We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (17 page)

Later I learned something about the people whose house it was. They had a factory
that made television sets and were very rich. The dog statues had been carved from
pictures of their actual dogs and marked their actual dogs’ graves. They had a party
every Fourth of July with lobsters flown in from Maine, a party that the mayor and
the police chief and the provost all attended. They’d no children of their own but
a gentle attitude toward wayward kids who wandered through. Sometimes they’d offer
you lemonade. They had thick Hoosier accents.

Lowell was stretched out on the sloping grass, his hands behind his head. I went to
lie next to him and the grass was not as thick and soft as it had seemed, though it
still smelled thick and soft. It smelled like summer. I put my head on my brother’s
stomach and listened to his innermost workings.

I was happy then, and happy now, lying on my bed remembering this. How one night I’d
gone to fairyland with my brother, and the very best part was that he’d had no particular
reason to ask me along, nothing he’d needed me to do. He’d brought me with him just
because.

I’d stretched out on the grass beside him, head on his stomach, and tried to keep
my eyes open, afraid that if I fell asleep, he’d go home without me. Fairyland was
all well and good, but I didn’t want to be alone there. Even this part made me happy
to remember. My brother could have left me behind that night, but he didn’t.

In my head, I finished the grid I’d started in the holding cell, the grid of what
was missing and for how long. One, my bicycle; two, Madame Defarge; three: the journals;
four: my brother.

Five: Fern. Where was Fern? Probably my brother knew. I should want to know, too,
but I was too afraid of the answer. If wishes were fishes, I’d soon see my brother
again and nothing he had to say about Fern would hurt me to hear.

But I knew that, both in fairyland and the real world, too, wishes were slipperier
things.

I
PHONED
H
ARLOW AGAIN,
and again got the machine. One more time I asked without pique, without drama, nothing
but calm dignity as far as the eye could see, where Madame Defarge was. The monkey
girl had made another unscheduled appearance, and it had landed her in jail again.
When would she learn to behave with restraint and decorum?

It was still raining—large, icy pellets—and I had no bike, so I phoned The Graduate
next, to see if a ventriloquist’s dummy of Madame Defarge had been left at the bar
a couple of nights before. I don’t think the man who answered the phone understood
the question. I don’t think he gave it the good old college try. It seemed I was going
to have to go and look for myself, whatever the weather.

I spent the next two hours wandering about the town searching for various things I
couldn’t find. I was soaking wet, cold to the bone, my eyes already starting to sting
again because I’d stabbed new contact lenses into them. A living, breathing puddle
of self-pity. Obviously, someone had taken Madame Defarge. I would never be able to
afford the ransom. I would never get her back.

Davis was an infamous hotbed of bicycle theft. Bicycles were taken on a whim; people
would steal one just to get to their next class. The police swept up the abandoned
bikes and sold them at auction once a year, the money going to the local women’s shelter.
I’d see my bike again, but I’d be outbid and I wouldn’t even get to complain, as it
was all for such a good cause. Did I want women to have shelter or didn’t I? I loved
that bike.

I faced the very real possibility that the sight of Officer Haddick chatting so familiarly
with me might have spooked my brother. He must know I’d never deliberately turn him
in. But how many times had Lowell said to me, “You just can’t keep your goddamn mouth
shut”? When I was five, six, eight, ten, a hundred thousand times? I
had
learned to keep my mouth shut, but Lowell had never noticed.

I returned to my apartment, empty-handed, teary-eyed, and frozen through. “My feet
will never be warm again,” I told Todd and Kimmy. “Toes will be lost.” They were sitting
at the kitchen table, playing a vigorous sort of card game. Most of the cards were
on the floor.

They paused long enough to click their tongues sympathetically and then moved on to
their own complaints—an aggrieved list of everyone who’d come by while I was out.

