We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (24 page)

I
N EVERYONE’S LIFE
there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken away against
their will.

Todd’s mother worked out a deal for Ezra. The legal system had refused to see that
opening a door was the same as closing one. Ezra pled guilty, got eight months in
a minimum-security prison in Vallejo. Todd’s mother said that he would serve five
if he behaved himself. It cost him his job, which he had cared a lot about. It cost
him any shot at the CIA (or maybe not, what do I know? Maybe it was just the résumé
padding they’d been waiting for). No apartment manager I’ve ever had since has put
his whole heart into it the way Ezra did. “The secret to a good life,” he told me
once, “is to bring your A game to everything you do. Even if all you’re doing is taking
out the garbage, you do that with excellence.”

I went down on visitors’ day—this was after Christmas—so he’d already been there about
a month, and they brought him out, in his orange jumpsuit, to where we were allowed
to sit on opposite sides of what, in another context, I would have called a picnic
table. We were warned not to touch and then left alone. Ezra’s mustache was gone,
his upper lip as raw as if the hair had been ripped off it like a Band-Aid. His face
looked naked, his teeth big and leporine. It was clear his spirits were low. I asked
him how he was doing.

“It ain’t the giggle that it used to be,” he said, which was reassuring to me. Still
Ezra. Still
Pulp Fiction.

He asked if I’d heard anything from Harlow.

“Her parents came up from Fresno, looking for her,” I said. “No luck, though. Nobody’s
seen her.”

In the days after I’d told Lowell that Harlow never talked about her family, she’d
given me the following information: three younger brothers, two older sisters. Half
brothers and half sisters, if you wanted to get technical.

She’d said that her mother was one of those women who loved being pregnant but wasn’t
much for long-term relationships. A hippie-chick, earth-goddess thing. Each of Harlow’s
siblings had had a different father, but all of them lived with their mother in a
falling-down house on the outskirts of town. Two kids back, they’d run out of room,
so some of the fathers had transformed the basement into a warren of bedrooms, where
the kids lived a largely unsupervised, Peter Pan sort of life. Harlow hadn’t seen
her own father in years, but he managed a small theater company up in Grass Valley,
so he’d give her a job after graduation, no problem. He was, she said, her ace in
the hole.

The similarity of Harlow’s basement to my long-ago tree-house fantasies had struck
me, except that you had to descend to enter Harlow’s Never-Never Land. (Which would
be a significant difference—recent studies suggest that people behave with more charity
if they’ve just gone upstairs and less if they’ve just gone down—if studies like that
weren’t just an enormous pile of crap. There’s science and there’s science, is all
I’m saying. When humans are the subjects, it’s mostly not science.)

The basement and the tree house shared another trait: neither was real.

Harlow turned out to be an only child. Her father read gas meters for PG&E. This is
a surprisingly dangerous job, because of the dogs, if not a glamorous one. Her mother
worked at the local library. When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from
tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out
a book.

Both her parents were tall but stooped, curled over their torsos in exactly the same
way, as if they’d just been punched. Her mother had Harlow’s hair, only short and
practical. She wore a silk scarf around her neck and under that, on a long silver
chain, an Egyptian cartouche. I could just make out the hieroglyphic of a bird. I
thought how she’d dressed carefully to come and talk to the local police, to see me,
see Reg. I imagined her at her closet, deciding what you’d wear to go learn something
about your child that just might break your heart. She reminded me of my own mother,
though they weren’t alike in any other way except for the heartbreak.

Harlow’s parents were afraid Harlow had been kidnapped and who knew what else, because
it wasn’t like her not to phone when she knew they’d be worried. They were, each of
them, fragile as blown glass, afraid she might be dead. They tried to get me to think
about that without them having to say it aloud. They suggested that Ezra might be
accusing her, might have staged the whole primate action, in order to cover up something
much more sinister. She would never, never miss Christmas, they said. Her stocking
was still hanging on the mantel, where they said it would stay until, one way or another,
she came home.

They’d insisted on taking me out for this conversation, so we were at Mishka’s, drinking
coffee in the quiet of the early days of winter quarter, hardly another customer in
the place, the grinding of the beans the only significant noise.

I
was drinking my coffee, anyway. Theirs sat untouched and getting colder by the minute.

I told them I had no doubt that Harlow was alive, that she had, in fact, returned
to our apartment the day after the monkey business to get something she’d left there.
Even though I hadn’t seen her for myself, I had evidence, I told them, she’d left
me clear evidence, and that was as far as I got. Her mother made a sound—something
halfway between a gasp and a shriek—inadvertent, but loud and high-pitched. Then she
burst into tears, grabbed my hands, upsetting our cups.

She herself took the worst of that. I suspected her lovely blouse was done for. “But
it’s just not like her,” her father said over and over again as we were mopping up
the mess. “Breaking in somewhere. Taking things”—meaning monkeys, I assume; I’d said
nothing about Madame Defarge—“taking things that don’t belong to her.”

I wondered if we were talking about the same person. Nothing seemed more like Harlow
to me.

But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see.
I told Ezra some of this. He was too depressed to be interested. To my surprise, the
need to touch him—something I’d certainly never felt before and probably felt now
only because it was forbidden—began to overwhelm me. I wanted to stroke his arm, finger
his hair, ruffle up some spirit. I sat on my hands to prevent it.

“Where did you think the monkeys would go?” I asked him.

“Wherever the hell they wanted,” he said.

A
S SOON AS
I’d said good-bye to Lowell at the Davis train station, there’d been no point in sticking
around, prolonging my college education any longer. I had a sister to take care of.
It was time to get serious.

I waited for that first report on Fern to arrive, but it never did. Whatever Lowell
thought he’d put into place had slipped out of it. Meanwhile, I checked out every
book I could find on the monkey girls—Jane Goodall (chimps), Dian Fossey (gorillas),
and Biruté Galdikas (orangutans).

I thought of going to work at Gombe Stream after graduation, spending long days observing
the Kasakela chimpanzees. I thought I might have something special to contribute there,
might find a way, after all this time, to make something good come from Dad’s experiment.
This, I thought, was the life I was born to live, so like those tree-house dreams
that used to rock me to sleep. I thought that I might find the place where I fit in
at last. Tarzan in the jungle. The idea vaulted me into elation.

Plummet. I remembered the 170 rapes over three days from Dr. Sosa’s lecture. Some
scientist had observed all that, had actually watched a chimp raped 170 times and
kept count. Good scientist. Not me.

Besides, because I had so assiduously avoided primates in all my classes, this career
path would have amounted to starting college over.

And how did it help Fern?

I remembered then that Lowell’s old girlfriend, Kitch, had once told me she thought
I’d be a great teacher. I’d figured she was just being polite—and also crazy, probably
driven crazy like so many before her by sorority living—but after several hours with
the university handbook in one hand and my transcript in the other, it seemed that
my fastest route through, the major that would accept most of the classes I’d already
taken, was education. Of course, then there would be the credential to get. But I
couldn’t see another degree I’d finish much before Mayan doomsday.

•   •   •

O
NE DAY THAT
spring I ran into Reg at the library and he suggested that we go together to see the
drama department’s gender-bending
Macbeth
. He had two tickets, he said, courtesy of some friend of Harlow’s.

We met around twilight at the Dramatic Art Building. (A month later, appropriately
enough, the name would be changed to the Celeste Turner Wright Hall, one of only three
buildings on campus named after a woman. We thank you, Celeste, we women of Davis.)
It was a beautiful night, and behind the theater, the redbuds and the currants were
blooming in the arboretum. Down the hill, I heard mallards quarreling languidly.

The play was the usual bloody affair, and none of Harlow’s ideas had been used. I
thought this was a shame. It wasn’t a bad show, but it would have been much more interesting
the way she’d envisioned it. Reg, though, persisted in his original assessment, that
there was nothing funnier than a man in a dress.

I found this appalling, demeaning to women and cross-dressers everywhere. I said that
he must be the only idiot in the world who thought
Macbeth
should be played for laughs.

He waved his hands cheerfully at me. “When a guy takes a girl to see a feminist show,”
he said, “he knows what he’s getting himself into. He knows the evening will end in
a fight.” He asked if I was getting my period, which he also thought was pretty damned
funny.

We were headed to his car then. I turned abruptly around. I preferred to walk, I told
him. By myself. What a jerk. I was halfway home before I realized what he’d said.
“When a guy takes a girl . . .” I hadn’t known it was a date.

The next day he called me up and asked me out again. We lasted about five months as
a couple. Even now, as I inch toward my forties, this remains a personal best for
me. I liked Reg a lot, but we never moved in together. We fought all the time. I wasn’t
as restful as he’d hoped.

“I don’t think this is going to work,” he said to me one evening. We were parked in
front of my apartment house waiting for the police to leave. They were ticketing the
third floor for noise violations.

“Why not?” I asked in the spirit of scientific inquiry.

“I think you’re terrific,” he said. “And a very pretty girl. Don’t make me spell it
out.” So I’m not sure exactly why we broke up.

Maybe he was the problem. Maybe I was. Maybe it was the ghost of Harlow, shaking her
gory locks at us.
Hence, horrible shadow! Unreal mockery, hence!

The conversation wasn’t as hurtful as it sounds in the recounting. When I think of
Reg, I think of him fondly. At the time, I was pretty sure I was the one who’d started
the breaking up, even though he was the first to say it. Later, though, I heard he
was dating a man, so maybe I was too quick to take the credit.

The fact remains that I can’t seem to make sex work over the long haul. Not for lack
of trying. Don’t make me spell it out.

I wonder if Lowell would say that the way I was raised has fucked me up sexually.
Or if none of you can make sex work over the long haul, either.

Maybe you think you can, but you really can’t. Maybe anosognosia, the inability to
see your own disability, is the human condition and I’m the only one who doesn’t suffer
from it.

Mom says I just haven’t met the right guy yet, the guy who sees the stars in my eyes.

True enough. I’ve yet to meet that guy.

•   •   •

T
HE MAN WHO
saw the stars in my mother’s eyes died in 1998. Dad had taken off for a solitary week
of camping, fishing, kayaking, and introspection along the Wabash River. Two days
in, while portaging the kayak over some rocks, he had a heart attack that he mistook
for the flu. He made it home and into bed, where he had a second heart attack a day
later, and a third in the hospital that night.

By the time I arrived, he was outdoors again, climbing some dream mountain in the
borderlands. It took concentrated, sustained effort, from both Mom and me, to tell
him I was there and I’m still not sure he knew me. “I’m really tired,” he said. “Could
you take my pack? Just for a little while?” He sounded embarrassed.

“Sure, Dad,” I said. “Sure. Look, I have it now. I’ll carry it for as long as you
need.” This was the last thing I said to him that I know he heard.

I imagine that sounds like a deathbed scene in a movie—clean, classic, profound, and
weighty. In fact, he lived another day, and there was nothing tidy about it. There
was blood, shit, mucus, moaning, and hours of audible, painful gasping for breath.
Doctors and nurses dashed about, and Mom and I were allowed into the room and then
tossed from it with regularity.

I remember an aquarium in the waiting room. I remember fish whose beating hearts were
visible inside their bodies, whose scales were the color of glass. I remember a snail
that dragged itself along the sides, the mouth in its foot expanding and contracting
endlessly as it moved. The doctor came out and my mother stood to meet him. “I’m afraid
we’ve lost him this time,” he said, as if there would be a next time.

•   •   •

N
EXT TIME,
I’ll put things right between my father and me.

Next time, I’ll give Mom the fair share of blame for Fern that her collapse forestalled
this time around. I won’t drop the whole of it onto Dad next time.

Next time, I’ll take the share that’s mine, no more, no less. Next time I’ll shut
my mouth about Fern and open it about Lowell. I’ll tell Mom and Dad that Lowell skipped
his basketball practice, so they’ll talk to him and he won’t leave.

I’d always planned to forgive Dad someday. It cost him so much, but it didn’t cost
him me, and I wish I’d said so. It’s painful and pointless that I didn’t.

So I’ve always been grateful for that one final request. It was a great gift to let
me take a burden, however imaginary, from him.

•   •   •

D
AD WAS FIFTY-EIGHT
years old at the time of his death. The doctor told us that, due to the combination
of diabetes and drink, he had the body of a much older man. “Did he live a stressful
life?” he asked us, and Mom asked back, who didn’t?

We left his body behind for further scientific analysis and got into the car. “I want
Lowell,” my mother said and then she melted over the steering wheel, gasping so hard
for breath it seemed that she might die along with Dad.

We changed places and I drove. I made several turns before realizing that I was not
on my way to the house of stone and air but back to the saltbox by the university,
where I’d grown up. I was almost home before I noticed.

Dad had a long, respectful obituary in
The New York Times
, which would have pleased him. Fern was mentioned, of course, but as a research subject,
not a “survived by.” I felt the jolt of Fern’s name coming when I hadn’t braced for
it, like hitting an air pocket in a plane. The monkey girl was still afraid of exposure,
and this seemed like an international reveal.

But by this time, I was at Stanford, where I didn’t know much of anyone. No one said
a word to me about it.

A few days after the obit ran, we got a postcard of the Regions Building in Tampa,
Florida, with its steepled roof and forty-two floors of pewter-tinted windows. “I’m
seeing so much of America today,” the postcard said. It was addressed to Mom and me.
There was no signature.