Dear Mr. You (13 page)

Anyway I was wrong about you. I am listening with no small
amount of awe when you have more to tell us. Thank you, NASA, for keeping watch and realizing that our universe will never be anything but light-years new. I want to understand that, and I am so comforted by the fact that I can’t. It only proves that some things won’t allow themselves to be understood. They aren’t for us to know and there’s rapture in that, don’t you think? Are you happy there, with your eyes glued to the heavens? You know so much, like why the ocean doesn’t fall out of the sky, and that there is no upside down. There is no up.

I don’t think you saw me properly before I got into your cab or you would not have fought with me. That’s what I want to believe. I think if you had gotten a better look then you wouldn’t have been shocked by what I shouted, actually screamed, at you.

The address was not complicated. I was having you take me to a fairly well-known square. To take me to the front of my building was a risk that tested my patience and I had none. That day I just had none.

I had to go twenty blocks from home to complete something that would take about forty minutes, but I hadn’t been leaving my house much. It took a lot of coaxing to get me to put on my coat and get out the door. I didn’t want anyone to see me. Looking around to make sure there was no one watching, I got into your cab on my corner. You were magically waiting for me, which wasn’t the luckiest thing that happened to you all day.

Once we were moving in traffic I felt I could take a breath. I spaced out and didn’t pay attention once I told you where I wanted to go.

I don’t know how long went by, it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes but I looked up and saw that you seemed to be taking me in the exact wrong direction. I turned around and looked behind me, and to each side, to make sure I was correct. I looked down at the paper I was holding with the address and my expected arrival time, which was in five minutes.

“No,” I said. “What are you doing? This is . . . no. You are going crosstown? Why are you doing that?” I held up the paper, even though you could not read it backward in the mirror. You did not look at me and pointed forward as though that was the correct choice. I stabbed at the paper as though my destination was there and not forward, and then I flopped back and hit the seat with my fist. I did this to keep from swearing but it did not keep me from swearing.

“Shit, goddamn. I mean, why, I mean why the hell-NO! Where are you going now? This is still wrong! Jesus, this is the wrong way too!” I waved the paper up and down, creating a whipping effect that did not soothe.

“Miss, do not to swear at me. You hear me?”

“But this is the wrong way, so why—”

“Miss, you do not to have to fucking swear. I am taking you. Miss, do you see?” You took your hands off the wheel entirely every time you said “Miss,” finally turning up your music to drown me out, which only made you shout to be heard over it. I slammed into the side window as you swerved into a U-turn,
which set us again in the wrong direction, and I slapped both sides of my face in disbelief. I began hitting the divider behind your head with my fists.

“Sir. Turn the COCK-A-FUCKING-ROUND. This is the wrong way and I need to be somewhere five minutes ago. I can’t breathe. I can’t. Wait. Are you fucking kidding me with the window? IT IS STUCK. OH MY GOD. Sir. I may barf. Open the fucking window before I barf. No, wait! No stop. No please. I beg of you to stop, STOP! That was Ninth Avenue, why did you not take it? Fuck’s sake, why?”

“Miss, do not to yell at me, I am taking you!” You were now screaming so loud that your turban was shaking. You reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a map.

“God. Wait. NO. That, my friend, is a map of the United States of America. It is not going to help us. I mean, God. YOU NOODLE, JESUS. YOU CAN’T FIND CHELSEA ON A MAP OF THE UNITED STATES! Who gave you that? That person hates you, do you know that? He is your enemy. Just take me home.” I tried to lie down in the backseat but sat right back up again, nauseous.

“No, I am not taking you home, Miss, I am to taking you to Chelsea.” You were weaving in and out of traffic, and ran through a stoplight, barely missing a girl and her dog.

“You can’t just—STOP! . . . LITTLE GIRL AND DOG, STOP! . . . Holy Mother, I asked you to take me home. Turn Around. Take FIFTH. Right HERE. TURN RIGHT. HERE. TAKE IT. TAKE IT TAKE IT TAKE IT. TAKE FIFTH. FUCKING TAKE FIFTH. TAKE IT. Yes. Thank you. Jesus.
Now turn right. NO, that is LEFT and I said RIGHT, okay, now stop. STOP. STOP THE MOTHERFUCKING CAB. STOP!” I had the door open before you were even a block from my apartment but it slammed shut again when I let go to dig in my purse for money. You muttered at me with your sitar music blaring as I threw a ten-dollar bill into the front seat and slid over very slowly, to the door. You turned off your music.

