We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (23 page)

. . . I soon realized the two possibilities open to me: the zoological garden or the
music hall. I did not hesitate. I said to myself: use all your energy to get into
the Music Hall. That is the way out. The Zoological Garden is only a new barred cage.
If you go there, you’re lost.

—F
RANZ
K
AFKA,
“A Report for an Academy”

I
N THE YEARS
after Fern,
we’d made a habit of traveling on Christmas. We went twice to Yosemite, once to Puerto
Vallarta. Once to Vancouver. Once all the way to London, where I ate my first kippers,
and once to Rome, where my parents bought a small cameo of a young girl for me from
a vendor outside the Colosseum because he’d said the girl looked like me, that we
were both
bellissima
. And Dr. Remak, who taught German literature at IU but had hidden talents, set it
into a ring for me when we got home and I felt
bellissima
whenever I wore it.

We’d never been religious, so Christmas had never meant that to us. After Lowell,
we mostly gave it up altogether.

When I finally arrived in Bloomington at the bitter end of 1996, the only sign of
the season was a small potted rosemary bush pruned into the shape of a Christmas tree.
It sat on a table by the front door, perfuming the entryway. No wreath outside. No
ornaments on the rosemary. I had decided not to tell my parents that I’d seen Lowell
until we’d gotten through Christmas. The lack of visible merriment told me the day
itself was still too fragile, my mother too unstable.

There was no snow that year. On the afternoon of the twenty-fifth, we drove to Indianapolis
and had our holiday supper with my Cooke grandparents. It was, as always, a wet meal.
The mashed potatoes were soggy, the green beans limp. The plates were heaped with
things indecipherable under a lake of brown gravy. My father drank like a fish.

As I recall, he was hoisting his glass that year in honor of the Colts’ kickers being
chosen for the Associated Press’s All-Pro team. Election to the All-Pros was a distinction
that generally eluded Indianapolis. He tried to involve his father in the celebration,
but Grandpa Joe had fallen asleep at the table, mid-sentence, like a man hit by a
spell. In retrospect, this was the descending doom of Alzheimer’s, but we didn’t know
that then and were affectionately amused.

My period was coming on and I had the dull weight of that in my abdomen. It gave me
an excuse to go lie down on the bed in the room where I’d slept the summer we lost
Fern. Of course, I didn’t say I was bleeding, but something so oblique and midwestern
that Grandpa Joe didn’t understand it at all and Grandma Fredericka had to whisper
it to him.

The harlequin print was still on the wall, just as it’d always been, but the bed had
a new frame, wrought iron, twisted into posts and headboards and leaved like ivy.
Grandma Fredericka was morphing from her faux-Asian period into full-blown Pottery
Barn.

This was the room in which I’d once spent all those weeks thinking that I was the
sister who spoke in toads and snakes, the one who’d been driven out to die alone and
miserable. This was the room in which I’d figured that Lowell had told everyone I
was a big fat liar and since Lowell never lied about anything, everyone had believed
him. This was the room in which I’d been the mal de vivre to Fern’s joie.

That story about Fern and the kitten was such a terrible one. If I’d made it up, that
was truly unforgivable.

Had I?

I turned off the bedside lamp and lay down facing the window. Across the street, the
neighbors’ Christmas lights dripped from the eaves like icicles, casting a pale glow
into the room. I thought of Abbie, the girl in my freshman dorm, who’d told us one
night how her sister had claimed their father molested her and then changed her mind,
said she’d only dreamed it. “And then this one crazy sister goes and ruins it all,”
Abbie had said. “I hate her.”

And Lowell: “If you tell anyone, I’ll hate you forever.”

It had seemed fair enough to me that evening in the freshman dorm. Fair enough to
hate someone for telling such an ugly lie.

And back when I was five, fair enough for Lowell to hate me. I’d promised not to tell
and I’d broken that promise. It’s not as if I hadn’t been warned.

