Farmer’s Market
After the park, we walked over to the Farmer’s Market, tasting dripping chunks of pomegranates and crunching sweet apples. The baby was in the stroller, and the girls teetered at the edges of my peripheral vision, sharp in-focus images against the autumn crowd of Ezra Pound’s couplet, “In A Station at the Metro,”
The apparition of the faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Suddenly one of those petals was coughing, her face turning red, and her mother beside her, wearing a baby in one of those modern, back to true motherhood carriers, started calling for help, “help,” help, she cried, and I realized that I had noticed the girl before the mother had started spinning and searching and that my focus had lost all of my girls and honed in on this red creature. Her hair red and curly, like the orphan Annie’s, her face round and red, her body strangely rigid. I watched the mother spinning, turning this way and that, searching, and stood for what feels like forever hoping someone would step in. Somehow nobody did. I called to my girls – “stay close” – and picked up the child and turned her upside down.
It resolved quickly and silently. The girl stayed red, and then I put my fingers in her mouth, and swept out thick apricot, and the girl’s color seemed to return, but she would not talk, and yet I knew she was breathing again, and I put her down, and she took another bite of her pear. Her mother was so strangely ungrateful, unaware, my heart pounding my whole body shaking and she seemingly so calm. That was all, a few moments.
We continued walking, and my cousin’s daughter said “Gross – you put your fingers in that girl’s mouth!” and the children became obsessed with finding me a way to wash my hands. All day long, they kept asking me, “Did you wash your hands? Did you wash your hands?” And what I did not tell them was that I had been washing my hands endlessly, thinking of Lady Macbeth, hoping to cleanse myself of the responsibility for caring for these lives, but knowing I could not, knowing that forever the spit of that child would be dripping from my hands, and I could never wash them clean.
For it was a brief moment and I stepped into it and I was lucky, and the girl was lucky but in that moment the What Ifs that I had been succeeding in keeping at bay finally penetrated, flooding the structures I had so gingerly built. And I was afloat, adrift in the wild waters, calling silently for help. Pomegranate rinds and stained mouths looking on, drifting by.
4 comments on “Farmer’s Market”
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Motherhood is a constant swirling vortex of ignoring and giving into “What ifs”, isn’t it? There’s a whole other blog post in why on earth that woman wasn’t able to find enough composure to offer up at least a basic thank you for saving her daughter. Sheesh.
Your comment about nobody else stepping in is really interesting to me. Do you think people didn’t notice? or do they just freeze or not know what to do? I had a similar experience when 6 months pregnant, except it was me who was choking and my husband trying to do the Heimlich while shouting for help in a very crowded room. As I stood there not able to breath and thinking very fast, all I could see was the people moving away and then looking at us. Luckily the taffy finally dislodged on the fourth or fifth attempt and once I was clearly okay, then a couple of people came over to help. The experience convinced me to take a first aid class, but I still wonder whether I’ll be able to do as you did and jump in to help or just freeze like so many others.
if I understand your blog correctly, you’re basically saying that you can watch my kids for the day too when you come in in a few weeks…right? I promise to thank you profusely 😉
Wonderful writing, wonderful story. But that other mother, spinning and spinning. Poor, poor redheaded child.
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