We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Read online

  She was listless and uninterested in things. Whenever I saw that she was awake, I’d talk to her, but she hardly seemed to notice. I worried that she wasn’t healthy, after all. Or not very bright. Or so traumatized that she’d never recover.

  Still, that was the week she took hold of my heart. She was so little and so alone in the world. So frightened and sad. And so much like a baby. So much like you, only with a lot of suffering added.

  I told your dad I didn’t see how the two of you could be compared when your world had been so gentle and hers so cruel. But there was no turning back by then. I was deeply in love with you both.

  I’d read everything I could about the other home-raised chimps, especially the book by Catherine Hayes about Viki, and I thought it would work out. At the end of her book, Catherine says they plan to keep Viki with them always. She says that people keep asking if Viki might someday turn on them, and then she opens the morning newspaper and reads about some kid who’s murdered his parents in their beds. We all take our chances, she said.

  Of course, Viki died before she reached full size; they were never put to the test. But we’d thought that, too, your father and I, we truly did, that Fern would be with us forever. Your part of the study would end when you went off to school, but we’d keep working with Fern. Eventually you’d go to college, you and Lowell both, and she’d stay home with us. That’s what I thought I was agreeing to.

  A few years ago I found something on the Web that Viki’s father had said. He was complaining about the way Viki is always held up as an example of a failed language experiment. Doomed to failure, because they tried to teach her to speak orally, which, of course, a chimp is physiologically incapable of doing. As we now know.

  But Mr. Hayes said that the significant, the critical finding of their study, the finding everyone was choosing to ignore, was this: that language was the only way in which Viki differed much from a normal human child.

  • • •

  “WHERE YOU SUCCEED will never matter so much as where you fail,” I said.

  “Good Lord,” Mom answered. “How debilitating. If I believed that, I’d just end my meal right here, right now with a chaser of hemlock.”

  We’d had this conversation one night when we were lingering at the table, finishing our wine. It had been a special dinner to celebrate the sale of our book. The advance had exceeded our expectations (though not met our needs). Candlelight bobbed and weaved in the drafty kitchen and we were using that part of the good china that had survived the Fern years. Mom seemed calm and not too sad.

  She said, “I remember reading somewhere about some scientist who thought we could miniaturize chimps to control them, the way we’ve done with dachshunds and poodles.”

  I did not say that I’d read about Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov, who in the 1920s made several attempts to create a human-chimp hybrid, the elusive humanzee. He’d inseminated chimps with human sperm, though his first thought had been to go the other way—human mothers, chimp sperm. These are the dreams that make us human, Mother. Pass that hemlock over to me when you’re done with it.

  • • •

  MOM SAID:

  When Fern woke up, she woke up. Spun like a pinwheel. Burst like a sunburst. Swung through our house like a miniature Colossus. You remember how Dad used to call her our Mighty Whirlitzer? All the noise and color and excitement of Mardi Gras, and right in our very own home.

  When you got just a little older, you and she were quite the team. She’d open the cupboards and you’d pull out every pot, every pan. She could work the childproof locks in a heartbeat, but she didn’t have your stick-to-itiveness. Remember how obsessed she was with shoelaces? We were always tripping over our feet because Fern had untied our shoelaces without us noticing.

  She’d climb up in the closets and pull the coats from the hangers, drop them down to you below. Fetch coins from my purse for you to suck on. Open the drawers and hand you the pins and the needles, the scissors and the knives.

  • • •

  “DID YOU WORRY about me and what the impact might be?” I asked. I poured myself another glass of wine to fortify me, since I couldn’t think of an answer I was going to want to hear sober.

  “Of course I did,” she said. “I worried about that all the time. But you adored Fern. You were a happy, happy child.”

  “Was I? I don’t remember.”

  “Absolutely. I worried about what being Fern’s sister would do to you, but I wanted it for you, too.” The candlelight was casting shadow puppets in the kitchen. The wine was red. Mom took another sip and turned her softly sagging face away from mine. “I wanted you to have an extraordinary life,” she said.

