Aerogrammes: And Other Stories

by Tania James

  He could see how human the chimp looked to the white woman. The color of its face was nearly as pink as her own, though most likely its skin would later darken like its mother’s. Saffa did not mention the mother. He said that he had found the baby in a forest, abandoned.

  Not only did Saffa know English words; he also knew English numbers, and refused to go below thirty-five dollars for the chimp. After paying him, the white woman removed the shawl from her shoulders and wrapped the baby inside it, oblivious to those who stared at her. She took the little girl by the hand, and together they made their way through the crowd. Saffa watched this strange little trio, pleased by the sale and yet reluctant to look away, curious as to what would become of them.

  • • •

  The woman who bought the chimpanzee was named Pearl Groves, and she was no idiot. She could smell the lies rolling off that poacher as strongly as his sweat, a nose for deceit that she’d acquired much too late in her marriage.

  Pearl’s husband was a noted herpetologist who had visited western Cameroon in 1969 to research the Hairy Frog, Trichobatrachus robustus, whose males were not in fact hairy but covered with tiny, cilia-like extensions of skin, allowing them more surface area through which to breathe. His love affair with the Hairy Frog had lasted for months, permeating their breakfast conversation and even surfacing, embarrassingly, at some dinner parties. Pearl found it hard to be inquisitive on the subject. She had never shared her husband’s love for amphibians but contented herself with the idea that their marriage was like a frozen dinner, compartmentalized but complementary.

  Six years after her husband ended his research trips, a letter followed. Pearl was gentle with the paper, torn along one corner, as fragile and baffling as a salvaged treasure map. The letter was written by an NGO worker in Sierra Leone, on behalf of an old woman whose daughter had died of malaria, leaving her with a granddaughter whose education and care she could not shoulder. Along with the letter came a small black-and-white photograph of a child with the eyes and dimples and mouth of Pearl’s husband. On the back of the photograph was written: Neneh, daughter of Mr. Groves.

  Pearl was sixty years old, a retired schoolteacher who had never wanted children. Neither had her husband. People assumed that this was because Pearl considered her students her children, a pleasant lie to which she sometimes resorted, but in reality, she couldn’t see how children fit into the frozen dinner of her marriage. And as far as an extramarital affair was concerned, she had presumed that her husband had passed the window of foolish opportunity. A part of her eyed him with wonder, searching for the rogue within, the simmering of lust. But at sixty-four, he had a belly that sagged over his belt; he mumbled nonsense in his sleep. Sometimes, if he was especially riveted by The $10,000 Pyramid while brushing his teeth, he would continue to brush, like a machine, until the foam streamed down his chin as he yelled, “Things that bite! THINGS THAT BITE!” And now, reading and rereading the letter, she kept wondering if it all would have been different had she just gone to Cameroon with her husband, had she just pretended to love those disgusting frogs.

  Maybe then he would have left his cleaning woman alone. The woman was originally from Bo, her husband admitted, haltingly. Sierra Leone. She had been new to Cameroon, like him, and lonely.

  Everyone in Pearl’s family implored her to come to her senses; one did not leave her home in Canton, Ohio, to retrieve a girl from a hut in Africa. Send money their way and be done with it. This was her husband’s view as well, though he had lost most of his authority and his life had become a prolonged exercise in deference: submitting the TV remote to Pearl, making a tuna melt for Pearl, shuffling out of any room she entered. Pearl simply replied that adopting Neneh was the right thing to do, leaning upon the brand of Baptist conviction that had always sustained her. Behind that conviction was her intention to shame her husband every day, to raise the mirror to his face and show him she was not deceived; she knew exactly who he was.

  Pearl’s husband thought her insane for going to Sierra Leone. He refused to accompany her or take her to the airport. She left him the number of the hotel in Bo where she and Neneh would be staying for a week, preparing for the flight back home. Whenever he tried to change the subject, Pearl switched it right back. Whenever he grudgingly referred to “the girl,” Pearl asserted her name—Neneh.

