Here’s what Grandma Donna thought she was telling me: that I was not too young to understand the dangers of mixing alcohol and drugs. That she just hoped she’d never live to see the day I had to have my stomach pumped. That such a thing would break our mother’s broken heart.
Six
THEN ONE MORNING, just like that, Mom came back into focus. I woke to Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” decanting note by cheerful note up the stairs. Our mother was up, calling us by piano to breakfast as she used to do, hands arched, foot pedal pumping. She had showered and cooked, would return soon to reading and, finally, talking. Weeks passed then without Dad taking a drink.
This was a relief, but less so than you might think, as you couldn’t depend on it now that you’d seen the other.
We spent that Christmas in Waikiki, where Santa wore board shorts and flip-flops and nothing felt like Christmas. We’d never been able to travel with Fern; now we could, and we needed to get away. Last year, Fern had insisted on plugging and unplugging the Christmas lights no matter how many times she was told to cut it out. It was our tradition to let her put the star on the top of the tree.
Fern, sneaking a present into an upstairs closet, hooting with excitement and giving the game away. Fern, on Christmas morning, filling the air with shredded wrapping paper, stuffing it down the backs of our necks like snow.
It was my first time on an airplane, the white clouds a rolling mattress beneath us. I loved the way Hawaii smelled, even in the airport, plumeria on the breeze and dribbled into the hotel shampoos and soaps.
The beach at Waikiki was shallow enough that even I could walk out a good long ways. We spent hours in the water, bobbing up and down, so when I lay at night on the hotel bed that Lowell and I were sharing, my blood still rocked in my ears. I learned to swim on that trip. Our parents stood beyond the breakers and caught me as I kicked from one to the other and I was pretty sure Fern couldn’t have done that, though I didn’t ask.
I had a revelation that I shared over breakfast—about how the world was divided into two parts: above and below. When you went snorkeling, you were visiting the part below, and when you climbed a tree, you were visiting the part above, and neither was better than the other. I remember being pretty sure that this was an interesting thing for me to say, something someone should be writing down.
When you think of three things to say, pick one and only say that. For months after Fern left, the two things I didn’t say were always about her. In Hawaii, I thought—but didn’t say—that maybe Fern could climb but I could dive. I wished she were there to see me do that. I wished she were there, hooting over a piece of lava cake, scaling the trunks of the palm trees like Spider-Man.
She would have so loved the breakfast buffet.
I saw her everywhere, but I never said so.
Instead I watched our mother obsessively for signs of breakage. She floated on her back in the ocean or lay on a chair by the pool drinking mai tais, and, on hula night, when the maître d’ asked for volunteers, she went right up. I remember how beautiful she was, brown from the sun, flowers dripping from her neck, her hands fluid and fluent—we throw our nets out into the sea, and all the ama-ama come a-swimming to me.
She was an educated woman, our father noted gingerly at dinner the night before we came home. An intelligent woman. Wouldn’t it be good to have a job so she wasn’t stuck in the house all the time, especially now that I’d be going to kindergarten?
I hadn’t known I was going to kindergarten until he said this. I hadn’t been around other kids all that much. I was stupid enough to be excited.
The sea was shining outside the restaurant window, just turning from silver to black. Mom agreed in that general way that means not to pursue the topic, and he took the hint. We were all alert to her hints back then. We were careful with each other. We tiptoed.
This lasted for many months. And then, one night at supper, Lowell said suddenly, “Fern really loved corn on the cob. Remember what a mess she’d make?” and I got a flash of yellow kernels pasted across Fern’s little pegs of teeth like bugs in a screen door. Probably we were having corn on the cob when Lowell said this, which would mean it was summer again—thunderstorms and fireflies and nearly a year since Fern had been sent away. But that’s just making a guess.
“Remember how Fern loved us?” Lowell asked.
Dad picked up his fork, held it trembling in his fingers. He put it down again, gave our mother a quick, glancing look. She was staring into her plate, so you couldn’t see her eyes. “Don’t,” he said to Lowell. “Not yet.”
