our sons and daughters would wear infinite crowns of bee-stung flowers.
“I mean…we all want to save the planet,” says my friend. “Is yelling at children the best way to go about it?”
My daughter scoots into my lap and opens her chubby fist. “Here, Mommy,” she says, and offers me an orange petal that she’s squished and heated into pulp. “This is for you.” I’m touched, I’m ashamed, I’m complicit. I mash her into my chest and inhale her like a bouquet. She was once part of the earth, but now she’s all mine.
Welcome back to my exercise in futility
Where have you been?
Nowhere.
What do you have to show for yourself?
Nothing.
What have you been reading?
Murders.
What have you been writing?
Executive shopping lists.
How has that been going?
Okay.
What’s your baby up to?
Not a baby, not a baby blog.
Who are you kidding?
What’s next for you?
Springtime. Renewal. Age-reversing serums. Excellence.
Alternatively?
More winter. More irrelevance.
How will we tell?
You won’t be able to! It will all look and feel the same!
Observations on a pregnancy
As my center of gravity changes and I grow closer to my due date, the pregnancy becomes less about me and more about this hypothetical child in my uterus. People ask fewer questions about how I’m doing and tend to focus instead on the promise of new life. Meanwhile the kid is still attached to my innards, thus I am slow to conceptualize her as her own entity. She’s my stomach. She’s a medley of gases. She’s responsible for weird vaginal phenomena that I won’t get into here. She’s movement and rhythm and an infusion of hormones that give me a Zen-like serenity about things that would normally cause depression and anxiety. She has a name, but only because I felt bad about calling her “the kid” all the time. Presumably she has a face, but I haven’t really seen it. She has fans. Her daddy is a big supporter. Her grandmothers both seem psyched to meet her. I encourage other people to lay hands on my belly because I need reassurance that the kid is not a figment of my imagination and that she will one day tunnel out into the real world by the grossest means necessary. But she never kicks people when she’s supposed to. Right now she is just mine.
Sometimes I think of my stomach as a Magic 8-Ball. While the kid is still in utero and living closest to the God spark, I feel that she might hold the answers to all my cosmic questions. “Can we afford to raise you in New York City?” One kick means “It is decidedly so.” Stillness means “Don’t count on it.” Treating my unborn child like an oracular toy seems to be my sole concession to acknowledging the miracle of all this pregnancy stuff. “Are you for real?” I whisper. “Are you magic?” She leans on my bladder and I dash to the bathroom. “Reply hazy try again.”
She’s given me pica. I’ve always been a nail-biter, but my habit is currently worse than it’s ever been. I have a premonition that I’ll lose the desire to bite as soon as she’s born. Right now my body craves fingernails. Perhaps I should be more careful about blaming the baby for things that are probably not her fault. M and I are both pretty self-critical, so it’s been fun for us to have a scapegoat when we fuck up. He bangs his knee on the corner of the bed frame for the third time in an hour. “Damn baby!” he says. I decide to sit in the window and eat a pint of ice cream instead of getting a job. “Thanks for nothing, kid!”
Do I “love” my unborn baby? Loving her right now is a difficult lesson in loving myself because we’re still so connected. Loving her right now is a study in risk because she’s still cooking and things could still go wrong. Loving her right now seems extremely wacky because I can’t even see her and the pregnancy websites keep describing her as various vegetable formations. And yet I do love this mysterious creation, this eggplant, this cabbage, this organic divinity sprung up from the garden of unprotected sex. Soon she’ll be a full-grown squash, and then I’ll really be head over heels.
At first we thought she was a boy. That was a relief. Boys tend to coast by on being boys and they don’t have to worry so much about their looks. I feel like an inexcusably shallow person when I find myself hoping that the kid is cute. If she’s not cute, it’s going to be a much harder road for her to travel, starting from the moment the obstetrician tosses her on the scale without so much as a “Looking good, babe!” and ending when she dies surrounded by legions of friends and family whom she’s attracted through her amazing, compensatory personality. Mostly I just want her to be cute so her daddy M, a professional photographer, will be able to exploit her as a child model and he won’t have to creep out other parents by asking them for baby loans. The other night I had a dream in which I brought the kid home from the hospital and I was the only one enamored with her. No one wanted to give her hugs and kisses. No one offered to hold her and tell her what chubby cheeks she had. They treated her with all the negative attention they would accord a troll. And yet I thought she was the most adorable human in the world. So I’m confident now that there’s no such thing as objective beauty when it comes to your own children. Everyone I know will just have to suffer alongside the abominable baby photos I will insist on Super Gluing to their refrigerators.