  But when Pearl arrived in Bo to claim Neneh, all her stern conviction dissolved, displaced by the immediate necessities of the child made real. Because Neneh’s grandmother was too old to travel from her village, Neneh had come with a representative from the NGO, a plumpish woman wearing a head wrap of blue and green and a matching skirt that fishtailed around her ankles. They had dinner in the hotel restaurant, groundnut soup and country rice, while the woman talked about Neneh’s mother. Pearl had thought that learning of the other woman would crush her, but instead she was oddly fascinated. Isatu had taken any number of jobs to support her child, selling cassava by the road and dyeing gara fabrics. The NGO worker kept saying the word “suffer” over and over: “Even just for buy half back and feeding and clothing, she suffered a lot.” The whole time, Pearl was vaguely aware of Neneh regarding her with a strange vigilance, as if trying to memorize her entirely.

  When it was time for the NGO woman to leave, she kissed Neneh once on each cheek and accepted the package Pearl had brought for Neneh’s grandmother, gifts that seemed all wrong. What would the old woman do with a flannel nightgown in this broiling heat? Pearl had also slipped money up the nightgown’s sleeve, but would Neneh’s grandmother know where to convert the dollar bills?

  For Neneh, Pearl had brought a red headband and a lacy white dress that would surely attract swarms of sienna dust. Dutifully, Neneh fit the headband over her braids and refused to remove it until she went to bed. With equal resolve, she would not go anywhere without holding Pearl’s hand. While Neneh slept, Pearl stared at the girl’s curled fingers, her hard palm inscribed with the same lines that appeared on her father’s. The lines filled Pearl with wonder rather than hate, and it was at that moment, tracing the birdlike bones of Neneh’s hand, that Pearl understood how hate could carry her only so far.

  Several days before they left for Ohio, Pearl thought it would be good to get Neneh out of the hotel. Pearl had chosen the hotel for its royal-sounding name—Sir Milton—but the toilet bowl was bereft of its seat, the water tasted of metal, and the mosquito nets had holes that left her scratching all night. The receptionist suggested that they visit the Cotton Tree, the site where the first African-American slaves, freed and arrived in 1792, had held a thanksgiving mass. Pearl felt apathetic about visiting a tree, but it turned out to be more astonishing, more alive than any monument she had seen, its massive trunk roped and coiled with fantastical vines as thick as her arm, with bat-filled branches that sprawled up against the pale blue sky. Deriving some strength from its ancient shade, Pearl felt that she could stand and stare forever at the tree, with Neneh at her side, and for the first time during her visit, she felt capable of everything her friends and family had dismissed.

  When she and Neneh walked past the vendors, Pearl did not flinch at what she saw: the dismembered parts of what seemed to be a goat, lying in the heat, bright with blood; the stares of local children gleefully pointing at her and calling out, “Pumui! Pumui!” There were women selling fruits and vegetables piled on burlap, green plantains and thick fingers of cassava, tables of trinkets in bowls, balls of black soap, mountains of country and white rice, hills of sesame seeds and black-eyed peas. Toward the end of their walk, Pearl and Neneh came upon a baby chimpanzee in a cardboard box.

  As Pearl reached for the chimp, she felt a rejuvenating sense of certainty, a rectitude with no moral or rational ground. She was destroying her old life, blow by blow, and building a new one out of new names. Neneh, and now Henry; the name came to Pearl as a breeze. She tucked Henry into her orange shawl and stroked the soft saucers of his ears. She did not consider what her husband would think of this latest development.
It didn’t matter. He hadn’t called a single time, and Pearl had known all along that he would not be home when she returned.

  • • •

  On the plane, Henry was so wide-eyed and serene that the flight attendants let him ride in Pearl’s lap, swaddled in her shawl. It had been relatively easy for Pearl to secure the import and export permits necessary for his adoption, but later that year, the United States issued a ban on the importation of chimpanzees as pets, citing them as health hazards and possible vessels for disease. Pearl was relieved that Henry had slipped by the ban. She dismissed the thought that her little coconut could be a hazard to anyone.

  So for a time, there was Pearl, Neneh, and Henry. In Canton, Henry adapted well to their lives, eating at the dinner table and watching television in earnest, especially if a nature documentary appeared on PBS. He enjoyed simple pleasures—a fried egg sandwich, a Dole fruit cup, the dial tone of an unhooked phone. Pearl grew so frustrated with finding phones off the hook that she gripped Henry by the arm and scolded him; he avoided her eyes. After she released him and sat down to watch the evening news, he leapt into her lap and planted an open-mouthed kiss on her lips.

