The light room, p.1
The Light Room, page 1
also by kate zambreno
O Fallen Angel
Green Girl
Heroines
Book of Mutter
Appendix Project
Screen Tests
Drifts
To Write as If Already Dead
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
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Copyright © 2023 by Kate Zambreno
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library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Zambreno, Kate, author.
Title: The light room / Kate Zambreno.
Description: New York : Riverhead, 2023.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023000937 (print) | LCCN 2023000938 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593421062 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593421086 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Psychological fiction. | Domestic fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3626.A6276 L54 2023 (print) | LCC PS3626.A6276 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20230113
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023000937
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023000938
Cover design: Tyriq Moore
Cover image: Seamartini / iStock / Getty Images Plus
Book design by Lucia Bernard, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen
pid_prh_6.0_144196919_c0_r0
For my daughters
Contents
Lightboxes
The Hall of Ocean Life
Time Dust–Black Hole
The Wind Was Full of Spring
Medici Slot Machines
Translucencies
_144196919_
Lightboxes
Otoño
Weeks after the baby is born, summer turns to fall. We begin taking our older daughter to an outdoor class held in an open meadow near the center of Prospect Park called the Nethermead, surrounded by a forest with the park’s oldest trees. We meet in a circle dotted with brightly colored plastic blankets, next to a great linden tree that we will see change throughout the seasons, see it green and burnish and molt and green again. Through the following year the children will play at the base of this moss-covered tree, climbing the big knots of its trunk, jumping off again onto the ground. In the distance, under other trees, other groups of children frolic as the adults watch.
* * *
The class is conducted mostly in Spanish. The woman who runs it, whom we know, had wanted her daughter to have a parent-child forest school where they speak the language they speak at home, where the outdoors can be its own classroom. She and her family live in our neighborhood, and they have just had another baby, like us—another private pandemic baby who sees faces only at home, as everyone’s face out in the world is still covered. We sit together cross-legged on the earth’s floor, wearing masks, and nurse our babies. We ask each other how we’re feeling; complain about our carriers, which we haven’t gotten the hang of again; report on our lack of sleep. We smile at our babies’ open faces, marvel each week at their transformation, wonder whether the younger ones resemble their older sisters, our sensitive and intense children, now aggrieved to be displaced as the babies of the family, not sleeping well at night. Her baby, a couple months older than mine, shoves sticks and grass into her mouth, which her mother patiently digs out again. I marvel at her calm, although months later I will be that mother sitting there, encouraging little feet to rub into dirt.
* * *
It is difficult to say how I am feeling. I don’t have time to think about myself, what with the demands of teaching at home, which started up again only weeks after the baby’s birth, and with the demands of the little ones. At first it is a labor walking from the car into the park—through the bridge, past the great trees, the boathouse, up the hill, past the waterfall, into the Nethermead. I carry the baby awkwardly in the carrier, having no muscle memory for it. It hurts my body, carrying her. I go slowly. Everything is slow. After these Tuesday mornings, one of my two days off from teaching during the week, I lie on the couch, nursing the baby all day, my chest tight and painful. Is it from carrying the baby, or holding her on my chest during the day as she sleeps? Am I dehydrated, or not getting enough calories after breastfeeding all day and night? I don’t know.
* * *
In time the walk to join the group grows easier, although I am still not supposed to pick up my three-year-old, carrying her away from intensities and squirmishes, and I still do, of course I do, how could I not. On these park days I tend not to drink water, as there are still no public bathrooms, and I have to pee the entire time, my abdomen swollen and tender. Although it is uncomfortable to nurse with a full bladder, I peek a breast out from a wool nursing tank top and give it to the baby, sometimes as I’m standing in the middle of the forest, a few paces away from the others. I take my mask off, eager to feel the cool air on my face, to feel some communion with nature. As summer passes into fall, and then into winter, when I get a few weeks off, my body becomes less leaden, grows lighter, I can walk distances without bleeding, and I know then that I am healing.
* * *
I worry for my now older daughter, for whom so much has changed, in this year of rapid seismic shifts. Like a meteorologist tracking variations, I watch her, wondering whether she will have an explosion of what I have learned to call “very big feelings,” which happens so often at this age, even without the crises of this year. She is set off, on one of the first weeks, when her friend, the daughter of the woman who runs the school, is given a certain toy to play with. The children are all given a bag of supplies, containing a magnifying glass, a shovel, a metal bucket, a wooden spoon, a maraca, a rainbow scarf, each marked neatly in black marker with the child’s name. But on this day her friend is handed an additional toy by the teacher. I can’t remember now what the toy is, though we hear about it for weeks afterward; all I know is that my daughter grabs it from this child’s hand, claiming it was stolen from her. When I try to wrestle it back, she loses control, and I have to carry her—even though I shouldn’t—many paces away from the group and try to calm her down. Then she takes off, racing across the field toward her friend, and I feel certain she is going to pummel her, take out all her rage on this unknowing child. When I run after my daughter, which I promise my midwives I am not doing, I carry her away, sobbing like she’s lost everything in the world, overcome with mortification and sadness and grief, and still tremendous spiky anger, and we take off early, leaving my partner, John, to pack up with the baby.
