Is there a character in all of fiction more isolated than the little red hen?
I think Mom and Dad must have instructed the school not to say anything about Fern, because their usual approach to social difference and difficulty was to wade in up to their empathetic eyeballs.
“The reason Tammy can’t eat Shania’s birthday cupcakes is because she’s allergic to wheat. Today we’ll learn about wheat—where it grows and how many of the foods we eat contain it. Tomorrow Tammy’s mother will bring in cupcakes made from rice flour, for us to taste. Does anyone else have allergies?”
“Today is the first day of the month of Ramadan. When Imad is older, he will observe Ramadan by fasting every day from sunrise to sunset. Fasting means not eating and not drinking anything but water. The dates of Ramadan are tied to the moon, so they change every year. Today we will make a lunar calendar. We will draw pictures of ourselves as astronauts walking on the moon.”
“Dae-jung doesn’t speak English, because his family comes from Korea. Today we will find Korea on a map. We will learn some Korean words so that Dae-jung isn’t the only one learning a new language. Here is how you say ‘Welcome, Dae-jung,’ in Korean.”
Without a specific injunction, it’s hard to see how my childhood with Fern didn’t ever become a lesson plan.
Dad gave me some tips designed to improve my social standing. People, he said, liked to have their movements mirrored. When someone leaned in to talk to me, I should likewise lean in. Cross my legs if they did, smile when they smiled, etc. I should try this (but be subtle about it. It wouldn’t work if anyone saw I was doing it) with the kids at school. Well-meant advice, but it turned out badly, played too readily into the monkey-girl narrative—monkey see, monkey do. Which also meant I’d blown the subtlety part.
Mom had a theory I heard through the bedroom wall. You didn’t need a lot of friends to get through school, she told Dad, but you had to have one. For a brief period in the third grade, I pretended that Dae-jung and I were friends. He didn’t talk, but I was well able to supply both sides of a conversation. I returned a mitten he’d dropped. We ate lunch together, or at least we ate at the same table, and in the classroom he’d been given the desk next to mine on the theory that when I talked out of turn, it might help his language acquisition. The irony was that his English improved due in no small part to my constant yakking at him, but as soon as he could speak, he made other friends. Our connection was beautiful, but brief.
As soon as he was genuinely fluent, Dae-jung transferred to the public school. His parents had ambitions for him that included the math classes at North. In 1996, my mother phoned me at school in Davis to tell me that Dae-jung was just down the road at UC Berkeley. “You two could get together!” she said. My short-lived belief in our friendship was that intoxicating to her. She’s never been able to give it up.
The word in Korean for “monkey” is won-soong-ee. That’s phonetic. I don’t know the proper romanization.
Three
MEANWHILE, Lowell clawed his way to high school. High school Lowell was easier to live with than middle school Lowell. He stopped demanding that we go see Fern and joined the rest of us in seldom mentioning her. He was chilly but polite; peace settled over the house like a thin mantle of snow. One Mother’s Day, he gave Mom a music box that played the theme from Swan Lake. She cried for days over it.
Marco was still Lowell’s best buddy, though Marco’s mom liked Lowell less than she had before they’d shoplifted Twizzlers from the Sahara Mart on Third Street, been picked up and made an example of.
He had an on-again, off-again relationship with a girl. Her name was Katherine Chalmers, but everyone called her Kitch. Kitch was Mormon. Her parents were strict and overwhelmed—they had nine children—so policing her had fallen to her two oldest brothers. Each rose to the challenge in his own special way. One showed up at our door and marched her home whenever she’d missed her curfew. The other bought bottles of Boone’s Farm wine for her so she wouldn’t have to shoulder-tap strangers. This mix, as our father’s studies would tell you, was a poor model for behavior modification. Kitch was a girl with a reputation.
