The Wire Monkey

There is a kind of hot and humid summer air on the Eastern Seaboard, mixed with salt coming off the Atlantic, which is like no other. There should be a word for it, a separate descriptor, but if there is, I’ve not heard it. Sticky and thick, it coats the body with an invisible layer of saline sap, and hair takes on the quality of seaweed, stringy and fibrous. I imagine these days are like those in many tropical climates, but in Southampton, New York, there is money and arrogance mixed into the salty atmosphere, making these sultry, stifling days almost unbearable.

My parents had settled in this part of New York to live out their days after a lifetime in Manhattan. Their house was located in the hamlet of Remsenburg, a part of the Town of Southampton on the south shore of Long Island. Covered in weathered cedar shingles, it sat on a gently sloping lawn leading to their dock, which was in a lovely saltwater cove off Moriches Bay, a large body of water separated by a thin strip of dunes from the Atlantic Ocean. Remsenburg had no traffic lights. The original post office of the town was a tiny structure built in 1897, and it was relocated to their property many years before my parents moved in. They converted it to a guest cottage, renovating it with new wainscoting, walls and ceilings as well as up-to-date plumbing. Though it was intended for overnight visitors, no one ever stayed there because it was totally infested with mildew from the moist ocean air. They painted it a pale yellow and the bedspreads inside were an all-too-cheerful periwinkle blue and white gingham; the curtains were made of white French eyelet lace. Their property was the last one on a deadend road called Holly Lane.

All the streets in the area were named after birds, plants, animals or ponds. Actually, there were few streets per se; they were almost all lanes or courts, paths or drives: Cricket Path, Wisteria Drive, Sweetgrass Lane, Meadow Lane, Bridle Path, Woodcock Lane, Sandpiper Court. There were many windy lanes named after the necks of people, fish and other objects: Captains Neck Lane, Basket Neck Lane, Fish Neck Lane, First Neck Lane, Coopers Neck Lane. When I visited, I would often take walks with my husband and use a fake sophisticated, semi-British accent as I made up the names of new thoroughfares in the Hamptons: Pain-in-the-Neck Lane, Poison Ivy Path, Stiff Neck Lane, Albatross Court, Broken Neck Drive, Vampire Squid Path.

Oh dahling, I’m shocked and dismayed that the Shelbys on Bedbug Lane put up such a flimsylooking privet hedge. They might as well have installed a picket fence or window glass. No doubt we will see them at the club and we must try our best to be cordial.

This part of the country is obviously not my cup of tea. The pretension is overwhelming and the quaintness so sweet it makes my teeth hurt. But this is where my parents lived, the grandparents of my two children and my sister’s newborn son. It was in the summer of 1988 that we all gathered for a long weekend in the house on Holly Lane, with the Atlantic Ocean in the distance and the old converted mold-infested post office that everyone was allergic to. My daughter, Emily, was nine and my son, Alex, was four. They were excited to fly from Minneapolis to MacArthur Airport in Islip, Long Island. My father picked us up and drove us to their piece of what is commonly thought of as paradise. When I look back, our enjoyment of all our trips to Remsenburg peaked during this 45-minute drive to the house. After that, it was all downhill.

My sister Alison, her husband and their three-month-old son had arrived the day before. They were all waiting eagerly when the car pulled into the long winding driveway off of Holly Lane. My mother was in the kitchen making several vats of her special iced tea. She simmered the tea for hours in enormous stockpots with lemon, mint and sugar. After all the hugs and hellos, my husband, Peter, took the kids down to the dock, where they looked for small fish swimming close to the surface of the water. There was a swimming pool outside the back of the house, and the shallow end was filled with an array of colorful pool toys my mother had gotten for their visit.

Now that the scene is set, I need to detour briefly to describe a famous psychology study done by Dr. Harry Harlow when he was the director of the Primate Lab at the University of Wisconsin from 1932 to 1974. Harlow studied the effects of maternal deprivation on baby rhesus monkeys in a series of experiments. Basically, what he found was this: baby monkeys fed and raised by their own mother turned out to be normal monkeys. Baby monkeys raised by a wire monkey covered in terry cloth turned out to be neurotic monkeys (reclusive with some odd social behaviors), and the monkeys raised with bare wire mothers (without any soft terry cloth) turned out to be frightened monkeys, often screaming in terror, monkeys that seemed autistic, often soothing themselves with rocking motions. This was a significant albeit controversial study that contributed to the field of psychology concerned with maternal deprivation and attachment. In graduate school, I was fascinated with Harlow’s work. The photographs taken of his laboratory’s rhesus babies with their terry cloth and bare wire mothers were strangely compelling to me. In fact, I copied many of them and pinned them to a bulletin board in my kitchen.
An example:

But I digress: On the third day of the visit to Remsenburg, the temperature was in the 90s and the humidity covered the air with what felt like a hot wet wool blanket. The house had airconditioning units in every room, but for some reason, my mother wanted the air turned on only in their cavernous bedroom upstairs. The rest of the house was broiling. The kids were mostly in and out of the pool, running into the kitchen from time to time for Popsicles or lemonade. Peter and Alison’s husband were outside watching the kids and playing with them in the pool so they were keeping cool. I was in the kitchen pouring myself a glass of ice water and getting one for my sister who was naked in the back guest room nursing her baby. It was so hot that any clothes felt confining. She said that the baby was stuck to her, moist skin to moist skin.

