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

was six months old or a year, he was shocked at her own oversize melon, fat cheeks and baldness. “I didn’t realize she used to look like that,” he would say regretfully, shaking his head.

“Of course there are rewards, or we would just kill ourselves,” said the mother. “That is so not the point.”

“The possibility exists,” said Chomsky, gently unwrapping his finger from the baby’s pudgy grip, “that you don’t actually have to be quite as vigilant as you are. Mothers, that is.”

“That’s what I think,” said K. “My wife is tense all the time about our daughter getting hurt. It’s this constant anxiety.”

“You don’t get it,” said the mother. “Neither of you. Trust me.”

Chomsky and K. shared a glance, and Chomsky came close to raising an eyebrow. K. told me later it ran through his head: He doesn’t get it? This is Noam Chomsky!

K. found himself wondering idly why Chomsky hadn’t won a Nobel. K. himself, who had studied phenomenology in grad school, personally disagreed with Chomsky and his followers when it came to linguistics. But he admired Chomsky for his persistence in politics.

“Can I take this?” asked the little girl, and stood up from a pile in the corner with a cobweb on her shoulder, holding up a heavily pocked dartboard.

“Are there darts along with the board?” asked Chomsky, and went to rummage beside her. “Because it’s not much good without them.”

“Mom says I can only have the kind of darts with sticky stuff on them,” said the little girl. “You know, the balls? Not the sharp ones.”

The baby in the carrier began to fuss nervously.

“OK. What did I come for? I can’t even remember what I came for,” said the mother distractedly, jiggling in place to keep the baby happy. “Oh yeah. There was supposed to be a bouncy chair here. With an animal mobile. Has anyone seen a bouncy chair?”

“It got took,” said the old scavenger woman. “Right before you got here. A lady in a Beemer.”

“Are you kidding? Vincent said he would keep it for me! I drove all the way from North Truro!”

“Do you have a sticker?” asked the scavenger sharply. Out-of-towners had no dump access.

“Yes, I have a sticker. Not that it’s really your business.”

The baby suddenly wailed, a gravelly, ragged noise in the closeness of the shed. K., having found a small blowup raft he thought would make a good water toy for our daughter, had moved a few paces away and was inspecting it for leaks.

“I can’t believe this,” said the mother when the baby quieted. “I can’t believe it. We had to go to Hyannis yesterday through an hour and a half of stopped traffic, and I didn’t buy a chair just because Vincent said it was here. I need that chair. I need it!”

“The kind where you plug it in and it vibrates?” asked K. “Or the kind where it swings and plays the music?”

“The kind where you hang it from the doorframe.”

“Oh yeah,” said K.

“Then you can do the dishes. You can go to the bathroom.”

“Whatever happened to a simple playpen?” mused Chomsky.

“Could you tell Mom I can have the sharp ones?” asked his granddaughter, tugging at his hand. “I’m old enough. Can you make her give them to me?”

“I can’t make her do anything,” said Chomsky.

“We actually have one of those we don’t use, I think,” said K. to the harried mother, wanting to help. “My daughter outgrew it. What I don’t know is where it ended up.”

The little girl was telling Chomsky that the dartboard she had at home was felt, with orange Velcro balls to throw.

“Yeah. Well. Thanks anyway,” said the mother to K., beginning to edge toward the door.

“I tell Mom I want real ones,” said the little girl.

“But all she says is, ‘You could take an eye out.’ That’s all she says.”

“God damn it,” cried the harried mother. One of her bare ankles was jammed into the wire hook of a coat hanger that protruded from a thick jumble underneath a table. She kicked it free awkwardly—the heavy baby leaning sideways, sacklike—and then stumbled, slamming her elbow into a shelf. The gerbil condo fell to the floor.

“Is it broken?” asked the granddaughter quickly.

Chomsky knelt down and lifted it, frowning. K. noticed the mother’s ankle was actually nicked, a bright, small jab of blood. The baby cried louder and the mother twisted to look past it to the floor.

“Was it rusted? Just take a look, could you, and tell me if it was rusty,” she said to K., almost pleading.

He bent down beside her leg. Several hangers were completely rusted, others not at all.

“I don’t think I can tell,” he said. “Some of them are, though. Yeah.”

“It’s broken,” announced Chomsky gloomily, and tapped the bottom of the cage. “The structural integrity has been compromised.”

“Do I need to get a shot, do you think? Tetanus?”

“For Chrissake, you’ll be fine, Melinda,” said Chomsky.

K. was shocked. He hadn’t realized Chomsky and the harried mother had a previous connection.

“I just gouged myself on a wire, Noam! Jesus! Teddy was up half the night crying and I’m exhausted! Jer’s away in the city! Could I have one second of sympathy?”

“I get so tired of the constant state of emergency,” said Chomsky. “Everything is a personal crisis. A kid spitting up is a crisis. A baby chair that’s missing is a major injustice. Frankly, it starts to feels like an exaggeration.”

“Oh. I see. So, things like this are never urgent to you?”

“Not really,” said Chomsky.

The harried mother, white-lipped, crossed her arms in front of the baby carrier and glared at him.

“For one thing, you’re not the one with vomit soaking into your bra, your back aching from a nine-month-old that already weighs twenty pounds and a bloody hole in the side of your foot. So it’s easy for you to be perfectly relaxed, isn’t it?”

“Crisis is big,” said Chomsky. “Crisis is not this trivial, daily texture of living.”

“Sure. If you’re a robot, that is,” said the harried mother.

K.