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ALSO BY Karen Joy Fowler

NOVELS

Wit’s End

The Jane Austen Book Club

Sister Noon

The Sweetheart Season

Sarah Canary

STORIES

What I Didn’t See

Black Glass

Artificial Things

A MARIAN WOOD BOOK Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons

Publishers Since 1838 Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

Copyright © 2013 by Karen Joy Fowler All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of

the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

The passages from Franz Kafka’s “A Report for an Academy” are quoted from a translation prepared by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College (now Vancouver Island University), Nanaimo, British Columbia,

Canada. The poem by Issa is quoted from a translation that appeared on Yoshi Mikami’s Issa’s Haiku home page. Lyrics are quoted from “The Hukilau Song” by Jack Owens, and “Love Potion No. 9” by Jerry Leiber and

Mike Stoller.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fowler, Karen Joy. We are all completely beside ourselves / Karen Joy Fowler.

p. cm. “A Marian Wood book.” ISBN 978-1-101-59568-8

1. Families—Fiction. 2. Self-realization in women—Fiction. 3. Human-animal relationships—Fiction. 4. Life change events—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. 6. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

PS35556.O844W4 2013 2013000988 813'.54—dc23

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies,

events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

IN MEMORY OF

the wonderful Wendy Weil, champion of books, animals, and, in both categories, me

Contents

Also by Karen Joy Fowler Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Prologue

Part One Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven

Part Two Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven

Part Three Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven

Part Four

Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven

Part Five Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven

Part Six Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven

Acknowledgments

. . . Your experience as apes, gentlemen—to the extent that you have something of that sort behind you— cannot be more distant from you than mine is from me. But it tickles at the heels of everyone who walks here on earth, the small chimpanzee as well as the great Achilles.

—FRANZ KAFKA, “A Report for an Academy”

Prologue

THOSE WHO KNOW ME NOW will be surprised to learn that I was a great talker as a child. We have a home movie taken when I was two years old, the old-fashioned kind with no sound track, and by now the colors have bled out—a white sky, my red sneakers a ghostly pink—but you can still see how much I used to talk.

I’m doing a bit of landscaping, picking up one stone at a time from our gravel driveway, carrying it to a large tin washtub, dropping it in, and going back for the next. I’m working hard, but showily. I widen my eyes like a silent film star. I hold up a clear piece of quartz to be admired, put it in my mouth, stuff it into one cheek.

My mother appears and removes it. She steps back then, out of the frame, but I’m speaking emphatically now—you can see this in my gestures—and she returns, drops the stone into the tub. The whole thing lasts about five minutes and I never stop talking.

A few years later, Mom read us that old fairy tale in which one sister (the older) speaks in toads and snakes and the other (the younger) in flowers and jewels, and this is the image it conjured for me, this scene from this movie, where my mother puts her hand into my mouth and pulls out a diamond.

I was towheaded back then, prettier as a child than I’ve turned out, and dolled up for the camera. My flyaway bangs are pasted down with water and held on one side by a rhinestone barrette shaped like a bow. Whenever I turn my head, the barrette blinks in the sunlight. My little hand sweeps over my tub of rocks. All this, I could be saying, all this will be yours someday.

Or something else entirely. The point of the movie isn’t the words themselves. What my parents valued was their extravagant abundance, their inexhaustible flow.

Still, there were occasions on which I had to be stopped. When you think of two things to say, pick your favorite and only say that, my mother suggested once, as a tip to polite social behavior, and the rule was later modified to one in three. My father would come to my bedroom door each night to wish me happy dreams and I would speak without taking a breath, trying desperately to keep him in my room with only my voice. I would see his hand on the doorknob, the door beginning to swing shut. I have something to say! I’d tell him, and the door would stop midway.

Start in the middle then, he’d answer, a shadow with the hall light behind him, and tired in the evenings the way grown-ups are. The light would reflect in my bedroom window like a star you could wish on.

Skip the beginning. Start in the middle.

Part One

The storm which blew me out of my past eased off. —FRANZ KAFKA, “A Report for an Academy”

One

SO THE MIDDLE of my story comes in the winter of 1996. By then, we’d long since dwindled to the family that old home movie foreshadowed—me, my mother, and, unseen but evident behind the camera, my father. In 1996, ten years had passed since I’d last seen my brother, seventeen since my sister disappeared. The middle of my story is all about their absence, though if I hadn’t told you that, you might not have known. By 1996, whole days went by in which I hardly thought of either one.

1996. Leap year. Year of the Fire Rat. President Clinton had just been reelected; this would all end in tears. Kabul had fallen to the Taliban. The Siege of Sarajevo had ended. Charles had recently divorced Diana.

Hale-Bopp came swinging into our sky. Claims of a Saturn-like object in the comet’s wake first surfaced that November. Dolly, the cloned sheep, and Deep Blue, the chess-playing computer program, were superstars. There was evidence of life on Mars. The Saturn-like object in Hale-Bopp’s tail was maybe an alien spaceship. In May of ’97, thirty-nine people would kill themselves as a prerequisite to climbing aboard.

Against this backdrop, how ordinary I look. In 1996, I was twenty-two years old, meandering through my fifth year at the University of California, Davis, and still maybe only a junior or maybe a senior, but so thoroughly uninterested in the niceties of units or requirements or degrees that I wouldn’t be graduating anytime soon. My education, my father liked to point out, was wider than it was deep. He said this often.

But I saw no reason to hurry. I’d no particular ambitions beyond being either widely admired or stealthily influential—I was torn between the two. It hardly mattered, as no major seemed to lead reliably to either.

My parents, who were still paying my expenses, found me aggravating. My mother was often aggravated those days. It was something new for her, analeptic doses of righteous aggravation. She was rejuvenated by it. She’d recently announced that she was through being a translator and go-between for me and my father; he and I had hardly spoken since. I don’t remember minding. My father was himself a college professor and a pedant to the bone. Every exchange contained a lesson, like the pit in a cherry. To this day, the Socratic method makes me want to bite someone.

Autumn came suddenly that year, like a door opening. One morning I was bicycling to class when a large flock of Canada geese passed overhead. I couldn’t

see them, or much of anything else, but I heard the jazzy honking above me. There was a tule fog off the fields and I was wrapped inside it, pedaling through clouds. Tule fogs are not like other fogs, not spotty or drifting, but fixed and substantial. Probably anyone would have felt the risk of moving quickly through an unseen world, but I have—or had as a child—a particular penchant for slapstick and mishap, so I took the full thrill from it.

I felt polished by the wet air and maybe just a little migratory myself, just a little wild. This meant I might flirt a bit in the library if I sat next to anyone flirtable or I might daydream in class. I often felt wild back then; I enjoyed the feeling, but nothing had ever come of it.

At lunchtime I grabbed something, probably grilled cheese, let’s say it was grilled cheese, in the school cafeteria. I was in the habit of leaving my books on the chair next to me, where they could be quickly moved if someone interesting came by but would discourage the uninteresting. At twenty-two, I had the callowest possible definition of interesting and, by the measure of my own calipers, was far from interesting myself.

A couple was sitting at a table near me and the girl’s voice gradually rose to the point where I was forced to pay attention. “You want some fucking space?” she said. She was wearing a short blue T-shirt and a necklace with a glass pendant of an angelfish. Long, dark hair fell in a messy braid down her back. She stood and cleared the table with one motion of her arm. She had beautiful biceps; I remember wishing I had arms like hers.

Dishes fell to the floor and shattered; catsup and cola spilled and mixed in the breakage. There must have been music in the background, because there’s always music in the background now, our whole lives sound-tracked (and most of it too ironic to be random. I’m just saying), but honestly I don’t remember. Maybe there was only a sweet silence and the spit of grease on the grill.

“How’s that?” the girl asked. “Don’t tell me to be quiet. I’m just making more space for you.” She pushed the table itself over, swung it to one side, dropped it. “Better?” She raised her voice. “Can everyone please leave the room so my boyfriend has more space? He needs a fucking lot of space.” She slammed her chair down onto the pile of catsup and dishes. More sounds of breakage and a sudden waft of coffee.

The rest of us were frozen—forks halfway to our mouths, spoons dipped in our soups, the way people were found after the eruption of Vesuvius.

“Don’t do this, baby,” her boyfriend said once, but she was doing it and he didn’t bother to repeat himself. She moved to another table, empty except for a tray with dirty dishes. There, she methodically broke everything that could be broken, threw everything that could be thrown. A saltshaker spun across the floor to my foot.

A young man rose from his seat, telling her, with a slight stutter, to take a chill pill. She threw a spoon that bounced audibly off his forehead. “Don’t side with

assholes,” she said. Her voice was very not chill. He sank back, eyes wide. “I’m okay,” he assured the room at large, but he

sounded unconvinced. And then surprised. “Holy shit! I’ve been assaulted.” “This is just the shit I can’t take,” the boyfriend said. He was a big guy, with a

thin face, loose jeans, and a long coat. Nose like a knife. “You go ahead and tear it up, you psycho bitch. Just give me back the key to my place first.”

She swung another chair, missing my head by maybe four feet—I’m being charitable; it seemed like a lot less—striking my table and upsetting it. I grabbed my glass and plate. My books hit the floor with a loud slap. “Come and get it,” she told him.

It struck me funny, a cook’s invitation over a pile of broken plates, and I laughed once, convulsively, a strange duck-like hoot that made everyone turn. And then I stopped laughing, because it was no laughing matter, and everyone turned back. Through the glass walls I could see some people on the quad who’d noticed the commotion and were watching. A threesome on their way in for lunch stopped short at the door.

“Don’t think I won’t.” He took a few steps in her direction. She scooped up a handful of catsup-stained sugar cubes and threw them.

“I’m finished,” he said. “We’re finished. I’m putting your shit in the hallway and I’m changing the locks.” He turned and she threw a glass, which bounced off his ear. He missed a step, staggered, touched the spot with one hand, checked his fingers for blood. “You owe me for gas,” he said without looking back. “Mail it.” And he was gone.

There was a moment’s pause as the door closed. Then the girl turned on the rest of us. “What are you losers looking at?” She picked up one of the chairs and I couldn’t tell if she was going to put it back or throw it. I don’t think she’d decided.

A campus policeman arrived. He approached me cautiously, hand on his holster. Me! Standing above my toppled table and chair, still holding my harmless glass of milk and my plate with the harmless half-eaten grilled cheese sandwich. “Just put it down, honey,” he said, “and sit for a minute.” Put it down where? Sit where? Nothing in my vicinity was upright but me. “We can talk about this. You can tell me what’s going on. You’re not in any trouble yet.”

“Not her,” the woman behind the counter told him. She was a large woman, and old—forty or more—with a beauty mark on her upper lip and eyeliner collecting in the corners of her eyes. You all act like you own the place, she’d said to me once, on another occasion, when I sent back a burger for more cooking. But you just come and go. You don’t even think how I’m the one who stays.

“The tall one,” she told the cop. She pointed, but he was paying no attention, so intent on me and whatever my next move would be.

“Calm down,” he said again, soft and friendly. “You’re not in any trouble yet.” He stepped forward, passing right by the girl with the braid and the chair. I saw her

eyes behind his shoulder. “Never a policeman when you need one,” she said to me. She smiled and it was

a nice smile. Big white teeth. “No rest for the wicked.” She hoisted the chair over her head. “No soup for you.” She launched it away from me and the cop, toward the door. It landed on its back.

When the policeman turned to look, I dropped my plate and my fork. I honestly didn’t mean to. The fingers of my left hand just unclenched all of a sudden. The noise spun the cop back to me.

I was still holding my glass, half full of milk. I raised it a little, as if proposing a toast. “Don’t do it,” he said, a whole lot less friendly now. “I’m not playing around here. Don’t you fucking test me.”

And I threw the glass onto the floor. It broke and splashed milk over one of my shoes and up into my sock. I didn’t just let it go. I threw that glass down as hard as I could.

Two

FORTY MINUTES LATER, the psycho bitch and I were tucked like ticks into the back of a Yolo County police car, the matter now being way too big for the guileless campus cops. Handcuffed, too, which hurt my wrists a great deal more than I’d ever imagined it would.

Being arrested had seriously improved the woman’s mood. “I told him I wasn’t fucking around,” she said, which was almost exactly what the campus cop had also said to me, only more in sorrow than in triumph. “So glad you decided to come with. I’m Harlow Fielding. Drama department.”

No shit. “I never met a Harlow before,” I said. I meant a first name Harlow. I’d met a last

name Harlow. “Named after my mother, who was named after Jean Harlow. Because Jean

Harlow had beauty and brains and not because Gramps was a dirty old man. Not even. But what good did beauty and brains do her? I ask you. Like she’s this great role model?”

