Mister Monkey

by Francine Prose

  The other kids, sitting on the rug, poked up their heads like the prairie dogs Edward saw on Animal Planet at his grandpa’s house, where he is allowed to watch TV. Hugo said something in German, obviously not nice, and Dad called him a Nazi pig asshole. Hugo told his dad to please not use language like that in front of the children, who, as his dad may have noticed, had already started their school day; Edward was very late. As usual.

  Hugo’s saying his name stripped off Edward’s cloak of invisibility and left him standing there, not naked, but naked was how it felt. Even his own dad seemed surprised to see him. All the kids were watching now, but Edward didn’t care, the others would admire him even more for having a dad brave enough to call Hugo a bad word.

  His dad said, “What language? Nazi? Pig? Asshole?” He said he was sorry about the Nazi part, but Hugo is an asshole.

  THAT WAS WHEN Edward ran to the elevator, where now he is pushing the button. The elevator door opens and shuts, opens and shuts, without interceding, without rescuing Edward, without even making enough noise to save him from hearing every word.

  Hugo says that Dad is the real asshole. His father is full of shit (zhit) just like the other parents who don’t give a zhit about their kids as long as they get into Harvard or have fabulous art careers and glorify them. Hugo’s English is unusually easy to understand, even from across the loft.

  Finally Dad and Hugo run out of insults, and they stand there, red-faced, breathing hard. They seem to have grown taller. Dad wipes his hands on the side of his pants, which he does when he’s nervous. Only then does Dad look around, in a panic, as if Nazi pig Hugo could have made Edward disappear.

  “Dad? Over here? By the elevator?” It’s lucky that Edward hadn’t taken off his jacket or put his backpack and lunch box away in his cubby. So he doesn’t have to retrieve his stuff with Hugo and the kids watching. Dad says he can push the elevator button if he wants.

  The freight elevator rattles and moans down from a loft pretending to be a school, a school that was never really a school, no matter if Hugo calls it the Sunflower School, no matter how much kids’ art Hugo tacks to one wall. On the other walls are Hugo’s gigantic color photos of homeless people pushing shopping carts and looking even more unhappy than they do when Edward sees them on the street. When Edward passes the public school, he makes his parents stop so he can watch kids his age swinging like monkeys from the jungle gym in the school yard, and he longs for a real school, not a pretend school like this one.

  Only now, he desperately loves his pretend school, only now that he sees it receding like something they are speeding past on a highway: smaller, larger, gone.

  “Am I coming back tomorrow?”

  “We’ll see about that,” says Dad.

  In the elevator his father is still taking shallow panting breaths. Another upsetting question is: Will Mom be mad? His dad seems worried too until they get outside and he calls Mom. Edward can tell that Mom isn’t mad even before his dad ends the call.

  “Mom says whatever. It would have happened sooner or later.”

  First Edward and his dad are relieved, and then he can watch Dad thinking the same thing he’s thinking: What will they do now?

  Dad lifts him into the Volvo that Grandpa bought them, which is double-parked, flashing its lights. Dad buckles him into his car seat and turns on the radio, which happens to be playing Edward’s favorite song, a girl singing about someone lying on the cold hard ground.

  At the office, Dad says he knows Edward won’t mind hanging out with Sophie. Edward is embarrassed just to be in beautiful Sophie’s presence. But Sophie, who is French, sweetly pretends not to notice how much Edward loves her. While his father is in the conference room giving his presentation, Sophie sneaks Edward a diet Coke and an energy bar and shows him how to make a chain from paper clips. She tells Edward to enjoy it because soon paper clips will be going the way of the rotary dial phone, cardboard matches, the typewriter, and the dinosaur.

  The dinosaur? Edward loves dinosaurs! He knows everything about them! He thinks that dinosaurs are more interesting than people. He has a whole collection of dinosaurs, little plastic ones, at his grandpa’s house. He keeps them in a box that used to belong to his Grandma Jane, whom he has learned never to mention in his grandfather’s presence.

