the habit of being

When I arrived at the country escape of my lover, I was about six months along, and no one knew it. His wife and her friends sat outside at black metal tables on brick patios, drinking cocktails in the afternoon sun. I stayed mostly in my room, which had a window overlooking the back patio and the yards beyond it. The women knew I was up there, but they did not seem to know or care who I was, or why I was there. I knew all of their names, Sandrine and Belinda and so on, were because he told me, when he visited me upstairs. We would also talk about the baby’s name. It took a long time, but we decided on one.

When she was born, I could not think of the name we had chosen. I was too ashamed to admit that I did not know my daughter’s name, so I waited for my lover to use it. He did not. So I called her the baby, and waited.

Her name was not the only thing I didn’t know. In fact, I knew nothing at all. She had come very early, almost as soon as I arrived in the country, before I was ready. I thought I would break her. I was most afraid of her neck breaking from the weight of her head. My lover was much older than I was, and had had other children long ago. He showed me how to support her head when I held her. When I tried to copy him, I pressed too hard on the back of her neck and one of the bones of her skull, which had not yet fused, moved out of place. She had a protrusion on her forehead like a reptile, and I was horrified, thinking that I had ruined her. Her father was able to move the bone back into its correct position, to my great relief, and I did not make the mistake again.

After I could hold her confidently, all I wanted to do was to hold her, and to look at her. She was incredibly beautiful, even though she looked very much like me, and I never believed anyone who told me I was beautiful. I could also see how she resembled the photographs he had shown me of his other children. She was more obviously ours than I had expected, and I was happy with her. When she cried and woke me, I was excited to see her, no matter how little sleep I’d had. I was very happy. The only problem was that I could not remember her name, though I remembered very clearly that we had discussed it long and hard and had come to a decision. I knew that having forgotten meant something was the matter with me.

One first morning I took the baby downstairs, he came along and took her from me. There was an infant seat set out on the breakfast table, and he took her over to lay her down in it. I went to pour myself some tea, and presently all the women were up and about. Sandrine asked me whose cousin I was, and I said I didn’t know.

While I drank my tea, I forgot all about the baby. When I remembered her again, I couldn’t believe I could have ever stopped thinking about her for an instant, and I felt guilty for it. I walked back over to pick her up, but there was not an infant seat on the table at all. Why would there have been an infant seat there?

The only thing on the table was a brown cardboard box. The top of the box was open, and the baby was in the bottom. She was limp when I lifted her, and I stood there screaming and screaming. I ran around the house looking for him but he wasn’t there. I ran out on the porch and found his wife and demanded that she call him, that it was an emergency, that the baby was dead. I waited while she left him a voicemail.

All the women went inside and I waited out on the porch in one of the black chairs until he came back. Now everyone knew everything and no one came near me. At first I’d been sure it was me forgetting about her that had made it happen, but then I wasn’t so certain. He was the one who put her in the box. He was the one who didn’t want people to know. It was hours until I heard the car.

He walked up to me from behind and knelt down next my chair and said he was sorry. I asked if he was sure nothing bad had happened when he put her down, and he said he was sure, she was fine, and he gathered me up in his arms. I needed to hug someone, so I hugged him, but I did not believe it.

When I am sitting in the car at night and it is raining and you are driving us to see someone and the drops are streaking down the windows and we are not talking to one another because talking would be too loud, I think that all the rain must come from women who have lost their babies, and if there were no more tears, if there were no more sadness, the grasses would become brown and the ground would become sandy and all the trees would go thirsty and the world would stop going. But that is not really what I think, I know it isn’t, because that sounds like a story and actually it isn’t like that until I try to tell it. It is a wordless hum and a hollow sphere of cloth in my head. From the center of the sphere, I am grabbing at the cloth and pulling it toward me from many angles all at once. I look out at the raindrops. I look through the raindrops. I look at the raindrops. I follow the raindrops as they leave the edge of the window. I look through the raindrops. I look at the raindrops and through them at the same time. I become the raindrops and the window and the blurry wet red tail-lights going and the blurry wet white head-lights coming and the highway and the sadness and the shadows of trees that I cannot see because it is too dark out but I know they are there. It doesn’t matter where we’re going or who it is we’re going to see, because I can already see them, I can see everyone, and I can hear you even though we’re not talking, and I can hear my thoughts even though they are wordless and I can hear the silence and the hum and the engine and the crying of women who have lost their babies. I see now that I am not the only such woman. I leave the raindrops with my eyes but I do not leave them and I look at your thigh. You’re wearing new jeans and they have lighter stripes on them to make them look older than they are. I put my hand on the denim and I can feel the heat of your skin underneath and I look at my hand on your thigh and I cannot believe how beautiful my hand is, how it seems to glow more brightly even than the little blue lights on the dash or the red tail-lights going or the white head-lights coming, and you know not to talk to me because that is how well you know me.

