The Monkey

The air in the morning is a gaudy, lavatorial green. There’s something about how the humidity sifts down off of the mountain, blurring through the trees that makes it that way—the color of high school bathrooms and watercolor shipwrecks, a kind of forced calm I want to run from.
And that’s why there are always film crews here, my father explains, spreading his toast with a brand of jam I don’t recognize. “They seek out the light,” he says, mocking the voice of some cartoon director—a man with a goatee and a canvas-back chair. “The rare, green hours.”
“Why can’t they seek out someone else’s rare hours,” my stepmother says, bedraggled. The crews wake all of us up with their lilting, jaggy Cantonese. Still in bed, my ears muffled by pillows, I try to figure out what they’re saying but the single word I understand is: “M’goi.” “Please,” they say, “Please… please,” with everything in between shouted and inelegant—the language of gruff directions, of pleadings.
By the afternoon they’re gone and there’s nothing to do but play Scrabble with my stepmother or watch television with her daughter in “the den”--the cave my father has festooned with dead animals. I wonder if this, like everything else, is him acting out—if at night, in bed beside my mother, he had dreamed of a room like this—papered in plaid, hung with the head of what’s labeled a “Barooka.”
“That’s not an animal,” my mother says over the phone, interrupting my dutiful report. “My god,” she whispers. “I’m googling that now and that’s really not an animal.”
Maxine and I watch shows I don’t know: A game show about pandas, a talk show where women bring in their babies and the babies get makeovers. One channel—a Chinese version of Lifetime—reruns a dubbed version of Clean House. I’ve seen it in America. Jokey crews go into ratpack houses, mock the inhabitants, and re-paint all the walls shades of “Pumpkin Spice.” Why on earth would anyone bother to dub this, I wonder aloud. Maxine is aghast. No one can believe what the Americans throw out.
“Like that pretty shepherd,” she says, pointing to a weeping, virgin girl of porcelain. “Or that velvet blanket.”
I am silent, identifying with the crew and all their slight grimaces. I think of my mother’s place: of the hoggy sweatshirts stuffing our closets, of the pale apricot paint that’s soured to a brand of pink, of the coppery gas smell that lopes through the apartment—unscourgeable. There are rooms in my life I want to gut, sell every scrap of, paint lemon yellow and forget.
“A wooden duck?” Maxine says, laughing. “Why do you even make those?”
“I’ve never made,” I say, “A wooden duck.”

One Saturday while I’m lollygagging on my bed, in denial about going down and facing a reality that includes my stepmother’s cheer, I see the flurry of a girl outside. It’s Maxine picking her way down the drive, headed for the film set in little whip-cream-colored slippers, holding aloft a tray of glasses of ginger juice she exchanges for cigarettes--long, thin ones advertised in the subway stations by models who exhale mint-leaves. She smokes, they smoke, and they jab each other in the sides when she opens he mouth, leaning in closer like they've all got to whisper.
There’s nothing intelligent she could be saying, and one of these days, I think I’ll go down there and say something to startle them--drop some comment about what kind of filters they're using to get through all this mossy light, say I’ve met Al Pacino in an elevator once. (I have.) But I see myself already, sauntering down—a pudgy white girl in the tourist ensembles my mother packed for me (waterproof shorts, light-weight shirts)—and I don't bother.
Downstairs, my stepmother is in the dining room, sucking on a wedge of lemon. She's reading the morning newspaper, her bare feet up on the chair beside her. There are congee splatters on the mahogany. Breakfast has been cleared away.
"Chen-Li is in the kitchen," she says sharply. "There’s cereal.”

Chen-Li is doing the dishes and laughing at something Maxine is saying. At the dinette table, Maxine is reading from a magazine, her legs crossed beneath her, the weight of her head canted on her fist. The hanging lamp illuminates her face so that I can see the fineness of the shadows beneath her eyes, beneath her chin.
“The hubby is only saying this about the honeymoon," Maxine reads, "It's going to be bananas." She looks up at Chen-Li, who is now doubled over, gripping the apples of her knees.
"Oh, Miss Erma," she starts, grabbing my arm--trying to explain, but not keeping it together. The movie they're filming down the block, Maxine says, is about a monkey butler.