“Hurry up and get out of my cab, get out!” you shouted. I said

I can’t hurry

“Go! I am not taking you to anywhere, you are very awful! I don’t want you anymore.” You were slapping the seat with your map, and waved it around in celebration of your being rid of me.

I was halfway out of the cab and stopped. I turned around, ungracefully, and I said hoarsely

No one does

My voice was shot and I barely got out

Look at me

You turned and looked, I think for the first time because you stopped waving your flag-map.

My life is worse than yours in this moment

I wailed

I am alone. Look, see? I am pregnant and alone. It hurts to even breathe.

Your hand slowly went to your mouth

I’m trying to get through it but I’m by myself every night and every morning and no one, nothing helps. I’m sorry I yelled. I can’t get my shoes on anymore. Please, I know I am awful, it’s been made clear but look at me, please

Look at me

I wasn’t yelling. My voice was small. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and tried to decide if I should keep talking and then I said

No, don’t. Really, you don’t have to so why would you.

You made a gesture. I didn’t know what it meant. It was a raising and dropping of your hands in your lap but I couldn’t decrypt it and I got out and carefully closed your door, walking up the block, stopping to throw my piece of paper in the trash.

I don’t know what you thought, if you had a daughter or a wife or if my little drama was a hangnail compared to your life. What I wish I could tell you is that I know it may have been. I don’t know what had happened to you that morning, or that year, or when you were six. I didn’t know your tragedy or hardship and it was grossly unfair of me to compare my life to yours. I am aware of my good fortune. What I don’t have to struggle for that
makes my life easier than most. I have thought of you and know you wouldn’t remember me but I am sorry. Really, I don’t fault you for anything except having that map of the United States of America in your taxi, which is about as useful as a walkie-talkie on the ground floor of the Empire State Building. The rest of it was simply a bad cab ride and every New Yorker has them. They’re part of the landscape.

You were a living reminder of what I always professed to believe, that you never know what happened to someone that day, so try to cut some slack, but being bound by my own ropes I was unable to give you that. I realize now that whatever I was walking through was a part of my life, one piece of a bigger story that is mostly beautiful.

So, Mr. Cabdriver, I apologize for the profanity and the blame. I caused your turban to pop loose from its foundation and that was extreme. I maintain that your music was, to my ears, like a cat being declawed and I think you should not assume everyone can take it at that volume. That is a simple suggestion.

I am hoping by now you have GPS but I’ll never know a thing about your life. I wonder all the time about the ceiling on what we actually know about anyone. This little moment from back then doesn’t define that situation in time for me any more than it can for you. It was, in the end, much worse and more necessary than I would be willing to reveal, which is probably the most revealing thing I can say.

I heard a deep voice. You appeared long enough to make annoying conversation and then tried to take my baby, dissolving before my eyes when I said no. I said, no, go. Or slept long enough for you to leave and come back. Or someone else did. I don’t really know what I saw but it kept happening.

I was so tired, you see. I shivered with exhaustion, was blind with it. I’d pushed a person out. Out of an orifice that I challenge having been designated as the exit ramp for humankind. No matter how dilated. And forget anesthesia, I’d had nary an Advil. I remember thinking to myself, were I about to give birth,
It probably should hurt more than this.
So that’s what you were dealing with. My pain threshold was not on that chart you were clutching while you pulsated in my sightline, discordantly calling out for me to hand over the baby, assuring me it was for my own good. I’m fine, I said, but you reappeared in your blue shower cap and booties, droning on

Give me the baby

Give me the baby it will be down the hall

With other given babies

I was tipped on my side to appear on guard. If I lay on my back I would fall asleep and I could not fall asleep because if I did you might take my baby. Standing upright was not an option. The two times I’d stood that day had resulted in an outpouring. My friend was standing in its pathway the first time and his lower half was drenched, “whoa,” he said, “I mean, not since
Free Willy.
” It was enough to fill a plastic pool. I could have swum laps in my afterbirth.

