We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

by Karen Joy Fowler

  One

  IN THE YEARS after Fern, we’d made a habit of traveling on Christmas. We went twice to Yosemite, once to Puerto Vallarta. Once to Vancouver. Once all the way to London, where I ate my first kippers, and once to Rome, where my parents bought a small cameo of a young girl for me from a vendor outside the Colosseum because he’d said the girl looked like me, that we were both bellissima. And Dr. Remak, who taught German literature at IU but had hidden talents, set it into a ring for me when we got home and I felt bellissima whenever I wore it.

  We’d never been religious, so Christmas had never meant that to us. After Lowell, we mostly gave it up altogether.

  When I finally arrived in Bloomington at the bitter end of 1996, the only sign of the season was a small potted rosemary bush pruned into the shape of a Christmas tree. It sat on a table by the front door, perfuming the entryway. No wreath outside. No ornaments on the rosemary. I had decided not to tell my parents that I’d seen Lowell until we’d gotten through Christmas. The lack of visible merriment told me the day itself was still too fragile, my mother too unstable.

  There was no snow that year. On the afternoon of the twenty-fifth, we drove to Indianapolis and had our holiday supper with my Cooke grandparents. It was, as always, a wet meal. The mashed potatoes were soggy, the green beans limp. The plates were heaped with things indecipherable under a lake of brown gravy. My father drank like a fish.

  As I recall, he was hoisting his glass that year in honor of the Colts’ kickers being chosen for the Associated Press’s All-Pro team. Election to the All-Pros was a distinction that generally eluded Indianapolis. He tried to involve his father in the celebration, but Grandpa Joe had fallen asleep at the table, mid-sentence, like a man hit by a spell. In retrospect, this was the descending doom of Alzheimer’s, but we didn’t know that then and were affectionately amused.

  My period was coming on and I had the dull weight of that in my abdomen. It gave me an excuse to go lie down on the bed in the room where I’d slept the summer we lost Fern. Of course, I didn’t say I was bleeding, but something so oblique and midwestern that Grandpa Joe didn’t understand it at all and Grandma Fredericka had to whisper it to him.

  The harlequin print was still on the wall, just as it’d always been, but the bed had a new frame, wrought iron, twisted into posts and headboards and leaved like ivy. Grandma Fredericka was morphing from her faux-Asian period into full-blown Pottery Barn.

  This was the room in which I’d once spent all those weeks thinking that I was the sister who spoke in toads and snakes, the one who’d been driven out to die alone and miserable. This was the room in which I’d figured that Lowell had told everyone I was a big fat liar and since Lowell never lied about anything, everyone had believed him. This was the room in which I’d been the mal de vivre to Fern’s joie.

  That story about Fern and the kitten was such a terrible one. If I’d made it up, that was truly unforgivable.

  Had I?

  I turned off the bedside lamp and lay down facing the window. Across the street, the neighbors’ Christmas lights dripped from the eaves like icicles, casting a pale glow into the room. I thought of Abbie, the girl in my freshman dorm, who’d told us one night how her sister had claimed their father molested her and then changed her mind, said she’d only dreamed it. “And then this one crazy sister goes and ruins it all,” Abbie had said. “I hate her.”

  And Lowell: “If you tell anyone, I’ll hate you forever.”

  It had seemed fair enough to me that evening in the freshman dorm. Fair enough to hate someone for telling such an ugly lie.

  And back when I was five, fair enough for Lowell to hate me. I’d promised not to tell and I’d broken that promise. It’s not as if I hadn’t been warned.

  Our winter coats were piled on the bedcovers. I pulled my mother’s parka over my feet. She used to splash herself with an eau de toilette called Florida Water, when I was little. The perfume she used now was as unfamiliar to me as the smell of the home-model house where my parents now lived. But this room smelled exactly the same—stale cookies and no staler than when I was five.

  We used to believe that memories are best retrieved in the same place where they were first laid down. Like everything else we think we know, that’s not so clear anymore.