"A monkey butler?"
"You know," says Chen-Li, "Like me!" She does a little dance like a monkey clapping cymbals. And then she bursts out laughing again.
Maxine explains: The movie is about a family that trained a monkey to be its servant. When the mother and the father die, the monkey doesn't understand. It goes looking for them. It crosses hills and valleys and seas. But the girl, the daughter of the mother and the father, had no one but the monkey. So she goes looking for him. And on the way--"She falls in love with the monkey," Maxine says.
“How does the monkey cross the ocean?” I ask. But no one answers me. Chen-Li has buckled over, and keeps laughing quietly to herself--a monkey butler--while Maxine, stone-faced, keeps reading whatever trashy magazine she’s reading. I pour myself a bowl of cereal, which Dad buys for seven dollars a box, imported all the way from America and stale by the time it gets here.

I've been here for the summer because my mother thought it would be good for me, or really because she wanted to feel like the kind of saintly mother who happily sends her daughter to her ex. "It's good to go abroad," she kept saying in the airport, telling and re-telling the story of how, as a girl, she had studied in France for a year. "The family never had any meat. Vegetables every night," she said, shaking her head. "Makes you realize."
From Queens to Hong Kong there had been seven meals in a row, perfectly spaced, with about three-and-a-half hours between each one and all of it airplane food—stuff to be crammed into the mouth, witnessed only by the B-list cast of a Sandra Bullock movie. But on the last flight—from London to Hong Kong—the ostentatiously beautiful stewardesses had served shrimp in plastic flutes, the beasts flayed outward like Busby Berkley dancers around a pool of ice—their tails already removed. The lady beside me nibbled one, and didn’t touch the rest. “It’ll be better in Hong Kong,” she said, pulling down her eyeshade. “Trust me, sweetie.”
I ate all of them. And when I put my face to the face-shaped window I could suddenly see land.

Hong Kong is a mountain with the city at its skirts, its slope forested, tropical, with apartment towers rising from the brush like teeth from the gums of the mouth. Dad’s house is three-quarters up and the cab rang through a ribbon of switchbacks—yawing from side to side as it climbed. Off a small road we turned and stopped before a stone building with a glowering, petulant face. Moss glommed up the cracks. It was quiet—the faroff scram of traffic inaudible through the trees.
We were let in by the maid—Chen-Li—who invited the driver in to the kitchen while I stayed out in the hall. It was late afternoon. I could feel the air pressing down from the high ceilings. The hallways were dark and I could hear footsteps padding down.
I had only seen Constance in photographs—photographs of Constance and my father on boat decks, photographs of Constance and my father sitting before glistening meals, the photographs of their wedding—hazy and soft, professionally sappy. The real Constance had makeup in all the cracks of her face, hair pulled tight, a light, jumpy body obscured by a sweater softer than any I had ever owned.
With long pale hands she shows me how to use the elaborate rotary dial phone in the hallway, she unlocks the door to my room. It was an ice-colored cube, small and hard, centered around a wide bed. Above the pillows hung a painting--a spare black "O" swished onto a white canvas—and I fell face-down below it into the feathered duvet, feeling as though I had given up all will and been spiraled here, like a coin dropped in a funnel that rolls, ever and ever, toward the mesmerizing drain.
* * *
My father was always going on business trips to Hong Kong.
He would come back to us with the same presents. My mother would get flowers made of paper, intricately so, so that within the blossom one could see the bud, jittery as a spider. “Oh the poor ladies who suffered to make this,” she would say say, pretending to smell it, pretending to put it in a vase and spray it with water. What I would get changed: I would open a paper box and find paper dolls shoes, a paper toy piano, even a Nintendo gaming system with paper buttons that wobbled in their cradles.
It’s strange to think of my father in a foreign country. He is in an office somewhere, sitting at a grey desk, looking at numbers on a sheet of paper. He is in an elevator falling downwards, the numbers over the door ring-dinging down, down, blinking and blinking. He is on the subway, holding a red bar, being jostled by the movement of the car. He is somewhere else watching something else: a poster, a panel of glass. I had looked up Hong Kong in the World Book and knew nothing more—there were alleys there that trickled toward the water, skyscrapers covered in glass. Women in the markets pawed over the fruit, feeling for ripeness.