  • • •

  MOM DUG OUT a video one of the grad students had made. There were a lot of these, which is why we still have an old VHS player long after the rest of you dumped yours. The opening shot is a long track up the farmhouse stairs. The sound track is from Jaws. My bedroom door swings open and there’s a scream.

  Shift to Fern and me. We’re lounging side by side in my beanbag chair. Our postures are identical, our arms crooked behind our necks, our heads cupped in our hands. Our knees are bent, one leg crossing over the other so one foot is on the ground, the other in the air. A picture of complacent accomplishment.

  The room about us has been trashed. We are Romans sitting amid the ruin of Carthage; Merry and Pippin in Isengard. Newspapers have been shredded, clothing and toys scattered, food discarded and stepped on. A peanut butter sandwich has been ground into the bedspread, the curtains bedazzled with Magic Markers. Around our contented little figures, grad students clean up the mess. On the screen, pages fall from the calendar as they work.

  Someday, we’ll be able to embed that video in a book. For this one, we used the photos from the baby books and tried to turn the lists of firsts—first steps, first teeth, first words, etc.—into something more like a story. We’re using a picture of Fern in one of Grandma Donna’s hats. Another, in which she’s holding an apple to her mouth with her feet. Another, where she’s looking at her teeth in the mirror.

  In each notebook, there was a set of facial close-ups—mood studies. We’ve paired them so that the embodiment of emotions in child and chimp can be contrasted. Here is me playful, all my teeth showing, and here is Fern, lip pulled over her top teeth. When I cry, my face clenches. My forehead is wrinkled, my mouth open wide; tears streak my cheeks. In Fern’s crying picture, her mouth is also open, but she’s thrown her head back, closed her eyes. Her face is dry.

  I can’t see much difference in the picture of me happy and the picture whose label says EXCITED. It’s easier with Fern. Her lips are opened in the first, funneled in the second. Her happy forehead is smooth; her excited one deeply creased.

  Fern snuck into most of my pictures. Here I’m in Grandma Fredericka’s arms and Fern is down below, clutching her leg. Here I sit in a toddler’s swing and Fern is dangling from the crossbar above me. Here we lean against our terrier, Tamara Press, all the small animals of the farmhouse in one concatenated row. Both of us have our hands plunged into Tamara’s fur, gripping it in our fists. She gazes mildly at the camera as if we were not hurting her with all the love in our hearts.

  Here we are hiking with Dad at Lemon Lake. I’m strapped into a BabyBjörn, my back against his chest, my face squished by the straps. Fern is in a backpack. She peeks over his shoulder, all wild hair and eyes.

  The poetry in our baby books was written in our mother’s hand, but the poets were Dad’s two favorites, Kobayashi Issa and Emily Dickinson. When I first read these in the journals, back in my college bedroom in the winter of ’97, it occurred to me that, for all his rigorous rejection of anthropomorphism, he could hardly have picked two who score more highly on Lowell’s test of kinship. Bonus points for bugs.

  ISSA

  Look, don’t kill that fly!

  It is making a prayer to you

  By rubbing its hands and feet.

  DICKINSON

  Be
e! I’m expecting you!

  Was saying Yesterday

  To Somebody you know

  That you were due—

  The Frogs got Home last Week—

  Are settled, and at work—

  Birds, mostly back—

  The Clover warm and thick—

  You’ll get my Letter by

  The seventeenth; Reply

  Or better, be with me—

  Yours, Fly.

  • • •

  2012.

  Year of the Water Dragon.

  An election year in the U.S., as if you needed to be reminded, the vituperative tunes of the Ayn Rand Marching Band bleating from the airwaves.

  And on the global level—Dämmerung of the Dinosaurs. Final Act: Revenge on the upstart mammals. Here is the scene where they cook us in our own stupidity. If stupid were fuel, we would never run out. Meanwhile, religious bullies at home and abroad are, in the short time remaining before the world ends, busily stomping out all hope of even ephemeral happiness.

  My own life, though, is pretty good. Can’t complain.