Lowell shook him off. “I want to go see her. We all need to go see her. She’s wondering why we haven’t come.”
Our father passed his hand over his face. He used to play a game with Fern and me where he did that. One pass down the face would reveal him scowling. His hand back up would bring a smile. Down, scowl. Up, smile. Down, Melpomene. Up, Thalia. Tragedy and comedy performed as facial expressions.
That night’s reveal showed him saggy and sad. “We all want that,” he said. His tone matched Lowell’s. Calm, but firm. “We all miss her. But we have to think what’s best for her. The truth is that she had a terrible transition, but she’s settled in now and happy. Seeing us would just stir her up. I know you don’t mean to be selfish, but you’d be making her feel worse for the sake of you feeling better.”
By now Mom was weeping. Lowell rose without another word, took his full plate to the garbage, dumped it in. He put his dish and glass into the dishwasher. He left the kitchen and he left the house. He was gone for two nights and he was not with Marco. We never did find out where he’d slept.
• • •
THIS WASN’T the first time I’d heard Dad make that argument. Back on the day when I’d gone to the farmhouse with Russell and Lowell, back on the day when I’d finally understood Fern wasn’t living there, I’d asked our father where she was.
He was up in his new study and I’d been sent to remind him that The Rockford Files was on, because Lowell couldn’t believe that “stay in your room and think about your behavior” might actually mean “miss your favorite TV shows.” I considered climbing on the desk and jumping into his lap, but I’d already shown poor judgment, going off without telling Melissa, and I knew Dad wasn’t in a playful mood. He’d catch me if I left him no choice in the matter, but he wouldn’t be happy about it. So I asked him about Fern instead.
He’d pulled me into his lap, smelling as he always did of cigarettes and beer, black coffee, Old Spice. “She has a different family now,” he said, “on a farm. And there are other chimpanzees, so she has lots of new friends.”
I was instantly jealous of all those new friends who got to play with Fern while I did not. I wondered if she liked anyone there better than me.
It felt odd to be sitting on one of Dad’s legs without Fern for ballast on the other. His arms around me tightened. He’d told me then, just as he’d told Lowell later (and probably more than once), that we couldn’t go see her, because it would upset her, but that she had a good life. “We’ll always always miss her,” he said. “But we know that she’s happy and that’s the important thing.”
“Fern doesn’t like being made to try new foods,” I said. This had been worrying me. Fern and I cared a lot about what we ate. “We like what we’re used to.”
“New can be good,” Dad said. “There’s a ton of foods Fern has never even heard of and would probably love. Mangosteens. Sweetsops. Jackfruits. Jelly palms.”
“But she can still eat her favorites?”
“Pigeon peas. Cake apples. Jamjams.”
“But she can still eat her favorites?”
“Jelly rolls. Monkey bars. Summer salts.”
“But she can still . . .”
He gave up. He gave in. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Of course. She can still eat her favorites.” I remember him saying that.
I believed in this farm for many years. So did Lowell.
• • •
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br /> WHEN I WAS ABOUT EIGHT, I recovered what seemed to be a memory. It came one piece at a time, like a puzzle I had to fit together. In this memory, I was a tiny child, riding in the car with my parents. We were on a narrow country road, buttercups, grasses, and Queen Anne’s lace crowding the car from the sides, brushing against the windows.
My father stopped for a cat that was crossing in front of us. I shouldn’t have been able to see this cat, strapped as I was into my car seat in the back, yet I now remembered it clearly as a black cat with a white face and belly. It wandered uncertainly in front of us, back and forth, until my father grew impatient and drove on, running it over. I remembered my shock; I remembered protesting. I remembered my mother defending my father, saying that the cat had just refused to get out of the way, as if there’d really been nothing else they could have done.
When it was complete, I took this memory to the only person I thought might believe it, my grandma Donna. She was sitting in an armchair, reading a magazine, probably People. I think that maybe Karen Carpenter had just died; both my grandmas took that hard. I was shaking when I told her, trying not to cry and not succeeding. “Oh, sweetheart,” Grandma Donna said. “I think that must have been a dream. You must know your father would never, ever do such a thing.”
