We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Rosemary acknowledges that Fern’s departure was harder for the other family members, who were old enough to understand it all. On the flip side, they all had personas from before Fern arrived to return to, whereas Rosemary did not. Without Fern to touch and be touched by all the time, Rosemary began to pick at herself. The two had often walked as one connected being, which made Rosemary feel unstoppable. Rosemary feels that the pain of her separation from Fern was close to the pain that real twins feel when one of the pair dies, which is considered the most severe form of human loss. Eventually, Rosemary came to feel that everything she had to say did not matter anymore, now that it was not data in an experiment.

Rosemary shares a wall with her parents and overhears many things as a result. Often, it’s her father fretting about his career, especially after Fern’s departure. She also hears her parents fret about Lowell’s change in personality and her own lack of non-imaginary friends. Through the wall, Rosemary learns that Lowell’s counselor, Ms. Delancey, believes that Lowell does not see his parents’ love as unconditional after Fern’s disappearance. Ms. Delancey tells the parents 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” (110). Rosemary’s father does not like Ms. Delancey. Rosemary thinks that Ms. Delancey’s diagnosis does not account for the pure grief of Fern’s departure. Ms. Delancey says that both Lowell’s rule-breaking and Rosemary’s strict rule adherence are responses to Fern leaving. She suggests that the parents set stricter boundaries; instead, the parents attempt to do exactly as Lowell wants. This does not work.

Rosemary is being bullied, and her parents transfer her to an alternative school in an attempt to stop the bullying. The students are not supposed to call each other names, so they start to mime monkeys instead. Rosemary’s father tells her that she can form friendships by subtly mirroring others’ behaviors. Unfortunately, she is not subtle enough, and instead the kids take this behavior as proof of her essential monkey-ness. Through the wall, Rosemary hears her mother say that all anyone really needs is one friend. Rosemary starts to pretend that a kid in her class who only speaks Korean is her friend. Once he learns English, he finds new friends. Later, Rosemary’s mother learns that the Korean boy goes to college near Rosemary and suggests that they see each other, showing how invested she had been in this fake friendship.

Lowell becomes easier to deal with in high school. He stops talking about Fern and develops a tumultuous relationship with a girl named Kitch Chalmers. At the Cookes’s house, Kitch is allowed over so long as she and Lowell keep his bedroom door open. Rosemary never tattles when she sees them canoodling. Meanwhile, Rosemary mostly stops talking in order to be ignored at school. Her parents and teachers call her inattentive.

Senior year, Lowell is the point guard on the basketball team, and the team is doing very well. This notoriety helps Rosemary’s social standing. One day, Rosemary hears Lowell come home when she knows he’s supposed to be at an important basketball practice. When she checks on him, he yells at her. At dinner with their parents, Lowell does not mention skipping practice and appears totally normal. The family watches a TV show together; it turns out to be the last time they all spend together as a family. Lowell packs money and clothes, sets the rats from his father’s lab free, and catches a bus to Chicago. Once again, the graduate students working with Rosemary’s father are unable to finish their projects.

Rosemary’s mother falls back into her depression. At first, Rosemary is convinced that Lowell will return for her upcoming birthday. After two weeks, the parents call the police, who are uninterested because Lowell is an adult. They hire a private investigator, and then another one. Rosemary moves into Lowell’s bed because she misses him and does not want to hear her mother crying through the wall. Months into Lowell’s disappearance, Rosemary picks up The Fellowship of the Ring to reread it and finds a note he left for her. It reads: “Fern is not on a fucking farm” (118).

The basketball team loses and the Cookes’s house gets vandalized. On Rosemary’s first day of seventh grade, the monkey-girl bullying continues. She knows that her mother is too sensitive to hear about this incident and believes that Lowell will eventually return and stop the bullying. Through the wall, she hears her parents’ concern about her silence.

They receive sporadic postcards from Lowell and, a year into his disappearance, they stop searching for him. The narrative skips to 1987, when Rosemary is outside playing alone and two men drive up and tell her that they need to speak with her brother. Rosemary informs the men that Lowell is with Fern. Her mother comes out and the two men show their FBI badges, saying that Lowell is a person of interest in an arson at the “John E. Thurman Veterinary Diagnosis Laboratory at UC Davis” (122). Then they ask who Fern is.

It is revealed that many of the rats that Lowell let loose from his father’s lab are recaptured, and others survive in the wild despite Rosemary’s father’s claim that they would not. 

At age 15, Rosemary is biking around the Indiana University campus when she hears someone call her name. It’s Kitch, and they grab a soda together. Kitch warns Rosemary to not be too crazy in her youth and tells her that she would make a good teacher. They talk about Kitch’s new boyfriend before finally bringing up Lowell. Kitch never heard from Lowell after he left, and she tells Rosemary that her family “deserved better” (123). Kitch tells Rosemary some information she never knew. The day Lowell left, she and Lowell were walking towards his basketball practice when they came across Matt, one of the graduate students studying Fern. Matt had accompanied Fern to her new home in a lab in South Dakota to ensure that she would not die of grief from the sudden separation. Matt reported that the lab treats Fern poorly. After this interaction, Lowell became inconsolable and started a fight with Kitch, who then broke up with him.

