We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (8 page)

Now we were bumping up the driveway. Fern was always quick to hear a car approach;
she’d already be at the window. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see her, but I knew for
certain that she wouldn’t want to see me. “Mary doesn’t want to see Fern,” I told
Lowell.

Lowell twisted around, pinned me with a narrow-eyed look. “Oh my God! You didn’t think
Fern was still here, did you? Fuck, Rosie.”

I’d never heard Lowell say
fuck
before; in retrospect, I’m sure he was trying to impress Russell.
Fuck
was another word that felt good in my mouth. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Quack, quack, quack.
“Don’t be such a baby,” Lowell said. “There’s nobody here at all. The house is empty.”

“I’m not a baby.” This was reflexive; I was too relieved to be insulted. No angry
reunion, then. The familiar treetops were overhead like golden clouds; beneath us,
the familiar crunching of the gravel under the tires. I remembered how I used to find
pieces of quartz in the driveway here, clear and crystalline. Like four-leaf clovers,
this happened just often enough to keep me looking. There was no gravel at the new
house and, so, no point.

The car stopped. We got out and walked around the side to the kitchen door, but it
was locked, all the doors were locked, Lowell told Russell, and the windows, even
the upstairs windows, had been, in our last year there, fitted with bars, the route
from the apple tree to the bedrooms cut off before I’d ever mastered it.

The only remaining hope was the dog door into the kitchen. I don’t remember ever having
a dog, but apparently, we did once, a large terrier—Tamara Press was her name—and
apparently, Fern and I had loved her to distraction and slept on top of her until
she died of cancer just before I turned two. Unlike most dog doors, the latches for
this one were on the outside.

Lowell undid them. I was told to go through.

I didn’t want to. I was frightened. I felt that the house must be hurt not to be my
house anymore, that it must feel abandoned. “It’s just an empty house,” Lowell told
me encouragingly. “And Mary will go with you,” as if even I could think Mary would
be good in a fight.

Mary was useless. I wanted Fern. When would Fern get to come home?

“Hey,” said Russell. Talking to me! “We’re counting on you, runt.”

So I did it for love.

•   •   •

I
SCRAPED THROUGH
the dog door into the kitchen, stood up inside a fall of sunlight, dust motes caroming
and shining about me like glitter. I had never seen the kitchen empty. The scuffed
linoleum was brighter and smoother where the breakfast table ought to have been. Fern
and I had once hidden under that table so that no one would see us drawing on the
floor with felt-tip markers. The ghosts of our artwork were still visible if you knew
to look for them.

The empty room closed about me like a hum, squeezed me tightly until it was hard to
breathe. I felt the whole kitchen thick with rage, only I couldn’t tell if it was
the house or Fern who was so angry. I opened the door hastily for Lowell and Russell,
and as soon as they entered, the house let me go. It was no longer angry. Instead
it was terribly sad.

The boys went ahead, talking quietly so I couldn’t hear, which made me suspicious
and I followed. There were so many things I missed here. I missed the wide staircase.
We used to sled down on beanbag chairs. I missed the cellar. In the winter, we’d always
had baskets of apples and carrots you could eat without asking, as many as you wanted,
though you had to go down into the dark to get them. I wasn’t going down into the
dark now unless the boys did, and if they did, then I wasn’t staying behind.

I missed how big and busy it had always been. I missed having a yard I couldn’t see
to the end of. I missed the barn, the horse stalls filled with broken chairs and bicycles,
magazines, bassinets, our stroller and car seats. I missed the creek and the fire
pit, where we roasted potatoes or popped corn in the summer. I missed the jars of
tadpoles we kept on the porch for scientific observation, the constellations painted
onto the ceilings, the map of the world on the library floor, where we could go with
our lunches and eat in Australia or Ecuador or Finland.
My palms cover continents
curved in red letters down the far western edge of the map. My palm didn’t even cover
Indiana, but I could find the state on the map by shape. Soon I’d hoped to be able
to read the words. Before we moved, my mother had been teaching me out of my father’s
math books.
The product of two numbers is a number.

“What a freak show,” Russell said, which took the shine right off for me. What a dump.
My room in our new house was bigger than my room here.

“Is the lawn still electrified?” Russell asked. The front yard was choked with dandelions,
buttercups, and clover, but you could see how it was meant to be a lawn.

“What are you talking about?” said Lowell.

