Now, when the baby pushes away, the mother offers him milk from her left breast, but he refuses it. She burps him against her toweled shoulder, flooded with chemical love for this fragile being. He fusses. She rocks him. Within fifteen minutes, he’s asleep again. This is life, she has learned, with a newborn: it’s easing someone into and out of consciousness, over and over, providing sustenance in between. As though infants inhabit a different planet, one that orbits its sun four times faster than Earth does. If you want to understand the human condition, pay close attention to infants: the stakes are simultaneously at their highest, because you could die at any moment, and at their lowest, because someone bigger is satisfying every need. Language and agency have not yet arrived. What’s that like? Observe a baby.
She places hers in his crib and cracks her neck.
When her husband returns around half past nine at night, his head shelled in the construction hard hat, his boots dusty, his odor of perspiration and sunblock a kind of home, their baby is still asleep. For the first time, the mother realizes she hasn’t spoken to anyone all day. She meant to take the baby for a walk but forgot. Television and radio did not occur to her. Fourteen hours tense and alone, panning the day for peril.
She hands her husband a plate of fish sticks and ketchup.
“What a feast.” He smiles, kissing her bare shoulder. “Thanks, baby.”
Don’t call me that, she doesn’t say. You’re welcome, she means to say, but she can’t remember how to transport words out of her head and into the world. It’s been years, she feels, since she tried.
“Hey, I’m really sorry about Elsie Blitz,” her husband says as he washes his hands. “That must’ve been sad for you.”
The mother blinks rapidly, as though trying to clear something from her vision. “What?”
Elsie Blitz is the star of Meet the Neighbors. It was Hope’s mother who first introduced her to the mid-twentieth-century family sitcom. Perhaps because Meet the Neighbors showcases a fraught but affectionate alliance between a conventional housewife and her rascal of a daughter, watching the show was a kind of matrilineal tradition in Hope’s family: when Hope was a kid, her mother viewed it alongside her, just as Hope’s grandmother had viewed it alongside Hope’s mother. Hope still summons the show to her screen when she can’t sleep, gradually identifying more with the mother than the daughter; maybe she’ll watch it with her own child, one day. Elsie Blitz plays Susie Evans, a trouble-loving spitfire at the center of the series. Elsie Blitz was a child so optimally childish, she came to represent all children to Hope. She had a face like an apple, a sunny grin, plentiful confidence. She could tap-dance, sing, and whistle. Her disobedience, however reckless, was always redeemed by the fun that it generated and ultimately forgiven by authorities. As a kid, Hope measured her deficiencies against the idealized Susie Evans, but neither the character nor the actress inspired envy. Just sisterly aspiration. In Hope’s mind, Elsie Blitz was forever frozen at the age of eleven—the age of Susie Evans in the series finale. It had been so nice to know that at least one person in the world would never have to grow up.
Her husband sits down at the kitchen table, his posture freighted with guilt, like he’s accidentally disclosed someone else’s secret. “I thought you would’ve heard by now.” He frowns. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise.”
“Why? What happened?”
“She passed away today,” her husband replies. “She was in her eighties.”
The mother braces for a feeling that never arrives. It’s as though she’s underwater, and the news exists above her, on a dock. “Oh,” she finally says. “Sad.”
Her husband studies her with concern but drops the subject. While they eat—while he eats—she considers telling her husband about the eye phobia. She has considered telling him every night for four weeks. Hey, she could say, once she remembered how to talk normally. There’s this weird thing. This weird thing that’s been happening, sort of funny, nothing crazy, just weird.
“How’s our big guy?” the husband asks between bites.
The mechanics of speech return to her, jerky at first. “He’s . . .” Not big. He’s tiny, she wants to scream. He needs to be rescued from his own smallness, like everyone else! She swallows a glassful of water in one breath. “Babies. What I like about babies.” Her eyes lose focus.
“Hm?”
“Babies know that just because you have it easy doesn’t mean that life is easy.”
Her husband chews a fish stick. “So he’s alive?”
She nods.
“Terrific.” He smooths her eyebrow, his finger rough. “I love you,” he says. “You’re tired, huh?”
“There’s this . . .” She fixes her eyes on the smoke detector. “This funny thing, that’s been happening.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
She hesitates. Her husband believes that she is a good mother, a normal person, a worthy investment. “I’m scared. . . .”
