TOO BRIGHT TO SEE
Prologue/Epilogue
Every mother has a murderer in her. Few of us will admit it but none of us can deny the truth of it. I could not say this to another human being, even my husband. If he knew who I was, he would be afraid of me. I am afraid of myself sometimes.
Look at me. Ten pounds overweight for the first time in my life. Three months overdue for a shower. I mean a haircut. My dark hair oily around the face you are sure you have seen before, but it is only the exhaustion you recognize. Mine is the face of a woman who has no face of her own. This, I have discovered, is happiness.
I remember thinking, in the days after my daughter was born, I would not die for this person I hardly know. I remember walking in the hills above our apartment late at night. She was never a good sleeper, like me, and pushing her in the stroller calmed us both. I remember one night in particular on Strawberry Hill. The yellow crocuses had pushed through the snow, their bodies fragile as glass, the sidewalks ice-dark, the streets empty at midnight, even the streetlights too drowsy to turn on, the slope steep, and I let go of her stroller.
The handle rushed into my palms with a force that was not equal to, but an approximation of, her life, and I became aware that something in me was dying. The young woman who enjoyed the thrill of risk, who went home with a stranger in a foreign city, who felt a stab of pleasure when, on black ice, the car lost control for a split second. That woman was dead by the time my daughter was six months old.
I was so sure I knew what kind of mother I would be. I had watched as my friends dissolved into tears at the sound of a baby's whimper. I had watched them put their toddlers down for the night and, in their first moments of the day without child appendages, scroll through photographs of those appendages on their phones.
I would not be that kind of mother, I had decided. I would approach motherhood as I had approached nearly everything else in my life. Crouched in the corner, ready to fight. I would be a kapo. I would stand on the other side of the door holding a timer. The baby might cry for an hour, two hours, four, but I would simply refuse to open the door and soon my well-behaved, deferential child would spring from my head fully formed. It should not surprise me by now that I was wrong about almost everything, most of all myself.
When Eva cried, her face flushed, her tongue lifted, she trembled with rage and panic, and I would have slaughtered armies if they had tried to stop me from picking her up. It made me think of the summer I was traveling in Greece, when I saw drifts of human hair floating along the cobble-stoned streets. A ferry had crashed into the rocks a few days before. Everyone on the island had lost someone, and in a collective howl of catharsis, the women had taken to the streets and torn out their hair, as they had in ancient times. This was how I felt when Eva cried and I could not hold her. This was how I felt when I was away from her and I simply imagined her crying.
But in the hospital room with no windows, after pushing for three hours under fluorescent lights so white they were almost blue, I held her slick body and felt as though I had been hired to play a part in a play I had never read.
I am supposed to love this child, I remember thinking. I had felt her move inside me. I had heard her heartbeat echo through the examination room. I had wept when blood burst from me like a water balloon and I thought I'd lost her. But in those first minutes of her life, she was a stranger to me, that warm body slick with blood and meconium that had been, until a few moments before, part of my body.
I was shaking so much I could hardly speak, but I was not cold. I looked at my husband. He would never understand if he knew who I was. I kissed him as Eva, still wet, clawed her way to my breast, and there, as the doctor sat between my legs stitching my body back together, I said, “How long do I have to wait before I can do this again?” I knew, the night my first was born, that I would at least try to become a mother of two, which is to say, a woman who sometimes feels like a factory of other people's happiness. Eva clamped down on my breast. It bloomed with blood blisters. This is who you are now, I told myself. You can take shelter in motherhood as surely as this baby will take shelter in you.
But I was not a mother yet, at least, not the mother I am now. Not the first time I looked into her eyes, bright as they were. Nor the second. Those early weeks, I held her awkwardly, as I'd held friends' babies, terrified that I might break her simply by touching her. We had trouble nursing and I spent hours with my breasts inside plastic cones watching my nipples become pistons in an unknowable machine. My breasts filled with milk she would not drink, hard and hot to the touch, the milk turning bitter inside me, the ducts infected.
This must have been eight or nine weeks after she was born. My period had already returned and with it my sexuality. I remember the brutally swift sex in the dark as she slept down the hall, the quick rush of orgasm, and I remember feeling as though the self I had been before I became a swollen river was rushing back to me.
I remember, around that time, being awake at four in the morning, pumping. The mastitis was in my left breast, my fever was spiking, the tips of the frozen elms were tapping the windows, and the pain was so profound, so tender and intimate, I could not help but weep.
My husband was, and is, a very talented sleeper, and though he was next to her crib on a mattress on the floor, he slept through it as she woke, and cried. It was unlike any other cry I have heard her utter before or since. She was only eight weeks old, but I felt certain that she was crying, not for something she wanted, but for me. It was more of a moan than a cry, like Paolo and Francesca. I would weep, and she would moan. I know her vision was not good enough to see me pumping in the living room, but I believe she understood something about my suffering that night. Here I am, I believe she was saying. Here I am to witness you. There is nowhere you can hide from yourself.
