MORE MEMORIES OF FERN:
In this first memory, we are three years old. Mother is sitting in the big love-seat in the library so that Fern can squeeze in on one side and me on the other. It’s raining, been raining for days, and I am sick of being inside, sick of using my inside voice. Fern loves being read to. She’s sleepy and quiet, pressing in as close to our mother as possible, her hands playing with the belt loops on Mom’s corduroy pants, smoothing the nap on Mom’s thighs. I, on the other hand, am flinging myself about, unable to get comfortable, kicking across Mom’s lap at Fern’s feet, trying to make her do something that will get her in trouble. Mom tells me to hold still in a voice that could pickle fish.
The book is Mary Poppins and the chapter is the one in which an old woman breaks off her own fingers, which then become sugar sticks for the children to suck on. I have a queasy feeling about this, but Fern hears the word sugar and her mouth begins to work in a sleepy, dreamy way. I don’t understand that Fern doesn’t understand about the fingers. I don’t understand that Fern doesn’t follow the story.
I interrupt constantly, because I wish to understand everything. What is a perambulator? What is rheumatism? Will I get rheumatism someday? What are elastic-sided boots? Can I have some? Are Michael and Jane mad when Mary Poppins takes their stars? What if there were no stars in the sky? Could that happen? “For God’s sake,” Mom says finally. “Can you just let me read the damn story?” and because she used the words God and damn, which she hardly ever does, Mary has to be sacrificed. It’s Mary wants to know, I tell her. “Mary is getting on my last nerve,” our mother says. “Mary should be nice and quiet like our little Fern here.”
Just as I sacrificed Mary, Fern has sacrificed me. She didn’t know what rheumatism was, either, but because I was the one who asked, now she does. She gets to know about rheumatism and she gets praised for not talking when she can’t even talk. I think that Fern has gotten praised for nothing and that I never get praised for nothing. It’s clear that Mom loves Fern best. I can see half of Fern’s face. She is almost asleep, one eyelid fluttering, one ear blooming like a poppy from her black fur, one big toe plugging her mouth so I can hear her sucking on it. She looks at me sleepily from over her own leg, from around the curve of Mom’s arm. Oh, she has played this perfectly, that baby who still wears a diaper!
• • •
MEMORY TWO: One of the graduate students has gotten a free compilation tape from the local radio station and she throws it into the cassette player. We are dancing together, all the girls—Mom and Grandma Donna, Fern and I, the grad students, Amy, Caroline, and Courtney. We are rocking it old-school to “Splish Splash I Was Taking a Bath,” “Paradise Park,” and “Love Potion No. 9.”
I didn’t know if it was day or night. I started kissin’ everything in sight.
Fern is smacking her feet down, loud as she can, jumping sometimes onto the backs of the chairs and then landing on the floor. She makes Amy swing her, and laughs the whole time she is in the air. I am shaking it, popping it, laying it down and working it out. “Conga line,” Mom calls. She snakes us through the downstairs, Fern and I dancing, dancing, dancing behind her.
• • •
MEMORY THREE: A day of bright sun and new snow. Lowell is throwing snowballs against the kitchen window. They splatter softly when they hit, leaving trails of shine across the glass. Fern and I are too excited to stand still but twirl about the kitchen, trailing and spinning our scarves. We are so anxious to get outside we are impossible to dress. Fern is stamping and rocking from side to side. She does a backflip, and then another, and then I am looking down on the top of her head as we link hands for a merry-go-round spin.
I am asking where snow comes from, and why it comes only in winter, and if it snows in Australia in the summer, does that mean everything in Australia is opposite to our world? Is it light during the night and dark during the day? Does Santa bring you presents only if you’ve been very bad? Mom is not answering my questions, but fretting instead, because there is no way to make Fern wear mittens or boots. If you put something on Fern’s feet, she screams.
