The Best American Essays 2013 (31 page)

Midway through the exam, when the baby started to fuss, I poked the baby’s mother on the arm and whispered,
Do you have a bottle?
She dug around in her backpack and (thank goodness) found one. I gave the bottle to the baby while students were bent over their exams. The baby sucked down its formula, making that gulping sound that babies make. They study you, their fat little fingers fondling the edges of the bottle, fondling your fingers, reaching for your nose, their bare toes. This one never took his eyes off me. Once he snapped the rubber nipple with his four teeth and then laughed loudly. The class heard this and then laughed too. The baby wanted us to love him, maybe to improve his chances of survival.

How quickly the border between classroom and home, personal and professional can dissolve! But it felt good to hold a baby in a classroom. I could breathe for a minute. A baby provides comic relief. A baby is funny and random and unscripted. But I could not fully enjoy the moment, because the whole time I was wrestling with ideas like
Is this really a good message to be sending to students? Shouldn’t I send her away, saying “No children allowed,” because those are the rules? Will this baby distract the other students?
How much do you bend the rules for these girls with their babies, these girls with the odds stacked so high against them?

11
.

My teenage students have babies right in the middle of a semester. The San Joaquin Valley has the highest teen pregnancy rate of any region in the United States. My students call me up and say, “Miss, I just wanted to remind you that my baby is due in a couple days . . . so if you don’t see me in class . . . that’s why.” They disappear for a couple days and then reappear, their eyes slightly glazed.
Back already?
I say, because after my baby was born, I’d staggered around for two weeks feeling like I’d just completed the Bataan Death March. But for most teenagers, the body heals itself and springs back into shape almost immediately; life goes on. Evolutionarily speaking, a quick recovery makes sense. Biologically, humans can give birth at a relatively young age; consider that, on average, girls begin to menstruate at age twelve—sometimes as young as age eight. But to what advantage? Do species evolve to produce as many offspring as possible, even at the risk of mothers being socially and mentally immature? Is it better to throw our
DNA
into the mix as often as possible to improve the odds that at least some of our genetic material will survive? Consider, though, life within a tribe—all those hands, the elders to keep watch, to give advice, to admonish. Perhaps for some humans, the young-mother model works just fine. But without the tribe, without rules, who will watch over the girls in my town—these girls who often need mothering themselves—these girls with their babies in their low-rent apartments with boyfriends who sometimes marry them, most often do not?

After class one girl says proudly, “Look, Miss. I can already button my old jeans!” She holds up her blouse to reveal her small, swollen belly. Any evidence of her pregnancy has all but disappeared. Who would know that an eight-pound baby had recently been expelled from that same body?

At times I’m baffled by the lack of impact motherhood seems to have upon many of my students. Many girls don’t appear to be visibly moved by the event of childbirth. Or at least they don’t know how to express their feelings about it. Afterward they return to class; I search, but cannot discern any real change in their eyes.
So? Well?
I say.
How did it go?
The girls often shrug. “He weighed nine pounds,” they might say, or, “He’s already sleeping through the night, Miss.” They’ll tell me details that they’ve heard other mothers say, common quips that you hear on
TV
or in doctors’ waiting rooms—bland, unrevealing details that seem scripted. Many of these same girls want to write essays about the births of their babies, but they almost always lack the language to express anything more than a basic plot outline. Example:

My water bag broke right in the middle of the grocery store. It felt so weird. My mom drove me to the hospital. They put me in bed and got me all hooked up to the machines and then the pain got really bad. It went on for hours. They ended up doing a C-section, thank god. The labor lasted over twenty hours but then the baby was born healthy and now I am so happy. I love my baby so much!

In the margins of their papers, I’ll press for specific details and analysis:
Describe the pain! Describe the baby! Do you feel any different? What obstacles do you face now?

12
.