The thrill of discovering a book on your own, with no help from any of your better-read friends and family. Simply finding it on the shelf, bring it home, falling in love. Realizing that the author has so many more, with overwhelming joy, brings tears. A reason to continue! You want to tell everyone, and yet also to keep it a secret. As if you could keep a Nobel Prize winner a secret. Sharing a favorite book or writer with a close friend can feel like sharing a lover, particularly if you have reason to her believe her feelings will be as strong as your own. It comes as both a relief and an insult if that does not turn out to be the case, and such jealousy if it is true.

Once, my mother even had to tell me I did not have dibs on Faulkner.

What some people think is, all potential long-term memories go through what they call a consolidation period, where they are vulnerable to being lost. That’s why when you have some sort of major head trauma or someone cuts out your medial temporal lobe or something, you’ll probably lose what happened in the weeks or months just prior to accident but you’ll still remember your childhood. Your childhood is consolidated and last night’s party isn’t. Apparently there’s also some sort of evidence that when consolidated memories are accessed, they become vulnerable again, so you might also lose whatever you were remembering around the time of, say, getting hit in the head with a hammer repeatedly, which is something my mother has anxiety dreams about. But it’s not just that memories can be deleted, but that they can be changed. So everytime you retrieve a memory, you’re also modifying it. Which is why people are such unreliable resources, compared to, say, computers.

This is the sort of stuff I learn about in the cognitive neuroscience classes I take. I also learn more “concrete” things about underlying mechanisms of this and that. I am particularly fond of the NMDA-type glutamate receptor and the impressed reaction people have when I tell them I am studying neuroscience. Like that somehow proves my worth, marks me as a bonafide smart person. At least until you think about how stupid it is to do something just because you like the way you think it sounds to other people. The “just because” is an exaggeration, of course. But the truth is we know next to nothing about how the brain works, and all the studying I’ve done has left me with only some tiny fraction of that next to nothing knowledge, and it’s not entirely clear to me that I’ll ever make use of it once I stop waiting for my life to happen to me. What does this stuff have to do with the writing life I want for myself?

My favorite story to tell myself is that I’m a writer, an artist. I continue to tell this story no matter what behavioral evidence to the contrary I might have. And according to one of my psychology classes, the discrepancy between who I think I should be and who I actually am is what makes me anxious. And the discrepancy between who I wish I were and who I actually am is what makes me sad. This is what passes for understanding. I give this theory as an example only because it resonates with me more than most.

My impression was always that writing shaped my memories. Like many other people who write (or who think of themselves as writers), I’m prone to statements like “I haven’t really lived something until I’ve written it down” or “I write to know what I’m thinking.” I’m terrified of losing everything that’s happened since the last time I kept a daily record. And I have a fear that my life is worthless if I can’t use it to communicate something. There’s research on how language shapes perception. The words that we call the world can define the way we see it. The vision lab where I work has been poking at the idea that there is no such thing as visual memory. Could it be that everything we remember is verbal? I am fascinated by this, and terrified by it. All the power of a writer is captured by this. But I feel trapped by my belief. Of course there could be a type of memory that is neither visual nor verbal. M says he thinks without words and can remember these nonverbal thoughts, but often has great difficulty communicating them to others. There are things that can’t be translated. Is my devotion to words keeping me from experiencing something profound? Or do I experience it all the same but feel like if I can’t report it, it isn’t real?