I've been giving a lot of thought to my next project, another novel, as of yet untitled. I've been sitting back, mostly, doing some research, and just generally shoving things into my brain in the hopes that they will soon boil over.
In the meantime, a preview:
Los Angeles, 1939:
I wrapped them so carefully. It was the least I could do, it was all I could do, and so I tucked their little limbs tightly against their bodies and swaddled each one up tight in the newsprint, so tightly that they might still believe, at least for a few moments longer, that I still held them close. We cry when we are born—I did, I’m told. My first did not; she was too young, but the second wailed. It was a painful cry. He was shocked, I think, shocked and outraged at the world he’d been forced into so abruptly. That first maternal embrace is just a salve, an attempt to make up for what’s been lost. But the world never again provides that level of comfort, nor safety. At least I did not lie to them and tell them that it would. Every embrace outside the womb is a failed attempt to slip back inside.
I've heard men say all sorts of things about children, about women, about women giving birth to children, but what they say is easy to laugh away. Their words are soap bubbles, glossy and chimerical, gone with the faintest gust of wind. They mean nothing to me, and though they may not be aware of it, their words mean little more to themselves. Self-righteous posturing over brandy, with no real danger of ever having to mean it.
Women, though. What women say can wound me, although I don’t know that I’ve ever let on, not in decades. They can judge me, and I know it; anyone who has lent her body to another and then, after that painful, joyful indignity, gone on to watch it toddle out into the world knows more of life than me.
But I wouldn’t have been allowed to watch; the brandy-men wouldn’t have had it. And while they know nothing, they own everything, tyrannical children banging away with their toys. And so I sung them into drowsy, laudanum-laden sleep—for I am not a heartless mother—just once, only once, before laying them into their trunk bed and firmly, quietly, closing the lid.
Tuesday, December 3, 2013 at 3:31PM