At the Chalmers house, Lowell wasn’t allowed anywhere near Kitch’s bedroom, but our parents had what Mom called an Open Door Policy, which is to say that Kitch could be in Lowell’s room, but only if the door was fully open. Sometimes I was sent to check on this and the door was always as demanded. But sometimes Lowell and Kitch were on the bed together, fully clothed, but vigorously trying to occupy the same space anyway. Mom never asked about that part, so I never said. Somewhere along the way, I’d learned not to tattle.
In fact, at some point, I’d mostly stopped talking altogether. I can’t tell you exactly when that happened. Years before, I’d figured out that school went best when I didn’t draw attention to myself, but knowing this and accomplishing it were two different things. So it happened gradually, over time, by dint of constant effort. First I eliminated the big words. They were getting me nowhere. Then I quit correcting other people when they used the wrong words. I raised the ratio of things I thought to things I said from three to one, to four to one, to five, to six, to seven.
I still thought as much as ever, and sometimes I imagined the responses I would have gotten if I had spoken up and what I would have then said next, and so on and so on. Without the release of talking, these thoughts crowded my brain. The inside of my head turned clamorous and outlandish, like the Mos Eisley spaceport bar in Star Wars.
Teachers began to complain of my inattentiveness. In the old days, even when I talked nonstop, I was still able to pay attention. I had become distractible, Mom said.
Unfocused, said Dad.
Lowell said nothing. Probably he hadn’t noticed.
In his senior year, he was the point guard on the South High School basketball team. This was a position of such power and prestige that even my life was made easier by it. I went to all the games. The bouncing echoes of a high school gym, the bells, the smells, the slap of the ball on the wood—these are things I still respond to with a profound sense of well-being. Indiana basketball. Everyone was nice to me when my brother was on the court directing traffic.
Marion, Indiana, had a powerhouse team that year and we had a game with them coming up; I was so excited I buzzed. I’d made a poster of a snake wrapped around a basketball so that it turned into Lowell’s number—9—and put it in the living room window. And then, one day, when Lowell was absolutely supposed to be at practice, leading his team through their drills, I heard him come in. I recognized the sound the door made when it was Lowell closing it.
I was upstairs, reading something or other—Bridge to Terabithia or Where the Red Fern Grows—one of those books where someone dies, because I was already soppy with tears. Mom was out, I don’t remember where, but I don’t think she could have changed a thing and I’m just as glad she didn’t try and have that failure to reproach herself with later.
I went down to see what was what. The door to his bedroom was shut. I opened it. Lowell was lying facedown on his bed, feet on his pillow, head at the foot. He looked up, but not so much that I could see his face. “Get the fuck out of my room,” he said. Voice full of nails. I didn’t move.
He swung his legs to the floor, stood, and turned toward me. His face was red, wet, and puffy as a cloud. He took me by the shoulders, shoved me out. “Don’t you ever fucking come in here again,” he said. “Fucking ever.” He closed the door.
By dinner he seemed normal. He ate and talked to Dad about the upcoming game. He didn’t say he’d missed practice and I didn’t say so, either. We watched an episode of The Cosby Show. I remember him laughing. It was the last thing we all did together.
That night he took all his money—his bank was a Groucho Marx sock puppet Grandma Donna made for him back when he’d had chicken pox—and put it in his gym bag along with some clothes. He’d always had a gift for making money and he never spent a dime, so I expect he had a goodly sum. He took ou
r father’s keys, walked to the lab, and let himself in. He consolidated the rats into a few large cages, which he then took outside. He let the rats go. Then he caught a bus to Chicago and he never came back.
Once again our father’s grad students lost data they’d spent years collecting. It was no kindness to the rats, Dad said, not with the weather we were having. It was certainly no kindness to our father, who stayed on at the university but never again had a grad student that any other professor wanted to work with. I’ll just say that Mom took Lowell’s disappearance hard, worse even than when we lost Fern, and leave it at that. I don’t have the words for what it did to her. She’s never even managed to pretend to recover.
