We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (9 page)

Language is such an imprecise vehicle I sometimes wonder why we bother with it. Here
is what I heard: that maybe Fern had reached, like a poltergeist, across time and
space and destroyed the home in which we’d all lived. A few broken windows might have
signified a party to me. Fern and I had thrown a croquet ball through one once and
had good fun doing it in spite of what came after. But every window in the place?
That didn’t sound larkish. That had the precision and persistence of fury.

Here’s what Grandma Donna thought she was telling me: that I was not too young to
understand the dangers of mixing alcohol and drugs. That she just hoped she’d never
live to see the day I had to have my stomach pumped. That such a thing would break
our mother’s broken heart.

T
HEN ONE MORNING,
just like that, Mom came back into focus. I woke to Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,”
decanting note by cheerful note up the stairs. Our mother was up, calling us by piano
to breakfast as she used to do, hands arched, foot pedal pumping. She had showered
and cooked, would return soon to reading and, finally, talking. Weeks passed then
without Dad taking a drink.

This was a relief, but less so than you might think, as you couldn’t depend on it
now that you’d seen the other.

We spent that Christmas in Waikiki, where Santa wore board shorts and flip-flops and
nothing felt like Christmas. We’d never been able to travel with Fern; now we could,
and we needed to get away. Last year, Fern had insisted on plugging and unplugging
the Christmas lights no matter how many times she was told to cut it out. It was our
tradition to let her put the star on the top of the tree.

Fern, sneaking a present into an upstairs closet, hooting with excitement and giving
the game away. Fern, on Christmas morning, filling the air with shredded wrapping
paper, stuffing it down the backs of our necks like snow.

It was my first time on an airplane, the white clouds a rolling mattress beneath us.
I loved the way Hawaii smelled, even in the airport, plumeria on the breeze and dribbled
into the hotel shampoos and soaps.

The beach at Waikiki was shallow enough that even I could walk out a good long ways.
We spent hours in the water, bobbing up and down, so when I lay at night on the hotel
bed that Lowell and I were sharing, my blood still rocked in my ears. I learned to
swim on that trip. Our parents stood beyond the breakers and caught me as I kicked
from one to the other and I was pretty sure Fern couldn’t have done that, though I
didn’t ask.

I had a revelation that I shared over breakfast—about how the world was divided into
two parts: above and below. When you went snorkeling, you were visiting the part below,
and when you climbed a tree, you were visiting the part above, and neither was better
than the other. I remember being pretty sure that this was an interesting thing for
me to say, something someone should be writing down.

When you think of three things to say, pick one and only say that.
For months after Fern left, the two things I didn’t say were always about her. In
Hawaii, I thought—but didn’t say—that maybe Fern could climb but I could dive. I wished
she were there to see me do that. I wished she were there, hooting over a piece of
lava cake, scaling the trunks of the palm trees like Spider-Man.

She would have so loved the breakfast buffet.

I saw her everywhere, but I never said so.

Instead I watched our mother obsessively for signs of breakage. She floated on her
back in the ocean or lay on a chair by the pool drinking mai tais, and, on hula night,
when the maître d’ asked for volunteers, she went right up. I remember how beautiful
she was, brown from the sun, flowers dripping from her neck, her hands fluid and fluent—
we throw our nets out into the sea, and all the ama-ama come a-swimming to me.

She was an educated woman, our father noted gingerly at dinner the night before we
came home. An intelligent woman. Wouldn’t it be good to have a job so she wasn’t stuck
in the house all the time, especially now that I’d be going to kindergarten?

I hadn’t known I was going to kindergarten until he said this. I hadn’t been around
other kids all that much. I was stupid enough to be excited.

The sea was shining outside the restaurant window, just turning from silver to black.
Mom agreed in that general way that means not to pursue the topic, and he took the
hint. We were all alert to her hints back then. We were careful with each other. We
tiptoed.

This lasted for many months. And then, one night at supper, Lowell said suddenly,
“Fern really loved corn on the cob. Remember what a mess she’d make?” and I got a
flash of yellow kernels pasted across Fern’s little pegs of teeth like bugs in a screen
door. Probably we were having corn on the cob when Lowell said this, which would mean
it was summer again—thunderstorms and fireflies and nearly a year since Fern had been
sent away. But that’s just making a guess.

“Remember how Fern loved us?” Lowell asked.

Dad picked up his fork, held it trembling in his fingers. He put it down again, gave
our mother a quick, glancing look. She was staring into her plate, so you couldn’t
see her eyes. “Don’t,” he said to Lowell. “Not yet.”