My cousin X. and I practically grew up together. Sometimes she’d stay at our house for seven, eight, nine days, and then I’d stop talking to her. I’d give her the cold shoulder. I just wouldn’t talk anymore. She’d say, “Are you mad at me?” I’d shrug. “Are you sick of me?” she’d say. “A little,” I’d say. I didn’t know how to articulate that I needed my bedroom back. I needed to close the door and read and think. I was that kind of kid. I needed solitude to feel normal. Sometimes I would just lock my door and stay in there the whole day. I’d stare at the ceiling. I remember saying, “I just need to think,” not really knowing what I needed to think about. Then she’d say, “Okay, I’d better go home then. I guess I’ll call my mom.” I loved X. the way only cousins can love other cousins, kids who are thrown together in this world by way of shared mothers, mothers who sometimes turn parenting into an informal commune, the philosophy being
You take them today, I’ll take them tomorrow
, the mission statement being
Together we will keep these children alive
. X.’s mother had gotten pregnant when she was eighteen. The guy ended up marrying her and then a couple years later he dumped two-year-old X. and my aunt onto Grandma’s front lawn. He tossed their clothes out of the car and all over the grass. Then he drove away. End of story.

So we understood why X. got pregnant at age eighteen. She started looking for love in all the wrong places—love with surfer guys with names like Travis and Dave. One day she got herself knocked up and her stepfather kicked her out of the house and she moved in with us. “I just can’t have an abortion again,” she told me. “I won’t do it.” The born-again Christians had gotten ahold of her, pressing antiabortion pamphlets into her hands, pamphlets that contained gruesome pictures of dead fetuses, their tiny hands awash in fresh blood. She’d convinced herself that her dead baby was waiting for her in heaven and for the time being the baby was being cared for by angels, who had it gently by the hand, and that one day it would be reunited with its mommy-on-earth, but only if mommy-on-earth was willing to call herself a sinner and change her wanton ways. “I’m having this baby,” she said defiantly. It was a common trope back then.

But babies get annoying real fast. They get bigger and then they squirm away from you and then they call you names like
butthead
and they take off their shoes and hurl them at you and as soon as you get the shoes laced up again, they pry them off and toss them behind the dresser, and inevitably you lose that shoe and now you’ve got four mismatched shoes without mates. Toddlers can be hard to take, especially when they start saying NO all the time and that’s the only word they know. They poke you in the eyes when you’re sleeping and you’re dead tired and they always have runny noses and the snot runs into their mouths and they lick at it with the edges of their tongues or smear it onto damp encrusted sleeves. They jump on you when you don’t expect it, knees and elbows jamming into your ribs, into your chest, into your cheekbones, and the more you try to wrench them off, the more they want to jump on you again; sometimes you want to shove them off and maybe pinch their little arms or yank a clump of hair or leave them in the crib even if they’re crying and calling you so pitifully, and you know this borders on child abuse, but it’s really hard when there’s no father and you are
it
—the kid’s sun and moon.

13
.

My daughter and my fourteen-year-old roommate’s daughter—born on the same night, the same hour—are now thirteen years old. When I look at my own daughter I cannot believe that a girl of roughly her age and temperament could be a mother. She slams doors. She stomps around. She throws up her hands and says, “Are you
kidding
me?” She sketches pictures of horses and then crumples them up. She announces, “I’ll take animals over people
any
day” (and she means it). And although her fingers are now longer than mine—her hands more graceful—I cannot, no matter how hard I try, imagine those hands changing a diaper.

Would our daughters have anything in common? My roommate’s daughter, according to county statistics (based on her mother’s age and ethnicity), will very likely have a baby before she turns eighteen. Then the girl will most likely drop out of school and struggle to care for her child in this place of leached soil turned to clay. My roommate’s daughter may never know about the migratory waterfowl such as Canadian geese and whistling swans that once stopped off in our valley marshlands—most of which have been drained to rechannel water for irrigation. And maybe the babies, in some weird way, reflect our need to find beauty once again in this landscape. In any case, I suspect our connection to the land runs deeper than we know.

As for our daughters, the fortuneteller might peer into her crystal ball or examine our girls’ palms and see a whole web of alternate realities.
Anything can happen
, she might say. For all of us, the road is wide open.

