“The Coasts of Birth Where the Old Ghost Babies Stand"

Dear Michael,

The close of your last missive affords me the perfect opportunity to discuss the eternally pregnant but forever barren Esther Longtree, waitress at the Greasy Spoon. Vera sits down at the ill-proportioned diner counter and patiently waits for Esther, with her rounded belly like a great gourd, to take her order. But of course, like everything else in the novel, the Greasy Spoon is not an ordinary diner and Esther, no typical waitress.

Esther tells Vera of her many pregnancies and never-ending stillbirths. She’s waitressing to pass the time “between two shores,” she says. She is heading toward “the coasts of birth where the old ghost babies stand,” but Vera, she feels, is going in a different direction, “heading in a gale toward the coasts of death.” “We are ships passing in the night and honking.”

Esther stands as a contradiction to the idea of heaven, of everlasting life. Here is a woman whose body continually anticipates new life, yet her life-giving potentiality is constantly, inevitably, denied. As Esther relates to Vera, people say that “she was never pregnant or everlastingly pregnant which were the same thing.” (Another example of the many apparent oppositions or inversions that Young loves to present that make us scratch our heads, questioning whether there truly are opposite ideas and experiences in this world!)

And what does all this mean for poor Vera, caught in a gale, rushing toward her own death? Perhaps the very ideas of life and death are symbolized by Esther’s womb. We live only briefly, sustained and nourished by life forces larger than ourselves, but any notion of an afterlife, a new life, beyond the borders of the warm, nurturing world in which we live is mere chimera.

Might Vera’s one thousand, three hundred page journey for a new life, reunited with Miss MacIntosh, have always been a stillborn endeavor? A magnification of the all-too-brief womb journeys of Esther’s “ghost babies,” whose little voices keep their expectant mother awake at night?

Skeptical of the fecundated wind,

Lori