At first he kept them in cages. He let them watch him gathering food, picking the bananas and breadfruit he then left within their reach. The monkeys picked the bananas up and looked at them and dropped them. They stayed on a kind of hunger strike for a week. Finally he gave up; maybe they needed to gather the food themselves. So he let them out of the cages, but now he had to be in a cage, for his own protection. Getting them out, and him in, was a complicated maneuver, but he did it, and still the monkeys wouldn’t forage, wouldn’t eat.
After two weeks he could see that they’d gotten thinner. He began eating like crazy, bananas, bananas, bananas, showing them how it was done, but they knew that. They didn’t want it. Another two weeks and the monkeys were very skinny, but there was nothing he could do, no one was going to force-feed them. Hospitalize them? Hook them all up to IVs? He began writing letters—Help, the monkeys are starving—mailing them out with the helicopters that dropped him extra food. And now he could see the monkeys getting dull and slack and sleepy; their fur was beginning to fall out. But maybe they were sneaking something at night, because it all happened so slowly, the whole thing took longer than he could believe.
Toward the end he thought of getting the trucks back and trucking them into the city and letting the monkeys die in the middle of downtown San Juan. But what would that have accomplished, except maybe scaring some children and getting him and the starving monkeys thrown in jail? So he stayed out in the jungle until they died. The children and the old ones went first. It took days, it was awful, bodies everywhere, like some nightmare monkey Jonestown. After he’d buried them all, he went into town. It was in San Juan that he realized he had stopped eating. He didn’t—still doesn’t—remember when he last ate. When he tries to eat, his throat clenches and he thinks he is going to choke.
Neither of them sleeps all night, though they both pretend. She wonders if monkeys ever pretend to sleep. She thinks of how once, long ago, a lover left her for someone else, a friend, a woman who used to visit them, and how the worst thing was wondering if the best way to win him back was to be more or less like that friend. What she feels now is so similar; she thinks: Should I be more human or more monkey?
In the morning she says she has a favor to ask him. She’s read that the best thing to do with the garden would be to turn the ground over now, stockpile manure and lay it on before fall, before the snow. She has arranged with a neighbor to borrow his pickup, and a farmer just down the road has said they can have some manure from his barn. Will he help her while he is here?
She has given this a lot of thought, so it is not nearly as weird as it might seem, asking a lover who’s just come home after two months to help you go get cowshit. She has found that chores like this—simple, physically demanding tasks connected unquestionably to survival—seem to do him good when he returns. The quickest recovery he ever made was one winter after he’d been with the elk: she got him to go out and split most of a cord of wood. Plus, this time she can’t help hoping that her planning for seasons ahead will make him think well of her, see in her the best of human intelligence and animal instinct combined.
He says that he would be glad to help. He even makes a joke of being back twenty-four hours and already shoveling shit. She sees this as a good sign. She makes a point of how he has old clothes—boots, overalls, a shirt—stored in the front hall closet. Look, she says, your stuff. It takes some restraint not to ask if he’s sure he doesn’t want breakfast.
They drive to the farm. The farmer shows them where to find the manure. They back the truck up to the barn door and start shoveling. They haven’t worked long, a few minutes perhaps, but already this job they are doing together—efficiently, wordlessly—is making her feel more hopeful.
Then he sticks his pitchfork into the pile and exposes a nest of wriggling pink creatures, no bigger than a finger, blind, squirming and squealing in terror. What are they? Newborn mice? Impossibly tiny pigs? Surely he knows, but doesn’t say; and suddenly she feels so distant from him that she can’t even ask. She thinks she may always remember these creatures and never know what they were. He throws a ragged slab of manure back on top of the nest, gently tamps it down so the animals are covered, then goes out and sits in the truck. In a little while she joins him, he guns the engine, and they leave. She wonders how she will explain this the next time she sees the farmer.