I knew nothing about Jean Harlow except that she was maybe in Gone With the Wind, which I’d never seen nor ever wanted to see. That war is over. Get over it. “I’m Rosemary Cooke.”

“Rosemary for remembrance,” Harlow said. “Awesome. Totally, totally charmed.” She slid her arms under her butt and then under her legs so her cuffed wrists ended up twisted in front of her. If I’d been able to do the same, we could have shaken hands, as seemed to be her intention, but I couldn’t.

We were taken then to the county jail, where this same maneuver created a sensation. A number of policemen were called to watch as Harlow obligingly squatted and stepped over her cuffed hands and back again several times. She deflected their enthusiasm with a winning modesty. “I have very long arms,” she said. “I can never find sleeves that fit.”

Our arresting officer’s name was Arnie Haddick. When Officer Haddick took off his hat, his hair was receding from his forehead in a clean, round curve that left his features nicely uncluttered, like a happy face.

He removed our cuffs and turned us over to the county for processing. “As if we were cheese,” Harlow noted. She gave every indication of being an old pro at this.

I was not. The wildness I’d felt that morning had long since vanished and left something squeezed into its place, something like grief or maybe homesickness.

What had I done? Why in the world had I done it? Fluorescent lights buzzed like flies above us, picking up the shadows under everyone’s eyes, turning us all old, desperate, and a little green.

“Excuse me? How long will this take?” I asked. I was polite as could be. It occurred to me that I was going to miss my afternoon class. European Medieval History. Iron maidens and oubliettes and burned at the stake.

“It takes as long as it takes.” The woman from the county gave me a nasty, green look. “Be faster if you don’t irritate me with questions.”

Too late for that. In the next breath, she sent me to a cell so I’d be out of her hair while she did the paperwork on Harlow. “Don’t worry, boss,” Harlow told me. “I’ll be right along.”

“Boss?” the woman from the county repeated. Harlow shrugged. “Boss. Leader. Mastermind.” She gave me that flaming-

Zamboni smile. “El Capitán.” The day may come when policemen and college students aren’t natural enemies,

but I sure don’t expect to live to see it. I was made to remove my watch, shoes, and belt, and taken barefoot into a cage with bars and a sticky floor. The woman who collected my things was as mean as she could be. There was an odor in the air, a strong amalgamation of beer, cafeteria lasagna, bug spray, and piss.

The bars went all the way to the top of the cell. I checked to be sure; I’m a pretty good climber, for a girl. More fluorescents in the ceiling, louder buzzing, and one of the lights was blinking, so the scene in the cell dimmed and brightened as if whole days were rapidly passing. Good morning, good night, good morning, good night. It would have been nice to be wearing shoes.

Two women were already in residence. One sat on the single naked mattress. She was young and fragile, black and drunk. “I need a doctor,” she said to me. She held out her elbow; blood was slowly oozing from a narrow gash, its color changing from red to purple in the blinking light. She screamed so suddenly I flinched. “I need help here! Why won’t anyone help me?” No one, myself included, responded and she didn’t speak again.

The other woman was middle-aged, white, nervous, and thin as a needle. She had stiff, bleached hair and a salmon-colored suit that was dressy, considering the occasion. She’d just rear-ended a cop car and she said that only the week before she’d been arrested shoplifting tortillas and salsa for a Sunday afternoon football party at her house. “This is so not good,” she told me. “Honestly, I have the worst luck.”

Eventually I was processed. I can’t tell you how many hours had passed, as I had no watch, but it was considerably after I’d given up all hope. Harlow was still in the office, shifting about on a rocky chair, making the leg thump while she fine- tuned her statement. She’d been charged with destruction of property and creating a public nuisance. They were garbage charges, she told me. They didn’t concern her;

they shouldn’t concern me. She made a phone call to her boyfriend, the guy from the cafeteria. He drove right over and she was gone before they finished my paperwork.

I saw how useful it could be to have a boyfriend. Not for the first time. I faced the same charges, but with one important addition—I was also accused of

assaulting an officer and no one suggested this charge was garbage. By now I’d convinced myself I’d done absolutely nothing but be in the wrong

place at the wrong time. I called my parents, because who else was I going to call? I hoped my mother would answer, as she usually did, but she was out playing bridge. She’s an infamous bridge hustler—I’m amazed there are still people who’ll play with her, but that’s how desperate for bridge some people get; it’s like a drug. She’d be home in an hour or two with her ill-gotten winnings rattling in a silver catch purse, happier than usual.

Until my father told her my news. “What the hell did you do?” My father’s voice was exasperated, as if I’d interrupted him in the midst of something more important, but it was just as he’d expected.

“Nothing. Called out a campus cop.” I felt my worries slipping from me like skin from a snake. My father often had this effect on me. The more irritated he was, the more I became smooth and amused, which, of course, irritated him all the more. It would anyone, let’s be fair.

“The littler the job, the bigger the chip on the shoulder,” my father said; that’s how quickly my arrest became a teaching moment. “I always thought your brother would be the one to call from jail,” he added. It startled me, this rare mention of my brother. My father was usually more circumspect, especially on the home phone, which he believed was bugged.

Nor did I respond with the obvious, that my brother might very well go to jail, probably would someday, but he would never ever call.

Three words were scratched in ballpoint blue on the wall above the phone. Think a head. I thought how that was good advice, but maybe a bit late for anyone using that phone. I thought how it would be a good name for a beauty salon.

“I don’t have a clue what to do next here,” my father said. “You’re going to have to talk me through it.”

“It’s my first time, too, Dad.” “You’re in no position to be cute.” And then, all of a sudden, I was crying so hard I couldn’t speak. I took several

runny breaths and made several tries, but no words came out. Dad’s tone changed. “I suppose someone put you up to it,” he said. “You’ve

always been a follower. Well, sit tight there”—as if I had a choice—“and I’ll see what I can do.”

The bleached blonde was the next to make a call. “You’ll never guess where I am!” she said. Her tone was bright and breathy, and it turned out she’d dialed the

wrong number. Because of who he was, a professional man used to having his own way, my

father managed to get the arresting officer on the phone. Officer Haddick had children of his own: he treated my father with all the sympathy my father felt he deserved. Soon they were calling each other Vince and Arnie, and the assault charge had been reduced to interfering with a police officer in the performance of his duty and soon after that it was dropped altogether. I was left with destruction of property and creating a public nuisance. And then these charges were dropped, too, because the eyeliner woman at the cafeteria came down and spoke for me. She insisted that I was an innocent bystander and had clearly not meant to break my glass. “We were all in shock,” she said. “It was such a scene, you can’t imagine.” But by then I’d been forced to promise my dad that I would come home for the whole of Thanksgiving so the matter could be properly discussed over four days and face-to-face. It was a heavy price to pay for spilling my milk. Not even counting time served.

Three

THE IDEA THAT we would spend the holiday talking about anything as potentially explosive as my arrest was a fiction, and we all knew this even as I was being made to promise to do so. My parents persisted in pretending we were a close-knit family, a family who enjoyed a good heart-to-heart, a family who turned to each other in times of trial. In light of my two missing siblings, this was an astonishing triumph of wishful thinking; I could almost admire it. At the same time, I am very clear in my own mind. We were never that family.

Random example: sex. My parents believed in themselves as scientists, dealers in the hard facts of life, and also as children of the openly orgasmic sixties. Yet whatever it is I think I know, I learned mostly from PBS’s wildlife and nature programming, novels whose authors were probably no experts, and the occasional cold-blooded experiment in which more questions are raised than answers found. One day, a package of junior-sized tampons was left on my bed along with a pamphlet that looked technical and boring, so I didn’t read it. Nothing was ever said to me about the tampons. It was just blind luck I didn’t smoke them.

I grew up in Bloomington, Indiana, which is where my parents still lived in 1996, so it wasn’t easy to get back for a weekend and I didn’t manage the four days I’d promised. Already the cheap seats were gone on Wednesday and Sunday, so I arrived in Indianapolis on Thursday morning and flew back Saturday night.

Except for Thanksgiving dinner, I hardly saw my father. He had a grant from the NIH and was happily sidelined by inspiration. He spent most of my visit in his study, filling his personal blackboard with equations like _0' = [0 0 1] and P(S1n+1) = (P(S1n)(1–e)q + P(S2n)(1–s) + P(S0n)cq. He barely ate. I’m not sure he slept. He didn’t shave, and he usually shaved twice a day; he had an exuberant beard. Grandma Donna used to say his four-o’clock shadow was just like Nixon’s, pretending that was a compliment but knowing it irritated the hell out of him. He emerged only for coffee or to take his fly-fishing rod out to the front yard. Mom and I would stand at the kitchen window, washing and drying the dishes, watching him lay out his line, the fly flicking over the icy borders of the lawn. This was the meditative activity he favored and there were too many trees in the back. The neighbors were still getting used to it.

When he worked like this, he didn’t drink, which we all appreciated. He’d been diagnosed with diabetes a few years back and shouldn’t have been drinking at any time. Instead he’d become a secret drinker. It kept Mom on high alert and I worried

sometimes that their marriage had become the sort Inspector Javert might have had with Jean Valjean.

It was my grandma Donna’s turn to have us for Thanksgiving, along with my uncle Bob, his wife, and my two younger cousins. We alternated between grandparents on holidays, because fair is fair and why should one side of the family have all the delight? Grandma Donna is my mother’s mother, Grandma Fredericka my father’s.

At Grandma Fredericka’s, the food had a moist carbohydrate heft. A little went a long way, and there was never only a little. Her house was strewn with cheap Asian tchotchkes—painted fans, jade figurines, lacquered chopsticks. There was a pair of matching lamps—red silk shades and stone bases carved into the shapes of two old sages. The men had long, skinny beards and real human fingernails inset creepily into their stony hands. A few years ago, Grandma Fredericka told me that the third level of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was the most beautiful place she had ever seen. It just makes you want to be a better person, she said.

Grandma Fredericka was the sort of hostess who believed that bullying guests into second and third helpings was only being polite. Yet we all ate more at Grandma Donna’s, where we were left alone to fill our plates or not, where the piecrusts were flaky and the orange-cranberry muffins light as clouds; where there were silver candles in silver candlesticks, a centerpiece of autumn leaves, and everything was done with unassailable taste.

Grandma Donna passed the oyster stuffing and asked my father straight out what he was working on, it being so obvious his thoughts were not with us. She meant it as a reprimand. He was the only one at the table who didn’t know this, or else he was ignoring it. He told her he was running a Markov chain analysis of avoidance conditioning. He cleared his throat. He was going to tell us more.

We moved to close off the opportunity. Wheeled like a school of fish, practiced, synchronized. It was beautiful. It was Pavlovian. It was a goddamn dance of avoidance conditioning.

“Pass the turkey, Mother,” my uncle Bob said, sliding smoothly into his traditional rant about the way turkeys are being bred for more white meat and less dark. “The poor birds can hardly walk. Miserable freaks.” This, too, was intended as a dig at my father, the enterprise being another of science’s excesses, like cloning or whisking up a bunch of genes to make your own animal. Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability.

I believe the same can be said of many families. Bob helped himself ostentatiously to a slice of dark meat. “They stagger around

with these huge ungodly breasts.” My father made a crude joke. He made the same joke or some variation of it

every time Bob gave him the opening, which was every other year. If the joke were witty, I’d include it, but it wasn’t. You’d think less of him and thinking less of him

is my job, not yours. The silence that followed was filled with pity for my mother, who could have

married Will Barker if she hadn’t lost her mind and chosen my father, a chain- smoking, hard-drinking, fly-fishing atheist from Indianapolis, instead. The Barker family owned a stationery store downtown and Will was an estate lawyer, which didn’t matter nearly so much as what he wasn’t. What he wasn’t was a psychologist like my father.

In Bloomington, to someone my grandma’s age, the word psychologist evoked Kinsey and his prurient studies, Skinner and his preposterous baby boxes. Psychologists didn’t leave their work at the office. They brought it home. They conducted experiments around the breakfast table, made freak shows of their own families, and all to answer questions nice people wouldn’t even think to ask.

Will Barker thought your mother hung the moon, Grandma Donna used to tell me, and I often wondered if she ever stopped to think that there would be no me if this advantageous marriage had taken place. Did Grandma Donna think the no-me part was a bug or a feature?

I think now that she was one of those women who loved her children so much there was really no room for anyone else. Her grandchildren mattered greatly to her, but only because they mattered so greatly to her children. I don’t mean that as a criticism. I’m glad my mother grew up so loved.

