We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (7 page)

I
N MOST FAMILIES,
there is a favorite child. Parents deny it and maybe they truly don’t see it, but
it’s obvious to the children. Unfairness bothers children greatly. It’s hard to always
come in second.

It’s also hard to be the favorite. Earned or unearned, the favorite is a burdensome
thing to be.

I was our mother’s favorite child. Lowell was our father’s. I loved our father as
much as our mother, but I loved Lowell best of all. Fern loved our mother best. Lowell
loved Fern more than he loved me.

When I lay out these facts, they seem essentially benign. Something here for everyone.
More than enough to go around.

T
HE MONTHS AFTER
my return from Indianapolis were the most harrowing time of my life. Our mother was
vaporous. She emerged from her bedroom only at night and always in her nightgown,
a sheath of flowered flannel with a disturbingly childlike bow at the neck. She’d
stopped combing her hair so that it twisted about her face, chaotic as smoke, and
her eyes were so sunken they looked bruised. She would start to speak, her hands lifting,
and then be suddenly silenced by the sight of that motion, her own hands in the air.

She hardly ate and did no cooking. Dad picked up the slack, but halfheartedly. He
would come home from campus and look in the cupboards. I remember dinners of peanut
butter on saltines, cans of tomato soup for starters and cans of clam chowder for
mains. Every meal a passive-aggressive cri de coeur.

Grandma Donna began coming over every day to watch me, but, in Bloomington in 1979,
watching me didn’t mean I could never be out of her sight. I was allowed the roam
of the neighborhood, just as I’d been allowed the roam of the farmhouse property,
only now it was the street I had to be warned about instead of the creek. Crossing
the street without a grown-up was forbidden, but I could usually scare up one of those
if needed. I met most of the neighbors by holding their hands and looking both ways.
I remember Mr. Bechler asking if I was maybe in training for the talking Olympics.
I was gold-medal material, he said.

There weren’t many children on the block and none anywhere close to my age. The Andersens
had a baby girl named Eloise. A ten-year-old boy named Wayne lived two houses down;
a high-school boy lived on the corner across the street. There was no one I could
reasonably be expected to play with.

Instead I got acquainted with the neighborhood animals. My favorite was the Bechlers’
dog Snippet, a liver-and-white spaniel with a pink nose. The Bechlers kept her tethered
in their yard, because, given half a chance, she ran off and she’d already been hit
by a car at least once that they knew of. I spent hours with Snippet, her head on
my leg or my foot, her ears cocked, listening to every word I said. When the Bechlers
realized this, they put a chair out for me, a little chair that they’d gotten back
when the grandchildren were young. It had a cushion on the seat shaped like a heart.

I also spent a lot of time alone, or alone with Mary (remember Mary? Imaginary friend
no one liked?), which was not something I’d ever done much of before. I didn’t care
for it.

Grandma Donna would change the beds and do the laundry, but only if our father wasn’t
there; she couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. If Lowell was angry that
Fern had been sent out of our lives, Grandma Donna was angry that she’d ever been
let in. I’m sure she’d deny this, say that she’d always loved Fern, but even at five
I knew better. I’d heard too often about my first birthday, how Fern had dumped out
Grandma Donna’s handbag and eaten the last photograph ever taken of Grandpa Dan, a
Polaroid that Grandma Donna kept in her purse to look at whenever she was feeling
low.

If there’d been a second photo, I probably would have eaten one too, Lowell said,
as I followed Fern’s lead in most things. And Lowell also said that Dad had found
it very telling that Grandma left her bag, filled as it apparently was with poisonous
objects, where Fern could reach it, but I could not.

