Monkey Justice: Stories

by Patti Abbott

  Now this is where Superman didn’t do me any favors. He looked down, saw what had happened and took off. He had that “oh, shit” look on his face, the one Dave used to get when I came after him with a baseball bat before he was totally awake in the morning.

  It turned out Superman was no more eager for bad press than the next guy.

  The cops didn’t believe my story. After they scrapped Dave off the sidewalk, (and he really did look kinda like those flattened people in comics) they came right upstairs. That’s the trouble with having a full-time doorman. They’re always there to take the package, hold the door, or identify the body. Even one compacted into two dimensions. He knew where we lived, of course, and how Dave used me for target practice.

  I’m still hoping Superman will do the right things and get me out of this fix. How can he be a super- hero if he lets a blameless woman go to jail when it was him that dropped the ball? Or dropped Dave, that is.

  Right now though, I am one of those people you always see in his stories, looking out my cell window into the night, muttering “Great Caesar’s Ghost” under my breath. Whatever happened to Truth, Justice and the American way?

  MONKEY JUSTICE

  The first indication there was something wrong came from the night nurse.

  “Two babies with black hair long enough to be braided!” she said, handing Cheryl her new daughter. “Is that your sister down the hall?”

  Cheryl shook her head. “I guess most babies look alike.”

  “Not to an old nursery nurse like me.” The nurse’s fingers splayed across her generous hips. Shaking her head, she helped the baby find Cheryl’s nipple.

  An aide brought in the birth registration form the next morning.

  “It’s Elizabeth Helen Tracey. Not Willa Tracey Manor.” Cheryl said. As she said the name aloud, a frisson of electricity—a warning of some sort—shot up her spine.

  Stephen and she had decided months before that traditional names sounded best.

  “Elizabeth or Michael,” he’d suggested. “Trendy names usually turn out to be a mistake.”

  She really didn’t mind that Stephen chose the baby’s name. Having a baby had been her idea although he’d raised no real objections.

  Mother and child were dressed and ready to go by eight the next morning. Stephen walked in looking especially handsome in his black knit shirt and gray slacks.

  “Look,” he said at once, “there’s something I have to tell you.” And he did tell her—in a crush of terse sentences, grimaces, expressions of regret, lame justifications. “Never thought it’d turn out like this. Both of you in here at once. She…” He shivered and looked out the door again. “Heather was three weeks early. You were two weeks late.”

  Cheryl sat in frozen silence trying to make sense of it. Two women gave birth to Stephen’s daughters twelve hours apart, and the upshot was Daddy was “going home” with the other “mother.” The frissons she’d experienced earlier quickly evolved, shooting through her body like bolts of lightning. Could the heart stop or the brain explode in an otherwise healthy woman? As a scientist, she should know the answer.

  “I know I’ve been a shit.” He was continuing, refusing to wind down.

  The baby fussed a little, and Stephen motioned to Cheryl in some imperceptible way to pick Libby up. Just the smallest flick of his hand and she was up on her feet. Had he motioned similarly when he wanted his dinner, the TV channel changed, sex? She’d never noticed.

  “I know it’s a shock but you’ll do better on your own—better than she would,” he continued, putting the forms in his breast pocket. “You—you’ve got a doctorate!” For the first time perhaps her degree seemed to please him.

  Later she remembered that Stephen never once picked up his child. Didn’t inquire if the baby was nursing well, what her blood type was, how much Libby weighed. Did he think any flash of interest indicated weakness, the possibility of a change of heart?

  Cheryl, her mother, and Libby took a cab home. Stephen used their car to transport his new family. Baby Willa and her flashy mother, Heather, went home in Cheryl’s red Taurus, making for a funny future anecdote, should Cheryl ever acquire a sense of humor about it.

  Two days later, Cheryl and her mother burned everything of Stephen’s. The things that wouldn’t burn, they set out on the curb—even those items she could have sold—his stereo, his camcorder, his leather jacket. She cried for a week and then filed for divorce. Stephen never spent a single day with his daughter in the house they’d bought with the idea of a family the year before.