  When he blew out the candles at his last birthday party, his wish was that he could see a real live dinosaur—one of the friendly ones, of course. The herbivorous ones. Herbivorous is a word he’s recently learned. Sometimes he just says the word—herbivorous, herbivorous—because something about it tastes delicious, like food, tastes better than what the word means: leaves and grass.

  Edward would like to continue this conversation about dinosaurs. He wants to impress Sophie with his knowledge, he wants to say herbivorous, and he thinks their talk could be steered to species extinction and from there to death, a topic he wants to know more about. Sophie might be more forthcoming about this mystery than his parents and grandfather.

  When you die, does everything stop? How is that possible? And what happens then? Does a person disappear forever? The world is full of dead people. His Grandma Jane, whom he never met, is dead. Whenever he asks about her, his mother says, “She would have loved you.” But that’s all she’ll say, and then she looks away or leaves the room. The last time Edward asked about his dead grandma, his grandpa’s face froze so solid that Edward couldn’t help thinking about how his grandfather was going to die too. His grandfather will die first. Then his parents, then him.

  But before he can decide how to ask what he wants to know, the phone rings, and by the time Sophie hangs up, Edward can’t think how to get back to the subject of dinosaurs, let alone death, so he keeps on stringing paper clips, which is boring. What is he supposed to do with the chain he’s made?

  If only he were back in the Sunflower School, where it’s probably snack time. By now the kids will be drinking the cartons of milk that, according to Edward’s mother, Hugo scams from the public-school education budget. As if the parents aren’t paying enough for Hugo to buy the fucking milk! Will he be allowed to return to school after Dad yelled at Hugo?

  That night his parents call the other parents, and by the next day all the kids have been taken out of the Sunflower School. There is no more Sunflower School, so now Hugo can take down the kids’ paintings and put up more photos of homeless people.

  Edward’s mom tells him that Hugo had to go back to Germany. That’s why he closed the school. Why does Mom think she has to lie to him when he can picture Hugo in his loft, waiting by the elevator for kids who won’t show up, or sitting at his computer and searching for new kids to replace them?

  He’s heard his mom ask another mom, What the hell are they supposed to do now that fifteen former Sunflower School students are being flung on the nonexistent mercies of the Brooklyn public school system? What if he never finds another school and never learns to write and do math, or any of the things he needs in order to grow up? He’ll be like those kids raised by wolves he saw with Grandpa on the History Channel.

  That night, the night after he and his grandfather saw Mister Monkey and when the parents came for dinner, Grandpa was the oldest, so he should have taken charge. He should have made the parents calm down and be nice, instead of being so mean about Hugo. Grandpa should have stopped them before they went so far that Dad knew he could call Hugo bad names without getting into trouble.

  Edward did hear his grandfather try to change the subject from Hugo eating a candy bar to peanut allergies in general. No one understood what he was saying. They just thought he was a goofy old man, and anyway it was too late. The parents had already said everything nasty they could think of to say about Hugo: the school, the name of the school, Hugo sending kids home with the wrong mittens and eating peanut candy. Edward can’t remember Hugo eating the candy. But what if it had killed Alex? What if Alex died? If Alex died, then anyone could. He could.

  Edward never liked Hugo, whose English is hard to un
derstand and who gets impatient when the kids don’t understand his English. He always seems uncomfortable around kids, which seems weird for someone who runs a school. And he makes everything so serious! Last year a kid began singing “Five little monkeys jumping on the bed,” and the other kids joined in until Hugo scolded them for laughing about the fate of innocent animals who may have suffered concussions or brain injuries as punishment for their rowdy unsupervised games.

  But this has been Edward’s second year, and he’s had time to figure out how to make the other kids like him and do whatever he says. Now, assuming his parents ever find a new school for him, he’ll have to start from scratch with all new kids, who are probably already following another kid and doing whatever he says.

