We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

The story jumps back in time to 1979. Rosemary is five years old and all of her family members are in distress. Rosemary notes that her father would want to preface this section with the fact that five-year-olds cannot access logic, so any perceived logic is imposed from an older perspective. The social and political context for the time is given, followed by lesser-known context about the era’s animal rights activism. This includes the founding of the Animal Defense League and an action by an group called Sea Shepherd in which they dyed seal pups’ coats to prevent them from being poached for their fur.

We pick up where Rosemary’s story that she told Harlow in the bar left off: She is being picked up by her father from her grandparents’ house after attempting to walk home. Rosemary is upset because she believes that she is being brought somewhere other than home. She falls asleep in the car and wakes up in a room that is not hers. Afraid, she calls for her mother. Her father comes instead and informs her that this is their new house; he suggests that she take a look around but tells her not to go into her mother’s room. Rosemary’s brother, Lowell, has refused to move into this new house and is staying with his friend, Marcos. While looking around, Rosemary comes to understand that she was not the one given away: Fern was.

Rosemary is glad that she was not given away but feels guilty, too. Her childhood is clearly separated into her time with Fern and her time after Fern. After Fern, Lowell stops wanting to be a member of their family and Rosemary’s parents want her to talk less. Rosemary does remember Fern remarkably well considering her young age when Fern was taken away, but she questions why she remembers the weeks after her departure from such strange, if not impossible angles. For a while, Rosemary is able to speak with her brother and grandmother about Fern, but eventually, her brother leaves, and her mother asks her grandmother to stop. Rosemary and her parents fall into relative silence. Rosemary is unsure how far her memories have deviated from the truth, as she has no one with whom to corroborate them. When she goes to college, Rosemary decides that she will not tell anyone about her past.

Rosemary writes that, despite her parents’ claims, they had favorites; she was her mother’s favorite while Lowell has her father’s. Rosemary’s favorite was her brother, while Lowell loved Fern more than he loved Rosemary. Fern’s favorite was Rosemary’s mother. Rosemary writes that being the favorite and the least favorite are both hard positions.

After Rosemary returns from her grandparents,’ her mother is emotionally devastated, rarely talking or eating. Rosemary’s father assembles lackluster meals and whenever he is not home, Grandma Donna comes over to look after Rosemary and clean up the house. Donna greatly dislikes Rosemary’s father and also disliked Fern because she ate the last remaining photo of Donna’s deceased husband. Before Rosemary was born, her father planned to name her and Fern after Grandma Donna and Grandma Fredericka, but both grandmothers wanted Rosemary as their namesake, not Fern.

There are few children in this new neighborhood, and Rosemary instead spends time with animals and her imaginary friend, Mary. Donna is unable to get Lowell to leave Marcos’s house and alternates between being sweet and harsh with Rosemary’s distressed mother. Rosemary can hear her parents fight in the evening. When Lowell is finally forced to come home, he punches Rosemary in the arm. She is ecstatic to see him.

Rosemary becomes fearful of her parents’ door being shut; she always feels a strange dread, though she is not sure what about. She hangs out with Lowell as much as she can. At times, Lowell is kind to Rosemary and they carry the weight of Fern’s disappearance and their mother’s sadness together. Other times, Lowell is mean to Rosemary. Rosemary likes to play with Lowell’s hair, which she thinks looks like Luke Skywalker’s; Rosemary did not get to see Star Wars as a child because Fern would not have been able to go to the movie theater, but Lowell loved the movies and told the sisters about the plot. Eventually, Rosemary watches the movie and learns that Lowell changed the plot in his telling so that Chewbacca won a medal, too.

Lowell starts to smell different, and Rosemary believes that it is the scent of anger, though in retrospect she knows it was puberty. He has three pet rats that are retired subjects from their father’s lab. Rosemary’s parents hire a counselor for Lowell even though her father does not believe in psychoanalysis. A babysitter, Melissa, is hired for Rosemary. Unsure of how to save her family, Rosemary tries to learn and use big words. In exchange for teaching Rosemary a new word a day, Rosemary is quiet and allows Melissa to watch her soapy TV show.

During this TV show one day, Rosemary sneaks off with Lowell, who is skipping class, and their neighbor, a high schooler named Russell. Lowell tells Rosemary that they are going on a mission, that they need her, and that she can bring Mary. Rosemary falls in love with Russell, but he is annoyed by how much she talks. As the three pull up to the farmhouse that Rosemary and her family used to live in, Rosemary becomes fearful about seeing Fern, whom she assumes still lives there with the graduate students. Lowell informs her that Fern does not live here anymore. To get into the house, Rosemary has to squirm in through the dog door. She misses Fern and thinks that the house seems angry. When Melissa sees that Rosemary is gone, she calls her father, who picks up the siblings at the old house.