  The other woman—Heather—occupied her thoughts from that day forward. A constant tallying, perpetual frustration, a jolting reminder at every turn was her legacy more than the physical loss of her husband. Over the years, the two women met only a handful of times. Libby had a good relationship with her half-sister, Willa, but it was hard for Cheryl to have her around.

  Fifteen years later, Cheryl opened the door and heard Stephen leaving a message on the machine. He always closed with a joke—as if she and Libby were in the audience at one of his retirement-planning seminars. Like it or not, she felt her pulse quicken as she found a hanger in the closet. Would a twenty-year marriage with its inevitable familiarity and frustrations have cooled her ardor?

  She’d meant to be home by seven but got stuck closing the lab, a lengthy process with the attention the monkeys were used to. Someone had allowed bedtime rituals to get out of hand and now the hugs, the songs, the tummy rubbing was interminable. Cheryl was not the tummy-rubbing sort and especially resented tucking Jimmy Carter in three times, but both her research assistants were allegedly down with the flu. She wondered briefly if Ruhan and Ellie were actually having sex in their student digs on Hancock Street.

  “Libby, are you up there?” Cheryl called, seeing the note on the fridge a second later. Her daughter insisted on writing on the wrong half of the post-it, so her messages hung like pink bats in flight from the stainless steel door.

  “At Maude’s house,” Cheryl read. Libby had closed her note with a smiley face. Could her daughter be that innocent or was it all a ruse to mask that fact that Libby and Maude were hooking up with a pair of pimply boys at the mall? Nowadays fellatio shared the intimacy level of her generation’s spin the bottle.

  Upstairs, Libby’s uniform was flung across her bed, her books dumped on the floor. Cheryl hung up the uniform, straightening the collar, brushing at little imperfections on the navy wool, smoothing the skirt. Stephen had just paid for new uniforms.

  “Has she grown again?” he’d asked, hunting in his breast pocket for a checkbook. He looked at Cheryl speculatively. “You’re nearly 5’7, right? With my 6’ 2,” Lib should easily hit 5’8 or 9.”

  Tall was preferable from his tone. Irrationally, she felt good about having produced the taller child, about pleasing Stephen.

  When she finally listened to Stephen’s message, it was another tedious summary of their financial arrangements, ending with,

  “I don’t guess Eugene will want—or be able to contribute financially—should you eventually cohabit?”

  She made a rude noise to the empty room. Her boyfriend, Gene’s job at the Science Center barely paid him a living wage. On the few occasions when the men had run into each other, Stephen treated Gene as insignificant, not even worth the effort of being outwardly rude. She was secretly afraid Stephen took his cue from her. It was convenient, if pathetic, to have a Saturday night date with someone who made so few demands, someone who could understand her work…to a point, someone who serviced her needs in an efficient way and then went home to one of those anonymous suites at an area motel.

  The capuchin monkeys “participating” in PRC experiments were socially housed and benefited from a program of environmental enrichment. That’s what the web pages, the, the center’s brochure, and the introduction to every grant proposal Cheryl wrote promised. University and federal regulations assured the capuchin monkeys of a nicer life than most of the students enjoye
d: they were never asked to share beds, go hungry, suffer corporeal punishment, or wake to bullets whizzing by their heads. Life at the Primate Research Center included up-to-date housing, advanced enrichment techniques, a nutritious and varied diet, a top-notch medical team, a huge assortment of cutting-edge toys and games, and a library of musical selections. A discussion over whether to hang artwork in their common room was not unusual. A monkey had only to show a preference for Bach, or grapes, or the color purple and it was seen to.

  Five articles and a three-hundred page book had resulted from the four-year study on cooperation among the PRC monkeys with Cheryl named first author on the majority of publications. The team had learned, for instance, that rewards obtained through joint effort were shared more readily than rewards given for individual achievements. A video produced by two MFAs in film production proved irresistible at her presentations. A chimp or a gorilla was one thing; a capuchin monkey was something else. The “ah” factor, she called it.