Our winter coats were piled on the bedcovers. I pulled my mother’s parka over my feet.
She used to splash herself with an eau de toilette called Florida Water, when I was
little. The perfume she used now was as unfamiliar to me as the smell of the home-model
house where my parents now lived. But this room smelled exactly the same—stale cookies
and no staler than when I was five.

We used to believe that memories are best retrieved in the same place where they were
first laid down. Like everything else we think we know, that’s not so clear anymore.

But this is still 1996. Step into my head as I pretend to be five again, as I try
to feel exactly what I’d felt when, at the end of another day in exile, I’d lie down
on this bed in this room.

What came to me first was my guilt over not keeping my promise. Second, the despair
of having lost Lowell’s love forever. Third, the despair of having been sent away.

More guilt. I’d taken the kitten from his mother, who’d cried about it, and I’d handed
him to Fern. And still more, because I’d left this part out when I’d told on Fern,
pretended that she’d acted alone. Whatever Fern and I did, we generally did it together
and we generally took the heat as a team, too. It was a point of honor.

But then I’d drilled down to outrage. Maybe I did share in the blame, but I hadn’t
killed the cat. That was all Fern. It was unfair not to believe me, unfair to punish
me most. Children are just as finely tuned as chimps to unfairness, especially when
we’re on the receiving end.

So maybe I hadn’t told the whole truth. But I wouldn’t have felt that powerful sense
of aggrievement if I’d lied.

On the bed with my mother’s coat wrapped around my feet, hearing the murmur of dishes
being done, sports being discussed, the traditional holiday gang-up of Grandma Fredericka
and Mom over Dad’s drinking, a rerun of a young, skinny Frank Sinatra caroling from
the television, I made myself go over the whole ghastly memory again. I looked for
cracks in the finish; I watched myself watching myself. And then something surprising
happened. I realized that I did know who I was.

In the face of that screen memory, still vivid enough in my mind to subvert the whole
concept of memory with the efficient, targeted flight of a math proof; in the face
of all those studies suggesting that character is unimportant in determining action,
and also the possibility that I am, from your perspective, just a mindless automaton
operated by alien puppet-masters, still I knew I had not made up that kitten. I knew
it because the person I was, the person I had always been,
that
person would not do
that
thing.

I fell asleep then, and in the old days my parents would have picked me quietly up,
driven the whole way to Bloomington, and carried me into my room, all without waking
me. In a Christmas miracle, the next morning, when I opened my eyes, I would have
been home and so would Lowell and Fern.

•   •   •

I
’D THOUGHT TO
tell my parents about Lowell that very night. I was in the mood for it after all that
painful soul-searching, and long car rides are as good as confessionals—or so I’m
guessing, never having been to confession—for uncomfortable conversations. But my
father was drunk. He tipped his seat back and fell asleep.

The next day seemed unpropitious for reasons I don’t remember but which probably had
to do with my mother’s mood, and then my grades arrived and, useful as a diversion
would have been, that didn’t seem right. So my visit had only a few days left by the
time I finally told. We were sitting at the breakfast table and the sun was pouring
in through the French doors that overlooked the backyard deck. The trees out back
made a screen so thick that sunlight rarely hit the room. When it did, we took advantage.
The only animals to be seen were a well-behaved party of sparrows at the bird-feeder.

You already know about Lowell’s visit, so instead of repeating all that, I’ll tell
you what I left out: Harlow, Ezra, the UC primate center, two trips to jail, drug
use, drunkenness, and vandalism. These things would be of no interest to my parents,
was my thinking on the matter. I started in the middle and I stopped in the middle,
too. I stuck mostly to Bakers Square and our long night of conversation and pie.

About that, my report was thorough. I didn’t conceal my concern over Lowell’s mental
condition or the criticisms he had of Dad’s work or the dreadful things we do to our
fellow animals. The conversation was hard on Dad. When I got to Fern, there was no
ignoring the fact that she wasn’t now and never had been on a farm, that she’d left
our house for a life of misery and imprisonment. I don’t remember exactly how I phrased
this, but my father accused me of harping on it. “You were five years old,” he said.
“What the hell
should
I have said to you?” as if the biggest crime here was the story he’d told.

