We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

by Karen Joy Fowler

  So I had only to walk out the door, make another trek downtown in the cold, hard rain, and there Lowell would be. I had a stirred-up feeling, a little excited, a little sick to my stomach, a sort of ipecac syrup of happiness. There Lowell would be.

  With Harlow.

  How could we talk about anything if Harlow was there?

  But did I really want to talk about anything?

  I felt all kinds of urgency. I also felt not quite ready. So I went to my bedroom, toweled my hair and changed into dry clothes, and then opened the powder-blue suitcase where Madame Defarge was sprawled over the folded clothes, ass up. I took her out. She smelled of cigarettes and had a damp spot on her dress. She’d obviously had a big night. Still, she was fine, hardly a hair out of place. She could go right back home whenever the airline picked her up, and no harm done, as promised.

  Suddenly, weirdly, I felt a pang at the thought of losing her. Life is all arrivals and departures. “I hardly knew you,” I said. “And now you’re leaving me.” Her uncanny valley eyes stared up. She snapped her reptilian jaw. I made her wrap her arms around my neck as if she were also sorry. Her knitting needles poked my ear sharply until I shifted her. “Please don’t go,” she said. Or maybe I said that. It was definitely one of us.

  • • •

  THE FLIP SIDE to solipsism is called theory of mind. Theory of mind postulates that, even though these cannot be directly observed, we readily impute mental states to others (and also to ourselves, since the bedrock proposal is that we understand our own mental states well enough to generalize from them). And so we constantly infer someone else’s intentions, thoughts, knowledge, lack of knowledge, doubts, desires, beliefs, guesses, promises, preferences, purposes, and many, many more things in order to behave as social creatures in the world.

  Children younger than four have trouble sequencing a jumbled set of images. They can describe any given picture, but they fail to see a character’s intentions or goals. This means they miss the very thing that links and orders the images. They miss the story.

  Young children have the innate potential for a theory of mind, just the way Noam Chomsky says they do for language, but they haven’t developed it yet. Adults and older children sequence images easily into a coherent narrative. I myself took this test many times as a child and I never remember not being able to do it, though if Piaget says there was a time I couldn’t, then there was a time I couldn’t.

  In 1978, when Fern was still safely tucked into our family, psychologists David Premack and Guy Woodruff published a paper titled “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?” In it, they relied primarily on a series of experiments done with a fourteen-year-old chimp named Sarah, in order to see if she could infer human goals in observed situations. They concluded that, within limits, she could.

  Subsequent research (that would be my father) raised doubts. Perhaps chimps were merely predicting behavior based on past experience rather than by imputing another’s desire and intention. Years of further experimentation have been mostly about improving the methodology for prying into the minds of chimps.

  In 2008, Josep Call and Michael Tomasello took another look at a whole range of approaches to this question and the results. Their conclusion was the same as Premack and Woodruff’s thirty years before. Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? They answered with a definite yes. Chimps do see that mental states, such as purpose and knowledge, combine to produce deliberate action. They even understand deceit.

  What chimps don’t seem capable of understanding is the state of false belief. They don’t have a theory of mind that accounts for actions driven by beliefs in conflict with reality.

  And really, who lacking that will ever be able to navigate the human world?

  • • •

  AROUND THE AGE of six or seven, human children develop a theory of mind that encompasses embedded mental states. They’ve long ago mastered the basic first-order stuff—i.e., Mommy thinks I’ve gone to bed. Next they learn to handle (and exploit) an additional layer—Daddy doesn’t know that Mommy thinks I’ve gone to bed.

  Adult social interactions call for a great deal of this awareness of embedded states. Most adults do this effortlessly and unconsciously. According to Premack and Woodruff, the typical human adult can work with four levels of embedded imputation—someone believes that someone else knows that someone else thinks that someone else feels unhappy—before becoming uncomfortable. Premack and Woodruff describe this four-level facility as “not impressive.” Gifted adults can go in as deep as seven layers, but that appears to be about the human limit.