  Those were difficult years, when most of Pearl’s friends and family stopped visiting, their phone calls dwindling. Pearl made them uncomfortable. Once, in her mailbox, she found a folded drawing of herself as a chimp, with a sloping forehead, flaring nostrils, a bun. She’d had smart-ass students before, but this somehow made her face simmer with shame. She rolled up the paper and used it to twirl out the spiderwebs inside the mailbox.

  Pearl forged ahead. She took it upon herself to homeschool Neneh in all subjects, well through the fourth grade. Neneh was a poor student, and sometimes Pearl wondered if she was progressing sluggishly on purpose, reluctant to join a school with children her own age.

  When Neneh turned ten years old, she enrolled at Walden Middle School, a short bus ride away. On the second day of class, Jurgen Roberts turned to her and asked, “Is it true your brother’s a chimp?” Just as Neneh was about to answer, Miss Davis demanded to know why Jurgen would ever say such a thing about someone’s brother.

  Neneh left school that day with the distinct impression that the answer she had almost given Jurgen Roberts was wrong. The correct answer to his question would have been: Henry’s not my brother, he’s my pet. She considered treating Henry as she had seen other people dealing with their dogs and cats, as though she were an authority whose job it was to tame his behaviors. One such behavior was his proclivity to blow kisses at the blond mailwoman who slipped their mail through the slot and blew him a kiss in return. It was weird. What if, by some slim and lovely chance, Natalie Sharpe came over to play one day? Would Henry, beguiled by her flaxen hair, try to kiss her, too?

  But Natalie Sharpe moved to Indiana, and Jurgen Roberts started going with Allie Sanfilippo, the girl who sat in front of him, at which point he stopped turning his head farther than forty-five degrees. Everything about the world of school was mercurial, the alliances tenuous, the cafeteria a minefield; at home, Henry was always waiting for her on the foyer stairs. He was her brother, whose leathery soles she liked to tickle until he gave desperate, panting bursts of laughter. A brother who winced when the trunk door fell on her head, who rubbed his own head in sympathy. A brother who stole the last grape Popsicle before she’d had even one, but at the very least, if she complained, he would break off a melty half and hold it out to her on his palm. “The half with the stick,” Neneh would insist, and, playing innocent, he would look away, as if he couldn’t understand her.

  Seven years later, Pearl was forced to donate Henry to a zoo. The county police department had been pressuring her to do so, ever since Pearl’s neighbor had informed the sheriff that Pearl was harboring an adult male chimpanzee, who, if angered, could lash out with savage strength. It didn’t matter when Neneh and Pearl tried to explain Henry’s many gentle aspects, how patient he was, how delighted by buttered popcorn, so much so that he stood rapt before the microwave, watching the flat envelope spin in the humming light, growing pregnant with his favorite food. He even knew how to press the Minute-Plus button, as well as Start and Open.

  “Popcorn?” the sheriff said, as if to imply that Pearl was choosing popcorn over local security.

  But gradually it became difficult for Pearl to ignore that she was aging. Her veins rose blue against her thinning skin, and various glands and muscles made her wake with a start in the night. She was seventy-two years old and Neneh was seventeen, too young to care for a fully grown chimp on her own.

  After many disappointing zoo tours, Pearl gave her reluctant approval to the Willow Park Zoo, in Florida, which provided a wider sanctuary than the primate pens she had seen, where the chimps were often numb with depression and boredom, butting their heads against the walls of their cages or masturbating. Here, the chimpanzee enclosure appeared larger, almost the size of a gymnasium, with a multitude of trees, both live and dead, and a flaccid waterfall between knobby gray boulders. Some chimpanzees were busy grooming each other, others explored the underbellies of stones they had doubtless explored before, while the younger ones tickled and tumbled around one another. It seemed to Pearl the best she could do.

