My father was a poststructuralist and my mother hated his guts. They did not know—how could they have known?—that by the age of ten months I not only comprehended all that they were saying but that I was as well marking time with a running commentary on the value and sense of their babbling. I lay helplessly on my back and stared up at their working mouth parts, like the mandibles of grasshoppers at work, mindless in their activity.
One evening, my father looked down at me, my mother standing beside him. He was not a fat man, but he was bloated, moving as if he were larger than he actually was. His face looked pulpy and I wanted to, and often did, squeeze his fleshy cheeks and pull. He hated that, and my insistence on doing it, coupled with my lack of speech, led him to say, “Maybe he’s mildly retarded.” “Maybe, he’s just stupid,” my mother said and so stationed herself in my thinking as the brighter of the two. I smiled my baby smile at her, unnerving her on a level that her speech⁴ kept her from knowing. “Look at him,” she said. “He’s smiling like he knows something.” “Gas,” my father said. “He can’t be stupid.” He was bothered by the thought. “Look at me. Look at us. How can he be stupid?” What an imbecile. “Lots of geniuses come from people of average or even less-than-average intelligence,” she said. Never were truer words spoken and they hung in the air like a tenacious perfume. My father fanned his nose and stroked the thin beard of which he was so proud and for which he cared like a garden. I looked away from his pudgy cheeks to my mother’s soft features. Oedipal concerns aside,⁵ I preferred the company of my mother, not simply because of the comfort of her softness and somewhat more compassionate nature, but because she possessed a native intelligence, a subhuman mind, though nothing negative is meant by that, an ability to abandon cohesion to what my father would call the signified. But he, for all his gum-bumping could not begin to understand not only the disconnection, but the connection itself, falling repeatedly into the same trap, the thought that he not only could talk about meaning, but that he could make it. Although they were well on their way to separate ways,⁶ I moved things along one evening. I lifted my father’s fountain pen from his shirt pocket as he was putting me down for the night. I was nearly one year old at the time and I used his pen to write the following on my crib sheet (pardon my pun): why should ralph speak ralph does not like the sound of it ralph watches the mouths of others form words and it looks uncomfortable lips look ugly to ralph when they are moving ralph needs books in his crib ralph does not wish to rely on the moving lips for knowledge ralph does not like peas ralph is sorry he stole da-da’s pen The following morning I awoke to my mother screaming. “Douglas! Douglas!” she called to my father. Inflato came running to her, his mouth frothy with teeth cleaner. “Look,” she said. “Look at that.” She pointed into my crib. I scooted over so they could see better. “It’s not funny,” Inflato said. “I know it’s not funny.” She looked at him looking at her. “I didn’t write it.” “Enough already. It’s not funny.” “Did you write it?” she asked. “No, I did not. Does that look like my handwriting?” “Well, does it look like mine?” she shot back. He stormed out. I could hear him spitting into the sink in the other room. My mother remained and she was staring at me. She believed that my father had not written the message and she knew that she had not and, barring some very strange intruder from this realm or another, I was the only other suspect. She left the room and returned quickly with a book, which she opened and handed to me upside down. I turned it over and began to read. She took it back and again gave it to me with the words turned over. Again, I righted the book and read. “You understand?” she asked. I nodded. A weird giggle escaped from her throat and she swallowed it as quickly as it had been issued. She looked as if she were contemplating calling my father back into the room, but she didn’t. “And you can read?” she asked. I nodded once more.