Rivka Galchen - Little Labours

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017

First published in the United States by New Directions in 2016

Copyright © Rivka Galchen 2016

Design by Erik Rieselbach

Cover design by Anna Morrison

Rivka Galchen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

“Notes on Some Twentieth-Century Writers” originally appeared in Harper’s Magazine .

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008225186

Ebook Edition © October 2016 ISBN: 9780008225193

Version: 2019-02-04

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Children’s books

The crystal child

A long, long time ago, in late August

A reason to apologize to friends

What drug is a baby?

Dynasty

Cargo cult

Mysteries of taste

Cravings

Religious aspects of the baby

Head shape

The romantic comedy

Wiped out

The species

Literature has more dogs than babies

More Frankenstein

And movies

Princess Kaguya

Rumpelstiltskin

How the puma affects others, one

How the puma affects others, two

Notes on some twentieth-century writers

Other people’s babies

Other people’s babies, two

Other people’s babies, three

Other people’s babies, four

Reversals

Mother writers

When the baby came home

When the empress moved

Screens

iPhone footage

Lots of writers have children

In Flagstaff, one

In Flagstaff, two

New variety of depression

A baby is an ideal vector for a revenge plot

A modern anxiety

Things that one was misleadingly told were a big part of having a baby

Babies in art

Video games

Orange

More babies in art

Sometimes it can seem like many hours with a baby

Stranger danger

How the puma affects others, three

Most of the great women writers of the twentieth century

Women writers

Baby girls and men

A friend who is not a close friend

I never

A Doll’s House

People who get along well with babies

The beginning of misunderstanding

A new citizen

Money and babies

Keep Reading …

About the Publisher

Books for young children rarely feature children. They feature animals, or monsters, or, occasionally, children behaving like animals or monsters. Books for adults almost invariably feature adults.

My mother tells me that people tell her, when she is out with the baby, that the baby is a crystal child. Some people ask for permission to touch the baby, because contact with crystal children is healing. “You should research what it is, crystal children,” my mother, who has a master’s degree in computer science and an undergraduate degree in mathematics, says more than once. From the moment my mother first met the baby, she found her to be an exceptional and superior creature; her ascribing of crystal child qualities to the baby is part of this ongoing story.

I finally go ahead and research crystal children. On the Web. I learn that, unlike rainbow children, crystal children have a difficult time because they believe they can change the way people think in order to heal the world; rainbow children by contrast understand that people cannot be changed, they can only be loved as they are; rainbow children are therefore less frustrated than crystal children. Crystal children were born, one site explains, mostly in the nineties, whereas rainbow children arrived, by and large, in the new millennium—prior to the generation of crystal children there was a generation of indigo children—and so maybe the puma is in fact a rainbow child, rather than a crystal child, or maybe she is part of an even newer generation, as yet uneponymized.

Maybe in the same way that children in the Middle Ages who were born with congenital hypothyroidism (as was common before salt was iodized because iodine is essential to thyroid development) had a certain look, and were mentally different from the mainstream, and were referred to as chrétiens —a term which unfortunately over time became cretins though all it meant at the time was Christians—crystal and rainbow and indigo children are terms used mostly if not prescriptively to refer to children who are unusual in ways most commonly associated with autism or Down’s syndrome.

Somehow I begin to believe in crystal children, and in the idea that my child has the special healing powers ascribed to crystal children. I start to believe this even though, unlike my mother, I don’t have a master’s degree in computer science, or an undergraduate degree in math. When I read one day that Isidor of Seville, back in the seventh century, was already saying that the world was round, he somehow knew so intuitively, I decide this is relevant.

But I still don’t understand why no one has ever stopped me on the street to talk about crystal children, why they have only stopped my mother. And I don’t understand why my mother, usually so suspicious of any comments made by “others,” is so open to these comments. Someone important to me says, “It sounds like a way to love and value children who are difficult.” Sure, I say, that sounds true. “Maybe your mother is telling you that she is a crystal child. Or that you are.”

In late August a baby was born, or, as it seemed to me, a puma moved into my apartment, a near-mute force, and then I noticed it was December, and a movie was coming out on what is sometimes called the day of the birth of our savior. If one was to accord respect to the tetraptych poster campaign, Forty-Seven Ronin featured one Keanu Reeves, one robot, one monster, and one young woman dressed in green and, for unclear reasons, upside-down. The poster I kept seeing was at the end of my block, below a dance studio, around the corner from a deli next door to a Japanese clothing shop that specializes in looks inspired by American streetwear, and across the street from a dollar-a-slice pizza place perennially playing Mexican pop music. I had melatonic madness at the time. Maybe for that reason the poster, as I passed it four or five times a day, always with the puma, began to seem to really mean something, something more than what was manifest. I felt this even though I knew the poster would soon enough be replaced by one for Vampire Academy or the newest remake of Robocop , and in fact it felt almost as if that randomness-revealing replacement had already happened, as if that was part of the poster’s message, that the accumulation of tomorrows was not—however lost to time I might be—going to cease producing its predictable melancholy. (However I, and I registered this as rare, I was myself at the time