“Business,” I said, when someone asked me why he went there, and I learned a sentence to say about the taxation codes, about how things were freer there. There was no sentence to say when my parents broke up, when he moved there, when he married Constance and e-mailed me the wedding photos—Constance in a pale-pink veil, standing before an ocean whose name I did not know.
Here I come back to see his step-daughter putting the same paper flowers into a vase on the piano. I ask her where she gets them. I think I would like to go there and walk along the aisles of false flowers, thinking of how my father must have felt when he walked there, thinking of us.
She tells me I can get them at the cemetery.
“The cemetery?” I ask.
“They’re for the dead,” she says. “At the end of the week, we’ll burn them.”
* * *
Here I barely speak to my father. I have nothing to say to him. He works during the day—even on the weekends--and we meet him somewhere downtown for dinner. The streets are loud, it’s impossible to park, and then we enter the restaurants—quiet, and dimly lit, with lamps hanging from the celing like tender, dropping fruits. Hosts greet us. “Very good, very good,” they say, and shove us off to mill near the bars, where beautiful women sit between the men, sizing eachother up. Dad orders us drinks while we wait for a table. "It's nice to have a daughter who's finally underage," he jokes--the drinking age here is 18 and no one checks; Maxine, he assures me, has been drinking since she mistook her mother's white wine for apple juice.
“It’s not true,” Maxine says, sipping selzer, and I believe her.
There's something about drinking with my father that I don't like. He has a glimmer in his eye, an appetite for something—as though he’s play-acting at being the corrupting uncle. Over the heads of us three women he watches the sports playing on the bar TV. "Oh!" he yells out. Someone scored. My stepmother ignores it, asks what everyone’s having.
There is a gulp of air between my thought of him and what he’s like here. He has a sour way of treating wait-staff, more hair on the back of his hands. At home, at night, in the dark of my room beneath the empty, modern painting, he gives me a backrub. He asks me if I know how happy he is that I’m here. “Uh huh,” I say, watching a trapezoid of moonlight that’s roving the floor. I am determined to watch it until it hits the other wall—but it never does.
“You know I love you very much,” he says.
“Uh huh,” I say.
* * *
I work during the days as an intern in Maxine's office. She got me the job. "Okay?" she asked, happily, over the phone after she had pitched it to me. "Okay?" My mother thought it might be a good idea.
"Office experience," she said, spooning Ben & Jerry's straight out of the freezer into her mouth. "That's what you need."
"But you don't have any office experience."
"And look at me now," she said, "Ice cream straight out of the bucket." My mother is a florist. She moved to the city because of my father, and then she missed nature. “Now all I do is kill it,” she jokes. But when I suggest that now she move back to the country, now that dad is gone, she doesn’t even pay attention. “You don’t understand old people,” she says. So she stays in the apartment my father bought, the one she hated until he left.
Maxine works at Sotheby's. She is an appraiser and wears a kind of tart perfume to work, sprayed around turtlenecks over which she lays strings of gold jewelry. I wonder what my father did and did not give to her, what other men did. There is one pin—a balking parrot, inlaid with blue stones—that I can imagine no man giving her, that I like her better for owning. She's gruff in the office, has a loud laugh you can hear down halls. I see her leaning on cubicles, winking at the fat, sallow men who pull at their collars when she walks in. Or, in the breakroom, speaking with the other women, blowing on her tea before she takes a sip. She is an expert on early clay pottery from the mainland--brown, salt-glazed urns, white horses that pull emerald-colored wagons, women with flat faces and hairdos that whorl around faces that stay blank and calm as coins.
The office is cushioned and beige, floored in rattan carpet as though to delude us into thinking that we’re all at the beach. I sit in a fake-wood cubicle with the other intern, a quiet local boy—Gilbert—who comes to work in the uniform of his summer program. Obsessively conscientious, he has become the one who is doing all the work through a process of entropy kick-started by my failure to do anything. We are supposed to be typing into a database what is written in an old, defunct card catologue—it’s a “virtual copy,” a phrase that sounds to me like the very definition of pointless labor. At the top of the cards are abstract titles: "Swimming in the River," "The Seventh Urn," "To Julia" and then below, the date of the sale and the stuffy names, sometimes, of whoever was stupid enough to buy it. In the "Notes" section of the database, we have started writing poems—switching off line-by-line, sending them through the computer system.
