We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

After Fern left, the Cookes started to travel every Christmas. After Lowell left, this tradition, and holidays as a whole, almost completely stopped. Rosemary decides to bring up seeing Lowell to her family after Christmas Day has passed. They have Christmas dinner at the Cooke grandparents’ house. Rosemary gets cramps and lies down in the same room that she lived in the summer her parents sent her away. She starts to think about her memory of Fern and the kitten, wondering if it is real or not. If she made the story up, she thinks, that was good reason for Lowell to hate her.

Lying in bed, Rosemary tries to access her younger self. She remembers extreme guilt for stealing the kitten, for pretending that it had all been Fern’s fault, and for telling on Fern after promising Lowell she wouldn’t. She feels grief for making her brother hate her and for being sent to her grandparents’. Rosemary forces herself to think through the memory again. In the process, she realizes that she does understand who she is: “still I knew I had not made up that kitten. I knew it because the person I was, the person I had always been, that person would not do that thing” (266).

Rosemary does not end up telling her parents about Lowell until a few days before her departure. She keeps the story minimal, leaving out the nefarious parts, but being honest about the state that Lowell was in. The knowledge that Lowell had wanted to come home and hold a normal life is too much for the parents to handle. Through this conversation, Rosemary learns that she was the reason that her family stopped talking about Fern; apparently, she would become inconsolable if anyone brought up Fern. Rosemary tells the reader that she is not sure she believes this information. Rosemary’s parents had not understood how much guilt Rosemary felt; they tell her that they did not give Fern away solely because of the kitten incident, but that there were many occasions on which Fern showed signs of becoming too big and dangerous. Rosemary realizes that her lie was not about the kitten, but rather that she was afraid of Fern. She was not afraid of Fern, she thinks, but rather was realizing she did not know all aspects of Fern anymore. 

Todd’s mother helps Ezra get a short sentence in a minimum-security prison. Rosemary visits him during his incarceration. He asks her whether she knows Harlow’s whereabouts and she says no. Rosemary shares that after Lowell left Davis, Harlow finally told her own life story, but once Harlow went missing, her parents came to Davis to search for her and Rosemary found out that everything Harlow told her was a lie. Harlow’s parents are certain that something awful happened to Harlow because she never missed Christmas before. Rosemary informs them that she believes Harlow is alive, because she had come back to her apartment to steal Madame Defarge the day after the Primate Center break-in. The parents are in disbelief that Harlow would commit a crime like this. Rosemary, on the other hand, thinks that this sort of crime is the exact sort of thing Harlow would do. Parents, Rosemary thinks, wear blinders when it comes to their children.

After Lowell visits Rosemary, she sees no point in staying in college any longer. She never receives any reports on Fern. Instead, she researches women who have worked with chimps and thinks that she will go work with chimps after she graduates. Then she remembers Dr. Sosa’s lecture and thinks about how little experience she has in this field. Next, remembering how Kitch once told her she would make a good teacher, Rosemary decides to major in education. She runs into Reg on campus and he asks her to go see the performance of Macbeth that Harlow had been so excited about. Rosemary wishes they had used Harlow’s ideas in the production, and Reg is being sexist and annoying, so Rosemary walks herself home. The two date for a few months, and Rosemary the narrator, who is now approaching 40, confesses that this is the longest she ever dated someone. She has trouble making sexual relationships last and isn’t sure if it is her or that she has not found the right person.

Rosemary’s father suffers from multiple heart attacks in 1998; he is only 58 years old at the time, but his body appears older due to stress. When she arrives to the hospital, he is living in a different reality. Believing that he is backpacking, he asks Rosemary to hold his pack so that he can rest. Rosemary is grateful that he allows her to help him in their final conversation. Rosemary speaks of a mythical next time: She will blame both her parents equally for Fern’s disappearance, will forgive her father, and will tell her parents about Lowell missing practice rather than telling on Fern for killing the kitten. In Rosemary’s mother’s state of mourning, she yearns for Lowell but has no way to get in touch with him. The New York Times runs an obituary that refers to Fern as an experiment rather than a child by whom Vince is survived. After the obituary is published, Rosemary and her mother receive a postcard that says “I’m seeing so much of America today” (280).

The story returns to 1996, after the holiday break. While Rosemary was home for the holidays, her suitcase was returned. Todd returned the other suitcase to the airline, which upsets Rosemary because she intended to put an apology note in the bag for the disappearance of Madame Defarge. She planned to write that the puppet was in the care of a radical activist.

There is nothing missing from her own bag. Opening one of her mother’s journals, she finds a Polaroid of her taken right after birth accompanied by a poem. The next journal has an early picture of Fern accompanied by another poem. Rosemary learns that her mother’s journals are not scientific but document her children’s lives.

