We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Read We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Online
Authors: Karen Joy Fowler
ALSO BY
Karen Joy Fowler
NOVELS
Wit’s End
The Jane Austen Book Club
Sister Noon
The Sweetheart Season
Sarah Canary
STORIES
What I Didn’t See
Black Glass
Artificial Things
A MARIAN WOOD BOOK
Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
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New York, New York 10014, USA
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Copyright © 2013 by Karen Joy Fowler
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed
in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in
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Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada
The passages from Franz Kafka’s “A Report for an Academy” are quoted from a translation
prepared by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College (now Vancouver Island University),
Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada. The poem by Issa is quoted from a translation that
appeared on Yoshi Mikami’s Issa’s Haiku home page. Lyrics are quoted from “The Hukilau
Song” by Jack Owens, and “Love Potion No. 9” by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fowler, Karen Joy.
We are all completely beside ourselves / Karen Joy Fowler.
p. cm.
“A Marian Wood book.”
ISBN 978-1-101-59568-8
1. Families—Fiction. 2. Self-realization in women—Fiction. 3. Human-animal relationships—Fiction.
4. Life change events—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. 6. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS35556.O844W4 2013 2013000988
813'.54—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely
coincidental.
IN MEMORY OF
the wonderful Wendy Weil,
champion of books, animals,
and, in both categories, me
. . . Your experience as apes, gentlemen—to the extent that you have something of
that sort behind you—cannot be more distant from you than mine is from me. But it
tickles at the heels of everyone who walks here on earth, the small chimpanzee as
well as the great Achilles.
—F
RANZ
K
AFKA,
“A Report for an Academy”
T
HOSE WHO KNOW ME NOW
will be surprised to learn that I was a great talker as a child. We have a home movie
taken when I was two years old, the old-fashioned kind with no sound track, and by
now the colors have bled out—a white sky, my red sneakers a ghostly pink—but you can
still see how much I used to talk.
I’m doing a bit of landscaping, picking up one stone at a time from our gravel driveway,
carrying it to a large tin washtub, dropping it in, and going back for the next. I’m
working hard, but showily. I widen my eyes like a silent film star. I hold up a clear
piece of quartz to be admired, put it in my mouth, stuff it into one cheek.
My mother appears and removes it. She steps back then, out of the frame, but I’m speaking
emphatically now—you can see this in my gestures—and she returns, drops the stone
into the tub. The whole thing lasts about five minutes and I never stop talking.
A few years later, Mom read us that old fairy tale in which one sister (the older)
speaks in toads and snakes and the other (the younger) in flowers and jewels, and
this is the image it conjured for me, this scene from this movie, where my mother
puts her hand into my mouth and pulls out a diamond.
I was towheaded back then, prettier as a child than I’ve turned out, and dolled up
for the camera. My flyaway bangs are pasted down with water and held on one side by
a rhinestone barrette shaped like a bow. Whenever I turn my head, the barrette blinks
in the sunlight. My little hand sweeps over my tub of rocks. All this, I could be
saying, all this will be yours someday.
Or something else entirely. The point of the movie isn’t the words themselves. What
my parents valued was their extravagant abundance, their inexhaustible flow.
Still, there were occasions on which I had to be stopped. When you think of two things
to say, pick your favorite and only say that, my mother suggested once, as a tip to
polite social behavior, and the rule was later modified to one in three. My father
would come to my bedroom door each night to wish me happy dreams and I would speak
without taking a breath, trying desperately to keep him in my room with only my voice.
I would see his hand on the doorknob, the door beginning to swing shut. I have something
to say! I’d tell him, and the door would stop midway.
Start in the middle then, he’d answer, a shadow with the hall light behind him, and
tired in the evenings the way grown-ups are. The light would reflect in my bedroom
window like a star you could wish on.
Skip the beginning. Start in the middle.
The storm which blew me out of my past eased off.
—F
RANZ
K
AFKA,
“A Report for an Academy”