The kitchen in the house was L-shaped; the small base of the L was a desk-like area with a telephone, the enormous New York phone books, pads of paper, a ceramic jar of pens and shelves holding my mother’s cookbooks. As I was filling the glasses with water, my mother entered the kitchen and started yelling so loudly I could barely understand what she was saying. It seems that I had violated her by having placed Alex’s tiny, adorable red sneakers, Keds to be exact, next to the phone books. I had intentionally put them where I could find them, and away from any food preparation. But my mother was coming apart at the seams due to my poor judgment, my inconsiderate behavior and my disrespectful decision to place the little shoes of her grandson at the edge of the kitchen counter desk. (These were, by the way, the sweet iconic little boy shoes of her grandson whom she said she missed and could not wait to see and whom she was spending almost no time with because she was chain-smoking Chesterfields while reading The New Yorker upstairs in her air-conditioned bedroom all afternoon.)

It’s okay, Mom, I said reassuringly, in a tone of voice as soft as hers was loud. I’ll move them right away. I wanted to get them out of the line of traffic and to a place where I could find them.

She screamed, Jesus Christ, Gail. What are you teaching your children - putting shoes on the counter?

I could not believe she was escalating, now calling into question my competency as a parent: They’re just tiny shoes, Mom. About four inches long. You might actually miss them when we’re gone … I did not leave them anywhere near food. Calm down.

Don’t you tell me to calm down, she continued her loud rant. I’ve been watching you today. You’ve been drinking too much water. What’s the matter with you? Do you have diabetes? You have a half a glass in the living room and now you are getting yourself another? What the hell is wrong with you?

Something came over me, watching her rage. I suddenly saw her as someone who had lost her sense of proportion, someone who was screaming as though her daughter had committed a felony. It was like road rage: I was the bad driver and she had gotten out of her car to read me the riot act.

It’s okay, Mom. Really. The house is so hot, the weather’s so humid, that I’m drinking a lot of water. One of these glasses is for Alison.

And where is Alison, for God’s sake? She bellowed. I haven’t seen her all afternoon!

She’s nursing the baby, Mom. I said gently as I put my hands on her shoulders. It is all just fine. The kids are enjoying the pool. Alison’s trying to stay cool while she’s nursing the baby. Dad’s in the den working on his computer project, and I’m in the kitchen getting Alison and myself some cold water. It will all be fine.

She became unglued, screaming: Don’t talk to me that way and get your hands off me!

Feeling trapped in the space with her, I turned away and walked to the refrigerator to get some ice for the two glasses of water I was holding. I noticed a typed quote taped onto the side of the fridge:

Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.

And then it dawned on me, an insight that made me feel enlivened, as though I had discovered the answer to an important question. I put ice in the glasses as my mother watched me. She had an expression on her face that said: You are a freak, you are a disappointment, you are disgusting. This, for some reason, seemed almost comical to me. I hurried down the two halls with the ice water spilling a little here and there. I burst into the room where my naked sweaty sister and baby nephew were and said, in a tone that might have been used by Isaac Newton the moment he discovered gravity:

I figured it out, Alison!! We got the wire monkey! We got the wire monkey!

Alison laughed so loudly I was afraid my mother would hear and barge into the room. So I ran into the bathroom and got two towels so we could laugh into them, muffling the sounds of hysteria and relief as we recognized the experience we shared of our mother. This was a bright spot in an otherwise muggy, oppressive summer day.

My mother had informed my father by dinnertime that I had placed Alex’s shoes on the kitchen counter. He was irritable and gave me a familiar look of exasperation. In truth, I think he was less angry about the shoes and more disgruntled that I had upset my mother. She liked the idea of having her family for the weekend. The reality was just too much for her. Too much togetherness, too many children, too much chaos — and of course, Gail was drinking too much water.

I was wobbly after the trip. It took me weeks at home in Minnesota to regain my bearings. Reality is so often bittersweet. Not everyone gets a real monkey mother. But as I lay on the couch with my four-year-old son reading him a story one afternoon, his red Keds resting on my knees, I knew for sure that he did not have a wire monkey for a mother. There was no bowling alley in my brain. I lived in a city that had streets and avenues, lakes and creeks, thirteen hundred miles away from the Hamptons. Geography was on my side, like a good friend.

My chicken wire mother started to relax after we left. By the fall, she would start enjoying the fantasy of the next visit. In her mind, the weather is outstanding day after day, shoes are on the floor, no one is asking for the AC to be turned on, and her two daughters and grandchildren are behaving beautifully, just as she wants them to, for the entire summer weekend on Holly Lane.