THE MONKEY

 

 

Charlie sits her down to watch a video of the comic Sarah Cooper lip-syncing Trump’s inane prattle about the bible, after his shameless photo-op at the Episcopal Church.

A reporter asks: “Wondering what one or two of your favorite bible verses are. Cooper’s eyes roll back into her head before she opens her supple face and nails Trump: Well, I wouldn’t want to get into it, because to me that’s very personal. You know when I talk about the bible it’s very personal, so I don’t want to get into verses.”

Pina bursts into uncontrollable laughter as the reporter presses for just a single verse and Cooper uses both hands to play a dissonant chord on an imaginary piano. No, I don’t want to do that … the bible means a lot to me, but I don’t want to get into specifics. Then Cooper taps her chin with a finger to indicate the answer is complete.

Another reporter asks a question that also cracks Pina up: “Are you an Old Testament guy or a New Testament guy?” Cooper’s eyes go deer-in-the-headlights, shifting from right to left before answering. Probably equal. I think it’s just an incredible . . . the whole bible is an incredible . . . the whole bible is . . . I joke . . . very much so . . . they always hold up The Art of the Deal, I say my second favorite book. But I just think the bible is very special.

“Play it again,” Pina shouts. “The idiot doesn’t even know the difference between the Old Testament and the New. He’s not opened a bible once in his life.”

Charlie plays it again and when the thirty-seven second clip is done, Pina asks for it once more.

“Gosh, you’re reminding me of my daughter when she was a tiny girl. I’d throw her in the air and catch her and she’d say, “Do again, da-da, do again.”

Pina follows suit: “Do again, Charlie, do again.”

 

If she hadn’t already been through menopause, Pina may have thought she was pregnant, waking up this morning with a craving for pickles. It’s not the store bought varieties she wants, but the type of sweet and sour, thin-sliced vegetables her mother used to prepare. She is certainly not pregnant, though she’s become a bit frightened by her longing to return to the comforts of her early childhood, most often expressed, since the plague has exerted its grip on her, in the desire for foods from childhood. She’s concerned by what this nostalgia, or whatever you want to call it, portends. Is she about to die or, perhaps, entering her second childhood?

In any case, she searches the Internet for quick pickling recipes before heading off alone to Sonoma Market in search of vegetables to pickle. Charlie cast her out of his condo this morning so he could spend a few hours alone with Roscoe. “I’ve neglected the poor bird lately,” he said.

“I’m sorry to have come between you,” Pina responded, with a wink and a rueful smile. “I don’t need exclusivity, Charlie. Stay away from other women and you can spend as much time with Roscoe as you like.” After saying this she wonders at what point she’ll become jealous of the talking bird.

 

Home from the market, with a massive load of vegies: baby carrots with their stems, Japanese eggplant, haricot vert, young beets, cauliflower, zucchini, and red onions, she washes all in a colander. Before preparing the various pickling solutions and rounding up her jars, Pina links her computer with the hotspot, and watches the vast protests in Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago, and Atlanta, as CNN flits from one city to another.

Damn, she’d like to be at one of these protests. With the computer on the kitchen counter, she slices vegetables and measures her solutions, halving the recommended amount of sugar. She will soon be in quick pickling heaven and when her bounty is ready she’ll bring a jar downstairs to Sylvie.

The peaceful turn the protests have taken astonishes her. She’s not clear how it’s happened. Did the cops actually root out all the white supremacist agitators, even though a good number of their own subscribe to those attitudes? The discipline and high energy of the protesters are remarkable—the country is being remade right before our eyes with the inspiration of the masses. She particularly loves the massive yellow letters: B L A C K   L I V E S   M A T T E R that the D. C. mayor ordered painted on the street facing the White House, which is now circled in ugly black fencing to protect the bunker baby from himself. The protesters have made use of the black fencing as a spot to mount posters and lay memorials.

Now the news shifts to San Francisco where a huge crowd of protesters on the Golden Gate Bridge blocks the northbound lanes of traffic. Social distancing appears to be a thing of the past. She can’t go. No, she can’t go.

Once all her vegetables are in jars bathed in pickling solutions, she slices up a cardboard box, finds a couple of markers, and makes signs to hang from the balcony of the deck. Two signs are ubiquitous around town, one in support of Sonoma Valley high School’s 2020 graduates, who missed their live graduation, and the other, which strikes her as curiously cryptic:

YOU  C A N ‘ T   Q U A R A N T I  N  E   L O V E.

She’s been seeing that sign for weeks and hasn’t a clue what it means.

With pencil, and black and red Sharpies, Pina crafts two handsome posters, using statements she noticed while watching protests on TV. One reads:  S I L E N C E   I S   V I O L E N C E, the other: W H I T E   S U P R E M A C Y   C A N C E L E D.  She tapes the posters to the outer balcony rail. It ain’t much, but it’s something.

 

She’s come to town to see what’s opened up this weekend. Sonoma, which has been so barren since the quarantine started, is now brimming over with people. Every parking place in the square is filled. It seems like a typical Saturday in a typical June. She and Vince tended to avoid the square in summer; now it is dangerously exciting. A long line of people waits outside the ice cream shop. Folks dine on linen covered tables outside of the Plaza Bistro. Pina turns up the first alley and notices all the tables filled in the back patio of La Casa. She skips the second alley, with the idea of catching a beer in the patio of Murphy’s Irish pub. The tables are well distanced from each other and there’s actually one waiting for her.

