The only remaining hope was the dog door into the kitchen. I don’t remember ever having a dog, but apparently, we did once, a large terrier—Tamara Press was her name—and apparently, Fern and I had loved her to distraction and slept on top of her until she died of cancer just before I turned two. Unlike most dog doors, the latches for this one were on the outside.
Lowell undid them. I was told to go through.
I didn’t want to. I was frightened. I felt that the house must be hurt not to be my house anymore, that it must feel abandoned. “It’s just an empty house,” Lowell told me encouragingly. “And Mary will go with you,” as if even I could think Mary would be good in a fight.
Mary was useless. I wanted Fern. When would Fern get to come home?
“Hey,” said Russell. Talking to me! “We’re counting on you, runt.”
So I did it for love.
• • •
I SCRAPED THROUGH the dog door into the kitchen, stood up inside a fall of sunlight, dust motes caroming and shining about me like glitter. I had never seen the kitchen empty. The scuffed linoleum was brighter and smoother where the breakfast table ought to have been. Fern and I had once hidden under that table so that no one would see us drawing on the floor with felt-tip markers. The ghosts of our artwork were still visible if you knew to look for them.
The empty room closed about me like a hum, squeezed me tightly until it was hard to breathe. I felt the whole kitchen thick with rage, only I couldn’t tell if it was the house or Fern who was so angry. I opened the door hastily for Lowell and Russell, and as soon as they entered, the house let me go. It was no longer angry. Instead it was terribly sad.
The boys went ahead, talking quietly so I couldn’t hear, which made me suspicious and I followed. There were so many things I missed here. I missed the wide staircase. We used to sled down on beanbag chairs. I missed the cellar. In the winter, we’d always had baskets of apples and carrots you could eat without asking, as many as you wanted, though you had to go down into the dark to get them. I wasn’t going down into the dark now unless the boys did, and if they did, then I wasn’t staying behind.
I missed how big and busy it had always been. I missed having a yard I couldn’t see to the end of. I missed the barn, the horse stalls filled with broken chairs and bicycles, magazines, bassinets, our stroller and car seats. I missed the creek and the fire pit, where we roasted potatoes or popped corn in the summer. I missed the jars of tadpoles we kept on the porch for scientific observation, the constellations painted onto the ceilings, the map of the world on the library floor, where we could go with our lunches and eat in Australia or Ecuador or Finland. My palms cover continents curved in red letters down the far western edge of the map. My palm didn’t even cover Indiana, but I could find the state on the map by shape. Soon I’d hoped to be able to read the words. Before we moved, my mother had been teaching me out of my father’s math books. The product of two numbers is a number.
“What a freak show,” Russell said, which took the shine right off for me. What a dump. My room in our new house was bigger than my room here.
“Is the lawn still electrified?” Russell asked. The front yard was choked with dandelions, buttercups, and clover, but you could see how it was meant to be a lawn.
“What are you talking about?” said Lowell.
“I heard if you stepped on the grass, you got an electric shock. I heard it was all wired up to keep people out.”
“No,” said Lowell. “It’s just regular grass.”
• • •
EVENTUALLY MELISSA’S SOAP ended and she noticed I wasn’t around. She looked all through the neighborhood until the Byards made her call our father, who’d just found out that Lowell was missing from school. He’d had to cancel his class, a point that was repeated to us many times over the next few days—that it was not just him we’d inconvenienced but a whole class of students, as if his not showing up hadn’t been the best part of their week. Arriving home, he saw that the car was gone.
So when, on our return, he lifted me out of the backseat, he didn’t ask how my day had been. It didn’t stop me telling him.
Five
THERE’S SOMETHING YOU DON’T KNOW yet about Mary. The imaginary friend of my childhood was not a little girl. She was a little chimpanzee.
So, of course, was my sister Fern.
Some of you will have figured that out already. Others may feel it was irritatingly coy of me to have withheld Fern’s essential simian-ness for so long.
