Little Labors (4 page)

One evening, this friend arrives at our home, to meet the puma, when she is fresh, less than two weeks old. He arrives wearing a forty-pound vest. The vest, he says, is recommended as a way to build strength and endurance. It's just a thing he's trying out. He just now walked the ten blocks from his home to our home, not too far. But with the vest. His teenage children and his girlfriend are with him too. They are often with him. He is very close to all of them. They say nothing about the vest. He apologizes for being a little late. He had been in a class for potential foster parents, he explains. We have never heard anything about this fostering interest before; it is new. “You always dream of just the normal kid, with no issues, who's been orphaned by a car crash,” he said explaining his hesitation, but interest, in taking on foster children. “But apparently it's much more difficult than that.”

We live at the intersection of Penn Station, the Port Authority, and the Lincoln Tunnel. Very few babies make their home in this area, while a relatively high number of men without homes make their homes here. Between the front door of our building and the butcher shop at the corner there lives a very slim Hispanic man who sometimes sweeps the sidewalk, and who sometimes helps the catering company next door move their boxes, and who sometimes just stands around. Once I saw him directing buses out of the nearby bus parking lot. He is sometimes well, and smoking a cigarette and making conversation with the catering and food cart and garment guys on the block, and he is at other times not well, and half-asleep on the sidewalk. When I first moved to the neighborhood, one afternoon when I walked by him, and he was sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against the wall of the butcher shop, he spat on me and shouted, “Ugly!” After he spat on me a second time, I took to crossing the street to avoid him, especially when I was pregnant, and generally more cautious than usual.

But in those first couple months at home with the puma, the environment around me blurred, like in those photos taken with the f-stop set just so, and one day I didn't notice this man who lives on our block, and so I didn't cross the street to avoid him, I instead walked right by him, and I heard someone shouting at me—it was him shouting at me—“God bless you! What a beautiful baby boy. Take care of that boy.” This has consistently been his response to our passing ever since. Even though the puma now occasionally wears a dress. Now, when we walk by, he and the little girl invariably exchange a high five. But not really invariably. When he is smoking, he suggests that she not come too near.

Flannery O'Connor: No children.

Eudora Welty: No children. One children's book.

Hilary Mantel, Janet Frame, Willa Cather, Jane Bowles, Patricia Highsmith, Elizabeth Bishop, Hannah Arendt, Iris Murdoch, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Mavis Gallant, Simone de Beauvoir, Barbara Pym: No children.

Helen Gurley Brown, author of
Having It All
: no children.

Katherine Anne Porter: No children, many husbands.

Alice Munro: Three children. Two husbands. First story collection at age thirty-seven.

Toni Morrison: Two children. First novel at age thirty-nine.

Penelope Fitzgerald: Three children. First novel age sixty. Then eight more novels.

John Updike: Many children. Many books. First book age twenty-five.

Saul Bellow: Many children. Many wives. Many books. First at age twenty-nine.

Doris Lessing: Left two of her three children to be raised by her father. Later semiadopted a teenage girl, a peer of one of her sons. Said, and had to repeatedly handle questions about having said, that there was “nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.” Many books.

Muriel Spark: One child, born in Southern Rhodesia during her marriage to Sydney Oswald Spark, who suffered from manic depression. She moved to London alone, leaving behind her husband. Her young son, also left behind, ended up in the care of some fruit sellers down the road, before he eventually moved to Scotland to live with his maternal grandparents. The child was later disinherited by his mother, who was annoyed, it is said, that he went around complaining that his mother wouldn't admit that she was Jewish. Among other things. Many books.

Rebecca West: Had one child with H. G. Wells, to whom she was not married. Tried to convince the child that she was his aunt and not his mother (arguably for his own good). In 1955, the child wrote a roman à clef,
Heritage
, about the son of two world-famous parents; the mother does not come off well. For twenty-nine years, West successfully blocked publication. In 1984, when the novel was finally released, the child, aged sixty-nine, wrote an introduction to the book that further condemned his mother. The same year, the child published a laudatory biography of his mostly absent father.

Shirley Jackson: Four children.

J. G. Ballard: Widowed with three young children. Drank every day, was very productive, and called all of his children, in his autobiography of the same name, “miracles of life.” In describing seeing his children newly born, he wrote, “Far from being young, as young as a human being can be, they seemed immensely old, their foreheads and features streamlined by time, as archaic and smooth as the heads of pharaohs in Egyptian sculpture, as if they had traveled an immense distance to find their parents. Then, in a second, they became young.” Ballard also wrote with fondness about his time as a child in the internment camps of Shanghai.

Are often noted to not be of interest.

Every hour, about 14,500 babies are born.

When Lucille Ball was pregnant, her character on television was also pregnant, though the word pregnant, like a swear word, could not, at the time, be said on television; Lucy was, instead, expecting. She carried bags, and stood behind chairs and sofas, so as to protect viewers from a full visual sense of what was expected. Lucille's husband on the show, Ricky Ricardo, was played by her actual husband, Desi Arnaz. In real life, Lucille Ball turned down show-business offers until someone was willing to also employ Desi Arnaz, who, probably because he was Cuban, was mostly denied employment. This dynamic is reversed in
I Love Lucy
. Ricky Ricardo is a successful bandleader at a nightclub, and a regular plot point is Lucy's desperate attempts to be part of his show. The episode of
I Love Lucy
in which Little Ricky is born was watched by forty-four million Americans, in three out of every four homes that had a television, and was titled, simply,
Lucy Goes to the Hospital.

For the first photos of the twins of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie,
People
paid fourteen million dollars.