Lowell shook him off. “I want to go see her. We all need to go see her. She’s wondering
why we haven’t come.”

Our father passed his hand over his face. He used to play a game with Fern and me
where he did that. One pass down the face would reveal him scowling. His hand back
up would bring a smile. Down, scowl. Up, smile. Down, Melpomene. Up, Thalia. Tragedy
and comedy performed as facial expressions.

That night’s reveal showed him saggy and sad. “We all want that,” he said. His tone
matched Lowell’s. Calm, but firm. “We all miss her. But we have to think what’s best
for
her
. The truth is that she had a terrible transition, but she’s settled in now and happy.
Seeing us would just stir her up. I know you don’t mean to be selfish, but you’d be
making her feel worse for the sake of you feeling better.”

By now Mom was weeping. Lowell rose without another word, took his full plate to the
garbage, dumped it in. He put his dish and glass into the dishwasher. He left the
kitchen and he left the house. He was gone for two nights and he was not with Marco.
We never did find out where he’d slept.

•   •   •

T
HIS WASN’T
the first time I’d heard Dad make that argument. Back on the day when I’d gone to
the farmhouse with Russell and Lowell, back on the day when I’d finally understood
Fern wasn’t living there, I’d asked our father where she was.

He was up in his new study and I’d been sent to remind him that
The Rockford Files
was on, because Lowell couldn’t believe that “stay in your room and think about your
behavior” might actually mean “miss your favorite TV shows.” I considered climbing
on the desk and jumping into his lap, but I’d already shown poor judgment, going off
without telling Melissa, and I knew Dad wasn’t in a playful mood. He’d catch me if
I left him no choice in the matter, but he wouldn’t be happy about it. So I asked
him about Fern instead.

He’d pulled me into his lap, smelling as he always did of cigarettes and beer, black
coffee, Old Spice. “She has a different family now,” he said, “on a farm. And there
are other chimpanzees, so she has lots of new friends.”

I was instantly jealous of all those new friends who got to play with Fern while I
did not. I wondered if she liked anyone there better than me.

It felt odd to be sitting on one of Dad’s legs without Fern for ballast on the other.
His arms around me tightened. He’d told me then, just as he’d told Lowell later (and
probably more than once), that we couldn’t go see her, because it would upset her,
but that she had a good life. “We’ll always always miss her,” he said. “But we know
that she’s happy and that’s the important thing.”

“Fern doesn’t like being made to try new foods,” I said. This had been worrying me.
Fern and I cared a lot about what we ate. “We like what we’re used to.”

“New can be good,” Dad said. “There’s a ton of foods Fern has never even heard of
and would probably love. Mangosteens. Sweetsops. Jackfruits. Jelly palms.”

“But she can still eat her favorites?”

“Pigeon peas. Cake apples. Jamjams.”

“But she can still eat her favorites?”

“Jelly rolls. Monkey bars. Summer salts.”

“But she can still . . .”

He gave up. He gave in. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Of course. She can still eat her favorites.”
I remember him saying that.

I believed in this farm for many years. So did Lowell.

•   •   •

W
HEN
I
WAS ABOUT EIGHT,
I recovered what seemed to be a memory. It came one piece at a time, like a puzzle
I had to fit together. In this memory, I was a tiny child, riding in the car with
my parents. We were on a narrow country road, buttercups, grasses, and Queen Anne’s
lace crowding the car from the sides, brushing against the windows.

My father stopped for a cat that was crossing in front of us. I shouldn’t have been
able to see this cat, strapped as I was into my car seat in the back, yet I now remembered
it clearly as a black cat with a white face and belly. It wandered uncertainly in
front of us, back and forth, until my father grew impatient and drove on, running
it over. I remembered my shock; I remembered protesting. I remembered my mother defending
my father, saying that the cat had just refused to get out of the way, as if there’d
really been nothing else they could have done.

When it was complete, I took this memory to the only person I thought might believe
it, my grandma Donna. She was sitting in an armchair, reading a magazine, probably
People
. I think that maybe Karen Carpenter had just died; both my grandmas took that hard.
I was shaking when I told her, trying not to cry and not succeeding. “Oh, sweetheart,”
Grandma Donna said. “I think that must have been a dream. You must know your father
would never, ever do such a thing.”

If anyone was eager to see the worst in Dad, it was my grandma Donna. Her instant
dismissal was enormously comforting. It gave me back the things I knew—that my father
was a kind man, that he would never do such a terrible thing. To this day, I can feel
the bump of the tire over the cat’s body. And to this day I am very clear in my mind
that it never happened. Think of it as my own personal Schrödinger’s cat.