I realize I did not rest following the birth. I ate. I did that. I had a Big Mac but did not sleep. I followed that with a Quarter Pounder, two slices of pizza, a chocolate milkshake, no nap, and two cupcakes. Maybe three. It became night, late night, and the Antigone chorus of you insisted it would be better if you took the baby to the nursery. So I could sleep. But, I said, no my touch baby. I don’t how am I tired. Care. Tired I am. How. No, I said. No touch him, please go.

You mumbled that I was making a big mistake but have it my way, and I thought, wait.

Yo, it’s me, the woman drooling on herself, lying on my side like an odalisque with a broken vagina: I am speaking to you. My mouth can only manage “Go away, please,” but my eyes are telling you the rest, all about a woman who has waited forever for this. Who wanted a baby since she was old enough to hold a toy of one. She was once a baby who wanted a baby, and now she,
I, yes, am very sleepy and unable to control reflexes. What does it really matter, though, if I just belched softly and consequently peed on myself? Yes, I am breathing so loudly through my mouth that I appear to be snoring with my eyes open and I smell. I am smelly. Look past that to the swaddled perfection in the bassinet. He vibrates with goodness and he is mine. You are correct that I am making a blunder but it’s my mistake to make. And just you wait. This is nothing. I may put a fresh spin on ruinous parenting. I will undoubtedly scar him repeatedly, no matter how hard I try not to. I don’t need help. I’m fully equipped to screw up my child all by myself and I promise I’ll get right on it. Now in fact.
But in my own special ways that don’t need your input.

•  •  •

You probably have your own babies. Maybe you relinquished them to the nursery when they were born, anxious for a break. I respect the choice. I just don’t know what is in that nursery, what he will hear, or if he might want me. It’s possible, too, that if I didn’t have seventeen maxi pads plastering my pubic area, and if there wasn’t an inflatable plastic doughnut lodged under my ass and if my lady parts weren’t swinging from where they struggle, tender and fragile as Tuesday’s sashimi, if it weren’t for that and for the high probability of pissing myself again or regurging a cupcake, I might consider cruising over and checking out that nursery. I really can’t though, and don’t want to risk him being over there alone and having a sucky and lonely first night on earth. You don’t have to understand. I lie here in the curious and mystical position of not caring what anyone thinks about me, maybe for the first time in my life. I care only about the little body wiggling in that plastic bassinet.

If you see that little baby next to me, you will notice he’s not an ordinary child, despite all the ways in which he is stunningly, exceptionally ordinary. There will be much celebrating of his average-ness, by me, and his below average too. He won’t be able to jump until he is almost eight, will not be capable of pronouncing the letter
r
, and will pass through a period, as his mother did, where he will stutter so badly that it makes him cry. There will be plenty that he won’t be the best at, but it is within all the medium and below that I will find relief, knowing he can enjoy the enviable position of normal, and the thrill of improving from floundering to adequate. I will also get permission from his average to marvel at his extraordinary. He will bring home his poetry notebook from school, his poems an unintelligible mass of spoken dialogue and exclamation points, but then one day he will produce poem after poem that would have made Whitman himself cry. There will be plenty of difficult and even intolerable, but he will burst forth intermittently with a grasp of humanity so unshakable and deep that I’ll remember the infant who stared back at me in his first moments. He will struggle with his homework until he rips the paper in despair, but then suddenly out of the sky will fall fully realized ideas and phrases, flowing from him with such force that he can’t stop writing, can’t be coaxed to stop and when he finally puts down his pencil he will have a tiny blister on his finger. I’ll know the boy who earned that blister, because I saw him in our first hello.

When I have the energy I’m going to drag my body around to study him up close again. I hope I won’t set off the call button or accidentally kick a bedpan to the floor, and apologize in advance if I do, but I need to see him again; his too-big feet, that overbite, the
brow knit in an anti-expression with which not a blessed thing can interfere. The wash of eternal over his gunmetal eyes will seem like something that has existed forever, and is only now beginning again. I’m pretty sure they call that holy.