The Seventh Urn
Was a thing I saved for you but would never give
Thinking only, that I had six, and six was not enough
And I needed the last one. I needed everything.
When we're done with one, I print it out and fold it and put it in my pocket and take it home with me. In the car, I fold and re-fold it, making a kind of origami of nervous disgrace.
* * *
Maxine has had this job before. "It's so dull, isn't it," she says. She is reclining sideways on the living room armchair, as though she’s too good to sit in the chair as it was intended to be sat in. Something is playing on the television that involves pandas, but I don’t care what it is—I’ll watch anything. "Though sure, the first day is always the worst.”
Maxine works downtown at the Lane Crawford, which she explains is the "Barney’s of Asia,” though it's not such a great explanation--I've never heard of Barney's. Maxine rolls her eyes over at me; she's performing for an audience that's not here--and she looks back at the television.
That night online I look up Barney's. On the page, a woman in a red felt coat winks. The coat is for sale. It's just a store.
* * *
On weekends, I sleep in. Usually I’d head down the hill in a $1 dollar cab ride and walk around. There are still temples I haven’t seen, ferry rides I haven’t taken. I bring books, read a lot, spend my mother’s money in the dingiest, crummiest restaurants I can find. I’ve deemed them more authentic; Old women serve me crabs and show me how to break them apart. The men wink when I’ve done it right.
But when I go downstairs Constance asks me if I wouldn't like to get out of the house with her--it's nearly noon, and she was thinking we could do some shopping, maybe surprise Connie at the store where she’s working. I say sure, non-committally. I pour a bowl of cereal. Connie watches me eat.
“I was just thinking,” she says, trawling it out a bit, looking at my face in a way I can tell she’s rehearsed whatever she’s about to say. “About the auction—you’ve heard about it, I’m sure?”
I’ve heard of it. The other intern had to type up the name-cards; A Mrs. Smell had been invited and we had giggled over it. Such a curse to be born with! I say, “Yeah, I think so.”
“God knows Maxine’s friends are all too rich to spend their summers at home,” Constance says. “I’ve been phoning around but it’s useless.” She explains that basically, the auctioneers need girls to carry the unbreakable, attractive things to the podium and back. I wouldn’t be paid. But it was be good experience. And it was at a fabulous hotel—the Mandarin Oriental. We’d get a free dinner and everything.

In the black car, the tinted windows turn the city sour. The sky is apocalyptic, the yellowish hue they say portends tornadoes. Constance is driving me down to the mall, now, not only to see Maxine but because I’ll need a good dress for tonight—“Something pretty,” she says. “Really gorgeous.”
The film crew parts when they see the car coming down from the drive. In black tees, their chunky tool belts dragging on their waists, they cling to the hill, looking through our windows as we pass. It’s the closest I’ve ever been to them. There, a round, wide straw circle floats with a hand on top--a perfectly manicured hand painted with red polish. Further down, I can see that it is a girl balancing precariously on a tree root holding on with one hand to the wall of the mountain, standing halfway between the switch-backing ribbons of road. In a narrow pencil skirt and dainty '40s heels, she has a face like a picture of a face. I point her out. “She must be the star.” But Connie can’t see her and we’ve already passed.
In the mall the ceiling and the floor are the same color--ice white. Chrome handrails guide around everything. It's shaped like a snail’s shell you're forced to whorl around, giving maximum face-time to the product. Constance knows her way around. She picks up a repaired watch in a store that seems to otherwise specialize in crystal paperweights, she walks through the department where Maxine works—a mirrored maze of purses and coiled belts—and we spy on Maxine as she stands bored behind a countertop laid with colored gloves.
“Where do you think she gets it from?” Connie says, darting away.
“Gets what?” I ask.
“Her distaste for everything. Her disapproval.” And then she interrupts the thought. We’re standing before a plate-glass window looking into a flurry of women. Chalk-skinned, big-eyed, they drift before countertops rubbing things into their cheeks, making kissy-faces at the mirrors. “Makeup first!” she says, leading me lightly by the elbow inside, where in Cantonese she convinces a humorless woman to seat me. Pencil-lipped, with bouffant hair looking like it’s about to spring, the woman "tests colors" while Constance claps, giddy.