Was my father kind to animals? I thought so as a child, but I knew less about the
lives of lab rats then. Let’s just say that my father was kind to animals unless it
was in the interest of science to be otherwise. He would never have run over a cat
if there was nothing to be learned by doing so.

He was a great believer in our animal natures, far less likely to anthropomorphize
Fern than to animalize me. Not just me, but you, too—all of us together, I’m afraid.
He didn’t believe animals could think, not in the way he defined the term, but he
wasn’t much impressed with human thinking, either. He referred to the human brain
as a clown car parked between our ears. Open the doors and the clowns pile out.

The idea of our own rationality, he used to say, was convincing to us only because
we so wished to be convinced. To any impartial observer, could such a thing exist,
the sham was patent. Emotion and instinct were the basis of all our decisions, our
actions, everything we valued, the way we saw the world. Reason and rationality were
a thin coat of paint on a ragged surface.

The only way to make any sense of the United States Congress, our father told me once,
is to view it as a two-hundred-year-long primate study. He didn’t live to see the
ongoing revolution in our thinking regarding nonhuman animal cognition.

But he wasn’t wrong about Congress.

M
ORE MEMORIES OF
F
ERN:

In this first memory, we are three years old. Mother is sitting in the big love-seat
in the library so that Fern can squeeze in on one side and me on the other. It’s raining,
been raining for days, and I am sick of being inside, sick of using my inside voice.
Fern loves being read to. She’s sleepy and quiet, pressing in as close to our mother
as possible, her hands playing with the belt loops on Mom’s corduroy pants, smoothing
the nap on Mom’s thighs. I, on the other hand, am flinging myself about, unable to
get comfortable, kicking across Mom’s lap at Fern’s feet, trying to make her do something
that will get her in trouble. Mom tells me to hold still in a voice that could pickle
fish.

The book is
Mary Poppins
and the chapter is the one in which an old woman breaks off her own fingers, which
then become sugar sticks for the children to suck on. I have a queasy feeling about
this, but Fern hears the word
sugar
and her mouth begins to work in a sleepy, dreamy way. I don’t understand that Fern
doesn’t understand about the fingers. I don’t understand that Fern doesn’t follow
the story.

I interrupt constantly, because I wish to understand everything. What is a perambulator?
What is rheumatism? Will I get rheumatism someday? What are elastic-sided boots? Can
I have some? Are Michael and Jane mad when Mary Poppins takes their stars? What if
there were no stars in the sky? Could that happen? “For God’s sake,” Mom says finally.
“Can you just let me read the damn story?” and because she used the words
God
and
damn
, which she hardly ever does, Mary has to be sacrificed. It’s Mary wants to know,
I tell her. “Mary is getting on my last nerve,” our mother says. “Mary should be nice
and quiet like our little Fern here.”

Just as I sacrificed Mary, Fern has sacrificed me. She didn’t know what rheumatism
was, either, but because I was the one who asked, now she does. She gets to know about
rheumatism
and
she gets praised for not talking when
she can’t even talk
. I think that Fern has gotten praised for nothing and that I never get praised for
nothing. It’s clear that Mom loves Fern best. I can see half of Fern’s face. She is
almost asleep, one eyelid fluttering, one ear blooming like a poppy from her black
fur, one big toe plugging her mouth so I can hear her sucking on it. She looks at
me sleepily from over her own leg, from around the curve of Mom’s arm. Oh, she has
played this perfectly, that baby who still wears a diaper!

•   •   •

M
EMORY
T
WO:
One of the graduate students has gotten a free compilation tape from the local radio
station and she throws it into the cassette player. We are dancing together, all the
girls—Mom and Grandma Donna, Fern and I, the grad students, Amy, Caroline, and Courtney.
We are rocking it old-school to “Splish Splash I Was Taking a Bath,” “Paradise Park,”
and “Love Potion No. 9.”

I didn’t know if it was day or
night
. I started kissin’ everything in sight.

Fern is smacking her feet down, loud as she can, jumping sometimes onto the backs
of the chairs and then landing on the floor. She makes Amy swing her, and laughs the
whole time she is in the air. I am shaking it, popping it, laying it down and working
it out. “Conga line,” Mom calls. She snakes us through the downstairs, Fern and I
dancing, dancing, dancing behind her.