In my defense, I had my reasons. I spent the first eighteen years of my life defined by this one fact, that I was raised with a chimpanzee. I had to move halfway across the country in order to leave that fact behind. It’s never going to be the first thing I share with someone.
But much, much more important, I wanted you to see how it really was. I tell you Fern is a chimp and, already, you aren’t thinking of her as my sister. You’re thinking instead that we loved her as if she were some kind of pet. After Fern left, Grandma Donna told Lowell and me that when our dog Tamara Press had died, our mother had been devastated—just the way she was now, being the implication. Lowell reported this to our father and we were all so offended Grandma Donna had to give it right up.
Fern was not the family dog. She was Lowell’s little sister, his shadow, his faithful sidekick. Our parents had promised to love her like a daughter, and for years I asked myself if they’d kept that promise. I began to pay better attention to the stories they read me, the stories I soon was reading to myself, looking to learn how much parents love their daughters. I was a daughter as well as a sister. It was not only for Fern’s sake that I needed to know.
What I found in books was daughters indulged and daughters oppressed, daughters who spoke loudly and daughters made silent. I found daughters imprisoned in towers, beaten and treated as servants, beloved daughters sent off to keep house for hideous monsters. Mostly, when girls were sent away, they were orphans, like Jane Eyre and Anne Shirley, but not always. Gretel was taken with her brother into the forest and abandoned there. Dicey Tillerman was left with her siblings in a parking lot at a shopping mall. Sara Crewe, whose father adored her, was still sent away to live at school without him. All in all, there was a wide range of possibility, and Fern’s treatment fit easily inside it.
Remember that old fairy tale I mentioned at the very start—how one sister’s words turn to jewels and flowers, the other’s to snakes and toads? Here is how that fairy tale ends. The older sister is driven into the forest, where she dies, miserable and alone. Her own mother has turned against her, we are told, a thing so disturbing I’d wished I hadn’t heard it and, long before Fern was sent away, had already told Mom never to read us that story again.
But maybe I made that last part up, me being so upset, so alarmed. Maybe later, after Fern left, I saw how I should have felt and revised my memory accordingly. People do that. People do that all the time.
Until Fern’s expulsion, I’d scarcely known a moment alone. She was my twin, my fun-house mirror, my whirlwind other half. It’s important to note that I was also all those things to her. I would say that, like Lowell, I loved her as a sister, but she was the only sister I ever had, so I can’t be sure; it’s an experiment with no control. Still, when I first read Little Women, it seemed to me I’d loved Fern as much as Jo loved Amy if not as much as Jo loved Beth.
• • •
WE WERE NOT the only household during this period attempting to raise a baby chimpanzee as if she were a human child. The aisles of the supermarkets in Norman, Oklahoma, where Dr. William Lemmon was prescribing chimps liberally to his grad students and patients, were full of such families.
We were not even the only household to do so while simultaneously raising an actual human child, though no one but us had twinned the child with the chimpanzee since the Kelloggs had done so in the 1930s. By the 1970s, in most chimped-up households, the human child was considerably older and no part of the experiment.
Fern and
I were raised in as much the same way as was deemed rational. I’m sure I was the only chimp sibling in the country who had to decline all birthday party invitations, though this was mostly to prevent me from bringing colds home; little chimps are terribly susceptible to respiratory infections. We went to exactly one party in my first five years, and I don’t even remember it, but Lowell told me there’d been an unfortunate incident involving a piñata, a baseball bat, and a lot of flying candy that ended with Fern biting Bertie Cubbins, the birthday girl, on the leg. Biting someone who’s not in the family—apparently, a really big deal.
I’m only guessing, of course, that other chimped-up families did things differently. Certainly Fern was hyperaware of any favoritism and responded to it with vigor and vinegar. Unfairness bothers chimps greatly.
My very earliest memory, more tactile than visual, is of lying against Fern. I feel her fur on my cheek. She’s had a bubble bath and smells of strawberry soap and wet towels. A few drops of water still cling to the sparse white hair of her chin. I see this, looking up from the shoulder I am leaning against.