* * *
Sitting by the lake, we look at the ducks, and I let her eat her cheese and apples, slimy slices sitting in the snack tray her father prepared for her. I hold her and stroke her and tell her how loved she is, that it’s going to be okay, and I try to listen. I cry too, because she is sad; we cry together. She doesn’t like that every child but her seems to know the language they are speaking, and to know one another. But soon she will be the elder in the group, I reassure her, and she will delight in saying adios to the teachers, and that is exactly what happens. Is this school? she keeps on asking throughout the fall. Am I really in preschool? Kind of, I say.
* * *
The next week, she and her friend go to the nearby playground in the park after class and they ride the tire swings together, being swung around by one of their fathers, and all is okay. But then, another time in those early days, her friend and another girl, also their age, take off on scooters, but they don’t invite her, and again she breaks down. From that time forward I negotiate each departure so that the three of them leave together, scooting over the bridge, down the big hill, past the ducks, past the weeping willow and the great trees, through the tunnel, before everyone says their goodbyes at the edge of the park, and that becomes part of the rhythm of Tuesday morning. The pleasure I feel seeing their three scooters in a row, a matching candy-colored helmet hanging from each handlebar—grape purple (ours), taxi yellow, a solid green.
* * *
By the end of otoño, my daughter is four years old. Her hair is long, and she has grown a full head taller, now the same height as her friends. She takes off fast over the hill, running away from me, laughing, as I call after her. At first it is extremely sunny in the bright open field, and I wear a big straw hat, and we move under the linden tree to sit under the traveling shadow, and then it grows cooler, and darker, and we begin to learn again about fall. I have started to lean into the seasons, their way of measuring time. The teacher, a young woman from Mexico, takes the children on walks across the meadow, has them observe the way the leaves are changing, the linden tree soon covered in yellows and rusts. They walk on the other side of the meadow to the Osage tree, picking up the green spiky fruits that lo ok like textured tennis balls. She tries to get the children to walk with her, as opposed to running away, wrestling and playing, jumping on top of each other, parents encouragingly yelling out to ask consent—Make sure they are okay with that! Make sure they are smiling! An impossible request, when they are all wearing masks, but we manage. Often the teacher will try to get the children to collaborate on some task, moving one of the tree trunks that dot the meadow, or sitting on a large branch and making a seesaw, up and down, up and down. At the foot of the linden tree there is a simple setup for making mud pies. Sometimes the teacher hangs a large rainbow scarf from the linden tree, twisting in the wind. I bring the baby up to it, and she watches the colors unfurl. We sing hello to the babies in the group during the morning song.
* * *
Soon we enter the season of rain. The trees are still a lush green, but before long the first dry leaves start to fall. The light is such a specific yellow tilting to brown, here in the forest. We dress our children in Muddy Buddys and rain pants with suspenders, and the boots they are so proud of, whose distinct colors become indistinguishable while stomping in puddles. My older daughter wears a set of sparkly blue, which match the inside blue of her raincoat. As I write this, less than a year later, she has of course already grown out of them. She crouches in her rain gear at the foot of the linden tree and carefully makes mud pies, turning one over and over with her hands, stirring with her spoon, as I hover nearby, observing, trying to encourage her by giving her freedom. She would play with the mud the entire time if they let her. And I could watch her the entire time, and watching feels like a balm I didn’t even know I needed. This is what I can give my daughter, now, the ability to get covered head to toe in mud without shame. (Except for her mask, which we try to keep dry and clean.) With my phone I film her dipping a piece of muddy sponge into her metal bowl, and carefully soaking the root of the tree with it. It’s so soothing to watch, her total absorption. She loves to splash in the puddles, to get completely soaked, to splash others, to stomp as hard as possible. She loves to sit in a great muddy puddle, which inevitably soaks through her clothes. At the end I rinse off all her rain gear and tools in the water pump nearby, trying not to get muddy myself, as I don’t have the proper gear.
