by Lydia Millet
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 glanc
e, 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. had no excuse to be in the shed anymore but couldn’t tear himself away. He picked up a china figurine of a pig in a tutu and turned it upside down, pretending to scrutinize a maker’s mark.
“What I’m suggesting is that emotion can be channeled in productive directions,” said Chomsky.
“That’s not emotion you’re talking about. That’s just opinion.”
“Opinion—” started Chomsky, but she interrupted him.
“What you realize when you have a kid, if you’re a woman, is we’re animals and it’s hard to be an animal. It’s hard work. It’s dirt and danger and bile.”
“That particular brand of gender essentialism—”
“But what you also realize as a mother is—and I don’t think men really get this out of fatherhood, I think maybe they get it in other ways, like if they’re having great illicit sex or beating the living shit out of someone—is that it’s great to be an animal; it’s what the core of life is, to be an animal. Not to be human. I don’t mean to be human; I don’t mean that at all, Noam. I mean to be a mammal.”
“Oh, please,” said Chomsky. His granddaughter set down the dartboard again, a little disappointed.
“Say what you like,” said the mother. A coolness came into her voice and it occurred to K. she had a certain steely quality. “Say what you like about anything you want. I don’t care. But consider the possibility that there’s something here you can’t know. Something here you will never know, Noam. Something you will never know that would change everything.”
She pushed the door open and slammed out, leaving the three of them alone in the shed. It was just K., Chomsky and the granddaughter. The old scavenger woman had slipped out unnoticed.
K., standing over a table, had the odd impression that the light filtering through the dirty gray windows had shifted or been subdued—as though an object of enormous weight and strange design had moved silently in front of the sun.
For a second, motionless, he remembered the Hindenburg. Great airships of the past.
Chomsky turned his attention to the gerbil condo.
“See? Right there,” he said quietly to the little girl.
“It’s got this crack all the way across the bottom now, from that corner to this one.”
“But the gerbils wouldn’t mind,” said the little girl.
“Would they?”
“They might not,” conceded Chomsky. “It would work just as well for them. But the problem is, the people would probably mind.”
“How come?”
“They won’t pick it up,�
� said Chomsky. There was a heaviness to him now, and K. thought he looked older. “They won’t even take it now, is the thing. They’ll just think it’s junk, with a crack across the base like that.”
“Oh,” said the little girl. She blinked, and again K. thought tears were coming. She shook her head but refused to cry.
“Come on,” said Chomsky gently, and shifted the gerbil condo to hold it propped against his side so he could take her hand. “Let’s go.”
They walked out of the shed, their shoulders, to K., looking stooped. He watched out the window, still clutching the pig ballerina, as the two of them trudged toward the main garbage pit with their burden. When they reached the pit Chomsky stood at the railing for a long moment, holding the gerbil cage with his thin arms outstretched. Finally he let go.
Jimmy Carter’s Rabbit
HE CAME TO SEE me at my Atlanta office, after his move back to Plains. It was a slow afternoon and the day’s sessions were already over when the Secret Servicemen stepped into my foyer. I wasn’t expecting company; my first thought when I opened the door on them—with their clean-cut hair, dark suits and earpieces—was hearing-impaired Witnesses.
Then I caught sight of that broad, down-home grin.
Our families went to the same church when we were boys, and we had Bible Study together. He was an avid student, hand always shooting straight up with the answers, while I spent most of the class lobbing spit-balls at the back of a fat girl’s head. Our interests were different: One of us was strong and popular, the other was bookish, but it was a small town, and even though there were some differences between us we were thrown together often enough. We hung out, playing stickball in the meadow behind the general store, or ran a Cowboys ’n Injuns racket in a rotting tree house. Typically I was a cowboy and Carter was one of the braves. One time, if I remember right, he was a squaw.
Anyway, after some neighborhood unpleasantness my parents moved the family to North Carolina. That happened when I was twelve, and contact between Jimmy and me ended.
Come 1981 I hadn’t seen the guy in nearly fifty years.
He wasn’t seeking me out in a professional capacity, he told me up front. Of course, if he hadn’t said that, the conversation would be privileged. No, he just wanted to get reacquainted. Was there someplace we could settle in for a chat?