Tryptophan: a chemical in turkey meat rumored to make you sleepy and careless. One of the many minefields in the landscape of the family Thanksgiving.

Minefield #2: the good china. When I was five, I bit a tooth-sized chunk out of one of Grandma Donna’s Waterford goblets for no other reason than to see if I could. Ever since, I’d been served my milk in a plastic tumbler with Ronald McDonald (though less and less of him each year) imprinted on it. By 1996 I was old enough for wine, but the tumbler was the same, it being the sort of joke that never gets old.

I don’t remember most of what we talked about that year. But I can, with confidence, provide a partial list of things not talked about:

Missing family members. Gone was gone. Clinton’s reelection. Two years back, the day had been ruined by my father’s

reaction to my uncle Bob’s assertion that Clinton had raped a woman or probably several women in Arkansas. My uncle Bob sees the whole world in a fun-house mirror, TRUST NO ONE lipsticked luridly across its bowed face. No more politics, Grandma Donna had said as a permanent new rule, since we wouldn’t agree to disagree and all of us had access to cutlery.

My own legal troubles, about which no one but my mother and father knew. My relatives had been waiting a long time to see me come to no good; it did them no harm to keep waiting. In fact, it kept them in fighting trim.

My cousin Peter’s tragic SAT scores, about which we all knew but were

pretending we didn’t. 1996 was the year Peter turned eighteen, but the day he was born he was more of a grown-up than I’ll ever be. His mother, my aunt Vivi, fit into our family about as well as my father—we’re a hard club to join, it seems. Vivi has mysterious flutters, weeps, and frets, so by the time Peter was ten, he could come home from school, look in the refrigerator, and cook a dinner for four from whatever he found there. He could make a white sauce when he was six years old, a fact often impressed upon me by one adult or another, with an obvious and iniquitous agenda.

Peter was also probably the only all-city cellist in the history of the world to be voted Best-Looking at his high school. He had brown hair and the shadows of freckles dusted like snow over his cheekbones, an old scar curving across the bridge of his nose and ending way too close to his eye.

Everyone loved Peter. My dad loved him because they were fishing buddies and often escaped to Lake Lemon to menace the bass there. My mom loved him because he loved my dad when no one else in her family could manage it.

I loved him because of the way he treated his sister. In 1996, Janice was fourteen, sullen, peppered with zits, and no weirder than anyone else (which is to say, weird on stilts). But Peter drove her to school every morning and picked her up every afternoon that he didn’t have orchestra. When she made a joke, he laughed. When she was unhappy, he listened. He bought her jewelry or perfume for her birthdays, defended her from their parents or her classmates, as needed. He was so nice, it hurt to watch.

He saw something in her, and who knows you better than your own brother? If your brother loves you, I say it counts for something.

Just before dessert, Vivi asked my father what he thought of standardized testing. He didn’t answer. He was staring into his yams, his fork making little circles and stabs as if he were writing in the air.

“Vince!” my mother said. She gave him a prompt. “Standardized tests.” “Very imprecise.” Which was just the answer Vivi wanted. Peter had such excellent grades. He

worked so hard. His SAT scores were a terrible injustice. There was a moment of congenial conspiracy and the end of Grandma Donna’s wonderful dinner. Pie was served—pumpkin, apple, and pecan.

Then my dad spoiled things. “Rosie had such good SATs,” he said, as if we weren’t all carefully not talking about the SATs, as if Peter wanted to hear how well I had done. My dad had his pie shoved politely out of the way in one cheek, smiling at me proudly, visions of Markov avoidance chains banging together like trash-can lids in his head. “She wouldn’t open the envelope for two whole days and then she’d aced them. Especially the verbal.” A little bow in my direction. “Of course.”

Uncle Bob’s fork came down on the edge of his plate with a click.

“It comes of being tested so often when she was little.” My mother spoke directly to Bob. “She’s a good test-taker. She learned how to take a test, is all.” And then, turning to me, as if I wouldn’t have heard the other, “We’re so proud of you, honey.”

“We expected great things,” my father said. “Expect!” My mother’s smile never faltered; her tone was desperately gay. “We

expect great things!” Her eyes went from me to Peter to Janice. “From all of you!” Aunt Vivi’s mouth was hidden behind her napkin. Uncle Bob stared over the

table at a still life on the wall—piles of shiny fruit and one limp pheasant. Breast unmodified, just as God intended. Dead, but then that’s also part of God’s plan.

“Do you remember,” my father said, “how her class spent a rainy recess playing hangman and when it was her turn the word she chose was refulgent? Seven years old. She came home crying because the teacher said she’d cheated by inventing a word.”

(My father had misremembered this; no teacher at my grammar school would have ever said that. What my teacher had said was that she was sure I hadn’t meant to cheat. Her tone generous, her face beatific.)

“I remember Rose’s scores.” Peter whistled appreciatively. “I didn’t know how impressed I should have been. That’s a hard test, or at least I thought so.” Such a sweetheart. But don’t get attached to him; he’s not really part of this story.

• • •

MOM CAME INTO my room on Friday, my last night at home. I was outlining a chapter in my text on medieval economies. This was pure Kabuki—look how hard I’m working! Everyone on holiday but me—until I’d gotten distracted by a cardinal outside the window. He was squabbling with a twig, hankering after something I hadn’t yet figured out. There are no red birds in California, and the state is the poorer for it.

The sound of my mother at the door made my pencil hop to. Mercantilism. Guild monopolies. Thomas More’s Utopia. “Did you know,” I asked her, “that there’s still war in Utopia? And slaves?”

She did not. She floated about for a bit, straightening the bedding, picking up some of the

stones on the dresser, geodes mostly, split open to their crystal innards like Fabergé eggs.

Those rocks are mine. I found them on childhood trips to the quarries or the woods, and I broke them open with hammers or by dropping them onto the driveway from a second-story window, but this isn’t the house I grew up in and this room isn’t my room. We’ve moved three times since I was born, and my parents landed here only after I took off for college. The empty rooms in our old house, my mother said, made her sad. No looking back. Our houses, like our family, grow

smaller; each successive one would fit inside the last. Our first house was outside of town—a large farmhouse with twenty acres of

dogwood, sumac, goldenrod, and poison ivy; with frogs and fireflies and a feral cat with moon-colored eyes. I don’t remember the house so well as the barn, and remember the barn less than the creek, and the creek less than an apple tree my brother and sister would climb to get into or out of their bedrooms. I couldn’t climb up, because I couldn’t reach the first branch from the bottom, so about the time I turned four, I went upstairs and climbed down the tree instead. I broke my collarbone and you could have killed yourself, my mother said, which would have been true if I’d fallen from the upstairs. But I made it almost the whole way down, which no one seemed to notice. What have you learned? my father asked, and I didn’t have the words then, but, in retrospect, the lesson seemed to be that what you accomplish will never matter so much as where you fail.

About this same time, I made up a friend for myself. I gave her the half of my name I wasn’t using, the Mary part, and various bits of my personality I also didn’t immediately need. We spent a lot of time together, Mary and I, until the day I went off to school and Mother told me Mary couldn’t go. This was alarming. I felt I was being told I mustn’t be myself at school, not my whole self.

Fair warning, as it turned out—kindergarten is all about learning which parts of you are welcome at school and which are not. In kindergarten, to give you one example out of many, you are expected to spend much, much more of the day being quiet than talking, even if what you have to say is more interesting to everyone than anything your teacher is saying.

“Mary can stay here with me,” my mother offered. Even more alarming and unexpectedly cunning of Mary. My mother didn’t like

Mary much and that not-liking was a critical component of Mary’s appeal. Suddenly I saw that Mom’s opinion of Mary could improve, that it could all end with Mom liking Mary better than me. So Mary spent the time when I was at school sleeping in a culvert by our house, charming no one, until one day she simply didn’t come home and, in the family tradition, was never spoken of again.

We left that farmhouse the summer after I turned five. Eventually the town swept over it, carried it away in a tide of development so it’s all culs-de-sac now, with new houses and no fields or barns or orchards. Long before that, we were living in a saltbox by the university, ostensibly so that my father could walk to work. That’s the house I think of when I think of home, though for my brother it’s the earlier one; he pitched a fit when we moved.

The saltbox had a steep roof I was not allowed up on, a small backyard, and a shortage of extra rooms. My bedroom was a girly pink with gingham curtains that came from Sears until one day Grandpa Joe, my father’s father, painted it blue while I was at school, without even asking. When your room’s pink, you don’t sleep a wink. When your room’s blue, you sleep the night through, he told me

when I protested, apparently under the misapprehension that I could be silenced with rhyme.

And now we were in this third house, all stone floors, high windows, recessed lights, and glass cabinets—an airy, geometric minimalism, with no bright colors, only oatmeal, sand, and ivory. And still, three years after the move, oddly bare, as if no one planned to be here long.

I recognized my rocks, but not the dresser beneath them, nor the bedspread, which was a quilted velvet-gray, nor the painting on the wall—something murky in blues and black—lilies and swans, or maybe seaweed and fish, or maybe planets and comets. The geodes did not look as if they belonged here and I wondered if they’d been brought out for my visit and would be boxed up as soon as I left. I had a momentary suspicion that the whole thing was an intricate charade. When I left, my parents would go back to their real house, the one with no room for me in it.

Mom sat on the bed and I put down my pencil. Surely there was preliminary, throat-clearing conversation, but I don’t remember. Probably, “It hurts your father when you don’t talk to him. You think he doesn’t notice, but he does.” This is a holiday classic—like It’s a Wonderful Life, we rarely get through the season without it.

Eventually she got to her point. “Dad and I have been talking about my old journals,” she said, “and what I ought to do with them. I still feel they’re sort of private, but your father thinks they should go to a library. Maybe one of those collections that can’t be opened until fifty years after your death, though I hear that libraries don’t really like that. Maybe we could make an exception for family.”

I’d been taken by surprise. My mother was almost, but not quite, talking about things we absolutely, resolutely did not talk about. The past. Heart clicking loudly, I answered by rote. “You should do whatever you want, Mom,” I said. “What Dad wants isn’t relevant.”

She gave me a quick, unhappy look. “I’m not asking for your advice, dear. I’ve decided to give them to you. Your dad is probably right that some library would take them, though I think he remembers them as more scientific than they are.

“Anyway. The choice is yours. Maybe you don’t want them. Maybe you’re still not ready. Toss them if you like, make paper hats. I promise never to ask.”

I struggled to say something to her, something that would acknowledge the gesture without opening the subject. Even now, even with years of forewarning, I can’t think just how I might have done that. I hope I said something graceful, something generous, but it doesn’t seem likely.

What I remember next is my father joining us in the guest room with a present, a fortune he’d gotten in a cookie months ago and saved in his wallet, because he said it was obviously for me. Don’t forget, you are always on our minds.

There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened. The mist lifts and suddenly

there we are, my good parents and their good children, their grateful children who phone for no reason but to talk, say their good-nights with a kiss, and look forward to home on the holidays. I see how, in a family like mine, love doesn’t have to be earned and it can’t be lost. Just for a moment, I see us that way; I see us all. Restored and repaired. Reunited. Refulgent.

Four

TOUCHED AS I WAS, there was nothing I wanted less than my mother’s journals. What’s the point of never talking about the past if you wrote it all down and you know where those pages are?

Mom’s journals were large, the size of sketch pads but thicker, and there were two of them, tied together with old green Christmas ribbon. I had to empty my suitcase and repack, sit on it to zip it closed again.

At some point, perhaps when I changed planes in Chicago, the suitcase waltzed off on its own adventures. I arrived in Sacramento, waited an hour at the luggage carousel, talked for another hour to a bunch of people with clear consciences and bad attitudes. I caught the last bus to Davis, empty-handed.

I felt guilty because I’d owned the journals less than a day and already lost them. I felt happy because just this once, the airlines had used their incompetence for good instead of evil and maybe, through no fault of my own beyond an excessive trust in everyone’s ability to do their job, I’d never see those notebooks again. I felt lucky not to have checked my textbooks.

Mostly I felt tired. The minute I stepped out of the elevator onto my floor, I could hear Joan Osborne’s “One of Us” and the music grew louder the closer I got to my own apartment. This surprised me, because I’d thought Todd (my roommate) wasn’t getting back until Sunday and I thought Todd was standing alone against the world in not liking “One of Us.”

I hoped he wouldn’t want to talk. Last time he’d gone to visit his father, they’d had a long conversation about everything they believed and wanted and were. It had all been so glorious that Todd had gone back downstairs after the good-nights to say how close to his father he now felt. From the doorway, he’d overheard Dad talking to the new wife. “Jeebus,” his dad was saying. “What an eejit. I’ve always wondered if he’s really mine.” If Todd had come home early, it was not for anything small.