At first we all thought he’d come back. I had a birthday looming; I was certain he wouldn’t miss that. He’d often taken off for a few days, as many as four on one occasion, and then returned without us ever learning where he’d slept. So in spite of the Great Rat Release, it took our parents a while to figure out that this time was different. Two weeks in, they decided the police, who saw him as a habitual runaway and also an adult, since he’d just turned eighteen, were insufficiently concerned. They hired their own investigator, a no-nonsense woman named K. T. Payne, to track him down. At first, Payne called us regularly at home. She hadn’t caught up to Lowell, but she was on the scent. There’d been sightings. There’d been reports. There’d been mischief, or so I gathered by the exact way no one was telling me much. “Hey, kiddo,” she’d say to me, if I was the one to answer, “how’s it sparking?” and I’d hang around to hear what I could hear, but our parents’ side of things would be carefully brief and noninformative.
Then Lowell disappeared entirely. With each new phone call, Mom circled the drain, and eventually Dad asked K.T. to use his office phone instead.
A second investigator was hired.
Weeks became months and still we believed he’d be back. I never moved into his room, though I often slept in his bed, which made me feel closer to him and got me away from that shared wall and Mom’s crying. One day I found a note he’d left for me inside The Fellowship of the Ring. He knew I reread that trilogy often; he knew that the day would soon come when I’d need the consolation of the Shire, which was as much like Bloomington, Indiana, as any place else in the world. “Fern is not on a fucking farm,” the note said.
I kept this to myself as Mom was in no condition to be told. I assumed Fern had been on the farm and then sent away again, probably for bad behavior. Besides, Lowell was dealing with it. Lowell would take care of Fern and then he would come back and take care of me.
It never once occurred to me that our father had been lying all along.
• • •
WHEN I WAS EIGHT OR NINE, I used to spend the time before I went to sleep at night imagining that Fern and I lived on her farm together. There were no adults and no other humans, only young chimps, chimps with a great need for someone to teach them songs, read them books. The bedtime story I used to tell myself was that I was telling the baby chimps a bedtime story. My fantasy was drawn in part from Peter Pan.
A second inspiration was the Swiss Family Robinson, Disney version. When we’d gone to Disneyland, the tree house had been my favorite thing in the whole park. If only I’d had no parents watching my every move, if only I’d been a happy, carefree orphan, I’d have hidden under the player piano until everything closed, and then taken up residence there.
I transplanted the whole thing, root, trunk, and branch, to Fern’s farm, where my nighttime ruminations focused on the pulleys and wires, how we’d get running water and grow vegetables—in my fantasy life, I liked vegetables—all without leaving the tree. I’d fall asleep with visions of gadgetry and logistical challenges dancing in my head.
Ironic then that many years later, the Swiss Family Robinson were forcibly moved out of the Disney tree house so that Tarzan and his saintly ape mother, Kala, could move in.
• • •
MARION CRUSHED Bloomington South and went on to win the state championship—the first year in a three-year streak known as the Purple Reign. I don’t think Lowell could have altered that outcome. Even so, his disappearance didn’t help my social standing. The morning after the game, there was toilet paper dripping like tinsel from the branches of our mulberry tree, and three bags of shit, probably dog but who really knows, by the front door. That day we played dodgeball at school and I came home one large walking bruise. No one had tried to stop it. I suspect some of the teachers might have liked to join in.
Months became years.
On my first day of seventh grade, someone taped a page from National Geographic to the back of my jacket. It was a glossy view of a fertile female chimp butt, pink and swollen and target-like. For the next two hours, whenever I was in the hall, kids poked at my back as I went past, in a fucking motion, until, finally, in French class, my teacher noticed the picture and removed it.
I figured the rest of my time at middle school would be more of the same. Add gum and ink and water from the toilet bowl. Stir vigorously. I came home that first day, locked myself in the bathroom, took a shower to cover the noise, and cried and cried for Lowell, who I still thought would someday be back. When he came home, Lowell would make them stop. Lowell would make them sorry. I just had to keep going until then, keep sitting in those classes and walking in those hallways.