Biking away from Kitch, Rosemary starts to pretend she did not learn this information. She tells herself that the lab in South Dakota must have been a temporary holding place. Further, if Fern were in real danger, Lowell would have fixed the situation by now. Rosemary does not tell her parents this new information.

Rosemary rarely thinks about Fern by the time she leaves for college. The last child leaving the house is difficult for Rosemary’s mother. Unconsciously, Rosemary tries to take classes that will not talk about primates, which is more difficult than expected; for example, in an English class, she has to read Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy,” which is narrated by an ape. She does not tell anyone about her family and tries to leave her previous reputation as a monkey girl behind. Rosemary’s freshman-year roommate, Scully, is extroverted and fills their room with friends. The topic of conversation is often families and how “weird” they are. When these friends ask Rosemary about her own family, she claims that they are not weird; she is proud that she can now successfully come across as normal. It turns out that being normal was no longer cool, and Rosemary struggles to form friendships. Rosemary explains to the reader that philosophical solipsism is the theory that, because we can never truly know that other humans are conscious, reality only exists within our own mind. She uses this theory to explain how she “feel[s] different from other people” (133). Rosemary points out that while the average chimp friendship is seven years, Scully and she never spoke again after their year as roommates.

The next year, Rosemary moves in with Todd, whom she tells about her family starting from the middle, rather than the beginning. One evening, Todd, his girlfriend at the time, and Rosemary watch an animated version of The Man in the Iron Mask, which follows a pair of twins, one of whom is the King of France but is mean, the other of whom is masked and imprisoned but has an amazing personality. Rosemary has a panic attack partway through the film. Not wanting to deal with what is making her emotional, Rosemary goes to her room to cry alone: “When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk” (135).

Rosemary asks the reader to imagine the scene in the cafeteria again now that they understand her more. She suggests that, as an imposter herself, she might have understood that what Harlow was doing was a performance. Also, this sort of outburst was the type of thing Rosemary had done herself in the past. Harlow embodies all of the “monkey-girl” qualities that Rosemary has tried to erase from herself. This makes Harlow a bad influence, but someone that Rosemary can potentially act like herself around. Rosemary then wonders what “herself” would act like.

Rosemary is desperate for her brother to come back to the apartment before holiday break. She thinks back to her first year of college, when she used the campus newspaper archives to research the bombing of the John E. Thurman Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory. Deep in these papers, Rosemary read about the Animal Liberation Front’s beliefs and tactics. Around the same time as that bombing, many other factories that used animal products in California were being bombed as well. In one of these papers, Rosemary came across a horrific article about a monkey that was made blind in order to be a test subject. This finding stopped her research. Rosemary recalls how hen the FBI caught Lowell for working with the ALF, they would not tell the Cookes how they found out about him.

Harlow decides that they should open the suitcase that was incorrectly delivered to Rosemary. Ezra helps the girls unlock it and inside, they find a ventriloquist dummy of Madame Defarge from A Tale of Two Cities. Rosemary does not want to touch it, as it is someone else’s and could be precious, but Harlow has different plans. She tells Rosemary that she will bring the doll back later, and Rosemary agrees because she wants to be likable. The two decide to go to a bar later.

There are few college lectures that Rosemary remembers. One that she does remember is the final session of Dr. Sosa’s “Religion and Violence” course. Dr. Sosa starts out briefly talking about violent women before continuing to talk about the usual topic of violence against women, justified by religion. He starts to compare chimpanzees to humans in their “propensity for insider/outsider violence” (147). Dr. Sosa informs the class that in chimp culture, all female chimps have a lower status than any male chimp. He looks at Rosemary as he says all these things because her father taught her to nod when professors look at her, which trains them to look at her more. In retrospect, she wonders if he taught her this so that she could not miss class without being noticed. Dr. Sosa points out that while both humans and chimps try to control “female sexual behavior,” only humans try to use God to justify it. As he talks about the frequency of rape in chimp culture, Rosemary notices that she is anxiously panting.

Rosemary informs the reader that, despite her lack of friends, she has had sex. The first man she had sex with commented on her silence, making her feel like she was not doing things right. After having painful sex multiple times, Rosemary goes to the doctor, who tells her that her hymen is not broken. She tells the reader that the point of these stories is to emphasize that while she has had bad sex before, she has never been forcibly raped. Dr. Sosa continues his lecture, saying that by contrast, bonobo societies are peaceful because the sex is plentiful. He makes a joke that only the men in the room laugh at, saying humans should follow their example and have more sex. A female student stands up and suggests that the female bonobos are attracted to the males because they’re peaceful. She also informs them the bonobo culture is matriarchal. Dr. Sosa tells her that he will think about her suggestions. He finishes the class by talking about the human preference for those in the in-group based on social constructions, which goes against humanity’s highest moral of “doing unto others as you have others do unto you” (151). Rosemary leaves the class in extreme distress. She did not even know that bonobos existed; she is not the expert she thought she was.