"You're so much brighter," Connie says. “You’ve really got so much to work with.”
My eyes are luxe looking, heavy as drapes. With a bow in my hair I’d look like the skunk Pepe le Pieu chased. Constance insists on buying a tube of mascara and a brick of lipstick, powders that come in a slick cigarette case the color of an oil spill. While she’s waiting for my father’s card to be processed she looks back at me—her creation in “new plum,” “terracotta,” and “dusty rose.”
“Don’t be so angry,” she says. “Men like it when you’re calm, confident. As soon as you could care less, they come storming in.” We are barreling through the tiled hallways of womens’ reinventions. Maniacs are poking at new eyes, new skins. I nearly trip over Connie. She has stalled in “Evening Wear.” Dresses slither down off the metal hangers like hung squid. Hunched up furniture lays low—crouching from some overhead wind. A dried-up woman approaches, hands clasped as though she’s about to kneel in prayer before us. “For the lady?” she asks Constance, nodding in my direction.
They speak in Cantonese, the woman looking me up and down, and Constance laughs a bit before the woman changes gears and springs to action—pulling clutches of maroon and mauve and eggplant down from their high perches, cycloning around the shop and locking me into the dressing room—a small, coffin-shaped box where I am finally alone.
There are spots on my nose—new spots. If I can’t perfect the rest of myself—my hammy, pale stomach, my inelegant arms—at least I can perfect these, and I squeeze at them until I hear Connie, over the stall door. “How’s it going?” she says, her voice cloying, hopeful.
I walk out. I am strapped in, buckled under into a reddish velvet—I’m a harlot for Mr. Claus, a lady of the night in winter wear. My stepmother gasps, her ring-covered hand flying to her mouth.
“What a change!” she says, and with her two cold hands, grips me by the shoulders, twirls me around, ogles how the fabric hugs my rump. I am told to look at myself in the three-way mirror. The fabric pulls across my stomach, foams around my neck. I look like a girl who doesn’t know where she belongs.
Connie pushes me back into the dressing room. A purple dress makes me look dead, a yellow dress makes me look twelve, and a scarlet number makes me look like a dead lady trying to look twelve. There’s nothing as old as how I feel—sixteen, going on forty.
I try a more humble looking eggplant sheath with long sleeves, only realizing the dangerous neckline after I’ve pulled it on. I am Morticia at a clambake.
“Va-va-va-voom,” Connie says. “You’re a man-eater.” The sales-lady is all smiles. With skittish, darting hands she heaves up my chicken-cutlet sized breasts, smooths the skirt flat, and looks up at me, as if to say, “Well…”
“This is the dress,” Connie says, hands on her hips, surveying. “This is the dress.”
In the car on the way home, Maxine is complaining about having to go to the auction. “I’m going to have an awful time,” she says, looking at her nails. “You can’t even enjoy yourself.”
“Honestly, I feel like if I forced you to do exactly what you want—like, ‘Go meet Marcy at some boy’s house,’” Connie says, sighing. “You’d say you were too exhausted to go.”
“Ugh,” is all Maxine says. “I really have to go?”
“Erma is going,” Connie says.
“It’s swell,” Maxine says to me, suddenly bright and excited. And then her face falls and she’s Maxine again—staring out the window to the places she can’t be.

My father is at home, sitting in the kitchen, drinking something out of a mug and reading the funnies section. He has an expression of serious concentration like he can’t be disturbed—not that he doesn’t want to be, but that it could not be possible to draw him out of that place into another.
Connie ducks her head in. “The ship’s leaving in an hour,” she says.
“I’m ready,” Dad says, not looking up. And for a second, it’s the dad I remember—undressed, unresponsive, embroiled in whatever’s before him—a skillet of bacon, a daughter’s shoelaces, the funnies.
Upstairs, laid-out on the duvet, the dress looks swollen—a purple wound gashed through the room. I wonder how I will explain it to my mother. “It’s just some old thing that Connie gave me,” I think. “Just some stupid thing she made me wear.” But I can’t figure out how to explain it without sounding like a prostitute, like some version of Julia Roberts being shopped for by Richard Gere who’s buying me things, making me respectable.
