The Pelvis Series

I.

Eve’s father swung her onto his shoulders and gave her a ride to the indoor forest. She pinched his ears. She was farseeing: a giraffe.

“Duck,” her father said as they passed through a door hanging with vines.

A white, plastic sky arched above. She heard a trickle of water, distant screeches of birds. She grabbed a hunk of her father’s hair and gently kicked him; he lowered her to the ground.

At a fork in the path, they peered through the simulated fog seeping rhythmically from vents. Set back against the plastic horizon, between the trees, a small door framed a patch of real sky. Moisture dripped from the ceiling.

Her father raised a hand, cupped his ear. She heard crickets chirping; she nodded. To the left, watching them through a glass wall, was a chimpanzee.

Eve and her father walked down the Ape Path. The chimp kept pace, his brackish eyes inscrutable, his thick lashes feminine and curious. Eve watched the chimp, close enough to touch, to understand. She squeaked her fingers along the glass. In the dense foggy air, she knew the chimp by his steps, his eyes; she knew her father by his neck, the wedge of his back. Her tongue was flat in her mouth: blank, unnecessary.

When the path veered away from the glass enclosure, the chimp disappeared from her view. She yanked on her father’s hand, and he lifted her to his shoulders.

II.

On a dig in South Africa (fieldwork for her linguistics doctorate), Eve unearthed a chimpanzee. It was 3.5 million years dead. She gazed into the empty eye sockets and beige muzzle of the intact skull. An hour later, she found shards of spine.

She worked on the computer, reconstructing the placement of the chimpanzee’s larynx. The partially reassembled skeleton lay on a table covered with black velvet, a cushion and contrasting background for the bones. With the help of the resident biologist—a timorous man with clumps of red back hair welling above his collar—Eve deduced the larynx to be high in the throat, restricting the range of sound.

She massaged her own larynx, low, like all Homo sapiens. She hummed a high note and made a cage of her fingers around the vibration.

That night, Eve got drunk. Three beers for each member of the American team and four each for the Africans because they haggled better, with charm. The hairy biologist produced a bottle of tequila and the Africans clapped and shouted for Eve as she tossed back five shots in five minutes. “You look like Ghana woman,” one man said, and touched her helixed hair. “Where are your people from?”

“Could be Ghana. Could be anywhere,” she said.

A game of charades was organized by the paleontologists who insisted on dividing: one team named Leakey, one, Johanssen. Eve sat next to the biologist and his tequila. When the Leakey group said that sound in charades was as legitimate as Piltdown Man, the game turned into a fight.

Eve leaned into the biologist: “So, Red, do you feed that animal on your back, or what? We all want to know.”

He laughed and pulled a comb from his pocket. “Want to give it a whirl?” he asked, and rapped the comb sharply against her forehead.

“Not here,” she said and staggered from the lab.

In the dark, on a mound of mistakenly excavated twentieth-century rabbit, lion, and hyena bones, Eve sat with her legs sprawled in front of her. The titanic sky rolled down to the earth in every direction, so that Eve stared straight ahead and still looked into the black star-crowded night, a piece of velvet studded with white bones. The biologist tapped her shoulder, and she leaned her head back.

“Gimme that comb,” she said, “and take off that dirty shirt.” A primitive fear, of decay, of the unknown, taunted her from the tar-pit sky. She knew it was eternal and complete. She was fragile, an inevitable fossil. The biologist removed his shirt.

Eve looked at him, at his red fringed pelt and triangular head. Against the night, his silhouette rose pointed and stout, blotting stars. She felt safe; his shape, like a tent, spoke of community. Reaching up, she pulled him onto the pile of bones. “They’re sharp,” he complained, and shrank from the triumph in her voice when she said, “I don’t feel anything,” and closed her eyes against the sky and the words and the unknown.

The biologist sat meekly, allowing her to tug at his red back hair, wincing when she untangled a snarl. “It’s nice,” she whispered to him, her legs clamped around his pale fleecy waist, her fingers wielding the comb like a crude weapon.

III.

For her dissertation research, Eve took a job in Texas working with language-impaired children. One of her cases could not speak; eight-year-old Jamie vocalized and gestured, but was usually unable to make herself understood. During her frequent tantrums, she wrapped her hands with her blonde, waist-length hair and punched her mother mechanically.