The whole question of clothing has been a touchy one. Excepting those times when Fern would be too cold without (a second exception has been made for the diaper), Mom would rather not dress her; she doesn’t want Fern made comical. But I have to wear clothes, so Fern also has to. Besides, Fern wants them. Mom decides to classify Fern’s clothing as self-expression, an anthropomorphism Dad dislikes.
On this occasion, Mom settles for pinning her own large gloves to the cuffs of Fern’s parka, shoving Fern’s hands into them but letting her take them right out again. Mom warns me to stay upright. No loping through the snow on my hands and feet. A smell spreads through the kitchen. I can see that Mom is considering sending Fern out anyway. “She stinks,” I say and Mom sighs, unzips Fern’s parka, takes her upstairs to change her clothes. Dad is the one who brings her down again, reinserts her into her snow wear. I hear the shower running upstairs. By now I’m so hot I’m sweating.
Lowell has been building a snow ant. The abdomen, which Lowell calls the metasoma, is not as big as he wants—he wants a giant, mutant snow ant as tall as he is—but the snow is so sticky, it’s already iced into place. When Fern and I finally burst out into the snow-globe world of the farmhouse yard, we find him trying to dislodge it, keep it rolling. We hop about him as he struggles. Fern swings up into the little mulberry tree above us. There is snow on the branches. Some of it she eats. Some of it she shakes down our necks until Lowell tells her to cut it out.
Fern is not much for cutting things out. Lowell puts up his hood. She drops onto his back, arm around his neck. I hear her laughing—a sound like a handsaw scraping back and forth. Lowell reaches over his head, grabs her arms, and somersaults her to the ground. She laughs more and scrambles up the tree for a repeat.
But Lowell has already moved off to find another white sheet of snow, start another snow ant. “My mistake was to stop and wait for you guys,” he tells us. “We got to keep it moving.” He ignores Fern’s cries of disappointment.
I stay behind, digging a trench around the unfinished metasoma with my mittened hands. Fern climbs down, starts after Lowell. She looks back to see if I’m coming and I sign for her to give me some help. Ordinarily, this would have no impact, but she’s still mad at Lowell. She pivots back.
Our father is standing on the porch with his coffee. “‘Nothing beside remains,’” Dad says, pointing with his cup to the abandoned snow-ant abdomen. “‘Round the decay of that colossal wreck.’”
Fern sits on the ground beside me, rests her chin on my arm, her feet on the metasoma. She stuffs another handful of snow into her mouth, smacks her protuberant, acrobatic lips, and turns to look up at me, eyes shining. Fern’s eyes seem larger than human eyes, because the whites are not white but an amber color only slightly lighter than the irises. When I draw Fern’s face, the crayon I use for her eyes is burnt sienna. Fern’s own drawings are never finished, as she always eats the crayon.
She kicks now at the snowball with her feet. It’s not clear this is meant to help, but it does. Beside her, I push with my hands. With less effort than I expected, it rocks a little and breaks free.
I’m able to roll it now so that it gathers girth. Fern is bouncing behind me like a cork on a wave, sometimes on top of the snow crust and sometimes falling through. She leaves a churned wake, the trail of the Tasmanian devil. The gloves pinned to her cuffs flop over the snow like leather fish.
Lowell turns, shading his eyes, because the sun is one bright dazzle on the ice-white world. “How did you do that?” he shouts back. He’s grinning at me through the porthole of his jacket hood.
“I tried really hard,” I tell him. “Fern helped.”
“Girl power!” Lowell shakes his head. “Awesome thing.”
“Power of love,” says my father. “Power of love.”
And then the graduate students arrive. We’re going sledding! No one tells me to calm down, because Fern won’t be calming down.
My favorite grad student is named Matt. Matt’s from Birmingham, England, and calls me luv, me and Fern both. I wrap my arms around his legs, jump up and down on the toes of his boots. Fern hurls herself at Caroline, knocking her into the snow. When Fern stands up, she is powdered head to toe like a doughnut. Both of us are demanding in our own ways to be picked up and swung. We are so excited that, in the strangely illuminating phrase my mother favors, we’re completely beside ourselves.