Our father had planned to name Fern and me after our grandmothers, one of us Donna
and one of us Fredericka, a coin toss to see which was which, but both grandmothers
insisted that I be the one with their name. Dad, who’d meant it as something nice,
maybe even compensatory, was annoyed when it turned into an argument. He’d probably
expected this of Grandma Donna, but not of his own mother. A hole was about to open,
a rupture in the space-time continuum of the Cooke family, until our mother stepped
in to plug it, saying that I would be Rosemary and Fern would be Fern, because she
was the mother and that was the way she wanted it. I learned of the earlier plan only
because Grandma Donna once referenced it in an argument as further evidence of Dad’s
peculiarity.

Personally, I’m glad it came to nothing. I suppose it’s because she is my grandmother
that Donna seems like a grandmother’s name. And Fredericka? A Rose by any other, if
you say so. But I can’t believe that being called Fredericka my whole life wouldn’t
have taken a toll. I can’t believe it wouldn’t have mind-bent me like a spoon. (Not
that I haven’t been mind-bent.)

So Grandma Donna would clean the kitchen, maybe unpack some dishes or some of my clothes
if she felt energetic, since it was clear by now that no one else planned to open
those boxes. She’d make me lunch and cook something medicinal, like a soft-boiled
egg, take it to the bedroom, put our mother in a chair so she could change the bedsheets,
demand the nightgown for the wash, beg Mom to eat. Sometimes Grandma Donna was all
sympathy, delivering in salubrious doses her preferred conversation—details on the
health and marital problems of people she’d never met. She was especially fond of
dead people; Grandma Donna was a great reader of historical biographies and had a
particular soft spot for the Tudors, where marital discord was an extreme sport.

When that didn’t work, she’d turn brisk. It was a sin to waste such a beautiful day,
she’d say even when it wasn’t such a beautiful day, or, your children need you. Or
that I should have started nursery school a year ago and already be in kindergarten.
(I didn’t, because Fern couldn’t go. Or Mary, either.) And that someone had to put
the brakes on Lowell, he was only eleven, for God’s sake, and shouldn’t be allowed
to rule the house. She would have liked to see one of her children running the emotional
blackmail game Lowell got away with; he should have a close encounter with his father’s
belt.

She drove once to Marco’s, intending to force Lowell home, but she came back defeated,
face like a prune. The boys had been out on their bikes, no one knew where, and Marco’s
mother said Dad had thanked her for keeping Lowell and she’d send him home when it
was our father who asked. Marco’s mother was letting the boys run wild, Grandma Donna
told Mom. Plus she was a very rude woman.

Grandma always left before our father returned from work, sometimes telling me not
to say she’d been there, because conspiracy is folded into her DNA like egg whites
into angel food cakes. But of course, Dad knew. Would he have left me there otherwise?
Later he’d bring whatever she’d cooked back down from the bedroom and shovel it into
the disposal. He’d get himself a beer and then another and then start on the whiskey.
He’d put peanut butter on a cracker for me.

At night, from my bedroom, I’d hear arguing—Mom’s voice too soft to be heard (or maybe
she wasn’t speaking at all), Dad’s laced (I know now) with liquor. You all blame me,
Dad said. My own goddamn children, my own goddamn wife. What choice did we have? I’m
as upset as anyone.

And finally, Lowell, home at last, climbing the stairs in the dark without anyone
hearing him and coming into my room, waking me up. “If only,” he said—eleven years
old to my five, socking me high on the arm so the bruise would be hidden by my T-shirt
sleeve—“if only you had just, for once, kept your goddamn mouth shut.”

I have never in my life, before or after, been so happy to see someone.

I
DEVELOPED A PHOBIA
about the closed door to our parents’ bedroom. Late at night, I could hear it, pulsing
in its frame like a heart. Whenever he let me, I huddled with Lowell in his room,
as far away from that door as I could get and still be home.

Sometimes Lowell felt sorry for me. Sometimes it seemed that he, too, was frightened.
We each carried the weight of Fern’s disappearance and our mother’s collapse, and
occasionally, for short periods, we carried it together. Lowell would read me a book
or let me jabber away while he played complicated games of solitaire that required
two or three decks of cards and were nearly impossible to win. If just anyone could
win a game, then Lowell couldn’t be bothered.

