We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (12 page)

“Can you get him for us?” the other man asked.

“My brother’s with Fern,” I said. I rubbed my hands on the thighs of my pants to get
the itch off. “He’s gone to live with Fern.”

Mom came out of the house and gestured for me to join her on the porch. She took me
by the arm, put me behind her, so that she stood between the men and me.

“FBI, ma’am,” the almost bald man told her. He showed her a badge. He said my brother
was a person of interest in a fire that had caused $4.6 million of damage to the John
E. Thurman Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at UC Davis. “It’d go best for him if
he came to talk to us of his own accord,” one of the men said. “You should tell him
that.”

“Who’s Fern?” asked the other.

•   •   •

M
OST OF THE RATS
that Lowell had released were recaptured, but not all. Despite our father’s dire
predictions, some survived that winter and the next one, too. They went on to have
full lives—sex, travel, and adventure. For many years after, there were hooded-rat
sightings in Bloomington. One rat was found in a shoe in a dorm room closet, another
in a downtown coffee shop. Under the pew in the campus chapel. In the Dunn cemetery,
eating the buttercups on a grave dating back to the Revolutionary War.

T
HEN
I
WAS FIFTEEN,
biking on my own through the beautiful, autumnal IU campus. Someone shouted my name
as I pedaled past. “Rosemary! Wait up,” this someone called. “Wait up!” So I waited
up and it was Kitch Chalmers, now a student at the U and seeming genuinely glad to
see me. “Rosemary Cooke!” she said. “My old buddy from back in the day!”

Kitch took me into the student union, bought me a Coke. She chitchatted a bit and
I listened. She told me that she regretted the wildness of her youth and hoped I wasn’t
making the same mistakes. She warned me that some things, once done, couldn’t be undone.
But she was on a better path now. She was in a sorority and her grades were good.
She was getting an education degree, which was something I, too, should think about.
You’d probably be a great teacher, she said, and to this day I have no idea why anyone
would have thought that, though it is what I eventually did.

She had a nice boyfriend, who was off on his mission in Peru, she told me, and he
didn’t let a week go by without calling her. Finally, she asked if we ever heard from
Lowell. She never had. Not one word since the day he’d left. She thought she deserved
better than that. We all deserved better, she said, we were a nice family.

And then she told me something I didn’t know about the last time she’d seen Lowell.
They’d been walking together to his basketball practice, she said, when they ran into
Matt. Matt my favorite grad student, Matt from Birmingham. Matt whom, after Fern left,
I’d never seen again.

Matt who’d known I loved him, but hadn’t even said good-bye.

It turned out, Kitch said, that Matt had left Bloomington with Fern. He’d seemed surprised
when Lowell didn’t already know that. Other chimps, separated suddenly from their
families, had sometimes just died with no clear cause but grief. So Matt had been
sent along, had volunteered, in fact, to help with the transition. He’d taken Fern
to a psych lab in Vermillion, South Dakota. This lab housed more than twenty chimps,
and was run by a Dr. Uljevik, about whom Matt had nothing good to say.

Although Fern was clearly suffering from the shock and terror of the move, Dr. Uljevik
insisted on limiting the time Matt had with her to a few hours a week. He’d put Fern
at once into a cage with four larger, older chimps, and when Matt told him that she’d
never been with chimps before and couldn’t they introduce her slowly, Dr. Uljevik
said no. He said she had to learn her place. She had to learn what she was. Dr. Uljevik
said, “If she can’t learn her place, we can’t keep her here.” He never once, in all
the time Matt had spent there, had called Fern by her name.

“Then,” Kitch said, “Lowell just lost it.” She’d tried to make him go on to basketball
practice. She was afraid he’d be benched for the Marion game. She’d told him he had
a responsibility to his teammates, to the whole school, heck, to the whole town.

“‘Don’t effing talk to me about responsibility,’” he’d said (which I doubted. Lowell
never said
effing
in his life). “‘That’s my sister in that cage.’” They’d had a fight and Kitch had
broken up with him.

Kitch had never known Fern, and so, like everyone else in town, she’d never really
understood; Lowell’s reaction still struck her as extreme and inexplicable. “I told
him I didn’t want to be the girlfriend of the guy who lost the game to Marion,” she’d
told me. “I wish I hadn’t said that, but we were always saying horrible things to
each other. I thought we’d make it up later, like we always did. He sure used to say
some horrible stuff. It wasn’t just me.”

But I barely heard that part, because I was still hearing what she’d said earlier.
“Out there in South Dakota,” Kitch had said, “Matt said they treated Fern like some
kind of animal.”