  But this is still 1996. Step into my head as I pretend to be five again, as I try to feel exactly what I’d felt when, at the end of another day in exile, I’d lie down on this bed in this room.

  What came to me first was my guilt over not keeping my promise. Second, the despair of having lost Lowell’s love forever. Third, the despair of having been sent away.

  More guilt. I’d taken the kitten from his mother, who’d cried about it, and I’d handed him to Fern. And still more, because I’d left this part out when I’d told on Fern, pretended that she’d acted alone. Whatever Fern and I did, we generally did it together and we generally took the heat as a team, too. It was a point of honor.

  But then I’d drilled down to outrage. Maybe I did share in the blame, but I hadn’t killed the cat. That was all Fern. It was unfair not to believe me, unfair to punish me most. Children are just as finely tuned as chimps to unfairness, especially when we’re on the receiving end.

  So maybe I hadn’t told the whole truth. But I wouldn’t have felt that powerful sense of aggrievement if I’d lied.

  On the bed with my mother’s coat wrapped around my feet, hearing the murmur of dishes being done, sports being discussed, the traditional holiday gang-up of Grandma Fredericka and Mom over Dad’s drinking, a rerun of a young, skinny Frank Sinatra caroling from the television, I made myself go over the whole ghastly memory again. I looked for cracks in the finish; I watched myself watching myself. And then something surprising happened. I realized that I did know who I was.

  In the face of that screen memory, still vivid enough in my mind to subvert the whole concept of memory with the efficient, targeted flight of a math proof; in the face of all those studies suggesting that character is unimportant in determining action, and also the possibility that I am, from your perspective, just a mindless automaton operated by alien puppet-masters, still I knew I had not made up that kitten. I knew it because the person I was, the person I had always been, that person would not do that thing.

  I fell asleep then, and in the old days my parents would have picked me quietly up, driven the whole way to Bloomington, and carried me into my room, all without waking me. In a Christmas miracle, the next morning, when I opened my eyes, I would have been home and so would Lowell and Fern.

  • • •

  I’D THOUGHT TO tell my parents about Lowell that very night. I was in the mood for it after all that painful soul-searching, and long car rides are as good as confessionals—or so I’m guessing, never having been to confession—for uncomfortable conversations. But my father was drunk. He tipped his seat back and fell asleep.

  The next day seemed unpropitious for reasons I don’t remember but which probably had to do with my mother’s mood, and then my grades arrived and, useful as a diversion would have been, that didn’t seem right. So my visit had only a few days left by the time I finally told. We were sitting at the breakfast table and the sun was pouring in through the French doors that overlooked the backyard deck. The trees out back made a screen so thick that sunlight rarely hit the room. When it did, we took advantage. The only animals to be seen were a well-behaved party of sparrows at the bird-feeder.

  You already know about Lowell’s visit, so instead of repeating all that, I’ll tell you what I left out: Harlow, Ezra, the UC primate center, two trips to jail, drug use, drunkenness, and vandalism. These things would be of no interest to my parents, was my thinking on the matter. I started in the middle and I stopped in the middle, too. I stuck mostly to Bakers Square and our long night of conversation and pie.

  About that, my report was thorough. I didn’t conceal my concern over Lowell’s mental condition or the criticisms he had of Dad’s work or the dreadful things we
do to our fellow animals. The conversation was hard on Dad. When I got to Fern, there was no ignoring the fact that she wasn’t now and never had been on a farm, that she’d left our house for a life of misery and imprisonment. I don’t remember exactly how I phrased this, but my father accused me of harping on it. “You were five years old,” he said. “What the hell should I have said to you?” as if the biggest crime here was the story he’d told.

  My parents were instantly undone by the news that Lowell would have liked to go to college. The fact that he would have liked to come home was too much for them to even contemplate and had to wait for another conversation later that same day. Tears all around the table. My mother, tearing the paper towel she’d used as a napkin to shreds, wiping her eyes and nose on the larger bits.

