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Lydia Littlemore was a pioneer of the furthermost untrammeled frontiers of science, of linguistics, of primatology, of cognitive psychology, and, indeed, of philosophy. But so, for that matter, is every mother whose child learns to speak. For she did nothing for me that a human mother would not do for her human child: she loved me. And I loved her. That was my only motivation. That was the only reward, the only conditioning I needed.

One could argue that love has no place in science. Those who make such arguments may as well argue that love has no place in human civilization, or in life.

XIV

At some point I realized there was a new woman working in the lab: Tal. I would not learn her last name—Gozani—until much later. Tal was taller than Lydia. Tal was tall for a woman. At first I think I had a little difficulty connecting the word to the person, because her name happened to be an exact homonym for an adjective describing what she was: tall. I already knew the word tall, though I don’t know if the scientists at the lab knew I knew it. As I have said, before I began to talk much I already comprehended far more spoken English than anyone imagined I did. Maybe I would have been less confused if Tal was short, or if she remained tall but was named “Short.” Anyway—she entered my life the way most people did in those days: one day, she was there. This woman I’d never seen before began to appear in the lab every day and began interacting with me, and there you have it.

In addition to being tall, I think Tal was very young when she first came to the lab. Younger than Lydia, anyway. She was (as I know in retrospect) a graduate student at the University of Chicago. I would guess Tal was in her early twenties when she started working at the lab—which would make her seven or eight years younger than Lydia when all this happened. At first I liked her well enough. I have always tended, and especially in those days, to get along with women better than I do with men, so I was glad to have another feminine presence in the lab. But there were some extraordinarily unusual aspects to Tal.

In addition to being tall, she had smooth, olive-colored, almost yellowish skin that offset her crisp gray-green eyes. She had thick, strong legs. She dressed in strange clothes. She would wear a thin sheet of bright stretchy decorative fabric wrapped around her legs for a skirt. She was constantly clicking and rattling all over with bits of rustic jewelry made of wood and rope and silver. She wore big clunky boots if the weather turned bad, and if it turned good she wore ropey brown woven sandals that crisscrossed up her calves. Often, though, she would go barefoot. She would take off her sweaty brown sandals and leave them by the door to the lab, then spend the day thumping around the floor in her bare feet. Sometimes I would inspect her sweaty brown sandals, lined up by the lab door. I would curiously lick the salt-ringed depressions that her toes had carved into their surfaces. This going barefoot was something I had never seen a human do before, at least not in a professional setting. Lydia was usually barefoot or in socks in the home, but outside her home, she always wore shoes all day. I wondered why ordinary norms of decorum were relaxed for Tal. All the other scientists’ feet were imprisoned within their shoes, generally workaday white sneakers, but Tal was allowed to romp the lab in dirty naked feet as comfortably as if this room were her own home.

She let me play with them, I remember—her bare feet. I had just met her for the first time a few days before. We sat together on my squishy blue mat, behind the glass wall that divided the lab into the human side and the chimp side, my playpen. We were sitting together, manipulating my toys. Tal sat cross-legged at first, then leaned back and stretched her legs out flat on the mat, and her bare feet emerged from beneath the stretchy red fabric of her skirt. I was transfixed by her feet.