• • •
My father, coming up from the Scaur with his pockets full of fossil ammonites, hears the screaming, and retreats to his shed. He will spend the entire night there, nervously sketching sea urchins in nearly impossible detail—the fragile test, the inching tube feet, the purple anus, the mouth (Aristotle’s lantern), the hollow black spines, pinching pedicellaria—occasionally thrusting his head out the door, then ducking just as quickly back when he hears her: screaming still.
• • •
I must emerge, of course, in the end, despite my mother’s reluctance. When I do arrive, finally, noisily, at around half past eight in the morning, I am grasped by the head, tumbled brusquely upside down by the capable Mrs. Marwook, dabbed in every pit and orifice, and swiped between all my digits with a rough wet cloth, then swiftly wrapped in swaddling clothes. Thus properly cleansed and restrained I am set to nurse, despite the warning in my mother’s hostile eye.
It’s a large barne, Marwook says, not entirely without sympathy, pulling the swaddling clothes tighter, as if by binding she can shrink me. A girl. Ginger hair.
Clearly Marwook does not entirely approve of ginger hair or large girls, together or singly, but neither does she disapprove—not entirely—or so her tone, one of mild restraint, implies.
Put it in the cradle, says my mother, wearily. She does not bother even to glance at whatever is upon her breast. Maybe she is afraid to look. Then, too, she can still feel the edge of her traveling case through the mattress, pressed hard against the back of her thigh, and she isn’t too tired, yet, to resent it.
So Mrs. Marwook takes me up, and lies me down.
• • •
It is only later, when all has been silent a while, that my father deems it safe to enter the bedroom and examine me.
It resembles Felix Girard, he says contemplatively, laying his index finger gently upon my tightly swaddled chest. My mother, sleeping, does not hear him. Which is unfortunate, since it might have been a consolation to her to learn that I did not resemble somebody else.
As for me, I am unconcerned. I know that I resemble nobody but myself, that I am the eating, sleeping, shitting, screaming center of the universe—Carlotta omphalos.
• • •
Red! Over here, Red! Walk my way!
• • •
Except that I’m not. The universe being larger, and more complicated than I can, at this moment, comprehend.
• • •
I express myself—a first, tyro’s effort—and from my mother receive no reply.
I think it needs to be fed, my father says, removing his finger from among my swaddling in response to certain noises I have made.
It is a first time, but it will not be the last, that it is my father, not my mother, who responds to my utterance. My mother never seems to hear, or maybe she cannot understand me. It is only after my father has applied his Rosetta stone to my vocal hieroglyphs and produced an interpretation (It is hungry—it is wet—it is tired—it is bored) that my mother acknowledges my efforts with a grudging Very well, and presents her breast, which is not the less beautiful—pink as it is, warm, and engorged with milk—for being begrudged.
(In one of those odd inversions that she manages so well, my mother seems to move farther away the closer she comes, so that when I am placed at her breast I suck, along with the milk, the hollow sensation, unidentifiable as yet by me, that presages not her living presence, but her impending absence; and not knowing what it is that I have swallowed, I am lulled to sleep with uneasy dreams of things I have never yet experienced: the weirdly elongated shadow of a pheasant perched on a stile at sunset in a silent empty field; the dead carapace of a crab, tossed and tangled with seaweeds; a chair abandoned in a cobbled yard, with a single glove resting on its seat.)