“A pet monkey? Awesome,” Chloe says.
“It’s a very famous book,” says Miss Sonya. “Has anyone heard of it? Has anyone’s mom or dad read it to them?”
Her voice trails off, and the children shake their heads no. In the Sunflower School at least some of the parents would have read the book to the kids, or the kids would have lied about it and pretended they had.
Encouraged, Edward goes on. “But the dad has a mean girlfriend who’s kind of like a witch, and she hates Mister Monkey and wants to get rid of him. So she tells everybody he stole her wallet, but he didn’t. And the cops arrest him!”
Miss Sonya wonders how many of the kids’ fathers have mean girlfriends. She’s certainly had her share of mean boyfriends. But this is not the time to reflect on her disappointing love life. This is lonely beautiful Edward’s moment to shine so that the others will see his light.
The child thinks of Hugo with his hand in Dad’s pocket. Stealing, like Mister Monkey. Except that the monkey didn’t do it. Hugo wasn’t stealing, either. He was just asking for what was his.
“Are you all right, Edward? The other children can’t wait to hear how your story turns out.”
It is not his story, but he feels as if it is. He almost feels as if he’s making it up, as if the puzzle pieces of the story are putting themselves together in his mind as he sails into the part about Mister Monkey going to jail and the nanny persuading the lady lawyer with the funny hair to help him. The kids will know about lawyers and courts. Surely they’ve seen crime shows on TV, even the kids who aren’t allowed to watch TV. His grandpa lets him play with his dinosaurs and watch TV at the same time. He sleeps over at his grandpa’s whenever his parents want some private time. Grandpa says he can stay up all night, but Edward always falls asleep, and his grandpa turns off the TV.
“There’s a trial. And the lawyer proves that the monkey is innocent and the girlfriend lied. Because she didn’t have any fingernails.”
“How did that prove that Mister Monkey was innocent?” Miss Sonya sounds worried. What if the children tell their parents they heard a story about an evil girlfriend without any fingernails and a larcenous monkey? This wouldn’t be a problem if they’d read the book to their kids.
“I don’t know.” Edward can feel his audience losing interest, just as he lost interest around this point in the play. The monkey was free. Who cared if the kids’ dad and the lady in the purple suit fell in love? And if the monkey jumps into the lady’s arms and wriggles against her? That stuff was for girls. What about the dead human mom? And the dead monkey parents? Doesn’t anyone think about them? What does dead mean, exactly? Maybe if he mentions the dead mom and the dead monkey parents again, Miss Sonya will enlighten them about what it means to be dead.
He’s not going to tell them how the lady dropped her phone and then kicked it, though it’s possible that this would make the kids perk up. The kids are looking around, bouncing up on their knees and sitting down again, picking their noses, flicking boogers at each other.
“That’s it. And everybody lived happily ever after,” he says.
“That’s a beautiful story, Edward. Class, didn’t you think that was a beautiful story?”
“Yes, Miss Sonya.”
The story has not made them want to be friends with him or like him any better than they did before. And this was the only chance he will ever have. He’s afraid he is going to cry. Nothing will ever be worse than this. Wrong! His grandpa will die, his mother and father will die. That will be worse than this.
“Edward, don’t look so unhappy,” says Miss Sonya. “Please, class, let’s give Edward a big thank-you round of applause.”
The children clap limply. Miss Sonya says, “Does anyone have any questions for Edward?”
Edward turns to ice, pure ice. No one told him that there would be questions. What will they ask him? Grandpa, are you interested in this? At first he’d been interested, and then he wasn’t, just like them. He should have ended the story with the monkey in jail.
“Miss Sonya, can I say something?” Terence asks.
“Of course, Terence.” Miss Sonya doesn’t hear the threat in Terence’s voice. But Edward does, and he waits, as if for an attack. Terence is handsome the way boys are supposed to be handsome. Blond hair, blue eyes, a face beneath which you can already see the hard sharp pitiless bones.
Terence says, “This isn’t really a question . . .”
