The Martians

Chapter 15 Jackie on Zo

It didn’t seem that bad to me but I had an epidural so what do I know. It was like an extremely arduous athletic effort that I couldn’t choose not to do. I’ve seen people’s scornful looks when I mention the epidural, but I say we’re Terran animals and if we’re going to give birth on another planet we deserve a little medical intervention. To insist on a natural childbirth on Mars is a kind of machismo I’m not interested in.

She was hard from the start. She was pulled out of me and put on my chest and I saw this little red face looking me right in the eye and yelling in protest. She was pissed off, you could read that on her face just as clear as on anyone older than her. I doubt not that we’re conscious in the womb, for at least the last part of the confinement, lost in thought without language, like music or meditation. And so we come out with our character already in place, intact and complete. Nothing afterward changes it. And in fact she was pissed off like that for years to come.

She sucked voraciously, cried inconsolably, slept fitfully, shrieked in her sleep as if fully awake—then woke up terrified by her own noise and cried some more. I often wondered what she dreamed about to scare her so. For thousands of years they’ve called it colic and no one knows what it is. Some say it’s the slow adjustment of the digestive system to the barrage of new chemicals. From the writhing of her torso I judge there is some truth to that. But I also think she was still pissed off about being ejected from the womb. Rage at the unfair loss of that narcissistic oceanic bliss. She remembered the womb. Even later when she forgot she remembered, and did everything she could to get back to that place. That’s Zo’s whole story really.

The colic drove me crazy. I couldn’t comfort her and couldn’t get her to stop crying. Nothing worked, and believe me I tried everything I could think of, because it exasperated me no end. Sometimes she cried ten hours straight. That’s a long time when a baby’s crying. The only thing that worked even a little was to hold her in my hands, one under her butt and one behind her head and neck, and raise her up and down rapidly, as if she were in a swing. This boggled her into silence and she even seemed to like it, or at least be interested. In any case she would stop crying. But one time when I was doing it an Arab woman came up to me and put her hand out and said, “Please, you should not do that, you might hurt the baby.”

“I’ve got her head supported,” I told her, and showed her.

“Still, their necks are so weak.” She was nervous, even scared, but persisting.

“She likes it. I know what I’m doing.”

But I never did it again. And I thought later about the kind of courage it takes to remonstrate with a stranger about his or her parenting.

If Michel’s belief in the theory of the four temperaments is correct, which I doubt, then she was choleric. Moody—like Maya, yes, she was. This similarity didn’t bother me as much as people might think. I liked Maya a lot more than she liked me—who wouldn’t, she’s like something out of Sophocles—but she wanted to fight, and I wasn’t going to back down. It was the same with Zo. It’s all a matter of one’s biochemistry—one’s moods I mean. That’s what Michel was saying too really, with all his biological correlations. The four temperaments, sure, except there are forty, or forty thousand. Grouped perhaps loosely in his four, who knows. Anyway Zo was a choleric’s choleric, the pure product.

She was extremely frustrated throughout her first year, when she couldn’t talk or walk. She could see all the rest of us doing those things and she wanted to too. She tipped over a million times, like a top-heavy doll. I kept a supply of butterfly Band-Aids on hand, in fact a complete little medical kit. She babbled authoritatively at everyone, but when they failed to understand her she got furious. She grabbed things out of your hand. She threw her cups and spoons and dishes at you, or on the floor. She would take big swings at you, and was so fast that some of them landed. She would head-butt you with the back of her head—she split my lip twice, but after that my face got faster than her head. Which made her furious. She would throw herself headlong on the floor and beat the ground with fists and feet, and howl. It was hard not to laugh at such histrionics, but I usually avoided letting her see me laugh, as it drove her berserk and her face would go an alarming purple color. So I tried to be noncommittal. It got easy to ignore. “Oh that’s just Zo doing her thing,” I would say. “It’s like an electrical storm going through her nervous system. There’s nothing you can do except let it run its course.”

When she learned to walk she got less cranky. She learned to feed herself too, very quickly. She refused high chairs or boosters or any baby utensils as affronts to her dignity. Once she could get around she was a danger to herself even more than before. She would eat anything. Changing her diapers, I found sand, dirt, pebbles, roots, twigs, small toys, little household objects—it was a real mess. And she would fight like crazy while you tried to change her. Not always, but about half the time. It was like that with all the daily routine—changing clothes, brushing teeth, getting in the bath, getting out of the bath—half the time she would cooperate, half she would object and fight you all the way. And if you let her win it only got worse next time. Give a centimeter and she would go for the kilometer.

I suppose eating dirt might have been how she got sick. She got some variant of the Guillain-Barré virus, but we didn’t know that at the time, we only saw the forty-degree temperature and then she was paralyzed completely, for six days. I couldn’t believe it. I was still in the full shock of it happening when she came out of it and started to move again—first twitches, then everything. It was an amazing relief. But I have to admit that after that she was worse than ever. Her tantrums would last an hour, and if you put her in a room by herself she would do her best to destroy it. She broke bones in both hands. So you had to stay in the room to watch her. I seriously considered making it a padded room.