Murasaki Shikibu, of
The Tale of Genji
, and Sei Shonagon,
of
The Pillow Book,
knew one another. They weren't fond of one another. Shikibu was reserved and retiring, and more well-placed politically; Shonagon was witty and conversationally brilliant, and had a less stable position at court. Tutored by their fathers, both women knew Chinese, which was then the language of power and of politics (and of serious literature), and it was a language that women were not taught; women were supposed to speak and write only in Japanese; both women wrote their masterworks in Japanese, the insignificant language of women and gossip.

After
The Pillow Book
and
The Tale of Genji,
the third most noted and enduring book from the Heian period is
The Tosa Nikki
. It is a sort of travelogue, written in Japanese, by a male author writing under a female pseudonym, and its opening line is, “I hear that diaries are things that men make but let's see what a woman can do.”

Both Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon had, it seems, babies. I don't know to what extent ladies at Heian court raised their babies. From the books it is difficult to tell. But at least, it would appear, somewhat. Even empresses nursed. Shikibu in her diaries describes the patheticness of her empress's baby not quite latching on. Shonagon complains in
The Pillow Book
of overly possessive wet nurses. Shonagon's empress, a different empress than Shikibu's, is sent away from court to have her baby, and though it was normal to be sent away, she was sent somewhere conspicuously low in status, she's in political decline, and the passage in which Shonagon describes this pregnant exile is one of the most willfully cheerful passages in
the whole book; that empress dies shortly after giving birth.

Today there are many writers who are mothers, sometimes writing specifically about motherhood, and in a genre that we recognize as literature. Or, at least, there are some mother writers, in this sense, if not many. There is Elena Ferrante, and Sarah Manguso. But among the mother writers of today probably two of the most celebrated are men: Karl Ove Knausgaard and, in his way, Louis C. K.

I set her down in her crib, and she didn't cry. Why, I wondered, is she not distressed? It's as if she assumes that we will, of course, love and care for her. It seemed so strange for her to assume that. I respected her fearlessness.

The passage in
The Pillow Book
titled “When the Empress Moved” tells of all the amusing and comic things that happen when the empress Teishi and her court (including Shonagon) are moved out of the main palace to another residence, one where the gate is not wide enough for the carriage to pass, where the master of the house doesn't know the words for things, and where the court ladies are not given their proper privacy. In this passage, Shonagon does not mention that the empress Teishi is pregnant and ill, that another woman from another family was also recently named empress, that the move to a house far beneath her station was a political one, part of an attempt to shift power to a different family, and she also does not mention that the empress Teishi will soon die in childbirth, an event that has most likely already happened when the passage was written but which isn't encompassed in the passage. Instead the writing is crowded over with laughter and “charm,” and scholars tell us that the passage has a special density of what in Japanese aesthetics is known as
okashii
—the amusing and the strange—and this high incidence of
okashii
(as opposed to
aware
, roughly translated to us as the pathos of things passing) often increases in
The Pillow Book
at moments when we might expect the opposite, at moments of distress and loss. (This is part of what makes me associate the book with what I think of as the “small” as opposed to the “minor.”)

Then the section that immediately
follows
that of “When the Empress Moved” (and though we can't be certain of the original order of the passages, it is plausible that they were in this order) is one full of the touchingly named quality of
aware
. It tells of a once-favored palace dog who is punished by being cast out from the palace—sent to Dog Island!—and who eventually makes his way back, injured and emaciated. The returned dog pretends to be a different dog, but cries telling tears when his true name is mentioned. Eventually, the dog receives an imperial pardon—his offense had been to startle a beloved cat who wore an imperial headdress and was known as Lady Myobu, that was why he was banished—and he is thereafter, according to Shonagon, “returned to his former happy state.” She continues, “Yet even now, when I remember how he whimpered and trembled in response to our sympathy, it strikes me as a strange and moving scene; when people talk to me about it, I start crying myself.” It is the passage with the happy ending that closes in tears.

The Pillow Book
is difficult to characterize. It's not a novel and not a diary and not poems and not advice, but it has qualities of each, and it would have been understood at the time as a kind of miscellany, a familiar form. The book consists of 185 entries, many of them quite short, some of them anecdotes, some lists, some pronouncements. “Oxen should have very small foreheads with white hair,” one short section begins. “A preacher ought to be good-looking,” begins another, but the passage then bumps into, “But I really must stop writing this kind of thing. If I were still young enough, I might risk the consequence of putting down such impieties, but at my present stage of life I should be less flippant.”

Often Shonagon seems wildly petty about issues of “taste”—“Nothing can be worse than allowing the driver of one's ox carriage to be poorly dressed”—and we have to remember that the writer of the passage, Shonagon, was a person whose very delimited power derived almost exclusively from her expert manipulation of the language of passing fashions. She knows the best way to starch cottons, what colors look best under what other colors, and just how to hold a fan; this arena of tiny decisions was a kind of politics, and the only kind available to her. In her list, “Things that have lost their power,” we find

a woman who has taken off her false locks to comb the short hair that remains . . . A large tree that has been blown down in a gale and lies on its side with its roots in the air . . . The retreating figure of a sumo wrestler who has been defeated in a match . . . A woman who is angry with her husband about some trifling matter, leaves home and goes somewhere to hide. She is certain that he will rush about looking for her; but he does nothing of the kind and shows the most infuriating indifference. Since she cannot stay away for ever, she swallows her pride and returns.

Scholars are not even sure of what Shonagon's real name was, but it is known that her father was a poet, that she was not considered naturally beautiful, and that whether she died an impoverished nun in the countryside or in mild gentility with a second husband is not clear.