At home she makes coffee. He puts his hands around the cup but doesn’t drink. Through the window, she can see the pickup, the few clumps of manure still unloaded in back. Perfect, she thinks. He tells her he can’t be with her, can’t be with anyone now. He says it isn’t fair to her, he is in terrible shape. He means it, he talks without stopping, without leaving her any silences in which to wedge an offer of patience or of help. Then he gets in his car and drives off.
She sits quietly for a while, wondering if, and how much, she should worry about him. Starving yourself is serious business. But then she thinks: He won’t starve, he’ll be all right, he is an expert on survival. This makes her feel slightly worse—does this mean she would rather he go crazy than just not love her? And this makes her think she deserves what has happened: she has not loved him unselfishly, or enough.
Now she is sorry she has taken this week off from work. She had imagined them spending it together. She would be better off in the lab, distracted, but she has told her friends at work he is coming home. If she cancels her vacation and goes in, she’ll have to talk about him.
The first day of vacation she goes to the store and buys lots of food. After that she stays home. She decides not to call him. Instead she will make a list of things to remember to tell him, things that happen to her. Then she’ll have the list if he calls.
At the end of the week he still hasn’t called, so she decides to call him. She picks up the phone and as she dials, reads the list:
1. A flock of geese flew overhead and she thought it was barking dogs.
2. In the grocery store, she overheard one teenage mother telling another how, the first year after her kid was born, she rented a trailer from an old guy who had put an electronic bug zapper right outside her bedroom window. The purple light and the zapping kept waking up the baby. She kept turning the light off, but the landlord kept sneaking back over and turning it on, and finally they had an argument and he evicted her.
3. After that trip to the grocery store, she stopped going out, and spent the rest of her vacation in bed. She ate in bed, didn’t bathe, watched a lot of TV. Her favorite part of the day was the early morning, before she was fully awake. She would put her head under the covers, where it was warm and smelled of her body, and she breathed in the smell, with its edge of the zoo, a little bit like his smell.
She reads through the list again. She puts down the phone. She thinks: I have nothing to tell him that isn’t about animals.
Electricity
ANITA SAILS THE BABY over her head. “Earth to Spaceship Bertie,” she says. “Earth to Spaceship Bertie. Can you read me?”
The baby’s laugh sounds forced, like Johnny Carson’s when he’s blown a joke. Last week she caught Bertie practicing smiles in the mirror over his crib, phony social smiles for the old ladies who goo-goo him in the street, noticeably different from his real smile. It occurs to her that the baby is embarrassed for her. Lately she’s often embarrassed for herself. This feeling takes her back fifteen years to her early teens, when she and her parents and her younger sister Lynne used to go places—Jones Beach, Prospect Park—and she’d see groups of kids her own age. At the time she had felt that being with her family made her horribly conspicuous; now she realizes that it probably made her invisible.
The house is quiet. Now since she’s back is the first time Anita can remember being in her parents’ home without the television going. She thinks of the years her father spent trailing her and Lynne from room to room, switching lights off behind them, asking who they thought was paying the electric bills. Yet he never turned the TV off; he’d fall asleep to the Late Sho
w. Now the TV is dark, the house is lit up like a birthday cake, and her father is down in the finished basement, silenced by the acoustical ceiling as he claps his hands, leaps into the air, and sings hymns in praise of God and the Baal Shem Tov.
In the morning, when Anita’s father goes off to the bet hamidrash, the house of study, Anita and her mother and the baby watch Donahue. Today the panel is made up of parents whose children have run away and joined cults. The week Anita came home, there was a show about grown children moving back in with their parents. It reminds Anita of how in high school, and later when she used to take acid, the radio always seemed to play oddly appropriate songs. Hearing the Miracles sing “What’s So Good about Good-bye?” when she was breaking up with a boyfriend had made her feel connected with lovers breaking up everywhere. But now she hates to think that her life is one of those stories that make Donahue go all dewy-eyed with concern.
