Little Labors by Rivka Galchen Page A

decision that no one had thought it appropriate to remark upon it, and one of the only reasons the awkwardness around her had gone away was because at nearly eight months the baby had died inside the womb, and then, though she was over forty, she became pregnant again, and the second time around, the baby was carried to term, and the then radicalness of her decision paled against joy and relief. Now it seems there are many more varieties of “normal” family.
I never
    I never especially cared for babies. When I heard about babies dying there was a part of myself that thought, At least it’s not a child! A child is someone that people know and who knows other people; was the loss of a baby really so different from the loss of a potential baby that happened every month? Once, at an elementary-school-age summer camp, they took us young campers to do rubbings of gravestones. My friend took several rubbings of the gravestones of babies, with the birth and death dates sometimes in the same month. Then she had written sad, short Blakean poems about the babies. After that, I thought that she was an odd girl, and melodramatic. I don’t feel that way now.
A Doll’s House
    I once saw a production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in which all the characters except for Nora were played by small people, by a midget, a dwarf, a person with Williams syndrome . . . This made stark the power that the childlike Nora, the wife and mother, really did have. I can still hear the enormous woman asking her very small and angry husband for some chocolates.
    However I have only heard of and seen one performance of A Doll’s House in which, at a certain moment, the audience literally gasped—and it was not at this version but at a straightforward performance. The gasp came when, in the second act, a real live baby was brought onto the stage. I don’t think even a live bear would have elicited as much of a reaction; I once saw a magic show in a theater and at the end of the show a live elephant showed up on stage, and I can report that the reaction to the elephant was considerably less than the reaction to the baby. Why was the baby on stage such a force? Because it might cry? Maybe it was the simple thrill of cameo: a baby seems indisputably from everyday life, and everyday life, though depicted on stage, also feels conspicuously absent from it. The actors other than the baby, if the baby can be termed an actor simply by context, seemed suddenly neon in their falseness, which in turn made them seem real, as if visible backstage, brushing their teeth, watching Mad Men on a laptop. In the original Ibsen script, there is no baby, there are just young children.
People who get along well with babies
    Four women are having dinner together. One begins to tell of how well her mother gets along with her baby, her grandson. The woman’s mother, the grandmother, prepares Hungarian food for the baby, she prepares him chicken with walnuts and pomegranate in rice which is then stuffed into a pepper—he loves it. The mother’s mother also has things to say to the baby all day long, she is in a constant conversation with him, she doesn’t run out of spirit to talk to him, and he loves it, and, because she talks to him so much, and cares for him so much, she is also the best at getting him to laugh; he loves her; she loves him. “I even believe,” the friend says, “that when me and my sister were babies, she was also this good.” Another mother at the table (who is, naturally, also a daughter) has her mother living with her right now, for a few months, as she helps take care of her granddaughter, now a young girl, no longer a baby. The grandmother is good with the young girl, very good, but maybe she was even better with her when she was a baby. When she was a baby, she was amazing with her, and she was a difficult baby, a colicky baby. This grandmother is wonderful with babies, and with the very