Kitch took me into the student union, bought me a Coke. She chitchatted a bit and I listened. She told me that she regretted the wildness of her youth and hoped I wasn’t making the same mistakes. She warned me that some things, once done, couldn’t be undone. But she was on a better path now. She was in a sorority and her grades were good. She was getting an education degree, which was something I, too, should think about. You’d probably be a great teacher, she said, and to this day I have no idea why anyone would have thought that, though it is what I eventually did.
She had a nice boyfriend, who was off on his mission in Peru, she told me, and he didn’t let a week go by without calling her. Finally, she asked if we ever heard from Lowell. She never had. Not one word since the day he’d left. She thought she deserved better than that. We all deserved better, she said, we were a nice family.
And then she told me something I didn’t know about the last time she’d seen Lowell. They’d been walking together to his basketball practice, she said, when they ran into Matt. Matt my favorite grad student, Matt from Birmingham. Matt whom, after Fern left, I’d never seen again.
Matt who’d known I loved him, but hadn’t even said good-bye.
It turned out, Kitch said, that Matt had left Bloomington with Fern. He’d seemed surprised when Lowell didn’t already know that. Other chimps, separated suddenly from their families, had sometimes just died with no clear cause but grief. So Matt had been sent along, had volunteered, in fact, to help with the transition. He’d taken Fern to a psych lab in Vermillion, South Dakota. This lab housed more than twenty chimps, and was run by a Dr. Uljevik, about whom Matt had nothing good to say.
Although Fern was clearly suffering from the shock and terror of the move, Dr. Uljevik insisted on limiting the time Matt had with her to a few hours a week. He’d put Fern at once into a cage with four larger, older chimps, and when Matt told him that she’d never been with chimps before and couldn’t they introduce her slowly, Dr. Uljevik said no. He said she had to learn her place. She had to learn what she was. Dr. Uljevik said, “If she can’t learn her place, we can’t keep her here.” He never once, in all the time Matt had spent there, had called Fern by her name.
“Then,” Kitch said, “Lowell just lost it.” She’d tried to make him go on to basketball practice. She was afraid he’d be benched for the Marion game. She’d told him he had a responsibility to his teammates, to the whole school, heck, to the whole town.
“‘Don’t effing talk to me about responsibility,’” he’d said (which I doubted. Lowell never said effing in his life). “‘That’s my sister in that cage.’” They’d had a fight and Kitch had broken up with him.
Kitch had never known Fern, and so, like everyone else in town, she’d never really understood; Lowell’s reaction still struck her as extreme and inexplicable. “I told him I didn’t want to be the girlfriend of the guy who lost the game to Marion,” she’d told me. “I wish I hadn’t said that, but we were always saying horrible things to each other. I thought we’d make it up later, like we always did. He sure used to say some horrible stuff. It wasn’t just me.”
But I barely heard that part, because I was still hearing what she’d said earlier. “Out there in South Dakota,” Kitch had said, “Matt said they treated Fern like some kind of animal.”
• • •
IT’S HARD ENOUGH here to forgive myself for things I did and felt when I was five, hopeless for the way I behaved at fifteen. Lowell heard that Fern was in a cage in South Dakota and he took off that very night. I heard the same thing and my response was to pretend I hadn’t heard it. My heart had risen into my throat, where it stayed all through Kitch’s horrible story. I couldn’t finish my Coke or speak around that nasty, meaty, beating lump.
But as I’d biked home, my head cleared. It took me all of five blocks to decide it wasn’t such a bad story, after all. Good old Matt. Twenty other chimps for friends, a new chimp family. The cage clearly just an interim measure before she was moved into Dad’s farm. Lowell had no gift for belief and faith. Lowell, I thought, Lowell was capable of leaping to some crazy conclusions.
Besides, if there had been a problem with Fern, Lowell had surely taken care of it by now. He’d gone to South Dakota and done whatever needed to be done. And then he’d moved on to Davis, California. The FBI had told us so. My own government. Would they lie?
