We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (10 page)

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.

•   •   •

H
ERE 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.

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.

—F
RANZ
K
AFKA,
“A Report for an Academy”

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 fact, it
took many years to truly sink in—finally I came to understand that all of my verbosity
had been valuable only in the context of my sister. When she left the scene, no one
cared anymore about my creative grammars, my compound lexemes, my nimble, gymnastic
conjugations. If I’d ever imagined I’d be more important without her constantly distracting
everyone, I found quite the opposite. The graduate students disappeared from my life
the same moment Fern did. One day, every word I said was data, and carefully recorded
for further study and discussion. The next, I was just a little girl, strange in her
way, but of no scientific interest to anyone.

T
HERE IS AN ADVANTAGE
to sharing a bedroom wall with your parents. You hear things. Hearing things is also
the disadvantage. Sometimes Mom and Dad had sex. Sometimes they talked. Sometimes
they had sex while they talked.

Years passed, but the things our parents talked about at night didn’t change as much
as you might think. Dad worried about his professional standing. Not so long ago he’d
been a young professor on the rise, gathering in grants and graduate students like
eggs at Easter. There were six students in his lab at the end of the Fern years, all
scribbling theses about the study in the old farmhouse. Two of them were able to finish
their work as planned, but four were not—at best, they had to narrow their focus,
jigger something thin and uninteresting from data already collected. The reputation
of the whole lab, of the whole department, suffered.

Our father turned paranoid. Although he himself had published solid and exciting work
during that five-year period, he was now certain that his colleagues disrespected
him. The evidence was everywhere he looked, at every staff meeting, every cocktail
party. It drove him periodically to drink.

Lowell continued to be a problem, mostly Lowell, but also me. Our parents lay beside
each other in their bed and fretted. What was to be done about us? When would Lowell
revert to the sweet, sensitive boy they knew he was inside? When would I manage to
make a friend I didn’t make up?

Lowell’s counselor, Ms. Dolly Delancy, said that Lowell no longer believed their love
for him was unconditional. How could he? He’d been told to care for Fern as a sister.
He’d done so, only to see her cast from the family. Lowell was confused and he was
angry. Good thing we have a trained professional to tell us that, Dad said.

Mom liked Ms. Delancy. Dad did not. Ms. Delancy had a son, Zachary, who was in the
third grade when I was in kindergarten. Zachary used to lie under the jungle gym and
whenever a girl swung over him, he’d call out the color of her underwear, even if
she was wearing pants and he couldn’t possibly know. I know our parents were aware
of this, because I was the one who told them. Dad thought it was relevant information.
Dad thought it was very telling. Mom did not.

Ms. Delancy said that the qualities making Lowell hard to live with were all very
good qualities, some of his best, in fact—his loyalty, his love, his sense of justice.
We wanted Lowell to change, but we didn’t want him changing the things preventing
that change. It made for a ticklish situation.

I didn’t have a counselor of my own, so Ms. Delancy shared her thoughts about me as
well. I was in the same predicament as Lowell, but while Lowell was responding by
pushing the boundaries, I was trying my hardest to be good. Both reactions made sense.
Both should be seen as cries for help.

Children do best with clear expectations and predictable consequences, Ms. Delancy
said, conveniently ignoring the fact that if you told Lowell, this is where we draw
the line, you could count on him stomping instantly over it.

Our parents decided it would be better to leave the line a blur and concentrate on
allaying Lowell’s insecurities. The house filled with love for Lowell, his favorite
foods, books, games. We played Rummikub. We listened to Warren Zevon. We went to fucking
Disneyland. It made him furious.

•   •   •

I
DON’T SUPPOSE
Ms. Delancy’s assessment was wrong, but I do think it was incomplete. The part she
was missing was our shared and searing grief. Fern was
gone
. Her disappearance represented many things—confusions, insecurities, betrayals, a
Gordian knot of interpersonal complications. But it also was a thing itself. Fern
had loved us. She’d filled the house with color and noise, warmth and energy. She
deserved to be missed and we missed her terribly. No one outside the house ever really
seemed to get that.

Because school was not making me feel the things everyone thought I needed to be feeling—valued
and indispensable—I was transferred in the first grade to the hippie school on Second
Street. The kids there didn’t like me any better, but name-calling was not tolerated
among the hippies. Steven Claymore taught the kids to scratch their armpits instead,
which sometimes kids just did, so it had deniability, and this allowed the adults,
including our parents, to console themselves that my situation had improved. I had
a wonderful first-grade teacher, Ms. Radford, who genuinely loved me. I was given
the part of the hen in
The Little Red Hen
—inarguably, the lead, the star turn. This was all it took to convince Mom that I
was flourishing. Her catatonia had been replaced with an implausible buoyancy. Lowell
and I were fine. We were such good kids, basically. Smart kids. At least we all had
our health! Every gangplank a seesaw.

Is there a character in all of fiction more isolated than the little red hen?

I think Mom and Dad must have instructed the school not to say anything about Fern,
because their usual approach to social difference and difficulty was to wade in up
to their empathetic eyeballs.

“The reason Tammy can’t eat Shania’s birthday cupcakes is because she’s allergic to
wheat. Today we’ll learn about wheat—where it grows and how many of the foods we eat
contain it. Tomorrow Tammy’s mother will bring in cupcakes made from rice flour, for
us to taste. Does anyone else have allergies?”

“Today is the first day of the month of Ramadan. When Imad is older, he will observe
Ramadan by fasting every day from sunrise to sunset. Fasting means not eating and
not drinking anything but water. The dates of Ramadan are tied to the moon, so they
change every year. Today we will make a lunar calendar. We will draw pictures of ourselves
as astronauts walking on the moon.”

“Dae-jung doesn’t speak English, because his family comes from Korea. Today we will
find Korea on a map. We will learn some Korean words so that Dae-jung isn’t the only
one learning a new language. Here is how you say ‘Welcome, Dae-jung,’ in Korean.”

Without a specific injunction, it’s hard to see how my childhood with Fern didn’t
ever become a lesson plan.

Dad gave me some tips designed to improve my social standing. People, he said, liked
to have their movements mirrored. When someone leaned in to talk to me, I should likewise
lean in. Cross my legs if they did, smile when they smiled, etc. I should try this
(but be subtle about it. It wouldn’t work if anyone saw I was doing it) with the kids
at school. Well-meant advice, but it turned out badly, played too readily into the
monkey-girl narrative—monkey see, monkey do. Which also meant I’d blown the subtlety
part.

Mom had a theory I heard through the bedroom wall. You didn’t need a lot of friends
to get through school, she told Dad, but you had to have one. For a brief period in
the third grade, I pretended that Dae-jung and I were friends. He didn’t talk, but
I was well able to supply both sides of a conversation. I returned a mitten he’d dropped.
We ate lunch together, or at least we ate at the same table, and in the classroom
he’d been given the desk next to mine on the theory that when I talked out of turn,
it might help his language acquisition. The irony was that his English improved due
in no small part to my constant yakking at him, but as soon as he could speak, he
made other friends. Our connection was beautiful, but brief.

As soon as he was genuinely fluent, Dae-jung transferred to the public school. His
parents had ambitions for him that included the math classes at North. In 1996, my
mother phoned me at school in Davis to tell me that Dae-jung was just down the road
at UC Berkeley. “You two could get together!” she said. My short-lived belief in our
friendship was
that
intoxicating to her. She’s never been able to give it up.

The word in Korean for “monkey” is
won-soong-ee
. That’s phonetic. I don’t know the proper romanization.