Sometimes, if he wasn’t completely awake, he’d let me climb into his bed after dark
to get away from our father’s shouting, though other times he’d remember to be mad,
send me silently sobbing back upstairs. Bed-hopping was an established custom in the
house—Fern and I had rarely ended the night in the bed where we’d started. Our parents
felt that it was natural and mammalian not to want to sleep alone, and though they
would have preferred we stay in our own beds, because we kicked and thrashed, they’d
never insisted on it.

While Lowell slept, I’d calm myself by fiddling with his hair. I liked to catch a
bit between two scissored fingers and run my thumb over the scratchy ends. Lowell
had Luke Skywalker’s haircut, but the color was pure Han Solo. Of course, I hadn’t
seen the movie back then. Too young for it and besides Fern couldn’t have gone. But
we had the trading cards. I knew about the hair.

And Lowell, who’d seen it several times, had acted it out for us. I liked Luke best.
I’m Luke Skywalker. I’m here to rescue you.
But Fern, who was more sophisticated in her tastes, preferred Han.
Laugh it up, fuzzball.

Unfairness bothers children greatly. When I did finally get to see
Star Wars
, the whole movie was ruined for me by the fact that Luke and Han got a medal at the
end and Chewbacca didn’t. Lowell had changed that part in his retelling, so it came
as quite a shock.

•   •   •

L
OWELL’S ROOM SMELLED
of damp cedar from the cage where three rats, washouts from our father’s lab, would
chirp and creak in their spinning wheel all night long. In retrospect, there was something
incomprehensibly strange about the way any of the laboratory rats could transform
from data point to pet, with names and privileges and vet appointments, in a single
afternoon. What a Cinderella story! But I didn’t notice that until later. Back then,
Herman Muenster, Charlie Cheddar, and little hooded Templeton represented nothing
to me but were only themselves.

Lowell smelled too, not bad, but sharp to my senses, because his smell had changed.
At the time, I thought the difference was that he was so mad; I thought that it was
anger I was smelling, but of course he was also growing up, losing the sweetness of
childhood, beginning to sour. He sweated in his sleep.

Most mornings, he left before anyone else was awake. We didn’t know this right off,
but he was having breakfast with the Byards. The Byards were a childless couple, devout
Christians, who now lived across the street from us. Mr. Byard’s eyesight was bad
and Lowell read the sports page aloud to him while Mrs. Byard fried up bacon and eggs.
According to Mrs. Byard, Lowell was sweet as a peekin pie and always welcome.

She’d known a bit about the situation at our house. Most of Bloomington did, though
no one really understood it. “I’m praying for you all,” she told me, appearing at
our door one morning, holding a tin of chocolate chip cookies and backlit like an
angel by a soft autumn sun. “You just remember you were the one made in God’s image.
You hold tight to that and it’ll carry you through the storm.”

•   •   •

M
Y
L
ORD, ANYONE
would think Fern had died, Grandma Donna said. Which is maybe what you, too, are thinking,
that at five, of course, I wouldn’t have figured that out without being told, but
anyone older would have.

I can only assume that our parents explained to me about Fern’s disappearance, possibly
many times, and I’ve repressed it. It simply isn’t plausible to think they hardly
said a word. But this I remember clearly—waking up each morning and going to sleep
each night in a state of inchoate dread. The fact that I didn’t know what I was dreading
made it no less dreadful. Arguably, more so.

Anyway, Fern was not dead. Still isn’t.

Lowell started seeing a counselor and this became a frequent topic in our father’s
nightly monologues. Lowell’s counselor would suggest something—a family powwow, a
session with the parents alone, some exercises in visualization or hypnosis—and our
father would explode. Psychoanalysis was completely bogus, he would say, good only
for literary theory. Maybe it was useful, when plotting books, to imagine that someone’s
life could be shaped by a single early trauma, maybe even one inaccessible in memory.
But where were the blind studies, the control groups? Where was the reproducible data?