• • •
I ALWAYS USED to believe I knew what Fern was thinking. No matter how bizarre her behavior, no matter how she might deck herself out and bob about the house like a Macy’s parade balloon, I could be counted on to render it into plain English. Fern wants to go outside. Fern wants to watch Sesame Street. Fern thinks you are a doodoo-head. Some of this was convenient projection, but you’ll never convince me of the rest. Why wouldn’t I have understood her? No one knew Fern better than I; I knew every twitch. I was attuned to her.
“Why does she have to learn our language?” Lowell asked my father once. “Why can’t we learn hers?” Dad’s answer was that we still didn’t know for sure that Fern was even capable of learning a language, but we did know for sure that she didn’t have one of her own. Dad said that Lowell was confusing language with communication, when they were two very different things. Language is more than just words, he said. Language is also the order of words and the way one word inflects another.
Only he said this at much greater length, longer than either Lowell or I, or certainly Fern, wished to sit still for. It all had something to do with Umwelt, a word I very much liked the sound of and repeated many times like a drumbeat until I was made to stop. I didn’t care so much what Umwelt meant back then, but it turns out to refer to the specific way each particular organism experiences the world.
I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied.
When the Kelloggs first raised a child alongside a chimpanzee, back in the 1930s, the stated purpose was to compare and contrast developing abilities, linguistic and otherwise. This was the stated purpose of our study as well. Color me suspicious.
The Kelloggs believed that their sensationalistic experiment had sunk their reputations, that they were never again taken seriously as scientists. And if I know this now, our ambitious father surely knew it then. So what was the goal of the Fern/Rosemary Rosemary/Fern study before it came to its premature and calamitous end? I’m still not sure.
But it seems to me that much of the interesting data is mine. As I grew, my language development not only contrasted with Fern’s but also introduced a perfectly predictable x-factor that undermined all such comparisons.
Ever since Day and Davis published their findings in the 1930s, there’s been a perception that twinness affects language acquisition. New and better studies took place in the 1970s, but I’m not sure our parents were looking in their direction yet. Nor would such studies have been completely relevant to a situation such as ours, where the twins had such disparate potentials.
Though Fern and I were sometimes separated while the grad students observed us, we spent most of our time together. As I developed the habit of speaking for her, she seemed to develop the expectation that I would. By the time I turned three, I was already serving as Fern’s translator in a way that surely retarded her progress.
So I think that, instead of studying how well Fern could communicate, our father might have been studying how well Fern could communicate with me. That there was a vice versa here, a tabloid-ready vice versa was unavoidable but unacknowledged. Here is the question our father claimed to be asking: can Fern learn to speak to humans? Here is the question our father refused to admit he was asking: can Rosemary learn to speak to chimpanzees?
One of the early grad students, Timothy, had argued that in our preverbal period, Fern and I had an idioglossia, a secret language of grunts and gestures. This was never written up, so I learned of it only recently. Dad had found his evidence thin, unscientific, and, frankly, whimsical.
• • •
SOMETIMES OOFIE, chimp star of the American Tourister luggage commercials, came on the TV. Fern paid no attention to him. But once, we caught a couple of reruns of Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, with the very handsome Tonga playing Link. These talking apes, in their suits and ties, were more interesting to Fern. She watched intently, puckering and unpuckering her prehensile mouth, making her sign for hat. “Fern wants a hat like Lancelot Link,” I told our mother. There was no need to make the request for myself. If Fern got a hat, I would get a hat.
Neither of us got a hat.
A short time later, our father arranged for a young chimp named Boris to visit the farmhouse for an afternoon. The sign Fern made for Boris was the same sign she used for the brown recluse spiders we sometimes found in the barn, which my mother translated as crawling poo, and Lowell as crawling shit (which seemed more sensible to me. Poo was a joke word. Shit was serious and Fern was being serious). Boris, Fern said, was dirty crawling shit. And then, deadly crawling shit.
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.
• • •
HERE 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.