We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Read online

  She herself took the worst of that. I suspected her lovely blouse was done for. “But it’s just not like her,” her father said over and over again as we were mopping up the mess. “Breaking in somewhere. Taking things”—meaning monkeys, I assume; I’d said nothing about Madame Defarge—“taking things that don’t belong to her.”

  I wondered if we were talking about the same person. Nothing seemed more like Harlow to me.

  But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see. I told Ezra some of this. He was too depressed to be interested. To my surprise, the need to touch him—something I’d certainly never felt before and probably felt now only because it was forbidden—began to overwhelm me. I wanted to stroke his arm, finger his hair, ruffle up some spirit. I sat on my hands to prevent it.

  “Where did you think the monkeys would go?” I asked him.

  “Wherever the hell they wanted,” he said.

  Three

  AS SOON AS I’d said good-bye to Lowell at the Davis train station, there’d been no point in sticking around, prolonging my college education any longer. I had a sister to take care of. It was time to get serious.

  I waited for that first report on Fern to arrive, but it never did. Whatever Lowell thought he’d put into place had slipped out of it. Meanwhile, I checked out every book I could find on the monkey girls—Jane Goodall (chimps), Dian Fossey (gorillas), and Biruté Galdikas (orangutans).

  I thought of going to work at Gombe Stream after graduation, spending long days observing the Kasakela chimpanzees. I thought I might have something special to contribute there, might find a way, after all this time, to make something good come from Dad’s experiment. This, I thought, was the life I was born to live, so like those tree-house dreams that used to rock me to sleep. I thought that I might find the place where I fit in at last. Tarzan in the jungle. The idea vaulted me into elation.

  Plummet. I remembered the 170 rapes over three days from Dr. Sosa’s lecture. Some scientist had observed all that, had actually watched a chimp raped 170 times and kept count. Good scientist. Not me.

  Besides, because I had so assiduously avoided primates in all my classes, this career path would have amounted to starting college over.

  And how did it help Fern?

  I remembered then that Lowell’s old girlfriend, Kitch, had once told me she thought I’d be a great teacher. I’d figured she was just being polite—and also crazy, probably driven crazy like so many before her by sorority living—but after several hours with the university handbook in one hand and my transcript in the other, it seemed that my fastest route through, the major that would accept most of the classes I’d already taken, was education. Of course, then there would be the credential to get. But I couldn’t see another degree I’d finish much before Mayan doomsday.

  • • •

  ONE DAY THAT spring I ran into Reg at the library and he suggested that we go together to see the drama department’s gender-bending Macbeth. He had two tickets, he said, courtesy of some friend of Harlow’s.

  We met around twilight at the Dramatic Art Building. (A month later, appropriately enough, the name would be changed to the Celeste Turner Wright Hall, one of only three buildings on campus named after a woman. We thank you, Celeste, we women of Davis.) It was a beautiful night, and behind the theater, the redbuds and the currants were blooming in the arboretum. Down the hill, I heard mallards quarreling languidly.

  The play was the usual bloody affair, and none of Harlow’s ideas had been used. I thought this was a shame. It wasn’t a bad show, but it would have been much more interesting the way she’d envisioned it. Reg, though, persisted in his original assessment, that there was nothing funnier than a man in a dress.

  I found this appalling, demeaning to women and cross-dressers everywhere. I said that he must be the only idiot in the world who thought Macbeth should be played for laughs.

  He waved his hands cheerfully at me. “When a guy takes a girl to see a feminist show,” he said, “he knows what he’s getting himself into. He knows the evening will end in a fight.” He asked if I was getting my period, which he also thought was pretty damned funny.

  We were headed to his car then. I turned abruptly around. I preferred to walk, I told him. By myself. What a jerk. I was halfway home before I realized what he’d said. “When a guy takes a girl . . .” I hadn’t known it was a date.

  The next day he called me up and asked me out again. We lasted about five months as a couple. Even now, as I inch toward my forties, this remains a personal best for me. I liked Reg a lot, but we never moved in together. We fought all the time. I wasn’t as restful as he’d hoped.