  Edward’s real fear, his secret fear, is that he’s brought this on himself. That all of this is punishment for what he did when they went to see Mister Monkey. When he’d asked his grandfather if he was interested in the play, he’d meant to whisper. He hadn’t intended his voice to sound so loud. His grandpa was too nice to make him feel embarrassed, but he knows it was unforgiveable, and when they saw that mean-looking kid outside the theater staring at them, he knew that the boy knew that he was the one, the loud little brat who’d spoiled the whole play.

  His other grandfather, Dad’s dad—whom they rarely see because he’s a judge and busier than the grandpa who retired from the museum—knows someone on the board of education. And after a few days, when his mom and dad take turns bringing him to work, which is fun at Dad’s, hanging out with Sophie, and not so much fun at Mom’s, coloring in a corner of her office while people come and sit at her desk and talk about things he can’t understand, one evening his mother puts down the phone and claps her hands and says that Edward has gotten a seat in the public-school kindergarten. The school with the jungle gym!

  All the former Sunflower School students have been trying to get into PS 39, he’s heard his mom tell another mom. Why do his parents never seem to notice that he’s listening?

  That Edward can go into Miss Sonya’s kindergarten is a victory for his family. His parents are happy. He tries not to worry about the fact that public school started three weeks ago, which means that the kindergarten kids are already best friends. They might as well have known each other since they were born.

  The school is very old and big and smells like sour milk and a refrigerator full of spoiled cheese sandwiches. In other words, a real school. He must have been crazy to want this. The principal, Miss Martinez, who also knows (or maybe has heard of) the friend of Grandpa the Judge, walks him and Dad to his new class.

  Friendly Miss Martinez says he doesn’t have to worry about finding his way around or getting lost because either his teacher or another kid will help him, and pretty soon he’ll know his way around all by himself. He so loves the idea of knowing his way around a new place without grown-up help that he forgets to be nervous until they reach the classroom door.

  The kids fall silent when they walk in. If he doesn’t look at them, they won’t see him, and by the time he opens his eyes, they will have disappeared. He forces himself to look at the teacher, who kneels in front of him so that their faces are on the same level.

  “Edward,” says Miss Martinez, “this is Miss Sonya. Miss Sonya, this is Edward.”

  Miss Sonya is almost as pretty as Sophie. She has yellow hair and is wearing a filmy pale blue dress, so much like the flower-petal dresses that fairies wear in cartoons that he half expects to see shivery wings fluttering over her shoulders. He knows those are girl cartoons. He shouldn’t watch them, ever, and he certainly shouldn’t be thinking about them now. Miss Sonya shakes his hand, solemnly and with just the right amount of pressure, unlike the painful squeeze that Hugo delivered to each child every morning, daring them with his wolf’s eyes, his wolf’s smile, to flinch.

  Miss Sonya looks at him, then looks again, the way grown-ups often do. His grandfather told him that this is because he’s such a beautiful child, but his parents overheard, and Mom suggested that Grandpa dial it down about the beauty. They don’t need Edward knowing that. They don’t want him to use it.

  Edward knows that he’s beautiful. It’s a handicap, not a gift. He is pretty the way a girl is pretty, which is worse than being ugly, which at least gives you the option of scaring kids with your repertoire of ugly expressions.

  Trying not to focus on any one kid, he takes in the patchwork of faces blanketing the room. None of them want him looking at them. He was the king of the Sunflower School. But he won’t be here. It’s way too late for that. He will be the lowliest slave in PS 39.

  “Say, ‘Welcome, Edward,’ class,” says Miss Sonya.

  “Welcome, Edward,” the class chants. Edward hates his name. He wishes his name was Tony, like the fat gangster he saw on TV when his parents thought he was asleep on the couch. Or at least Eduardo, like that guy in the store where his grandpa bought him a soda and chips. No one will be friends with him. That much is clear. The best he can do is not talk too often, not answer any questions, even when he knows the answers. At recess and lunch he will watch the others with a stiff little smile so Miss Sonya will think he’s being included and won’t pity him, which will just make him feel worse.

  Miss Sonya will make the other kids include him, though they won’t see why they should. In fact they’re grateful to Edward for showing up just when they were figuring out that they were going to have to find one kid to despise and exclude. And now he can be the chosen one.

