We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (6 page)

T
HAT STORY
I
TOLD
H
ARLOW
—that story in which I’m sent to my grandparents in Indianapolis—obviously that story
isn’t really from the middle of this story. I did tell it to Harlow just when I said,
so my telling of it is from the middle, but the happening and the telling are very
different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true, only that I honestly
don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it.

Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An
oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the
moment it was meant to capture.

And I’ve reached a point here, now that my brother has arrived, where I don’t see
how to go further forward without going back—back to the end of that story, back to
when I returned to my family from my grandparents’ house.

Which also happens to be the exact moment when the part I know how to tell ends and
the part I’ve never told before begins.

. . . a short time perhaps when measured by the calendar, but endlessly long to gallop
through, as I have done, at times accompanied by splendid people, advice, applause,
and orchestral music, but basically alone . . .

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

S
O NOW IT’S 1979.
Year of the Goat. The Earth Goat.

Here are some things you might remember. Margaret Thatcher had just been elected prime
minister. Idi Amin had fled Uganda. Jimmy Carter would soon be facing the Iran hostage
crisis. In the meantime, he was the first and last president ever to be attacked by
a swamp rabbit. That man could not catch a break.

Here are some things you maybe didn’t notice at the time. The same year Israel and
Egypt signed a peace treaty, it snowed for half an hour in the Sahara Desert. The
Animal Defense League was formed. Up on the Magdalen Islands, eight crew members from
the
Sea Shepherd
sprayed more than a thousand seal pups with a harmless but permanent red dye. This
dye was designed to ruin their pelts and save the pups from hunters. The activists
were arrested and, in pitch-perfect Orwellian double-speak, charged with violating
the Seal Protection Act.

Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” was on the radio,
The Dukes of Hazzard
on the TV.
Breaking Away
was in the theaters and Bloomington, Indiana, was ready for its close-up.

The only part of this I was aware of at the time was the
Breaking Away
part. In 1979, I was five years old, and I had problems of my own. But that’s how
excited Bloomington was—even the suffering children could not miss the white-hot heat
of Hollywood.

•   •   •

M
Y FATHER WOULD
surely want me to point out that, at five, I was still in Jean Piaget’s preoperational
phase with regard to cognitive thinking and emotional development. He would want you
to understand that I am undoubtedly, from my more mature perspective, imposing a logical
framework on my understanding of events that didn’t exist at the time. Emotions in
the preoperational stage are dichotomous and extreme.

Consider it said.

Not that there aren’t times when dichotomous and extreme are exactly what’s warranted.
Let’s simplify matters and just agree that, at this point in my story, my whole family,
all of us, young and old, was really really really upset.

The day after my cross-capital trek from trampoline to little blue house, my father
appeared. My grandparents had called him to come fetch me, but no one told me that
part. I still thought I was being given away, only not to my grandparents, who’d turned
out not to want me. Where next? Who would love me now? I sobbed in as decorous a manner
as possible, because my father didn’t like it when I cried and I still had hopes.
But no one admired my heroic restraint and my father didn’t even seem to notice my
tears. He had obviously washed his hands of me.

I was sent out of the room, where a good deal of hushed and ominous talking happened,
and even when my bag was packed and I was in the backseat and the car was moving,
I still didn’t know I was being taken home. Which was just as well, because I wasn’t.

As a child, I chose to escape unhappy situations by sleeping through them. I did so
now, and when I woke I was in a strange room. In many ways, the strangest things about
this room were the bits that weren’t strange. My chest of drawers was by the window.
The bed I was in was my bed, the quilt over me was my quilt—hand-sewn by Grandma Fredericka
back when she’d loved me, appliquéd with sunflowers that stretched from the foot to
the pillow. But the drawers were all empty and, under that quilt, the mattress was
bare to the buttons.

There was a fort made of boxes by the window, one of them a carry-all for beer cans,
and through the handholds I could see the cover of my own
Where the Wild Things Are
, with its egg-shaped stain of smeared Hershey’s Kiss. I climbed onto a box to look
outside and found no apple tree, no barn, no dusty fields. Instead some stranger’s
backyard, with a barbecue, a rusted swing-set, and a well-kept vegetable garden—tomatoes
reddening, pea pods popping—swam mistily behind the double-paned glass. In the farmhouse
where I lived such vegetables would have been picked, eaten, or thrown long before
they’d ripened on the vine.

The farmhouse where I lived grumbled and whistled and shrieked; there was always someone
pounding on the piano or running the washing machine or jumping on the beds or tub-thumping
the pans or shouting for everyone to be quiet because they were trying to talk on
the phone. This house lay in an oneiric hush.

I’m not sure what I thought then, perhaps that I was to live here alone now. Whatever
it was, it sent me sobbing back to bed and back to sleep. In spite of my best hopes,
I woke up in the same place in the same tears, calling despairingly for my mother.

My father came instead, picking me up and holding me. “Shh,” he said. “Your mother
is sleeping in the next room. Were you scared? I’m sorry. This is our new house. This
is your new room.”

“Everyone lives here with me?” I asked, still too cautious to be hopeful, and I felt
my father flinch as if I’d pinched him.

He put me down. “See how much bigger your new room is? I think we’re going to be very
happy here. You should look around, kiddo. Explore. Just not into your mother’s room,”
pointing out their door, which was right next to mine.

The floors of our old house were a bruised wood or linoleum, anything that could be
cleaned in a hurry with a mop and a bucket of water. This house had a scratchy silver
carpet extending from my new bedroom into the hall with no break. I wouldn’t be skating
in my socks here. I wouldn’t be riding my scooter on this rug.