No matter how her mother tied Jamie’s hair, the child shook it loose. When she began yanking it out in fits of frustration, her mother cut it into a bob that curved around Jamie’s face in shaggy points. With her short hair, Jamie was unwilling to punch, so she created a new expression of anger. By pointing at the fridge she demanded a juice box and then emptied it in one crushing squeeze, one livid slurp. She tossed the flattened juice box to the floor, then pounced on it and tore it to shreds with her hands and teeth, saving the mutilated plastic straws as trophies. If seriously confounded, she pulled out her own eyebrows and eyelashes and would not allow her mother to attach fake ones. Both speech therapy and sign language failed to help Jaime.

Eve investigated alternate methods. She read about a pygmy chimpanzee, or bonobo, named Kanzi, who learned to communicate through a system of lexigrams, a language called Yerkish.

The system pleased Eve: a computerized board covered with arbitrary symbols, each one representing a word: noun, adjective, or verb in the shape of a spiral, square, semicircle, rod. She saw possibilities: I want pasta, I miss you, I’m tired. A total of seven hundred potential words lined the lexigram board. The center performing the chimpanzee research also sponsored a program for speech-impaired children.

Eve wrote letters, e-mailed, telephoned the center, bombarding anyone who would listen with her credentials and interests. She said she would move to Georgia and agreed to learn the lexigram process first with chimpanzees, then humans, as the center requested.

She was granted a three-year internship (with no pay). She promised Jamie and her mother that she would send for them as soon as she began work with children.

IV.

When they met, Lola grabbed Eve’s hand and brought her to the TV. They spent the afternoon watching a Discovery program on the migration patterns of monarch butterflies. Lola was a bonobo, with immense gaps between her teeth and hands textured like olive meat. She was fond of placing towels on her head; when she pulled the ends around her face, she looked uncommonly like Mother Theresa, benevolent and wise. In sunlight, red highlights streaked her long, black fur. Her ears wiggled when it thundered. She laughed easily, explosive, sounding like seagulls cavorting around a Dumpster. Because of a mild case of arthritis, she was not very dexterous, even clumsy when climbing. The red of her lips bled almost up to her nostrils, and a deep cove of wrinkled forehead interrupted her soft hair. If embarrassed, she covered her face with her hands.

“Lola, Lo-lo-lo-lo, Lola,” Eve sang to her.

What amazed Eve most was the level of comprehension she read in Lola’s eyes. She showed her pictures of Jamie, her own parents, her cat. She learned that Lola was pregnant and that her mother had died when she was eight. When Eve was twenty-four, her parents died in an airplane crash. As soon as she told Lola, she found herself clasped in a vigorous embrace.

The pregnancy was Lola’s third; all her babies had been stillborn. Lola told Eve this using the lexigrams to say, “My babies quiet.” She also told Eve she liked bananas and oranges and disliked the woman with white hair who mopped the floors (“Dirty White Head”), and she hid Eve’s car keys at the end of each day—always in a different spot. Arriving home, Eve worked on her dissertation and wrote letters to Jamie and her mother. She sent them pictures of Lola playing dress-up and drinking vodka and cranberry juice with the American Sign Language chimps: Fouts, Jane, and Darwin. From the ASL chimps Lola learned the hand-signs for “Gimme,” “More,” and “Hurry,” which she eventually combined into a sentence, “Hurry, Gimme More.” In turn, she taught her friends the lexigrams for “Lola Pretty” and “Please Hug.”

Hats and scarves and accessories of any kind thrilled Lola. She loved to try on clothes and look in the mirror; sometimes her hands flew to her face in embarrassment, sometimes her smile stretched happy and gapped. She had a collection of postcards, reproduced prints by Frida Kahlo (her favorite: Diego on my Mind) and Georgia O’Keeffe (she ignored the flower paintings but was fascinated by the bone and sky pieces). She played darts—the bullseye a photograph of Noam Chomsky. She adored UPS deliverers; ripping open packages was one of her assigned chores. She danced to polka music, L. L. Cool J. But only one activity, car rides, evoked cheers of delight. When Eve told her they were going for a drive, Lola wrapped an orange silk scarf around her head, Grace Kelly style. She took her backpack and stuffed it full of bananas, audiotapes, magazines (she demanded Playgirl whenever she was in estrus or if she had just encountered her favorite man, a grad student with green eyes who was studying bisexuality and face-to-face copulation in bonobos). Beethoven remained her favorite composer, from childhood through adulthood, particularly the Seventh Symphony conducted by Herbert von Karajan. Once she and Eve turned onto the open road, Lola put Beethoven in the deck, rolled down her window, and stuck out her hand, tapping against the side of the car and causing many near accidents. She had a hatred for policemen on motorcycles, especially if they wore sunglasses, and Eve always had to speed in case Lola tried to unseat a cop with her long arms.

