Try Ex-Lax, someone suggested in a letter from the States, the monkeys might get sick and leave. They helpfully included several bars of the recommended product. My parents called my sister and me into the room. As soon as we trotted in, we spied the slim package resting between our parents on the couch and eyed it with guarded interest. Boxes from overseas were hit and miss. Sometimes we would get candy, more often it was underwear or worse, hand-me-down underwear.

Our books were filled with fairy tales designed to make the mouths of small children water. There were houses built of gumdrops and licorice, cookies that galloped down country lanes, chocolate eggs won by diligent school children, and trucks that cruised neighborhoods, offering up music and ice cream.

My parents held up the Ex-Lax. “This is not for you. It’s to chase off the monkeys, to make them ill. This is not chocolate. You are not to eat this.” Eating had become a great obsession. We climbed trees for fruit, picked bunches of sour grass, roamed the fields with other children in search of doh doh, a spinach-like vegetation that my mother would add to our meal. Doh doh was my favorite food. Sonja, more decadent, chose spaghetti and peas. These we rarely saw.

Our books were filled with fairy tales designed to make the mouths of small children water. There were houses built of gumdrops and licorice, cookies that galloped down country lanes, chocolate eggs won by diligent school children, and trucks that cruised neighborhoods, offering up music and ice cream.

The Ex-lax, with its crisp wrapper, balanced on my mother’s palm. “Trust us, you don’t want to eat this,” my parents said once more, before plotting the downfall of the monkeys. The Ex-lax would go out in the evening, they decided.

In a pinnacle of self-control and filial obedience, Sonja and I gave the Ex-lax a wide berth. So did the neighboring children, who had also been warned. So did the monkeys. Only the ants were drawn to the slabs of exposed chocolate resting on a rock. After a week, my father retrieved the Ex-lax, ants running up his hand. The monkeys watched from the branches as if to say: we are here to stay.

My mother’s response to the garden tragedy was to plant another, this one closer to the house. There was no room for a crop, only a few tomato vines. “I need something new on the table,” she told my father. Together, they tilled the earth, planted seeds, weeded the patch of ground, and tied the vines to stakes, but it was my mother who found particular pleasure in the pale stems that rose toward the sun. When the first fruit appeared, she hovered over the plant like an anxious nursemaid, inducing Sonja and me to take our Fisher Price toys outside and to play near the garden. Constant vigilance, however, could not be maintained. Sonja and I grew tired of staying in the yard; my mother grew tired of posting herself in front a window.

As soon as the first tomatoes were big enough, they were picked green and placed on the windowsill, where they rot. The rest were allowed to ripen, both my mother and the monkeys biding their time, wondering how long they could wait before the other would pluck the fruit right out from under their noses. Sometimes my mother won, and a slice of tomato appeared beside our avocado. More often the monkeys won, the novel fruit carried up a tree and devoured.