  • • •

  HEADING INTO THE Crepe Bistro for dinner with Harlow and my brother was a challenging exercise in theory of mind. Had Lowell told Harlow how long it had been since he’d seen me? How excited was it okay for me to be? Although I trusted in Lowell’s discretion, I didn’t believe he had the same trust in mine. We both had secrets that the other might not know were secrets. So I had to figure out what Lowell had already told Harlow about our family, and he had to figure out what I’d already told her, and we both had to guess what the other didn’t want said, and all this had to be communicated quickly and in full view of Harlow, but without her knowing.

  Test question: How many levels of imputation do you find in the following sentence? Rosemary is afraid that Lowell might not guess that Rosemary really doesn’t want him to tell Harlow about Fern because Rosemary believes once Harlow hears about Fern she’ll tell everyone else and then everyone else will see Rosemary as the monkey girl she really is.

  And all I wanted was to be alone with my brother. I hoped Harlow had a sharp enough theory of mind to figure that out. If necessary, I planned to help her get there. I expected Lowell to help, too.

  Six

  BY THE TIME I arrived at the restaurant, I had walked so much that evening that my feet ached all the way up to my knees. I was so cold my ears throbbed. It was a relief to come inside the little room where the candles were lit, the windows fogged with steam and breath. Lowell and Harlow were seated in a corner, sharing a cozy fondue.

  Lowell had his back to the door, so I saw Harlow first. Her face was flushed, her dark hair loose and curling around her throat. She was wearing a boatneck sweater that had slipped off one shoulder so you could see her bra strap. (Flesh-colored.) I watched her pick up a bit of bread and throw it at Lowell, smiling that dazzle of teeth. In an instant, I was four years old, left behind on the ground while Lowell and Fern climbed the apple tree, laughing. “You never choose me,” I was shouting at Lowell. “It never gets to be my turn.”

  I didn’t see Harlow notice me, but she leaned in, said something, and Lowell turned. Friday night in the bar, I’d recognized him instantly, but tonight he looked older, more tired, and less like himself. He was incontrovertibly a grown-up now and this had all happened without me there to see it. Despite the bleached hair, he looked like our father; he had our father’s nighttime stubble of beard. “Here she is!” he said. “Hey, squirt. Get over here!”

  He stood for a brief hug, moved his backpack and coat from the third chair to the floor so that I could sit down. All very casual, as if we saw each other often. Message received.

  I tried to shake the feeling that I’d interrupted something, that I was the intruder.

  “The kitchen was closing,” Harlow said, “so Travers ordered you dinner.” They appeared to have already downed several glasses of the bistro’s excellent hard cider. Harlow’s spirits were high. “But we were just about to give up and eat it. You got here just in time.”

  Lowell had gotten me a salad and a lemon crepe. It was very close to what I would have ordered myself. I felt the prickling of tears over that, how, after all these years, my brother could still order dinner for me. He’d done only one thing wrong and that was to put bell pepper in the salad. I’d always picked the bell pepper out of our mother’s spaghetti sauce. Fern was the one who liked bell peppers.

  “Hey!” Lowell was leaning back, rocki
ng his chair onto its hind legs. I was afraid if I looked at his face, I wouldn’t be able to look away again, so I didn’t. I looked at his plate, dribbled with melted cheese. I looked at his chest. He was wearing a black, long-sleeved T-shirt with a colored landscape and the words WAIMEA CANYON underneath. I looked at his hands. They were a man’s hands, rough-looking, and on the back of the right one, a large raised scar ran from his knuckles up his wrist until it vanished under his cuff. I was blinking hard; these things swam in and out of focus. “Harlow tells me she didn’t even know you had a brother. What’s that about?”

  I took a breath, tried to find my balance. “I save you for special occasions. My best, my only sibling. You’re too good for every day.” I wanted to match Lowell’s insouciance, but I don’t think I succeeded, because what happened next was that Harlow pointed out that I was shaking so much my teeth were clicking.

  “It’s freezing outside,” I said, more crossly than I meant to. “And I had to walk all over town, in the rain, searching for Madame Defarge.” I could feel Lowell looking at me. “Long story,” I told him.

