Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [65]
He had breasts. Not large ones. Small breasts, like a flat-chested woman temporarily swollen with milk. Then with his red beard, his face of a sunburnt forty-five-year-old man, stern-visaged, long-nosed, thin-lipped, he began to nurse. The baby stopped wailing and begun to suck greedily. An expression of serene enjoyment spread over Barbarossa’s intellectual schoolmaster’s face. He let go of the room, of everything, and floated. Her breasts ached with remembrance. She had loved breastfeeding—that deep-down warm milky connection that seemed to start in her womb and spread up through her trunk into her full dark-nippled breasts. Her heavy breasts opened to Angelina’s flower face, the sweet sunflower cradled in her arm. She had been borne on the currents of that intimate sensual connection, calmer, gentler than making love but just as enormous and satisfying. She had nursed Angelina until Eddie had absolutely insisted that she stop; for eight months she had nursed her. Angie had been a fat healthy baby. Only after Eddie had made her stop breast-feeding had Angie turned cranky about eating and become the thin doelike child of the photographs.
She felt angry. Yes, how dare any man share that pleasure. These women thought they had won, but they had abandoned to men the last refuge of women. What was special about being a woman here? They had given it all up, they had let men steal from them the last remnants of ancient power, those sealed in blood and in milk.
“I suppose you do it all with hormones,” she said testily.
“At least two of the three mothers agree to breast-feed. The way we do it, no one has enough alone, but two or three together share breast-feeding.”
“Why bother? Don’t tell me you couldn’t make formula?”
“But the intimacy of it! We suspect loving and sensual enjoyment are rooted in being held and sucking and cuddling.”
“Where are the babies from the empty cradles? Are they sick?”
“Outside with mothers or somebody! Oftentimes when we’re working, we take the baby in a backpack. They get fresh air. When breast-feeding ends, everybody who feels like it lugs them around.”
“Suppose you took Barbarossa’s baby and he wanted it. Wouldn’t he get sore?”
“What are kenners for? You ask.”
She stared at the room, blue and lemon and grass green. Sunlight melted through the circle of windows and a muted vegetable light passed through the dome. The windows stood open to the breezes now. The person in green was changing a diaper and wiping the cradle. Both diaper and wipe-up went down a chute.
“Well, at least you’re not so crazy about ecology that you wash diapers.”
“They’re made from cornhusks and cobs, and they compost. Very soft. Feel.” The diapers tore off a large roll hung from a stand in the form of a snake dancing, with many tinkling bells attached. Over the cradles mobiles turned and twittered. No pink and blue, no Disney animals prancing, no ugly cartoon pigs decked in human clothes. The nursery was airy, soothing, full of rustling and little bells and wind chimes and the sound of the stringed instrument, the cradles rocking. On the window seat, Barbarossa cuddled his baby to his breast, all the stern importance melted from his features. She could almost hate him in the peaceful joy to which he had no natural right; she could almost like him as he opened like a daisy to the baby’s sucking mouth.
The person in green was cuddling the baby just changed and singing a slightly mournful lullaby:
“Nobody knows
how it flows
as it goes.
Nobody goes
where it rose
where it flows.”
“Where’s Jackrabbit?” Connie asked, realizing that somewhere in the maze of rooms and courtyards he had slipped away.
“Gone to play. This house seduces you.”
“Nobody chose
how it grows
how it flows.
How it grows
how it glows
in the heart of the rose …”
As they went up a broad shallow stairway, that song, plaintive and endless, followed after them.
“Except in the nursery and among the very young, the kids don’t have toys,” she said suddenly.
“Most of what