Beautiful Soon Enough

Cage

Cage Around the corner from my fancy East Side school there’s a window on Lexington Avenue with cages in it. At home I live in a cage too. It’s green, wallpapered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and expensive paintings on our walls; my father collects them, he likes landscapes. They yell at the dinner table, making points with the silverware . They growl like starved animals at each other every night when he comes home from his office on Fifty-Seventh Street. He calls 142 berdeshevsky my mother a culture vulture. He never likes her friends. They yell at feeding time, especially. We’re locked in our apartment and I have to listen to it. School is the getaway, snobby rich girls but they don’t yell. The shop is the real escape. I see it on a Monday, I dream about it for two weeks before I ever go in. Silky animals. I love animals. But for two weeks I won’t go in. Then I stop in front, it’s the monkey. She’s in the window in a cage, my silken savior. The cage is gold metal about three-feet-high and square, thin slats and shiny. The lock gleams too, it looks like a yellow sapphire. She is squatting in it, butt to the sawdust, a piece of bark and lettuce and old carrots, that’s all. How can she eat that? I hate vegetables, I like lamb chops and apricot juice. I decide right then I could bring her meat tomorrow. And a brownie. I promise her I will, through the window, through the cage, through our brains. Her eyes are turned-earth with tiny blue veins around the pupils and a film over them like milk. She’s scratching inside her ear and I think she’s crying. She’s as big as my mouse doll on my bed in my room, but the mouse is bigger than any real mouse. And the mouse has clothes. The monkey is all naked and clean bright white fur with tan tufts on her ribs and at her armpits. She shows her tiny teeth, a speck of lettuce stuck in front. The way she sits I can see her bright pink parts too. It’s her tragic milk eyes that make me want to stay. I go inside the shop and gag right away. It stinks inside. The guy in the grey cowboy hat grunts at me and lets me edge near the monkey in his window. Don’t touch, little girl, ok? You can look but don’t stick your fingers in there, she might bite you. I say ok, really softly. I guess he doesn’t hear. Did you hear? I say yes again, very softly. The rank stink of about fifty different animal bodies makes me feel sick but I just want to get closer to the white monkey. I can’t help seeing it all. I look quickly as if I had to memorize it all for a test and then I can get back to the pearl-eyed monkey and get out. But she is crying. cage 143 There’s an open-topped tank, two feet long. It has a red sign that says Piranha. He’s no real color, just darker than the water, and floating . He sees me. There’s a wall of dogs whining in different octaves. All hungry. A wall of cats. I hate cats. They’re the only animal I hate. A wall of birds, peach and green, turquoise, yellow, red, all cawing and pecking for love. I say, I’ll be there in a minute, little birds. There are wooden shelves of litter and dog cereal and a skinny metal rack of seed branches losing some seeds to the floor, and a turn-around stand that has rubber mouse toys and bell toys and fake fur. The guy in the grey cowboy hat is sitting high in an iron swivel barbershop chair at his counter, with a New York Times all spread open across his lap. My father reads that paper too. I remember how I don’t like barbershops; my father took me to one once, and they cut off all my curls. So you like animals, little girl? He’s being nice but I don’t feel like talking to him. I want to talk to the white monkey. She’s...