  But Harlow had started speaking before I finished. “You should have just asked me! I knew where she was!” And to Lowell, “Rosemary and I were out on the town Friday for a wild night of puppetry.”

  We were both of us speaking only to Lowell now. “Harlow hasn’t told me about her family, either,” I said. “We really haven’t known each other long.”

  “Not a long friendship,” Harlow agreed. “But superdeep. Like they say, you never know a person till you’ve done time with them.”

  Lowell smiled affectionately at me. “Done time? Little Miss Perfect here?”

  Harlow took hold of his wrists, so he turned instantly back to her. “She has an arrest record”—moving his hands until they were about a foot apart—“this big,” Harlow said. They were staring into each other’s eyes. I felt my heart beat three times—tick, tick, tick. Then she let go of him, gave me a quick smile.

  I thought the smile was a question—is this okay?—though I wasn’t sure about which part. Okay to tell him about our arrest or okay to hold his hands and stare into his eyes? I tried for a look back that said no, absolutely not to both, but either she didn’t understand or had never been asking in the first place. Or was no longer looking in my direction.

  She went on to tell him about our first trip to the pokey. The big house. The slammer.

  But she managed to do this without mentioning Reg, so I went back and folded him in. The good Reg, not the bad one. “Her boyfriend,” I said, “came right over and bailed her out.”

  She dealt with it deftly. Reg quickly became not just bad, but scary bad, and me, well, I became someone so generous that I’d let a person I hardly knew hide out in my apartment. “She’s awesome, your sister,” Harlow said to Lowell. “I said to myself, self, there’s a person you want to know better. There’s the person you want to have your back in the world.”

  The story of the lost suitcase followed and then the discovery of Madame Defarge and then the night on the town. Harlow told most of this, but added frequent invitations for me to join in. “Tell him about the car wash,” she said, so I did that part while Harlow pantomimed us groping through the soapy tentacles in the dark, planning our weddings.

  She even included Tarzan and my theories of relativity, only now it appeared she’d always agreed with me. When she said Tarzan’s name, Lowell put his scarred hand on my sleeve and left it there. I’d been about to take off my coat, but then didn’t. That weight on my arm seemed like the only attention I had from him; I wasn’t about to lose it.

  To be fair—every story Harlow told, every detail in every story, redounded to my credit. I was the one with the cool but wacky ideas. I was the one who could be counted on. I stood up for myself and I stood up for my friends. I was a ball. I was a blast.

  I was so not what was going on here.

  I do believe that Harlow meant to be kind. I do believe that she believed that I wanted her to sell my brother on a bunch of good qualities I didn’t truly have. She could neither know nor help how she looked, with the candlelight painting her face and hair all different colors and that reflected shine in her eyes. She made my brother laugh.

  Pheromones are Earth’s primordial idiom. We may not read them as readily as ants do, but they make their point. I’d come assuming we’d be ditching Harlow as soon as we could. Then the hard cider flowed and the stories wound about themselves until, like Escher prints, they’d swallowed their own tails. And I had another think coming.

  The evening ended with all three of us back in my apartment, Madame Defarge liberated once again, sexily kicking up her heels. She touched Lowell’s cheek. She told him he was très cool and also, paradoxically, très hot. He was one quick ticket to ooh-la-la land.

  Lowell reached out, brushing past Madame Lefarge’s skirt and all the way to Harlow. He held her hand for a minute, stroking over her palm with his thumb. He pulled her closer. “Don’t toy with me, madame,” Lowell said, his voice so soft I barely heard him.

  And Madame Defarge’s accent went straight to Memphis. “Not yet, sugar,” she answered just as softly. “But I surely am planning to.”

  “Speaking of puppets,” Todd said to me, with a contemptuous nod toward Lowell. He still hadn’t figured out Lowell was my brother. When the penny dropped, he felt so bad he gave me his bed and went to spend the night at Kimmy’s. He even said I could play his brand-new Nintendo 64, because an offer like that would have made him feel a whole lot better.