  Cheryl’s new research looked at perceptions of fairness among the capuchins. All the monkeys seemed capable of discerning preferential treatment, especially where food was involved.

  She was considering the recent enigmatic behavior of a monkey named Pacino the next morning when Libby came thundering downstairs, her socked feet skidding on the bottom steps.

  “Hey, Mom, guess what? Dad says Willa’s going to spend a semester in Seville next year.” Her daughter sat down abruptly to her usual breakfast: two pieces of multi-grained toast smeared with peanut butter and a banana. Her food preferences closely approximated the monkeys at the PRC.

  “Did your father just call?”

  “He told me last week.”

  “How long has Willa been studying Spanish?” Cheryl’s hand shook as she picked up her coffee. How in the world could Heather’s daughter be that fluent already?

  “Same as me—since fifth grade.”

  Libby was studying French, but after five years, she couldn’t put together a sentence without stumbling over the most basic conjugations, and her accent was appalling. Both girls attended expensive private schools enrolling only girls. Cheryl had insisted on a sexually segregated school after much research and Heather followed suit, deferring to Cheryl’s judgment. But it was Heather who’d first demanded the private school, eventually dislodging over $50,000 a year between the two girls. Should Cheryl insist on public school and then watch Willa go off to Harvard, leaving Libby behind at State? Each daughter profited from the other mother’s demands.

  Could Willa possibly be bright? Cheryl had never factored in this possibility.

  “Does St. Bea’s offer an exchange program in sophomore year?”

  “I hope you’re not thinking I’d want to go off to Paris. God, it’s my worse subject, Mom! I’d sooner…” An apt example of what would compare with the horror of semester in Paris eluded her. “Anyway, Willa’s a sophomore.”

  “How could she be a sophomore? She’s the same age as you.”

  They all knew the dates of the girls’ birth well enough. It was the principal event of their lives. Sometimes she wondered what would have happened if the events had been separated by a week or two. Would Stephen have moved seamlessly between two households, never tipping his hand?

  “They accelerated her.” Libby rose, dumped the last of her breakfast down the disposal, and put her tablemat in the drawer—a stream of milk running down the red plastic as the drawer slid shut. “Didn’t you know that?”

  Her left sock was drooping and she leaned over to yank it up, bending from the waist. Cheryl could see her pink briefs. The back of her heavy reddish-brown hair was still damp, her uniform minus a button, and her legs in need of a razor.

  A semester in Seville! There was no reason on earth for a high school student to go abroad for four months. Maybe a ten-day trip, but not a whole semester! Why hadn’t Stephen told her about Willa’s acceleration? She removed Libby’s placemat from the drawer and wiped it off.

  Like all PRC monkeys, Pacino was born in captivity—a suburban primate used to coddling. Cheryl watched him now as he scampered across the yard, looking for Bette probably. He was dogging Bette now. Relationship upheavals could wreak havoc with research. It was important the monkeys reacted to the proper stimulus. A new romance, a sudden feud, could throw their results off.

  Pacino suffered a head injury several weeks earlier. Formerly, the troop peacemaker, he was now the village scoundrel, stealing food, engaging in hostile shoves. He was also attempting to recast his role from that of a subservient male to a more dominant one. Only through the use of a muted style could a satellite male hope to attain more status, especially with the females in the troop.

  But Pacino didn’t get it. If monkey intelligence could be accurately measured, Cheryl was convinced she’d find satellite males were more intelligent than the alphas, who only had to throw their chests out to succeed with the females.

  She dialed Gene’s cell just before eleven. “Guess what? Stephen’s sending Willa to Seville in the fall.”

  “Permanently?” Gene asked.

  “Of course not permanently! She’s going for an entire semester though.” She could hear water running, echoing voices, the clatter of enamel. “What are you doing there, Gene?”

  “Mopping up the bathroom. One of the fourth graders just had a nosebleed. Poor kid…”

  “So what do you think I should do?”

  “About what?”

  She sighed. “About Willa’s trip to Seville?”