I opened the door and Harlow was on my couch. She was wrapped in the crocheted shawl Grandma Fredericka had made for me when I had the measles, and she was drinking one of my diet sodas. She sprang up to turn the music down. Her dark hair was twisted onto her head and had a pencil stuck through it. I could see I gave her quite a start.

• • •

ONCE, at a parent-teacher conference, my kindergarten teacher had said that I had boundary issues. I must learn to keep my hands to myself, she’d said. I remember the mortification of being told this. I’d truly had no idea that other people weren’t to be touched; in fact, I’d thought quite the opposite. But I was always making mistakes like that.

So you’ll have to tell me what the normal reaction to coming home and finding someone you hardly know in your house would be. I was already tired and wired. My response was to gape silently, like a goldfish.

“You scared me!” Harlow said. More dim-witted gaping. She waited a moment. “God, I hope you don’t mind?” As if it had only just

occurred to her I might. Notes of sincerity, contrition. She began talking faster. “Reg kicked me out because he thinks I have no money and nowhere to go. He thought I’d walk around for a couple of hours and then have to crawl home and beg him to let me back in. He pisses the hell out of me.” Sisterhood! “So I came here. I thought you wouldn’t be back until tomorrow.” Reason. Composure. “Look, I can see you’re tired.” Compassion. “I’ll get right out of your hair.” Commitment.

She was trying so hard to get a read on me, but there was nothing to read. All I felt was exhausted, to the marrow of my heavy bones, to the roots of my stolid hair.

Well, and maybe curious. Just the tiniest bit. “How did you know where I live?” I asked.

“I got it off your police report.” “How did you get in?” She pulled the pencil, and her hair dropped silkily to her shoulders. “I gave your

apartment manager a pretty face and a sad story. I’m afraid he can’t really be trusted.” Her tone now was one of great concern.

• • •

I MUST HAVE gotten angry while I slept, because that’s how I woke up. The phone was ringing and it was the airline, saying they had my bag and would deliver it in the afternoon. They hoped I’d think of them the next time I flew.

I went to use the toilet and it overflowed. After several futile attempts to flush, I called the apartment manager, embarrassed to have him in my bathroom dealing so openly with my piss, but grateful it was nothing more.

Though he was eager. He came at a run, in a clean shirt rolled to show his upper arms, his plunger brandished like a rapier. He looked about for Harlow, but it was a tiny place, no way to miss her unless she was gone. “Where’s your friend?” he asked. His name was Ezra Metzger, a name of considerable poetry. Obviously, his parents had had hopes.

“Home with her boyfriend.” I was in no mood to soften this news. Besides, I’d

been good to Ezra on other occasions. One time, two nondescript men had come to my door and asked questions about him. They said he’d applied for a job in the CIA, which struck me as a terrible idea no matter how you looked at it, and I still gave him the best recommendation I could make up on the spot. “I never see the guy,” I said, “unless he wants to be seen.”

“The boyfriend. She told me about him.” Ezra looked at me. He had a habit of sucking on his teeth so his mustache furled and unfurled. I expect he did that for a while. Then he said, “Bad news there. You shouldn’t have let her go back.”

“You shouldn’t have let her in. Without anyone here? Is that even legal?” Ezra had told me once that he didn’t think of himself as the manager of the

apartment house so much as its beating heart. Life was a jungle, Ezra said, and there were those who’d like to bring him down. A cabal on the third floor. He knew them, but they didn’t know him, didn’t know who the fuck they were dealing with. They’d find out. Ezra saw conspiracies. He lived his life camped out on the grassy knoll.

He also talked a lot about honor. Now I saw his mustache in full anguished quiver; if he could have committed seppuku with the plunger on the spot, he’d have done it. Mere moments later, he saw how he’d done nothing wrong. Anguish became outrage. “You know how many women are killed every year by their boyfriends?” he asked. “Pardon the shit out of me for trying to save your friend’s life.”

We settled on a wintry silence. Fifteen minutes passed before he reeled in a tampon. It wasn’t mine.

I tried to go back to bed, but there were long, dark hairs on my pillowcase and the smell of vanilla cologne on my sheets. I found Pixy Stix straws in the trash and fresh scratches in the gold-specked Formica where she’d cut something without a cutting board. Harlow was not a person who lived lightly on the land. The blueberry yogurt I’d planned for lunch was gone. Todd came slamming in, bad mood walking, made worse by the news that we’d been squatted on.

Todd had a third-generation Irish-American father and a second-generation Japanese-American mother, who hated each other. As a kid, he’d spent summers with his dad, coming home with itemized lists of unexpected expenses his mother was expected to cover. Replacement of ripped Star Wars T-shirt—$17.60. New shoelaces—$1.95. It must be so great, Todd used to tell me, having a normal family like you.

Once, he’d dreamed of experimental fusions, that he would be the one to merge folk harps with anime. Now he saw the incommensurability. In his own words: matter and antimatter. The end of the world.

Ever since the Great Eejit Incident, Todd had reached into his Japanese heritage when he needed an insult. Baka (idiot). O-baka-san (honorable idiot). Kisama (jackass). “What kind of kisama does something like that?” he asked now. “Do we

have to change the locks? Do you know how fucking much that’s going to cost?” He went to his bedroom to count his CDs and then went out again. I would have left myself, gotten a coffee downtown, but I needed to be home for the suitcase.

No sign of it. At five of five, I called the airline number—800-FUCK-YOU— and was told I had to speak directly to lost luggage at the Sacramento Airport. No one answered in Sacramento, though my call was important to them.

About seven p.m., the phone rang, but it was my mother checking to see I’d gotten home all right. “I know I said I’d never mention it,” she told me. “But I feel so good about giving you those journals. Like a weight’s been lifted. There. That’s the last thing I’ll say about them.”

Todd came back around nine, with a pizza of apology from the Symposium Restaurant. His girlfriend, Kimmy Uchida, joined us and we all ate in front of Married . . . with Children and then the couch got a little busy, since it had been four whole days since Kimmy and Todd last saw each other. I went to my room and read for a while. I think I was reading The Mosquito Coast then. There seemed to be no end to the insane things fathers did to their families.

Five

NEXT MORNING THE PHONE woke me up. It was the airline saying they had my suitcase and would deliver it in the afternoon. Since I had a class, they promised to leave it with my apartment manager.

Three nights passed then before I managed to find Ezra again. On one of those, I’d gone out with Harlow. She’d come to my door, wearing a jeans jacket and tiny hoop earrings. Gold glitter frosted her hair because, she said, brushing it away with her fingers, she’d walked through a party on her way to my place. A golden wedding anniversary. “Like having just one husband in your whole life is something to brag about,” she said. And then, “Look. I know you’re mad. That was totally wack, crashing at your place without asking. I get it.”

“I’m over it,” I told her, and she said in that case, even though it was only Tuesday and too early for the traditional weekend bacchanal (in 1996, I believe, that still started on Thursday; I’m told it’s Wednesday now), I should let her buy me a beer. We walked downtown, past Sweet Briar Books and the big tomato sculpture at the food co-op, past the Jack in the Box and Valley Wine to the corner opposite the train station where the Paragon bar was. The sun was down, but the horizon still a scarlet slash. Crows were rioting in the trees.

I hadn’t always loved the big sky here, or the flat, fenced yards, or the year- round summery smell of cow shit. But I’d submitted to the fences, stopped noticing the smell, and was a convert to the sky. The sunset you see is always better than the one you don’t. More stars are always better than less. I feel the same about crows, though I know there are some who don’t. Their loss.

I’d rarely been to the Paragon; the college crowd goes elsewhere. It’s about as close as Davis gets to rough, which means that the drinkers there are serious, they show up, an army of the mutant undead who mostly once went to Davis High School, where they lived high old lives of football or skateboarding or keggers. There was a game on the television, volume up—Knicks versus Lakers—plus a lot of zombified nostalgia in the room. It added up to an intermittent din.

Everyone seemed to know Harlow. The bartender brought our drinks himself. Every time I ate a few peanuts, he came and refilled the bowl. Every time we finished our beers, new ones arrived, courtesy of one guy or another, who’d then come to the table only to have Harlow send him away. “I’m so sorry,” she’d say with a sugar-sparkle smile. “But we are just right in the middle of something here.”

I asked her: where she was from (Fresno), how long she’d been in Davis (three

years), and what she planned after college. Her dream was to live in Ashland, Oregon, and design sets and lighting for the Shakespeare Company there.

She asked me: would I rather be deaf or blind, smart or beautiful? Would I marry a man I hated to save his soul? Had I ever had a vaginal orgasm? Who was my favorite superhero? Which politicians would I go down on?

I have never been so thoroughly drawn out. Whom did I love best, my mother or my father? Now we were inching into dangerous territory. Sometimes you best avoid talking

by being quiet, but sometimes you best avoid talking by talking. I can still talk when I need to. I haven’t forgotten how to talk.

So I told Harlow about a summer when I was little, the summer we moved from the farmhouse. It’s a story I’ve told often, my go-to story when I’m being asked about my family. It’s meant to look intimate, meant to look like me opening up and digging deep. It works less well when bits have to be shouted top-volume in a rampageous bar.

It starts in the middle, with me being shipped off to my Grandpa Joe and Grandma Fredericka’s. There was no warning of this and I couldn’t now remember what my parents had told me as to why—whatever it was, I wasn’t buying. I knew the winds of doom when they blew. I believed I’d done something so bad, I’d been given away.

• • •

MY COOKE GRANDPARENTS lived in Indianapolis. They had this hot, airless house with a smell that was almost nice but not quite, sort of like stale cookies. There was a painting of a man and woman in harlequin masks in my bedroom and all that faux Asian stuff in the living room. Really faux. Faux faux. Remember those disturbing sages with their real human fingernails? Now imagine trying to sleep in that house.

The few other kids on the street were a lot older. I would stand behind the front- door screen and watch them, wishing they’d ask me something I knew the answer to, but they didn’t. Sometimes I would go out back, but Grandpa Joe had put in concrete so as to not have the yard work, and it was even hotter than in the house. I’d bounce a ball or watch ants in the flower beds for a while, and then I’d go back in and whine for a popsicle.

My grandparents mostly watched TV or slept in their chairs in front of it. I got to see cartoons every Saturday, which wasn’t allowed at home, and I saw at least three episodes of Super Friends, so I must have been there at least three weeks. Most afternoons, there was a soap opera we all watched together. There was this guy named Larry and his wife, Karen. Larry was head of a hospital and Karen entertained gentlemen while he was at work, which didn’t sound so bad to me, yet

clearly was. “One Life to Live,” said Harlow. “Whatever.” Grandma Fredericka would get annoyed because I talked all through the show

even as she complained that it was all sexed up and no good anymore. It used to be about family, she’d say. It used to be something you could watch with your five- year-old grandbaby in the room. But Grandpa Joe said my talking made the show better. He warned me, though, to remember that real people didn’t really behave like this, as if I might go home thinking it was okay to switch places with your twin brother so as to fake your own death, or steal another mother’s baby if your own had died.

But mostly there was nothing to do. Every day exactly the same, and every night, bad dreams of pinching fingers and harlequin masks. Lots of breakfasts of scrambled eggs with gross little white flecks in them, which I never ate but they kept serving me anyway. “You’ll never be bigger than a minute,” Grandma Fredericka would say, scraping my plate sadly into the trash. And—“Can you hush up for just one minute so I can hear myself think?” Something people had been asking me for as long as I could remember. Back then, the answer was no.

Then she met some woman at the beauty shop, who said I could come and play with her kids. We had to drive to get there. Her kids turned out to be two strapping boys—one of them was only six, but he was already enormous. They had a trampoline and I was wearing a skirt that flew up when I jumped and everyone could see my underpants. I don’t remember if they were mean about it or I was just humiliated on principle. But that was the end for me; I cracked. When no one was paying attention, I walked out the door and I intended to walk the whole way home. Real home. Bloomington.

I knew I would have to walk a long time. I don’t think it ever crossed my mind I might go in the wrong direction. I chose streets with shady lawns and sprinklers. A woman on a porch asked me where my parents were and I said I was visiting my grandparents. She didn’t ask anything else. It must have already been very late when I started, because I was only five; I can’t have walked too far, whatever it felt like, and soon it was getting dark.