The twice-divorced mother of a Moonie is blaming everything on broken homes. “Don’t you ever become a Moonie,” Anita whispers, pressing her lips against the back of the baby’s neck. Another mother is describing how her daughter calls herself Prem Ananda, wears only orange clothes, has married a boy the guru’s chosen for her, and, with her doctorate in philosophy, works decorating cakes in the ashram bakery.
“Cakes?” says Anita’s mother. “That’s nothing. Only my Sam waits till he’s fifty-seven to join a cult. After thirty-three years of marriage, he’ll only make love through a hole in the sheet.”
“A hole in the sheet?” Repeating this, Anita imagines Donahue repeating it, then realizes: incredibly, she and her mother have never talked about sex. Not ever. Imagining her mother on Donahue, Anita sees only close-ups, because if the camera pulled back, it would see up her mother’s housedress to where the pale veined thighs dimple over the tops of her support hose.
Anita goes over and hugs her mother so hard that Bertie, squeezed between them, squawks like one of his bath toys. The baby starts to cry, her mother starts to cry, and Anita, not knowing what else to do, presses Bertie against her mother and pats and rubs them as if trying to burp both of them at once.
Anita takes nothing for granted. When she lifts her foot to take a step, she no longer trusts the ground to be there when she puts it down. She used to say that you could never really tell about people; now she knows it’s true. She never once doubted that Jamie loved her, that he wanted the baby. When he came to visit her and Bertie in the hospital and began crying, she was so sure it was from happiness that she literally did not hear him say he’d fallen in love with somebody else.
She’d made him repeat it till he was almost shouting and she remembered who this Lizzie was: another lawyer in his office. At a garden party that summer Lizzie had asked to touch Anita’s belly.
Just as Jamie was offering to move out of the house they had rented for its view, for their vision of children standing at the Victorian Bay window watching boats slip up the Hudson, a nurse wheeled the baby in, in a futuristic clear plastic cart.
“Spaceship Bertie,” said Jamie.
Anita’s sister Lynne says that men do this all the time: Jamie’s acting out his ambivalence about fatherhood, his jealousy of the mother-infant bond. This sounds to Anita like something from Family Circle or Ladies’ Home Journal. Lynne has read those magazines all her life, but now that she’s going for her master’s in women’s studies, she refers to it as “keeping up.” Lynne can’t believe that Anita never had the tiniest suspicion. A year ago, Anita would have said the same thing, but now she knows it’s possible. Whenever she thinks about last summer, she feels like a Kennedy-assassination buff examining the Zapruder film. But no matter how many times she rewinds it, frame by frame, she can’t see the smoking gun, the face at the warehouse window. All she sees is that suddenly, everyone in the car starts moving very strangely.
Anita’s mother believes her. Overnight, her husband turned into a born-again Hasid. Perhaps that’s why she hardly sounded surprised when on the day she and Anita’s father were supposed to drive up to Nyack to see the baby, Anita called to say that she and Bertie were coming to Brooklyn. Over the phone, her mother had warned her to expect changes. Daddy wasn’t himself. No, he wasn’t sick. Working too hard as usual, but otherwise fine. Her tone had suggested something shameful. Had he, too, fallen in love with somebody else?
Pulling into her parents’ driveway, Anita thought: He looks the same. He opened the door for her and waited while she unstrapped Bertie from his car seat, then sidestepped her embrace. He’d never been a comfortable hugger, but now she missed his pat-pat-pat. She held Bertie out to him; he shook his head.
“Bertie, this is your grandpa,” she said. “Grandpa, this is Bertie.”
“Has he been circumcised?” asked her father.
“Of course,” said Anita. “Are you kidding? My doctor did it in the hospital.”
“Then we’ll have to have it done again,” said her father. “By a mohel.”
“Again!” yelled Anita. “Are you out of your mind?”
Attracted by the noise, her mother came flying out of the house. “Sam!” She grabbed the baby from Anita. “Can’t you see she’s upset?”
The commotion had comforted Anita. Everything was familiar—their voices, the pressure of her mother’s plump shoulder pushing her into the house, the way she said, “Coffee?” before they’d even sat down.