First Ezra, on some lame excuse but clearly looking for Harlow. As a result, he’d
seen the damaged smoke alarm. There’d been a lecture. Todd and I were putting not
only our own lives at risk, but the lives of every single person in the building.
And who was responsible for the safety of these people? On whom were they depending?
Not me and Todd, that was for damned-sure certain. No, it was Ezra himself in whom
they’d put their faith. Maybe we didn’t care if Ezra let them down, but it wasn’t
going to happen. We could take that to the bank.

Next, some loser, some white-guy
baka
in a backward baseball cap, looking for Harlow, had given Todd this puppet-thing
he’d said Harlow had asked him to return. “Ugly on a stick,” said Todd, presumably
about the puppet. And, about Harlow, “Is this like her office now? Her business address?

“Because then Herself drops in. Goes and gets a beer without even asking, takes the
puppet to your bedroom, and says to tell you it’s back in the suitcase as promised.”

“And ‘no harm done,’” said Kimmy. “‘As promised.’”

And then, another knock on the door! Skinny, bleached-blond, maybe thirty years old?
Name of Travers. Looking for me, but since I wasn’t around, he and Harlow had gone
off together. “Putty in her hands,” Todd said. “Poor sad sap.”

The fact that Harlow had hardly touched her purloined beer seemed to bother Todd more
than anything else. She hadn’t even asked and now it just had to be poured down the
sink as if it were a Bud Light or something instead of the last specialty wheat beer
Todd had, a Hefeweizen, from the Sudwerk microbrewery. He wouldn’t finish it himself,
because who knew where Harlow’s mouth had been? “It’s been Grand Central Station for
kisama
here all evening,” Todd said. He turned back to his card game, slamming the jack
of clubs onto the table.

“You bastard,” said Kimmy either to Todd or to his ruthless jack, though I did, just
for a minute, think she was talking to me.

Kimmy was one of those people I made uncomfortable for reasons they themselves couldn’t
figure out. She never looked at my face, but maybe she was that way with everyone,
maybe she’d been raised to think it was impolite. Todd said his grandmother, his mother’s
mother, would never look someone in the eye or show someone her feet, although he
also said she was the rudest person to clerks and waitresses that he’d ever met. “We’re
in America,” she would remind him loudly if he seemed embarrassed. “Every customer
is the king.”

Kimmy cleared her throat. “They said to tell you if you got back in the next hour,
which you barely did, you should join them at the crepe place. They’re having dinner
there.”

So I had only to walk out the door, make another trek downtown in the cold, hard rain,
and there Lowell would be. I had a stirred-up feeling, a little excited, a little
sick to my stomach, a sort of ipecac syrup of happiness. There Lowell would be.

With Harlow.

How could we talk about anything if Harlow was there?

But did I really want to talk about
anything
?

I felt all kinds of urgency. I also felt not quite ready. So I went to my bedroom,
toweled my hair and changed into dry clothes, and then opened the powder-blue suitcase
where Madame Defarge was sprawled over the folded clothes, ass up. I took her out.
She smelled of cigarettes and had a damp spot on her dress. She’d obviously had a
big night. Still, she was fine, hardly a hair out of place. She could go right back
home whenever the airline picked her up, and no harm done, as promised.

Suddenly, weirdly, I felt a pang at the thought of losing her. Life is all arrivals
and departures. “I hardly knew you,” I said. “And now you’re leaving me.” Her uncanny
valley eyes stared up. She snapped her reptilian jaw. I made her wrap her arms around
my neck as if she were also sorry. Her knitting needles poked my ear sharply until
I shifted her. “Please don’t go,” she said. Or maybe I said that. It was definitely
one of us.

•   •   •

T
HE FLIP SIDE
to solipsism is called theory of mind. Theory of mind postulates that, even though
these cannot be directly observed, we readily impute mental states to others (and
also to ourselves, since the bedrock proposal is that we understand our own mental
states well enough to generalize from them). And so we constantly infer someone else’s
intentions, thoughts, knowledge, lack of knowledge, doubts, desires, beliefs, guesses,
promises, preferences, purposes, and many, many more things in order to behave as
social creatures in the world.

Children younger than four have trouble sequencing a jumbled set of images. They can
describe any given picture, but they fail to see a character’s intentions or goals.
This means they miss the very thing that links and orders the images. They miss the
story.