* * *
The rains that fall are heavier than I remember, at any time, in the decade I’ve lived here. I know the reason for this, and that it will become worse, and that the sea levels will continue to rise. After a large storm, the pathway through the woods floods and becomes a river that we can’t cross except by wading through, and the children, all dressed in masks and rainsuits, splash around in the dirty water, making noises of glee while parents watch at a distance. My daughter is the one in the green-and-brown rainsuit, in the center of everything as usual, bobbing up and down in ecstasy.
Territory of Light
We rent the first floor of an old house that was long ago painted a dark slate blue with now-weathered, once-white detailing and a brick-red front door. We have been here for nearly a decade. Now there are four of us here, plus the dog. We live mostly in the main open room, although there is little that is open about it anymore—tables, chairs, a wall full of bookshelves behind the couch, with more books stacked on the console, where we drop our bags, near where we hang our coats, in a protruding mass that hangs on the side above. My desk sits, cramped in the front window, mostly unused. In the morning, the weak winter light filters through the diaphanous front curtains. Under the window nearest the door the curtain is torn to shreds, from the dog’s futile jumping and barking at postal workers and couriers. Often I sit on the couch in this front room to be nearer to this morning light, near also where the children like to play, where we cluster together our chaos.
* * *
Each day of the week, one of us teaches at home. A box holding one of our faces or the other, against a background of our dingy room, peering into other boxes of other faces, other rooms. My eyes hurt from being on the computer all day, taking breaks every hour when I hear the baby needs me. “Need,” that’s the word for the pierce of her hungry cry. When I am teaching or in a student meeting, no matter how we try to arrange the apartment, wherever John secrets himself away with the children, in our bedroom or in my older daughter’s room, which used to be my office, I can always hear the baby crying out for me.
* * *
Since I began work only a couple weeks after giving birth, at first we position me on the couch to teach my classes, which are now online, bulwarked by pillows, sitting with the towel over a hole our dog has scratched in the cushion, trying our best to arrange the light so that shadows don’t fall across my face, in an otherwise shadowy room. Already I feel the weight of overwork on my body, the bleeding into the toilet bowl on days I work too much, which is most days. In November I take on a weeklong visiting gig at night, in order to pay for a new couch. Eventually I will sit on this new couch all day, except for the hours I spend teaching at my desk, feeding the baby, trying to get reading or work done on the laptop, or writing notes in my journal as the baby sleeps on me, trying with what little time I have to capture the daily, ephemeral impulse of that fall and winter.
* * *
When the couch finally comes, in January, in pieces we have to assemble, it is harder, less comfortable. But it looks more presentable, although generic, for this new life, in which our rooms are the visual background for constant work. Usually kept out of the frame: the blocks and toys and dolls, the filthy rugs, the clean laundry awaiting folding on the edge of the dining table, the packages newly arrived or waiting to be returned, the dog toys, the diaper pail, a baby crying, a dog barking, a child demanding attention.
* * *
This semester, I am teaching a graduate seminar on the subject of time. The only space I can find to get any real reading done for the class is in the middle of the night, when I sit up and bear the baby across my lap, waiting for her arm to go limp enough for me to attempt to put her back into the crib. I use the flashlight on my phone to check the thermometer, the radiator hissing and knocking full blast in November, until I wake up most nights sweating through the sheets, and then the radiator failing as we enter the winter. Wake up, take the baby, check the time to see how many hours she has slept, check the thermometer, put her on each breast, hoping she is awake enough to feed, try to pick up the mason jar of water and drink some, replacing my fluids, willing myself not to drop the heavy jar on her head. I give her my breast every time she wakes, every time she cries. The light on my phone throws a shadow against the wall, making me look like a mountain or a ghost. By the end of the semester I am translucent with exhaustion.
* * *
In early December, in the middle of the night, with a booklight slung around my neck, I read Yūko Tsushima’s I-novel Territory of Light, a narrative of a single mother raising her child in 1970s Japan. I am drawn to the pastel shimmery blues and pinks on the cover of the translation. There is a brief period when I am awake, at 4 a.m., or 4:30 a.m., or 5 a.m. every morning, or is it still night, and I move into the other room with the baby, knowing that she needs to nurse, letting her father sleep, and I read the novel, feeling ecstatic in those early hours. At some point, however, the accumulation of sleeplessness causes me to hit a wall, and I am no longer able to read, the exhaustion immobilizes me. Tsushima published the novel in monthly installments in a magazine. It feels like the right time for me to read it now, this work of the vertiginousness of early motherhood, of exhaustion and despair and small joys, of lightness and darkness. I am so drawn to her dreamlike world, which is about stillness and interiority and solitude. I am interested in how the work organizes and contains the seasons, how we move through time.