•   •   •

I
T’S HARD ENOUGH
here to forgive myself for things I did and felt when I was five, hopeless for the
way I behaved at fifteen. Lowell heard that Fern was in a cage in South Dakota and
he took off that very night. I heard the same thing and my response was to pretend
I hadn’t heard it. My heart had risen into my throat, where it stayed all through
Kitch’s horrible story. I couldn’t finish my Coke or speak around that nasty, meaty,
beating lump.

But as I’d biked home, my head cleared. It took me all of five blocks to decide it
wasn’t such a bad story, after all. Good old Matt. Twenty other chimps for friends,
a new chimp family. The cage clearly just an interim measure before she was moved
into Dad’s farm. Lowell had no gift for belief and faith. Lowell, I thought, Lowell
was capable of leaping to some crazy conclusions.

Besides, if there
had
been a problem with Fern, Lowell had surely taken care of it by now. He’d gone to
South Dakota and done whatever needed to be done. And then he’d moved on to Davis,
California. The FBI had told us so. My own government. Would they lie?

At dinner, I adopted my usual strategy of saying nothing. The spoken word converts
individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you’ve gone
over that cliff. Saying nothing was more amendable, and over time I’d come to see
that it was usually your best course of action. I’d come to silence hard, but at fifteen
I was a true believer.

A
ND THEN
I
TRIED
to never think of Fern again. By the time I left for college, I’d come surprisingly
close to achieving this. It had all happened so long ago. I’d been so young. I’d spent
many more years without her than with her, and most of the years I’d had with her
were years I didn’t remember.

I left home, the last of the children to do so. Though Mom had acquiesced to this
out-of-state nonsense, her voice on the phone that first year was ragged. I couldn’t
come back for the summer and still qualify for in-state tuition during my sophomore
year, so I didn’t. Mom and Dad came to visit in July. “At least it’s a dry heat,”
they kept telling me, though once the thermometer tops a hundred I think that’s just
crazy talk. We drove around campus; wound, without noting it, past the old arson crime
site, the lab now fully operational.

Then they went back to Bloomington, where, in August, they moved house. It was a strange
feeling, to know that once again I lived somewhere I’d never seen.

With no conscious decision regarding the matter, I found myself avoiding classes that
dealt with primates. No genetics, no physical anthropology, and certainly no psychology.
You might be surprised at how hard dodging primates can be. Take Introduction to Classical
Chinese and find yourself devoting a week to Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, and the
chaos he wreaks in Heaven. Take a European literature class and find on the syllabus
Kafka’s “A Report for an Academy,” with its ape narrator, Red Peter, which your professor
will tell you is a metaphor for being Jewish and you’ll see how it might work that
way, but it’s not the most obvious reading. Take astronomy and maybe there’s a section
devoted to exploration, to those pioneering dogs and chimps of space. You might be
shown the photos of the space chimps in their helmets, grinning from ear to ear, and
you might feel an urge to tell the rest of your class that chimps grin like that only
when they’re frightened, that no amount of time among humans will change it. Those
happy-looking space chimps in those pictures are frankly terrified and maybe you just
barely stop yourself from saying so.

So it’s not true that I never thought of Fern. More that I never thought of her unless
prompted and then I never lingered there.

I came to UC Davis both to find my past (my brother) and to leave it (the monkey girl)
behind. By monkey girl, I mean me, of course, not Fern, who is not now and never has
been a monkey. In some unaccessed part of my brain, somewhere in that thinking that’s
below language, I must have still believed it was possible to fix my family and myself,
live our lives as if Fern had never been part of us. I must have believed that this
would be a good thing to do.

Checking into the freshman dorms, I made a decision never to talk about my family.
I wasn’t a talker anymore and I anticipated little difficulty in this. But I was surprised
to find that the families we’d all left behind were, often as not, the topic du jour
and harder to avoid than I’d hoped.

My first roommate was an
X-Files
obsessive from Los Gatos. Her name was Larkin Rhodes, a natural blonde who dyed her
hair red and made us all call her Scully. In states of high emotion, Scully’s cheeks
turned from a scrubbed pink to white to pink again, so quickly it was like time-lapse
photography. She started talking about her family practically the minute we met.

Scully had gotten in first, chosen a bed, and thrown her clothes onto it in a heap
(they stayed that way for months; it was like a nest she slept in), and was putting
up posters when I opened the door. One poster was, of course, the famous “I Want to
Believe” from
The X-Files
. The other was from
Edward Scissorhands
, which she said was her very favorite Johnny Depp. “What’s yours?” she asked and
I might have made a better first impression if I’d had one.