Young children have the innate potential for a theory of mind, just the way Noam Chomsky
says they do for language, but they haven’t developed it yet. Adults and older children
sequence images easily into a coherent narrative. I myself took this test many times
as a child and I never remember not being able to do it, though if Piaget says there
was a time I couldn’t, then there was a time I couldn’t.

In 1978, when Fern was still safely tucked into our family, psychologists David Premack
and Guy Woodruff published a paper titled “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?”
In it, they relied primarily on a series of experiments done with a fourteen-year-old
chimp named Sarah, in order to see if she could infer human goals in observed situations.
They concluded that, within limits, she could.

Subsequent research (that would be my father) raised doubts. Perhaps chimps were merely
predicting behavior based on past experience rather than by imputing another’s desire
and intention. Years of further experimentation have been mostly about improving the
methodology for prying into the minds of chimps.

In 2008, Josep Call and Michael Tomasello took another look at a whole range of approaches
to this question and the results. Their conclusion was the same as Premack and Woodruff’s
thirty years before. Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? They answered with
a definite yes. Chimps do see that mental states, such as purpose and knowledge, combine
to produce deliberate action. They even understand deceit.

What chimps don’t seem capable of understanding is the state of false belief. They
don’t have a theory of mind that accounts for actions driven by beliefs in conflict
with reality.

And really, who lacking that will ever be able to navigate the human world?

•   •   •

A
ROUND THE AGE
of six or seven, human children develop a theory of mind that encompasses embedded
mental states. They’ve long ago mastered the basic first-order stuff—i.e., Mommy thinks
I’ve gone to bed. Next they learn to handle (and exploit) an additional layer—Daddy
doesn’t know that Mommy thinks I’ve gone to bed.

Adult social interactions call for a great deal of this awareness of embedded states.
Most adults do this effortlessly and unconsciously. According to Premack and Woodruff,
the typical human adult can work with four levels of embedded imputation—someone believes
that someone else knows that someone else thinks that someone else feels unhappy—before
becoming uncomfortable. Premack and Woodruff describe this four-level facility as
“not impressive.” Gifted adults can go in as deep as seven layers, but that appears
to be about the human limit.

•   •   •

H
EADING INTO THE
Crepe Bistro for dinner with Harlow and my brother was a challenging exercise in theory
of mind. Had Lowell told Harlow how long it had been since he’d seen me? How excited
was it okay for me to be? Although I trusted in Lowell’s discretion, I didn’t believe
he had the same trust in mine. We both had secrets that the other might not know were
secrets. So I had to figure out what Lowell had already told Harlow about our family,
and he had to figure out what I’d already told her, and we both had to guess what
the other didn’t want said, and all this had to be communicated quickly and in full
view of Harlow, but without her knowing.

Test question: How many levels of imputation do you find in the following sentence?
Rosemary is afraid that Lowell might not guess that Rosemary really doesn’t want him
to tell Harlow about Fern because Rosemary believes once Harlow hears about Fern she’ll
tell everyone else and then everyone else will see Rosemary as the monkey girl she
really is.

And all I wanted was to be alone with my brother. I hoped Harlow had a sharp enough
theory of mind to figure that out. If necessary, I planned to help her get there.
I expected Lowell to help, too.

B
Y THE TIME
I arrived at the restaurant, I had walked so much that evening that my feet ached
all the way up to my knees. I was so cold my ears throbbed. It was a relief to come
inside the little room where the candles were lit, the windows fogged with steam and
breath. Lowell and Harlow were seated in a corner, sharing a cozy fondue.

Lowell had his back to the door, so I saw Harlow first. Her face was flushed, her
dark hair loose and curling around her throat. She was wearing a boatneck sweater
that had slipped off one shoulder so you could see her bra strap. (Flesh-colored.)
I watched her pick up a bit of bread and throw it at Lowell, smiling that dazzle of
teeth. In an instant, I was four years old, left behind on the ground while Lowell
and Fern climbed the apple tree, laughing. “You never choose me,” I was shouting at
Lowell. “It never gets to be my turn.”