In winter, Lola pouted. Forced to stay indoors, she used the lexigram board to sign “Bad oranges,” and “Dirty Eve take Good Lola outside.” The year Eve came to the language center, the winter was unusually long. Mid-April, the first warm day, Lola followed Eve around, sensing a treat. “Yes, Lola,” Eve told her. “We’re going for a car ride.”

Lola donned her maternity tank top, her gravid stomach bulging, her baby due in two months. She waddled around, fanning herself with the portable lexigram sheet as Eve packed a picnic basket with grapes, cheese sandwiches, a jar of pickles, and napkins. She stowed the basket in the trunk of the car.

With all the windows rolled down, orange scarf wrapped around her head, and wind rippling her sleek, conditioned fur, Lola waved at houses and children looking out the back of a school bus. She whipped her face into a frenzy of terrifying expressions, the children laughing encouragement and forcing their arms joyfully out the side-windows to give her the finger. She gave it back. The wind inflated her orange scarf and she broke the sideview mirror trying to look inside her mouth.

When they stopped at a gas station, the attendant ran from Lola, who got out of the car and stood on one leg, stretching the other above her head. He locked himself in the booth and stared at Lola’s pendulous breasts, full stomach, and red engorged sex. Since Lola was always allowed to pay for gas, Eve handed her a ten dollar bill and told her to slide it gently under the slot. The attendant whimpered and cried as Lola gave him the money, grunting her friendly grunt.

As they neared the park, Lola became pensive and quiet. Usually when Eve asked her what she was thinking about, Lola ignored her. Eve reached out and touched Lola’s head. She asked, “What are you thinking about?” Lola poked at the lexigram “Mommy.”

“Are you thinking of your Mommy?” asked Eve. “Wuhh, wuh, wuh,” Lola replied in her guttural voice, and twisted her toes. Eve patted Lola’s stomach, sagging under the bottom of the tank top. Tilting the lexigram board, she tapped “Mommy,” then patted Lola’s stomach again and wondered if she herself would ever be a mother. At thirty-eight, three years younger than Lola, she did not feel ready for children.

“Tell me, Lola, what’s in your stomach?” Eve asked, and Lola pointed triumphantly to the symbol, “Baby.” They turned into the park.

Black fur gleaming red, Lola led the way to a path they had used once in the fall, peeled off her tank top and unwound the orange scarf from her head. She hardly walked bipedally now, preferring the protective four-hand stance, her back shielding the life inside her. The woods smelled faintly of scallions. Lola gathered sorrel for Eve and daffodils for herself, some of which she ate. Nostrils flared, she loped ahead, scouting. When the sun drifted behind clouds, the air turned cool. Eve mimicked thrush and sparrow calls, trying to engage the birds in conversation. Lola swatted at mosquitoes and ate the ones she caught. “Good protein,” Eve told her.

On the bank of a small creek, they spread out a blanket and unpacked the picnic basket. A crow circled above them and called out, the sound echoing. The crow chased its own voice, spinning in wide, flirtatious circles. “Too bad humans understand echoes,” Eve said to Lola. “We could have been spared some loneliness.” She folded the paper napkins into triangles.

Once Lola gave birth, the center would concentrate on teaching her baby and monitoring how much he learned from his mother (they already knew it was a boy, but did not tell Lola). When the baby turned three, Lola would stop working altogether—money at the center had to be reserved for learning chimps and post-retirement upkeep was expensive. The center tried to accrue money to study old age in chimpanzees, but no donors were interested, and Lola would be sent to a conservancy with other retired chimps and bonobos, a better fate than the last set of aged ASL chimps who had been shipped to a research institute and injected with hepatitis.

Eve wondered if she would be friends with Lola’s son as she watched her trying to open the jar of pickles, grunting in frustration. Holding the jar out to Eve, Lola mimed a twisting motion with her right hand and furrowed her brow pleadingly.

They ate the entire jar of pickles, Lola teaching Eve how to eat with her toes. When they finished eating, they lay on their sides and flipped through magazines. It began to rain. Plashes of water fell onto the magazines, sticking the pages together. Out of the blanket, they made a roof and huddled together.

V.