  There were surprises for me, too, which surprised me; I’d thought I was the one with the new information. Most startling was my parents’ insistence that I was the reason we’d never talked about Fern, that I was the one who couldn’t handle it. I hyperventilated at any mention of her name, they said, scratched at my skin until it bled, pulled my hair out by the roots. They were absolutely united in this: over the years they’d made many attempts to talk to me about Fern and I’d thwarted every one.

  That dinner when Lowell had said that Fern loved corn on the cob and also us, that dinner when he’d left the house because my mother wasn’t ready to talk about Fern yet—my parents didn’t remember that dinner the way I did. I was the one, they said, who’d burst into tears and told them all to shut up. I’d said they were making my heart hurt and then I simply screamed incoherently and hysterically and effectively until everyone stopped talking and Lowell left the house.

  This assertion flies in the face of many things I remember. I pass it on because there it is, res ipsa loquitur, and not because I’m persuaded.

  Despite my alleged hysteria, my parents seemed surprised by the depth of the guilt I felt over Fern’s exile. Disturbing as it is, no one abandons a child for killing a nonhuman animal. The kitten was not what got Fern sent away. She would have gotten in trouble, just as Lowell had said, and efforts would have been made to keep small, fragile creatures out of her hands, and that would have been the end of it.

  But there had been other incidents that my parents swore I knew about and had even witnessed, though I have no memory of them. Aunt Vivi had claimed that Fern leaned into my cousin Peter’s stroller and took his whole ear into her mouth. Aunt Vivi had said she would never visit us again as long as that beast was in the house, which had distressed my mother though my father saw it as a win-win.

  One of the grad students had been badly bitten in the hand. He was holding an orange at the time, so it was possible Fern had meant to bite the orange. But the bite had been serious enough to require two surgeries and resulted in a lawsuit against the university. And Fern had never liked that guy.

  One day, she had flung Amy, a grad student she adored, against a wall, a distance of several feet. This seemed to come out of nowhere, and Amy insisted it was an accident, but other students said Fern had not looked playful or careless, though they were unable to account for the aggressive behavior. Sherie, who saw it, left the program as a result, though Amy stayed.

  Fern was still a little girl and a sweet-tempered one. But she was getting bigger. She was getting out of control. “It wouldn’t have been responsible to wait for something more serious to happen,” my father said. “It wouldn’t have been good for Fern or anyone else. If she’d really hurt someone, the university would have put her down. We were trying to take care of everyone, here. Honey, we had no choice.”

  “It wasn’t you,” my mother said. “It wasn’t ever about you.”

  Again, not entirely persuasive. As we continued to talk over the final days of my visit, I found that, just as I’d acquitted myself of one lie, I accused myself of another. I’d told my mother Fern had killed a kitten and that wasn’t a lie and didn’t get her sent off and there was no guilt to be had over having said so.

  But I hadn’t stopped with that. I’d never thought that Fern would deliberately hurt me. I’d never noticed that she might, any more than I had these thoughts of Lowell or my parents. But her remorselessness, the way she’d stared impassively at the dead kitten and then opened his stomach with her fingers, had shocked me to the core. So this is what I should have said to Mom; this is what I meant to say—

  That there was something inside Fern I didn’t know.

  That I didn’t know her in the way I’d always thought I did.

  That Fern had secrets and not the good kind.

  Instead I’d said I was afraid of her. That was the lie that got her sent away. That was the moment I made my parents choose between us.

  Two

  IN EVERYONE’S LIFE there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken away against their will.

  Todd’s mother worked out a deal for Ezra. The legal system had refused to see that opening a door was the same as closing one. Ezra pled guilty, got eight months in a minimum-security prison in Vallejo. Todd’s mother said that he would serve five if he behaved himself. It cost him his job, which he had cared a lot about. It cost him any shot at the CIA (or maybe not, what do I know? Maybe it was just the résumé padding they’d been waiting for). No apartment manager I’ve ever had since has put his whole heart into it the way Ezra did. “The secret to a good life,” he told me once, “is to bring your A game to everything you do. Even if all you’re doing is taking out the garbage, you do that with excellence.”