“I heard if you stepped on the grass, you got an electric shock. I heard it was all
wired up to keep people out.”

“No,” said Lowell. “It’s just regular grass.”

•   •   •

E
VENTUALLY
M
ELISSA’S SOAP
ended and she noticed I wasn’t around. She looked all through the neighborhood until
the Byards made her call our father, who’d just found out that Lowell was missing
from school. He’d had to cancel his class, a point that was repeated to us many times
over the next few days—that it was not just him we’d inconvenienced but a whole class
of students, as if his not showing up hadn’t been the best part of their week. Arriving
home, he saw that the car was gone.

So when, on our return, he lifted me out of the backseat, he didn’t ask how my day
had been. It didn’t stop me telling him.

T
HERE’S SOMETHING YOU DON’T KNOW
yet about Mary. The imaginary friend of my childhood was not a little girl. She was
a little chimpanzee.

So, of course, was my sister Fern.

Some of you will have figured that out already. Others may feel it was irritatingly
coy of me to have withheld Fern’s essential simian-ness for so long.

In my defense, I had my reasons. I spent the first eighteen years of my life defined
by this one fact, that I was raised with a chimpanzee. I had to move halfway across
the country in order to leave that fact behind. It’s never going to be the first thing
I share with someone.

But much,
much
more important, I wanted you to see how it really was. I tell you Fern is a chimp
and, already, you aren’t thinking of her as my sister. You’re thinking instead that
we loved her as if she were some kind of pet. After Fern left, Grandma Donna told
Lowell and me that when our dog Tamara Press had died, our mother had been devastated—just
the way she was now, being the implication. Lowell reported this to our father and
we were all so offended Grandma Donna had to give it right up.

Fern was not the family dog. She was Lowell’s little sister, his shadow, his faithful
sidekick. Our parents had promised to love her like a daughter, and for years I asked
myself if they’d kept that promise. I began to pay better attention to the stories
they read me, the stories I soon was reading to myself, looking to learn how much
parents love their daughters. I was a daughter as well as a sister. It was not only
for Fern’s sake that I needed to know.

What I found in books was daughters indulged and daughters oppressed, daughters who
spoke loudly and daughters made silent. I found daughters imprisoned in towers, beaten
and treated as servants, beloved daughters sent off to keep house for hideous monsters.
Mostly, when girls were sent away, they were orphans, like Jane Eyre and Anne Shirley,
but not always. Gretel was taken with her brother into the forest and abandoned there.
Dicey Tillerman was left with her siblings in a parking lot at a shopping mall. Sara
Crewe, whose father adored her, was still sent away to live at school without him.
All in all, there was a wide range of possibility, and Fern’s treatment fit easily
inside it.

Remember that old fairy tale I mentioned at the very start—how one sister’s words
turn to jewels and flowers, the other’s to snakes and toads? Here is how that fairy
tale ends. The older sister is driven into the forest, where she dies, miserable and
alone. Her own mother has turned against her, we are told, a thing so disturbing I’d
wished I hadn’t heard it and, long before Fern was sent away, had already told Mom
never to read us that story again.

But maybe I made that last part up, me being so upset, so alarmed. Maybe later, after
Fern left, I saw how I should have felt and revised my memory accordingly. People
do that. People do that all the time.

Until Fern’s expulsion, I’d scarcely known a moment alone. She was my twin, my fun-house
mirror, my whirlwind other half. It’s important to note that I was also all those
things to her. I would say that, like Lowell, I loved her as a sister, but she was
the only sister I ever had, so I can’t be sure; it’s an experiment with no control.
Still, when I first read
Little Women
, it seemed to me I’d loved Fern as much as Jo loved Amy if not as much as Jo loved
Beth.

•   •   •

W
E WERE NOT
the only household during this period attempting to raise a baby chimpanzee as if
she were a human child. The aisles of the supermarkets in Norman, Oklahoma, where
Dr. William Lemmon was prescribing chimps liberally to his grad students and patients,
were full of such families.

We were not even the only household to do so while simultaneously raising an actual
human child, though no one but us had twinned the child with the chimpanzee since
the Kelloggs had done so in the 1930s. By the 1970s, in most chimped-up households,
the human child was considerably older and no part of the experiment.