  • • •

  MOM AND I are living together these days in Vermillion, South Dakota. We are renting a nondescript townhouse, smaller even than the house of stone and air. I miss the mild winters of Bloomington and the milder ones of Northern California, but Vermillion’s a university town and pleasant enough.

  For the last seven years, I’ve been a kindergarten teacher at Addison Elementary, which is as close to living with a chimp troop as I’ve been able to get so far. And Kitch was right. More than right, prophetic. I’m good at it. I’m good at reading body language, especially that of small children. I watch them and I listen and then I know what they’re feeling, what they’re thinking, and, most important, what they’re about to do.

  My old kindergarten behaviors, so appalling when I was a kindergartner myself, are apparently quite acceptable in a teacher. Every week we try to learn a word we hope their parents don’t know, a task they approach with enthusiasm. Last week’s word was frugivorous. This week’s is verklempt. I’m preparing them for the SATs.

  I stand on my chair when I need to get their attention. When we sit on the rug, they climb all over my lap, comb through my hair with their fingers. When the birthday cupcakes come, we greet them with the traditional chimpanzee food-hoot.

  We have a whole unit on proper chimp etiquette. When you visit a chimp family, I tell them, you must stoop over, make yourself smaller, so you’re not intimidating. I show them how to sign friend with their hands. How to smile so that they cover their top teeth with their upper lips. When our class picture is taken, I ask the photographer for two—one to go home to their parents and one for the classroom. In the classroom picture, we are all making our friendly chimp faces.

  After we’ve practiced our good manners, we take a field trip to the Uljevik Lab, now called the Center for Primate Communication. We file into the visitors’ room, where there’s a bulletproof wall of glass between the chimps and us.

  Sometimes the chimps don’t feel like having guests, and they show it by rushing the wall, body-slamming it with a loud crash, making the glass shiver in its frame. When this happens, we go away, come back another time. The center is their home. They get to decide who comes in.

  But we also have a Skype connection in the classroom. I leave this open throughout the morning, so my students can check on the chimps anytime they like, and the chimps can do likewise. Only six chimps remain here now. Three are younger than Fern—Hazel, Bennie, and Sprout. Two are older, both males—Aban and Hanu. So Fern is not the largest, nor the oldest, nor the malest. And yet, by my observation, she is the highest-status chimp here. I’ve observed Hanu making the chimp gesture of supplication—arm extended, wrist limp—to Fern, and I’ve never seen Fern do that to anyone. So there, Dr. Sosa.

  My kindergartners far prefer my niece Hazel to my sister. They like Sprout, the youngest at five years, best of all. Sprout is unrelated to Fern, but he brings back my memories of her more often than she herself does. We see fewer images of older chimps, more of the tractable babies. Fern has grown heavy and slow. Her life has worn on her.

  My kindergartners say she’s kind of mean, but to me she’s just a good mother. She manages the social life at the center and doesn’t tolerate nonsense. When there’s a row, she’s the one who stops it, forces the rowers to hug and make up.

  Sometimes our own mother appears on the other end of the Skype connection, telling me to pick something up at the store on my way home or reminding me that I have a dentist appointment. She volunteers at the center daily. Her current job is to make sure Fern gets to eat the foods she likes.

  The day our mother walked in for the first time, Fern refused to look at her. She sat with her back to the glass and wouldn’t turn around even to see what Hazel and Mom were saying to each other. Mom had made peanut butter cookies, Fern’s old favorites, and they were delivered, but she’d refused to eat them. “She doesn’t know me,” Mom said, but I thought the evidence was otherwise. Fern would not turn down a peanut butter cookie for no reason.

  The first time Mom was the one to deliver lunch to the chimps—there is a small window for this, just large enough to slide a tray through—Fern was waiting for her. She reached out to grab Mom’s hand. Her grip was tight enough to hurt and Mom asked her several times to ease up, but Fern never showed any sign of hearing. She remained impassive and imperious. Mom had to bite her before she’d let go.

