We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Read online

  The last time I saw him, I was eleven years old and he hated my guts.

  • • •

  THE SUITCASE wasn’t mine. That goes without saying.

  Seven

  THAT STORY I TOLD HARLOW—that story in which I’m sent to my grandparents in Indianapolis—obviously that story isn’t really from the middle of this story. I did tell it to Harlow just when I said, so my telling of it is from the middle, but the happening and the telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true, only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it.

  Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

  And I’ve reached a point here, now that my brother has arrived, where I don’t see how to go further forward without going back—back to the end of that story, back to when I returned to my family from my grandparents’ house.

  Which also happens to be the exact moment when the part I know how to tell ends and the part I’ve never told before begins.

  Part Two

  . . . a short time perhaps when measured by the calendar, but endlessly long to gallop through, as I have done, at times accompanied by splendid people, advice, applause, and orchestral music, but basically alone . . .

  —FRANZ KAFKA, “A Report for an Academy”

  One

  SO NOW IT’S 1979. Year of the Goat. The Earth Goat.

  Here are some things you might remember. Margaret Thatcher had just been elected prime minister. Idi Amin had fled Uganda. Jimmy Carter would soon be facing the Iran hostage crisis. In the meantime, he was the first and last president ever to be attacked by a swamp rabbit. That man could not catch a break.

  Here are some things you maybe didn’t notice at the time. The same year Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty, it snowed for half an hour in the Sahara Desert. The Animal Defense League was formed. Up on the Magdalen Islands, eight crew members from the Sea Shepherd sprayed more than a thousand seal pups with a harmless but permanent red dye. This dye was designed to ruin their pelts and save the pups from hunters. The activists were arrested and, in pitch-perfect Orwellian double-speak, charged with violating the Seal Protection Act.

  Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” was on the radio, The Dukes of Hazzard on the TV. Breaking Away was in the theaters and Bloomington, Indiana, was ready for its close-up.

  The only part of this I was aware of at the time was the Breaking Away part. In 1979, I was five years old, and I had problems of my own. But that’s how excited Bloomington was—even the suffering children could not miss the white-hot heat of Hollywood.

  • • •

  MY FATHER WOULD surely want me to point out that, at five, I was still in Jean Piaget’s preoperational phase with regard to cognitive thinking and emotional development. He would want you to understand that I am undoubtedly, from my more mature perspective, imposing a logical framework on my understanding of events that didn’t exist at the time. Emotions in the preoperational stage are dichotomous and extreme.

  Consider it said.

  Not that there aren’t times when dichotomous and extreme are exactly what’s warranted. Let’s simplify matters and just agree that, at this point in my story, my whole family, all of us, young and old, was really really really upset.

  The day after my cross-capital trek from trampoline to little blue house, my father appeared. My grandparents had called him to come fetch me, but no one told me that part. I still thought I was being given away, only not to my grandparents, who’d turned out not to want me. Where next? Who would love me now? I sobbed in as decorous a manner as possible, because my father didn’t like it when I cried and I still had hopes. But no one admired my heroic restraint and my father didn’t even seem to notice my tears. He had obviously washed his hands of me.

  I was sent out of the room, where a good deal of hushed and ominous talking happened, and even when my bag was packed and I was in the backseat and the car was moving, I still didn’t know I was being taken home. Which was just as well, because I wasn’t.

  As a child, I chose to escape unhappy situations by sleeping through them. I did so now, and when I woke I was in a strange room. In many ways, the strangest things about this room were the bits that weren’t strange. My chest of drawers was by the window. The bed I was in was my bed, the quilt over me was my quilt—hand-sewn by Grandma Fredericka back when she’d loved me, appliquéd with sunflowers that stretched from the foot to the pillow. But the drawers were all empty and, under that quilt, the mattress was bare to the buttons.

  There was a fort made of boxes by the window, one of them a carry-all for beer cans, and through the handholds I could see the cover of my own Where the Wild Things Are, with its egg-shaped stain of smeared Hershey’s Kiss. I climbed onto a box to look outside and found no apple tree, no barn, no dusty fields. Instead some stranger’s backyard, with a barbecue, a rusted swing-set, and a well-kept vegetable garden—tomatoes reddening, pea pods popping—swam mistily behind the double-paned glass. In the farmhouse where I lived such vegetables would have been picked, eaten, or thrown long before they’d ripened on the vine.

  The farmhouse where I lived grumbled and whistled and shrieked; there was always someone pounding on the piano or running the washing machine or jumping on the beds or tub-thumping the pans or shouting for everyone to be quiet because they were trying to talk on the phone. This house lay in an oneiric hush.

  I’m not sure what I thought then, perhaps that I was to live here alone now. Whatever it was, it sent me sobbing back to bed and back to sleep. In spite of my best hopes, I woke up in the same place in the same tears, calling despairingly for my mother.

  My father came instead, picking me up and holding me. “Shh,” he said. “Your mother is sleeping in the next room. Were you scared? I’m sorry. This is our new house. This is your new room.”

  “Everyone lives here with me?” I asked, still too cautious to be hopeful, and I felt my father flinch as if I’d pinched him.

  He put me down. “See how much bigger your new room is? I think we’re going to be very happy here. You should look around, kiddo. Explore. Just not into your mother’s room,” pointing out their door, which was right next to mine.

  The floors of our old house were a bruised wood or linoleum, anything that could be cleaned in a hurry with a mop and a bucket of water. This house had a scratchy silver carpet extending from my new bedroom into the hall with no break. I wouldn’t be skating in my socks here. I wouldn’t be riding my scooter on this rug.