•   •   •

M
EMORY
T
HREE:
A day of bright sun and new snow. Lowell is throwing snowballs against the kitchen
window. They splatter softly when they hit, leaving trails of shine across the glass.
Fern and I are too excited to stand still but twirl about the kitchen, trailing and
spinning our scarves. We are so anxious to get outside we are impossible to dress.
Fern is stamping and rocking from side to side. She does a backflip, and then another,
and then I am looking down on the top of her head as we link hands for a merry-go-round
spin.

I am asking where snow comes from, and why it comes only in winter, and if it snows
in Australia in the summer, does that mean everything in Australia is opposite to
our world? Is it light during the night and dark during the day? Does Santa bring
you presents only if you’ve been very bad? Mom is not answering my questions, but
fretting instead, because there is no way to make Fern wear mittens or boots. If you
put something on Fern’s feet, she screams.

The whole question of clothing has been a touchy one. Excepting those times when Fern
would be too cold without (a second exception has been made for the diaper), Mom would
rather not dress her; she doesn’t want Fern made comical. But I have to wear clothes,
so Fern also has to. Besides, Fern wants them. Mom decides to classify Fern’s clothing
as self-expression, an anthropomorphism Dad dislikes.

On this occasion, Mom settles for pinning her own large gloves to the cuffs of Fern’s
parka, shoving Fern’s hands into them but letting her take them right out again. Mom
warns me to stay upright. No loping through the snow on my hands and feet. A smell
spreads through the kitchen. I can see that Mom is considering sending Fern out anyway.
“She stinks,” I say and Mom sighs, unzips Fern’s parka, takes her upstairs to change
her clothes. Dad is the one who brings her down again, reinserts her into her snow
wear. I hear the shower running upstairs. By now I’m so hot I’m sweating.

Lowell has been building a snow ant. The abdomen, which Lowell calls the metasoma,
is not as big as he wants—he wants a giant, mutant snow ant as tall as he is—but the
snow is so sticky, it’s already iced into place. When Fern and I finally burst out
into the snow-globe world of the farmhouse yard, we find him trying to dislodge it,
keep it rolling. We hop about him as he struggles. Fern swings up into the little
mulberry tree above us. There is snow on the branches. Some of it she eats. Some of
it she shakes down our necks until Lowell tells her to cut it out.

Fern is not much for cutting things out. Lowell puts up his hood. She drops onto his
back, arm around his neck. I hear her laughing—a sound like a handsaw scraping back
and forth. Lowell reaches over his head, grabs her arms, and somersaults her to the
ground. She laughs more and scrambles up the tree for a repeat.

But Lowell has already moved off to find another white sheet of snow, start another
snow ant. “My mistake was to stop and wait for you guys,” he tells us. “We got to
keep it moving.” He ignores Fern’s cries of disappointment.

I stay behind, digging a trench around the unfinished metasoma with my mittened hands.
Fern climbs down, starts after Lowell. She looks back to see if I’m coming and I sign
for her to give me some help. Ordinarily, this would have no impact, but she’s still
mad at Lowell. She pivots back.

Our father is standing on the porch with his coffee. “‘Nothing beside remains,’” Dad
says, pointing with his cup to the abandoned snow-ant abdomen. “‘Round the decay of
that colossal wreck.’”

Fern sits on the ground beside me, rests her chin on my arm, her feet on the metasoma.
She stuffs another handful of snow into her mouth, smacks her protuberant, acrobatic
lips, and turns to look up at me, eyes shining. Fern’s eyes seem larger than human
eyes, because the whites are not white but an amber color only slightly lighter than
the irises. When I draw Fern’s face, the crayon I use for her eyes is burnt sienna.
Fern’s own drawings are never finished, as she always eats the crayon.

She kicks now at the snowball with her feet. It’s not clear this is meant to help,
but it does. Beside her, I push with my hands. With less effort than I expected, it
rocks a little and breaks free.

I’m able to roll it now so that it gathers girth. Fern is bouncing behind me like
a cork on a wave, sometimes on top of the snow crust and sometimes falling through.
She leaves a churned wake, the trail of the Tasmanian devil. The gloves pinned to
her cuffs flop over the snow like leather fish.

Lowell turns, shading his eyes, because the sun is one bright dazzle on the ice-white
world. “How did you do that?” he shouts back. He’s grinning at me through the porthole
of his jacket hood.

“I tried really hard,” I tell him. “Fern helped.”

“Girl power!” Lowell shakes his head. “Awesome thing.”

“Power of love,” says my father. “Power of love.”

And then the graduate students arrive. We’re going sledding! No one tells me to calm
down, because Fern won’t be calming down.

