Eh and Tibbet turned the cameras on at the same moment and signaled to her.

She called Junior over. With him watching, she picked up a blue marker and drew on her forehead a somewhat sloppy circle. Junior watched, interested.

Then she called him closer and drew a triangle on his forehead just above and between his eyes. He went cross-eyed for a moment trying to see what she’d drawn on his forehead, then rolled into the water and beelined straight to the mirror so he could examine the marking.

This reaction, they got on film.

* * *

Back then, she had believed that it was easy to tell if someone was speaking English or not. She believed that spoken language was a yes-or-no condition, a straightforward fact as distinct as a room one could stand inside of, with a door that shut.

However, a few years after the end of this experiment, she watched her twins, Rachel and Ned, learning language. Ned, at twelve months, would burble mmm, mmm while looking at her. Did he mean mom? Rachel once said uk as a truck drove down the street, but then wouldn’t repeat the word for weeks. Was the sound happenstance or communication? Ned did say buh buh occasionally when he wanted the ball, but he also made that sound when he was eating cereal. The difference between babbling and language was not black and white, but a gradation. It was similar to how Rachel learned to walk, a lengthy and uninspiring process that started with an inauspicious rocking on the hands and knees. After each progression in skill (rocking backward a few inches or pulling herself up on the side of the couch to stand for a moment), she would regress for days, seeming to unlearn all she had mastered. Watching Rachel rock on all fours, her chin wet with drool, one would never imagine the height of the handspring she’d master in high-school gymnastics, her body flying through the air.

When Cora tried to teach Junior to speak, she had not known about this back-and-forth process: a new skill, then a regression. She would begin to believe he was doing better, then that progress would disappear and she would convince herself she’d been wrong.

And as with any young student, there were long swaths of time when she couldn’t get him to concentrate on learning. He’d want to play catch or swim upside down in the deep end while blowing strings of bubbles. Or he’d have an erection and, having already mounted the inflatable raft eight times that day, would try stubbornly to rub it against her calf.

One morning he wouldn’t stop trying. She was asking him to say fish, holding the fish in one hand and the broom in the other, ready to react with either. He would burble different noises in the air, appearing to concentrate on trying to speak, while he let his body bit by bit drift around, moving so imperceptibly she wouldn’t notice, until his lower belly was beside her calf. He’d thrust, she’d stumble and jab at his side with the broom’s bristles and he’d bolt away. Within a few minutes, he’d return, acting as though he was ready to re-commit himself to the lesson.