Intimations by Alexandra Kleeman Page B

again grow from you. Karen tried to sway back and forth, but it was not a sturdy chair. She sat still and closed her eyes. She had been doing okay at Ned Regan’s farm until she saw how they separated the cows from their calves. A milk cow only lactates if she has recently given birth, and this means that each dairy cow must be bred back roughly once a year. Calving is continual, and crucial. At the same time, the calf must be displaced so that it does not consume the bulk of the milk that is to be collected and sold. Ned Regan’s policy was to allow the cow and calf a week together, plenty of time to absorb the colostrum, an antibody-rich milk that mother cows produce in the first few days after birth. Most farmers only allowed three days, and industrial farms took thebabies within hours. In the first few days after birth, Ned allowed the mothers to lick their babies dry. He lifted the spindly calves up to their mothers’ teats if they were too weak to find them themselves, he guided the teats into their wet mouths. But on the seventh day, Karen watched as Ned and his dairy hands set up a series of pens bounded by electrified wire. As the lot was herded through the pasture, the calves passed under a low-lying wire while their mothers remained on the other side. Once most of the calves had passed through, Ned and his helpers strung two more wires to close off the breach. The few calves that remained unsorted were sorted out by hand. They hauled them up into the back of a pickup and drove them away. The mothers cried out for their calves all through the night, and the night after, and the night after that. “Why don’t the mothers fight when you take them away?” Karen asked Ned once he returned from dropping the calves off in town. “They feel safe in groups,” Ned answered. “That’s why they don’t spook when you walk them to the slaughterhouse.”
    Karen saw a text message on her phone. It was from Martin. She could see the shadow he cast in the thin slit of light coming from under the front door. He was still there, pacing back and forth. She never wanted to see him again. Martin had experienced only one truly uncivil encounter in the history of his romantic life. In college, a girl he had been sleeping with and whom he liked very much had stopped calling him and then stopped talking to him in the halls. When he saw her in the university buildings, she walked by him not as though he were a stranger, but as though he were not there at all. Later a friend told him she had spreadthe rumor that he cheated on her with someone from his economics class. This was not only false, but mystifyingly so. Martin knew nobody in his economics class. He couldn’t even name one female who took the class with him. The situation was bizarre, the girl’s behavior inexplicable. This experience impressed upon Martin the view that most women were unknowable. As he said: “Women will sometimes burn a thing just to watch it burn.” Although he was occasionally lonely, he tried not to be bitter. He thought there were good things in the world that he would encounter by chance. He was only thirty-five, and he believed it would happen whether or not he changed himself significantly.
    Karen went back to her room and closed the door. There was very little light now coming in through the bedroom window. She climbed the ladder up to her bed and wrapped herself in the duvet. She slept in a lofted bed, like a child. She was always afraid that she would roll off it in the middle of the night and break her neck on her own bureau dresser. This fear woke her sometimes, and she’d stretch out her arm to feel for the end of the bed before rolling her body inward to where the mattress met the wall. A psychology graduate student that Karen had met at a party listened to her description of the milk calf weaning and became excited. “Don’t you think it’s so interesting,” said the