My favorite grad student is named Matt. Matt’s from Birmingham, England, and calls
me
luv
, me and Fern both. I wrap my arms around his legs, jump up and down on the toes of
his boots. Fern hurls herself at Caroline, knocking her into the snow. When Fern stands
up, she is powdered head to toe like a doughnut. Both of us are demanding in our own
ways to be picked up and swung. We are so excited that, in the strangely illuminating
phrase my mother favors, we’re completely beside ourselves.

•   •   •

I
ALWAYS USED
to believe I knew what Fern was thinking. No matter how bizarre her behavior, no matter
how she might deck herself out and bob about the house like a Macy’s parade balloon,
I could be counted on to render it into plain English. Fern wants to go outside. Fern
wants to watch
Sesame Street
. Fern thinks you are a doodoo-head. Some of this was convenient projection, but you’ll
never convince me of the rest. Why wouldn’t I have understood her? No one knew Fern
better than I; I knew every twitch. I was attuned to her.

“Why does she have to learn our language?” Lowell asked my father once. “Why can’t
we learn hers?” Dad’s answer was that we still didn’t know for sure that Fern was
even capable of learning a language, but we did know for sure that she didn’t have
one of her own. Dad said that Lowell was confusing language with communication, when
they were two very different things. Language is more than just words, he said. Language
is also the order of words and the way one word inflects another.

Only he said this at much greater length, longer than either Lowell or I, or certainly
Fern, wished to sit still for. It all had something to do with
Umwelt
, a word I very much liked the sound of and repeated many times like a drumbeat until
I was made to stop. I didn’t care so much what
Umwelt
meant back then, but it turns out to refer to the specific way each particular organism
experiences the world.

I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied
is rarely the thing being studied.

When the Kelloggs first raised a child alongside a chimpanzee, back in the 1930s,
the stated purpose was to compare and contrast developing abilities, linguistic and
otherwise. This was the stated purpose of our study as well. Color me suspicious.

The Kelloggs believed that their sensationalistic experiment had sunk their reputations,
that they were never again taken seriously as scientists. And if I know this now,
our ambitious father surely knew it then. So what was the goal of the Fern/Rosemary
Rosemary/Fern study before it came to its premature and calamitous end? I’m still
not sure.

But it seems to me that much of the interesting data is mine. As I grew, my language
development not only contrasted with Fern’s but also introduced a
perfectly predictable
x-factor that undermined all such comparisons.

Ever since Day and Davis published their findings in the 1930s, there’s been a perception
that twinness affects language acquisition. New and better studies took place in the
1970s, but I’m not sure our parents were looking in their direction yet. Nor would
such studies have been completely relevant to a situation such as ours, where the
twins had such disparate potentials.

Though Fern and I were sometimes separated while the grad students observed us, we
spent most of our time together. As I developed the habit of speaking for her, she
seemed to develop the expectation that I would. By the time I turned three, I was
already serving as Fern’s translator in a way that surely retarded her progress.

So I think that, instead of studying how well Fern could communicate, our father might
have been studying how well Fern could communicate with me. That there was a vice
versa here, a tabloid-ready vice versa was unavoidable but unacknowledged. Here is
the question our father claimed to be asking: can Fern learn to speak to humans? Here
is the question our father refused to admit he was asking: can Rosemary learn to speak
to chimpanzees?

One of the early grad students, Timothy, had argued that in our preverbal period,
Fern and I had an idioglossia, a secret language of grunts and gestures. This was
never written up, so I learned of it only recently. Dad had found his evidence thin,
unscientific, and, frankly, whimsical.

•   •   •

S
OMETIMES
O
OFIE,
chimp star of the American Tourister luggage commercials, came on the TV. Fern paid
no attention to him. But once, we caught a couple of reruns of
Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp
, with the very handsome Tonga playing Link. These talking apes, in their suits and
ties, were more interesting to Fern. She watched intently, puckering and unpuckering
her prehensile mouth, making her sign for hat. “Fern wants a hat like Lancelot Link,”
I told our mother. There was no need to make the request for myself. If Fern got a
hat, I would get a hat.

Neither of us got a hat.

A short time later, our father arranged for a young chimp named Boris to visit the
farmhouse for an afternoon. The sign Fern made for Boris was the same sign she used
for the brown recluse spiders we sometimes found in the barn, which my mother translated
as
crawling poo
, and Lowell as
crawling shit
(which seemed more sensible to me.
Poo
was a joke word.
Shit
was serious and Fern was being serious). Boris, Fern said, was dirty crawling shit.
And then, deadly crawling shit.