We don’t leave until six-thirty so I get dressed at six twenty-five, though Maxine’s been hooking and unhooking herself into various sheaths for forty-five minutes. “Your makeup!” Connie shriekds when she sees me, scooting me into the bathroom where I do the easy part—the mouth, the dabbing of the powders—while she does my eyes, curling them with immense, spidery clamps that render me temporarily immobile.
“Beauty's just a language--I don't know--what is it? The language of surface. You can learn to speak it. Snap your fingers and you could be like Maxine. It's just another language you can use to get what you want,” Connie says. “To—I don’t know what, to get the job you want, to entrap young men.”

“Is that what you did?” I say. It's bolder than I've ever been with her.
Constance laughs. “I can’t convince your father of anything. I couldn’t convince him not to marry me. I can’t convince him to tie his shoes.”
“You didn’t want to marry him?”
“I did, and I didn’t. You don’t know what you want until you’ve already half-chosen it, and then you’ve got to explain it to your friends.”
“I know I don’t want to wear the dress.”
“The thing is, you don’t know yet. You’re not old enough to know. And I know. You’re beautiful. I’m making you wear this dress, and forcing you to be happy.”


We park somewhere on Hollywood Road, before a long row of shops that sell the kind of pottery Connie specializes in, but fakes. Early in the summer I had come here as a tourist. A small figurine of a lady called out to me. She wore a green cape. I bought it for my mother. “You know who this is made for, right?” Connie said, when she saw it on the kitchen table. Years ago, she explained, people from the Mainland shattered this stuff, burned and banished it, and Hong Kongers sheltered it, reconstructed the fragments. Now the Mainlanders want it again, the very horses of white clay that they had given up on.
“I just bought it because it’s pretty,” I said.
“And that’s why they destroyed it. They thought that whatever’s pretty has no value—it’s just fluff. What Chinese throw away, what Americans throw away—Hong Kong people shelter.”
The hotel is sleepily-lit. Sofas fat enough to die on have been spat up all over the room. On either side of the Grand Ballroom, a slender woman is smoking an anxious cigarette as though in respite from whatever terrible thing is in there. The airy room is honey-colored. Waiters scuttle about the fleet of circular tables, joking with eachother as they lay down knives. My father hangs back while Connie hustles me and Maxine into a side-room.
Six bored-looking teenagers in their best things are being spoken to by a bald man, his bald head halved by a pair of sharp glasses. There are three girls in long silk dresses and two boys in too-big suits lollygagging in a cluster of gilt bamboo-frame chairs, like they were poured down from on high. Everyone is too cool to be here.
The man at the head of the room is talking about when to smile and when to not smile and we listen to him for about fifteen minutes before we’re shuffled off in pairs. Maxine and Marcy go together and I’m paired with the boy who was ousted from the other set of boys—the other intern, the dork exiled for being the only one not here for the booze.
“I’ll do all right with you,” he says.
I ask him what that’s supposed to mean.
“It means they like something to look at, these old men.”
Around the tables are bunched men in old tweed suit-jackets, ladies in washy gray silks. “My dear, my dear,” they say, jostling their spouses to notice what we are holding—a yellow vase, a parrot’s cage, a kind of crystal bottle full of old liquer. We wear white gloves, we look happy.
“You’re Elvin’s daughter, aren’t you?” one of the men asks me, holding my arm, nearly causing me to drop the $5,000 dollar fountain pen I’m carrying around. “Tell him Paul says ‘Thanks.’”
“I’m not,” I say, stuttering. “You think I’m someone else”—and go off toward another table, where Gilbert is pulling me, sticking to our scheduled route. “And what does the nice lady have this evening?” asks an old man whose sharp nose points down to his soup. “A ballpoint pen?”
“A 1939 Conway Stewart Fountain pen, sir,” I say. “Limited edition of 100, patterned with the uh, Liberty designs.”
“Based on the fabrics produced by the House of Liberty,” says Gilbert.
As I move around the table, showing how the pen catches the light, I see it’s the table of Connie and my father, “Wonderful,” Connie says. “Beautiful job!”