I’ve been trying to live the pregnancy from moment to moment and not fantasize about the future, but M routinely gets swept away by some image of himself holding his little girl for the first time or taking her to ballet lessons and then he gets so emotional that he has to go call his mom. Meanwhile I’m farting in the bed, prostrate with heartburn, wondering when it will be time to eat again. M is online shopping for ballet slippers and I am cursing the fact I have to pee for the tenth time since dinner. Out of self-preservation or hormonal overdosing or whatever, I tend to curtail my imagination and just respond to what my senses are telling me. They suggest that my body isn’t mine right now, but they also can’t yet drum up an image of who’s running the show. So I’m just waiting to see what’s in store for us on the 4th of July. “Outlook good,” says the 8-Ball.
Fashion Week gestation
He’s in Midtown photographing models for New York Fashion Week, and I am at home dog-sitting a friend’s puppy. We are still trying to come up with the perfect name for our unborn child. He texts me with ideas throughout the day. The teenage models he’s shooting are not only genetically blessed, but they also have outstanding names: Anja, Svetlana. I text him back with names of dogs I meet in the dog park: Juno, Georgia. Somewhere between the glamour and the pooper-scooper, we will find our baby.
I’ve never done well with roommates. It’s hard for me to relax when another consciousness is operating nearby. While the puppy and I are alone in the apartment during the day, I find myself obsessing about what the puppy is thinking and feeling. Is the puppy hungry? Is the puppy angry with me for letting a herpetic bulldog bleed on her at the dog park? There are two walls between me and the napping puppy, but I can still sense the longing in her soul. This will never do. I can’t focus on my work. Oh wait. I’m about to have a baby. It’s possible that babies also exert a strong presence in one’s household. Maybe I should have opted for a plant.
Anja the fashion model takes direction well. When told to pout her lips, she pouts her lips. When told to flip her hair, she flips her hair. Betty the puppy takes direction less well. When told to heel, she sniffs a slice of pizza that someone has dropped cheese-down on the sidewalk. When told to urinate, she chases after a pigeon. I want to blame the breed for the discrepancy, but what if I lack the natural authority of a father figure?
I stuff the puppy’s frail little legs into the sleeves of her doggy jacket, and worry about an international influx of models freezing to death in New York this week. These women boast very little meat on their bones and unless they’re on a tropical beach somewhere, they don’t know how to dress appropriately for the weather. I think about sending some scarves and mittens to work with my baby daddy so he can distribute them to the models. But my outerwear is not designer, and it all smells like the dog park, so never mind. The important thing is that I have maternal instincts.
On having no hustle
Several major players in my life have recently pointed out that I lack hustle. They say that I don’t apply to enough things. I don’t ingratiate myself with powerful people. I don’t ask my former writing professors to recommend me for fellowships and residencies. I don’t dress like a ham sandwich and hang out on the street corner, proselytizing about ham sandwiches. I just don’t have the temperament for it. Which is not to say that I haven’t defied my own nature at times and attempted to hustle. I’ve sent some embarrassing emails over the years. These bids for love and attention trill with false modesty and labored charm. I always feel far more sympathetic to the poor souls on the receiving end of these needy emails than I do to myself, the sender.
We’re told that everyone hates the hustle, but you just have to suck up your pride and crippling social anxiety and do it or you’ll never get anywhere. You have to play the game, fake it til you make it, network, ask for help, never give up, never surrender. But I’m not sure hustle is a quality I want to have. Other people impress me when they aggressively go after what they want. I don’t devalue their hustle (unless they’re Republicans). And I’m not naïve enough to believe that successful careers just happen organically, without cocktail parties and emails. But why do I need to be successful in the first place? I think my real life’s ambition is something more in line with being an anonymous contemplative than sharing a billboard with Jeffrey Eugenides.
