Dept. Of Speculation

8

Then one day I discovered something that surprised me. The baby was calm at Rite Aid. She seemed to like the harsh light of it, the shelves of plenty. For fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, she’d suspend her fierce judgment of the world and fall silent there. And when she did, a tiny space would clear in my head and I could think again. So I began to go there with her every day, wandering up and down the narrow aisles while the terrible drugstore music played. I’d stare at the lightbulbs and the cold medicine and the mousetraps and everything looked strange and useless to me. The last time I’d felt that way I was sixteen and lived in Savannah, Georgia. I wore moth-eaten dresses and fancied myself an existentialist. The days were long then too.

We ran into the dog-walking neighbor once on our way there. He seemed to hate everything except my baby. “Serious expression,” he said approvingly. “Won’t suffer fools gladly.” The baby gave him her thousand-yard stare. She made a little sound like a growl maybe. He wanted her to pet his dog, a giant brooding mastiff with a spiked collar. “He’s a good dog,” he told me. “He hates drunks and blacks and he’s not too crazy about Spanish either.”

Sleep when the baby sleeps, people said. Don’t go to bed angry.

If I knew telekinesis, I would send this spoon over there to feed that baby.

My best friend came to visit from far away. She took two planes and a train to get to Brooklyn. We met at a bar near my apartment and drank in a hurry as the babysitter’s meter ticked. In the past, we’d talked about books and other people, but now we talked only of our respective babies, hers sweet-faced and docile, mine at war with the world. We applied our muzzy intellects to a theory of light. That all are born radiating light but that this light diminished slowly (if one was lucky) or abruptly (if one was not). The most charismatic people — the poets, the mystics, the explorers — were that way because they had somehow managed to keep a bit of this light that was meant to have dimmed. But the shocking thing, the unbearable thing it seemed, was that the natural order was for this light to vanish. It hung on sometimes through the twenties, a glint here or there in the thirties, and then almost always the eyes went dark.

“Put a hat on that baby,” said every old biddy that passed me. But the devil baby cleverly dispatched with them to ride bareheaded in the freezing rain and wind.

Is she a good baby? People would ask me. Well, no, I’d say.

That swirl of hair on the back of her head. We must have taken a thousand pictures of it.