I picked out a house because I liked the color. It was painted bright blue and had a red door. And it was tiny, like a house in a fairy tale. I knocked, and a man in a bathrobe and undershirt answered. He asked me in and gave me a glass of Kool- Aid while we sat at the kitchen table. He was nice. I told him about Larry and Karen, the harlequins, the enormous boys, walking back to Bloomington. He listened very seriously and then pointed out a few flaws in my plan I hadn’t noticed. He said if I just knocked on doors and asked for dinner or lunch, I might be fed some foods I didn’t like. I might be expected to clean my plate, because that was the rule in some houses, and they might give me Brussels sprouts or liver or

whatever it was I hated most. I was ready to be talked out of walking to Bloomington anyway.

So I told him my grandparents were the Cookes, and he called a couple of Cookes in the phone book till he found them. They fetched me and I was sent back home the next day, because, they said, I’d turned out to be a handful and real noisy to boot.

• • •

“YOUR MOTHER WASN’T having a baby?” Harlow asked. “No,” I said. “I just thought—I mean, isn’t that the usual reason a kid gets sent off to stay with

the grandparents? We’re talking the classics here.” My mother wasn’t having a baby; she was having a nervous breakdown, but I had

no intention of telling Harlow that. The beauty, the utility of this story is in its power to distract. So I said instead, “I haven’t told you the weird part yet,” and Harlow clapped her hands together with a loud smack. Drinking, like being arrested, made her unnervingly agreeable.

A man wearing a Celtics jersey approached our table, but Harlow waved him away. She did so with a this-hurts-me-more-than-it-hurts-you expression on her face. “We’re just getting to the weird part,” she explained. He hung around a few minutes, hoping to hear the weird part for himself, but it wasn’t for everyone and I waited him out.

“When I was in the little blue house, I asked to use the bathroom,” I said, lowering my voice and leaning in so close I could smell the hops on Harlow’s breath. “The guy in the bathrobe told me it was the second door on the right, but I was five years old. So I opened the wrong door, a bedroom door. And there on the bed was this woman, lying on her stomach, with her hands and feet all tied up with pantyhose behind her back. Trussed. There was something stuffed in her mouth. Maybe men’s socks.

“When I opened the door, she turned her head to look at me. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to think. I had this silvery sharp sense of something very very wrong. Then—”

There was a brief cold wind as someone opened the door into the Paragon, came inside, closed the door.

“She winked at me,” I said.

• • •

A MAN WALKED up behind Harlow and put a hand on the back of her neck. He was wearing a black knit toque with a Canadian maple-leaf on it, and had a sharp nose

that swerved slightly left. Surfer-type, but in a minor key. He was a good-looking guy and I’d last seen him in the university cafeteria, dodging Harlow’s sugar cubes. “Rose, this is Reg,” Harlow said. “Of whom you’ve heard me speak so lovingly.”

Reg didn’t acknowledge me. “I thought you said you had to work.” “I thought you were going to the library.” “I thought there was some crisis with the show. All hands on deck.” “I thought you had this big test you had to study for. Your whole future hanging in

the balance.” Reg grabbed a chair from a neighboring table and helped himself to Harlow’s

beer. “You’ll thank me later,” he said. “Hold your breath, why don’t you?” Harlow suggested sweetly. And then,

“Rosemary’s favorite superhero is Tarzan.” “No, he’s not,” Reg said, not missing a beat. “Because Tarzan doesn’t have

superpowers. He’s not a superhero.” “I told her that!” This was true. I hadn’t had a favorite superhero until Harlow asked. And then I’d

picked Tarzan on impulse, same as I’d done with her other questions, a freewheeling exercise in free-association. But the more she’d questioned my choice, the more committed I’d become to it. I tend to do that in the face of opposition. Ask my dad.

And now that she’d reopened the argument, I thought it was cowardly of her, pretending to be convinced when she was really just lying low, waiting for backup to arrive.

But outnumbered is not persuaded, at least not in my family. “It’s a matter of context,” I said. “Ordinary powers in one world are superpowers in another. Take Superman.”

But Reg refused to take Superman. “Batman is as far as I’ll go,” he said. “I can go no farther.” Under that sexy cap, he had the brains of a bivalve and I was glad not to be the one sleeping with him.

Six

IN FACT, I’D never read Burroughs; it wasn’t a book my parents would have wanted in the house. All I knew about Tarzan was whatever was in the tap water. When Reg began to lecture me on the racism of the books, I didn’t know if the books were racist, which wouldn’t be Tarzan’s fault, or if Tarzan himself was racist, which would be more problematic. But I didn’t think I could win the argument by admitting ignorance. This left as my only option a quick God, look at the time withdrawal.

I walked home alone through the dark grid of downtown streets. A long train thundered past on my right, setting off the lights and bells of the barrier arms. There was a cold wind flipping the leaves on the trees, and outside Woodstock’s Pizza, a loose scrum of men I crossed the street to avoid. One of them shouted an invitation to me, but it was uninviting.

Todd was still up and he hadn’t read Burroughs, either, but there was a manga version—New Jungle King Tar-chan—and he was all over that. Tar-chan had superpowers. Most definitely. Todd tried to describe the series to me (which seemed to be a sprightly mix of cooking and pornography) and offered to bring me some issues next time he went home, but it wasn’t clear I wouldn’t have to be able to read Japanese.

I couldn’t get him focused on the point now—that Reg was an asshole—because he was so busy making his own: that Masaya Tokuhiro was a genius. Anyway, it was becoming less clear to me that Reg had been so egregiously out of line. And why had I been jabbering away about Tarzan in the first place? That was indiscreet. I must have been very drunk.

• • •

A NIGHT OR TWO LATER, I finally treed Ezra. He had my suitcase, but I was still being punished; it wasn’t convenient just then to turn it over. “You’re too busy?” I asked incredulously. How many floors did he think this apartment building had?

“Correctamundo,” he told me. “That you don’t think so just shows how little you know.”

Two more days passed before he unlocked the broom closet—(there’s shit in there that could seriously fuck up the wells. You could poison the whole town if you wanted, Ezra had told me. It was his job to keep that shit out of the hands of the sort of terrorists who lived on the third floor)—and pulled the suitcase out. It was

hard-shelled and powder-blue. “Oh, yeah,” Ezra said. “I forgot. This guy came by yesterday, said he was your

brother Travers. He wanted to wait for you, but I told him he couldn’t even imagine the hissy fit you’d throw if I let some friend or family member stay in your place when you weren’t there.”

I was torn between my disbelief that the visitor had really been my brother, a happy amazement that he’d come for me at last, and a steaming disappointment that Ezra had sent him off, probably never to return. These were complicated things to be feeling simultaneously. My heart flopped in my chest like a hooked fish.

Although my parents continued to get the occasional postcard, the last word I’d personally had from my brother came when I graduated high school. It’s a big world, he’d written on the back of a picture of Angkor Wat. Get big. The postmark was London, which meant he could have been anywhere but there. The fact that my brother’s name was not Travers was the most persuasive detail in Ezra’s account. My brother would never have used his real name.

“Did he say he’d come back?” I asked. “Maybe. Maybe he said in a couple of days.” “A couple like two days or a couple like a few days? Did he say a couple or did

he say a few?” But Ezra had had enough. Ezra believed in dispensing information only on a

need-to-know basis. He sucked on his teeth and said he couldn’t remember for sure. He’d been busy. He had an apartment building to run.

When we were kids, my brother was my favorite person in the whole world. He could be, and often was, awful, but there were other times. He’d spent hours teaching me to play catch and also cards. Casino and I doubt it, gin rummy, go fish, hearts, and spades. He was a good poker player, but under his tutelage, I was better, if only because I was so little no one expected me to be. We made some serious book off his friends. They paid him in cash, but I took my winnings in the more universal currency of Garbage Pail Kids cards. I used to have hundreds of those. Buggy Betty, the little green-fly girl, was my favorite. She had such a nice smile.

One day, Steven Claymore threw a snowball at me with a rock inside, because I’d said he was ineluctable, which he didn’t like the sound of but proved true. I came home with a spongy lump on my forehead and some gravel in my knee. The next day my brother showed up at school where he held Steven’s arm behind his back until Steven apologized and then my brother took me to Dairy Queen and bought me a chocolate-dipped cone with his own money. There was trouble about this later, both the arm-twisting and the two of us leaving our respective schools without telling anyone, but the family rules of conduct had gotten all vague and convoluted where my brother was concerned and there were no real consequences for either of us.

• • •

SO I’D HAD several reasons for choosing to come to UC Davis. First, it was far enough from home that no one would know anything about me. Second, my mother and father had said okay. We’d visited the campus together

and they’d found the town practically midwestern. They were particularly besotted with the spacious bike lanes.

But third, and really, I’d come because of my brother, and my parents must have known and had their own hopes. Ordinarily, my father kept his wallet nailed shut and all the bike lanes in all the midwestern-type towns in the world wouldn’t have had him forking over a year of out-of-state tuition when there were perfectly good universities right there in Indiana, one of them merely blocks away.

But the FBI had told us that my brother had been in Davis in the spring of ’87, about a year after he took off, and the government can’t be wrong about everything; even a stopped clock, etc. They’d never said anywhere else they thought he’d been, only Davis.

And I just didn’t think I could do it anymore, this business of being my parents’ only child. In my fantasies, my brother would rattle his knuckles on my apartment door and I’d open it, not expecting a thing, thinking maybe it was Ezra coming to borrow Todd’s Game Boy or instituting new protocols for the building regarding hazardous trash. I would recognize him instantly. God, I’ve missed you, my brother would say, pulling me into a hug. Tell me everything that’s happened since I left.

The last time I saw him, I was eleven years old and he hated my guts.

• • •

THE SUITCASE wasn’t mine. That goes without saying.

Seven

THAT STORY I TOLD HARLOW—that story in which I’m sent to my grandparents in Indianapolis—obviously that story isn’t really from the middle of this story. I did tell it to Harlow just when I said, so my telling of it is from the middle, but the happening and the telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true, only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it.

Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

And I’ve reached a point here, now that my brother has arrived, where I don’t see how to go further forward without going back—back to the end of that story, back to when I returned to my family from my grandparents’ house.

Which also happens to be the exact moment when the part I know how to tell ends and the part I’ve never told before begins.

Part Two

. . . a short time perhaps when measured by the calendar, but endlessly long to gallop through, as I have done, at times accompanied by splendid people, advice, applause, and orchestral music, but basically alone . . .

—FRANZ KAFKA, “A Report for an Academy”

One

SO NOW IT’S 1979. Year of the Goat. The Earth Goat. Here are some things you might remember. Margaret Thatcher had just been

elected prime minister. Idi Amin had fled Uganda. Jimmy Carter would soon be facing the Iran hostage crisis. In the meantime, he was the first and last president ever to be attacked by a swamp rabbit. That man could not catch a break.

Here are some things you maybe didn’t notice at the time. The same year Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty, it snowed for half an hour in the Sahara Desert. The Animal Defense League was formed. Up on the Magdalen Islands, eight crew members from the Sea Shepherd sprayed more than a thousand seal pups with a harmless but permanent red dye. This dye was designed to ruin their pelts and save the pups from hunters. The activists were arrested and, in pitch-perfect Orwellian double-speak, charged with violating the Seal Protection Act.

Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” was on the radio, The Dukes of Hazzard on the TV. Breaking Away was in the theaters and Bloomington, Indiana, was ready for its close-up.

The only part of this I was aware of at the time was the Breaking Away part. In 1979, I was five years old, and I had problems of my own. But that’s how excited Bloomington was—even the suffering children could not miss the white-hot heat of Hollywood.

• • •

MY FATHER WOULD surely want me to point out that, at five, I was still in Jean Piaget’s preoperational phase with regard to cognitive thinking and emotional development. He would want you to understand that I am undoubtedly, from my more mature perspective, imposing a logical framework on my understanding of events that didn’t exist at the time. Emotions in the preoperational stage are dichotomous and extreme.

Consider it said. Not that there aren’t times when dichotomous and extreme are exactly what’s

warranted. Let’s simplify matters and just agree that, at this point in my story, my whole family, all of us, young and old, was really really really upset.

The day after my cross-capital trek from trampoline to little blue house, my father appeared. My grandparents had called him to come fetch me, but no one told me that part. I still thought I was being given away, only not to my grandparents,

who’d turned out not to want me. Where next? Who would love me now? I sobbed in as decorous a manner as possible, because my father didn’t like it when I cried and I still had hopes. But no one admired my heroic restraint and my father didn’t even seem to notice my tears. He had obviously washed his hands of me.

I was sent out of the room, where a good deal of hushed and ominous talking happened, and even when my bag was packed and I was in the backseat and the car was moving, I still didn’t know I was being taken home. Which was just as well, because I wasn’t.

