Baby in Crisis
by Arushi Sinha
When Baby’s therapist video calls her, the woman holds her phone so that the top third of her face is off-screen. Dr. Therapist has abandoned the ritual of wearing white pearl earrings. Sometimes she forgets the premise of video entirely and begins to use the device like a walkie talkie. Baby was at first annoyed, but has come to find that it is much easier to talk to the image of someone’s left cheek on a screen than it is to sit across from them and look them in the eye, breathe the same air, etc. Baby has taken to wearing sheet masks from her Beauty Box subscription during these sessions, but finds they unstick and peel off her face once they come into contact with hot tears.
They did not name her Baby; she named herself that.
Baby wears her kimono around the house listening to Lana Del Rey on vinyl, desperate to feel something. Baby’s feelings have begun to float around as if there were no gravity, nothing to be rooted in; she has started to take the shape of someone stuck sitting in room temperature bathwater.
Baby in crisis is always cooking. The meals have amplified in complexity and prep time. To date, she has mail-ordered three cookbooks – French, Japanese, and Moroccan. As a natural progression, she was possessed by a single-minded desire to stock a pantry that catered equally to each cuisine. Chickpeas, nori, goose fat, smoked paprika, cultured butter, furikake. She enrolls in a service called Damaged Goods that sends her misshapen vegetables (she feels an affinity for them immediately – the unloved ones). The making of lists makes Baby feel like she’s moving forward: items are bought and organized and cooked and eaten and replenished. Maybe it is not so much forward-facing as it is cyclical.
Baby is in a place where she can no longer distinguish between something that is forward-facing and something which is cyclical.
Baby calls two of her exes. This is not an act of restraint; she has only that many. The first is unresponsive so after three and a half glasses of the Rioja from Wine Club, she sends him an unhinged string of vaguely accusatory texts. Hours later she deletes them, only then realising that she has made things worse. Number One does not respond, but Baby is now relieved because it is he who has made things worse. Thirteen deleted texts merit a response and there is no one around to convince Baby that she is wrong. Number Two is very happy, thank you - doing well, gardening, new baby, smiling wife (lawyer; tasteful highlights); social media quicksand that Baby flails in for days like a fly landing in honey.
Baby’s libido is not used to this kind of neglect. She finds herself eyeing men on the street with the first thought being, how can I lure this man into my apartment. The last man she thought this about was riding a skateboard shirtless and had open wounds on his back, but she caught a whiff of his Axe body spray and grew wet. At one time, Baby enjoyed at least the basic dignity of thinking herself above the girl in Axe commercials, and now this too is gone.
Baby’s friends call to ask about her. Their tone of questioning resembles that of someone enquiring after a single shoe spotted on the side of the road. Baby is sure that she feels suspended and stationary like the fruit inside a set jelly, but gets the impression that being okay is not the response that anyone expects or wants or believes from her. She feels resentful at the notion of having to invent pathos for their benefit, but often Baby gives in and talks about heartbreaks that haven’t happened or phantom injuries, both with a mildly tragic air. The cooking gives Baby something to talk about, and is generally met with favourable response, less so than when she declares that she wants to be like Nigella, a cocaine-laced domestic Goddess who doesn’t care what you think.
At night in bed, Baby cares what everyone thinks. She feels both fastened to her thoughts and untethered from her body, as if floating above it in some kind of ghost-like fog. She runs through her lists because lately it has become easier to forget, memory feels shorter, each day crashing into the one before and the one after until all she is sure of is that time is a thing that passes people by and makes you old from young.
Arushi Sinha is a fiction writer with an MFA from Columbia University. She is a 2020 New York State Writer’s Workshop scholar. Her writing can be found in the Columbia Journal and Harper’s Bazaar India, where she was a Staff Writer. Arushi is currently working on a short story collection, and lives between New York and New Delhi.