If anyone was eager to see the worst in Dad, it was my grandma Donna. Her instant dismissal was enormously comforting. It gave me back the things I knew—that my father was a kind man, that he would never do such a terrible thing. To this day, I can feel the bump of the tire over the cat’s body. And to this day I am very clear in my mind that it never happened. Think of it as my own personal Schrödinger’s cat.
Was my father kind to animals? I thought so as a child, but I knew less about the lives of lab rats then. Let’s just say that my father was kind to animals unless it was in the interest of science to be otherwise. He would never have run over a cat if there was nothing to be learned by doing so.
He was a great believer in our animal natures, far less likely to anthropomorphize Fern than to animalize me. Not just me, but you, too—all of us together, I’m afraid. He didn’t believe animals could think, not in the way he defined the term, but he wasn’t much impressed with human thinking, either. He referred to the human brain as a clown car parked between our ears. Open the doors and the clowns pile out.
The idea of our own rationality, he used to say, was convincing to us only because we so wished to be convinced. To any impartial observer, could such a thing exist, the sham was patent. Emotion and instinct were the basis of all our decisions, our actions, everything we valued, the way we saw the world. Reason and rationality were a thin coat of paint on a ragged surface.
The only way to make any sense of the United States Congress, our father told me once, is to view it as a two-hundred-year-long primate study. He didn’t live to see the ongoing revolution in our thinking regarding nonhuman animal cognition.
But he wasn’t wrong about Congress.
Seven
MORE MEMORIES OF FERN:
In this first memory, we are three years old. Mother is sitting in the big love-seat in the library so that Fern can squeeze in on one side and me on the other. It’s raining, been raining for days, and I am sick of being inside, sick of using my inside voice. Fern loves being read to. She’s sleepy and quiet, pressing in as close to our mother as possible, her hands playing with the belt loops on Mom’s corduroy pants, smoothing the nap on Mom’s thighs. I, on the other hand, am flinging myself about, unable to get comfortable, kicking across Mom’s lap at Fern’s feet, trying to make her do something that will get her in trouble. Mom tells me to hold still in a voice that could pickle fish.
The book is Mary Poppins and the chapter is the one in which an old woman breaks off her own fingers, which then become sugar sticks for the children to suck on. I have a queasy feeling about this, but Fern hears the word sugar and her mouth begins to work in a sleepy, dreamy way. I don’t understand that Fern doesn’t understand about the fingers. I don’t understand that Fern doesn’t follow the story.
I interrupt constantly, because I wish to understand everything. What is a perambulator? What is rheumatism? Will I get rheumatism someday? What are elastic-sided boots? Can I have some? Are Michael and Jane mad when Mary Poppins takes their stars? What if there were no stars in the sky? Could that happen? “For God’s sake,” Mom says finally. “Can you just let me read the damn story?” and because she used the words God and damn, which she hardly ever does, Mary has to be sacrificed. It’s Mary wants to know, I tell her. “Mary is getting on my last nerve,” our mother says. “Mary should be nice and quiet like our little Fern here.”
Just as I sacrificed Mary, Fern has sacrificed me. She didn’t know what rheumatism was, either, but because I was the one who asked, now she does. She gets to know about rheumatism and she gets praised for not talking when she can’t even talk. I think that Fern has gotten praised for nothing and that I never get praised for nothing. It’s clear that Mom loves Fern best. I can see half of Fern’s face. She is almost asleep, one eyelid fluttering, one ear blooming like a poppy from her black fur, one big toe plugging her mouth so I can hear her sucking on it. She looks at me sleepily from over her own leg, from around the curve of Mom’s arm. Oh, she has played this perfectly, that baby who still wears a diaper!
• • •
MEMORY TWO: One of the graduate students has gotten a free compilation tape from the local radio station and she throws it into the cassette player. We are dancing together, all the girls—Mom and Grandma Donna, Fern and I, the grad students, Amy, Caroline, and Courtney. We are rocking it old-school to “Splish Splash I Was Taking a Bath,” “Paradise Park,” and “Love Potion No. 9.”
