Baby

"忠孝東路 Loyalty and Filial Piety East Road" by L. Acadia

She wanted to be called “baby” and no one had ever called her “baby.” She just wasn’t a “baby” type of person.

Her new boyfriend revealed that he had called his previous partner “baby,” but that it had started out as a joke. A sarcastic “baby” that just became what they called each other, eventually.

So, together, she and the new boyfriend, they just weren’t “baby” type people, it seemed, or at least not earnest baby type people. Which made sense. She and her previous partner had called each other “little pierogi” for a while and also “darling.” The first was explicitly from a joke, and the second was always said a bit jokey too. Before that, an old boyfriend had addressed her as “babe” once, quite earnestly, and she had laughed lightly and affectionately but still laughed. If she had any complaints they could only be to herself.

It was fall and they went with friends to the corn maze in Armada. Two years ago, it had felt goofy-festive, as they had all been in their mid-30s and it was mostly families there. A sort of we-can-still-do-these-things-with-our-friends mood among people who hadn’t done the family thing but nonetheless felt like participating in something to mark the change of seasons, combined with a sort of jovial ha-ha feeling. Then they had skipped a year, and now they were in step with everyone else, with two of the friend group having had babies in the interval.

None of the friends knew the new boyfriend well yet. They knew him just a little. The babies didn’t know her well yet, either.

When they got there, the four separate cars all arriving within fifteen minutes of each other, they started off in a parking lot with goats. The goats had a series of beams to walk on, surrounded by netting and a pen, and the little families of goats traversed the beams and the children below oohed and ahhed at them. The babies of her own group, Parker and Willis, were bundled up, snuggled by one person then another from their group. They looked at pumpkins and animals, and they went through the corn maze, which was not at all scary or hard to figure out and seemed to be geared to little kids. In the middle of the maze they wound up just talking for a bit, broken off into different pairs, and not proceeding through the maze but catching up about their various creative projects and what they had read and watched and gone to see recently. The conversation kept going and she enjoyed the intimacy and the particularity, the little group of friends with the same shared aesthetic sensibility that had, at some point in the past, felt singular and driving, more so than now, but still, there they were and they all made things and thought about things that felt related. She could see now, at her current age, how arbitrary it all was: a university had developed a graduate program in the arts; that sort of program had low overhead and brought in money. A few years later, around the time she and the others had all been in their early 20s, these types of programs were growing. And she and some of the people who were now her friends—who in previous eras wouldn’t have wound up in graduate school at all, since they were all from pretty modest backgrounds—had gone to the program and met one another and discussed the same niche interests of the same professor, and the others in her friend group had gone to another nearby program, where another professor—one who was friends with the first professor—had trained them in similar texts and ways of thinking. They had all believed that this gave them something they should be happy to get, and, for the most part, their interest, as determined by institutional forces as it had turned out to be, still held: they loved each other and stayed friends for the next decade and a half.

And so there they stood talking, and eventually the light shifted and prompted them to keep moving, even though it was not getting close to evening; the light had shifted only because of a cloud crossing the sky. But it made them feel the wind and realize that they should’ve brought gloves, maybe, or at least would need them if they stayed much longer, and they completed the maze and ate cider doughnuts while watching the goats, who bleated and shook out their fur in the afternoon light.

As they drove home, her boyfriend expressed his pleasure. He liked the friends. The day was good. They had gotten outside. When they got back to her place they made dinner and then cocktails and Herman the dog wedged in between them as they watched a movie on a laptop. They both loved the movie but couldn’t quite keep awake. She pulled herself out of a semi-sleep to shut the laptop and move Herman out of the room. But first she lay there, turned around and at the foot of the bed, petting Herman for a bit as her boyfriend fell in and out of dozing. “What’s wrong, baby?” he mumbled, sort of still asleep and wondering what was going on. And there in his mouth she was briefly the previous girlfriend, the one who had been called “baby” until the sarcasm faded, the one who had eventually become just regular “baby.”

And so, she thought, if they were tired enough and pleased enough, she could be “baby” too.

About the Author

Marie Buck is the author of several poetry collections, including Spoilers, a collaboration with Matthew Walker (Golias Books, 2024), Unsolved Mysteries (Roof Books, 2020), and Goodnight, Marie, May God Have Mercy on Your Soul (Roof Books, 2017). Her creative and scholarly writing have appeared in Post45, Brooklyn Rail, Poetry Project Newsletter, and Hythe, among others. She grew up in upstate South Carolina and received an MFA in poetry writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She currently teaches writing at New York University.

about the artist

L. Acadia (acadiaink.com) is an assistant professor at National Taiwan University with photography in Lesbian Art Circle, Lotus-Eater, Nonbinary Review, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere.