We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (26 page)

My own life, though, is pretty good. Can’t complain.

•   •   •

M
OM AND
I
are living together these days in Vermillion, South Dakota. We are renting a nondescript
townhouse, smaller even than the house of stone and air. I miss the mild winters of
Bloomington and the milder ones of Northern California, but Vermillion’s a university
town and pleasant enough.

For the last seven years, I’ve been a kindergarten teacher at Addison Elementary,
which is as close to living with a chimp troop as I’ve been able to get so far. And
Kitch was right. More than right, prophetic. I’m good at it. I’m good at reading body
language, especially that of small children. I watch them and I listen and then I
know what they’re feeling, what they’re thinking, and, most important, what they’re
about to do.

My old kindergarten behaviors, so appalling when I was a kindergartner myself, are
apparently quite acceptable in a teacher. Every week we try to learn a word we hope
their parents don’t know, a task they approach with enthusiasm. Last week’s word was
frugivorous
. This week’s is
verklempt
. I’m preparing them for the SATs.

I stand on my chair when I need to get their attention. When we sit on the rug, they
climb all over my lap, comb through my hair with their fingers. When the birthday
cupcakes come, we greet them with the traditional chimpanzee food-hoot.

We have a whole unit on proper chimp etiquette. When you visit a chimp family, I tell
them, you must stoop over, make yourself smaller, so you’re not intimidating. I show
them how to sign
friend
with their hands. How to smile so that they cover their top teeth with their upper
lips. When our class picture is taken, I ask the photographer for two—one to go home
to their parents and one for the classroom. In the classroom picture, we are all making
our friendly chimp faces.

After we’ve practiced our good manners, we take a field trip to the Uljevik Lab, now
called the Center for Primate Communication. We file into the visitors’ room, where
there’s a bulletproof wall of glass between the chimps and us.

Sometimes the chimps don’t feel like having guests, and they show it by rushing the
wall, body-slamming it with a loud crash, making the glass shiver in its frame. When
this happens, we go away, come back another time. The center is their home. They get
to decide who comes in.

But we also have a Skype connection in the classroom. I leave this open throughout
the morning, so my students can check on the chimps anytime they like, and the chimps
can do likewise. Only six chimps remain here now. Three are younger than Fern—Hazel,
Bennie, and Sprout. Two are older, both males—Aban and Hanu. So Fern is not the largest,
nor the oldest, nor the malest. And yet, by my observation, she is the highest-status
chimp here. I’ve observed Hanu making the chimp gesture of supplication—arm extended,
wrist limp—to Fern, and I’ve never seen Fern do that to anyone. So there, Dr. Sosa.

My kindergartners far prefer my niece Hazel to my sister. They like Sprout, the youngest
at five years, best of all. Sprout is unrelated to Fern, but he brings back my memories
of her more often than she herself does. We see fewer images of older chimps, more
of the tractable babies. Fern has grown heavy and slow. Her life has worn on her.

My kindergartners say she’s kind of mean, but to me she’s just a good mother. She
manages the social life at the center and doesn’t tolerate nonsense. When there’s
a row, she’s the one who stops it, forces the rowers to hug and make up.

Sometimes our own mother appears on the other end of the Skype connection, telling
me to pick something up at the store on my way home or reminding me that I have a
dentist appointment. She volunteers at the center daily. Her current job is to make
sure Fern gets to eat the foods she likes.

The day our mother walked in for the first time, Fern refused to look at her. She
sat with her back to the glass and wouldn’t turn around even to see what Hazel and
Mom were saying to each other. Mom had made peanut butter cookies, Fern’s old favorites,
and they were delivered, but she’d refused to eat them. “She doesn’t know me,” Mom
said, but I thought the evidence was otherwise. Fern would not turn down a peanut
butter cookie for no reason.

The first time Mom was the one to deliver lunch to the chimps—there is a small window
for this, just large enough to slide a tray through—Fern was waiting for her. She
reached out to grab Mom’s hand. Her grip was tight enough to hurt and Mom asked her
several times to ease up, but Fern never showed any sign of hearing. She remained
impassive and imperious. Mom had to bite her before she’d let go.

In subsequent visits, she’s softened. She signs with Mom now, and keeps a careful
track of where Mom is, much more so than with anyone else. She follows her about as
best she can, with her inside and Mom out. She eats her cookies. In Fern’s baby book,
there’s a photo in the farmhouse kitchen of Fern and me at the table, each with a
beater to lick. Fern is gnawing on hers like a chicken leg.

I used to wonder what I’d tell Fern when she asked about Lowell or Dad. We’d had to
remind Grandpa Joe in his nursing home that Dad had died, over and over, and five
minutes later he’d be asking us again, in an anguished voice, what he’d done so bad
that his only son never came to see him. But Fern has never mentioned either one.

Sometimes my kindergartners and the chimps do a craft project together, either when
we visit or over Skype. We finger-paint. We cover paper with paste and glitter. We
make clay plates with our handprints impressed into them. The center holds fund-raisers,
where they sell chimp artwork. We have several of Fern’s paintings on the walls of
the townhouse. My favorite is her rendition of a bird, a dark slash across a light
sky, no cage for creature or artist in evidence anywhere.

The center has shelves and shelves of video still to be analyzed; the researchers
are behind the data by decades. So the six chimps left in residence are all retired
from the science game. Our intrusions are welcomed as a way to keep them stimulated
and interested, and no one worries about us muddying the results.

These six chimps are cared for in the best way possible, and yet their lives are not
enviable. They need more room inside and much more out. They need birds, trees, streams
with frogs, the insect chorus, all of nature unorchestrated. They need more surprise
in their lives.

I lie awake at night and, just as I once fantasized about a tree house where I’d live
with Fern, now I’m designing a home for humans, like a guardhouse, but bigger—a four-bedroom,
two-bathroom guardhouse. The front door is also the only entry to a large compound.
The back wall is all bulletproof glass and looks out on twenty acres, maybe more,
of dogwood, sumac, goldenrod, and poison ivy. In my fantasy, humans are confined to
the house and chimps run free over the property, the six from the center but others
as well, maybe even my nephews, Basil and Sage. This is the clue that it’s all just
a dream; introducing two full-grown males into our little community is a terrible
and dangerous idea.

In the last several years, the news has carried reports of horrific chimp attacks.
I’m not afraid of Fern. Still, I understand that she and I will never touch each other
again, never sit with our arms around each other, never walk in tandem as if we were
a single person. This dream sanctuary is the best solution I can imagine—an electrified
fence around us, a bulletproof wall between.

•   •   •

I
T WILL TAKE
more than a kindergarten teacher’s salary. Publishing her journals as a children’s
book was Mom’s idea. She wrote the originals and did much of the work preparing the
final version, but Fern and I are whimsically listed as coauthors on the cover. All
profits will go directly to the center, to a fund for enlarging the chimps’ outdoor
enclosure. Cards for donations will also be slipped inside each book.

Our publisher is excited and optimistic. The pub date has been arranged around my
summer vacation. The publicity department expects a number of media bookings. When
I think too much about this, I panic, find myself hoping for print rather than radio,
radio rather than television or, selfishly, no notice at all.

Some of this is my familiar fear of exposure. It terrifies me to think that, come
summer, there will be no more hiding, no more passing. Everyone from the woman who
cuts my hair to the queen in England might know who I am.

Not who I really am, of course, but an airbrushed version of me, more marketable,
easier to love. The me that teaches kindergarten and not the me who will never have
children. The me who loves my sister and not the me who got her sent away. I still
haven’t found that place where I can be my true self. But maybe you never get to be
your true self, either.

I once thought of the monkey girl as a threat only to myself. Now I see how she could
blow the whole caper. So, added to the old fear of exposure, is this other fear that
I’ll mess up, miscalculate just how much monkey girl to let out. There’s no data to
suggest that I can make you love me whatever I do. I could be headed back to middle
school, no hallways and classrooms this time, but the tabloids and the blogs instead.

Pretend I’m on your television sets. I’ll be on my best human behavior. I won’t climb
on the tables or jump on the couches even though humans have done those things on
television shows before and not been rousted from the species for it. And still you’ll
be thinking to yourselves—it makes no sense, because she looks perfectly normal, even
rather pretty in some lights, and yet. There’s just something off about her. I can’t
put my finger on it . . .

