Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [100]
Joe and Debby are also preoccupied, though in their case more vocally. What obsesses them is their baby’s intellectual development, or rather his lack of it. Jakie is already sixteen months old, for God’s sake, and he hasn’t started to talk—hasn’t said a single damn word, though many kids his age or even younger (examples are cited) are already dauntingly verbal. Their anxiety, it occurs to Fred, is clearly a function of what some modern critics would call an over-valorization of language; it hardly matters to them that Jakie is, as he points out now, a healthy, strong, active child.
“If he’d just start to speak, he’d be so much more like a real person,” Debby explains. “I mean, sure, I know he’s healthy, and he’s kind of sweet sometimes, but he’s not exactly human, you know what I mean?”
“It’s so damn frustrating not being able to communicate with him,” says Joe. “Not to know all the things he must be thinking and experiencing. Our own kid. You can’t help wondering, when he starts speaking, what is he going to say to us?”
“You could be disappointed,” Fred remarks. “My father told me once that when I was a baby he used to look at me, having deep Wordsworthian thoughts about childhood, and wondering what message from the realms of glory I would bring down to him. Then finally I learnt to talk, and I said my first sentence, and it was, ‘Freddy want cookie.’”
“How old were you when you said that?” asks Debby, failing to get the point.
“I haven’t any idea.” Fred sighs.
“Most children don’t start putting sentences together until they’re about two,” Joe says. “But they can usually produce single words a lot sooner. Ordinarily. Jakie babbles a lot, but nothing comes of it. I mean, what do you think?”
“He looks okay to me,” says Fred, who has no experience of babies. Maybe there is something wrong with Jakie; how the hell should he know? He has a hard time considering the subject, or any subject; he scarcely sees the picturesque scene through which he is walking: on the one hand a bank of long grass and wild flowering weeds, on the other the brightly painted barges and the tall horse chestnuts in the gardens on the opposite shore, which have begun to scatter their clusters of bloom onto the canal, transforming it into a floating carpet of cream and pink stars. London is visible to him now only in painful flashes of memory; most of the time he moves in a city of clouded gloomy shapes and noises.
Almost the only people Fred has seen anything of since Rosemary’s party are the Vogelers, and he has seen more of them than he wants to, mostly because he hasn’t the energy to invent excuses. Joe and Debby’s opinion of London has improved with the good weather, but not much. Sure, the place looks better, Joe admits, but Jesus Christ, it ought to be warmer than this by June. Back home they’d have been swimming for months, Debby says. And you might as well forget about trying to get a decent tan.
The Vogelers’ views are shared by several friends they have made here—two Canadian historians, met in the British Museum lunchroom, and another couple, relatives of the first, from Australia. All four of them agree with Joe and Debby about the inadequacy of British food, the lukewarmness of British beer, the chilliness of the natives, and the disappointing smallness of every national monument and tourist attraction.
They also have an explanation. Andy (the Australian) outlined it to Fred last week in a pub