Which brings me back to my perennial dream of working as a long-distance truck driver. A person has to make money somehow, and I love to drive. I love to think about things through a wide window. And you can only go so fast behind the wheel. There’s always a speed limit. I find that fact really comforting, especially coming from the literary field where there’s no cap on how smart or talented or prolific you’re supposed to be. Even if you’re happily driving your beat-up Subaru 35 miles an hour through a school zone, you imagine that someone else is driving 95 miles an hour, with the cops chasing him, jumping drawbridges and shit, and your experience is ruined. As a professional truck driver I can drive 65 miles an hour all day long, receive a consistent paycheck, eat snacks from my lap, and have total freedom to meditate quietly on life while an unobtrusive radio bolsters my thoughts with an 80s soundtrack.
I can still write short stories at truck stops. I can still read books if they’re on tape. But no one will be able to accuse me of not having hustle. “In this business,” I’ll say, “hustle kills.”
And just like that I’m a mommy blogger
At the age of 35, a woman has to answer some tough questions. Is boxed mac & cheese an essential food group? Yes. Does infinite time remain to incubate a human being in one’s uterus? No.
Temporal Anxiety was supposed to drive me to publish several brilliant and precocious novels by the time I turned 30, but instead it just hovered around my desk year after year, reminding me that I was a failure. Writing books takes serious time, and conceiving a baby takes an instant. It’s no wonder that Temporal Anxiety is so much more effective in getting women pregnant than in getting them published.
Last fall I became furious with the male psychiatrist I was seeing when I came to him with morning sickness, mood disorder flaring, looking for medication advice so I wouldn’t give birth to an artichoke. “Are you happy to be pregnant?” he said. “Because you don’t sound happy to be pregnant.” Just because he couldn’t hear “the angel of the house,” he wanted to reduce my first-trimester mental state to some binary notion of happy mom/sad mom, and this made me an angry mom indeed. I soon found another doctor, a woman who recognized my neurochemical needs, who didn’t prescribe feelings, and who didn’t try to see my inner world in terms of black and white.
Most women I know are ambivalent about having kids. I was ambivalent about having kids. I might spawn a dozen babies who grow up to be magnanimous world leaders and still be ambivalent about having kids. It mystifies me how anyone can plunge headfirst into parenthood without having a full-blown psychological crisis. Birthing centers should have mental wards attached. Because this transformation from person to mother-person is hard and often paradoxical. You’re happy, and also sad. You feel gain, and also loss. You’re elated, and also emetic (I spent New Year’s Eve toasting the toilet water with my stomach bile). You want to have a child, but you also resent that you weren’t allowed to wait until age 80 to do it. Thanks a lot, bod.
But also, non-sarcastically, thanks a lot, bod.
Now that the ultimate biological decision has been made, I can resume racing against the clock with my creative projects. In six months I’ll probably have to put my pen down for a little while (is a couple days realistic?) in order to cater to a helpless baby, so I’d better knock out some grownup fiction in the meantime. I wonder if the prevalence of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll peak in the work of female writers just before they give birth. I actually suspect this happens postpartum. If there’s one thing I don’t anticipate motherhood making me, it’s soft. I’ll probably come home from the hospital and immediately start writing gritty crime fiction about homicidal babies.
I’m also comforted by the fact that I’m entering motherhood with my innate selfishness still entirely intact. I’m already hatching ways I can use this child to advance my business ventures. Thanks to having a photographer father, the kid will be the most photographed kid in America. And thanks to having a writer mom, the kid will be the most photographed barn in America. And Dad will stage-dad the hell out of the kid while Mom will Anne-Lamott the shit out of the kid and the kid will just have to put up with it until he’s old enough to move in with Grandma, and everyone will be…yes, I think, happy.
Art on the installment plan
She can’t open the window more than a few centimeters, for if she does, the squirrel that prowls the fire escape will collapse its skull, creep into her kitchen, and steal one of her bananas. She doesn’t know for a fact that the felonious squirrel likes bananas, but she never would have guessed that it liked tomatoes either, and over the summer it stole several of them right out of the fruit bowl.
Why can’t she give this squirrel a banana? She has a whole bunch of them. Who is she, Donald Trump? Would she also withhold milk from a crying baby?
