We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

by Karen Joy Fowler

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.

me and my father; he and I had hardly spoken since. I don’t remember minding.

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.

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.

Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability. I believe the same can be said of many families.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

because conspiracy is folded into her DNA like egg whites into angel food cakes.

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.

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.

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?

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.

The things I had to say would collect in my chest until they were so crowded together I was ready to burst.

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.

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

I felt that the house must be hurt not to be my house anymore, that it must feel abandoned.

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.

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.

Language is such an imprecise vehicle I sometimes wonder why we bother with it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I never told my parents. My mother wasn’t strong enough to hear it; she would never come out of her room again if I told. The only thing I could do for her now was to be okay. I worked at that as if it were my job. No complaints to management about worker conditions.

In their bedroom, in the dark, Mom and Dad worried about how quiet I’d become. It was bound to happen, they assured each other. Typical teenage sullenness; they’d been much the same themselves.

The FBI had told us so. My own government. Would they lie?

The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you’ve gone over that cliff.

What a scam I’d pulled off! What a triumph. Apparently, I’d finally erased all those little cues, those matters of personal space, focal distance, facial expression, vocabulary. Apparently, all you needed to be considered normal was no evidence to the contrary.

Except that now I’d achieved it, normal suddenly didn’t sound so desirable. Weird was the new normal and, of course, I hadn’t gotten the memo. I still wasn’t fitting in. I still had no friends. Maybe I just didn’t know how. Certainly I’d had no practice.

Scully and I shared a bedroom for nine months. We never had a serious quarrel or falling out. And then we packed up, sashayed off into our separate lives, and haven’t spoken since. Say good-bye to Scully. We won’t be seeing her again until 2010, when she friends me on Facebook for no discernible reason and with nothing much to say.

Let me just repeat that I’d once gone, in a matter of days, from a childhood where I was never alone to this prolonged, silent only-ness. When I lost Fern, I’d also lost Lowell—at least I lost him in the way he’d been before—and I’d lost my mother and father in that same way, and I lost all the grad students for real, including my beloved Matt from Birmingham, who, when the moment came, chose Fern over me.

It seemed as if I couldn’t get even the instinctual, mammalian parts of my life right.

“Bonobos are matriarchal,” the young woman said. “How do you know it’s the sex and not the matriarchy that makes a society peaceful? Female solidarity. Females protecting other females. Bonobos have it. Chimps and humans don’t.”

About Washoe, Roger Fouts has said, she taught him that in the phrase human being, the word being is much more important than the word human.

Our relationship had started so promisingly, what with both of us breaking things in best monkey-girl fashion and swinging off to jail together. But I could see she was reassessing me now. I was not as gamesome as she’d thought. I was beginning to disappoint.

Nobody liked my crying and now that I’m laughing, I can see that I’m still irritating the hell out of everyone.

He says that a drunk woman is a woman asking for trouble.

“We need a sort of reverse mirror test. Some way to identify those species smart enough to see themselves when they look at someone else. Bonus points for how far out the chain you can go. Double bonus for those who get all the way to insects.”

At least we were at the train station. Airports and train stations are where you get to cry. I’d once gone to an airport for just that purpose.