  In subsequent visits, she’s softened. She signs with Mom now, and keeps a careful track of where Mom is, much more so than with anyone else. She follows her about as best she can, with her inside and Mom out. She eats her cookies. In Fern’s baby book, there’s a photo in the farmhouse kitchen of Fern and me at the table, each with a beater to lick. Fern is gnawing on hers like a chicken leg.

  I used to wonder what I’d tell Fern when she asked about Lowell or Dad. We’d had to remind Grandpa Joe in his nursing home that Dad had died, over and over, and five minutes later he’d be asking us again, in an anguished voice, what he’d done so bad that his only son never came to see him. But Fern has never mentioned either one.

  Sometimes my kindergartners and the chimps do a craft project together, either when we visit or over Skype. We finger-paint. We cover paper with paste and glitter. We make clay plates with our handprints impressed into them. The center holds fund-raisers, where they sell chimp artwork. We have several of Fern’s paintings on the walls of the townhouse. My favorite is her rendition of a bird, a dark slash across a light sky, no cage for creature or artist in evidence anywhere.

  The center has shelves and shelves of video still to be analyzed; the researchers are behind the data by decades. So the six chimps left in residence are all retired from the science game. Our intrusions are welcomed as a way to keep them stimulated and interested, and no one worries about us muddying the results.

  These six chimps are cared for in the best way possible, and yet their lives are not enviable. They need more room inside and much more out. They need birds, trees, streams with frogs, the insect chorus, all of nature unorchestrated. They need more surprise in their lives.

  I lie awake at night and, just as I once fantasized about a tree house where I’d live with Fern, now I’m designing a home for humans, like a guardhouse, but bigger—a four-bedroom, two-bathroom guardhouse. The front door is also the only entry to a large compound. The back wall is all bulletproof glass and looks out on twenty acres, maybe more, of dogwood, sumac, goldenrod, and poison ivy. In my fantasy, humans are confined to the house and chimps run free over the property, the six from the center but others as well, maybe even my nephews, Basil and Sage. This is the clue that it’s all just a dream; introducing two full-grown males into our little community is a terrible and dangerous idea.

  In the last several years, the news has carried reports of horrific chimp attacks. I’m not afraid of Fern. Still, I understand that she and I will never touch each other again, neve
r sit with our arms around each other, never walk in tandem as if we were a single person. This dream sanctuary is the best solution I can imagine—an electrified fence around us, a bulletproof wall between.

  • • •

  IT WILL TAKE more than a kindergarten teacher’s salary. Publishing her journals as a children’s book was Mom’s idea. She wrote the originals and did much of the work preparing the final version, but Fern and I are whimsically listed as coauthors on the cover. All profits will go directly to the center, to a fund for enlarging the chimps’ outdoor enclosure. Cards for donations will also be slipped inside each book.

  Our publisher is excited and optimistic. The pub date has been arranged around my summer vacation. The publicity department expects a number of media bookings. When I think too much about this, I panic, find myself hoping for print rather than radio, radio rather than television or, selfishly, no notice at all.

  Some of this is my familiar fear of exposure. It terrifies me to think that, come summer, there will be no more hiding, no more passing. Everyone from the woman who cuts my hair to the queen in England might know who I am.

  Not who I really am, of course, but an airbrushed version of me, more marketable, easier to love. The me that teaches kindergarten and not the me who will never have children. The me who loves my sister and not the me who got her sent away. I still haven’t found that place where I can be my true self. But maybe you never get to be your true self, either.

  I once thought of the monkey girl as a threat only to myself. Now I see how she could blow the whole caper. So, added to the old fear of exposure, is this other fear that I’ll mess up, miscalculate just how much monkey girl to let out. There’s no data to suggest that I can make you love me whatever I do. I could be headed back to middle school, no hallways and classrooms this time, but the tabloids and the blogs instead.

  Pretend I’m on your television sets. I’ll be on my best human behavior. I won’t climb on the tables or jump on the couches even though humans have done those things on television shows before and not been rousted from the species for it. And still you’ll be thinking to yourselves—it makes no sense, because she looks perfectly normal, even rather pretty in some lights, and yet. There’s just something off about her. I can’t put my finger on it . . .