  THAT SAME WEEK Miss Sonya asks Edward to bring in something for show-and-tell. It will only be the fifth show-and-tell this year. They don’t have it every day. Their schedule is complicated, as Edward is just learning. The others already know what to do when, which makes him seem stupid. He was the smart one at the Sunflower School, where they did the same things every day. How could he not have appreciated how awesome that was?

  The kids who haven’t been chosen yet for show-and-tell resent the new kid for being picked first. Especially Terence, who is the boss, the way Edward was the boss of the Sunflower School. Terence is not about to surrender his power to a kid who started three weeks late and who looks like a girl.

  At the Sunflower School, they’d sewn coin purses out of leather, braided together with shoelaces. But Edward knows that bringing in a handmade purse and telling the class about how his old school closed down because some Nazi fascist asshole had a fight with his dad is not the way to make the others see him as someone they want to befriend.

  Edward is searching through his stuff when he remembers the program from Mister Monkey. He and his grandpa got it from the nice lady who showed them to their seats and whom he recognized later in a police uniform dragging Mister Monkey off to jail.

  Part of him is afraid of ever mentioning Mister Monkey again, on the chance that his outburst in the theater has been the cause of everything that has gone wrong since then. And part of him thinks that if he talks about the play, maybe other kids will go see it, and somehow that will make up for his ruining the performance when he went with his grandpa. Maybe that will reverse the curse that made him leave the paradise where he was king and sent him to this smelly school where everyone hates him.

  He’s overheard enough to know that many kids in Miss Sonya’s class go to plays and children’s concerts, music lessons and gymnastics. They think that these activities are cool. Well, he’s gone to a play. He is not an alien from Planet Sunflower School. Regardless of the weird feelings left over from Mister Monkey, he will tell the class about his afternoon at the theater.

  SHOW-AND-TELL COMES right before lunch. The children clean up the tables at which they sit in groups of four. The first kids to clear their tables are the first ones allowed to come sit in the story circle. At Edward’s table are three scowling boys who hardly speak. Because of their lack of teamwork, they are always last to join the circle, and today the circle is closed by the time Edward arrives; no one’s moving to make room. Luckily, Miss Sonya motions for him to
step over the circle—unluckily, into the center.

  Terence’s group is always first: three boys and a beautiful girl named Chloe who is Terence’s girlfriend even though they are only in kindergarten. But today Edward doesn’t care because he has a magic object, a helper: the pamphlet from Mister Monkey. Maybe it wasn’t the greatest play, but he is pretty sure that he can tell the story and get the class interested—way more interested (the word still makes him cringe) than he and his grandpa were.

  Miss Sonya says, “Listen, class. . . . Edward and his grandfather went to see a play. Edward, why don’t you tell us about it?”

  Edward stands in the middle of the rug and tries to look at the other kids, but they’ve merged into a blur of shifty eyes and smirking faces. Doesn’t Miss Sonya see?

  “It was a musical. From a book my grandpa read me. The book was about a brother and sister whose mom is dead. Killed in Africa by hunters who shoot elephants for ivory.”

  “Sad.” Miss Sonya looks worried. She hopes Edward’s story doesn’t get any more tragic or violent. This is only her second year out of Teach for America. She is being closely monitored by the principal, Guadalupe Martinez, who is kind and supportive but who doesn’t want any trouble. There’s a budget crisis. Teachers are being fired, and Miss Sonya’s only ace in the hole is that she is being paid less than the teachers whom they are letting go.

  She asks, “Does everyone know where Africa is? Does everyone know what ivory is?”

  Yes, say the children, including the ones who don’t.

  The children were with him at dead mother. They know the story is sad. They like sad stories. They like stories about death. They want to hear less about Africa and ivory and more about the murdered mom.

  “The kids hardly remember her,” Edward says, and then before the class can recover from the shock of this unimaginable thing, this obvious lie, he says, “They live with their dad and their housekeeper and a pet monkey their mom adopted. They call him Mister Monkey.”