At dinner, I adopted my usual strategy of saying nothing. The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you’ve gone over that cliff. Saying nothing was more amendable, and over time I’d come to see that it was usually your best course of action. I’d come to silence hard, but at fifteen I was a true believer.
Five
AND THEN I TRIED to never think of Fern again. By the time I left for college, I’d come surprisingly close to achieving this. It had all happened so long ago. I’d been so young. I’d spent many more years without her than with her, and most of the years I’d had with her were years I didn’t remember.
I left home, the last of the children to do so. Though Mom had acquiesced to this out-of-state nonsense, her voice on the phone that first year was ragged. I couldn’t come back for the summer and still qualify for in-state tuition during my sophomore year, so I didn’t. Mom and Dad came to visit in July. “At least it’s a dry heat,” they kept telling me, though once the thermometer tops a hundred I think that’s just crazy talk. We drove around campus; wound, without noting it, past the old arson crime site, the lab now fully operational.
Then they went back to Bloomington, where, in August, they moved house. It was a strange feeling, to know that once again I lived somewhere I’d never seen.
With no conscious decision regarding the matter, I found myself avoiding classes that dealt with primates. No genetics, no physical anthropology, and certainly no psychology. You might be surprised at how hard dodging primates can be. Take Introduction to Classical Chinese and find yourself devoting a week to Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, and the chaos he wreaks in Heaven. Take a European literature class and find on the syllabus Kafka’s “A Report for an Academy,” with its ape narrator, Red Peter, which your professor will tell you is a metaphor for being Jewish and you’ll see how it might work that way, but it’s not the most obvious reading. Take astronomy and maybe there’s a section devoted to exploration, to those pioneering dogs and chimps of space. You might be shown the photos of the space chimps in their helmets, grinning from ear to ear, and you might feel an urge to tell the rest of your class that chimps grin like that only when they’re frightened, that no amount of time among humans will change it. Those happy-looking space chimps in those pictures are frankly terrified and maybe you just barely stop yourself from saying so.
So it’s not true that I never thought of Fern. More that I never thought of her unless prompted and then I never lingered there.
I came to UC Davis both to find my past (my brother) and to leave it (the monkey girl) behind. By monkey girl, I mean me, of course, not Fern, who is not now and never has been a monkey. In some unaccessed part of my brain, somewhere in that thinking that’s below language, I must have still believed it was possible to fix my family and myself, live our lives as if Fern had never been part of us. I must have believed that this would be a good thing to do.
Checking into the freshman dorms, I made a decision never to talk about my family. I wasn’t a talker anymore and I anticipated little difficulty in this. But I was surprised to find that the families we’d all left behind were, often as not, the topic du jour and harder to avoid than I’d hoped.
My first roommate was an X-Files obsessive from Los Gatos. Her name was Larkin Rhodes, a natural blonde who dyed her hair red and made us all call her Scully. In states of high emotion, Scully’s cheeks turned from a scrubbed pink to white to pink again, so quickly it was like time-lapse photography. She started talking about her family practically the minute we met.
Scully had gotten in first, chosen a bed, and thrown her
clothes onto it in a heap (they stayed that way for months; it was like a nest she slept in), and was putting up posters when I opened the door. One poster was, of course, the famous “I Want to Believe” from The X-Files. The other was from Edward Scissorhands, which she said was her very favorite Johnny Depp. “What’s yours?” she asked and I might have made a better first impression if I’d had one.
Fortunately, Scully was the oldest of three sisters and accustomed to compensating for lesser minds. She told me that her father was a contractor who worked on high-end houses—houses with rolling ladders in the libraries, red carp in the fountains, closets the size of bathrooms, bathrooms the size of bedrooms. He spent his weekends at Renaissance Faires, wearing velvet hats and saying good morrow to the wenches there.
Her mother designed cross-stitching kits and marketed them under the company name of X-Rhodes (pronounced Crossroads). She gave craft workshops all over the country, but was particularly popular in the South. Scully had a pillow on her bed with a cross-stitched aerial view of the Great Wall of China, a display of thrilling chiaroscuro—really, it was as if you were there.