  The new upstairs consisted of my bedroom, my parents’ bedroom, my father’s study with its blackboard already propped against the wall, and one bathroom with a blue tub and no shower curtain. My new room may have been bigger than the bright little nook I’d had in the farmhouse, but I could see that the house itself was smaller. Or maybe I couldn’t see that when I was five. Ask Piaget.

  Downstairs was a living room with a tiled fireplace, the kitchen with our breakfast table in it, another bathroom, smaller, with a shower but no tub, and next to that my brother’s room, only my brother’s bed had no blankets, because, I found out later that night, he’d refused to set foot in the new house, and had gone instead to stay with his best friend Marco for as long as they’d have him.

  And that right there is the difference between me and my brother—I was always afraid of being made to leave and he was always leaving.

  All the rooms had boxes in them and almost none of the boxes had been opened. There was nothing on the walls, nothing on the shelves. A few dishes in the kitchen, but no sign of our blender, toaster, bread-maker.

  As I made my way for the first time through the house I would live in until I was eighteen, I began to suspect what had happened. I could find no place where the graduate students would work. I looked and looked, back upstairs and then down again, but could
find only three bedrooms. One of them was my brother’s. One of them was our mother and father’s. One of them was mine. I hadn’t been given away.

  Someone else had.

  • • •

  AS PART OF leaving Bloomington for college and my brand-new start, I’d made a careful decision to never ever tell anyone about my sister, Fern. Back in those college days, I never spoke of her and seldom thought of her. If anyone asked about my family, I admitted to two parents, still married, and one brother, older, who traveled a lot. Not mentioning Fern was first a decision, and later a habit, hard and painful even now to break. Even now, way off in 2012, I can’t abide someone else bringing her up. I have to ease into it. I have to choose my moment.

  Though I was only five when she disappeared from my life, I do remember her. I remember her sharply—her smell and touch, scattered images of her face, her ears, her chin, her eyes. Her arms, her feet, her fingers. But I don’t remember her fully, not the way Lowell does.

  Lowell is my brother’s real name. Our parents met at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona at a high school summer science camp. “I’d come to see the heavens,” our father always said. “But the stars were in her eyes,” a line that used to please and embarrass me in equal measure. Young geeks in love.

  I would think better of myself now if, like Lowell, I’d been angry about Fern’s disappearance, but it seemed too dangerous just then to be mad at our parents and I was frightened instead. There was also a part of me relieved, and powerfully, shamefully so, to be the one kept and not the one given away. Whenever I remember this, I try to also remember that I was only five years old. I’d like to be fair here, even to myself. It would be nice to get all the way to forgiveness, though I haven’t managed it yet and don’t know that I ever will. Or ever should.

  Those weeks I spent with our grandparents in Indianapolis still serve as the most extreme demarcation in my life, my personal Rubicon. Before, I had a sister. After, none.

  Before, the more I talked the happier our parents seemed. After, they joined the rest of the world in asking me to be quiet. I finally became so. (But not for quite some time and not because I was asked.)

  Before, my brother was part of the family. After, he was just killing time until he could be shed of us.

  Before, many things that happened are missing in my memory or else stripped down, condensed to their essentials like fairy tales. Once upon a time there was a house with an apple tree in the yard and a creek and a moon-eyed cat. After, for a period of several months, I seem to remember a lot and much of it with a suspiciously well-lit clarity. Take any memory from my early childhood and I can tell you instantly whether it happened while we still had Fern or after she’d gone. I can do this because I remember which me was there. The me with Fern or the me without? Two entirely different people.

  Still, there are reasons for suspicion. I was only five. How is it possible that I remember, as I seem to, a handful of conversations word for word, the exact song on the radio, the particular clothes I was wearing? Why are there so many scenes I remember from impossible vantage points, so many things I picture from above, as if I’d climbed the curtains and was looking down on my family? And why is there one thing that I remember distinctly, living color and surround-sound, but believe with all my heart never occurred? Bookmark that thought. We’ll come back to it later.

  I remember often being told to be quiet, but I seldom remember what I was saying at the time. As I recount things, this lacuna may give you the erroneous impression that I already wasn’t talking much. Please assume that I am talking continuously in all the scenes that follow until I tell you that I’m not.

  Our parents, on the other hand, had shut their mouths and the rest of my childhood took place in that odd silence. They never reminisced about the time they had to drive halfway back to Indianapolis because I’d left Dexter Poindexter, my terry-cloth penguin (threadbare, ravaged by love—as who amongst us is not) in a gas station restroom, although they often talk about the time our friend Marjorie Weaver left her mother-in-law in the exact same place. Better story, I grant you.

  I know from Grandma Fredericka, and not our parents, that I once went missing for long enough that the police were called, and it turned out I’d tailed Santa Claus out of a department store and into a tobacco shop where he was buying cigars, and he gave me the ring off one, so the police being called was just an added bonus on what must have already been a pretty good day.

  I know from Grandma Donna, and not our parents, that I once buried a dime in some cake batter as a surprise, and one of the graduate students chipped her tooth on it, and everybody thought Fern had done it, until I spoke up, so brave and honest. Not to mention generous, since the dime had been my own.

  So who knows what revelries, what romps my memories have taken with so little corroboration to restrain them? If you don’t count the taunting at school, then the only people who talked much about Fern were my grandma Donna, until Mom made her stop, and my brother Lowell, until he left us. Each had too obvious an agenda to be reliable: Grandma Donna wishing to shield our mother from any share of blame, Lowell stropping his stories into knives.

  Once upon a time, there was a family with two daughters, and a mother and father who’d promised to love them both exactly the same.

  Two

  IN 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.

  Three

  THE 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.