Lullabies for Little Criminals

“I wasn’t sure whether or not she was joking, so I laughed loudly and briefly. My laugh sounded different than usual, as if I were laughing in a room with no furniture. I was still uncomfortable with the idea of sex. When I first heard of French kissing, I thought it was something that only mental patients and the kids who failed grade four would do when they grew up.”

Before this moment, Marika told Baby how she’s been having sex with men for money. Baby doesn’t know how to respond, so she laughs awkwardly. This reveals how the environment around her is constantly trying to rip her from childhood and make her grow up before her time. It also shows how she doesn’t have any good role models in her life. Her dad is absent most of the time, and Marika, a girl who Baby used to consider a friend, is now doing things that she doesn’t want to be part of. 

“Jules came into my room later that night after Lester and Kent had left. He had his hands in front of him feeling around, although it wasn’t particularly dark. He did that even when the light was on when he was stoned. He squeezed in next to me. He was in the mood to talk, I could tell. We lay on the bed as if we were crammed in a confessional booth together. When he was stoned, he was honest. I loved when he told me his secrets.”

This moment demonstrates one of the few bonding moments between Baby and her dad. The tragedy is that these bonding moments only occur when Jules is high on heroin, and Baby takes this to mean that he loves her most when he’s high. Later, when Jules is sober and distant, this gives her the idea that heroin must be a good thing, since it’s what allowed Jules to love her.

“After I got the news, I started wearing a star sticker that I took off my math test and stuck on my forehead. I stole Isabelle’s eye shadow and mascara even though she’d told me not to. She said young girls looked prettier without makeup anyway. I started cursing more and throwing bottles against train tracks. I did these things for no good reason. I didn’t know anyone whose father lived in a hospital.”

Before this moment, Baby found out that Jules needed to stay in the hospital longer than anticipated. She acts out as a result of the news, but she doesn’t understand why she’s acting this way. She chalks it up to the fact that she doesn’t have any role models in her life to show her how to act, and she doesn’t know anyone going through exactly what she’s going through.

“When he finally drove up into the driveway, he didn’t even cut the engine. He waited for me to run outside and meet him. Isabelle walked me out, her arm squeezing me to her side. For a second, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted her to let me go. Isabelle was very good about making me not worry about things.”

In this moment, Baby is saying goodbye to her foster mother, but for the first time, she feels a loss at the thought of leaving her. She realizes that she’s grown comfortable with the predictability of life with Isabelle. She’s also hurt that Jules didn’t even bother to come in and see where she’s been living the last few months. His indifference is yet another example of his lack of interest in the details of her life.

“I hoped that we would stay there forever and that we would never be separated again. For this to happen, I thought Jules would have to start acting more adultlike and responsible. You get very religious about the idea of parents in a foster home. They seem as fragile as a glass horse on a shelf. While Jules was in the hospital, I had learned that our relationship was a vulnerable thing, but it turned out that he hadn’t. Because I had come back from the foster home looking healthier and with good color, Jules got the unfortunate idea that I could handle myself without him.”

Baby returns from the foster home only to realize that nothing is different with Jules and yet things feel different. Jules still leaves her alone most of the time, only this time it’s worse because he thinks she is stronger now. It’s also worse for her because this time she’s aware that their relationship is fragile. Being at the foster home was the first time she had ever been separated from him, and now she realizes that it could easily happen again.

“I felt comfortable when I saw him at Mary’s, standing in the hallway with a sweatshirt down to his knees. He was the most unthreatening child, and any sort of fright at the moment might have killed me. Felix was happy to have a friend with him all the time; he wanted to spend every one of his waking minutes with me. I started to do the things he liked to do.”

Baby moves in with her neighbor Mary while Jules is in rehab, and she quickly befriends Mary’s youngest son, Felix. Felix clings to her, and she appreciates his friendship equally. His friendship makes her feel at home at Mary’s, as if she has a family while Jules is away. She again grows comfortable in her new home.

“As I walked out into the evening, I wished that I was on drugs too. Oliver was a junkie and so he had more in common with my dad than I did.”

Baby goes to visit her dad while he’s in rehab, and for the first time she feels truly estranged from him. They have a hard time connecting in conversation, but he has no problem connecting with Oliver, a fellow addict he’s met at the rehab center. This makes Baby deduce that the only way she can connect with her dad is if she’s an addict, too.

“As I packed away the orange ball that was supposed to be Saturn, I found that, although I deeply wanted to live with Jules again, it hurt me to leave here.”