Edward is relieved, then annoyed because he can tell that this is not going to have anything to do with him or Mister Monkey. His moment in the spotlight is over before it’s begun. In a voice that’s louder and more certain than Edward’s babyish whisper, Terence says, “My dad told me that human beings used to be monkeys. My dad says that before we were cavemen we were monkeys living in trees.”
“My dad said that too,” says a girl whose name, Edward thinks, is Jade. Yesterday at lunch, Jade—if that is her name—told Edward that her grandma cleans houses and works every Tuesday as a radiology technician. And Edward could tell that Terence was mad at Jade for talking to him.
Edward says, “No! Humans are descended from dinosaurs! The whole planet used to be one big jungle. The cavemen lived in trees. The dinosaurs were as big as subway trains, and they could kill and eat people. Dinosaurs ruled the world. The biggest was the brontosaurus, but the stegosaurus was the meanest. Some of them were herbivorous and some of them . . . ate meat.”
“Herbivorous!” says Miss Sonya. “What a wonderful word! Go on, Edward.”
Edward tries hard not to smile. Oh, how he adores Miss Sonya! He forces himself to go on:
“Then something happened. An asteroid, maybe. The cavemen lived, and the dinosaurs died. My grandpa said the same thing, about how we used to be monkeys. But that isn’t true. One day a dinosaur mom had a baby that looked a little like a human baby, and then that baby had a baby that looked a little bit more like a human baby, and so on, for millions and millions of years until the dinosaurs turned into humans.”
He adds this last for good measure, though he’s not quite sure it’s true. He’s not sure if any of what he’s said is true. But now that he’s said it, he’ll swear to it. He’ll swear to it on his life.
“That kid’s wrong.” Terence has forgotten Edward’s name. “He’s lying.”
“His name is Edward,” prompts Miss Sonya. “And that’s a little harsh. I know you don’t mean to be harsh, Terence. Maybe you should apologize. Edward isn’t lying.”
Edward’s chest aches with gratitude. His teacher is taking his side.
Chloe says loyally, “Terence is right. About the monkeys. My dad told me the same thing.”
The class looks at Miss Sonya. Everyone knows this is serious, and that she is the judge who must decide the life-or-death question of whether Edward or Terence is right.
Chloe says, “Miss Sonya? What do you think?”
Miss Sonya is silent for so long that the class wonders if she’s heard. The clock on the wall gets louder to fill the unbearable hush. Tick tock tick tock tick tock. Even the clock sounds nervous. A siren wails outside. Maybe school will end before Miss Sonya has to decide. Everyone knows that’s not possible. It isn’t even lunchtime.
Miss Sonya says, “Different people believe different things about how human beings developed. Many people believe that God created the world in seven days, that he made Adam and Eve on the sixth day and then rested. Many people believe that humans started as creatures so small you’d need a microscope to see them. And many people believe that these creatures lived in the water, and then the water dried up, or the water didn’t dry up and we crawled out of the water and started breathing air, and our flippers turned into lungs and wings and feet. The lizard turned into the chicken, which is why you can still see the lizard in the eye of the chicken and in the tilt of its beak. Then came the wild animals with fur, and a tail for balance. Some of these creatures are extinct now. Like the dodo. Do you know what a dodo is, class?”
The children laugh. Dodo is a funny word. They have no idea what it means.
“Yes,” they reply, in unison. They want to see where this is going. Ultimately Miss Sonya will have to decide between Edward and Terence. Edward has a bad feeling about this: she hasn’t mentioned dinosaurs, though they too are extinct.
Miss Sonya says, “Little by little these creatures got more like humans. They stood up on their legs and walked and had families and started schools and became teachers and kindergarteners at PS 39.”
Terence holds up his hand. Edward wishes that his grandfather had never taken him to the play. It’s all Grandpa’s fault. It was a stupid story, a stupid play. No one would love a pet monkey like a sister or brother. No one would accuse a monkey of stealing her wallet. No one would try a monkey in court. Even the actors thought it was stupid. The kid who’d played the monkey was waiting for them outside the theater. The monkey-boy knew that Edward was the one who’d talked out loud. Edward was scared, and then he got more scared when he realized that his grandfather was scared too.