Fern and I were raised in as much the same way as was deemed rational. I’m sure I
was the only chimp sibling in the country who had to decline all birthday party invitations,
though this was mostly to prevent me from bringing colds home; little chimps are terribly
susceptible to respiratory infections. We went to exactly one party in my first five
years, and I don’t even remember it, but Lowell told me there’d been an unfortunate
incident involving a piñata, a baseball bat, and a lot of flying candy that ended
with Fern biting Bertie Cubbins, the birthday girl, on the leg. Biting someone who’s
not in the family—apparently, a really big deal.

I’m only guessing, of course, that other chimped-up families did things differently.
Certainly Fern was hyperaware of any favoritism and responded to it with vigor and
vinegar. Unfairness bothers chimps greatly.

My very earliest memory, more tactile than visual, is of lying against Fern. I feel
her fur on my cheek. She’s had a bubble bath and smells of strawberry soap and wet
towels. A few drops of water still cling to the sparse white hair of her chin. I see
this, looking up from the shoulder I am leaning against.

I see her hand, her black nails, her fingers curling and uncurling. We must have still
been very young, because her palm is soft and creased and pink. She is giving me a
large golden raisin.

There is a dish of these raisins on the floor in front of us, and I think they must
have been Fern’s and not mine, earned somehow in one of our games, but it doesn’t
matter, because she is sharing them with me—one for her, one for me, one for her,
one for me. My feeling in this memory is a great contentment.

Here’s a later memory. We’re in my father’s study, playing a game we call Same/NotSame.
Fern’s version involves being shown two things—two apples, for instance, or one apple
and one tennis ball. She’s holding two poker chips, one colored red and one colored
blue. If she thinks the two things are the same, she’s supposed to give Sherry, today’s
grad student, the red chip. Blue means different. It’s not clear she understands the
game yet.

Meanwhile, this game is already too simple for me. I’m working with Amy, who has given
me several lists of four items. I’m being asked which thing doesn’t fit. Some of the
lists are pretty tricky. Piglet, duckling, horse, and bear cub becomes pig, duck,
horse, and bear. I love this game, especially since Dad has explained there are no
right and wrong answers; it’s all just to see how I think. So I get to play a game
I can’t lose
and
I get to tell everyone everything I’m thinking while I do it.

I’m making my choices and also telling Amy what I know about ducks and horses and
the like, what my experience of them has been. Sometimes when you give bread to ducks,
the big ones take all of it and the little ones don’t get any, I tell her. That’s
not fair, right? That’s not nice. Sharing is what’s nice.

I tell her how I was once chased by ducks because I didn’t have enough bread to go
around. I say that Fern doesn’t give her bread to the ducks. She eats it herself,
which is sometimes true but sometimes not. Amy doesn’t correct me, so I say this again,
with more confidence. Fern is not a good sharer, I say, eliding Fern’s good record
of sharing with
me
.

I tell Amy that I’ve never ridden a horse, but I will someday. Someday I’ll have a
horse of my own, probably named Star or maybe Blaze. Fern couldn’t ride a horse, could
she? I ask. I’m always on the hunt for things I can do that Fern can’t. “You may be
right,” Amy says, writing it all down. Life couldn’t be better.

But Fern is getting frustrated, because she’s not being allowed to eat the apples.
She quits playing Same/NotSame. She comes over, rests the rough shelf of her forehead
against my own flat one so that I’m staring straight into her amber eyes. She’s so
close her breath is in my mouth. I can smell that she’s unhappy, her usual sort of
wet-towel smell, but with a pungent, slightly acrid undertone. “Stop bothering me,
Fern,” I say, giving her a little push. I am, after all, working here.

She wanders about the room for a bit, signing for apples and also bananas and candy
and other delicious things, but disconsolately, since none of the above is materializing.
Then she begins to jump back and forth between the top of our father’s desk and the
big armchair. She’s wearing her favorite yellow skirt with the pictures of blackbirds
on it and it flies up to her waist when she jumps, so you can see the diaper underneath.
Her lips protrude and funnel, her small face pale and bare. I hear the soft
oo oo oo
sounds she makes when she’s anxious.

She’s not having fun, but it still looks like fun to me. I climb onto Dad’s desk myself
and nobody says no, or even be careful, maybe because no one said these things to
Fern and so now they can’t. It’s farther than I thought and I land on the floor on
my elbow. As I fall, I hear Fern laughing. This causes some excitement. Typically,
a chimp laughs only when there is physical contact. Prior to this, Fern has laughed
only when she was being chased or tickled. Mocking laughter is a distinctly human
trait.