  “I don’t think this is going to work,” he said to me one evening. We were parked in front of my apartment house waiting for the police to leave. They were ticketing the third floor for noise violations.

  “Why not?” I asked in the spirit of scientific inquiry.

  “I think you’re terrific,” he said. “And a very pretty girl. Don’t make me spell it out.” So I’m not sure exactly why we broke up.

  Maybe he was the problem. Maybe I was. Maybe it was the ghost of Harlow, shaking her gory locks at us. Hence, horrible shadow! Unreal mockery, hence!

  The conversation wasn’t as hurtful as it sounds in the recounting. When I think of Reg, I think of him fondly. At the time, I was pretty sure I was the one who’d started the breaking up, even though he was the first to say it. Later, though, I heard he was dating a man, so maybe I was too quick to take the credit.

  The fact remains that I can’t seem to make sex work over the long haul. Not for lack of trying. Don’t make me spell it out.

  I wonder if Lowell would say that the way I was raised has fucked me up sexually. Or if none of you can make sex work over the long haul, either.

  Maybe you think you can, but you really can’t. Maybe anosognosia, the inability to see your own disability, is the human condition and I’m the only one who doesn’t suffer from it.

  Mom says I just haven’t met the right guy yet, the guy who sees the stars in my eyes.

  True enough. I’ve yet to meet that guy.

  • • •

  THE MAN WHO saw the stars in my mother’s eyes died in 1998. Dad had taken off for a solitary week of camping, fishing, kayaking, and introspection along the Wabash River. Two days in, while portaging the kayak over some rocks, he had a heart attack that he mistook for the flu. He made it home and into bed, where he had a second heart attack a day later, and a third in the hospital that night.

  By the time I arrived, he was outdoors again, climbing some dream mountain in the borderlands. It took concentrated, sustained effort, from both Mom and me, to tell him I was there and I’m still not sure he knew me. “I’m really tired,” he said. “Could you take my pack? Just for a little while?” He sounded embarrassed.

  “Sure, Dad,” I said. “Sure. Look, I have it now. I’ll carry it for as long as you need.” This was the last thing I said to him that I know he heard.

  I imagine that sounds like a deathbed scene in a movie—clean, classic, profound, and weighty. In fact, he lived another day, and there was nothing tidy about it. There was blood, shit, mucus, moaning, and hours of audible, painful gasping for breath. Doctors and nurses dashed about, and Mom and I were allowed into the room and then tossed from it with regularity.

  I remember an aquarium in the waiting room. I remember fish whose beating hearts were visible inside their bodies, whose scales were the color of glass. I remember a snail that dragged itself along the sides, the mouth in its foot expanding and contracting endlessly as it moved. The doctor came out and my mother stood to meet him. “I’m afraid we’ve lost him this time,” he said, as if there would be a next time.

  • • •

  NEXT TIME, I’ll put things right between my father and me.

  Next time, I’ll give Mom the fair share of blame for Fern that her collapse forestalled this time around. I won’t drop the whole of it onto Dad
next time.

  Next time, I’ll take the share that’s mine, no more, no less. Next time I’ll shut my mouth about Fern and open it about Lowell. I’ll tell Mom and Dad that Lowell skipped his basketball practice, so they’ll talk to him and he won’t leave.

  I’d always planned to forgive Dad someday. It cost him so much, but it didn’t cost him me, and I wish I’d said so. It’s painful and pointless that I didn’t.

  So I’ve always been grateful for that one final request. It was a great gift to let me take a burden, however imaginary, from him.

  • • •

  DAD WAS FIFTY-EIGHT years old at the time of his death. The doctor told us that, due to the combination of diabetes and drink, he had the body of a much older man. “Did he live a stressful life?” he asked us, and Mom asked back, who didn’t?

  We left his body behind for further scientific analysis and got into the car. “I want Lowell,” my mother said and then she melted over the steering wheel, gasping so hard for breath it seemed that she might die along with Dad.