“I’ll get it,” said Anita. “You hold the baby.” But her mother headed her off at the kitchen door.
“It’s arranged a little different now,” she explained. “Those dishes over there by the fridge are for meat. These here by the stove are for milk.”
That night they couldn’t eat till her father had blessed the half grapefruits, the maraschino cherries, the boiled flank steak, the potatoes and carrots, the horseradish, the unopened jar of applesauce, the kosher orange gelatin with sliced bananas. During the meal, Bertie began to fuss, and Anita guided his head up under her shirt.
“Is it all right if the baby drinks milk while I eat meat?” she asked. Her mother laughed.
“Edna,” said her father, “don’t encourage her.”
Bertie cried when Anita tried to set him down, so she was left alone with her father while her mother did the dishes.
“What is this?” she asked him. “You never went to shul in your life. Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Ron didn’t speak to us for a year because on the Saturday of Cousin Simon’s bar mitzvah, you forgot—you said—and took us all to Rip Van Winkle’s Storybook Village.”
“I did forget.” Her father laughed. “Anyhow, we didn’t miss anything. Simon was bar-mitzvahed in the Reform temple. The church.”
“The church!” repeated Anita. “Dad, what’s the story?”
“The story, Anita?” Her father took a deep breath. Then he said:
“Once upon a time, a jeweler was taking the subway home to East Flatbush from his shop on Forty-sixth Street. At Nostrand, he finally got a seat and opened his Post when he heard loud voices at the far end of the car. Looking up, he saw three Puerto Rican kids in sneakers, jeans, and hot pink silk jackets which said ‘Men Working’ on the fronts, backs, and sleeves. When he realized that the jackets had been stitched together from the flags Con Ed put up near excavations, he found this so interesting that it took him a while to notice that the kids had knives and were working their way through the car, taking money and jewelry from the passengers and dropping them into a bowling bag. Then he thought: Only in New York do thieves wear clothes which glow in the dark. The boys didn’t seem to be hurting anyone, but it still didn’t make the jeweler comfortable. He thought: Is this how it happens? One night you pick the wrong subway car, and bingo! you’re an item in the morning paper.
“Halfway down the car, they reached an old lady who started to scream. Then suddenly, the lights began to flash on and off in a definite pattern: three long blinks, three short blinks, three long blinks. By the fourth SOS the muggers had their noses pressed against the door, and when it open
ed at the station, they ran. ‘Thank God, it’s a miracle!’ cried the old lady.
“Meanwhile the jeweler had his head between his knees. He was trying to breathe, thinking he must have been more scared than he’d known. Then he looked up and saw a young Hasidic man watching him from across the aisle.
“‘It wasn’t a miracle,’ said the Hasid. ‘I did it. Follow me out at the next stop.’
“Normally, this jeweler wasn’t the type to follow a Hasid out onto the Eastern Parkway station. But all he could think of was, had his wallet been stolen, he’d have had to spend all the next day at the Motor Vehicles Bureau replacing his license and registration. He felt that he owed somebody something, and if this Hasid was taking credit, keeping him company was the least he could do.
“On the platform, the Hasid pointed to a bare light bulb and said, ‘Look.’ The light blinked on and off. Then he waved at a buzzing fluorescent light. It blinked too. ‘I lied before,’ said the Hasid. ‘It wasn’t my doing. Everything is the rebbe’s…’”
Anita’s father stopped when her mother came in, drying her hands. “Bertie!” Anita’s mother cried, picking the baby up and waltzing him into the kitchen. “Don’t listen to this nonsense! A whole life ruined for one blinky light bulb!”
“It wasn’t the light,” said Anita’s father.
Anita wanted to ask if his story really happened or if he’d made it up as a metaphor for what happened. She thought: Something must have happened. In the old days, her father didn’t make up stories. But she forgot her questions when she heard her mother in the kitchen singing “Music, Music, Music” to Bertie, singing “Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon,” sounding just like Teresa Brewer.
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