She didn’t emerge right away, not that first day. She seemed to prefer the cage, with its impermeable top and the fading odors of her home, safe there from whatever loomed over her, above the high concrete walls of the outdoor enclosure in which the cage had been placed. Sounds came to her: the harsh broken cries of parrots and macaws, the noise of traffic out on the street and the engines of planes that were like insects droning across the sky, the trumpeting of an elephant, a snarl, a roar, and over it all the screeching of monkeys, monkeys and apes.
Vijay
He hadn’t confessed it to anyone, not even his brother, because he wasn’t a dork and didn’t want to be taken for one, like all the other Indians and Chinese he’d been lumped together with in school since kindergarten, but his secret love, his true love, wasn’t for the engineering degree his parents kept pushing him toward, but for animals. He wanted to be a zoologist — or better yet, a field biologist, studying animals in a state of nature, just like on the TV shows. Both Vik and Manny would say things like, Why the zoo all the time, man, what’s the deal? You in love with a gorilla, or what? And he would shrug and say, I don’t know, you got a better suggestion? And they didn’t. Because the zoo was five blocks from the house and he and Vik had been going there since they were kids, just to get out from under the critical eye of their mother, who would have objected if they were going to just hang out on the street like hooligans (Hooligans and I don’t know, gangbangers, isn’t that what they call them?) but found the idea of the zoo vaguely educational. It was a place where they weren’t going to get in trouble anyway — or that was the way she saw it.
By the time they got to the burger place on Sloat across from the zoo, it was already three in the afternoon and it just seemed natural to doctor their Cokes with a hit or two from the bottle, especially since it was a holiday and it was a hair-of-the-dog kind of thing, though Manny said it was disgusting to waste good vodka like that so he ordered an orange drink to go with his. It was a gray day, heavy with mist rolling in off the ocean. The burger place was deserted, the streets were empty. Christmas. They stared out the window on nothing, chewing.
“What time you got to be home?” he asked Manny. “It’s like a special dinner today, right? With like your aunts and uncles and all that?”
Manny ducked his head, took a pull of his orange and vodka. He was in his board shorts and a black hoodie and he was wearing a brand-new Warriors cap, a Christmas present from his sister. “I don’t know,” he said. “Six, six-thirty. And yeah, I got to be there.”
Vik hadn’t said much to this point, his eyes raw and red, his cheeks puffed out as if the burger was repeating on him. “Hey, if we’re going to go,” he said now, “we ought to go because we can’t smoke here and I think I’ve had about enough of sitting and staring out the window on nothing — anybody comes by and sees us here they’re going to think we’re losers, right? Primo losers.”
So they got up and shuffled out the door, Vijay secretly pleased it was his brother who’d got them motivated instead of him because he wouldn’t want to seem too eager, but the fact was the zoo would be closing at dusk and they didn’t really have all that much time. Out on the sidewalk, Vik lit a joint and they passed it hand to hand as they crossed the street to the zoo’s entrance. “So Christmas,” Vik was saying to Manny. “Do you have a tree and all that?”
Manny had his head down as if he had to watch his feet to be sure where they were going. He seemed rocked already. “Yeah,” he murmured.
“That cool?”
“Yeah. We put lights on it, ornaments, colored balls.”
“Spangles? Those silver things, I mean?”
“Tinsel, yeah.”
They were almost at the ticket kiosk now, Vijay digging into his wallet for the family pass their mother renewed each year. All he had to do was flash it at whoever was behind the window, usually a bony red-haired girl with no tits and an onyx stud like a mole under her lip, and she just waved them in — Manny, with his dark skin and black buzz cut, passing for just another brother in the Singh family.
Vik said, “That’s a German thing, you know.”
“What, tinsel?”
“The tree. ‘O Tannenbaum.’ Didn’t you guys have to sing that in elementary school?” Then he was laughing, one of those warm-up laughs that promised more but really wasn’t out of control yet. “I mean, it’s not Mexican or even American, but German. Can you picture it, all those Nazis handing out these scrawny little trees to cheer up the Jews at what, Auschwitz?”
They were there now, at the window, and Vijay was flashing the family membership card, and though the girl wasn’t there—Christmas—but some fat old man instead, it wasn’t a problem. He barely glanced up from his iPhone, the old man — fat, fat as a Butterball turkey stuffed with sausage and chestnuts and cranberries and whatever — fixing them for half a second with his beady brown dog’s eyes, and then he waved them in.
Siobhan
Of course, the wedding didn’t start right away (and the groom couldn’t see the bride because that was bad luck), so she had to go into this little back room that looked like somebody’s office with her sister and her friends, everybody putting on makeup and texting like mad and passing around a silver flask with Sambuca in it. Nobody offered her any, which she wouldn’t have taken anyway, even out of curiosity, because liquor was for adults and she wasn’t an adult and was in no particular hurry to be one. She did have a Red Bull though, and it made her feel as if she were in the final lap of a race at school and beating everybody by a mile.
Then her mother came for them and they were outside in the damp air, the fog misting around them and the smell of the animals sharp in her nostrils. There was a hooting in the distance, one of the monkeys, the ones with voices like fire alarms. It just kept going, this monkey, and when you thought it was going to stop, when it slowed down and the hoots were softer and spaced further apart, it was only gathering breath for the next blast. That was the thing about having the wedding at the zoo — it was weird, but in a good way, because you never knew what was going to happen. Unlike in a church. Here was this thing out of a jungle someplace that didn’t care in the slightest about weddings and caterers and the volume of the string quartet her mother had hired to play the wedding march as they came down the walk and under the roof of the open-air pavilion.
She was watching her feet, afraid to trip or stumble or do something wrong, all the adults standing now and looking back over their shoulders to get a glimpse of the bride, while the string quartet strained to drown out the monkey. All the men were in tuxedos. Some of the women wore hats. There were flowers everywhere. And then, just as she got to where the minister was waiting along with Dylan and the best man, she saw Dylan’s little brother Jason, who was thirteen and a secret smoker of clove cigarettes, Jason, dressed in a suit and tie and giving her his starving zombie look to make her laugh. But she didn’t laugh, though the Red Bull was pulsing through her. She just swept up the aisle the way she’d practiced it at the rehearsal, smiling at everybody as if she were the one getting married — and maybe someday she would be.