I didn’t see Harlow notice me, but she leaned in, said something, and Lowell turned.
Friday night in the bar, I’d recognized him instantly, but tonight he looked older,
more tired, and less like himself. He was incontrovertibly a grown-up now and this
had all happened without me there to see it. Despite the bleached hair, he looked
like our father; he had our father’s nighttime stubble of beard. “Here she is!” he
said. “Hey, squirt. Get over here!”

He stood for a brief hug, moved his backpack and coat from the third chair to the
floor so that I could sit down. All very casual, as if we saw each other often. Message
received.

I tried to shake the feeling that I’d interrupted something, that
I
was the intruder.

“The kitchen was closing,” Harlow said, “so Travers ordered you dinner.” They appeared
to have already downed several glasses of the bistro’s excellent hard cider. Harlow’s
spirits were high. “But we were just about to give up and eat it. You got here just
in time.”

Lowell had gotten me a salad and a lemon crepe. It was very close to what I would
have ordered myself. I felt the prickling of tears over that, how, after all these
years, my brother could still order dinner for me. He’d done only one thing wrong
and that was to put bell pepper in the salad. I’d always picked the bell pepper out
of our mother’s spaghetti sauce. Fern was the one who liked bell peppers.

“Hey!” Lowell was leaning back, rocking his chair onto its hind legs. I was afraid
if I looked at his face, I wouldn’t be able to look away again, so I didn’t. I looked
at his plate, dribbled with melted cheese. I looked at his chest. He was wearing a
black, long-sleeved T-shirt with a colored landscape and the words
WAIMEA CANYON
underneath. I looked at his hands. They were a man’s hands, rough-looking, and on
the back of the right one, a large raised scar ran from his knuckles up his wrist
until it vanished under his cuff. I was blinking hard; these things swam in and out
of focus. “Harlow tells me she didn’t even know you had a brother. What’s that about?”

I took a breath, tried to find my balance. “I save you for special occasions. My best,
my
only
sibling. You’re too good for every day.” I wanted to match Lowell’s insouciance,
but I don’t think I succeeded, because what happened next was that Harlow pointed
out that I was shaking so much my teeth were clicking.

“It’s freezing outside,” I said, more crossly than I meant to. “And I had to walk
all over town, in the rain, searching for Madame Defarge.” I could feel Lowell looking
at me. “Long story,” I told him.

But Harlow had started speaking before I finished. “You should have just asked me!
I knew where she was!” And to Lowell, “Rosemary and I were out on the town Friday
for a wild night of puppetry.”

We were both of us speaking only to Lowell now. “Harlow hasn’t told me about her family,
either,” I said. “We really haven’t known each other long.”

“Not a long friendship,” Harlow agreed. “But superdeep. Like they say, you never know
a person till you’ve done time with them.”

Lowell smiled affectionately at me. “Done time? Little Miss Perfect here?”

Harlow took hold of his wrists, so he turned instantly back to her. “She has an arrest
record”—moving his hands until they were about a foot apart—“this big,” Harlow said.
They were staring into each other’s eyes. I felt my heart beat three times—tick, tick,
tick. Then she let go of him, gave me a quick smile.

I thought the smile was a question—is this okay?—though I wasn’t sure about which
part. Okay to tell him about our arrest or okay to hold his hands and stare into his
eyes? I tried for a look back that said no, absolutely not to both, but either she
didn’t understand or had never been asking in the first place. Or was no longer looking
in my direction.

She went on to tell him about our first trip to the pokey. The big house. The slammer.

But she managed to do this without mentioning Reg, so I went back and folded him in.
The good Reg, not the bad one. “Her boyfriend,” I said, “came right over and bailed
her out.”

She dealt with it deftly. Reg quickly became not just bad, but scary bad, and me,
well, I became someone so generous that I’d let a person I hardly knew hide out in
my apartment. “She’s awesome, your sister,” Harlow said to Lowell. “I said to myself,
self, there’s a person you want to know better. There’s the person you want to have
your back in the world.”

