If Michel's belief in the theory of the four temperaments is correct, which I doubt, then she was choleric. Moody—like Maya, yes, she was. This similarity didn't bother me as much as people might think. I liked Maya a lot more than she liked me—who wouldn't, she's like something out of Sophocles—but she wanted to fight, and I wasn't going to back down. It was the same with Zo. It's all a matter of one's biochemistry—one's moods I mean. That's what Michel was saying too really, with all his biological correlations. The four temperaments, sure, except there are forty, or forty thousand. Grouped perhaps loosely in his four, who knows. Anyway Zo was a choleric's choleric, the pure product.
She was extremely frustrated throughout her first year, when she couldn't talk or walk. She could see all the rest of us doing those things and she wanted to too. She tipped over a million times, like a top-heavy doll. I kept a supply of butterfly Band-Aids on hand, in fact a complete little medical kit. She babbled authoritatively at everyone, but when they failed to understand her she got furious. She grabbed things out of your hand. She threw her cups and spoons and dishes at you, or on the floor. She would take big swings at you, and was so fast that some of them landed. She would head-butt you with the back of her head—she split my lip twice, but after that my face got faster than her head. Which made her furious. She would throw herself headlong on the floor and beat the ground with fists and feet, and howl. It was hard not to laugh at such histrionics, but I usually avoided letting her see me laugh, as it drove her berserk and her face would go an alarming purple color. So I tried to be noncommittal. It got easy to ignore. “Oh that's just Zo doing her thing,” I would say. “It's like an electrical storm going through her nervous system. There's nothing you can do except let it run its course.”
When she learned to walk she got less cranky. She learned to feed herself too, very quickly. She refused high chairs or boosters or any baby utensils as affronts to her dignity. Once she could get around she was a danger to herself even more than before. She would eat anything. Changing her diapers, I found sand, dirt, pebbles, roots, twigs, small toys, little household objects—it was a real mess. And she would fight like crazy while you tried to change her. Not always, but about half the time. It was like that with all the daily routine—changing clothes, brushing teeth, getting in the bath, getting out of the bath—half the time she would cooperate, half she would object and fight you all the way. And if you let her win it only got worse next time. Give a centimeter and she would go for the kilometer.
I suppose eating dirt might have been how she got sick. She got some variant of the Guillain-Barré virus, but we didn't know that at the time, we only saw the forty-degree temperature and then she was paralyzed completely, for six days. I couldn't believe it. I was still in the full shock of it happening when she came out of it and started to move again—first twitches, then everything. It was an amazing relief. But I have to admit that after that she was worse than ever. Her tantrums would last an hour, and if you put her in a room by herself she would do her best to destroy it. She broke bones in both hands. So you had to stay in the room to watch her. I seriously considered making it a padded room.
She was also terrible to other kids. She would walk right up to them and knock them down, almost as if experimentally. It was impersonal, and she didn't seem malicious—more like deranged. And indeed later we figured out that she had a perceptual problem after her illness, and thought she was farther away from things than she really was. So when she got interested in another person, bam, over they went. She was a cheery little anarchist in her day care, so high-maintenance I was embarrassed to inflict her on the place. But I needed to work and I needed time away from her, so I did it anyway. They didn't complain, not directly.
The more she learned to talk the more she challenged the rules. NO was her first word and her favorite for years. She said it with immense conviction. The trick questions got the biggest NOs of all. Will you get out of the bath? No. Don't you want to get to read a book? No. Don't you want to have dessert? No. Do you like to say no? NO.
She picked up language so fast I couldn't really remember how it happened. For a few months it was just a few words, then all of a sudden she could say whatever she wanted. That made her more relaxed in some ways. Her good moods were really good, and lasted longer. She was so cute you could hardly stand it. It has to be some kind of evolutionary mechanism to keep you from killing them. She was always on the move, jumping around, looking to do something or go somewhere. She developed a passion for trams and trucks, and would cry out, “Tram!” or “Truck!” Once I was out by myself and I saw a truck and said, “Oooh, big truck,” and the people sitting around me on the tram looked at me.