I didn’t know if it was day or night. I started kissin’ everything in sight.
Fern is smacking her feet down, loud as she can, jumping sometimes onto the backs of the chairs and then landing on the floor. She makes Amy swing her, and laughs the whole time she is in the air. I am shaking it, popping it, laying it down and working it out. “Conga line,” Mom calls. She snakes us through the downstairs, Fern and I dancing, dancing, dancing behind her.
• • •
MEMORY THREE: A day of bright sun and new snow. Lowell is throwing snowballs against the kitchen window. They splatter softly when they hit, leaving trails of shine across the glass. Fern and I are too excited to stand still but twirl about the kitchen, trailing and spinning our scarves. We are so anxious to get outside we are impossible to dress. Fern is stamping and rocking from side to side. She does a backflip, and then another, and then I am looking down on the top of her head as we link hands for a merry-go-round spin.
I am asking where snow comes from, and why it comes only in winter, and if it snows in Australia in the summer, does that mean everything in Australia is opposite to our world? Is it light during the night and dark during the day? Does Santa bring you presents only if you’ve been very bad? Mom is not answering my questions, but fretting instead, because there is no way to make Fern wear mittens or boots. If you put something on Fern’s feet, she screams.
The whole question of clothing has been a touchy one. Excepting those times when Fern would be too cold without (a second exception has been made for the diaper), Mom would rather not dress her; she doesn’t want Fern made comical. But I have to wear clothes, so Fern also has to. Besides, Fern wants them. Mom decides to classify Fern’s clothing as self-expression, an anthropomorphism Dad dislikes.
On this occasion, Mom settles for pinning her own large gloves to the cuffs of Fern’s parka, shoving Fern’s hands into them but letting her take them right out again. Mom warns me to stay upright. No loping through the snow on my hands and feet. A smell spreads through the kitchen. I can see that Mom is considering sending Fern out anyway. “She stinks,” I say and Mom sighs, unzips Fern’s parka, takes her upstairs to change her clothes. Dad is the one who brings her down again, reinserts her into her snow wear. I hear the shower running upstairs. By n
ow I’m so hot I’m sweating.
Lowell has been building a snow ant. The abdomen, which Lowell calls the metasoma, is not as big as he wants—he wants a giant, mutant snow ant as tall as he is—but the snow is so sticky, it’s already iced into place. When Fern and I finally burst out into the snow-globe world of the farmhouse yard, we find him trying to dislodge it, keep it rolling. We hop about him as he struggles. Fern swings up into the little mulberry tree above us. There is snow on the branches. Some of it she eats. Some of it she shakes down our necks until Lowell tells her to cut it out.
Fern is not much for cutting things out. Lowell puts up his hood. She drops onto his back, arm around his neck. I hear her laughing—a sound like a handsaw scraping back and forth. Lowell reaches over his head, grabs her arms, and somersaults her to the ground. She laughs more and scrambles up the tree for a repeat.
But Lowell has already moved off to find another white sheet of snow, start another snow ant. “My mistake was to stop and wait for you guys,” he tells us. “We got to keep it moving.” He ignores Fern’s cries of disappointment.
I stay behind, digging a trench around the unfinished metasoma with my mittened hands. Fern climbs down, starts after Lowell. She looks back to see if I’m coming and I sign for her to give me some help. Ordinarily, this would have no impact, but she’s still mad at Lowell. She pivots back.
Our father is standing on the porch with his coffee. “‘Nothing beside remains,’” Dad says, pointing with his cup to the abandoned snow-ant abdomen. “‘Round the decay of that colossal wreck.’”
Fern sits on the ground beside me, rests her chin on my arm, her feet on the metasoma. She stuffs another handful of snow into her mouth, smacks her protuberant, acrobatic lips, and turns to look up at me, eyes shining. Fern’s eyes seem larger than human eyes, because the whites are not white but an amber color only slightly lighter than the irises. When I draw Fern’s face, the crayon I use for her eyes is burnt sienna. Fern’s own drawings are never finished, as she always eats the crayon.
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Page 8