The story of the lost suitcase followed and then the discovery of Madame Defarge and
then the night on the town. Harlow told most of this, but added frequent invitations
for me to join in. “Tell him about the car wash,” she said, so I did that part while
Harlow pantomimed us groping through the soapy tentacles in the dark, planning our
weddings.

She even included Tarzan and my theories of relativity, only now it appeared she’d
always agreed with me. When she said Tarzan’s name, Lowell put his scarred hand on
my sleeve and left it there. I’d been about to take off my coat, but then didn’t.
That weight on my arm seemed like the only attention I had from him; I wasn’t about
to lose it.

To be fair—every story Harlow told, every detail in every story, redounded to my credit.
I was the one with the cool but wacky ideas. I was the one who could be counted on.
I stood up for myself and I stood up for my friends. I was a ball. I was a blast.

I was so not what was going on here.

I do believe that Harlow meant to be kind. I do believe that she believed that I wanted
her to sell my brother on a bunch of good qualities I didn’t truly have. She could
neither know nor help how she looked, with the candlelight painting her face and hair
all different colors and that reflected shine in her eyes. She made my brother laugh.

Pheromones are Earth’s primordial idiom. We may not read them as readily as ants do,
but they make their point. I’d come assuming we’d be ditching Harlow as soon as we
could. Then the hard cider flowed and the stories wound about themselves until, like
Escher prints, they’d swallowed their own tails. And I had another think coming.

The evening ended with all three of us back in my apartment, Madame Defarge liberated
once again, sexily kicking up her heels. She touched Lowell’s cheek. She told him
he was très cool and also, paradoxically, très hot. He was one quick ticket to ooh-la-la
land.

Lowell reached out, brushing past Madame Lefarge’s skirt and all the way to Harlow.
He held her hand for a minute, stroking over her palm with his thumb. He pulled her
closer. “Don’t toy with me, madame,” Lowell said, his voice so soft I barely heard
him.

And Madame Defarge’s accent went straight to Memphis. “Not yet, sugar,” she answered
just as softly. “But I surely am planning to.”

“Speaking of puppets,” Todd said to me, with a contemptuous nod toward Lowell. He
still hadn’t figured out Lowell was my brother. When the penny dropped, he felt so
bad he gave me his bed and went to spend the night at Kimmy’s. He even said I could
play his brand-new Nintendo 64, because an offer like that would have made
him
feel a whole lot better.

I excused myself and went to the bathroom to peel my contacts off my insulted eyes.
My jaw ached from the way I’d been forcing it to smile. Sometime between my salad
and crepe, I’d stopped wanting to be Harlow’s friend and started wishing I’d never
met her. I felt bad about this—my jealousy, my anger—what with her saying all those
nice things about me. Though I was pretty sure she didn’t like me nearly as well as
she was claiming.

Anyway, she didn’t know how long Lowell and I had been apart.

But he did. I was even angrier with him. He’d abandoned me to our parents and their
sad, silent house when I was only eleven years old. And now, reunited for the first
time in a decade, he’d hardly looked at me. And had no more willpower than a bonobo.

Todd’s room smelled like pizza, probably because there were two old slices in a box
on his desk, tips curling up like the tongues of old shoes. Also on the desk—a lava
lamp, very retro, that swelled and splatted and threw off a slight reddish light.
No end of comic books in case I couldn’t sleep, but no worries on that score. Twice
Reg called and woke me up and twice I had to tell him I had no idea where Harlow was.
I thought that Harlow must have heard the phone and known it was Reg, known that she
was making me lie to him, which gave me the permission I’d been missing to be as mad
at her as I liked.

I knew that Reg knew I was lying, and that he knew that I knew that he knew. Maybe
science says that the best of us can manage only seven levels of embedded theory of
mind, but I say I could go on like that indefinitely.