Her mother had once made Scully miss a high school dance in order to clean the bathroom grout with bleach on a toothbrush. “That there tells you everything you need to know about Mama. She has Martha Stewart on speed dial,” Scully said. And then, “Not like for real. Just kind of psychically.” She fixed her sad blue eyes on me. “You know how everything seems so normal when you’re growing up,” she asked plaintively, “and then comes this moment when you realize your whole family is nuts?” By the time I’d heard all that, I had known her for maybe twenty minutes.
Scully was appallingly gregarious—so outgoing she was practically incoming. Everything seemed to happen in our room. I’d come back from class or dinner, or I’d wake up in the middle of the night, and there’d be a half-dozen freshmen, sitting with their backs against the walls, carrying on about the Whac-A-Mole dynamics of the homes they’d just left. Their parents were so weird! Like Scully, they’d just figured that out. Every single one of them had weird parents.
One of them had a mother who’d once grounded her a whole summer because she’d gotten a B-plus in biology. Her mother had grown up in some part of Delhi where they didn’t abide B-pluses.
One of them had a father who made the whole family stand at the refrigerator and down a glass of orange juice before going out for breakfast, because restaurant orange juice was too expensive to order, but you could hardly call it breakfast without.
One night the girl across the hall, Abbie something or other, told us she had an older sister who, at sixteen, said that back when she was three, their dad used to make her touch his penis. Abbie was lying across the foot of my bed when she said this, her head on one hand, black hair falling like a fountain around her bent arm. She was probably wearing a tank top and flannel plaid pajama bottoms. She slept in these, but she also wore them to class. She said that everyone in L.A. went to school in their pajamas.
“And then, after everyone goes into therapy and takes sides, and no one is speaking to anyone anymore,” Abbie said, “she suddenly remembers he didn’t; she maybe only dreamed he had. And she’s like still pissed off at everyone who didn’t believe her, because what if it had been true? She’s a crazy person,” Abbie said. “Sometimes I truly hate her. Like the rest of the family is fine, you know? And then this one crazy sister ruins it all.”
This was so serious no one knew how to respond. We all sat and watched Scully paint her toenails with gold glitter, and no one said a word. The silence went on too long, turned awkward.
“Whatev,” Abbie said, which in 1992 meant you didn’t really care no matter how much it had sounded as if you did. She didn’t just say this; she used a hand sign as well—index fingers up, hands joined at the thumbs into a W. That we had forced her to whatev us made our silence so much worse.
Whatev was the first hand sign I learned at college, but there were several popular then. There was the thumb-and-index-finger L held against the forehead, which meant Loser. The whatev W could be flipped up and down, W to M to W to M, in which case it meant Whatever, your mother works at McDonald’s. ’Cause that’s the way we rolled back in ’92.
Doris Levy spoke up. “My father sings in the grocery store,” she offered. She was sitting with her arms around her knees on the floor by Scully’s golden toes. “Top-of-his-lungs loud.” Old-school rock and roll piped in over the intercom, and her father in the deli, picking up all the cheeses and smelling them, belting away. Mama told me not to come. Wake me up before you go-go.
“Maybe he’s gay,” Scully suggested. “He sounds kind of gay to me.”
“One night at dinner, out of nowhere, he asks me if I respect him,” Doris said. “What the fuck am I supposed to say to that?” She turned to me. “Your parents are probably pretty weird, too?” she asked. I caught the whiff of collusion. I got that we were filling the silence as a team so that Abbie wouldn’t regret having told us what she’d told us. I got that it was my turn now.
But I flubbed the handoff. I was still hearing Abbie’s voice—and then this one crazy sister goes and ruins it all—and everything else was someone shouting at me from a distant, stormy shore.
“Not really,” I said, and stopped so as to not talk about my parents. Who were, after all, as ordinary a pair of people who’d tried to raise a chimp like a human child as you were ever going to find.
“You are lucky to be so fucking normal,” Scully told me and everyone else agreed.