  We changed places and I drove. I made several turns before realizing that I was not on my way to the house of stone and air but back to the saltbox by the university, where I’d grown up. I was almost home before I noticed.

  Dad had a long, respectful obituary in The New York Times, which would have pleased him. Fern was mentioned, of course, but as a research subject, not a “survived by.” I felt the jolt of Fern’s name coming when I hadn’t braced for it, like hitting an air pocket in a plane. The monkey girl was still afraid of exposure, and this seemed like an international reveal.

  But by this time, I was at Stanford, where I didn’t know much of anyone. No one said a word to me about it.

  A few days after the obit ran, we got a postcard of the Regions Building in Tampa, Florida, with its steepled roof and forty-two floors of pewter-tinted windows. “I’m seeing so much of America today,” the postcard said. It was addressed to Mom and me. There was no signature.

  Four

  BACK IN 1996, the airlines had returned my suitcase just a few days after I’d left for Christmas vacation. Todd was still in the apartment, since he rarely rushed home for the holidays, so he was able to ID it, take possession. “It’s the real deal,” he told me. “Your actual suitcase. I’d know it anywhere.” He’d given the other back, which I hadn’t anticipated happening in my absence and was distressed about.

  Of course, it’s always possible that while I was hitting the tarmac in Indiana, Harlow was sneaking into my room, as she so liked to do, and putting Madame Defarge safely back into her powder-blue sarcophagus. “Always possible” as in “No chance in hell.”

  I do feel terrible about that. I’m sure she was an expensive and irreplaceable antique. I’d meant to put a note inside the suitcase before it was returned, making my apologies. Let me do so here:

  Dear jogging puppeteer,

  Although I didn’t steal Madame Defarge myself, she did disappear while under my care. I’m so sorry. I’m sure you valued her highly.

  The only consolation I can offer is my belief that she’s now living the life of ceaseless retribution for which she is so justly famous. She has, in short, returned to form as a political activist and dispenser of rough justice.

  I still hope to get her home to you someday, intact in all her parts. I look for her on eBay at least once every month.

  My sincerest apologies,

  Rosemary Cooke

  My own bulging suitcase had no such missing items. There was my blue sweater, there were my bedroom slippers, my pajamas, my underwear; there were our mother’s journals, not as sprightly as when last seen—travel had frayed their corners, disheveled their covers, left the Christmas ribbon at a rakish angle. Everything a bit squashed, but essentially unharmed.

  I didn’t open the journals immediately. I was tired from the trip home and scraped raw from all the talking and thinking of Fern I’d done over the last weeks. I decided to put them away for a bit on the top shelf of my closet, pushed back so I wouldn’t see them every time I slid the mirrored doors apart.

  And then, having made that decision, I flipped open the cover on the top one.

  There was a Polaroid of me, taken in the hospital in the early hours of my life. I’m red as a berry, shiny from the pickling of the womb, and squinting at the world through suspicious, slitted eyes. My hands are fists up by my face. I look ready to rumble. Under my picture, there is a poem.

  dear, dear,

  what a fat, happy face it has

  this peony!

  I went ahead and opened the cover of the second notebook. Fern also has a picture and a poem, or at least part of a poem. The photo was taken the first day she arrived at the farmhouse. She’s almost three months old and wrapped like seaweed around someone’s arm. It must be our mother’s; I recognize the large, green weave of the shirt from other pictures.

  The hair on Fern’s head, including her side whiskers, is up. It springs from her bare face in an aggrieved and agitated halo. Her arms are twigs, her forehead creased, her eyes huge and startled.

  A Mien to move a Queen—

  Half Child—Half Heroine—

  Mom’s notebooks are not scientific journals. Although they do include a graph or two, some numbers and some measurements, they’re not the dispassionate, careful observations from the field that I expected.

  They appeared to be our baby books.

  Five

  I’VE TOLD YOU the middle of my story now. I’ve told you the end of the beginning and I’ve told you the beginning of the end. As luck would have it, there is considerable overlap between the only two parts that remain.