•   •   •

A
ND THEN,
just like the old days, Lowell came and got me in the night. He was wearing his coat
and backpack. He shook me awake without a word, gesturing for me to come, and waited
in the living room while I got ready, dressing in my same clammy clothes, since anything
dry was back in my own bedroom with Harlow. I followed him out the door. In the darkened
hall, he put his arms around me and I smelled the wet wool of his lapels. “How about
a piece of pie?” he said.

•   •   •

I
CONSIDERED PUSHING
him away, answering with something nasty, but I was too afraid he was leaving already.
I settled on brief. Sullen but deniable. “Sure.”

He obviously knew his way around Davis, knew, in the wee hours of the morning, where
the pie was. The streets were deserted and the rain had finally stopped. We moved
from streetlight to streetlight toward a spectral mist that drifted continuously in
front of us but couldn’t be entered. Our footsteps echoed off the silent sidewalks.
“How are Mom and Dad?” Lowell asked.

“They moved. To this little place on North Walnut. It’s so weird how they’ve fixed
it up—like a model home or something. None of our old stuff is there.” Already, against
my will and only provisionally, I was softening. It felt good to share my worries
and irritations about our parents with someone equally responsible for making them
miserable. More so, if we’re being honest. This was what I’d hoped for whenever I’d
imagined seeing Lowell again, this exact moment when I could stop being an only child.

“How’s Dad’s drinking?”

“Not too bad. Though I’m not there, what do I know? Mom’s working for Planned Parenthood
now. I think she likes it. Playing tennis. Playing bridge.”

“Of course,” said Lowell.

“There’s no piano in the new house.” I gave Lowell a minute to deal with this disturbing
news. I didn’t say, She stopped playing the piano when you left. A car passed in a
spray of water. A crow, hunching over the warm streetlight as if it were an egg, scolded
us from above. Maybe in Japanese.
“Ba! Ka! Ba! Ka!”
We were definitely being called rude names; the only question was the language. I
told Lowell this instead.

“Crows are very smart. If they say we’re idiots, we’re idiots,” he answered.

“Or it could just be you.” I used the neutral sort of tone you adopt when you want
to claim later that you were only joking. Maybe I’d softened, but I hadn’t forgiven.

“Ba! Ka! Ba! Ka!”

I could never, in a million years, have distinguished this particular crow from any
other, but Lowell told me that crows are good at recognizing and remembering people.
They have unusually large brains for their bodies, a proportion similar to chimpanzees.

I felt my pulse stutter at the word
chimpanzees
, but Lowell said nothing further. We walked past a house on B Street, where the trees
had all been stuffed with balloons. There was a banner over the front door, still
illuminated by a porch light.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARGARET!
Fern and I used to get balloons on our birthdays, though Fern had to be watched every
moment so she didn’t bite one, swallow the rubber, and suffocate.

We passed Central Park. Even in the dark, I could see how all the grass had been drowned
in the winter mud; the ground was slick and black. Once I’d made mud-shoes for Fern
and me from paper plates and shoestrings. Fern wouldn’t wear hers, but I’d tied mine
onto my feet, thinking I would walk over the mud in them like snow-shoes over snow.
You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says.

Though no one admires you for it.

“I tried to read Dad’s last paper,” Lowell said finally. “‘The Learning Curve in Stochastic
Learning Theory.’ I could hardly follow from one paragraph to the next. It was like
I’d never seen those words before. Maybe if I’d gone to college.”

“Wouldn’t have helped.” I told him briefly about Thanksgiving and how Dad had annoyed
Grandma Donna with his Markov chains. I mentioned Peter’s SATs and Uncle Bob’s conspiracy
theories and I almost told him Mom had given me her journals, but what if he’d wanted
to see them? I didn’t want to admit, even to him, that they were lost.

We walked into Bakers Square, with their gingham curtains, laminated place mats, and
Muzak. It wasn’t a bad setting for us, very old-school, as if we’d stepped back a
decade or more to our childhoods, though perhaps a bit too brightly lit. The Muzak
was even older—Beach Boys and Supremes. “Be True to Your School.” “Ain’t No Mountain
High Enough.” Our parents’ music.