For a moment she wishes Charlie were here and thinks to call him. Has he had enough time with Roscoe yet? But, no, it’s lovely to be here herself, basking in the mild sunshine. At the next table, three white women in their twenties, are talking about George Floyd and about the concept of being complicit. What she can hear of the conversation is intelligent. The woman in the group whose voice projects the most forcibly—a redhead with a perky nose, wearing a crucifix, says, “It’s really counterintuitive, but one can be as guilty doing nothing, as doing something evil.”

The woman beside her, with juicy red lips, shakes her head. “No,” she says, “evil is worse.”

“Silence can be evil,” the first woman asserts. “How about those cops who stood by while George Floyd was murdered right in front of them.”

Pina wants to tell the redhead that she’s right.

Finally the masked server approaches, offering Pina a lunch menu.

“No, I only want a beer. I’ll have a Lagunitas on tap.”

Given a choice between a sixteen-ounce glass or a twenty, she doesn’t hesitate before choosing the twenty. The young women at the next table are now talking about CNN host Chris Cuomo, debating about whether he’s cute or not. Two of them think he is, but the redhead says, “I think there’s something boorish about him. Pina agrees with her again.

On her way out of the alley Pina hears a boisterous crowd on the square. She’s thrilled to see that it’s an actual protest on the square. Tractors, adorned with signs, are parked at the foot of the square. “Black Lives Matter.” “Cultivate Justice.” There are maybe 200 people bunched in the street around the tractors. Everybody is wearing a mask and, because the wind is blowing formidably enough to dissipate any virus floating around, she feels it’s safe to join the others. Notably, there’s not a single law enforcement officer visible. Have they already been defunded?

The crowd is made up almost entirely of young white people, mostly women, but an older black lady with an American flag-styled straw hat holds the megaphone. She balances herself on a long red staff. “I was just driving through town and I saw y’all, and I thought, Sonoma, all these white people—amazing. So I hope you don’t mind me saying a few words. This is doing my heart good. Look at how young you are. You don’t have to be out here, but you are. You’re out here speaking up for justice for black people, for all people. I grew up in Austin, the capitol city of Texas. The Clarksville neighborhood where I lived was founded by freed slaves, but didn’t even have its streets paved until 1975.”

The woman says that she’d like to lead demonstrators in the singing of “We Shall Overcome,” describing it as “a nugget of the Civil Rights era, written by Mr. Pete Seeger.” Before commencing she says, “Only we need to change the tense of the verse. With all due respect to Mr. Seeger, we shall not be overcoming SOMEDAY; we ARE overcoming TODAY.” The crowd responds with a rousing shout. The song, which had always sounded dirge-like to Pina, is far more powerful in its new iteration.

Next a young black woman takes the megaphone and leads some call and response. “NO JUSTICE,” she shouts, and the protesters holler back, “NO PEACE.” “SAY HIS NAME.” “GEORGE FLOYD.”

Pina is thrilled to be a part of this—a genuine protest in Sonoma, the first she’s attended since the Woman’s March, just after Trump’s inauguration. She realized then as she realizes now that it’s women who are the most inspired leaders of these movements.

They now march around the square, at safe distance, with more call and response and, somehow, all the storefronts that she’s familiar with look different. There is something transformative about being numerous. When they’ve made it all the way around the square. Pina stands close to a man she noticed earlier sitting atop his red tractor. She loves seeing a guy in big beard, cowboy hat, and bandana mask standing beside a tractor emblazoned with all manner of Black Lives Matter signs. The man, no doubt noticing her appreciation, gives her a big wink.

Pina also spots a man with a small monkey on its shoulder. Every time there is a round of applause the monkey claps its little pink hands. Monkey see, monkey do. She wonders how much she’s lived her life as a monkey, behaving according to script. The monkey has no choice, but she . . . She’s reminded of a poem, “The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” by Randall Jarrell, which Vince read her more than once in their early days. One line of the poem, in which the woman stands at the cage of an animal, has stayed with Pina:

Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!

Pina gazes again at the monkey and is astonished by how everything she sees is filtered through her monomaniacal consciousness.

Now the young woman with the megaphone introduces herself as a graduate of Sonoma Valley High, who attends Santa Rosa Junior College. She reads a well written and harrowing history of the racism she’s experienced in her life from age five to the present, and then she talks a little bit about white privilege. While in college, Pina had read Peggy McIntosh’s seminal essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” which contained a long list of ways that whites in this culture had unearned advantages. At the time, Pina took the list very seriously and strove to add items to it, but that was a long time ago and her resolve to remain mindful of her unearned advantages has all but disappeared.

The speaker has them all raise two hands in the air and gives the instruction for people to put down a finger each time they’ve experienced one of the racial indignities she reads from a list. These indignities range from being called a racial epithet to losing a job to a less qualified person who happened to be white. As the list proceeds, Pina gazes around the crowd. Most people have not dropped a finger. She notices a few Latinas and black people with many missing fingers. When the list is finished Pina’s fingers are all still stretched tall in the air, emblems not of triumph but privilege.