Our father tells Sherry and Amy to listen carefully when Fern laughs. The sound is
constrained by and timed to her breath, so the laughter comes in pants. Perhaps, Dad
suggests, Fern can’t sustain a single sound through a cycle of repeated exhalation
and inhalation. What would this mean for oral speech development? No one seems to
care that Fern was being mean, though that seems to me to be the crucial bit.

Later, because no one paid attention when I said my elbow hurt and then it turned
out to be broken, Dad apologized by letting me see the damage on my X-ray. The fissures
look like the crackle finish on a china plate. I’m somewhat soothed by the seriousness
of having broken a bone.

But not completely. The things I can do that Fern can’t are a molehill compared to
the mountain of things she can do that I can’t. I’m considerably bigger, which should
count for something, but she’s considerably stronger. The only thing I do better is
talk, and it’s not clear to me that this is a good trade-off, that I wouldn’t swap
it instantly for being able to scamper up the banister or stretch like a panther along
the top edge of the pantry door.

This is why I invented Mary, to even the score. Mary could do everything Fern could
and then some.
And
she used her powers for good instead of evil, which is to say only under my direction
and on my behalf.

Although my primary motive for her creation was to have a playmate no one preferred
to me. The best thing about Mary was that she was kind of a pill.

•   •   •

A
FEW DAYS
after the trip to the farmhouse, Mary and I can be found in the branches of a maple
in Russell Tupman’s backyard. We are looking into Russell’s kitchen, where his patchwork-vest-wearing
elf of a mother has covered a table with newspaper and taken a cleaver to a pumpkin.

Why are we in Russell’s maple? Because it’s the one tree on the block I can easily
climb. The base of its trunk forked into three parts, one almost parallel to the ground,
so that I could start by simply walking as if on a trestle, holding on to the branches
above for balance. As I got higher, I had to climb, but the branches were numerous,
each an easy step to the next. The fact that we could look from those branches into
the windows of Russell’s house was just a bonus. We were definitely there for the
climbing and not to reconnoiter.

Mary went higher than I could, and she said she could see all the way back down the
street to the Byards’ roof. She said she could see into Russell’s bedroom. She said
Russell was jumping on his bed.

But she was lying, because the next thing I knew, Russell was coming out the kitchen
door and walking straight toward me. The tree still had a smear of red leaves, so
I hoped I was hidden. I held very still until Russell was directly beneath me. “What
are you doing up there, runt?” he asked. “What do you think you’re looking at?”

I told him that his mother was cutting up a pumpkin. Only I used the word
dissecting
. Lowell had once found a dead frog by the creek at the farmhouse and he and my father
had spent an afternoon dissecting it on the dining room table, slicing open the chambers
of its little wet nut of a heart. I hadn’t minded that, but now the sight of Russell’s
mother reaching into the pumpkin was beginning to upset my stomach, send saliva into
my mouth. I swallowed hard and stopped looking through the window.

I was standing on one branch, holding with one hand on to a higher one, swaying slightly,
casually, as I talked. You would never have known my stomach was roiling. Savoir faire
to spare. “Monkey girl,” Russell said, a phrase I would come to know well when I started
school. “What a weirdo.” But his tone was pleasant enough and I didn’t take offense.
“Tell your brother I’ve got his money.”

I looked into the kitchen again. Russell’s mother had started pulling the intestines
from the pumpkin, slapping them by the handful onto the newspaper. My head went empty
and my legs shook, and for a moment I thought that I would fall or, even worse, vomit.

So I straddled a branch for more stability, but it was a thin branch, so flexible
that it bent unexpectedly under my weight and suddenly I was sliding down it, breaking
off little shoots and leaves as I went. I landed back on the ground, feet first, butt
second. My hands were covered with scratches.

“What the hell are you doing now?” Russell asked and then flicked a finger toward
the crotch of my pants, where the leaves had left a stain. I really can’t describe
the humiliation of this. I knew my crotch wasn’t something to be looked at or talked
about. I knew it shouldn’t be an autumn red.

•   •   •

A
FEW DAYS LATER
, the cops busted Russell. Grandma Donna told me that he’d thrown a Halloween party
at the farmhouse. Every window in the place had been broken, she said, and an underage
girl had spent a night in the hospital.