We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Read online

  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.

  • • •

  SOMETIMES OOFIE, 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.

  Surrounded as she was by humans, Fern believed she was human. This wasn’t unexpected. Most home-raised chimps, when asked to sort photographs into piles of chimps and humans, make only the one mistake of putting their own picture into the human pile. This is exactly what Fern did.

  What seems not to have been anticipated was my own confusion. Dad didn’t know then what we think we know now, that the neural system of a young brain develops partly by mirroring the brains around it. As much time as Fern and I spent together, that mirror went both ways.

  Many years later, I found on the Web a paper our father had written about me. Subsequent studies with larger sample sizes have confirmed what Dad was among the first to suggest: that, contrary to our metaphors, humans are much more imitative than the other apes.

  For example: if chimps watch a demonstration on how to get food out of a puzzle box, they, in their turn, skip any unnecessary steps, go straight to the treat. Human children overimitate, reproducing each step regardless of its necessity. There is some reason why, now that it’s our behavior, being slavishly imitative is superior to being thoughtful and efficient, but I forget exactly what that reason is. You’ll have to read the papers.

  The winter after Fern vanished, and half a term late because of the tumult and turmoil at home, I started kindergarten, where my classmates called me the monkey girl or sometimes simply the monkey. There was something off about me, maybe in my gestures, my facial expressions or eye movements, and certainly in the things I said. Years later, my father made a passing reference to the uncanny-valley response—the human aversion to things that look almost but not quite like people. The uncanny-valley response is a hard thing to define, much less to test for. But if true, it explains why the faces of chimps so unsettle some of us. For the kids in my kindergarten class, I was the unsettling object. Those five- and six-year-olds were not fooled by the counterfei
t human.

  I could and did quarrel with their word choice—were they so stupid, I asked winningly, that they didn’t know the difference between monkeys and apes? Didn’t they know that humans were apes, too? But the implication that I’d be okay with being called ape girl was all my classmates needed to stick with their original choice. And they refused to believe they were apes themselves. Their parents assured them they weren’t. I was told that a whole Sunday school class had been devoted to rebutting me.

  Here are some things my mother worked with me on, prior to sending me off to school:

  Standing up straight.

  Keeping my hands still when I talked.

  Not putting my fingers into anyone else’s mouth or hair.

  Not biting anyone, ever. No matter how much the situation warranted it.

  Muting my excitement over tasty food, and not staring fixedly at someone else’s cupcake.

  Not jumping on the tables and desks when I was playing.

  I remembered these things, most of the time. But where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail.

  • • •

  HERE ARE SOME THINGS I learned only once I got to kindergarten:

  How to read children’s faces, which are less guarded than grown-ups’, though not as expressive as chimps’.

  That school was about being quiet (and you’d think Mom might have added that to the things she’d warned me about; that rule I’d been given—that rule where you say only one for every three things you want to say—it wasn’t nearly sufficient to the cause).

  That big words do not impress children. And that grown-ups care a lot about what big words actually mean, so it’s best to know that before you use one.

  But most of all, I learned that different is different. I could change what I did; I could change what I didn’t do. None of that changed who I fundamentally was, my not-quite-human, my tabloid monkey-girl self.

  I hoped that Fern was doing better among her own kind than I among mine. In 2009, a study showed macaque monkeys seemingly evidencing the uncanny-valley response themselves, which makes it probable for chimps.

  Of course, none of that was in my thinking back then. For years, I imagined Fern’s life as a Tarzan reversal. Raised among humans and returned now to her own kind, I liked to think of her bringing sign language to the other apes. I liked to think she was maybe solving crimes or something. I liked to think we’d given her superpowers.

  Part Three

  I did not think things through in such a human way, but under the influence of my surroundings conducted myself as if I had worked things out.

  —FRANZ KAFKA, “A Report for an Academy”

  One

  I THINK IT’S inarguable that Mom, Dad, and Lowell were more shattered by Fern’s departure than I was. I fared better simply by virtue of being too young to quite take it in.

  And yet there were ways in which I was the one who carried the damage. For Mom, Dad, and Lowell, Fern had arrived in the middle of the story. They’d gotten to be themselves first, so they had a self to go back to. For me, Fern was the beginning. I was just over a month old when she arrived in my life (and she just shy of three months). Whoever I was before is no one I ever got to know.

  I felt her loss in a powerfully physical way. I missed her smell and the sticky wet of her breath on my neck. I missed her fingers scratching through my hair. We sat next to each other, lay across each other, pushed, pulled, stroked, and struck each other a hundred times a day and I suffered the deprivation of this. It was an ache, a hunger on the surface of my skin.

  I began to rock in place without knowing I was doing so and had to be told to stop. I developed the habit of pulling out my eyebrows. I bit on my fingers until I bled and Grandma Donna bought me little white Easter gloves and made me wear them, even to bed, for months.

  Fern used to wrap her wiry pipe-cleaner arms around my waist from behind, press her face and body into my back, match me step for step when we walked, as if we were a single person. It made the grad students laugh, so we felt witty and appreciated. Sometimes it was encumbering, a monkey on my back, but mostly I felt enlarged, as if what mattered in the end was not what Fern could do or what I could do, but the sum of it—Fern and me together. And me and Fern together, we could do almost anything. This, then, is the me I know—the human half of the fabulous, the fascinating, the phantasmagorical Cooke sisters.