Fortunately, Scully was the oldest of three sisters and accustomed to compensating
for lesser minds. She told me that her father was a contractor who worked on high-end
houses—houses with rolling ladders in the libraries, red carp in the fountains, closets
the size of bathrooms, bathrooms the size of bedrooms. He spent his weekends at Renaissance
Faires, wearing velvet hats and saying good morrow to the wenches there.

Her mother designed cross-stitching kits and marketed them under the company name
of X-Rhodes (pronounced
Crossroads
). She gave craft workshops all over the country, but was particularly popular in
the South. Scully had a pillow on her bed with a cross-stitched aerial view of the
Great Wall of China, a display of thrilling chiaroscuro—really, it was as if you were
there.

Her mother had once made Scully miss a high school dance in order to clean the bathroom
grout with bleach on a toothbrush. “That there tells you everything you need to know
about Mama. She has Martha Stewart on speed dial,” Scully said. And then, “Not like
for real. Just kind of psychically.” She fixed her sad blue eyes on me. “You know
how everything seems so normal when you’re growing up,” she asked plaintively, “and
then comes this moment when you realize your whole family is nuts?” By the time I’d
heard all that, I had known her for maybe twenty minutes.

Scully was appallingly gregarious—so outgoing she was practically incoming. Everything
seemed to happen in our room. I’d come back from class or dinner, or I’d wake up in
the middle of the night, and there’d be a half-dozen freshmen, sitting with their
backs against the walls, carrying on about the Whac-A-Mole dynamics of the homes they’d
just left. Their parents were so weird! Like Scully, they’d just figured that out.
Every single one of them had weird parents.

One of them had a mother who’d once grounded her a whole summer because she’d gotten
a B-plus in biology. Her mother had grown up in some part of Delhi where they didn’t
abide B-pluses.

One of them had a father who made the whole family stand at the refrigerator and down
a glass of orange juice before going out for breakfast, because restaurant orange
juice was too expensive to order, but you could hardly call it breakfast without.

One night the girl across the hall, Abbie something or other, told us she had an older
sister who, at sixteen, said that back when she was three, their dad used to make
her touch his penis. Abbie was lying across the foot of my bed when she said this,
her head on one hand, black hair falling like a fountain around her bent arm. She
was probably wearing a tank top and flannel plaid pajama bottoms. She slept in these,
but she also wore them to class. She said that everyone in L.A. went to school in
their pajamas.

“And then, after everyone goes into therapy and takes sides, and no one is speaking
to anyone anymore,” Abbie said, “she suddenly remembers he didn’t; she maybe only
dreamed he had. And she’s like
still
pissed off at everyone who didn’t believe her, because what if it had been true?
She’s a crazy person,” Abbie said. “Sometimes I truly hate her. Like the rest of the
family is fine, you know? And then this one crazy sister ruins it all.”

This was so serious no one knew how to respond. We all sat and watched Scully paint
her toenails with gold glitter, and no one said a word. The silence went on too long,
turned awkward.

“Whatev,” Abbie said, which in 1992 meant you didn’t really care no matter how much
it had sounded as if you did. She didn’t just say this; she used a hand sign as well—index
fingers up, hands joined at the thumbs into a W. That we had forced her to
whatev
us made our silence so much worse.

Whatev
was the first hand sign I learned at college, but there were several popular then.
There was the thumb-and-index-finger L held against the forehead, which meant
Loser
. The
whatev
W could be flipped up and down, W to M to W to M, in which case it meant
Whatever, your mother works at McDonald’s.
’Cause that’s the way we rolled back in ’92.

Doris Levy spoke up. “My father sings in the grocery store,” she offered. She was
sitting with her arms around her knees on the floor by Scully’s golden toes. “Top-of-his-lungs
loud.” Old-school rock and roll piped in over the intercom, and her father in the
deli, picking up all the cheeses and smelling them, belting away.
Mama told me not to come. Wake me up before you go-go.

“Maybe he’s gay,” Scully suggested. “He sounds kind of gay to me.”

“One night at dinner, out of nowhere, he asks me if I respect him,” Doris said. “What
the fuck am I supposed to say to that?” She turned to me. “Your parents are probably
pretty weird, too?” she asked. I caught the whiff of collusion. I got that we were
filling the silence as a team so that Abbie wouldn’t regret having told us what she’d
told us. I got that it was my turn now.

But I flubbed the handoff. I was still hearing Abbie’s voice—
and then this one crazy sister goes and ruins it all
—and everything else was someone shouting at me from a distant, stormy shore.