My parents were instantly undone by the news that Lowell would have liked to go to
college. The fact that he would have liked to come home was too much for them to even
contemplate and had to wait for another conversation later that same day. Tears all
around the table. My mother, tearing the paper towel she’d used as a napkin to shreds,
wiping her eyes and nose on the larger bits.

There were surprises for me, too, which surprised me; I’d thought I was the one with
the new information. Most startling was my parents’ insistence that I was the reason
we’d never talked about Fern, that I was the one who couldn’t handle it. I hyperventilated
at any mention of her name, they said, scratched at my skin until it bled, pulled
my hair out by the roots. They were absolutely united in this: over the years they’d
made many attempts to talk to me about Fern and I’d thwarted every one.

That dinner when Lowell had said that Fern loved corn on the cob and also us, that
dinner when he’d left the house because my mother wasn’t ready to talk about Fern
yet—my parents didn’t remember that dinner the way I did. I was the one, they said,
who’d burst into tears and told them all to shut up. I’d said they were making my
heart hurt and then I simply screamed incoherently and hysterically and effectively
until everyone stopped talking and Lowell left the house.

This assertion flies in the face of many things I remember. I pass it on because there
it is,
res ipsa loquitur
, and not because I’m persuaded.

Despite my alleged hysteria, my parents seemed surprised by the depth of the guilt
I felt over Fern’s exile. Disturbing as it is, no one abandons a child for killing
a nonhuman animal. The kitten was not what got Fern sent away. She would have gotten
in trouble, just as Lowell had said, and efforts would have been made to keep small,
fragile creatures out of her hands, and that would have been the end of it.

But there had been other incidents that my parents swore I knew about and had even
witnessed, though I have no memory of them. Aunt Vivi had claimed that Fern leaned
into my cousin Peter’s stroller and took his whole ear into her mouth. Aunt Vivi had
said she would never visit us again as long as that beast was in the house, which
had distressed my mother though my father saw it as a win-win.

One of the grad students had been badly bitten in the hand. He was holding an orange
at the time, so it was possible Fern had meant to bite the orange. But the bite had
been serious enough to require two surgeries and resulted in a lawsuit against the
university. And Fern had never liked that guy.

One day, she had flung Amy, a grad student she adored, against a wall, a distance
of several feet. This seemed to come out of nowhere, and Amy insisted it was an accident,
but other students said Fern had not looked playful or careless, though they were
unable to account for the aggressive behavior. Sherie, who saw it, left the program
as a result, though Amy stayed.

Fern was still a little girl and a sweet-tempered one. But she was getting bigger.
She was getting out of control. “It wouldn’t have been responsible to wait for something
more serious to happen,” my father said. “It wouldn’t have been good for Fern or anyone
else. If she’d really hurt someone, the university would have put her down. We were
trying to take care of everyone, here. Honey, we had no choice.”

“It wasn’t you,” my mother said. “It wasn’t ever about you.”

Again, not entirely persuasive. As we continued to talk over the final days of my
visit, I found that, just as I’d acquitted myself of one lie, I accused myself of
another. I’d told my mother Fern had killed a kitten and that wasn’t a lie and didn’t
get her sent off and there was no guilt to be had over having said so.

But I hadn’t stopped with that. I’d never thought that Fern would deliberately hurt
me. I’d never noticed that she might, any more than I had these thoughts of Lowell
or my parents. But her remorselessness, the way she’d stared impassively at the dead
kitten and then opened his stomach with her fingers, had shocked me to the core. So
this is what I should have said to Mom; this is what I meant to say—

That there was something inside Fern I didn’t know.

That I didn’t know her in the way I’d always thought I did.

That Fern had secrets and not the good kind.

Instead I’d said I was afraid of her. That was the lie that got her sent away. That
was the moment I made my parents choose between us.