I see her hand, her black nails, her fingers curling and uncurling. We must have still been very young, because her palm is soft and creased and pink. She is giving me a large golden raisin.
There is a dish of these raisins on the floor in front of us, and I think they must have been Fern’s and not mine, earned somehow in one of our games, but it doesn’t matter, because she is sharing them with me—one for her, one for me, one for her, one for me. My feeling in this memory is a great contentment.
Here’s a later memory. We’re in my father’s study, playing a game we call Same/NotSame. Fern’s version involves being shown two things—two apples, for instance, or one apple and one tennis ball. She’s holding two poker chips, one colored red and one colored blue. If she thinks the two things are the same, she’s supposed to give Sherry, today’s grad student, the red chip. Blue means different. It’s not clear she understands the game yet.
Meanwhile, this game is already too simple for me. I’m working with Amy, who has given me several lists of four items. I’m being asked which thing doesn’t fit. Some of the lists are pretty tricky. Piglet, duckling, horse, and bear cub becomes pig, duck, horse, and bear. I love this game, especially since Dad has explained there are no right and wrong answers; it’s all just to see how I think. So I get to play a game I can’t lose and I get to tell everyone everything I’m thinking while I do it.
I’m making my choices and also telling Amy what I know about ducks and horses and the like, what my experience of them has been. Sometimes when you give bread to ducks, the big ones take all of it and the little ones don’t get any, I tell her. That’s not fair, right? That’s not nice. Sharing is what’s nice.
I tell her how I was once chased by ducks because I didn’t have enough bread to go around. I say that Fern doesn’t give her bread to the ducks. She eats it herself, which is sometimes true but sometimes not. Amy doesn’t correct me, so I say this again, with more confidence. Fern is not a good sharer, I say, eliding Fern’s good record of sharing with me.
I tell Amy that I’ve never ridden a horse, but I will someday. Someday I’ll have a horse of my own, probably named Star or maybe Blaze. Fern couldn’t ride a horse, could she? I ask. I’m always on the hunt for things I can do that Fern can’t. “You may be right,” Amy says, writing it all down. Life couldn’t be better.
But Fern is getting frustrated, because she’s not being allowed to eat the apples. She quits playing Same/NotSame. She comes over, rests the rough shelf of her forehead against my own flat one so that I’m staring straight into her amber eyes. She’s so close her breath is in my mouth. I can smell that she’s unhappy, her usual sort of wet-towel smell, but with a pungent, slightly acrid undertone. “Stop bothering me, Fern,” I say, giving her a little push. I am, after all, working here.
She wanders about the room for a bit, signing for apples and also bananas and candy and other delicious things, but disconsolately, since none of the above is materializing. Then she begins to jump back and forth between the top of our father’s desk and the big armchair. She’s wearing her favorite yellow skirt with the pictures of blackbirds on it and it flies up to her waist when she jumps, so you can see the diaper underneath. Her lips protrude and funnel, her small face pale and bare. I hear the soft oo oo oo sounds she makes when she’s anxious.
She’s not having fun, but it still looks like fun to me. I climb onto Dad’s desk myself and nobody says no, or even be careful, maybe because no one said these things to Fern and so now they can’t. It’s farther than I thought and I land on the floor on my elbow. As I fall, I hear Fern laughing. This causes some excitement. Typically, a chimp laughs only when there is physical contact. Prior to this, Fern has laughed only when she was being chased or tickled. Mocking laughter is a distinctly human trait.
Our father tells Sherry and Amy to listen carefully when Fern laughs. The sound is constrained by and timed to her breath, so the laughter comes in pants. Perhaps, Dad suggests, Fern can’t sustain a single sound through a cycle of repeated exhalation and inhalation. What would this mean for oral speech development? No one seems to care that Fern was being mean, though that seems to me to be the crucial bit.
Later, because no one paid attention when I said my elbow hurt and then it turned out to be broken, Dad apologized by letting me see the damage on my X-ray. The fissures look like the crackle finish on a china plate. I’m somewhat soothed by the seriousness of having broken a bone.