“Not really,” I said, and stopped so as to not talk about my parents. Who were, after
all, as ordinary a pair of people who’d tried to raise a chimp like a human child
as you were ever going to find.

“You are lucky to be so fucking normal,” Scully told me and everyone else agreed.

What a scam I’d pulled off! What a triumph. Apparently, I’d finally erased all those
little cues, those matters of personal space, focal distance, facial expression, vocabulary.
Apparently, all you needed to be considered normal was no evidence to the contrary.
This plan of moving halfway across the country and never talking to anyone ever again
was working like a dream.

Except that now I’d achieved it, normal suddenly didn’t sound so desirable. Weird
was the new normal and, of course, I hadn’t gotten the memo. I still wasn’t fitting
in. I still had no friends. Maybe I just didn’t know how. Certainly I’d had no practice.

Maybe sedulously making sure that no one really knew me was an impediment to friendship.
Maybe all those people coming in and out of my room
were
friends and I just hadn’t realized it, because I’d been expecting more. Maybe friendship
was not as big a deal as I’d thought and I actually had lots of friends.

Inferential data suggests otherwise. I wasn’t asked along when Scully and a Brady
Bunch of other freshmen went off to Tahoe for a weekend to ski. I learned of it only
afterward, the plans carefully not laid in my room, not discussed in my presence.
On the trip, Scully had hooked up with an older guy from Cal Poly, who slept with
her one night and then wouldn’t speak to her the next morning. This had to be so thoroughly
talked through that I overheard, and Scully saw me overhearing. “We didn’t think you’d
be into it,” Scully said, “coming from Indiana and all. Like
you
need to go somewhere and see snow.” Awkward laugh, eyes darting about like pinballs,
cheeks aflame. She was so embarrassed I felt bad for her.

•   •   •

I
F YOU’VE EVER
been a college undergraduate taking Philosophy 101, you’ve probably encountered the
concept of philosophical solipsism. According to solipsism, reality exists only inside
your own mind. What follows then is that you can only be certain of your own status
as a conscious being. Everyone else might be some sort of mindless marionette operated
by alien overlords or cat parasites, or possibly running about with no motivation
at all. You’ll never prove otherwise.

Scientists have solved the problem of solipsism with a strategy called
inference to the best explanation
. It’s a cheap accommodation and no one is happy about it, with the possible exception
of those alien overlords.

So I can’t prove that I’m different from you, but that’s my best explanation. I infer
this difference from the responses of other people. I assume my upbringing is the
cause. Inference and assumption, smoke and Jell-O, nothing you could build a house
on. Basically, I’m just telling you that I feel different from other people.

But maybe you feel different, too.

The average chimp friendship lasts about seven years. Scully and I shared a bedroom
for nine months. We never had a serious quarrel or falling out. And then we packed
up, sashayed off into our separate lives, and haven’t spoken since. Say good-bye to
Scully. We won’t be seeing her again until 2010, when she friends me on Facebook for
no discernible reason and with nothing much to say.

•   •   •

F
OR MY SECOND YEAR,
I answered an apartment-share advertisement I’d found on the Food Co-op bulletin
board. Todd Donnelly, a junior majoring in art history, turned out to be a nice, quiet
guy, a guy who took people at their word, which is a dangerous but generous way to
live in the world. I heard a lot more about his Irish father, from whom he got his
freckles, and his Japanese mother, from whom he got his hair, than he heard about
my parents, but he heard more than most. By then I’d figured out the way to talk about
my family. Nothing simpler really. Start in the middle.

One night Todd managed to procure, through his own mysterious methods, an animated
version of
The Man in the Iron Mask
, done by Burbank Films Australia. Alice Hartsook, his girlfriend at the time (Todd
was such an idiot to let her go), came over. They took the couch, heads at either
end, feet heaped in the middle, toes wriggling. I lay on the rug with some pillows.
We ate microwaved popcorn and Todd discoursed on animation in general and the Burbank
style in particular.

You know the story. One twin is the king of France. One twin is thrown into the Bastille
and forced to wear an iron mask so no one will ever see his face. The twin in prison
has all the kingly qualities. The real king is a real asshole. Toward the middle of
this cartoon there is a lovely ballet under a firework sky. Oddly, that was the moment
at which I found I couldn’t breathe. On the television—pirouettes, arabesques, and
a shower of colored stars. On the floor—me, sweating, heart running uphill, gulping
for air but unable to open my lungs. I sat up and the room went dark, revolving slowly
about me.