ZADIE SMITH

FROM
The New Yorker

T
HE FIRST TIME
I heard her I didn’t hear her at all. My parents did not prepare me. (The natural thing in these situations is to blame the parents.) She was nowhere to be found on their four-foot-tall wood-veneer hi-fi. Given the variety of voices you got to hear on that contraption, her absence was a little strange. Burning Spear and the Beatles; Marley, naturally, and Chaka Khan; Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and James Taylor; Luther Vandross, Anita Baker, Alexander O’Neal. And Dylan, always Dylan. Yet nothing of the Canadian with the open-tuned guitar. I don’t see how she could have been unknown to them—it was her peculiar curse to never really be unknown. Though maybe they had heard her and simply misunderstood.

My parents loved music, as I love music, but you couldn’t call any of us whatever the plural of
muso
is. The Smiths owned no rare tracks, no fascinating B-sides (and no records by the Smiths). We wanted songs that made us dance, laugh, or cry. The only thing that was in any way unusual about the collection was the manner in which it combined, in one crate, the taste of a young black woman and an old white man. It had at least that much eclecticism to it. However, we did not tend to listen to white women singing very often. Those particular voices were surplus to requirements, somehow, having no natural demographic within the household. A singer like Elkie Brooks (really Elaine Bookbinder—a Jewish girl, from Salford) was the closest we got, though Elkie had that telltale rasp in her throat, linking her, in the Smith mind, to Tina Turner or Della Reese. We had no Kate Bush records, or even the slightest hint of Stevie Nicks, raspy though she may be. The first time I was aware of Debbie Harry’s existence, I was in college. We had Joan Armatrading and Aretha and Billie and Ella. What did we need with white women?

It was the kind of college gathering where I kept sneaking Blackstreet and Aaliyah albums into the CD drawer, and friends kept replacing them with other things. And then there she was, suddenly: a piercing sound, a sort of wailing—a white woman, wailing, picking out notes in a nonsequence. Out of tune—or out of anything I understood at the time as
tune
. I picked up the CD cover and frowned at it: a skinny blonde with heavy bangs, covered in blue. My good friend Tamara—a real singer, serious about music—looked over at me, confused.
You don’t like Joni?
I turned the CD over disdainfully, squinted at the track list.
Oh, was that Joni?
And very likely went on to say something facetious about white-girl music, the kind of comment I had heard, inverted, when I found myself called upon to defend black men swearing into a microphone. Another friend, Jessica, pressed me again:
You don’t like Joni?
She closed her eyes and sang a few lines of what I now know to be “California.” That is, she sang pleasing, not uninteresting words, but in a strange, strangulated falsetto—a kind of Kafkaesque “piping”—which I considered odd, coming out of Jess, whom I knew to have, ordinarily, a beautiful, black voice. A soul voice. You don’t like Joni?

Perhaps this is only a story about philistinism. A quality always easier to note in other people than to detect in yourself. Aged twenty, I listened to Joni Mitchell—a singer whom millions enjoy, who does not, after all, make an especially unusual or esoteric sound—and found her incomprehensible. Could not even really recognize her piping as “singing.” It was just noise. And, without troubling over it much, I placed her piping alongside all the interesting noises we hear in the world but choose, through habit or policy, to separate from music. What can you call that but philistinism?
You don’t like Joni?
My friends had pity in their eyes. The same look the faithful tend to give you as you hand them back their “literature” and close the door in their faces.

In the passenger seat of a car, on the way to a wedding. I no longer had the excuse of youth: I was now the same age as Christ when he died. I was being driven west, toward Wales. Passing through woods and copses, a wild green landscape, heading for the steep and lofty cliffs . . . It is a very long drive to Wales. The driver, being a poet, planned a pit stop at Tintern Abbey. His passenger, more interested in finding a motorway service station, spoke frequently of her desire for a sausage roll. The mood in the car was not the brightest. And something else had been bothering me for several miles without my being quite conscious of its source, some persistent noise . . . But now I focused in on it and realized it was that bloody piping again, ranging over octaves, ignoring the natural divisions between musical bars, and generally annoying the hell out of me, like a bee caught in a wing mirror. I made a plea for change to the driver, who gave me a look related to the one my friends had given me all those years earlier, though this was a stronger varietal, the driver and I being bonded to each other for life by legal contract.