  I excused myself and went to the bathroom to peel my contacts off my insulted eyes. My jaw ached from the way I’d been forcing it to smile. Sometime between my salad and crepe, I’d stopped wanting to be Harlow’s friend and started wishing I’d never met her. I felt bad about this—my jealousy, my anger—what with her saying all those nice things about me. Though I was pretty sure she didn’t like me nearly as well as she was claiming.

  Anyway, she didn’t know how long Lowell and I had been apart.

  But he did. I was even angrier with him. He’d abandoned me to our parents and their sad, silent house when I was only eleven years old. And now, reunited for the first time in a decade, he’d hardly looked at me. And had no more willpower than a bonobo.

  Todd’s room smelled like pizza, probably because there were two old slices in a box on his desk, tips curling up like the tongues of old shoes. Also on the desk—a lava lamp, very retro, that swelled and splatted and threw off a slight reddish light. No end of comic books in case I couldn’t sleep, but no worries on that score. Twice Reg called and woke me up and twice I had to tell him I had no idea where Harlow was. I thought that Harlow must have heard the phone and known it was Reg, known that she was making me lie to him, which gave me the permission I’d been missing to be as mad at her as I liked.

  I knew that Reg knew I was lying, and that he knew that I knew that he knew. Maybe science says that the best of us can manage only seven levels of embedded theory of mind, but I say I could go on like that indefinitely.

  • • •

  AND THEN, just like the old days, Lowell came and got me in the night. He was wearing his coat and backpack. He shook me awake without a word, gesturing for me to come, and waited in the living room while I got ready, dressing in my same clammy clothes, since anything dry was back in my own bedroom with Harlow. I followed him out the door. In the darkened hall, he put his arms around me and I smelled the wet wool of his lapels. “How about a piece of pie?” he said.

  • • •

  I CONSIDERED PUSHING him away, answering with something nasty, but I was too afraid he was leaving already. I settled on brief. Sullen but deniable. “Sure.”

  He obviously knew his way around Davis, knew, in the wee hours of the morning, where the pie was. The streets were deserted and the rain had finally stopped. We moved from streetlight to streetlight toward a spectral mist that drifted continuously in front of us but couldn’t be entered. Our footsteps echoed off t
he silent sidewalks. “How are Mom and Dad?” Lowell asked.

  “They moved. To this little place on North Walnut. It’s so weird how they’ve fixed it up—like a model home or something. None of our old stuff is there.” Already, against my will and only provisionally, I was softening. It felt good to share my worries and irritations about our parents with someone equally responsible for making them miserable. More so, if we’re being honest. This was what I’d hoped for whenever I’d imagined seeing Lowell again, this exact moment when I could stop being an only child.

  “How’s Dad’s drinking?”

  “Not too bad. Though I’m not there, what do I know? Mom’s working for Planned Parenthood now. I think she likes it. Playing tennis. Playing bridge.”

  “Of course,” said Lowell.

  “There’s no piano in the new house.” I gave Lowell a minute to deal with this disturbing news. I didn’t say, She stopped playing the piano when you left. A car passed in a spray of water. A crow, hunching over the warm streetlight as if it were an egg, scolded us from above. Maybe in Japanese. “Ba! Ka! Ba! Ka!” We were definitely being called rude names; the only question was the language. I told Lowell this instead.

  “Crows are very smart. If they say we’re idiots, we’re idiots,” he answered.

  “Or it could just be you.” I used the neutral sort of tone you adopt when you want to claim later that you were only joking. Maybe I’d softened, but I hadn’t forgiven.

  “Ba! Ka! Ba! Ka!”

  I could never, in a million years, have distinguished this particular crow from any other, but Lowell told me that crows are good at recognizing and remembering people. They have unusually large brains for their bodies, a proportion similar to chimpanzees.

  I felt my pulse stutter at the word chimpanzees, but Lowell said nothing further. We walked past a house on B Street, where the trees had all been stuffed with balloons. There was a banner over the front door, still illuminated by a porch light. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARGARET! Fern and I used to get balloons on our birthdays, though Fern had to be watched every moment so she didn’t bite one, swallow the rubber, and suffocate.