As a child, I chose to escape unhappy situations by sleeping through them. I did so now, and when I woke I was in a strange room. In many ways, the strangest things about this room were the bits that weren’t strange. My chest of drawers was by the window. The bed I was in was my bed, the quilt over me was my quilt— hand-sewn by Grandma Fredericka back when she’d loved me, appliquéd with sunflowers that stretched from the foot to the pillow. But the drawers were all empty and, under that quilt, the mattress was bare to the buttons.

There was a fort made of boxes by the window, one of them a carry-all for beer cans, and through the handholds I could see the cover of my own Where the Wild Things Are, with its egg-shaped stain of smeared Hershey’s Kiss. I climbed onto a box to look outside and found no apple tree, no barn, no dusty fields. Instead some stranger’s backyard, with a barbecue, a rusted swing-set, and a well-kept vegetable garden—tomatoes reddening, pea pods popping—swam mistily behind the double- paned glass. In the farmhouse where I lived such vegetables would have been picked, eaten, or thrown long before they’d ripened on the vine.

The farmhouse where I lived grumbled and whistled and shrieked; there was always someone pounding on the piano or running the washing machine or jumping on the beds or tub-thumping the pans or shouting for everyone to be quiet because they were trying to talk on the phone. This house lay in an oneiric hush.

I’m not sure what I thought then, perhaps that I was to live here alone now. Whatever it was, it sent me sobbing back to bed and back to sleep. In spite of my best hopes, I woke up in the same place in the same tears, calling despairingly for my mother.

My father came instead, picking me up and holding me. “Shh,” he said. “Your mother is sleeping in the next room. Were you scared? I’m sorry. This is our new house. This is your new room.”

“Everyone lives here with me?” I asked, still too cautious to be hopeful, and I felt my father flinch as if I’d pinched him.

He put me down. “See how much bigger your new room is? I think we’re going to be very happy here. You should look around, kiddo. Explore. Just not into your mother’s room,” pointing out their door, which was right next to mine.

The floors of our old house were a bruised wood or linoleum, anything that could be cleaned in a hurry with a mop and a bucket of water. This house had a

scratchy silver carpet extending from my new bedroom into the hall with no break. I wouldn’t be skating in my socks here. I wouldn’t be riding my scooter on this rug.

The new upstairs consisted of my bedroom, my parents’ bedroom, my father’s study with its blackboard already propped against the wall, and one bathroom with a blue tub and no shower curtain. My new room may have been bigger than the bright little nook I’d had in the farmhouse, but I could see that the house itself was smaller. Or maybe I couldn’t see that when I was five. Ask Piaget.

Downstairs was a living room with a tiled fireplace, the kitchen with our breakfast table in it, another bathroom, smaller, with a shower but no tub, and next to that my brother’s room, only my brother’s bed had no blankets, because, I found out later that night, he’d refused to set foot in the new house, and had gone instead to stay with his best friend Marco for as long as they’d have him.

And that right there is the difference between me and my brother—I was always afraid of being made to leave and he was always leaving.

All the rooms had boxes in them and almost none of the boxes had been opened. There was nothing on the walls, nothing on the shelves. A few dishes in the kitchen, but no sign of our blender, toaster, bread-maker.

As I made my way for the first time through the house I would live in until I was eighteen, I began to suspect what had happened. I could find no place where the graduate students would work. I looked and looked, back upstairs and then down again, but could find only three bedrooms. One of them was my brother’s. One of them was our mother and father’s. One of them was mine. I hadn’t been given away.

Someone else had.

• • •

AS PART OF leaving Bloomington for college and my brand-new start, I’d made a careful decision to never ever tell anyone about my sister, Fern. Back in those college days, I never spoke of her and seldom thought of her. If anyone asked about my family, I admitted to two parents, still married, and one brother, older, who traveled a lot. Not mentioning Fern was first a decision, and later a habit, hard and painful even now to break. Even now, way off in 2012, I can’t abide someone else bringing her up. I have to ease into it. I have to choose my moment.

Though I was only five when she disappeared from my life, I do remember her. I remember her sharply—her smell and touch, scattered images of her face, her ears, her chin, her eyes. Her arms, her feet, her fingers. But I don’t remember her fully, not the way Lowell does.

Lowell is my brother’s real name. Our parents met at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona at a high school summer science camp. “I’d come to see the heavens,” our father always said. “But the stars were in her eyes,” a line that used to please and embarrass me in equal measure. Young geeks in love.

I would think better of myself now if, like Lowell, I’d been angry about Fern’s disappearance, but it seemed too dangerous just then to be mad at our parents and I was frightened instead. There was also a part of me relieved, and powerfully, shamefully so, to be the one kept and not the one given away. Whenever I remember this, I try to also remember that I was only five years old. I’d like to be fair here, even to myself. It would be nice to get all the way to forgiveness, though I haven’t managed it yet and don’t know that I ever will. Or ever should.

Those weeks I spent with our grandparents in Indianapolis still serve as the most extreme demarcation in my life, my personal Rubicon. Before, I had a sister. After, none.

Before, the more I talked the happier our parents seemed. After, they joined the rest of the world in asking me to be quiet. I finally became so. (But not for quite some time and not because I was asked.)

Before, my brother was part of the family. After, he was just killing time until he could be shed of us.

Before, many things that happened are missing in my memory or else stripped down, condensed to their essentials like fairy tales. Once upon a time there was a house with an apple tree in the yard and a creek and a moon-eyed cat. After, for a period of several months, I seem to remember a lot and much of it with a suspiciously well-lit clarity. Take any memory from my early childhood and I can tell you instantly whether it happened while we still had Fern or after she’d gone. I can do this because I remember which me was there. The me with Fern or the me without? Two entirely different people.

Still, there are reasons for suspicion. I was only five. How is it possible that I remember, as I seem to, a handful of conversations word for word, the exact song on the radio, the particular clothes I was wearing? Why are there so many scenes I remember from impossible vantage points, so many things I picture from above, as if I’d climbed the curtains and was looking down on my family? And why is there one thing that I remember distinctly, living color and surround-sound, but believe with all my heart never occurred? Bookmark that thought. We’ll come back to it later.

I remember often being told to be quiet, but I seldom remember what I was saying at the time. As I recount things, this lacuna may give you the erroneous impression that I already wasn’t talking much. Please assume that I am talking continuously in all the scenes that follow until I tell you that I’m not.

Our parents, on the other hand, had shut their mouths and the rest of my childhood took place in that odd silence. They never reminisced about the time they had to drive halfway back to Indianapolis because I’d left Dexter Poindexter, my terry- cloth penguin (threadbare, ravaged by love—as who amongst us is not) in a gas station restroom, although they often talk about the time our friend Marjorie Weaver left her mother-in-law in the exact same place. Better story, I grant you.

I know from Grandma Fredericka, and not our parents, that I once went missing for long enough that the police were called, and it turned out I’d tailed Santa Claus out of a department store and into a tobacco shop where he was buying cigars, and he gave me the ring off one, so the police being called was just an added bonus on what must have already been a pretty good day.

I know from Grandma Donna, and not our parents, that I once buried a dime in some cake batter as a surprise, and one of the graduate students chipped her tooth on it, and everybody thought Fern had done it, until I spoke up, so brave and honest. Not to mention generous, since the dime had been my own.

So who knows what revelries, what romps my memories have taken with so little corroboration to restrain them? If you don’t count the taunting at school, then the only people who talked much about Fern were my grandma Donna, until Mom made her stop, and my brother Lowell, until he left us. Each had too obvious an agenda to be reliable: Grandma Donna wishing to shield our mother from any share of blame, Lowell stropping his stories into knives.

Once upon a time, there was a family with two daughters, and a mother and father who’d promised to love them both exactly the same.

Two

IN MOST FAMILIES, there is a favorite child. Parents deny it and maybe they truly don’t see it, but it’s obvious to the children. Unfairness bothers children greatly. It’s hard to always come in second.

It’s also hard to be the favorite. Earned or unearned, the favorite is a burdensome thing to be.

I was our mother’s favorite child. Lowell was our father’s. I loved our father as much as our mother, but I loved Lowell best of all. Fern loved our mother best. Lowell loved Fern more than he loved me.

When I lay out these facts, they seem essentially benign. Something here for everyone. More than enough to go around.

Three

THE MONTHS AFTER my return from Indianapolis were the most harrowing time of my life. Our mother was vaporous. She emerged from her bedroom only at night and always in her nightgown, a sheath of flowered flannel with a disturbingly childlike bow at the neck. She’d stopped combing her hair so that it twisted about her face, chaotic as smoke, and her eyes were so sunken they looked bruised. She would start to speak, her hands lifting, and then be suddenly silenced by the sight of that motion, her own hands in the air.

She hardly ate and did no cooking. Dad picked up the slack, but halfheartedly. He would come home from campus and look in the cupboards. I remember dinners of peanut butter on saltines, cans of tomato soup for starters and cans of clam chowder for mains. Every meal a passive-aggressive cri de coeur.

Grandma Donna began coming over every day to watch me, but, in Bloomington in 1979, watching me didn’t mean I could never be out of her sight. I was allowed the roam of the neighborhood, just as I’d been allowed the roam of the farmhouse property, only now it was the street I had to be warned about instead of the creek. Crossing the street without a grown-up was forbidden, but I could usually scare up one of those if needed. I met most of the neighbors by holding their hands and looking both ways. I remember Mr. Bechler asking if I was maybe in training for the talking Olympics. I was gold-medal material, he said.

There weren’t many children on the block and none anywhere close to my age. The Andersens had a baby girl named Eloise. A ten-year-old boy named Wayne lived two houses down; a high-school boy lived on the corner across the street. There was no one I could reasonably be expected to play with.

Instead I got acquainted with the neighborhood animals. My favorite was the Bechlers’ dog Snippet, a liver-and-white spaniel with a pink nose. The Bechlers kept her tethered in their yard, because, given half a chance, she ran off and she’d already been hit by a car at least once that they knew of. I spent hours with Snippet, her head on my leg or my foot, her ears cocked, listening to every word I said. When the Bechlers realized this, they put a chair out for me, a little chair that they’d gotten back when the grandchildren were young. It had a cushion on the seat shaped like a heart.

I also spent a lot of time alone, or alone with Mary (remember Mary? Imaginary friend no one liked?), which was not something I’d ever done much of before. I didn’t care for it.

Grandma Donna would change the beds and do the laundry, but only if our father wasn’t there; she couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. If Lowell was angry that Fern had been sent out of our lives, Grandma Donna was angry that she’d ever been let in. I’m sure she’d deny this, say that she’d always loved Fern, but even at five I knew better. I’d heard too often about my first birthday, how Fern had dumped out Grandma Donna’s handbag and eaten the last photograph ever taken of Grandpa Dan, a Polaroid that Grandma Donna kept in her purse to look at whenever she was feeling low.

If there’d been a second photo, I probably would have eaten one too, Lowell said, as I followed Fern’s lead in most things. And Lowell also said that Dad had found it very telling that Grandma left her bag, filled as it apparently was with poisonous objects, where Fern could reach it, but I could not.

Our father had planned to name Fern and me after our grandmothers, one of us Donna and one of us Fredericka, a coin toss to see which was which, but both grandmothers insisted that I be the one with their name. Dad, who’d meant it as something nice, maybe even compensatory, was annoyed when it turned into an argument. He’d probably expected this of Grandma Donna, but not of his own mother. A hole was about to open, a rupture in the space-time continuum of the Cooke family, until our mother stepped in to plug it, saying that I would be Rosemary and Fern would be Fern, because she was the mother and that was the way she wanted it. I learned of the earlier plan only because Grandma Donna once referenced it in an argument as further evidence of Dad’s peculiarity.

Personally, I’m glad it came to nothing. I suppose it’s because she is my grandmother that Donna seems like a grandmother’s name. And Fredericka? A Rose by any other, if you say so. But I can’t believe that being called Fredericka my whole life wouldn’t have taken a toll. I can’t believe it wouldn’t have mind-bent me like a spoon. (Not that I haven’t been mind-bent.)

So Grandma Donna would clean the kitchen, maybe unpack some dishes or some of my clothes if she felt energetic, since it was clear by now that no one else planned to open those boxes. She’d make me lunch and cook something medicinal, like a soft-boiled egg, take it to the bedroom, put our mother in a chair so she could change the bedsheets, demand the nightgown for the wash, beg Mom to eat. Sometimes Grandma Donna was all sympathy, delivering in salubrious doses her preferred conversation—details on the health and marital problems of people she’d never met. She was especially fond of dead people; Grandma Donna was a great reader of historical biographies and had a particular soft spot for the Tudors, where marital discord was an extreme sport.