I never told my parents. My mother wasn’t strong enough to hear it; she would never come out of her room again if I told. The only thing I could do for her now was to be okay. I worked at that as if it were my job. No complaints to management about worker conditions.
There was no point in telling my father. He’d never let me quit after only one day. He couldn’t help me and he’d make some terrible blunder if he tried. Parents are too innocent for the Boschian landscapes of middle school.
So I kept my mouth shut. I was always keeping my mouth shut by then.
Fortunately for me, that first day turned out to be as bad as it got. There were other students, kids even more offensively weird than I, who took the full weight of middle school in my place. Occasionally, someone would ask, in tones of great concern, if I was in estrus, which was my own fault; no one would have even known the word if I hadn’t used it once, apparently memorably, back in the fourth grade. But mostly no one spoke to me at all.
In their bedroom, in the dark, Mom and Dad worried about how quiet I’d become. It was bound to happen, they assured each other. Typical teenage sullenness; they’d been much the same themselves. I’d grow out of it. Hit some reasonable midpoint between the constant talking I’d done before and my current silence.
Occasionally, we heard from Lowell. A postcard would come, sometimes with a message, sometimes without, always unsigned. I remember one with a picture of the Nashville Parthenon and a St. Louis postmark. “I hope you’re happy,” he’d written on the back, which is a hard thing to parse, and you have to work to take it at face value, but it could mean just exactly what it said. Lowell could have been hoping we were happy.
• • •
WE STOPPED LOOKING for him one day in 1987, early June. Lowell had been gone more than a year. I was out on the driveway, throwing a tennis ball against the garage door and catching it, which is how you play catch when there’s only one of you. I was thirteen years old, had a whole hot summer stretching ahead of me before I went back to school. The sun was shining and the air was wet and still. I’d been to the library that morning and had seven books waiting in my room, three of which I’d never read before. Across the street, Mrs. Byard waved at me. She was mowing their lawn and the motor of the mower had a sleepy distant hum, like bees. I wasn’t happy, exactly, but I was remembering how happiness felt.
Two men parked a black car in front of the house and came up the walk. “We need to talk to your brother,” one of the men said to me. He was dark-skinned, but not black. Hair shaved so short he was almost bald, and sweating in the heat. He took a handkerchief out, wiped the top of his head with it. I would
have liked to do that, too, run my hand over his hair. I would probably have liked the way that stubble felt in my palm.
“Can you get him for us?” the other man asked.
“My brother’s with Fern,” I said. I rubbed my hands on the thighs of my pants to get the itch off. “He’s gone to live with Fern.”
Mom came out of the house and gestured for me to join her on the porch. She took me by the arm, put me behind her, so that she stood between the men and me.
“FBI, ma’am,” the almost bald man told her. He showed her a badge. He said my brother was a person of interest in a fire that had caused $4.6 million of damage to the John E. Thurman Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at UC Davis. “It’d go best for him if he came to talk to us of his own accord,” one of the men said. “You should tell him that.”
“Who’s Fern?” asked the other.
• • •
MOST OF THE RATS that Lowell had released were recaptured, but not all. Despite our father’s dire predictions, some survived that winter and the next one, too. They went on to have full lives—sex, travel, and adventure. For many years after, there were hooded-rat sightings in Bloomington. One rat was found in a shoe in a dorm room closet, another in a downtown coffee shop. Under the pew in the campus chapel. In the Dunn cemetery, eating the buttercups on a grave dating back to the Revolutionary War.
Four
THEN I WAS FIFTEEN, biking on my own through the beautiful, autumnal IU campus. Someone shouted my name as I pedaled past. “Rosemary! Wait up,” this someone called. “Wait up!” So I waited up and it was Kitch Chalmers, now a student at the U and seeming genuinely glad to see me. “Rosemary Cooke!” she said. “My old buddy from back in the day!”
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Page 10