We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler Read Free Book Online Page B

fantasies, my brother would rattle his knuckles on my apartment
     door and I’d open it, not expecting a thing, thinking maybe it was Ezra coming to
     borrow Todd’s Game Boy or instituting new protocols for the building regarding hazardous
     trash. I would recognize him instantly. God, I’ve missed you, my brother would say,
     pulling me into a hug. Tell me everything that’s happened since I left.
    The last time I saw him, I was eleven years old and he hated my guts.
    •   •   •
    T HE SUITCASE wasn’t mine. That goes without saying.

Seven
    T HAT STORY I TOLD H ARLOW —that story in which I’m sent to my grandparents in Indianapolis—obviously that story
     isn’t really from the middle of this story. I did tell it to Harlow just when I said,
     so my telling of it is from the middle, but the happening and the telling are very
     different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true, only that I honestly
     don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it.
    Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An
     oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the
     moment it was meant to capture.
    And I’ve reached a point here, now that my brother has arrived, where I don’t see
     how to go further forward without going back—back to the end of that story, back to
     when I returned to my family from my grandparents’ house.
    Which also happens to be the exact moment when the part I know how to tell ends and
     the part I’ve never told before begins.

Part Two

    . . . a short time perhaps when measured by the calendar, but endlessly long to gallop
     through, as I have done, at times accompanied by splendid people, advice, applause,
     and orchestral music, but basically alone . . .
    —F RANZ K AFKA, “A Report for an Academy”

One
    S O NOW IT’S 1979. Year of the Goat. The Earth Goat.
    Here are some things you might remember. Margaret Thatcher had just been elected prime
     minister. Idi Amin had fled Uganda. Jimmy Carter would soon be facing the Iran hostage
     crisis. In the meantime, he was the first and last president ever to be attacked by
     a swamp rabbit. That man could not catch a break.
    Here are some things you maybe didn’t notice at the time. The same year Israel and
     Egypt signed a peace treaty, it snowed for half an hour in the Sahara Desert. The
     Animal Defense League was formed. Up on the Magdalen Islands, eight crew members from
     the
Sea Shepherd
sprayed more than a thousand seal pups with a harmless but permanent red dye. This
     dye was designed to ruin their pelts and save the pups from hunters. The activists
     were arrested and, in pitch-perfect Orwellian double-speak, charged with violating
     the Seal Protection Act.
    Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” was on the radio,
The Dukes of Hazzard
on the TV.
Breaking Away
was in the theaters and Bloomington, Indiana, was ready for its close-up.
    The only part of this I was aware of at the time was the
Breaking Away
part. In 1979, I was five years old, and I had problems of my own. But that’s how
     excited Bloomington was—even the suffering children could not miss the white-hot heat
     of Hollywood.
    •   •   •
    M Y FATHER WOULD surely want me to point out that, 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.
    Consider it said.
    Not that there aren’t times when dichotomous and extreme are exactly what’s warranted.
     Let’s simplify matters and just agree that, at this point in my story, my whole family,
     all of us, young and old, was really really really upset.
    The day after my