  Last fall, Mom and I spent many weeks looking through her journals together, preparing them for publication. In her late sixties now, Mom’s taken to wearing overalls—“I haven’t seen my waist since Aught One,” she likes to say, but she’s actually gotten skinnier as she’s aged, ropier arms, bonier legs. She’s still an attractive woman, but now you can see the skull beneath the face. These old photos reminded me of how happy she’d always looked back before we broke her.

  “You were the prettiest baby anyone ever saw,” she told me. The Polaroid provides no evidence of this. “Perfect ten on the Apgar.” Six hours of labor, according to her journal. Weighing in at 7 pounds, 2 ounces. 19 inches tall. Quite a decent catch.

  I was five months old when I first learned to sit up. There’s a photo of me sitting, back straight as a knitting needle. Fern is leaning against me, her arms around my middle. She appears to be either just starting or just finishing a yawn.

  At five months, Fern was already crawling on her knuckles and her little clenched feet. “She used to lose track of the floor,” Mom said. “Her hands were fine. She could see them and where they ought to go. But she’d wave her feet around behind her, trying to find the ground up in the air or out to the side or anywhere else but down. It was just so cute.”

  I started to walk when I was ten months old. At ten months, Fern could make it all the way downstairs by herself, swinging on the railings. “You were very early with all your benchmarks, compared to other children,” Mom said consolingly. “I think maybe Fern pushed you a little.”

  At ten months, I weighed 14 pounds, 7 ounces. I had four teeth, two on the top, two on the bottom. Fern weighed 10 pounds, 2 ounces. Mom’s charts show both of us small for our age.

  My first word was bye-bye. I signed it at eleven months, said it at thirteen. Fern’s first sign was cup. She was ten months old.

  • • •

  I WAS BORN in a hospital in Bloomington, an unremarkable delivery. Fern was born in Africa, where, barely a month later, her mother was killed and sold as food.

  Mom said:

  We’d been talking about raising a chimpanzee for several years. All very theoretical. I’d always said I wouldn’t have a chimp taken from its mother. I’d always said it had to be a chimp with nowhere else to go. I kind of thought that would be the end of that. I got pregnant with you and
we stopped talking about it.

  And then we heard about Fern. Some friends of some friends bought her from poachers at a market in Cameroon, because they hoped we’d want her. They said she was all but dead at the time, just as limp as a rag, and filthy, streaked with diarrhea and covered in fleas. They didn’t expect her to live, but they couldn’t bear to walk away and leave her.

  And if she did make it, then she’d have proved herself one tough little nut. Resilient. Adaptable. Perfect for us.

  She was still in quarantine when you were born. We couldn’t take any chances on her bringing something into the house. So for one month, you were my only baby. You were such a happy little soul. And easy—you hardly ever cried. But I was having second thoughts. I’d forgotten how tiring it all was, the sleepless nights, the endless nursing. I would have said no to the study then, but what would happen to Fern? And every time I hesitated, I was promised all this help. A village. Of grad students.

  It was a blustery day when Fern finally blew into town. So tiny and terrified. The wind slammed the door behind her and she just jumped from the arms of the guy who’d brought her over to me. That was that.

  She used to grip me so tightly that the only way I could put her down was to pry her loose, one digit at a time. For two years, I had bruises from her fingers and toes all over my body. But that’s how it works in the wild—the baby chimp clings to its mother for the whole of the first two years.

  Her grip was so strong that this one time just after she arrived, I’d put her down and her little hands were flailing about in protest when they found each other by accident. They clamped together like clamshells. She couldn’t get them apart. She started screaming and your father had to go in and unlock her hands for her.

  For the first week, she mostly slept. She had a cradle, but I could put her into it only if she was already asleep. She’d curl up on my lap with her head on my arm, and yawn so I could see all the way down her throat, which would make me yawn, too. And then the light would slowly go out of her eyes. The lids would come down, flutter for a bit, then close.