I’ll creep you out a little bit in that uncanny valley way I have. Or else I’ll annoy
you; I get that a lot. Just don’t hold it against Fern. You would like Fern.

I wish Mom could do the media instead of me, but she can’t be passed off as an innocent
victim. The studio audience will shout at her.

So here we are. The human half of Bloomington’s Sister Act, the phantasmagorical Rosemary
Cooke, is about to take the show on the road. Every word I say out there will be on
my sister’s behalf. I’ll be widely admired. Fern will be stealthily influential. That’s
the plan.

That was the plan.

A
ND IF YOU
won’t listen to
me
 . . .

My sister’s life, as performed by Madame Defarge:

Once upon a time, there was a happy family—a mother, a father, a son, and two daughters.
The older daughter was smart and agile, covered in hair and very beautiful. The younger
was ordinary. Still, their parents and their brother loved them both.

Mon Dieu!
One day, the older daughter fell into the power of a wicked king. He threw her into
a prison where no one would see her. He cast a spell to keep her there. Every day
he told her how ugly she was. The wicked king died, but this did not break the spell.

The spell can only be broken by the people. They must come to see how beautiful she
is. They must storm the prison and demand her release. The spell will be broken only
when the people rise up.

So rise up already.

•   •   •

O
N
D
ECEMBER 15, 2011,
The New York Times
carried the news that the National Institutes of Health had suspended all new grants
for biomedical and behavioral studies on chimpanzees. In the future, chimp studies
will be funded only if the research is necessary for human health and there is absolutely
no other way to accomplish it. Two possible exceptions to the ban were noted—the ongoing
research involving immunology and also that on hepatitis C. But the report’s basic
conclusion was that most research on chimps is completely unnecessary.

Small victories. Fern and I celebrated the news with champagne. Our father used to
give us one sip each on New Year’s Eve. It always made Fern sneeze.

I wonder if she remembers that. I know she won’t have confused our little celebration
with New Year’s. The holidays are observed at the center, and Fern has always been
very clear about their order—first Mask Day, then Bird-Eating Day. First Sweet-Tree
Day, and, only after that, No-Bedtime Day.

I wonder about Fern’s memory a lot. Lowell said: She recognized me instantly. Mom:
She doesn’t know me.

Research at Kyoto University has demonstrated the superiority of chimps to humans
at certain short-term memory tasks. A vast superiority. As in, We can’t even play
on the same field.

Long-term memory is more difficult to study. In 1972, Endel Tulving coined the phrase
episodic memory
to refer to the ability to remember incidents in one’s individual life with detailed
temporal and spatial information (the what, when, where) and then access them later
as episodes through a conscious reexperiencing of them, a sort of mental time travel.

In 1983, he wrote: “Other members of the animal kingdom can learn, benefit from experience,
acquire the ability to adjust and adapt, to solve problems and make decisions, but
they cannot travel back into the past in their own minds.” Episodic memory, he said,
is a uniquely human gift.

How he knows this isn’t clear. It seems to me that every time we humans announce that
here is the thing that makes us unique—our featherless bipedality, our tool-using,
our language—some other species comes along to snatch it away. If modesty were a human
trait, we’d have learned to be more cautious over the years.

Episodic memory has certain subjective features. It comes with something called “a
feeling of pastness,” and also a feeling of confidence, however misplaced, in the
accuracy of recollection. These interiorities can never be observed in another species.
Doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Doesn’t mean they are.

Other species do show evidence of functional episodic memory—the retention of the
what, where, and when of individual experiences. The data has been particularly persuasive
with regard to scrub jays.

Humans are actually not so good at remembering the when. Extremely good at remembering
the who, though. I would guess chimps, social as they are, might be the same.

Does Fern remember us? Does she remember but not recognize us as the people she remembers?
We certainly don’t look the way we used to, and I don’t know if Fern understands that
children grow up, that humans grow old, same as chimps. I can find no studies that
suggest what a chimp might remember over a period of twenty-two years.

Still, I believe Fern knows who we are. The evidence is compelling, if not conclusive.
Only the exacting ghost of my father keeps me from insisting on it.