And slowly, I stopped weeping. The pain in my breast had not gone away, nor had the fever, but as the sun rose over Cambridge and icicles dripped onto the snow, my weeps turned to whimpers turned to silence, and as they did, her moans subsided, turned to croons. Then I could hear her breathing deeply and I knew she had fallen back asleep, but I would never be the same. She had seen me on that long highway from midnight to first light. She had seen the most vulnerable version of me, the one I hide from almost everyone, and that night, she was the one to comfort me.
I knew her after that night. I knew that she was precocious. That much was obvious. Strangers in the grocery store would approach me to tell me what a remarkable child I had. Sometimes I thought people thought she was unusually small, since she looked her age, but did not act her age. But after that night, I knew that she was much more than the curly-haired phenom she appeared to be. I knew that she was, and is, one of the most loving people I have ever met in my life. I have never believed in past lives, but it was easy, at eight weeks, to look into her eyes and believe that she was older than me, that I had no idea how to be a mother, but she had done this before and would be patient with me as I learned how to love her.
Traffic rushed through the slush of Aberdeen Ave. I turned my pump off, examined the blood blisters in my areoles and the yellow milk, never enough, in the bottles. No, I thought. I will never again allow her to be the strong one between us.
Two women were still at war inside me. From the morning I bent over the pit toilet behind the three-room house in the rainforest, I felt as though my body was swiftly becoming a myth. Part human, part werewolf. As nausea prickled my scalp, as I ceased to eat anything but ugali and bread, I felt as though my body was being hijacked by a woman I had never intended to become, a woman who no longer cared whether her teeth were brushed and her face was washed, a woman who no longer cared whether she was published in a top journal or any journal at all. I was in equal parts horrified, and anthropologically fascinated, to find myself becoming a version of the woman I had seen in the grocery store allowing her toddler to pummel her into submission. And yet, before I started to become this myth, there was nothing on earth I would have killed for.
What I am trying to say is I could not have disappeared. Changed my name. Changed hers. I was living in that state of horror and insight which the Greeks called anagnorisis and which is as old as story itself. Oedipus gouging out his eyes. King Lear weeping into the hair of the only human left on earth who loved him.
** *
It's five in the morning now, the middle of July. The desert is so cold the insides of my nostrils are stinging. Dunes to the east. Dunes to the west. They look to me like bodies lying on their sides. Ten canvas tents and a cistern of water behind the wadi. The sky is blue-dark, pinpricked by stars, and I can hear the baby breathing.
I build a three-stone fire, fill the teapot at the cistern, light the sticks. I can hear jackals in the distance and my husband clearing his throat. I click on my headlamp, open the slim volume on my lap, and read.
He has flown up into essential calm.
In this part of Tanzania, red blocks of earth rise from the plain as though struck by the gods, raising to the light the ledger of what lived here two million years ago.
“Mama!” Eva cries.
This is one of the many questions that keeps me up at night.
“Mama!”
What did it look like? The first hominid that was not a chimp.
I hear Hans grumbling in his tent. “It's still fucking dark,” he says. I can hear his
girlfriend, who, believe me, I have noticed is younger and prettier than me, murmur something to him in their tent. I feel a stab of light through my veins. He whispers something and I hear her laugh out loud. I can still feel his stubble on my inner thigh.
“Delia?” my husband says.
I do not look up from the page.
“I think the baby will want to nurse soon.”
Say nightmare, say it loud, I read.
“Mama!”
Nightmare begins responsibility.
The baby, who is technically a toddler but we still call the baby, has just discovered how to use his five teeth, biting the flesh of my belly that will never again look good in a two-piece, and Eva has mastered the art of positive parenting. Just yesterday, she came to my shade tent as I was working on a particularly tricky Pan skeleton.
“Mama!” she said.
“Where is your father?”
“Nursing the baby.”
I smiled at her over my glasses. “When it's a bottle, you don't call it nursing. Where is Grandmom?”
“She went to town.”
I turned back to the monkey skeleton. I was pretty sure it was colobus, and I was pretty sure the teeth marks were leopard. Eva picked up my cell phone. “You have a choice,” she said. Her three-year-old face serious as a monk's. “If you play airplane with me right now, I will not throw this,” my cell phone, “against that rock.” She pointed at a kopje.
The water is boiling now, the sun breaking over the hills, and I can hear the baby babbling in his sleep. I can hear Eva telling my husband she is hungry and something in me is rising like a bubble in a glass of water. Soon, she will be sitting in my lap and the baby will be moussing his hair with ugali and for a few moments, maybe as much as an hour, I will allow myself to believe that I am exactly what I seem to be. A working mother of two kids under four. Tired, caffeinated, clothes too big, hair too long, and undeniably, palpably, happy.