  I’ve read that no loss compares to the loss of a twin, that survivors describe themselves as feeling less like singles and more like the crippled remainder of something once whole. Even when the loss occurs in utero, some survivors respond with a lifelong sense of their own incompleteness. Identical twins suffer the most, followed by fraternals. Extend that scale awhile and eventually you’ll get to Fern and me.

  Although it had had no immediate impact on the cut of my jibber-jabber—in fact, it took many years to truly sink in—finally I came to understand that all of my verbosity had been valuable only in the context of my sister. When she left the scene, no one cared anymore about my creative grammars, my compound lexemes, my nimble, gymnastic conjugations. If I’d ever imagined I’d be more important without her constantly distracting everyone, I found quite the opposite. The graduate students disappeared from my life the same moment Fern did. One day, every word I said was data, and carefully recorded for further study and discussion. The next, I was just a little girl, strange in her way, but of no scientific interest to anyone.

  Two

  THERE IS AN ADVANTAGE to sharing a bedroom wall with your parents. You hear things. Hearing things is also the disadvantage. Sometimes Mom and Dad had sex. Sometimes they talked. Sometimes they had sex while they talked.

  Years passed, but the things our parents talked about at night didn’t change as much as you might think. Dad worried about his professional standing. Not so long ago he’d been a young professor on the rise, gathering in grants and graduate students like eggs at Easter. There were six students in his lab at the end of the Fern years, all scribbling theses about the study in the old farmhouse. Two of them were able to finish their work as planned, but four were not—at best, they had to narrow their focus, jigger something thin and uninteresting from data already collected. The reputation of the whole lab, of the whole department, suffered.

  Our father turned paranoid. Although he himself had published solid and exciting work during that five-year period, he was now certain that his colleagues disrespected him. The evidence was everywhere he looked, at every staff meeting, every cocktail party. It drove him periodically to drink.

  Lowell continued to be a problem, mostly Lowell, but also me. Our parents lay beside each other in their bed and fretted. What was to be done about us? When would Lowell revert to the sweet, sensitive boy they knew he was inside? When would I manage to make a friend I didn’t make up?

  Lowell’s counselor, Ms. Dolly Delancy, said that Lowell no longer believed their love for him was unconditional. How could he? He’d been told to care for Fern as a sister. He’d done so, only to see her cast from the family. Lowell was confused and he was angry. Good thing we have a trained professional to tell us that, Dad said.

  Mom liked Ms. Delancy. Dad did not. Ms. Delancy had a son, Zachary, who was in the third grade when I was in kindergarten. Zachary used to lie under the jungle gym and whenever a girl swung over him, he’d call out the color of her underwear, even if she was wearing pants and he couldn’t possibly know. I know our parents were aware of this, because I was the one who told them. Dad thought it was relevant information. Dad thought it was very telling. Mom did not.

  Ms. Delancy said that the qualities making Lowell hard to live with were all very good qualities, some of his best, in fact—his loyalty, his love, his sense of justice. We wanted Lowell to change, but we didn’t want him changing the things preventing that change. It made for a ticklish situation.

  I didn’t have a counselor of my own, so Ms. Delancy shared her thoughts about me as well. I was in the same predi
cament as Lowell, but while Lowell was responding by pushing the boundaries, I was trying my hardest to be good. Both reactions made sense. Both should be seen as cries for help.

  Children do best with clear expectations and predictable consequences, Ms. Delancy said, conveniently ignoring the fact that if you told Lowell, this is where we draw the line, you could count on him stomping instantly over it.

  Our parents decided it would be better to leave the line a blur and concentrate on allaying Lowell’s insecurities. The house filled with love for Lowell, his favorite foods, books, games. We played Rummikub. We listened to Warren Zevon. We went to fucking Disneyland. It made him furious.

  • • •

  I DON’T SUPPOSE Ms. Delancy’s assessment was wrong, but I do think it was incomplete. The part she was missing was our shared and searing grief. Fern was gone. Her disappearance represented many things—confusions, insecurities, betrayals, a Gordian knot of interpersonal complications. But it also was a thing itself. Fern had loved us. She’d filled the house with color and noise, warmth and energy. She deserved to be missed and we missed her terribly. No one outside the house ever really seemed to get that.

  Because school was not making me feel the things everyone thought I needed to be feeling—valued and indispensable—I was transferred in the first grade to the hippie school on Second Street. The kids there didn’t like me any better, but name-calling was not tolerated among the hippies. Steven Claymore taught the kids to scratch their armpits instead, which sometimes kids just did, so it had deniability, and this allowed the adults, including our parents, to console themselves that my situation had improved. I had a wonderful first-grade teacher, Ms. Radford, who genuinely loved me. I was given the part of the hen in The Little Red Hen—inarguably, the lead, the star turn. This was all it took to convince Mom that I was flourishing. Her catatonia had been replaced with an implausible buoyancy. Lowell and I were fine. We were such good kids, basically. Smart kids. At least we all had our health! Every gangplank a seesaw.