Halfway through, when the waiters are unloading the trays of desserts, they take us to the small room we have been in before. There are bottles of wine we’re passing over the table and Maxine and Marcy look like they’re getting drunk. For dessert a waiter brings a silver tray covered in lozenge-shaped chocolates and hard purple fruits. Gilbert takes a steak-knife and cuts into one down the stem. Inside is a white, pulpy core, like a miniature albino orange half the size of the fruit itself.
“Taste it,” he says. “Fruit that tastes like God intended it to taste.”
I ask if God doesn’t invent all fruit.
“Probably,” says Gilbert, thoughtful, but it tastes just like that—or I’m drunk on the wine he’s pouring. “Like God would make,” I say, thinking of how I can describe this to my mother.
Twirling around the auction, smiling and winking, I keep thinking people are looking at me as though I’m something they want. I am as pretty as someone else’s daughter, some normal girl. And then I remember. It’s not me they’re looking at, but what I am holding: a blue urn, a gilt flower.

The car is parked in some helicon hotel garage. Maxine warbles into the concrete vaults of the place. The taffeta of our stuffed skirts fill the backseat, giving a ruffling chorus to the quiet jazz on the radio.
“That boy Gilbert was nice,” says Constance. I can smell her perfume over the car leather.
“He thought someone was nice,” Maxine says.
“What?” my father says. “Who thought what?”
“That boy Gilbert. Had a crush on Erma.”
“No he didn’t.” Outside, men are walking their wives’ embarrassing lapdogs through the night—trying to go unnoticed.
“He did or didn’t,” Maxine says. “It still looked like he did.”

On the rectangle of the lawn, there is an orange towel I recognize from the downstairs bath. The door is open—the dark maw of the house soaks in the street. “Don’t anybody move,” my father says under his breath. “Back in the car.” Through the glass I can’t hear what my father is saying, but I know it’s the police on the other end of the phone. He’s sweating, worried, pacing—turning red. “Get back in the car,” Connie tells him. He does. She puts her hand on his thigh.
The police come and take pictures, hold outstretched clubs. When they turn on the lights, all of the sounds of the house turn on, too. They find no one, don’t know who did it. In an hour they leave. I walk through the house over the heaps of things, looking at the mess that is left. I’m on Clean House. “Oh, tsk tsk,” I say. Dishes are poking up from the hallway’s dark carpet like iceberg tips. Though my own room is untouched—the air inside stale--Maxine’s clothes have been disgorged from bureaus, thrown over the room like brush strokes. “My lamp!” she says, holding up cracked yellow pieces I now can’t remember having ever seen together. I think of how terrible it is to outlive anything.
At the end of the hall is my father and stepmother’s bedroom. I have never been inside. There’s a rumpled, unmade bed, ransacked closets, an open window. There is a bedside travel clock my mother gave my father—a clock face couched within a brass clamshell, as though it were the pearl. Through the two arches of the suite, I can see Connie’s back.
“In the yard,” Connie says, “There’s a monkey.” Her left hand rests on the mirror of the vanity table while her right hand sweeps open the venetian blinds. “Did you hear me?” she says. “There’s a monkey in the street.”
It’s an orangutan, wearing the uniform of a hotel bellhop—a purplish vest, lined in sequins. “It’s the monkey,” I say. Then I yell it down the hall. “It’s the monkey. Maxine, come see, it’s the monkey,” and suddenly there is Maxine. We are all looking out the window—three womens’ faces angled down at a monkey that doesn’t look up.
“It’s the monkey,” she says, nearly whispering.
“What monkey?” Connie asks, but there’s no time. I’ve read about people dying from monkeys, about the beasts going crazy, tearing peoples’ faces off. I run to the end of the hall, yell out for my father, but he’s not there—he’s not anywhere. My feet have a kind of nostalgia built into them, a retro-active knowledge for what it is like to be hunted. I run downstairs to the house phone in the hallway, the rotary dial I now I can’t seem to be getting to work. I want to call my father but I don’t even know how to press the numbers, it’s all wrong, I can’t talk to anyone. And there is the monkey, ambling slowly down the hall, touching each piece of plate that he has broken, as if they were his children.