The Dogs of Babel

NINETEEN

During that first winter of our marriage, Lexy and I fought a battle between us. I wanted us to have a child. A baby with my features and hers. I imagined Lexy pregnant, holding our child within her, cradling it with her blood and her bones wherever she went. I imagined walking the leafy streets, pushing my son or my daughter—or both! Twins are not an unheard-of occurrence in my family—in a carriage, narrating the life of the neighborhood as we walked. “Look,” I would say. “The leaves are changing color. Look, there goes Mrs. Singh in her red car.” My child lying on her back, taking in the sky. I could almost see the soft curl of her hair. I wanted it very much. I wanted to spread a blanket on the grass when the weather got warm and to set my baby down upon it so she could reach for handfuls of grass and wriggling worms. I wanted to rescue a worm from her pudgy fingers before she put it in her mouth. I wanted to lift her up to the sky and hear her laugh. I wanted to dance her around the room when she was fussy and wouldn’t sleep.

We were at a restaurant the first time I brought it up. At the table next to us was a couple with a baby, a boy maybe eight months old. I was in love with the scene of it, the mother and father taking turns entertaining the baby with a parade of toys produced one by one from a voluminous diaper bag, feeding him a snack from a plastic bag full of dry Cheerios, offering him a bottle of juice. From time to time, the baby would let out a string of nonsense syllables, and the happy sound filled the restaurant.

At one point, the baby’s mother scooped up a spoonful of couscous from her plate and offered it to the baby. “Look at that,” she said to her husband as the baby swallowed it. “His first couscous.”

Lexy smiled at me. “His first couscous,” she said in a low voice. “If I ever had a kid, it’d probably be more like, ‘Aw, look at that, his first Big Mac.’”

I laughed. “His first taco chip. Wasn’t that a Norman Rockwell painting?”

“Or one of those Precious Moments figurines. His first Hostess snack cake.”

“His first onion ring.”

“His first Mountain Dew.”

“I had a friend in college who told me his mother used to put Coke in his baby bottle.”

“Wow. Nothing like an infant hopped up on caffeine.”

I paused to take a bite of my salad. “So,” I said. “Do you ever think about that?”

“What,” she said, “babies hopped up on caffeine?”

“No,” I said. “Babies, period.”

“Sure, I think about it,” she said. “But mostly I think no.” She looked at me to see my reaction.

“Why not?” I asked. “Don’t you like kids?”

“I love them. I’m just not sure I should have one.”

“That’s a strange choice of words,” I said. “You didn’t say, ‘I’m not sure I want to have one’ or ‘I’m not sure I’d like to have one,’ you said, ‘I’m not sure I should have one.’ What does that mean?”

“Oh, here we go,” Lexy said, rolling her eyes. “The perils of dining with a linguist.”

“No, really,” I said. “I’m curious. Why don’t you think you should have a baby?”

She searched my face for a long minute before she spoke. “I’m just not sure it’s fair to give a child me for a mother. And that’s the last I’ll say about it.”

I stared at her, astonished. “Are you serious? My God, Lexy, I think you’d make a wonderful mother. You’re caring and generous —”

She put up her hand to stop me. “No,” she said. “Don’t. I don’t want to talk about it anymore, okay?”

“But, Lexy, I can’t believe you’d think such a thing.”

She stood up. “I’m going to the bathroom,” she said, “and when I come back, we’re going to talk about something else.”

She started to get up, then stopped. “You know I’d never actually feed that kind of stuff to a baby, right?” she said.

“See?” I said, smiling. “There’s that maternal instinct kicking in.”

We didn’t discuss it again that night. But the conversation wasn’t over. I found myself thinking about the subject almost constantly in the weeks that followed. At the time, I had a graduate student in one of my seminars, a woman named Angelica Raza, who was pregnant with her first child. One day, she and I both arrived early to class, and after we exchanged a few pleasantries, I decided to ask her some questions that might help me figure things out.