Rosemary tells the reader that they have now heard all parts of her story except the very beginning and the very end. Rosemary and her mother are editing the journals for publication. In looking through these books, Rosemary sees how her mother used to look before all the grief and loss. She also sees the developmental differences between her and Fern; while she learned to sit, Fern was crawling. Rosemary’s mother tells her that she and Vince decided that they would only raise a chimp if the baby was an orphan with no place to go. Friends of the Cookes found Fern, whose mother was killed when she was only one month old, at a market in Africa and brought her to the Cookes. While Rosemary was being born, Fern was extremely sick and in quarantine. Fern, traumatized, would not separate from Rosemary’s mother’s side. Rosemary’s mother loved both her and Fern deeply and immediately; she found it hard to believe that the two of them could be studied side by side, given the trauma that Fern was born into.

Rosemary’s mother tells her about a quote from another chimp parent that states that the only difference between a human child and a young chimp is the ability to orate. She tells Rosemary that she and Fern worked together to wreak havoc; they watch a home video of the two hanging out in a room that they have completely wrecked. When Rosemary asks her mother if she ever worried about raising the two of them together, she responds that she was both worried and excited.

The books that they publish feature photos of Fern and Rosemary experiencing the same emotions as one another, to show how different it looks. The books include poetry by Emily Dickinson and Kobayashi Issa, who Vince loved despite both of their tendencies towards anthropomorphism.

Rosemary brings the reader forward to 2012. The world is bad, she says, but her life is good. She is living with her mother in South Dakota and teaching preschool. She teaches her students about chimp culture, and they take field trips to visit Fern and the other chimps at the Uljevik lab. After observing the chimps in the center, Rosemary has come to believe that Fern is not of lower status than the male chimps. Fern is old now, and the younger chimps remind Rosemary more of the Fern she once knew.

Rosemary’s mother volunteers at the lab daily and ensures that Fern gets to eat her favorite foods. The first time that she brought lunch in for Fern, Fern squeezed her arm so tightly that she had to bite Fern to make her let go. After that first incident, the two of them started to communicate in sign language again. Although all of the chimps are retired, their lives are still not full of the freedom that they deserve. Rosemary dreams of living in a house full of windows where the humans can be inside and watch the chimps on the outside, free. More chimp attacks against humans have been reported, so Rosemary knows that she and Fern will never touch again. The income from the books that Rosemary and her mother publish will be used to make a larger outdoor enclosure for the chimps at the lab. Rosemary is going to do media appearances for the book; she is nervous but knows that she needs to speak for her sister.

Rosemary does a dramatic telling of Fern’s life through Madame Defarge’s perspective. The older, hairier sister in this telling is locked away by an evil king who casts a spell on her and calls her ugly. Once the king dies, she is still under the spell. To break the spell, everyone must demand that the sister is let go and go to witness her beauty. The story ends with a call to action: “rise up already” (300).

In 2011, the National Institutes of Health reported that using chimps for research is almost never necessary and stopped giving out grants for research on chimps that could be done another way. On hearing this, Rosemary brings champagne to Fern to celebrate. Growing up, they were allowed to try champagne each New Year’s Eve. Rosemary wonders whether Fern remembers the champagne. Rosemary’s mother does not believe that Fern remembers her, while Rosemary does think that Fern knows who they are in some way, even though they look so different than they had two decades before.

It is difficult to study long-term memory in chimps, though chimps are proven to have better short-term memory than humans. Endel Tulving conceptualized “episodic memory,” which is the ability to place memories in a specific space and time. He believed that only humans have episodic memory, though Rosemary doesn’t know how he came to this conclusion. Rosemary thinks that each quality that humans believe separates us from animals has eventually been proven to be shared with another creature. Other animals, she says, are believed to have episodic memory. 

The press is excited about the book. Rosemary and her mother decide to remove certain details that would be too much for children to hear from the books. Rosemary knows that Lowell would not approve of this censuring, which is why she has written the story that the reader is reading. Lowell is finally arrested; his charges include upcoming plans to attack SeaWorld. The woman that helped Ezra is still on the run. Rosemary notes that neither of her siblings can write their own stories because they are in cages. Rosemary is saddened by the way her brother is treated by the prison system. Three months into being arrested, Lowell has not yet spoken. Rosemary feels certain that this is because her brother wants to be tried by the court as a nonhuman animal. She hopes to get Todd’s mother to be her brother’s lawyer, but it will be expensive. Rosemary thinks of Thomas More’s vision of utopia, in which slaves, who are kept out of sight, perform ugly, difficult tasks so the Utopians can remain peaceful. This vision reminds her of her brother, who has put himself in the places where these ugly tasks are performed. He has refused to close his eyes to the abuse that humans enact; in return, he has lost everything. Rosemary has lost both of her siblings and needs them back.

Rosemary completes her story by telling the reader about her reunion with Fern after two decades of separation. Before Rosemary came, Rosemary’s mother told Fern that she was going to visit and brought Fern some items to jog her memory. One of these items was a red poker chip. Rosemary brings another red chip when she comes and puts it against the glass. From the other side, Fern puts her hand against the chip. They both put their heads against the glass. From this angle, Rosemary sees bits and pieces of Fern, which she both no longer knows and knows so well that it is like seeing herself.