The Japanese shoguns had the unusual distinction of being perhaps the only major rulers ever to eradicate firearms. In 1587, the shogun declared that all non-samurai were required to hand over weapons—both guns and swords—to the government, which had announced it was going to use the metal in the construction of an enormous statue of Buddha. (Facts & Details)
She wonders if disarmament would work in the United States if artists promised a statue of Jesus to the owners of assault rifles.
Facebook: where people go to announce the death of their cats.
It’s been weeks since she effectively made her way out of bed. Yesterday he bellyflopped onto the mattress beside her and then diverted her with his repertoire of comical swimming strokes, as if the bed were a pool or an ocean and not a queen-sized black hole of ruminating despair. “I’m sorry,” he said, getting to his feet after he’d shown her his butterfly. “I’m being codependent.”
They bought a print from an artist down the street. The artist told them that a middle-school janitor had bought the original painting. The man had poked his head into the artist’s studio one day to inquire about the price of the oil portrait in the window. “Three thousand dollars,” the artist told him. “Damn,” said the janitor, and departed. Thirty minutes later he was back. “I’ll give you two hundred dollars for it every month for the next fifteen months,” he said. The artist agreed. Fifteen months later, the janitor took the portrait home. He occasionally texts the artist a photograph of himself hanging out at home with his arm around the painting.
The Rat Queen of Park Slope
For three days last week M and I were responsible for a small, helpless animal named Betty. Even if Betty had been the most self-sufficient of puppies, able to feed and water herself in the wild, she still would not have survived long under our care because we didn’t trust her with keys to our Brooklyn apartment. Thus a few times a day we had to escort her down two flights of stairs and up the street to the local dog park.
Our local dog park resembles nothing if not a prison yard. It’s surrounded by chain-linked fencing and filled with gravel three inches deep. You have to breach two security gates to enter and exit. But the dogs go bonkers for their gravel oasis. In this park they call their own, they can race back and forth with frenetic impunity. They can indulge in impotent orgies while their owners play on smartphones and pretend their pets aren’t indiscriminately humping one another. To a farm dog, the dog park would seem restrictive and dusty and depressing. To a city dog, the dog park is a blissful reservoir of freedom from the 400-square-foot apartment where he spends 99% of his time.
I get the sense that dog people typically bond by talking to each other about their dogs. How much they weigh. How much they like to eat socks. How they’re getting a bath later yes you are aren’t you cutie yes you are. But at our local dog park, nobody was interested in discussing the coddled, yapping creatures lunging at our ankles. Our neighbors wanted to talk about the rats.
Here is the nightmarish gossip that initiated me into dog park society: A few weeks ago the dog park’s rat situation was so bad that a rat emerged in broad daylight to bite a dog on the leg, prompting public health officials to shut down the park temporarily. A subsequent inspection of the park and the neighboring children’s playground yielded the discovery of 125 bordering rat burrows. Sensibly, the rats had dug their vast empire along the perimeter of a promised land brimming with their favorite foods: dog shit, garbage, and the Cheddar Bunny crumbs that frequently get stuck to toddlers’ faces.
One acerbic older woman whom the other dog park regulars barely seemed to tolerate blamed yuppies for the rat infestation. “Park Slope didn’t have a problem with rats until the yuppies arrived and started eating brunch all over the place.” She said she’d gotten in trouble at the playground recently for shrieking about rats and scaring the children. She also said that the authorities had managed to eradicate 100 of the 125 local rat burrows by setting traps and clearing the brush that served as the rats’ cover, but then the city had gone ahead and planted some new shrubs immediately outside the dog park gates, which was just stupid.
While the woman shared these facts, Betty was happily plunging her adorable puppy face into a mound of rat feces. We shooed her away in a panic, but minutes later, while being chased by a horny pug, Betty dove headfirst into the same pile, effectively atomizing the feces so we humans felt an urgent need to step away, shielding our mouths and noses from the hantaviral shitstorm.
On later visits to the dog park, we found that everyone there had something negative to say about the rats. We were encouraged to gaze over the fenceline so we could see into the dark apertures of the remaining burrows. We were encouraged to become students of the city’s anti-rat poster campaign warning against not cleaning up after your dog. We were told that the bubonic plague is alive and well.