But not completely. The things I can do that Fern can’t are a molehill compared to the mountain of things she can do that I can’t. I’m considerably bigger, which should count for something, but she’s considerably stronger. The only thing I do better is talk, and it’s not clear to me that this is a good trade-off, that I wouldn’t swap it instantly for being able to scamper up the banister or stretch like a panther along the top edge of the pantry door.
This is why I invented Mary, to even the score. Mary could do everything Fern could and then some. And she used her powers for good instead of evil, which is to say only under my direction and on my behalf.
Although my primary motive for her creation was to have a playmate no one preferred to me. The best thing about Mary was that she was kind of a pill.
• • •
A FEW DAYS after the trip to the farmhouse, Mary and I can be found in the branches of a maple in Russell Tupman’s backyard. We are looking into Russell’s kitchen, where his patchwork-vest-wearing elf of a mother has covered a table with newspaper and taken a cleaver to a pumpkin.
Why are we in Russell’s maple? Because it’s the one tree on the block I can easily climb. The base of its trunk forked into three parts, one almost parallel to the ground, so that I could start by simply walking as if on a trestle, holding on to the branches above for balance. As I got higher, I had to climb, but the branches were numerous, each an easy step to the next. The fact that we could look from those branches into the windows of Russell’s house was just a bonus. We were definitely there for the climbing and not to reconnoiter.
Mary went higher than I could, and she said she could see all the way back down the street to the Byards’ roof. She said she could see into Russell’s bedroom. She said Russell was jumping on his bed.
But she was lying, because the next thing I knew, Russell was coming out the kitchen door and walking straight toward me. The tree still had a smear of red leaves, so I hoped I was hidden. I held very still until Russell was directly beneath me. “What are you doing up there, runt?” he asked. “What do you think you’re looking at?”
I told him that his mother was cutting up a pumpkin. Only I used the word dissecting. Lowell had once found a dead frog by the creek at the farmhouse and he and my father had spent an afternoon dissecting it on the dining room table, slicing open the chambers of its little wet nut of a heart. I hadn’t minded that, but now the sight of Russell’s mother reaching into the pumpkin was beginning
to upset my stomach, send saliva into my mouth. I swallowed hard and stopped looking through the window.
I was standing on one branch, holding with one hand on to a higher one, swaying slightly, casually, as I talked. You would never have known my stomach was roiling. Savoir faire to spare. “Monkey girl,” Russell said, a phrase I would come to know well when I started school. “What a weirdo.” But his tone was pleasant enough and I didn’t take offense. “Tell your brother I’ve got his money.”
I looked into the kitchen again. Russell’s mother had started pulling the intestines from the pumpkin, slapping them by the handful onto the newspaper. My head went empty and my legs shook, and for a moment I thought that I would fall or, even worse, vomit.
So I straddled a branch for more stability, but it was a thin branch, so flexible that it bent unexpectedly under my weight and suddenly I was sliding down it, breaking off little shoots and leaves as I went. I landed back on the ground, feet first, butt second. My hands were covered with scratches.
“What the hell are you doing now?” Russell asked and then flicked a finger toward the crotch of my pants, where the leaves had left a stain. I really can’t describe the humiliation of this. I knew my crotch wasn’t something to be looked at or talked about. I knew it shouldn’t be an autumn red.
• • •
A FEW DAYS LATER, the cops busted Russell. Grandma Donna told me that he’d thrown a Halloween party at the farmhouse. Every window in the place had been broken, she said, and an underage girl had spent a night in the hospital.
Language is such an imprecise vehicle I sometimes wonder why we bother with it. Here is what I heard: that maybe Fern had reached, like a poltergeist, across time and space and destroyed the home in which we’d all lived. A few broken windows might have signified a party to me. Fern and I had thrown a croquet ball through one once and had good fun doing it in spite of what came after. But every window in the place? That didn’t sound larkish. That had the precision and persistence of fury.
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Page 7