Love in Infant Monkeys, Lydia Millet [best motivational novels txt] 📗

the water bottle. The whole assemblage, of course, approximates the animal’s natural environment. Burrows, et cetera.”

“We had a gerbil,” volunteered the little girl.

“Mongolian,” elaborated Chomsky.

“First we had two, but one died,” said the little girl.

“I see,” said K.

“Hamsters—now, if you want to get a hamster, those are good-looking but purely solitary,” said Chomsky, and lowered his voice. “Strictly one to a cage. Or they’ll rip each other’s throats out. But your Mongolians are social.”

“My brother had a hamster,” said the little girl.

“Golden,” concurred Chomsky, nodding. “Your basic Syrian. Most domesticated Goldens are bred down from a single female in Aleppo. In the nineteen-thirties, I believe. ’Course, they were originally exported as research subjects.”

“That hamster choked,” said the little girl solemnly to K. “It choked right to death. On a piece of popcorn. My dad buried it.”

“Hamsters,” said K. “Are those the ones where the males have the prominent . . . ?”

“I recommend the gerbils,” said Chomsky. K. could tell he was trying to project his voice toward the teenagers, who were holding up a black-and-orange, flame-detailed skateboard (no wheels). He wanted to break it to Chomsky: They were way past gerbils.

“I’d like to take you up on it,” said K. “But my family travels a lot.”

“They do need care and attention,” said Chomsky, a bit punitively.

“You have to clean out the cage all the time or it stinks,” said the girl.

“Also,” said K., “an animal stuck in a box all its life, I’m not sure I’d feel great about that.”

“The Mongolians seem to do well enough,” said Chomsky.

“Herky liked to go out. One time I let him run around and he fell in the garbage can,” said the little girl.

“Herky?” asked K.

“It was short for Hercules.”

“He had no problem making it out of the garbage can then, I guess.”

“I had to pour all the garbage onto the kitchen floor.”

A harassed-looking mother with lank hair appeared in the doorway behind Chomsky, a sleepy, bobble-headed infant strapped to her chest in a padded carrier.

“Can I get through, please?” she asked tersely, in the two seconds before Chomsky noticed. He stepped back, looking past her to the outside and holding high the yellow condo.

“I’ve got a great gerbil house! Up for grabs!”

The harried mother, unimpressed, pushed by him and let the door slam behind her, heading purposefully for a pile of used baby objects. K. wanted to tell her, “Hey! This is Noam Chomsky here! The last American dissident!”

“They don’t make ’em like this anymore,” said Chomsky, half to himself. “This is from the seventies.”

“You could always sell it on eBay,” said K., and grinned. “You might say, ‘Official Noam Chomsky-Owned Habitrail. ’ It could go for hundreds. If not thousands.”

“Damn it,” said the harried mother, and turned back to them. There was yellow-white vomit all down her blue carrier, burbling from the infant’s mouth in a continuous stream. “Damn it, damn it, damn it!” She struggled to pull a packet of baby wipes out of a shoulder bag, and as she twisted to reach the wipes vomit dribbled off the baby’s chin and onto the floor.

“Thing barfed. Grotesque,” said one of the teenagers, holding the skateboard. He wriggled behind Chomsky, then kicked the door open on his way out. The other boy followed.

“I can’t—I can’t—” said the mother, and K. saw she was on the verge of tears.

“Here, let me,” he said, and held open her bag while she rummaged around inside it.

“You just get . . . so tired,” she said, shaking her head as she plucked at the baby wipes. They clung together stubbornly until K. helped her separate one from the mass.

“I know,” said K. “I have a toddler myself.”

“But you’re not the mother,” said the mother, wiping at the baby’s chin.

Chomsky had handed the gerbil condo to his granddaughter, who held it precariously as he cleared a place for it on a shelf.

“It shouldn’t be on the floor,” he said. “Could get stepped on. Or overlooked.”

“Could I have another?” said the mother, looking around for a trash can for the used tissue. Finally she pulled out a Ziploc bag full of cookie crumbs and stuffed the used tissue in. Distracted, K. watched Chomsky set the condo up on the shelf, turning it this way and that—possibly to show it off to its best advantage.

“There you go,” said K.

“My husband, I mean, he’s a loving father, but he doesn’t basically always have the responsibility. From when you wake up in the morning till you—feel better, sweetie?—fall into bed at night. Even when you’re sleeping. I mean, you dream about it: bad things happening to the baby. The tension of that—you know, protective-ness never leaves you. Not completely. Everything you have to . . . planning, organizing, knowing every second . . . I mean, just making sure I don’t even go to the damn dump without a full complement of baby wipes, for Chrissake. You can’t even walk out the door without . . . there you go, sweetie. All cleaned up.”

K. was nodding with what he hoped looked like empathy, but she barely noticed him. K. had the feeling she was talking more to Chomsky than to him.

“I mean, fathers essentially go on doing what they’ve always done. Just maybe a little less of it. But the woman, all of a sudden, has to come second to herself. Not in theory—because I know my husband would do anything for the baby, in an emergency or whatever—but in practice. Every day. Every hour.”

“There are rewards, though, aren’t there?” asked Chomsky with a paternal air. He extended a forefinger to the baby, which grabbed it.

The mother was wiping her own hands now, up and down the fingers. K. looked at the baby’s face: It was a pumpkinhead, he would tell me later.

K. believed that almost all babies not his own were just a little ugly. He tended to feel sorry for them in their homeliness. But then, whenever he looked back at pictures of our two-year-old when she