Eva is unzipping our canvas tent now, she is running across the red sand and rushing into my arms and I am smelling her curls that, to me, will always smell like they did when she was a baby. The smell of life itself. I tuck her hair behind her ears and say the phrase she invented. “I am so happy to love you.”
“Pretend,” she says. “Pretend that I am a baby kangaroo and you are the Mama and you love me so much!”
“Oh, my Joey!” I say. I wrap my arms around her. “I am so happy to have a baby!” We play this game almost every day. I know she needs to be reminded, in this make-believe world, that I still love her as much as I did when she was my only baby.
The baby is crying now, running through the door of the canvas tent, and there he is, running straight toward the three-stone fire in his first attempt at self-annihilation of the day.
I set Eva down on the sand, intercept the baby on his way to the fire. Eva pats his belly and says, “I love you so much buddy majuty! You are a tushie little guy!”
I have no idea what that means. This is another one of her made-up phrases that makes no sense and perfect sense and which I will never correct. This is something I try to remind myself every day. The point is not that she gets the right answer. The point is that she gets to an answer for herself.
My mother is coughing in her canvas tent now and my husband is emerging from ours. I can see that early morning fog in his eyes, and I give him that look that says, if only I had an hour alone with you. “The kids need sunscreen,” I say.
He kisses me on the top of my head.
“And good morning to you too.”
My mother emerges from her tent.
“Ugali okay for breakfast, Mom?”
“For something new and different,” she says.
Mother. My mother. For years I could not call her that, even to myself. But that was
before I understood what a mother is.
The baby hands me The Big Red Barn, crawls into my lap. He is so excited his arms are flapping up and down like a bird and Eva is screaming, “My turn! No, my turn!”
“I can read to you, Sweetheart?” my husband says.
“No! Mama!”
I sit on the red sand cross-legged. I balance Eva on one leg and Xavier on the other, and read. “In the big red barn by the great green field.”
This is how we write the poetics of how our children will love others one day.
“There was a pink pig who was learning to squeal.”
I pull my breast out and let Xavier nurse. I don't care if the rest of the crew sees.
“There was a great big horse and a very little horse.”
I want Hans to see.
“My turn!” Eva yells, reaching for my other breast. I pull it out and let her nurse too. “There was a big pile of hay, and a little pile of hay and that was where the children play.”
I think of the mother chimp in the highlands who, an orphan herself, held another orphan's trembling body and nursed it as her own.
“How did you sleep?” my husband asks my mother.
“And a weathervane shaped like a horse, of course,” I read.
Both my children drinking deep now. Eva smiles up at me. “It tastes like vanilla ice cream,” she says.
And what about the Homo habilus and Homo erectus who killed to bring duiker back to camp and fed the little ones first? Were their epic battles so different from ours? Make sure the children are fed. Protect them from every threat you can see—hyenas, murderers, drought—and always, always, try to see better.
See better even when you see that which you cannot stand to know. Keep the children safe. At all costs, keep the children safe. Make the world, for them, a simple place, until they are old enough to see that it isn't.
“No, no, no, no!” Eva says.
We will never be shortlisted for the Nobel Prize, not for this work. We may even be reviled by the very people to whom we gave the best of us. But the body does not lie, and life, if we're lucky, is long, and time has a way of chipping away at our fictions like an archeologist's pick, so that, one day, we might see what has lived inside us all along, what has grown into its own version of the greatness those who loved us gave us long ago.
“It goes, a weathervane of course. A golden. Flying. Horse!” Eva says.
We protect our children with murderous intensity, and we know that this is the only reason humans, chimps, hominids, the first mammals that were warm-blooded lizards, have survived this long. Because we are willing to do almost anything to defend them.
“Are you sure you don't want some of this Feng Zhao Ren?” my mother says.
This is what I tell myself when I jolt awake after midnight, when I see my children's
chests rising and falling like the skins of moons and I think to myself, look. Look at these two humans who did not exist four years ago. They need me more than anyone else on earth, despite everything.
“Down!” the baby says. I set him on the sand, and he reaches for the knife my husband was using to cut papaya. Self-annihilation attempt of the day #2.
This is what I tell myself when I catch my face in the mirror and look into the eyes I hardly recognize as my own. This is what I tell myself when my husband flings his arm over me in his sleep. The sandpaper backs of his arms. His faintly sour smell that always smells good to me. He is always so good to me. I look at his beard growing in, half-white. That thin, beautiful body. You have no idea what I am capable of, I think. What all mothers are capable of.
“Can today be my epic sugar day?” Eva says.
Under the right circumstances, we would all kill to protect our children.
“Yesterday was your sugar day,” my husband says.
But we can never say it, even to each other, and we can never let the men who love us see it.
“Are we out of sunscreen?” my husband says.
This is the true excavation of my life.
“But I suppose ugali isn't the worst food for a constitution like mine,” my mother says.
I will spend the rest of my life sifting through the sands of what I know to be true, searching, ever searching.
“Good morning,” Hans says.
For that thing that can never be found.