The Golden State

I feel very cheerful and businesslike this morning—there are some mornings that just start out like that, where I transact matters of household or professional importance in an efficacious way. I remove the furze of orange juice and cigarettes from my teeth and I think Today things are going to be better. I am wearing the white shirt with the stew on it from dinner two nights ago. I strip naked and change Honey’s diaper. She is cheerful too and she takes great amusement in my naked body, pulling at my boobs and poking at my nipple and giving me big smiles showing all her little tiny teeth. “Nipple,” I say. I take her into the bathroom and put her down on the mat and shower with the curtain open so I can see her. She plops onto her butt and hauls herself back up and toddles over to the side of the bathtub and puts her hands into the water and cries. It is a very quick shower but it does the job. I tear through the house picking up all of our clothes and blankets and her stuffed animals and bedding from the Pack ’n Play and the dish towels and the bathmat for good measure and I stuff them all into the washing machine and wash them on hot. I feed her Cheerios and banana with a towel knotted around my body and I fill up the dishwasher with our modest dishes. I hazard a guess at the workings of the coffee machine. I read The Runaway Bunny. I put the things in the dryer. I take Honey out of her romper and put her into a clean pair of pants and a T-shirt. “It’s important to get dressed and go out into the day,” I tell her. We read three more books while she drinks milk. She prances around the living room and I watch as she learns how to step over the rags taped over the brick base of the wood stove. I’m so interested in her progress that she has gotten to the stove itself before I remember to tell her No. Not that the stove is on, of course, but it seems like stoves should always be avoided in case they are on. I have read on BabyCenter that you should not say “No” to everything that children want to do, but should instead make some other sound of guidance, like “Uh-uh,” or “Mm-mm,” and save the “No” for really bad situations. The stove does seem like one of those nonnegotiable things, so I look at her and say, gently, “No.” She puts her hand onto the little handle of the stove and yanks at it. “NO,” I bark at her, and she whips her hand back as though she’s been struck. She starts to cry. I scoop her up and put her a safe distance from the stove. “We don’t play with the stove,” I tell her. She slams her head back into the ground and starts up the desperate wailing of two evenings ago. The golden hour of morning success comes to a close and I feel the endless day stretching out before me. I try to gather up her little flailing limbs into a hug and she bites me on the shoulder, very hard. “NO” I yell and I feel like biting her back and throwing her onto the carpeted floor but instead I lay her down a little too firmly and feel very marginal.

We go outside and I set still-crying Honey down on the grass so I can look at the laptop. I see many e-mails from Hugo about THE CONFERENCE but decide not to read them. It’s Saturday, for one, I determine after a brief calculation. And enough brooding about the damn Institute, I think. I take Honey back inside. She is still oddly fussy and she wants to be put down and then she wants to be picked up and then she flails and then she’s back down and then she’s back up. Maybe she’s getting new molars, teeth are always the explanation for everything it seems like. I don’t have very many toys up here for her to play with so I get out a bunch of Grandma’s wooden spoons, which are still in the ceramic pot by the sink where she kept them. Honey promptly hits herself in the forehead with one of them and cries again when I take it away so I pick her up and coo.