Naturally, I was horrified by what I was learning about my idyllic neighborhood. It was like finding out that your long-term boyfriend has an STD that will eventually chew off your privates while you’re unconscious. Rats are gross. Rats are pests. Rats have collapsible rib cages and unplated skulls that allow them to squeeze between the bars of birdcages and devour pet canaries. But something about the unquestioned flood of rat criticism made me want to step in and defend the little monsters. Many of the harsh things that the dog park people were saying about rats could just as easily be applied to humans, or to dogs for that matter. Looking around the park, I saw a whole bunch of stocky, inbred, social, ravenous animals that mindlessly shat and pissed and served as vectors for disease. One could argue that the main difference was that they wore collars. (And used smartphones, haha.)
I decided to do some research. I was prepared to dazzle the dog park people with a recitation of rat facts that were both positive and fun. I was going to change hearts and minds, and make a real difference in interspecies relations in my neighborhood. But Betty peed on our rug one too many times and our dog-sitting adventure came to an end. And I think loitering in a dog park without a dog is probably the same level of creepy as loitering in a playground without a child. Fortunately I still have you people. Here is what I learned about our rat friends, primarily from Jerry Langton’s Rat: How the World’s Most Notorious Rodent Clawed Its Way to the Top:
- Rats have friendships with each other and if a member of their clan is disabled, they are just as likely to feed him as eat him.
- Rats are neophobics, meaning they’re scared of new things, the exception being new environments. If you give a rat an island to take over, as humans have been doing for many centuries, the rat will explore every inch of that island, and then it will swim for three days so it can reach the next island, and explore that one too.
- Rats love scrambled eggs!
- Rats can’t belch or vomit. They can actually die from drinking carbonated beverages. Exterminators have attempted to use Pepsi as rat poison but the soda usually goes flat by the time the rats are brave enough to enjoy it.
- Rats are omnivores just like us! (With the exception of Pepsi products.)
- Rats are shy and they struggle with obesity.
- These things exist, and I’d like to be a part of them somehow: American Fancy Rat and Mouse Association, Rodent Control Academy, New York City Rodent Complaint Form.
- Rats only bite babies when they’re sleeping because the babies smell like food, which sounds like Mommy’s fault to me.
- I once knew a drug dealer who kept two rats as pets and those rats were a lot cleaner than he was.
- Rats have superior digestive systems. They can poop up to 200 times a day. Amazing!
- In the Middle Ages, rats were cheap and efficient torture devices. A rat would be secured to someone’s abdomen, then a hot object would be brandished over the rodent until it got so frightened that it began to burrow into flesh.
- Rats used to provide humans with hours of entertainment by getting violently slaughtered by bloodthirsty dogs in basement arenas.
- Rats have figured out an ingenious way to heat their burrows in winter by using their own fermented urine!
- The world’s most popular lab rat was named after one of my ancestors.
- Rats love to reside in thatched roofs, which is part of the reason that medieval people had such a plague problem, and also why 10% of people in Mozambique can expect to be nibbled by a rat while they’re sleeping.
- In 1664 the Lord Mayor of London decided that cats and dogs were causing the plague, so he had them all killed, removing the rat’s only nemeses. The rat population boomed. Dopey mayor!
- Rats always build an emergency rear exit into their burrows. If there’s an earthquake, they wisely flee en masse through these “bolt holes” because they fear the roof caving in. But sometimes what they think is an earthquake is actually a jackhammer at a construction site and there are the rats anyway, swarming up from the earth and comically surrounding people in hard hats.
- Rats can develop an immunity to rat poison.
- Rats can sometimes be so playful with each other that their tails become tangled together. Then they can continue playing as a team without interruption until they all die of starvation. Silly!
If these fun facts don’t win over even the most passionate of rat haters, I don’t know what will.
The alternative to learning to love the rats is continuing to despise and destroy the rats. I also understand that impulse. Personally I would like to see a sky full of hawks. They would dive through the air right and left, taking out the bad rats but leaving the friendly ones. Unfortunately many of the smaller dog species in the dog park could get mixed up in the carnage. But they would be martyrs and we would honor them accordingly.
I could also volunteer to lead the rats away, maybe into New Jersey, using my iPhone playlist. This is the least I can do for my beloved neighborhood. I wouldn’t even ask to be paid! Though I might attempt to lure the cutest children on the playground into our photo studio later. So I can make money they can be safe from the rats.