When that didn’t work, she’d turn brisk. It was a sin to waste such a beautiful day, she’d say even when it wasn’t such a beautiful day, or, your children need you. Or that I should have started nursery school a year ago and already be in kindergarten. (I didn’t, because Fern couldn’t go. Or Mary, either.) And that

someone had to put the brakes on Lowell, he was only eleven, for God’s sake, and shouldn’t be allowed to rule the house. She would have liked to see one of her children running the emotional blackmail game Lowell got away with; he should have a close encounter with his father’s belt.

She drove once to Marco’s, intending to force Lowell home, but she came back defeated, face like a prune. The boys had been out on their bikes, no one knew where, and Marco’s mother said Dad had thanked her for keeping Lowell and she’d send him home when it was our father who asked. Marco’s mother was letting the boys run wild, Grandma Donna told Mom. Plus she was a very rude woman.

Grandma always left before our father returned from work, sometimes telling me not to say she’d been there, because conspiracy is folded into her DNA like egg whites into angel food cakes. But of course, Dad knew. Would he have left me there otherwise? Later he’d bring whatever she’d cooked back down from the bedroom and shovel it into the disposal. He’d get himself a beer and then another and then start on the whiskey. He’d put peanut butter on a cracker for me.

At night, from my bedroom, I’d hear arguing—Mom’s voice too soft to be heard (or maybe she wasn’t speaking at all), Dad’s laced (I know now) with liquor. You all blame me, Dad said. My own goddamn children, my own goddamn wife. What choice did we have? I’m as upset as anyone.

And finally, Lowell, home at last, climbing the stairs in the dark without anyone hearing him and coming into my room, waking me up. “If only,” he said—eleven years old to my five, socking me high on the arm so the bruise would be hidden by my T-shirt sleeve—“if only you had just, for once, kept your goddamn mouth shut.”

I have never in my life, before or after, been so happy to see someone.

Four

I DEVELOPED A PHOBIA about the closed door to our parents’ bedroom. Late at night, I could hear it, pulsing in its frame like a heart. Whenever he let me, I huddled with Lowell in his room, as far away from that door as I could get and still be home.

Sometimes Lowell felt sorry for me. Sometimes it seemed that he, too, was frightened. We each carried the weight of Fern’s disappearance and our mother’s collapse, and occasionally, for short periods, we carried it together. Lowell would read me a book or let me jabber away while he played complicated games of solitaire that required two or three decks of cards and were nearly impossible to win. If just anyone could win a game, then Lowell couldn’t be bothered.

Sometimes, if he wasn’t completely awake, he’d let me climb into his bed after dark to get away from our father’s shouting, though other times he’d remember to be mad, send me silently sobbing back upstairs. Bed-hopping was an established custom in the house—Fern and I had rarely ended the night in the bed where we’d started. Our parents felt that it was natural and mammalian not to want to sleep alone, and though they would have preferred we stay in our own beds, because we kicked and thrashed, they’d never insisted on it.

While Lowell slept, I’d calm myself by fiddling with his hair. I liked to catch a bit between two scissored fingers and run my thumb over the scratchy ends. Lowell had Luke Skywalker’s haircut, but the color was pure Han Solo. Of course, I hadn’t seen the movie back then. Too young for it and besides Fern couldn’t have gone. But we had the trading cards. I knew about the hair.

And Lowell, who’d seen it several times, had acted it out for us. I liked Luke best. I’m Luke Skywalker. I’m here to rescue you. But Fern, who was more sophisticated in her tastes, preferred Han. Laugh it up, fuzzball.

Unfairness bothers children greatly. When I did finally get to see Star Wars, the whole movie was ruined for me by the fact that Luke and Han got a medal at the end and Chewbacca didn’t. Lowell had changed that part in his retelling, so it came as quite a shock.

• • •

LOWELL’S ROOM SMELLED of damp cedar from the cage where three rats, washouts from our father’s lab, would chirp and creak in their spinning wheel all night long. In retrospect, there was something incomprehensibly strange about the way any of the laboratory rats could transform from data point to pet, with names and

privileges and vet appointments, in a single afternoon. What a Cinderella story! But I didn’t notice that until later. Back then, Herman Muenster, Charlie Cheddar, and little hooded Templeton represented nothing to me but were only themselves.

Lowell smelled too, not bad, but sharp to my senses, because his smell had changed. At the time, I thought the difference was that he was so mad; I thought that it was anger I was smelling, but of course he was also growing up, losing the sweetness of childhood, beginning to sour. He sweated in his sleep.

Most mornings, he left before anyone else was awake. We didn’t know this right off, but he was having breakfast with the Byards. The Byards were a childless couple, devout Christians, who now lived across the street from us. Mr. Byard’s eyesight was bad and Lowell read the sports page aloud to him while Mrs. Byard fried up bacon and eggs. According to Mrs. Byard, Lowell was sweet as a peekin pie and always welcome.

She’d known a bit about the situation at our house. Most of Bloomington did, though no one really understood it. “I’m praying for you all,” she told me, appearing at our door one morning, holding a tin of chocolate chip cookies and backlit like an angel by a soft autumn sun. “You just remember you were the one made in God’s image. You hold tight to that and it’ll carry you through the storm.”

• • •

MY LORD, ANYONE would think Fern had died, Grandma Donna said. Which is maybe what you, too, are thinking, that at five, of course, I wouldn’t have figured that out without being told, but anyone older would have.

I can only assume that our parents explained to me about Fern’s disappearance, possibly many times, and I’ve repressed it. It simply isn’t plausible to think they hardly said a word. But this I remember clearly—waking up each morning and going to sleep each night in a state of inchoate dread. The fact that I didn’t know what I was dreading made it no less dreadful. Arguably, more so.

Anyway, Fern was not dead. Still isn’t. Lowell started seeing a counselor and this became a frequent topic in our

father’s nightly monologues. Lowell’s counselor would suggest something—a family powwow, a session with the parents alone, some exercises in visualization or hypnosis—and our father would explode. Psychoanalysis was completely bogus, he would say, good only for literary theory. Maybe it was useful, when plotting books, to imagine that someone’s life could be shaped by a single early trauma, maybe even one inaccessible in memory. But where were the blind studies, the control groups? Where was the reproducible data?

According to our father, the nomenclature of psychoanalysis had taken on a scientific patina only when it was translated into English Latinates. In the original German, it was refreshingly modest. (You must picture him shouting this. In the

house I grew up in, it was perfectly ordinary for a tantrum to include words like Latinates, nomenclature, and patina.)

Yet the counselor had been our father’s idea. Like so many other parents of troubled children, he’d felt the need to do something, and like so many other parents of troubled children, a counselor was the only something he could think of to do.

For me, he engaged a babysitter, Melissa, a college student with owlish glasses and blue streaks zigzagging, like lightning, through her hair. The first week, I went to bed the minute she arrived and got up again only when she left. I was, let’s agree, a babysitter’s dream.

It was a learned behavior. Once, when I was four, as a stratagem for shutting me up, a babysitter named Rachel had spooned several kernels of popcorn onto my tongue and told me they would pop if I only kept my mouth closed long enough. This seemed like an entirely desirable goal and I lasted as long as I could and took the failure hard until Lowell told me it never would have happened. That put me off babysitters entirely.

As I got used to Melissa, I decided I liked her. This was a bit of luck. I’d concocted a plan that involved fixing my family with the only valuable thing I had to offer—my talking—and I couldn’t do it alone. I tried to explain to Melissa the games I was supposed to be playing for my father, the tests I was supposed to be taking, but she couldn’t or wouldn’t get it.

We settled on a compromise. Every time she came, she would teach me a new word from the dictionary. The only rule was that it had to be a word so lonely, so dusty with neglect that she, too, hadn’t known it beforehand. I didn’t care what the words meant; that saved a lot of time and bother. In return, I had to not talk to her for an hour. She would set the oven timer to make sure, which generally resulted in me asking her every few minutes when the hour would be up. The things I had to say would collect in my chest until they were so crowded together I was ready to burst.

“How was your day, Rosie?” Dad would ask when he came home from work and I’d tell him it was ebullient. Or limpid. Or dodecahedron. “That’s good to hear,” he’d say.

None of this was meant to be informative. Obviously, it didn’t even need to cohere. Catachresis? Bonus points.

I was merely trying to show him that I, at least, was continuing with our work. Whenever he was so disposed, he would find me, sleeves rolled up and hard at it.

• • •

ONE AFTERNOON, Grandma Donna came and forced our mother into an outing— coffee and a shopping trip. Summer had gone and autumn was headed toward its

sell-by date. Melissa was supposed to be watching me but was watching television instead.

Melissa was now an established part of the household and watched TV every afternoon, although daytime TV had never been allowed before, children being expected to make their fun up from scratch.

Melissa had gotten hooked on a soap. It wasn’t the same soap as my grandparents’—there was no Karen, no Larry. Melissa’s soap was all about Ben and Amanda, Lucille and Alan. And if my grandparents’ soap had been regrettably sexed up, this one was an orgy. Melissa let me watch it with her because I wouldn’t understand a thing; because I didn’t understand a thing, I rarely wished to watch. We disagreed as to how quiet I should be while the show was on.

Melissa was beginning to slip the tether. She’d just taught me a word and then made me promise not to ever say it to our parents. The word was ithyphallic. Years later, if ithyphallic had come up on the SATs, I’d have been all over it, but no such luck. It’s not really a very useful word.

And just ask Lowell if I’m the sort of person who keeps her promises. The minute I saw our father, I told him that my day had been ithyphallic, instead of the official day’s word, which was psychomanteum, but whether that figured in the impending decision to let Melissa go, I cannot say.

Anyway, before I said ithyphallic to our father, I said it to Lowell. Lowell was supposed to be at school, but had come home early, sneaking in through the back door, motioning at me to follow him outside, which I did, though not as quietly as he’d wanted. Lowell was uninterested in my new words, waved them past with an impatient flick of his hand.

One of the neighbors was out front, the boy from the white house on the corner, the big boy from the high school. Russell Tupman, leaning against Mom’s blue Datsun, lighting a weary cigarette and sucking it in. I’d never thought to see Russell Tupman in my own driveway. I was charmed. I was flattered. I fell instantly in love.

Lowell held up his hand and shook it. The car keys rang in his fist. “You sure about her?” Russell asked, indicating me with his eyes. “I hear she’s a talker.”

“We need her,” Lowell said. So I was told to get in the back and Lowell fastened my seat belt, which he was pretty conscientious about doing even when Russell wasn’t the one driving. I learned later that Russell didn’t technically have his license yet. He’d taken driver’s ed and everything; he knew how to drive. I don’t remember a moment’s anxiety about his driving, no matter how much fuss it caused after.

Lowell said that we were going on a secret adventure, a spy caper, and I was allowed to bring Mary, because Mary knew how to keep her mouth shut and was an example to us all. I was pretty happy about the whole thing, pretty honored to be going off with the big boys. Looking back, I can see that Lowell was only eleven

years old, while Russell was sixteen, and that this must have been an enormous gap, but at the time I thought of them as equally glamorous.

I was also, in those days, desperate to get out of the house. I’d had a dream in which I heard someone knocking on our parents’ door from the inside. It started with a jaunty rhythm, like the sound of tap shoes, only each tap was louder than the last until they were so loud I thought my eardrums would burst. I woke up terrified. The sheets beneath me were soaked and I had to get Lowell to change my pajamas, strip the bed.

Russell switched from our mother’s radio station to WIUS, the student one, and some song I didn’t know came on, but not knowing the song didn’t stop me singing along in the backseat until Russell finally told me I was hell on his nerves.

Hell. I repeated that several times, but under my breath so Russell wouldn’t have to deal with it. I liked the way it made my tongue curl.

I couldn’t see out the front window, only the back of Russell’s head bopping in time against the headrest. I tried to think of how to make him love me. Something inside me knew that big words weren’t the way to Russell’s heart, but I couldn’t think what else I could offer.

More songs on the radio and an ad for an original radio mystery play to be aired on Halloween. Then a caller who wanted to talk about a professor who was making his entire class read Dracula, even the Christians who thought it imperiled their souls. (Let’s just pause here for a moment to imagine how a person who felt imposed on by vampires back in 1979 feels today. And then, right back to my story.)

More callers. Most people liked Dracula though some didn’t, but nobody liked professors who thought they could tell you what to read.

The car began to bounce and I heard gravel under the tires. We came to a stop. I recognized the bright crown of the tulip tree by our old farmhouse drive, its golden leaves floating in a white-blue sky. Lowell got out to open the gate, got back in.