She was also terrible to other kids. She would walk right up to them and knock them down, almost as if experimentally. It was impersonal, and she didn’t seem malicious—more like deranged. And indeed later we figured out that she had a perceptual problem after her illness, and thought she was farther away from things than she really was. So when she got interested in another person, bam, over they went. She was a cheery little anarchist in her day care, so high-maintenance I was embarrassed to inflict her on the place. But I needed to work and I needed time away from her, so I did it anyway. They didn’t complain, not directly.

The more she learned to talk the more she challenged the rules. NO was her first word and her favorite for years. She said it with immense conviction. The trick questions got the biggest NOs of all. Will you get out of the bath? No. Don’t you want to get to read a book? No. Don’t you want to have dessert? No. Do you like to say no? NO.

She picked up language so fast I couldn’t really remember how it happened. For a few months it was just a few words, then all of a sudden she could say whatever she wanted. That made her more relaxed in some ways. Her good moods were really good, and lasted longer. She was so cute you could hardly stand it. It has to be some kind of evolutionary mechanism to keep you from killing them. She was always on the move, jumping around, looking to do something or go somewhere. She developed a passion for trams and trucks, and would cry out, “Tram!” or “Truck!” Once I was out by myself and I saw a truck and said, “Oooh, big truck,” and the people sitting around me on the tram looked at me.

But she still had a hell of a temper. And now when she got mad she would chew you out as well as hit you and throw things at you. You had to laugh at how basic she was. She said the meanest things she could think of. “Go ’way!” “I don’t like you!” “You’re not my friend!” “You’re not my mom!” “You’re nothing!” “I don’t love you anymore!” “I hate you!” “You’re dead!” “Go ’way!”

In public this could be embarrassing. Often when I took her out she would look at someone nearby and announce loudly, “I don’t like that guy.” And sometimes add, “Go ’way!”

“Be polite Zo,” I would say, with an apologetic look, trying to convey that she did this to everyone. “That’s not nice.”

After that infancy when she hit the so-called terrible twos it was kind of hard to tell the difference. Though it did get worse in some ways. At times it was almost impossible to deal with her. It was like living with a psychotic. Every day was a complete roller coaster, with several great highs and just as many shrieking tantrums. Everything you told her to do she would stop and decide whether she wanted to obey or not, and usually the very idea of being told what to do would offend her, and she would opt for defiance just on principle. Often she would do the opposite of what she was told to do. I had to be ready for that or it was trouble. I had to decide whether it was worth it to tell her not to do something—if it really mattered. If it did then I had to be prepared for the whole melodrama. Once I said, “Zo, don’t bang that mug on the table,” and she slammed it down before I could get to her and it broke the mug and the tabletop, which was glass. She was round-eyed but unrepentant. Angry at me, as if I had tricked her. She also wanted to break a few more to see how it worked.

All these intensities were constant and across the board, and so she could be a joy when she was in a good mood. We explored Mars like John in the beginning. I never felt more strongly that I was in the presence of mental brilliance than when I was with her, out walking together on the moors or in the streets of a town, when she was about three—not even with Sax or Vlad or Bao Shuyo. The sense that here was someone intently observing the world and then putting things together faster than I could ever dream of doing. She laughed at things all the time, often for reasons I couldn’t see, and when she laughed she was so beautiful. At all times she was an exceptionally good-looking child, but when she laughed there was a physical beauty that along with the innocence was heart-stopping to see. How we manage to ruin that quality is humanity’s great crime, repeated over and over.

Anyway, that beauty and laughter made all the temper tantrums a lot easier for me, sure. You couldn’t help but love her, she was so passionate. When she blew up and hit the deck screaming and pounding and thrashing on the floor I would think, Oh well, that’s just Zo. No need to take it personally. Not even the I hate you Moms—they weren’t personal either, not really. It was just she was passionate. I loved her so much.

Which only made it worse seeing Nirgal. What a contrast—week after week taking care of Zo, exhausted a lot of the time, and then he would drop by, just as airy and vague and agreeable as ever—everyone’s friend, mild and somewhat removed. Like Hiroko a bit. And yes he was Zo’s father, I admit it now, but who could imagine that she had anything to do with him, so blithe and smooth he was, all his life. He may be the Great Martian, everyone seems to think so, but he was nothing to her I tell you. One time he came by and everyone was fawning over him as usual, drawn to him as if to some kind of magic mirror, and Zo took one look at him and turned to me and said, “I don’t like that guy.”

“Zo.”

A daring glance at him: “Go ’way!”

“Zo! Be nice!” I looked at him. “She does this with everybody.”

Immediately she ran to Charlotte and hugged her legs, glancing at me. Everyone laughed and she glowered, not expecting that.

“Okay,” I said, “she does it with fifty percent of everybody, and hugs the other half. But which half you’re in keeps changing.”

Nirgal nodded and smiled at her, but he still looked startled when she loudly insisted, “I don’t like that guy!”

“Zo, stop it! Be polite.”

And eventually, I mean over years, she did get a bit more polite. Eventually the world wears you down, you get a veneer of civilization over your real self. But how I loved her when she was a little animal and you saw just what she was really like. How I loved her. These days we get together for lunch and she is the most arrogant supercilious young woman you can imagine, completely full of herself, condescending to me from an enormous height, and I just look at her and laugh, thinking, You think you’re so tough—you should have seen yourself when you were two.