According to our father, the nomenclature of psychoanalysis had taken on a scientific
patina only when it was translated into English Latinates. In the original German,
it was refreshingly modest. (You must picture him shouting this. In the house I grew
up in, it was perfectly ordinary for a tantrum to include words like
Latinates
,
nomenclature
, and
patina
.)

Yet the counselor had been our father’s idea. Like so many other parents of troubled
children, he’d felt the need to do
something
, and like so many other parents of troubled children, a counselor was the only something
he could think of to do.

For me, he engaged a babysitter, Melissa, a college student with owlish glasses and
blue streaks zigzagging, like lightning, through her hair. The first week, I went
to bed the minute she arrived and got up again only when she left. I was, let’s agree,
a babysitter’s dream.

It was a learned behavior. Once, when I was four, as a stratagem for shutting me up,
a babysitter named Rachel had spooned several kernels of popcorn onto my tongue and
told me they would pop if I only kept my mouth closed long enough. This seemed like
an entirely desirable goal and I lasted as long as I could and took the failure hard
until Lowell told me it never would have happened. That put me off babysitters entirely.

As I got used to Melissa, I decided I liked her. This was a bit of luck. I’d concocted
a plan that involved fixing my family with the only valuable thing I had to offer—my
talking—and I couldn’t do it alone. I tried to explain to Melissa the games I was
supposed to be playing for my father, the tests I was supposed to be taking, but she
couldn’t or wouldn’t get it.

We settled on a compromise. Every time she came, she would teach me a new word from
the dictionary. The only rule was that it had to be a word so lonely, so dusty with
neglect that she, too, hadn’t known it beforehand. I didn’t care what the words meant;
that saved a lot of time and bother. In return, I had to not talk to her for an hour.
She would set the oven timer to make sure, which generally resulted in me asking her
every few minutes when the hour would be up. The things I had to say would collect
in my chest until they were so crowded together I was ready to burst.

“How was your day, Rosie?” Dad would ask when he came home from work and I’d tell
him it was ebullient. Or limpid. Or dodecahedron. “That’s good to hear,” he’d say.

None of this was meant to be informative. Obviously, it didn’t even need to cohere.
Catachresis? Bonus points.

I was merely trying to show him that I, at least, was continuing with our work. Whenever
he was so disposed, he would find me, sleeves rolled up and hard at it.

•   •   •

O
NE AFTERNOON,
Grandma Donna came and forced our mother into an outing—coffee and a shopping trip.
Summer had gone and autumn was headed toward its sell-by date. Melissa was supposed
to be watching me but was watching television instead.

Melissa was now an established part of the household and watched TV every afternoon,
although daytime TV had never been allowed before, children being expected to make
their fun up from scratch.

Melissa had gotten hooked on a soap. It wasn’t the same soap as my grandparents’—there
was no Karen, no Larry. Melissa’s soap was all about Ben and Amanda, Lucille and Alan.
And if my grandparents’ soap had been regrettably sexed up, this one was an orgy.
Melissa let me watch it with her because I wouldn’t understand a thing; because I
didn’t understand a thing, I rarely wished to watch. We disagreed as to how quiet
I should be while the show was on.

Melissa was beginning to slip the tether. She’d just taught me a word and then made
me promise not to ever say it to our parents. The word was
ithyphallic
. Years later, if
ithyphallic
had come up on the SATs, I’d have been all over it, but no such luck. It’s not really
a very useful word.

And just ask Lowell if I’m the sort of person who keeps her promises. The minute I
saw our father, I told him that my day had been ithyphallic, instead of the official
day’s word, which was
psychomanteum
, but whether that figured in the impending decision to let Melissa go, I cannot say.

