circus

We went to the circus yesterday. Calder’s, that is, at the Whitney. 6 new mamas and our 6 busy infants, stuffed into the 6 train uptown. We were like a baby parade, ladies with babies zipped inside coats, resplendent in fuzzy suits with ears on the hoods and knitted bonnets that tie below the chin. Or double chin as the case may be. It was a whirlwind of gear and feeding – our first stop was the museum café where we took up three tables and all sunk back into the folding chairs to feed the hungry ones, who gulped and slurped and smacked their lips as they would have at home, oblivious to their cultured surroundings.

But the Circus, that was something else again. The elevator opens onto a wall of wire portraits, Jimmy Durante and Josephine Baker. Line made three dimensional, you could see inside their heads. They swayed gently and made themselves again in shadow against the wall. Anna was captivated. She grinned and talked to them like she grins and talks to things she loves at home – her favorite radiator and lamp post, her beloved bookshelf and fridge. We walked and she looked – the sweet lumpy-hipped dancer, the three graces with arms akimbo, the rumple-trunked elephant. Her eyebrows gathered together in concentration. Every so often she’d call to what she saw. We walked the length of Romulus and Remus suckling on their lean wire mama wolf. The nipples looked like they were made of wooden drawer-pulls. We saw the splayed dangling toes of the dancer lady and the tiny pig swinging inside the happy sow.

When it was time to go, it was Time to Go. Some of us waited in the lobby while others of us teamed up on an amazingly explosive poop in the second floor bathroom where the changing table was chin-high. The lobby babies all leaned back in their slings, staring at the honeycomb of lights on the ceiling, black, white, black, white. We ladies, tired, looked up happily too.