Here, Baby is about to leave Mary’s house, but similar to how she felt about leaving the foster home, she’s sad to go. As she’s packing up a school project that she and Felix made, she realizes how much she loves the normalcy of being part of a family. She loves Jules, but she’s aware that he can’t give him a stable family life.

“Once I got my things unpacked in the apartment, I felt as if I was in an entirely different reality. I had a window that looked out onto the street and would need a curtain. I thumbtacked a pillowcase up. I was going to miss a woman’s touch. No matter what apartment my dad and I moved into, there would never be a mother there.”

After living with Isabelle and Mary, Baby is acutely aware of being motherless when she goes back to live with Jules. She’s aware that a mother would bring a feminine touch to her home, but with just Jules, she knows her apartments will never truly feel like home; not only will Jules never decorate to make it feel cozy, but he also can’t provide the emotional support of a mother.

“He grabbed on to my foot, wailing loudly. I knew that he was just playing around, but at the same time I knew that he meant it. I don’t know why I always felt so much for him, why I felt so bad when he was unhappy.”

Here, Theo begs Baby to come to the pool with him. She agrees because she feels bad for him, and she admits that she hates when he is sad. Even later, when Theo dislocates her arm, she feels sorry for him instead of feeling angry. This demonstrates a cycle of self-destructive behavior, where Baby puts the feelings of others above herself.

“It might have been the painkillers that were making me feel that way. Actually, they were probably behind my enjoyment of melancholy, too. I was glad when I went to the doctor and he said I could knock off the pills and take my arm out of the sling. He said it was necessary to feel pain now, so that I knew if I was being hurt.”

Baby was put on painkillers after Theo dislocated her arm, and she started to like the way they made her emotional pain feel comforting. However, the doctor’s words foreshadow what’s to come when Baby becomes addicted to heroin. When she’s high, she doesn’t feel the pain of being with Alphonse and prostituting. It’s only when she comes down that she feels the pain of her reality.

“I was almost thirteen and he thought I was old enough to be left alone in the house. I didn’t think that I was because I was still afraid of the dark. Plus, if someone decided to kick the door in, I wasn’t going to be able to beat them up.”

At this point, Jules is sober, but he now leaves Baby alone much of the time. He’s slipping further into depression, isolation, and mental illness, and he isn’t capable of taking caring of her. She doesn’t want to be left alone, and she still desperately craves Jules’s attention. Being left alone and desperate is what ultimately propels her into Alphonse’s arms.

“I’d get excited when grown-ups paid attention to me. It always made me feel so special. I didn’t have a mother and my dad wasn’t ever around anymore. I was even friends with the retarded people who stood rocking back and forth on the corner.”

Baby’s desire to be cared for by adults, combined with the complete lack of parental guidance in her life, explains why she quickly fell prey to the imminent dangers in her environment. Specifically, without a parent to tell her what’s right or wrong, she listens to any adult who will give her attention.

“I was always kind of smitten by women. Probably because I never had a mother. The women that I was most crazy about were the young drug addicts. They’d be sitting on the hoods of cars late at night wearing white leather jackets with wide flaps and jean shorts. When they were stoned, they’d always smile at me. They had smiles that were so sweet and tender, smiles that made them seem as if they might have been crying a couple minutes before.”

Without a mother or maternal figure in her life, Baby looks to the women in her environment as role models for what it means to be a woman. In her eyes, the most beautiful and kind, and therefore the most emulative, are the young addicts. This might explain why Baby slipped so easily into addiction and prostitution, because looking to the young drug addicts and prostitutes was the only example of womanhood she had in her life.

“Suddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you’re you enough, you don’t know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair. A dandelion growing out of a crack in a sidewalk outside your front door is a garden. You could believe that a song your parent was singing in the evening was the most tragic opera in the world. It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you.”

Here, Baby defines the true loss of innocence. It’s not just about doing adult things; it’s a change in perspective. After the moment Alphonse kisses Baby, and it makes her feel dirty and different. She knows that she could never be just a kid again, and here she’s longing for the simplicity that comes along with childhood. When she was still just an innocent child, she believed that Jules, despite all his flaws, was a good father. Now she’s aware that he can’t give her what she needs.

“Once my friend’s mother had taken us both to the swimming pool. She was wearing a bikini and let us roll the flab on her belly like it was bread dough. I’d never felt anything like that. I wanted desperately to have my own mother whose belly I could poke whenever I pleased.”

Throughout the novel, one of Baby’s strongest longings is for the love of a mother. She sees examples of mothers around her, but they are often very flawed. However, this memory is one of the most wholesome, where Baby acknowledges that the touch and feeling of a mother is a priceless gift that she will never receive. There are other moments where Baby just wants to touch someone’s mother, like when she hugs Theo’s mom and when she wants to hug Mary.