Lola retired at forty-five, Jamie’s second year in the children’s program, and the year Eve finished her dissertation and was hired as a permanent member of the center. It was Eve who arranged for Lola’s send-off picnic at her favorite park. Numerous guest speakers signed up for the event: a specialist on hominid teeth Eve knew from her days on the dig, an ethologist, a cultural anthropolgist. Eve had ordered round tables, white tablecloths, and peach napkins folded into swans (in honor of chimpanzee Washoe and her creation of WATER BIRD) for the wealthy sponsors’ table and Lola’s center table where Pan—Lola’s three-year-old son—Eve, Fouts, Jane, and Darwin also sat. Green and white balloons tossed above the back of each chair. Eve was wearing a new spring dress, white and sheer, flecked with little pink roses. She had twisted her hair and forced earrings through her long-closed piercings.

Lola jabbered to Pan and fed him carrots. She tried to rub up against a handsome paleontologist from Kenya. A few children chased stray programs skipping across the lawn. Eve’s group of speech-impaired children sat at the next table, Jamie happily among them. The child’s hair was long again, almost to her waist. She sat on her mother’s lap and used a lexigram board to demand more coleslaw. After only three months in the program, Jamie had begun to communicate. Lately, she combined sign language with lexigrams. Sometimes she said “Mommy” or “Eve” in a whisper. She and Lola wore the same pink party hat.

The paleontologist from Kenya gave Lola a plastic model of a human pelvis. She sniffed it lovingly and toyed with herself. One speaker remained: Eve. After her introduction, she walked up to the podium and stood under an oversized green umbrella stamped with white chimpanzees. She tapped the microphone, unexpectedly nervous. She saw Lola lying on her back with Pan balanced on her hands and feet, playing airplane. Pan giggled, sounding like a small seagull. His fur glowed with a red hue.

Eve talked about Lola and her accomplishments as a student and mother, her generosity, her love of paintings, dogs, Mississippi John Hurt, her long sentences. She told the story of Roger Fouts and Washoe, the ASL chimp, and the day a deaf girl came to the house to visit. Sitting in the kitchen, the child saw Washoe through the window, and at the same time that she signed “MONKEY” to Washoe, Washoe signed “BABY” to the child. Human-raised and cross-fostered, Washoe thought of herself as a Homo sapiens. The first time she met other chimpanzees she disdainfully referred to them as “Black Bugs,” but after a few days she called them “Man” or “Woman,” deciding they were all one people, all primates.

VI.

The picnic was over. Stars crammed the sky; the moon was a tilted crescent. Lola had consumed three pounds of grapes and seven chili dogs. Pan was frisky from too much iced tea. Eve supervised the removal of tables and chairs, and made sure the microphone was returned to the soundman. She took out her earrings and put them in her backpack. She was tired.

At ten, the lights in the park went out. Eve, Lola, and Pan ambled to the van together. The crickets buzzed like power tools: screwguns, circ saws, drills. Lola carried the plastic pelvis and led the way through the woods. She knew where the van was parked. Eve always forgot.

When they came out of the trees and onto the blacktop, they stopped and looked at the sky. The stars pulsed and blazed; the Milky Way cloudy, like the wax on a plum.

“Orion,” Eve said. “And look! There are the Pleiades.”

Lola waved the pelvis. She stood bipedally, and so did Pan. Silently, they gazed up. The crickets buzzed and clicked. A thin cloud sidled in front of the moon. Eve stared at the stars, searching for a pattern.

She asked Lola for the pelvis. She looked at the sky through the hip sockets so the stars were framed in white circles of bone. On the back of Lola’s “Pelvis With Moon” postcard she had read that Georgia O’Keeffe held flowers and bones against the sky to see the objects clearly, to get a sense of foreground and distance.

She pulled her eye farther away from the hip socket: the curve of white bone; the black sky pitted with light.

“Pelvis With Stars,” she said to Lola, and gave the bone back to her. “Like your painting. You know the one?”

Lola held the bone up to her own eyes and hooted. She signed “SKY” to Pan, who copied the gesture, sweeping the air with his hand. He begged for the pelvis in high, pleading grunts.

“Good. Yes. Sky,” Eve said to Pan, making the motion herself.

Lola watched Pan’s hand, then grabbed his thumb and moved it away from his fingers.

“It was a bit slurred,” Eve agreed.

Pan tried again, his hand in front of his face, the arc smooth, expansive. He kept his eyes on his mother: “SKY.”

Lola chuffed and gave him the pelvis.

“That’s right,” Eve said, looking up. “Sky.”