Miss Sonya is saying, “And then there’s natural selection. Some day you children will learn all about Charles Darwin and his voyage on the Beagle. The survival of the fittest,” she says, and then she shuts her eyes and puts her hands over her face. Her fingernails are pearly pink, but the polish has chipped, leaving ragged empty spaces.
Terence says, “But which one is true, Miss Sonya? The dinosaurs or the monkeys?”
Another silence. Edward hears a chanting voice deep inside his head: No more monkeys jumping on the bed!
“I would have to go with . . . the monkeys.” Miss Sonya says monkeys so softly that the children can barely hear.
The dinosaurs have betrayed him. Edward never wants to see another dinosaur again. He doesn’t want to think about dinosaurs. The next time he goes to his grandpa’s house, he’ll throw all his dinosaurs in the garbage.
“Thank you, Edward,” Miss Sonya says, “for inspiring such an interesting discussion. Class, let’s have another big round of applause for Edward.”
Clap clap. Terence has won. Miss Sonya has betrayed Edward. He will never get over this humiliation. Clap clap. Losing makes his chest hurt. Clap clap. This is how he will feel the first time the kids call him Mister Monkey, the first time he is caught in the rain, the first time he gets lost on the subway, the first time he fails to get something he desperately wants, the first time he loses something he cherishes. This is how he will feel after his first unhappy love affair and all the others that follow.
[ CHAPTER 5 ]
MISS SONYA HAS A DREAM
MISS SONYA DREAMS that a very large and threatening chimpanzee is sitting cross-legged on her living room floor. He’s cradling a cardboard box in his lap and pulling out sheets of paper, tearing them up and flinging the scraps in the air. His giggle is terrifying, his sharp incisors glisten with spit.
In the dream Miss Sonya knows that the pages are her poems, not the poems she wrote in college but the poems she wanted to write and would have written had she not been accepted by Teach for America, and then, thanks to her mother’s friend who works for the board of education, been hired to teach kindergarten at PS 39, one of the best public schools in Brooklyn, a job for which Sonya feels grateful, even in her dream.
She awakes in a Xanax haze. Apparently it’s morning, a bright sunny morning in . . . she has no idea where she is. All right, she’s in her room. In her bed. She no longer wonders if she’s becoming dependent on sleeping pills. She is dependent on sleeping pills. If only she could remember how a normal person falls asleep. She needs to close her eyes and watch the thoughts cascading like a deck of cards shuffled and thrown on the . . . What she really needs is to tell someone that she has a problem.
Last week she asked the children to describe their bedtime routines, mostly to find out if their parents read to them or not. Her attention had wandered as they’d prattled on about their electric toothbrushes and stuffed toys and pajamas, and then the room went still, and it was her turn. She’d said, “Every night I take a sleeping pill at eleven o’clock.”
If just one kid tells just one parent, and if that one parent tells the school, her teaching career will be over. And it won’t help to explain that her harmless miniconfession was a cry for help. Now Sonya knows why she had that dream. Yesterday, in class, beautiful Edward, the new boy, told the class about Mister Monkey the Musical. Sonya knew the plot. She’d read the book as a child. It was one of those books she’d never liked as much as her teachers did, though she’d never admitted it, because it felt like a personal failure
Sonya knew what Edward was trying to say, even when he mangled the plot. She could have interrupted and helped him. But sometimes interceding is worse for the kids; it would have been a mistake with Edward. She will bribe and cajole and manipulate the others, even confident heartless Terence, until they are nice to Edward and want to be his friend.
Edward told his story about the monkey in the play, and then Terence started in about evolution. Sonya looks out her window at the gnarled, half-dead hickory tree reaching up from her neighbor’s yard and she thinks, Cavemen in the trees. Herbivorous. Please dear merciful God don’t let some parent complain because evolution is definitely not on the kindergarten curriculum.
Her principal, Guadalupe, makes all the teachers feel as if she is on their side. But Guadalupe has her own back to watch, her own career to consider.