  The zoo curator was eager to adopt Henry, as the zoo had no adult male chimpanzees and, thus, no way of breeding. Pearl refused any payment in return but was adamant in her negotiations: (1) that she and Neneh be allowed to privately visit with Henry, and (2) that Henry not be traded or sold. Papers were signed and promises made; Henry was brought to the zoo.

  Upon first hearing the shrieks of his new family, Henry scrambled up to the roof of the cafeteria, his mouth stretched into a fear grin, all teeth and pink gums. Neneh coaxed him down, offering him a Dole fruit cup, while Pearl made kissing noises. She raised her hands to him. Eventually, he descended, but he continued yelping while Neneh and Pearl took turns embracing him. His legs were quivering.

  Pearl paid no attention to the keepers and the curator who stood around, hands on their hips, exchanging worried glances. Pearl murmured softly but firmly to Henry, which was what she used to do when thunderstorms drove him out of his own bed and into her arms. She did her very best to comfort him, without crooning or condescending as though he were a baby or a dog, as much for Henry’s sake as for these keepers. She wanted them to know that Henry should be treated with as much dignity as they would afford to each other, and that he was as precious to her as any human being who had walked into or out of her life.

  • • •

  At the zoo, the female chimps despised Henry. The keepers had no idea what to do. Without support from a single female, Henry had no chance of melding with the group, let alone achieving the rank of alpha male.

  There were four adult females plus Max, a baby boy. As the oldest female, Nana had taken up the position of alpha male, and though Henry made no effort to seize power, his very presence posed a challenge to her reign. Each morning during the first week, as soon as the chimps were released from their night cages, Nana and her gang of disgruntled females went after Henry in a screaming blitzkrieg that didn’t cease until he had been chased into the upper reaches of a tree. Sometimes Nana bit at his feet and drew blood, her allies screeching at Henry from below. Henry’s legs shook; he vomited. Nothing he ate stayed down for long anyway, owing to his preference for omelets and sausage over the zoo’s food pellets.

  Joseph, the oldest keeper, felt for Henry. He remembered how Mrs. Groves had held Henry before she’d left. The way she’d cupped the crown of his head was not unlike the way Joseph’s sister Julia had cradled her son’s, though Chip was eighteen years old and lying in a casket. Drunk, he had sped his mother’s car across a patch of black ice and into a tree. Now his photographs were used in the drunk-driving videos shown to high schoolers and DUI offenders, a picture of Chip, pale and unprepared for the flash, and next to this, his Civic like a crumple of metal Kleenex. These thoughts had been fresh in Joseph’s mind as he’d offered Mrs. Groves hi
s handkerchief. She had hesitated before taking it. After blotting her eyes, she’d said, “Thank you,” and pulled herself straight.

  At Joseph’s suggestion, the keepers removed Nana from the sanctuary and kept her in separate quarters for a week. By the time she returned, the other females had grown used to Henry, who most enjoyed playing with little Max. The females had even begun to greet Henry as they would the alpha male, grunting before him as they lowered themselves onto their knuckles, as if doing quick push-ups. Joseph wondered how Henry knew to sit up tall before the bowing female, how he knew to bristle his coat so that he appeared larger than all the others. Whether from memory or instinct, Henry seemed to understand that he could gain authority from these daily greetings.

  When finally Nana returned to the group, she chased Henry into a tree, but none of the other females joined her. The next day, Henry retaliated by staying his ground, bristling his coat and baring the dagger-sized canines that she lacked. When Nana growled at him, he slapped her across the face so hard that she fell and rolled onto her side. Screaming in protest, she fled to the other females, who embraced her and calmed her, but did not defend her.

  •

  Over the next ten years, keepers came and went. A Bengal tiger died after a visitor threw it a fudge brownie that had been sugared with ground glass. The zoo curator was fired, replaced by a woman intent on raising more money. The new curator used the negative publicity to hold a fund-raiser, which supplied the budget to enlarge several quarters so that animals were now kept at a greater distance from the visitors, behind a transparent plastic shield.

  The shield proved frustrating for Henry, who was used to flirting in close proximity to blond women. Before, when a blonde would peer at the cage from behind the hip-high visitor bar, Henry would hoist himself onto the rock closest to her and blow kisses. He’d then drop to his hands and began swaying back and forth, his fur ruffled, ready to mate.