The toddler had only been mobile for six months, but she had already consumed three times her weight in sand, dirt, rocks, and dog food. Her unorthodox appetite baffled her parents. It certainly wasn’t that she was malnourished. Her typical breakfast consisted of three eggs, two slices of toast, and a mountain of fruit. And yet if her parents left her unsupervised in the house for over a minute they’d inevitably find her squatting over the doggie bowl, shoveling kibble into her mouth as fast as she could. Then she’d smile up at her parents, trying to charm her way out of trouble, but her infraction was always betrayed by the thick brown paste sticking to her virgin white baby teeth.
It didn’t help that the toddler was so independent. From the time she’d mastered crawling, she was filled with steely purpose. It was as if she woke up every morning with a long list of tasks that she needed to complete that day at maximum speed and efficiency. She must roll her grandmother’s desk chair across the living room and back. She must remove every magnet from the face of the refrigerator. She must flee the supervisory perimeter of all the grown-ups and ascend the most treacherous stairway. She must make haste to the garage in order to handle every power tool in turn. She must consume three cups of dirt. And if her parents ever tried to thwart one of her clear objectives, she would be furious. Didn’t they know how busy she was? Did they not comprehend the value of her time? Did the mayor of New York have to take naps every afternoon?
The toddler’s voracity for life and between-meal snacking was most evident during visits to her grandmother’s house. Not only did Nana have a dog that needed to be fed and watered everyday, she also had several jars of delicious loose change, a pile of compost, a kiddie pool she’d converted into a sandbox, and a gravel driveway that was basically heaven on earth. The toddler marched around the house and grounds with a demeanor that suggested she was the most competent person there. Before she began her peregrinations, she liked to seize some object that she would only part with upon pain of death, something like a sharp stick or one of her grandmother’s heirloom necklaces.
But the toddler’s favorite companion on her dedicated tours of Nana’s property was a small trophy that her uncle had once won playing peewee soccer. The trophy featured a short metal man on the verge of kicking a ball, and for all intents and purposes, this man was the toddler’s abject servant. He came with his master when she inspected the swing-set ladder. He stood at attention on the tray table of her high chair when she devoured lunch. He faithfully oversaw her dips into the dog’s water bowl. But the metal man lived in fear that eventually his master would discover the one flaw that would nullify all his other acts of devotion: he was inedible.
Toddler and trophy grew apart before the former realized that she could not behead the latter. Or perhaps she’d known it all along and it was a sign of her maturation that she’d ever employed an individual she could not also eat. But whatever the cause of their estrangement, the trophy soon returned to the bookshelf and the toddler found a new slave to her various enterprises. His name was Batman, and he was a Pez dispenser. And if she gnawed on him at just the right angle, she could sometimes score a piece of his ear.