“The Doppelgängers” by Helen Phillips, recommended by Lauren Groff
AN INTRODUCTION BY LAUREN GROFF
Childbearing is an act of radical transformation. Like all women’s work, it is radically undervalued.
You sail through your days prow-first like a battleship, your body made public, strangers placing their hands on your belly. You face an intensifying sequence of lightning bolts that splits you and turns you inside out. In the end, someone hands you a real, live human being that you have made out of nothing, out of two dense cells.
(Whenever a man assumes physical superiority, I think: Oh, honey-bear, oh, sweetness, you’re no stronger than me. Strong is making a whole person in your body.)
Childbearing is undervalued because it’s women’s work, but also because it’s animal work, and how special can it be if the squirrels and the whales can do it, and so dumbly, too? It is also true that complexity is frightening and we take comfort in the Manichean. So, brain-work: important! Body-work: trifling.
Yet because we are the thinking animals, any act of radical transformation will change us intellectually. Bearing a child and being its exhausted flesh-and-blood shell for the first few months, watching that spark leap and kindle behind the new eyes, can turn any raw mother into a philosopher, an existentialist, a metaphysician, an ethicist, an epistemologist. Nobody can touch and taste and smell such new skin and not understand aesthetics.
This is only one of the reasons why I love the work of Helen Phillips so damn much. What we persist in seeing as the domestic, boring, and everyday, are in fact some of the weirdest things on the planet. Helen Phillips insists on this weirdness, she looks harder at it, she bores deeper into it, and she makes us see anew the things we often take for granted.
For instance, in this story, “The Doppelgängers,” Phillips shows the blistering world of new motherhood to be personal and intimate and inherently terrifying. It is also, and equally, a strange collective act, lived alongside other new mothers who exist in the same shadowy, eerie world, who are undergoing the same torments and feeling both anchored by and separate from the body. Phillips knows that a parent makes us always Other.
I read Helen Phillips because she is wise and she is funny. She is a writer on whom nothing is lost. Best of all, she is a quiet subversive. In Helen Phillips’s world, everything appears as vast and rich as it truly is.
Lauren Groff
Author of Fates and Furies
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Recommended by Lauren Groff
The Queen always looked profound when she pooped. Her eyes solemn, as though regarding the void. That was why they had taken to calling her The Queen, even though she was only a month old. Also, the way she sat enthroned in her car seat in the over-packed car as they drove to the new town. And the regal purple stars on her blanket, beneath which her absurdly tiny legs jerked this way and that.
“It’ll be better here,” Sam assured Mimosa that night in the new house. She was standing in the new kitchen beside the new window looking out into the new backyard. She was holding The Queen close to her. She—Mimosa, not The Queen—was crying. The Queen was sleeping. The Queen’s head fit flawlessly beneath Mimosa’s chin. She wondered if all babies’ heads fit so flawlessly beneath their mothers’ chins, if it was a biological thing. Who were those women, those women who had cautioned her, “Don’t worry if you don’t love your baby right away; it takes a while”?
“It’ll be better here,” Sam said again, or maybe he didn’t. She was too tired to know. Everything was a blur—the red numbers on the digital clock, the black hole of The Queen’s mouth.
Sam came up behind Mimosa and did something, the bite on the back of her neck, his vampire move. It was a trick he’d discovered by accident, one night many years ago; they’d been rolling around in bed and somehow his teeth had found the skin there. He’d immediately let go and apologized. “No,” she’d said firmly, giddily, realizing that now she could love him. “I mean, please. Do it again.”
Since this was the first time he had done it since the birth of The Queen, Mimosa was particularly sensitive to it. The touch of his teeth traveled silken down her spine, like an epidural in the seconds before it begins to numb. She turned to him, opening her mouth. The Queen awoke with a howl.
While Sam was at work, Mimosa ran her fingers from the top of The Queen’s head all the way down her spine, again and again, an addiction. It was too much, this beauty, this responsibility. The Queen burped. The Queen stared wide-eyed at the corner of the room as though watching a ghost emerge from the wall. The Queen farted. Mimosa couldn’t bear the softness like a piece of overripe fruit where The Queen’s skull had yet to fuse. It seemed that The Queen could vanish or disintegrate in an instant, that it would take almost nothing to destroy her.
“Are you there?” Sam said, standing in the doorway. A heat wave had begun. The bedroom was hot and dark. The whole house was hot and dark. He couldn’t see who was crying and who was sleeping.
