The Monkey Lady's Gift

Back in Tennessee, I was the woman with the color-coded calendar. The teacher who mapped contingencies for contingencies. I had arranged my entire adult life into tidy, manageable increments: lesson plans, five-year projections, sensible shoes. Comfort was the thing I built and rebuilt around myself, the way some people stack sandbags against a flood. I did not yet know that the flood was not coming from outside.

And then, somewhere in my early fifties, the sandbags began to feel like the flood.

He flicked on the flashlight and aimed it at the screen. Two golden eyes stared back. Then the beam caught the rest of it: a green iguana the size of a cocker spaniel, clinging to the outside of the mesh. It turned its prehistoric head slowly to look at us, utterly unbothered by the machete-wielding gringo.

We stood there in silence, Ron naked, me in an oversized T-shirt, both of us frozen in ridiculous combat stances. The iguana blinked once, then released its grip and dropped to the sand with a soft thump. We laughed until tears ran down our faces, until our stomachs ached. We were not dying. We weren't under attack by spirits or monkeys or La Mujer Mono. We were just two middle-aged North Americans scared of a lizard.

They laughed so hard one nearly fell off his stool. One man who spoke some English leaned forward with a grin that spread across his whole face. "You said your husband is tired from having sex."

My face went the color of a stop sign. "No. No, I meant...pescar. Fishing. He went fishing." We both started laughing, the kind of helpless, unstoppable laughter that takes over your whole body. The kind that makes you realize you've been holding a lot of tension somewhere deep in your chest and now it is finally letting go. "We know nothing," I said, wiping my eyes. "Nothing," Ron agreed, still grinning. He paused. "But we're learning."

Her husband was pedaling an old cast-iron sewing machine in the corner. I was too engrossed in searching for water, a clean spoon, and shooing away the snorting pig licking drips of batter from the dirt floor. When the cake batter was settling into two cloth-covered dented pans, I ran outside to announce that I was ready for the oven, when roars of laughter met me.

"What is so funny?" I asked, unaware of my appearance. "You're covered in red cake dye," they hooted. Homemade red grenadine smeared my hands, once-white t-shirt, and legs. I began to resemble an ancient Nahuatl warrior painted for battle. Since there was no mirror available this side of the island, and water was valuable and scarce, I had to spit-clean my war-painted face and body.