Anyway, before I said
ithyphallic
to our father, I said it to Lowell. Lowell was supposed to be at school, but had
come home early, sneaking in through the back door, motioning at me to follow him
outside, which I did, though not as quietly as he’d wanted. Lowell was uninterested
in my new words, waved them past with an impatient flick of his hand.

One of the neighbors was out front, the boy from the white house on the corner, the
big boy from the high school. Russell Tupman, leaning against Mom’s blue Datsun, lighting
a weary cigarette and sucking it in. I’d never thought to see Russell Tupman in my
own driveway. I was charmed. I was flattered. I fell instantly in love.

Lowell held up his hand and shook it. The car keys rang in his fist. “You sure about
her?” Russell asked, indicating me with his eyes. “I hear she’s a talker.”

“We need her,” Lowell said. So I was told to get in the back and Lowell fastened my
seat belt, which he was pretty conscientious about doing even when Russell wasn’t
the one driving. I learned later that Russell didn’t technically have his license
yet. He’d taken driver’s ed and everything; he knew how to drive. I don’t remember
a moment’s anxiety about his driving, no matter how much fuss it caused after.

Lowell said that we were going on a secret adventure, a spy caper, and I was allowed
to bring Mary, because Mary knew how to keep her mouth shut and was an example to
us all. I was pretty happy about the whole thing, pretty honored to be going off with
the big boys. Looking back, I can see that Lowell was only eleven years old, while
Russell was sixteen, and that this must have been an enormous gap, but at the time
I thought of them as equally glamorous.

I was also, in those days, desperate to get out of the house. I’d had a dream in which
I heard someone knocking on our parents’ door from the inside. It started with a jaunty
rhythm, like the sound of tap shoes, only each tap was louder than the last until
they were so loud I thought my eardrums would burst. I woke up terrified. The sheets
beneath me were soaked and I had to get Lowell to change my pajamas, strip the bed.

Russell switched from our mother’s radio station to WIUS, the student one, and some
song I didn’t know came on, but not knowing the song didn’t stop me singing along
in the backseat until Russell finally told me I was hell on his nerves.

Hell. I repeated that several times, but under my breath so Russell wouldn’t have
to deal with it. I liked the way it made my tongue curl.

I couldn’t see out the front window, only the back of Russell’s head bopping in time
against the headrest. I tried to think of how to make him love me. Something inside
me knew that big words weren’t the way to Russell’s heart, but I couldn’t think what
else I could offer.

More songs on the radio and an ad for an original radio mystery play to be aired on
Halloween. Then a caller who wanted to talk about a professor who was making his entire
class read
Dracula
, even the Christians who thought it imperiled their souls. (Let’s just pause here
for a moment to imagine how a person who felt imposed on by vampires back in 1979
feels today. And then, right back to my story.)

More callers. Most people liked
Dracula
though some didn’t, but nobody liked professors who thought they could tell you what
to read.

The car began to bounce and I heard gravel under the tires. We came to a stop. I recognized
the bright crown of the tulip tree by our old farmhouse drive, its golden leaves floating
in a white-blue sky. Lowell got out to open the gate, got back in.

I hadn’t known this was where we were coming. My good mood turned anxious. Though
no one had said so, as no one was saying much of anything, I’d assumed Fern had been
left behind in the old farmhouse to live with the graduate students. I’d pictured
her life going on much as before, maybe even with less disruption than I’d had—missing
Mom, for sure (and weren’t we all?), but with Dad still stopping by to oversee the
drills, the games with colored poker chips and raisins. When, in a couple of months,
she’d turn six, I’d assumed like every other year she’d have a birthday cake with
the icing roses she and I so loved. (I don’t know for a fact that she didn’t.)

So my thinking was that it was sad that she never got to see our mother, and I wouldn’t
have wanted to be her, but it wasn’t
that
sad. The graduate students were nice and they never shouted, because they weren’t
allowed to and they loved Fern. They loved Fern more than they loved me. Sometimes
I had to wrap myself around their legs and refuse to let loose, just to get their
attention.