red. Tal balanced our books, cleaned the apartment, kept things in order and cooked our meals. She was a decent cook in her own right, though I would have preferred Lydia’s cooking. Tal was capable of making something out of nothing in the kitchen; she could immaculately conceive a meal out of whatever pathetic smattering of ingredients happened to be knocking around in the cupboards and refrigerator—but satiating as her dishes were, these meals tasted ever increasingly of our bitter poverty. Lydia was out of commission. Even when she was awake, she just puttered around our apartment with the vacant eyes of a starving person, picking things up and putting them back down, often babbling incoherently, or else remaining disturbingly silent. If she wanted to salt her food at the table she would point at the saltshaker and say, “The… the… the… the…………… the…” Meaning, of course, “Please pass the salt.” Lydia’s silences grew longer, darker, more profound. Her words were leaving her. One by one the elements of her vocabulary were packing up their things and vacating their apartments in the condemned building of her mind. It was such a heartbreaking experience, I could never adequately describe what it was like to live with her in the following months. The only places Lydia ever went were to the doctor or to her speech pathologist, who was unable to prevent the words from crumbling away from her. Every word she spoke was preceded by and followed by such long silences that it was impossible to remember how her sentence had begun. Tal assured me that because of the nature of Lydia’s aphasia, because it was in Broca’s area and not Wernicke’s, she could understand us when we spoke to her, although she herself had greater and greater difficulty speaking. Her mind had become half-silvered, like Clever Hands’s. Her eyes were one-way mirrors, the windows to her soul opaque on the outside. She could see out; we increasingly could not see in. She slept all day. Her belly got bigger as my child grew obstinately inside her. I, Bruno, who was perfectly healthy, had become deeply nervous and unsure whether I would be able to handle the travails and responsibilities of my coming fatherhood—much less how she would handle her coming motherhood.
Once, after I arrived home through the sliding glass back doors to avoid the protesters, and shook the snow powder off my coat and thunked the mush off my boots against the doorframe, coming in from one of my daylong journeys that had taken me through the park and then through the vaulted and chandeliered reading room of the library and through the pages of whatever I was reading at the time (I think it was Gibbon’s Decline and Fall), Tal asked me in a solemn tone to sit with her at the kitchen table. She wanted to talk with me about something. She was not angry, but I recognized the note of sternness, of getting-down-to-businessness in her voice when she requested my audience, and so I instantly began to dread whatever was coming. To her credit, at least she softened the hideous blow to my well-being she was about to deliver by preparing me a cup of hot chocolate. She knew precisely how I liked it, with five small slimy marshmallows bobbing on the surface, slowly dissolving into the hot tan liquid. I blew on the surface of my hot chocolate, and sipped.
“Bruno,” she said, her palms anchored on the surface of the kitchen table and her fingers intertwined. “You know we’re running low on money. I’m doing the best I can to take care of Lydia. But I’m afraid you need to help out, too.”
I gulped in mild terror, scalding the back of my throat with too big and quick an intake of hot chocolate. The thing was this: I had to get a job. I needed to “pull more of my weight” around our household. When Lydia and I returned to Chicago, Tal had been working at the lab again. She worked at the lab for most of the day, then came home to us to housekeep and nurse. And still there was no money. She was wearing herself thin. Norman Plumlee was still the director of the Behavioral Biology Lab at the Erman Biology Center. She