Love in Infant Monkeys (10 page)

K. first noticed Chomsky standing at the open door of the junk shed, holding up a weird object composed of interlocking tubes and chambers in a smoky yellow plastic. It took him a couple of sideways glances to be sure, because the last time he'd seen the eminent scholar on video he'd been twenty years younger. Chomsky was trying to find a taker for the large yellow object, which turned out to be a deluxe gerbil condo.

A tall, affable grandfather with gray hair and glasses—he was almost eighty by then—he was presenting the
gerbil condo, K. said, with a kind of desperate eagerness to the assembled company, which consisted of my husband, a couple of indifferent teenagers and a cranky old woman who scavenged the dump frequently. Chomsky did not want the gerbil condo to get lost in the dusty saucers and half-broken toys. You could tell, said K., he thought it was a truly good thing, serviceable and worthy.

The cranky old woman drew near, her shrewish face calculating. Did the object have value? She reached out a hand and tapped the bottom as Chomsky held it up. “Good for gerbils and hamsters both,” said Chomsky. “Even mice. Modular and pretty easy to clean.”

The old woman made a sour expression and turned away, muttering about rats.

But Chomsky had not been interested in her patronage anyway, said K. Indeed he had seemed to dismiss her on sight as a less-than-serious prospect. He wanted someone who would appreciate the glorious condo for what it was; he wanted to secure the good opinion of a rational person like him, a person with discrimination and high standards.

K. thought maybe the gerbil or hamster had belonged to the grandchild, and was recently deceased. Was this
why Chomsky hesitated to just leave the cage there with the rest of the castoffs? Maybe it was the little girl's feelings he was trying to protect.

K. himself had no use for the condo, possessing no rodent pets, but he stepped up and pretended to inspect a segment of tubing.

“Oh. Are you Noam Chomsky?” he asked after a minute, as though this were purely an afterthought.

“Yes, yes I am,” said Chomsky, and then returned to showcasing the condo. “Good ventilation—see? And these chambers are for bedding and eating. You put aspen shavings in there. And here's where you hang 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 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.