Miss Sonya closes her eyes, and at the edge of sleep—only now, too late!—a banner flutters, no, a poster on the wall of some long-forgotten classroom, an image of a monkey growing taller and standing on two legs and looking progressively more human, trudging along in an increasingly gloomy procession from the carefree joyous primate swinging from trees to the man who walks upright but whose heart is sadder and whose shoulders are more stooped than the chimp’s, a human stumbling into a future in which the species will mutate again . . . into what? A humanoid fish with gills capable of surviving on the toxic sludge at the bottom of the ocean that has covered the earth. But before that can occur, the line from monkey to Homo sapiens takes a sharp turn and slouches faster, faster, then begins to run—and rushes straight at Sonya, brandishing a club, like the ape in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or is she remembering that wrong?
What’s done is done. Don’t worry about what happened yesterday, or about what might happen today, and besides, as they used to say in Teach for America, every mistake is a teachable moment. A lesson. In this case, a lesson about prompt intervention, about ending the instructive, interesting, though extremely unwise discussion of whether humans descended from the monkeys or the dinosaurs. Instead of redirecting the class, Sonya dived into a pit of self-indulgence and regaled her captive audience with her own evolution fantasy, which might not even be true. Who knows what Darwin actually said? Not Sonya, who could be in real trouble. Last night she frantically Googled Darwin, her racing heartbeat slowing only when she read a speech in which a famous biologist said that everyone has his own way of interpreting Darwin. Well! That was a relief!
Rolling out of the bed and into the shower and getting dressed and checking the weather on her phone makes her feel competent and in control. Competent? Not even remotely. Here’s the proof: she’s walked the five blocks to the DeKalb Avenue station and gotten on the first of the three trains she has to take to school when she checks her phone and sees that she’s gotten a text message from someone named Greg, with the address of the restaurant where’s she’s supposed to meet him . . . tonight. For a date! A competent person doesn’t forget such things. Memory loss is the number one side effect of prescription sleep-aid abuse.
Sonya and Greg “met” (she can’t even think the word without quotation marks) on Truelove.com. His photo showed a guy (blond and so handsome she couldn’t believe he was contacting her) in jeans and a black T-shirt sitting on the steps of a brownstone. No naked-to-the-waist bodybuilder weirdness, no baseball cap hiding God knows what.
He listed his profe
ssion as “environmental lawyer” and his personal motto as “Saving the planet, one case at a time.” Sonya imagined listening, enthralled, as he told her how he’d fought for the life of an adorable tree toad with giant goggly eyes or a brilliantly colored jungle bird threatened by Big Oil or some luxury ecotourist resort.
After a few encouraging e-mails, Miss Sonya and Greg had their first and so far only phone conversation. Given that Greg’s profile said that he was born in Georgia (the other Georgia!) and that he has been in this country only five years, Sonya was surprised that he didn’t have more of an accent. She was charmed by the few English phrases he got slightly wrong.
“Sonya,” he’d said. “Is that a Russian name?”
Did he want it to be? Do Georgians hate Russians? As he waited for her answer, she searched for Georgia on Wikipedia (why hadn’t she done this earlier?) but got the state, not the country. Anyhow she might as well tell the truth, which would emerge soon enough.
“No,” she said. “I’m not Russian. My mother likes Russian novels.”
“Good,” said Greg. “Excuse me, but I didn’t come all this way to date Russian girls.”
“I’m not Russian,” repeated Sonya.
It took her a while to understand where he was saying they should meet.
“An-sos. In Bensonhurst. Everyone knows An-sos. Where you can’t get a table unless you’re not just any Mafioso but like a crime-family head or district attorney or supermodel or Marty Scorsese.”
“Oh,” she said. “Enzo’s!”
“An-sos,” he said. “I love it. It makes me homesick. It’s just like where the gangsters and the bigwig politicians hung out back in Tbilisi. Same food, same upholstery, same everything. Only difference, maybe: more wine and pasta, less vodka and kebabs.”
Already this was more interesting than what she mostly hears from guys, who talk about their former girlfriends and their social media presence and their promising careers. And this may be her only chance to have dinner at Enzo’s.
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