Over the weekend they did things. Nice things, together, as a family. Sam insisted. It felt strange to Mimosa to be out and about, strolling down the sidewalk, sitting on a bench, eating ice cream. She was so accustomed to being inside the house. She was so accustomed to sitting on the bed with The Queen on her knees. Her armpits were damp and her sundress smelled. Her breasts were leaking.
On the other bench, another couple ate ice cream and gazed into a stroller. The woman wore the same sandals as Mimosa.
“Let’s go,” Mimosa said, standing abruptly.
Sam looked up, surprised.
The labor had been so long. She hadn’t slept more than three hours at a stretch since then. He rose and gripped the handlebar of the stroller. She stormed down the sidewalk toward a quieter street. Small, sensible houses, not unlike their own. She allowed Sam and The Queen to catch up with her. At the end of the block, a woman was watering a row of sagging stargazer lilies with a long hose. Mimosa, who liked stargazers, very nearly smiled as they approached the yard.
But this woman, the woman with the hose; she was wearing the same sundress as Mimosa. And, arcing outward from the small house: the wail of a newborn.
In the middle of the middle of the night, The Queen was screaming for milk, and Mimosa’s breasts were dripping, but the screaming interfered with the latch. The Queen was sticky with milk. Mimosa was sticky with milk. Mimosa wrestled The Queen’s confused, damp body closer to her nipple. Milk plastered them together at their stomachs.
On Monday, the heat was worse than ever. Something was happening to The Queen: hundreds if not thousands of small bumps had arisen on her skin. Mimosa noticed the rash when The Queen woke her at 4:57 in the morning (Sam slept through the crying, could always sleep through, and this was troubling to Mimosa, and at times filled her with queasy hatred, as though she had married a Frisbee or a spoon rather than a man).
Mimosa stepped around the moving boxes and turned on the overhead light in The Queen’s room. She removed The Queen’s onesie and diaper. She stood at the changing table for far too long, staring at The Queen’s skin. The Queen kicked and twisted and reached, oblivious to her mother’s hard gaze. Only when The Queen’s flailing arm had a little heart-wrenching spasm (overexcitement? agitation?) did Mimosa finally pick her up.
She went back into the other room and watched Sam sleep. Then she shoved The Queen at his face.
“Oh,” Sam cooed sleepily, taking the baby, pressing her into his chest hair. “I am looking! I am looking at this beautiful, perfect baby! Oh my!”
The Queen smiled at her father, or so it seemed.
Mimosa pulled The Queen away from him and held her close, as close as close could be, the baby’s head in its nook beneath Mimosa’s chin, but she wished there was some way to hold her even closer.
The house felt small, small and hot. Mimosa could smell herself more strongly by the minute. Her body odor had intensified since The Queen’s birth. Sam had read somewhere that newborns can recognize only one person in the entire world, and the way they recognize that person is by scent alone. She wondered when her stink would begin to offend The Queen, or if The Queen liked it more as it grew stronger.
In the car on the way to the park she felt victorious (having packed the diaper bag, located the car keys) and rolled down all the windows. She wanted to sit on a bench by the pond and hold The Queen in her lap and gaze at the swans. This was something she had imagined doing when she was pregnant.
But today even the birds terrified her. The swans and the pigeons were preparing for a face-off. They surrounded the most desirable bench, the pigeons viciously iridescent, the swans viciously white, ready for some kind of reckoning.
She spun the stroller around, away from the battlefield. The Queen began to fuss. Only a witch would dare stroll her infant in such indecent heat.
“You’re my best friend,” she said to soothe The Queen, but it just sounded plaintive.
Mimosa drove home slowly. She wished The Queen could be up front in the passenger seat beside her. She narrated the sights they passed: that’s a church, that’s a school, that’s a gas station. Soon the backseat was swathed in the hush of The Queen’s sleep. They said it was good to talk to your baby, but sometimes it was hard to know what to say, even when your baby was The Queen.
If Mimosa had been alone, truly alone, as she had so often been as of five weeks ago, she would have turned on the radio. But now the hush enveloped the car as Mimosa pulled up to a stop sign.
There were four cars at the four-way stop, three in addition to Mimosa’s.
First the car to Mimosa’s left passed through the intersection, driven by a woman with a dark bob, a tired face, a car seat in the back. Next the car to Mimosa’s right passed through the intersection, driven by a woman with a dark bob, a tired face, a car seat in the back. Then the car across from Mimosa passed through the intersection, driven by a woman with a dark bob, a tired face, a car seat in the back. Now it was Mimosa’s turn. She was horrified, paralyzed.
Yet it was her turn, and so she drove.
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