  I went down on visitors’ day—this was after Christmas—so he’d already been there about a month, and they brought him out, in his orange jumpsuit, to where we were allowed to sit on opposite sides of what, in another context, I would have called a picnic table. We were warned not to touch and then left alone. Ezra’s mustache was gone, his upper lip as raw as if the hair had been ripped off it like a Band-Aid. His face looked naked, his teeth big and leporine. It was clear his spirits were low. I asked him how he was doing.

  “It ain’t the giggle that it used to be,” he said, which was reassuring to me. Still Ezra. Still Pulp Fiction.

  He asked if I’d heard anything from Harlow.

  “Her parents came up from Fresno, looking for her,” I said. “No luck, though. Nobody’s seen her.”

  In the days after I’d told Lowell that Harlow never talked about her family, she’d given me the following information: three younger brothers, two older sisters. Half brothers and half sisters, if you wanted to get technical.

  She’d said that her mother was one of those women who loved being pregnant but wasn’t much for long-term relationships. A hippie-chick, earth-goddess thing. Each of Harlow’s siblings had had a different father, but all of them lived with their mother in a falling-down house on the outskirts of town. Two kids back, they’d run out of room, so some of the fathers had transformed the basement into a warren of bedrooms, where the kids lived a largely unsupervised, Peter Pan sort of life. Harlow hadn’t seen her own father in years, but he managed a small theater company up in Grass Valley, so he’d give her a job after graduation, no problem. He was, she said, her ace in the hole.

  The similarity of Harlow’s basement to my long-ago tree-house fantasies had struck me, except that you had to descend to enter Harlow’s Never-Never Land. (Which would be a significant difference—recent studies suggest that people behave with more charity if they’ve just gone upstairs and less if they’ve just gone down—if studies like that weren’t just an enormous pile of crap. There’s science and there’s science, is all I’m saying. When humans are the subjects, it’s mostly not science.)

  The basement and the tree house shared another trait: neither was real.

  Harlow turned out to be an only child. Her father read gas meters for PG&E. This is a surprisingly dangerous job, because of the dogs, if not a glamorous one. Her mother worked at the local library. When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller
sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.

  Both her parents were tall but stooped, curled over their torsos in exactly the same way, as if they’d just been punched. Her mother had Harlow’s hair, only short and practical. She wore a silk scarf around her neck and under that, on a long silver chain, an Egyptian cartouche. I could just make out the hieroglyphic of a bird. I thought how she’d dressed carefully to come and talk to the local police, to see me, see Reg. I imagined her at her closet, deciding what you’d wear to go learn something about your child that just might break your heart. She reminded me of my own mother, though they weren’t alike in any other way except for the heartbreak.

  Harlow’s parents were afraid Harlow had been kidnapped and who knew what else, because it wasn’t like her not to phone when she knew they’d be worried. They were, each of them, fragile as blown glass, afraid she might be dead. They tried to get me to think about that without them having to say it aloud. They suggested that Ezra might be accusing her, might have staged the whole primate action, in order to cover up something much more sinister. She would never, never miss Christmas, they said. Her stocking was still hanging on the mantel, where they said it would stay until, one way or another, she came home.

  They’d insisted on taking me out for this conversation, so we were at Mishka’s, drinking coffee in the quiet of the early days of winter quarter, hardly another customer in the place, the grinding of the beans the only significant noise.

  I was drinking my coffee, anyway. Theirs sat untouched and getting colder by the minute.

  I told them I had no doubt that Harlow was alive, that she had, in fact, returned to our apartment the day after the monkey business to get something she’d left there. Even though I hadn’t seen her for myself, I had evidence, I told them, she’d left me clear evidence, and that was as far as I got. Her mother made a sound—something halfway between a gasp and a shriek—inadvertent, but loud and high-pitched. Then she burst into tears, grabbed my hands, upsetting our cups.