Rosemary informs the reader that both Mary and Fern are chimps. Rosemary believed that the only skill she has over Fern is talking, so she invented a friend that could do way more things than Fern could. She explains her logic for withholding this information: Readers would consider Fern a pet, rather than a sister and child, if they knew she was a chimp. For a long time, Rosemary searched for examples of sisters in literature to compare her relationship to, and she found that Fern was definitely a sister. Rosemary wonders whether she remembers an old fairy tale about two sisters correctly; the way she remembers it, the mother turns against one of the sisters, and she is left to die alone.

Although many other people were experimenting with raising chimps as if they were children at the time, the Cookes were the first family since the Kelloggs to twin a child with a chimpanzee. Rosemary and Fern were never apart, and Rosemary rarely socialized with other children because chimps are prone to illness. Rosemary’s first memory is being in the bath with Fern, who is feeding her raisins that she earned for herself in an experiment. In another memory, Rosemary and Fern are participating in one of the graduate students’ games. Rosemary is enjoying herself because she gets the game and Fern does not; she tells the students that Fern is bad at sharing, even though it is not true. Fern becomes upset and starts to climb around the room. Rosemary does the same. When Rosemary falls, Fern laughs at her. The students are interested in this because chimps do not make fun of others by laughing as humans do. Rosemary is sad that the students don’t care that Fern is being mean. She feels vindicated when she finds out that her bone is broken.

Back in the present, a couple of days after Rosemary and the boys went to the farmhouse, Rosemary and Mary climb a tree that happens to give them a view into Russell’s house. Rosemary sees his mother carving a pumpkin. Russell sees her in the tree but as he questions her, the sight of the pumpkin guts start to make her feel ill. She falls, and the leaves stain her crotch red. Russell tells her to tell Lowell that he has the money. Russell eventually gets caught having a party in the farmhouse. Donna uses this incident to teach Rosemary a lesson about not using alcohol and drugs, but Rosemary doesn’t understand. Instead, she thinks that “maybe Fern had reached, like a poltergeist, across time and space and destroyed the home in which we’d all lived” (85).

Rosemary’s mother comes out of her depression. Her father quits drinking. For the first time in Rosemary’s life, the family is not constrained by Fern and travels. The family goes to Hawaii, which Rosemary loves. With Fern gone, Rosemary’s parents want her to speak less. People are not always interested in everything Rosemary has to say like they were before. Rosemary silently misses Fern and fears that her mother will become ill again. A few months into this new life, Lowell brings up Fern, asking: “Remember how Fern loved us?” (88). Their father tells them not to talk about Fern and claims that visiting Fern would make her life harder. He had made the same argument before when Rosemary asked him where Fern was. After Lowell’s question, their mother bawls and Lowell runs away for a few nights.

When Rosemary is eight years old, a memory comes to her in which her father ran over a cat because it would not get out of the way. Disturbed by this new memory, she asks Donna if it really happened. She is relieved when her grandmother tells her that it is not. While she used to think of her father as kind to all animals, she now thinks of him as kind to animals unless he needs to use them for science. Her father “animalizes” humans, insisting that humans are emotional and instinctual, rather than rational beings. 

Rosemary shares a series of memories about Fern. In one, her and Fern are three years old and cozied up with their mother, who is reading them Mary Poppins. Rosemary is antsy, while Fern is relaxed. Part of the story makes Rosemary feel icky, and she notices that Fern does not have the same reaction. Rosemary asks a bunch of questions and when her mother gets upset, she blames it on Mary. Her mother suggests that “Mary should be nice and quiet like our little Fern here” (94). Rosemary wishes that her mother praised and loved her as much as she did Fern. In another memory, Rosemary, Fern, their mother, Donna, and some graduate students are having a dance party.

Rosemary shares another anecdote, of mother preparing her and Fern to play in the snow. Rosemary is all ready to go, while Fern struggles to wear gloves and poops in her diaper. Meanwhile, Lowell has been attempting to build a huge snow ant outside. He gets frustrated and the sisters are able to help him out. The graduate students join the children for sledding. In reference to this snowy day, Rosemary paraphrases her mother, saying that “we are so excited that […] we’re completely beside ourselves” (98). Rosemary always believed that she knew everything that Fern thought, and often still believes this.

Another time, Lowell asks their father why he expects Fern to learn their language, rather than vice versa. Their father starts to lecture them and Rosemary zones out. She understands that psychologists are not usually studying the thing they claim to be and wonders whether her parents are actually studying her ability to communicate with Fern. She asserts that Fern believed that she was a human like the rest of her family. One time, the Cookes bring another chimp to meet her and she uses sign language to call it a “crawling shit.” Conversely, when Rosemary enters school, the other kids seem to think that she was not entirely human. Despite Rosemary’s mother’s attempts to train any chimp-like behaviors out of her, the other kids call her “monkey girl.” Eventually, Rosemary learns that being silent is the best way to get through school unscathed. Later, Rosemary finds a paper of her father’s that claims that humans are more prone to imitation than apes are, despite the stereotype.