What a scam I’d pulled off! What a triumph. Apparently, I’d finally erased all those little cues, those matters of personal space, focal distance, facial expression, vocabulary. Apparently, all you needed to be considered normal was no evidence to the contrary. This plan of moving halfway across the country and never talking to anyone ever again was working like a dream.
Except that now I’d achieved it, normal suddenly didn’t sound so desirable. Weird was the new normal and, of course, I hadn’t gotten the memo. I still wasn’t fitting in. I still had no friends. Maybe I just didn’t know how. Certainly I’d had no practice.
Maybe sedulously making sure that no one really knew me was an impediment to friendship. Maybe all those people coming in and out of my room were friends and I just hadn’t realized it, because I’d been expecting more. Maybe friendship was not as big a deal as I’d thought and I actually had lots of friends.
Inferential data suggests otherwise. I wasn’t asked along when Scully and a Brady Bunch of other freshmen went off to Tahoe for a weekend to ski. I learned of it only afterward, the plans carefully not laid in my room, not discussed in my presence. On the trip, Scully had hooked up with an older guy from Cal Poly, who slept with her one night and then wouldn’t speak to her the next morning. This had to be so thoroughly talked through that I overheard, and Scully saw me overhearing. “We didn’t think you’d be into it,” Scully said, “coming from Indiana and all. Like you need to go somewhere and see snow.” Awkward laugh, eyes darting about like pinballs, cheeks aflame. She was so embarrassed I felt bad for her.
• • •
IF YOU’VE EVER been a college undergraduate taking Philosophy 101, you’ve probably encountered the concept of philosophical solipsism. According to solipsism, reality exists only inside your own mind. What follows then is that you can only be certain of your own status as a conscious being. Everyone else might be some sort of mindless marionette operated by alien overlords or cat parasites, or possibly running about with no motivation at all. You’ll never prove otherwise.
Scientists have solved the problem of solipsism with a strategy called inference to the best explanation. It’s a cheap accommodation and no one is happy about it, with the possible exception of those alien overlords.
So I can’t prove that I’m different from you, but that’s my best explanation. I infer this difference from the responses of other people. I assume my upbringing is the cause. Inference and assumption, smoke and Jell-O,
nothing you could build a house on. Basically, I’m just telling you that I feel different from other people.
But maybe you feel different, too.
The average chimp friendship lasts about seven years. Scully and I shared a bedroom for nine months. We never had a serious quarrel or falling out. And then we packed up, sashayed off into our separate lives, and haven’t spoken since. Say good-bye to Scully. We won’t be seeing her again until 2010, when she friends me on Facebook for no discernible reason and with nothing much to say.
• • •
FOR MY SECOND YEAR, I answered an apartment-share advertisement I’d found on the Food Co-op bulletin board. Todd Donnelly, a junior majoring in art history, turned out to be a nice, quiet guy, a guy who took people at their word, which is a dangerous but generous way to live in the world. I heard a lot more about his Irish father, from whom he got his freckles, and his Japanese mother, from whom he got his hair, than he heard about my parents, but he heard more than most. By then I’d figured out the way to talk about my family. Nothing simpler really. Start in the middle.
One night Todd managed to procure, through his own mysterious methods, an animated version of The Man in the Iron Mask, done by Burbank Films Australia. Alice Hartsook, his girlfriend at the time (Todd was such an idiot to let her go), came over. They took the couch, heads at either end, feet heaped in the middle, toes wriggling. I lay on the rug with some pillows. We ate microwaved popcorn and Todd discoursed on animation in general and the Burbank style in particular.
You know the story. One twin is the king of France. One twin is thrown into the Bastille and forced to wear an iron mask so no one will ever see his face. The twin in prison has all the kingly qualities. The real king is a real asshole. Toward the middle of this cartoon there is a lovely ballet under a firework sky. Oddly, that was the moment at which I found I couldn’t breathe. On the television—pirouettes, arabesques, and a shower of colored stars. On the floor—me, sweating, heart running uphill, gulping for air but unable to open my lungs. I sat up and the room went dark, revolving slowly about me.
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Page 11