The new upstairs consisted of my bedroom, my parents’ bedroom, my father’s study with
its blackboard already propped against the wall, and one bathroom with a blue tub
and no shower curtain. My new room may have been bigger than the bright little nook
I’d had in the farmhouse, but I could see that the house itself was smaller. Or maybe
I couldn’t see that when I was five. Ask Piaget.

Downstairs was a living room with a tiled fireplace, the kitchen with our breakfast
table in it, another bathroom, smaller, with a shower but no tub, and next to that
my brother’s room, only my brother’s bed had no blankets, because, I found out later
that night, he’d refused to set foot in the new house, and had gone instead to stay
with his best friend Marco for as long as they’d have him.

And that right there is the difference between me and my brother—I was always afraid
of being made to leave and he was always leaving.

All the rooms had boxes in them and almost none of the boxes had been opened. There
was nothing on the walls, nothing on the shelves. A few dishes in the kitchen, but
no sign of our blender, toaster, bread-maker.

As I made my way for the first time through the house I would live in until I was
eighteen, I began to suspect what had happened. I could find no place where the graduate
students would work. I looked and looked, back upstairs and then down again, but could
find only three bedrooms. One of them was my brother’s. One of them was our mother
and father’s. One of them was mine. I hadn’t been given away.

Someone else had.

•   •   •

A
S PART OF
leaving Bloomington for college and my brand-new start, I’d made a careful decision
to never
ever
tell anyone about my sister, Fern. Back in those college days, I never spoke of her
and seldom thought of her. If anyone asked about my family, I admitted to two parents,
still married, and one brother, older, who traveled a lot. Not mentioning Fern was
first a decision, and later a habit, hard and painful even now to break. Even now,
way off in 2012, I can’t abide someone else bringing her up. I have to ease into it.
I have to choose my moment.

Though I was only five when she disappeared from my life, I do remember her. I remember
her sharply—her smell and touch, scattered images of her face, her ears, her chin,
her eyes. Her arms, her feet, her fingers. But I don’t remember her fully, not the
way Lowell does.

Lowell is my brother’s real name. Our parents met at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona
at a high school summer science camp. “I’d come to see the heavens,” our father always
said. “But the stars were in her eyes,” a line that used to please and embarrass me
in equal measure. Young geeks in love.

I would think better of myself now if, like Lowell, I’d been angry about Fern’s disappearance,
but it seemed too dangerous just then to be mad at our parents and I was frightened
instead. There was also a part of me relieved, and powerfully, shamefully so, to be
the one kept and not the one given away. Whenever I remember this, I try to also remember
that I was only five years old. I’d like to be fair here, even to myself. It would
be nice to get all the way to forgiveness, though I haven’t managed it yet and don’t
know that I ever will. Or ever should.

Those weeks I spent with our grandparents in Indianapolis still serve as the most
extreme demarcation in my life, my personal Rubicon. Before, I had a sister. After,
none.

Before, the more I talked the happier our parents seemed. After, they joined the rest
of the world in asking me to be quiet. I finally became so. (But not for quite some
time and not because I was asked.)

Before, my brother was part of the family. After, he was just killing time until he
could be shed of us.

Before, many things that happened are missing in my memory or else stripped down,
condensed to their essentials like fairy tales. Once upon a time there was a house
with an apple tree in the yard and a creek and a moon-eyed cat. After, for a period
of several months, I seem to remember a lot and much of it with a suspiciously well-lit
clarity. Take any memory from my early childhood and I can tell you instantly whether
it happened while we still had Fern or after she’d gone. I can do this because I remember
which me was there. The me with Fern or the me without? Two entirely different people.

Still, there are reasons for suspicion. I was only five. How is it possible that I
remember, as I seem to, a handful of conversations word for word, the exact song on
the radio, the particular clothes I was wearing? Why are there so many scenes I remember
from impossible vantage points, so many things I picture from above, as if I’d climbed
the curtains and was looking down on my family? And why is there one thing that I
remember distinctly, living color and surround-sound, but believe with all my heart
never occurred? Bookmark that thought. We’ll come back to it later.

I remember often being told to be quiet, but I seldom remember what I was saying at
the time. As I recount things, this lacuna may give you the erroneous impression that
I already wasn’t talking much. Please assume that I am talking continuously in all
the scenes that follow until I tell you that I’m not.

Our parents, on the other hand, had shut their mouths and the rest of my childhood
took place in that odd silence. They never reminisced about the time they had to drive
halfway back to Indianapolis because I’d left Dexter Poindexter, my terry-cloth penguin
(threadbare, ravaged by love—as who amongst us is not) in a gas station restroom,
although they often talk about the time our friend Marjorie Weaver left her mother-in-law
in the exact same place. Better story, I grant you.

I know from Grandma Fredericka, and not our parents, that I once went missing for
long enough that the police were called, and it turned out I’d tailed Santa Claus
out of a department store and into a tobacco shop where he was buying cigars, and
he gave me the ring off one, so the police being called was just an added bonus on
what must have already been a pretty good day.

I know from Grandma Donna, and not our parents, that I once buried a dime in some
cake batter as a surprise, and one of the graduate students chipped her tooth on it,
and everybody thought Fern had done it, until I spoke up, so brave and honest. Not
to mention generous, since the dime had been my own.

So who knows what revelries, what romps my memories have taken with so little corroboration
to restrain them? If you don’t count the taunting at school, then the only people
who talked much about Fern were my grandma Donna, until Mom made her stop, and my
brother Lowell, until he left us. Each had too obvious an agenda to be reliable: Grandma
Donna wishing to shield our mother from any share of blame, Lowell stropping his stories
into knives.

Once upon a time, there was a family with two daughters, and a mother and father who’d
promised to love them both exactly the same.