Her husband puts down his fork, takes her seriously. “What?”
“Nothing.” She begins to cry as quietly as she can. “I’m—so—tired.”
Her husband wipes his mouth and studies her with his dark and searching eyes. “Babe,” he says. He stands and takes her back in his hands, kneading muscles and skin, and she wonders who designs costumes for bearded dragons, what species will study evidence of hers in 90 million years, and what misunderstandings will result. What would a nuclear explosion feel like? Would the death be instantaneous? Are there physical buttons involved? Will her busted vagina ever resume its life as a pussy? Where did the dead mouse land after she flung it out of their window? Where is that man she saw at the drive-through, and what is he doing right now? Is this the most valuable work of her life? Is she a psychopath? Is she a threat to them all?
“Oh, babe,” he says. “Of course you are.”
“What?”
“Of course you’re tired.”
C6: Ida and Reggie, both in their seventies, sit in their living room, smoking cigarettes and watching the news on high volume. Bad factory fire in Detroit, Michigan. Pageant queen starts nonprofit phone-case business, proceeds funding dental care for refugees. Superpest destroying monocrops of pepper in Vietnam.
Ida remembers what she wanted to tell Reggie earlier that afternoon.
“Reggie.” She coughs. “Reggie.”
“What?”
“Can you hear me, Reggie?”
“Huh?”
“Turn it down.”
“Huh?”
“Turn it down. I got to tell you something.”
He presses a gnarled thumb to the remote. “What?”
“Frank’s in jail again,” announces Ida.
“Tina’s Frank?”
“What other Frank do we have?”
“What’d he do this time?”
“What do you think?”
“Another robbery?”
Ida nods. “This time he had a gun.”
“I thought that knee surgery would keep him out of trouble.”
“Bad knee can’t stop a dog like Frank.”
“Well, feels good to be right all along, I guess.” Reggie takes a long drag. “We did what we could.”
“He had that flashy car,” mumbles Ida. “Those stupid boots.”
“I just hope Tina knows she can’t come whining to us, hauling her kids over to do ‘chores’ around the place and expecting us to pay them.”
“We should’ve tried something different,” says Ida. “One of those barefoot schools. Piano lessons. Vitamins. No gluten. None of the kids turned out right.”
“Ida, it’s done and gone now. Tina’s a grown woman. The best thing we can do for her is let her take care of herself.”
Ida bobs a cigarette between her teeth.
“And you’re wrong,” Reggie says. “The kids turned out fine.” He restores the volume of the news. Australian parents beg national governments to rescue their daughters and grandchildren from camps in Syria. Their Australian daughters married ISIS members, and now they face unspeakable violence. Can scientists successfully grow a human kidney in a pig? Not yet but stay tuned. Groundwater contaminated in North Dakota. Celebrity baby born with hypertrichosis, colloquially referred to as werewolf syndrome. A thirteen-year-old girl goes viral for shaving bars of soap. “It’s just a simple supply-and-demand kind of situation,” she says with a shrug when questioned. Her channel has made her a millionaire. “I listen to what the people want.”
When the news anchor asks her to explain ASMR to boomers, she takes a deep breath, like she’s bracing for liftoff. “Okay, well, it stands for autonomous sensory meridian response. It’s these tingles some people get around their skull? And kind of down their spine? You feel like—like you’re shimmering or something. It’s the best feeling I know. There are all sorts of triggers. The rustle of leaves or whatever, someone taking your photograph. A really special present, made just for you. Haircuts. Bob Ross. Anyway, I get it whenever someone’s paying very close attention to something else. Back when I was little, I thought either everyone felt it and nobody talked about it, or nobody felt it except for me. Either way, I knew to keep my trap shut. But then, when I was maybe eleven, there was this thing in the news about it, and suddenly we all found each other. It was like a revolution. I mean—revelation. I started watching these videos, and I realized there was an opening in the market. But this soap-shaving stuff? That’s not my thing. It does nothing for me. I just do it for the masses.”
The news anchor laughs uncomfortably. “So is it like a—is it like a . . .?”
“What?”
“Is it like a . . .?”
The girl watches him impatiently. “What? Like a dirty thing?”
“Well—”
“No. It doesn’t have to be, at least. And geez, I’m thirteen. Why are you asking me that?”