“They had all lost faith in their profession after spending a couple years working in juvenile corrections. You could not make a child with bad memories into a kid with good memories. A really effective social worker would have to be a time traveler who could go back in time and undo the abuse most kids here had suffered.”

Here, Baby explains the reason that the detention center staff are so apathetic about their job; they think that they can’t really make a difference in the lives of the children because they are already too damaged to be helped. This way of thinking leads to cyclical behavior: without any adult guidance in their lives, the children continue to perpetuate what they’ve been taught. This moment illustrates another reason why Baby is distrustful of adults: nearly every adult in her life has betrayed her trust, whether that’s Jules, Alphonse, or the detention center staff who allow the children to humiliate each other when they’re unsupervised.

“It is a fact that things always get worse for children after a stint in juvenile detention. Being there does something to you morally. When I left a month later, I felt much more vulnerable. I was like one of those baby birds that fall out of their nests in the spring and are virtually impossible to rescue; they need an amount of attention that no one can give them.”

Here, Baby compares herself to a baby bird, and recognizes that without a mother or parental figure to care for her she is completely vulnerable. Like a baby bird that’s lying helpless on the ground is defenseless against a predator, Baby is powerless against Alphonse.

“Then one day I had a new social worker, a slim Indian man with a British accent who took notes all the time. I was in shock. What a fool I was. I realized that I had thought Corey loved me, but she hasn’t even said goodbye.”

Baby’s first social worker after she gets out of rehab is Corey, and she felt a special bond with her. However, when Corey leaves unexpectedly without even saying goodbye, Baby feels foolish for having let herself grow attached. This is yet another example of how Baby desires the affection, attention, and companionship of a trusted adult, particularly of a mother figure, and yet again her trust is broken when they disappoint her.

“I hardly even touched him, but it didn’t seem necessary. Somehow every part of me was being touched by him. Every part of me was full of him. I couldn’t move a finger on my hand or my knee without squishing against him. I felt helpless. He sucked on my fingers and then he held my hand up against his face and licked my palm. My whole body seemed wet.”

This describes the first sexual encounter between Baby and Alphonse. It also demonstrates Alphonse’s predatory behavior and how Baby doesn’t actively engage in the moment; Alphonse is doing things to her, and she goes along with it but doesn’t actively engage in the experience. Alphonse is an adult while Baby is only thirteen, and this is one of the most criminal acts in the book. It signifies the ways Baby is caught in the slipstream of her environment, unable to make conscious choices for herself.

“I didn’t even feel like a prostitute. A prostitute stands there all night looking for people. A prostitute wears a sparkly silver jacket and high heels, not a tacky winter hat and snow boots.”

This moment reveals Baby’s innocence when she begins prostituting. The fact that she doesn’t feel like a prostitute demonstrates that she doesn’t really know what a prostitute is. She knows they have sex for money, but she doesn’t understand why. Most prostitutes in her neighborhood work for drugs or to provide for themselves, but Baby is only doing it because Alphonse told her to. She doesn’t understand that the men who are hiring her are pedophiles and that they’re more criminal and predatory than the men who are sleeping with older prostitutes. In short, she isn’t aware that her situation is vastly different than that of the older prostitutes.

“I gave Alphonse all the money I made. Since I would have been scared to death to do it without him, I figured he deserved the money. He insisted on giving me back a little money each time, and five dollars was more than I needed anyhow.”

This moment reveals that Baby doesn’t prostitute for the money; she’s simply doing it because Alphonse wants her to. Baby is too young and immature to understand the consequences of her actions or to have the agency to stand up to abusive adults. Like the title of this section suggests, she is only pretending to be a grown-up. Since she’s never had any good role models in her life to show her how to be an adult, she’s just doing what the adults around her do; the difference between her and them is that she doesn’t know why she’s doing the things she does.

“Things were different now. I wasn’t just going to forgive him for not taking care of me during the past year. Instead of saving me, he had rejected me. If he hadn’t sent me away to a center for rejected children, I wouldn’t have become such good friends with Alphonse. I would be a virgin. I needed to be angry at someone other than myself. Being angry at Jules kept my head above water.”

This is the first time that Baby self-reflectively implicates Jules as the source of her problems. Specifically, she pinpoints the moment that he sent her away to the juvenile detention center as moment that everything really fell apart for her. Before being sent away, she had trusted Jules to be there for her when things got really bad. When Jules found out that she was hanging out with Alphonse, he had sent her away rather than protecting her. When she comes back from the center, she feels betrayed, and this propels her even further into Alphonse’s arms.