“So,” I asked. “Did you always want kids?”

She thought about it. “Yeah, pretty much always,” she said. “My husband was a little harder to sell on the idea. But he came around eventually. Obviously,” she added, placing her hands on her rounded belly.

“How’d you bring him around?”

“Well, basically, I tried not to pressure him. He’s just a cautious guy, and he likes to make decisions in his own time. It took him seven years to decide to marry me. And we’d been living together for five.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Tell me about it,” she laughed. “I knew he’d eventually decide he was ready for kids, but I was afraid I’d be eighty by that time.”

“But you didn’t pressure him?”

“No. One thing I’ve learned about John is that he doesn’t respond well to pressure. So I kept it light. I’d drop little comments about people we knew who were having babies, and I’d make jokes. For a while, we had this game where we’d try to come up with the most inappropriate baby names we could think of. I think the winner was Tabula, for a girl. Get it? Tabula Raza?”

I laughed.

“And then one day,” she went on, “he just turned to me out of the blue, I think we were watching a cop show or something, and said, ‘Let’s have a baby.’”

“That’s great,” I said.

“Yeah, and now he can’t wait. He’s read more baby books than I have.”

Just then, a couple of other students arrived, and the conversation shifted to something else. But later that night, when I got home, I decided to give Angelica’s method a try.

I started by telling Lexy Angelica’s story about naming a girl Tabula. She smiled and said, “Oh, you linguistics scholars. Never a dull moment.”

“So then,” I said, “I was wondering if there were any names that wouldn’t go with our last names, but I couldn’t think of any for Iverson. I guess Ivan Iverson would be pretty bad.”

“Well, not as bad as Stinky Iverson,” Lexy said. “It doesn’t matter what your last name is, I think if you name a child Stinky, you’re setting him up for a life of hardship.”

This seemed to be going pretty well, I thought. “What about Ransome?” I said. “Is there anything that doesn’t go with Ransome? Kings, I guess. You wouldn’t want to name a kid Kings Ransome. But that’s not a real name, anyway.”

“My dad used to have some complicated joke that took forever to tell, and I was too young to really get it anyway, about how he should have two sons and name them both William. God, I wish I could remember the whole thing, it’d tell you a lot about what my father was like. Anyway, the punch line was something about paying a Ransome in small Bills.”

I laughed, maybe a little too hard.

Lexy looked at me. She had a serious expression on her face, suddenly. “Sweetie, I know what you’re doing,” she said. “And I don’t think it’s going to work.”

“No?” I took her hand. “Look, Lexy, I don’t want to put any pressure on you, but don’t you think it’s possible you might change your mind?”

“Well, anything’s possible, but I don’t think so.” She looked away. “I guess this is something we should have talked about before we got married,” she said, and it was like a question. “I guess it might have changed things.” Her voice sounded fragile suddenly, like a little girl’s.

“No, of course not,” I said. “Nothing could have stopped me from marrying you.” She smiled at me tentatively. “I can’t say I’m not disappointed, and I can’t say I don’t hope you’ll reconsider, but I’m in this with you for good. No matter what.”

And so I agreed to it. I agreed to a life without children. I agreed it would be just the two of us, here in the tilting world. What would our days be like, I wondered, with that space in them, the space where a child might be, the space where a child might walk between us, holding each of our hands? But no, I resolved. Our days could be filled with the two of us. We would walk through our days together, and the shadow we would cast on the ground would be tall, the shadow of two adults walking together, not the familiar H of adult-child-adult walking hand in hand. We would live a good, quiet life, uninterrupted by the shouts of children at play, the daily chaos of cuts and scrapes and quarrels over the sharing of toys. There would still be the two of us, and the bright sky of our love. I could do this for her. This was not so bad. There would be hard times, but what did I care if we had hard times? The branches of my love were wide, and they caught the rain and the snow. We would be okay, the two of us together. We would be okay.