  “What can you do?”

  How like Gene to give in on everything just because doing otherwise was difficult. “Stephen didn’t even tell me Willa accelerated. She’s already a sophomore.”

  “Probably thought it’d make you feel badly.”

  How like Gene also to try and find the good in Stephen’s actions. “He told Libby right away. I hate it when the other three all know something I don’t.” For a high school dropout, Heather excelled at coming up with ways to open Stephen’s checkbook, to capture his interest, to retain her position of primacy.

  “Listen, I’ve gotta go, Cheryl. I have another group coming in at 11:30 and their experiments aren’t even set up.” There was a clattering sound just then, as if he had merely dropped the phone rather than hung it up.

  Before she could move forward on a plan to extract some conciliatory prize for Libby, progress on her current research project intervened. Justice for monkeys, it seemed, was measured in grapes. Nearly all the monkeys balked at trading a cement token for a cucumber slice after a monkey was awarded a grape in plain sight. Not that the team hadn’t known the animals preferred grapes to cucumbers. What no one was sure of was whether they would classify grapes as a superior “prize.” And, in the most extreme scenario, when one capuchin had watched another receive a grape without even having to trade a cement token for it, the female threw her cucumber away even though she had already “paid” for it.

  Ellie called her in immediately. “Bette put up with the cuke on the first round. But the second time we offered her a cucumber slice instead of a grape, she wouldn’t go for it.”

  “And you’re sure she understood?”

  “Oh, she understood all right. Glow Worm …well, she just flaunted it. And when we finally handed over the grape, Bette waved it in the air like a trophy and ran all around the room showing it to everyone.”

  “For Pete’s sake,” Cheryl said. “It’s not like they don’t get grapes all the time.”

  “Well, she hasn’t gotten over it,” Ellie complained. “She’s making all the others upset.” The ruckus was nearly deafening.

  “Bette made need a timeout,” Cheryl said.

  Although there was really no reason to believe this sort of punishment had any meaning to the problem animal, it often meant something to the other monkeys and the lab techs—a little peace. A sulky animal was tedious.

  “Put her in the isolation cage.” Cheryl covered her ears. “Show her no mercy.”

 
She got hold of Stephen the next day and he showed up that night.

  “Seville, Stephen! Isn’t she a little young?”

  “It’s not until next fall,” he told her. “She’s at the top of her class, you know.” He chuckled a little. “She does seem more like you than Heather at times. Sometimes I wonder if the girls were switched at birth. They looked almost like twins then. Remember?”

  “And how come you didn’t tell me Willa skipped ninth grade?”

  “Oh, that. Well, it’s not like Libby can’t go to Spain, too. What’s good for the goose is good for the goose.”

  “Paris, Stephen. Elizabeth’s studying French—the more difficult language,” she added. “With some concentrated tutoring, we could get her into shape.”

  “She’s more into hockey and basketball than academic stuff. And doesn’t she hate to be away—even overnight?”

  “We can have Libby ready by the following year. This is an opportunity we—she— can’t turn down.”

  Cheryl’s brain was racing with ideas about how to get Libby ready for the trip. She had a whole university at her disposal after all—a French department with an expensive language lab, an exchange program with several French universities, a French language film series every spring, dozens of graduate students looking for extra money. Libby would learn to speak French if she had to drag her to a tutor’s house every afternoon.

  “It’s only fair that you pay for some extra tutoring for Libby, Stephen. You’ve put her in an awkward….”

  “I guess you know what’s best for your daughter,” he interrupted, pulling out his checkbook. “Have I ever deprived her of anything?”

  “Our daughter,” Cheryl corrected him. “We may have to work on this together, Stephen. She’s usually more responsive to your cues than mine.”

  “Well, I just don’t know how much time I’m going to have next year.” His eyes flashed. “Heather’s pregnant.”

  An immediate and profound silence filled the room more solidly than any words. “Can you imagine our delight after all these years?” he finally added. Cheryl looked at him blankly. Had he really said what she thought he’d said?