I hadn’t known this was where we were coming. My good mood turned anxious. Though no one had said so, as no one was saying much of anything, I’d assumed Fern had been left behind in the old farmhouse to live with the graduate students. I’d pictured her life going on much as before, maybe even with less disruption than I’d had—missing Mom, for sure (and weren’t we all?), but with Dad still stopping by to oversee the drills, the games with colored poker chips and raisins. When, in a couple of months, she’d turn six, I’d assumed like every other year she’d have a birthday cake with the icing roses she and I so loved. (I don’t know for a fact that she didn’t.)

So my thinking was that it was sad that she never got to see our mother, and I wouldn’t have wanted to be her, but it wasn’t that sad. The graduate students were nice and they never shouted, because they weren’t allowed to and they loved Fern. They loved Fern more than they loved me. Sometimes I had to wrap myself around

their legs and refuse to let loose, just to get their attention. Now we were bumping up the driveway. Fern was always quick to hear a car

approach; she’d already be at the window. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see her, but I knew for certain that she wouldn’t want to see me. “Mary doesn’t want to see Fern,” I told Lowell.

Lowell twisted around, pinned me with a narrow-eyed look. “Oh my God! You didn’t think Fern was still here, did you? Fuck, Rosie.”

I’d never heard Lowell say fuck before; in retrospect, I’m sure he was trying to impress Russell. Fuck was another word that felt good in my mouth. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Quack, quack, quack. “Don’t be such a baby,” Lowell said. “There’s nobody here at all. The house is empty.”

“I’m not a baby.” This was reflexive; I was too relieved to be insulted. No angry reunion, then. The familiar treetops were overhead like golden clouds; beneath us, the familiar crunching of the gravel under the tires. I remembered how I used to find pieces of quartz in the driveway here, clear and crystalline. Like four-leaf clovers, this happened just often enough to keep me looking. There was no gravel at the new house and, so, no point.

The car stopped. We got out and walked around the side to the kitchen door, but it was locked, all the doors were locked, Lowell told Russell, and the windows, even the upstairs windows, had been, in our last year there, fitted with bars, the route from the apple tree to the bedrooms cut off before I’d ever mastered it.

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.

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.

• • •

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 now 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.

She kicks now at the snowball with her feet. It’s not clear this is meant to help, but it does. Beside her, I push with my hands. With less effort than I expected, it rocks a little and breaks free.

I’m able to roll it now so that it gathers girth. Fern is bouncing behind me like a cork on a wave, sometimes on top of the snow crust and sometimes falling through. She leaves a churned wake, the trail of the Tasmanian devil. The gloves pinned to her cuffs flop over the snow like leather fish.

Lowell turns, shading his eyes, because the sun is one bright dazzle on the ice- white world. “How did you do that?” he shouts back. He’s grinning at me through the porthole of his jacket hood.

“I tried really hard,” I tell him. “Fern helped.” “Girl power!” Lowell shakes his head. “Awesome thing.” “Power of love,” says my father. “Power of love.” And then the graduate students arrive. We’re going sledding! No one tells me to

calm down, because Fern won’t be calming down. My favorite grad student is named Matt. Matt’s from Birmingham, England, and

calls me luv, me and Fern both. I wrap my arms around his legs, jump up and down on the toes of his boots. Fern hurls herself at Caroline, knocking her into the snow. When Fern stands up, she is powdered head to toe like a doughnut. Both of us are demanding in our own ways to be picked up and swung. We are so excited that, in the strangely illuminating phrase my mother favors, we’re completely beside ourselves.

• • •

I ALWAYS USED to believe I knew what Fern was thinking. No matter how bizarre her behavior, no matter how she might deck herself out and bob about the house like a Macy’s parade balloon, I could be counted on to render it into plain English. Fern wants to go outside. Fern wants to watch Sesame Street. Fern thinks you are a doodoo-head. Some of this was convenient projection, but you’ll never convince me of the rest. Why wouldn’t I have understood her? No one knew Fern better than I; I knew every twitch. I was attuned to her.

“Why does she have to learn our language?” Lowell asked my father once. “Why can’t we learn hers?” Dad’s answer was that we still didn’t know for sure that Fern was even capable of learning a language, but we did know for sure that she didn’t have one of her own. Dad said that Lowell was confusing language with communication, when they were two very different things. Language is more than just words, he said. Language is also the order of words and the way one word inflects another.

Only he said this at much greater length, longer than either Lowell or I, or certainly Fern, wished to sit still for. It all had something to do with Umwelt, a word I very much liked the sound of and repeated many times like a drumbeat until I was made to stop. I didn’t care so much what Umwelt meant back then, but it turns out to refer to the specific way each particular organism experiences the world.

I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied.

When the Kelloggs first raised a child alongside a chimpanzee, back in the 1930s, the stated purpose was to compare and contrast developing abilities, linguistic and otherwise. This was the stated purpose of our study as well. Color me suspicious.

The Kelloggs believed that their sensationalistic experiment had sunk their

reputations, that they were never again taken seriously as scientists. And if I know this now, our ambitious father surely knew it then. So what was the goal of the Fern/Rosemary Rosemary/Fern study before it came to its premature and calamitous end? I’m still not sure.

But it seems to me that much of the interesting data is mine. As I grew, my language development not only contrasted with Fern’s but also introduced a perfectly predictable x-factor that undermined all such comparisons.

Ever since Day and Davis published their findings in the 1930s, there’s been a perception that twinness affects language acquisition. New and better studies took place in the 1970s, but I’m not sure our parents were looking in their direction yet. Nor would such studies have been completely relevant to a situation such as ours, where the twins had such disparate potentials.

Though Fern and I were sometimes separated while the grad students observed us, we spent most of our time together. As I developed the habit of speaking for her, she seemed to develop the expectation that I would. By the time I turned three, I was already serving as Fern’s translator in a way that surely retarded her progress.

So I think that, instead of studying how well Fern could communicate, our father might have been studying how well Fern could communicate with me. That there was a vice versa here, a tabloid-ready vice versa was unavoidable but unacknowledged. Here is the question our father claimed to be asking: can Fern learn to speak to humans? Here is the question our father refused to admit he was asking: can Rosemary learn to speak to chimpanzees?

One of the early grad students, Timothy, had argued that in our preverbal period, Fern and I had an idioglossia, a secret language of grunts and gestures. This was never written up, so I learned of it only recently. Dad had found his evidence thin, unscientific, and, frankly, whimsical.

• • •

SOMETIMES OOFIE, chimp star of the American Tourister luggage commercials, came on the TV. Fern paid no attention to him. But once, we caught a couple of reruns of Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, with the very handsome Tonga playing Link. These talking apes, in their suits and ties, were more interesting to Fern. She watched intently, puckering and unpuckering her prehensile mouth, making her sign for hat. “Fern wants a hat like Lancelot Link,” I told our mother. There was no need to make the request for myself. If Fern got a hat, I would get a hat.

Neither of us got a hat. A short time later, our father arranged for a young chimp named Boris to visit the

farmhouse for an afternoon. The sign Fern made for Boris was the same sign she used for the brown recluse spiders we sometimes found in the barn, which my mother translated as crawling poo, and Lowell as crawling shit (which seemed

more sensible to me. Poo was a joke word. Shit was serious and Fern was being serious). Boris, Fern said, was dirty crawling shit. And then, deadly crawling shit.

Surrounded as she was by humans, Fern believed she was human. This wasn’t unexpected. Most home-raised chimps, when asked to sort photographs into piles of chimps and humans, make only the one mistake of putting their own picture into the human pile. This is exactly what Fern did.

What seems not to have been anticipated was my own confusion. Dad didn’t know then what we think we know now, that the neural system of a young brain develops partly by mirroring the brains around it. As much time as Fern and I spent together, that mirror went both ways.

Many years later, I found on the Web a paper our father had written about me. Subsequent studies with larger sample sizes have confirmed what Dad was among the first to suggest: that, contrary to our metaphors, humans are much more imitative than the other apes.

For example: if chimps watch a demonstration on how to get food out of a puzzle box, they, in their turn, skip any unnecessary steps, go straight to the treat. Human children overimitate, reproducing each step regardless of its necessity. There is some reason why, now that it’s our behavior, being slavishly imitative is superior to being thoughtful and efficient, but I forget exactly what that reason is. You’ll have to read the papers.

The winter after Fern vanished, and half a term late because of the tumult and turmoil at home, I started kindergarten, where my classmates called me the monkey girl or sometimes simply the monkey. There was something off about me, maybe in my gestures, my facial expressions or eye movements, and certainly in the things I said. Years later, my father made a passing reference to the uncanny-valley response—the human aversion to things that look almost but not quite like people. The uncanny-valley response is a hard thing to define, much less to test for. But if true, it explains why the faces of chimps so unsettle some of us. For the kids in my kindergarten class, I was the unsettling object. Those five- and six-year-olds were not fooled by the counterfeit human.

I could and did quarrel with their word choice—were they so stupid, I asked winningly, that they didn’t know the difference between monkeys and apes? Didn’t they know that humans were apes, too? But the implication that I’d be okay with being called ape girl was all my classmates needed to stick with their original choice. And they refused to believe they were apes themselves. Their parents assured them they weren’t. I was told that a whole Sunday school class had been devoted to rebutting me.

Here are some things my mother worked with me on, prior to sending me off to school:

Standing up straight. Keeping my hands still when I talked.

Not putting my fingers into anyone else’s mouth or hair. Not biting anyone, ever. No matter how much the situation warranted it. Muting my excitement over tasty food, and not staring fixedly at someone else’s

cupcake. Not jumping on the tables and desks when I was playing. I remembered these things, most of the time. But where you succeed will never

matter so much as where you fail.

• • •

HERE ARE SOME THINGS I learned only once I got to kindergarten: How to read children’s faces, which are less guarded than grown-ups’, though

not as expressive as chimps’. That school was about being quiet (and you’d think Mom might have added that

to the things she’d warned me about; that rule I’d been given—that rule where you say only one for every three things you want to say—it wasn’t nearly sufficient to the cause).

That big words do not impress children. And that grown-ups care a lot about what big words actually mean, so it’s best to know that before you use one.

But most of all, I learned that different is different. I could change what I did; I could change what I didn’t do. None of that changed who I fundamentally was, my not-quite-human, my tabloid monkey-girl self.

I hoped that Fern was doing better among her own kind than I among mine. In 2009, a study showed macaque monkeys seemingly evidencing the uncanny-valley response themselves, which makes it probable for chimps.

Of course, none of that was in my thinking back then. For years, I imagined Fern’s life as a Tarzan reversal. Raised among humans and returned now to her own kind, I liked to think of her bringing sign language to the other apes. I liked to think she was maybe solving crimes or something. I liked to think we’d given her superpowers.

Part Three

I did not think things through in such a human way, but under the influence of my surroundings conducted myself as if I had worked things out.

—FRANZ KAFKA, “A Report for an Academy”

One

I THINK IT’S inarguable that Mom, Dad, and Lowell were more shattered by Fern’s departure than I was. I fared better simply by virtue of being too young to quite take it in.

And yet there were ways in which I was the one who carried the damage. For Mom, Dad, and Lowell, Fern had arrived in the middle of the story. They’d gotten to be themselves first, so they had a self to go back to. For me, Fern was the beginning. I was just over a month old when she arrived in my life (and she just shy of three months). Whoever I was before is no one I ever got to know.

I felt her loss in a powerfully physical way. I missed her smell and the sticky wet of her breath on my neck. I missed her fingers scratching through my hair. We sat next to each other, lay across each other, pushed, pulled, stroked, and struck each other a hundred times a day and I suffered the deprivation of this. It was an ache, a hunger on the surface of my skin.

I began to rock in place without knowing I was doing so and had to be told to stop. I developed the habit of pulling out my eyebrows. I bit on my fingers until I bled and Grandma Donna bought me little white Easter gloves and made me wear them, even to bed, for months.

Fern used to wrap her wiry pipe-cleaner arms around my waist from behind, press her face and body into my back, match me step for step when we walked, as if we were a single person. It made the grad students laugh, so we felt witty and appreciated. Sometimes it was encumbering, a monkey on my back, but mostly I felt enlarged, as if what mattered in the end was not what Fern could do or what I could do, but the sum of it—Fern and me together. And me and Fern together, we could do almost anything. This, then, is the me I know—the human half of the fabulous, the fascinating, the phantasmagorical Cooke sisters.

I’ve read that no loss compares to the loss of a twin, that survivors describe themselves as feeling less like singles and more like the crippled remainder of something once whole. Even when the loss occurs in utero, some survivors respond with a lifelong sense of their own incompleteness. Identical twins suffer the most, followed by fraternals. Extend that scale awhile and eventually you’ll get to Fern and me.

Although it had had no immediate impact on the cut of my jibber-jabber—in fac