We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Over breakfast, Rosemary learns that Fern was owned by Indiana University. So when Fern was sent away, the Cooke parents had no choice in where she went, and the only thing they could do was send Matt along. Lowell tells Rosemary that their parents did everything they could, but Rosemary is struggling to comprehend this. Lowell says that he will never be able to return to the lab but has someone who gives him updates on Fern. Rosemary learns that Dr. Uljevik greatly disliked Fern. Once, Lowell was able to convince someone to fund getting Fern into a fancy sanctuary, but Uljevik refused to let Fern leave and sent a different chimp, who was almost killed by the other chimps. Thankfully, Uljevik is now retired. Fern has never left South Dakota since she arrived, likely due to her success in giving birth. All of her pregnancies have occurred through artificial insemination, as she does not want to have sex. Lowell considers this rape. Fern’s first two children were taken away and put in the St. Louis zoo. Her last child, Hazel, has been able to stay with Fern because the graduate students are studying their relationship. Fern is teaching Hazel sign language.

Lowell returns to the story of his attempt to free Fern all those years ago. After being chased out of the lab, Lowell realized he needed more support in his mission. Afraid of the police finding him, he caught a ride to Riverside, California to join an action. As the sun rises during breakfast, Rosemary cries. Lowell tells her that he had never intended to leave home forever. He regrets not going to college and finding a legal way to remain close with Fern. He believes he has failed Fern. Lowell tells his sister he is going to catch a train. Rosemary tries to think of how to get her brother to stay; she barely got a chance to speak during their time together and has so much to say. Lowell says that being stationary is dangerous for him and that he has a major action coming up, for which he needs to be totally off the radar. This means that the reports on Fern will now be sent to Rosemary.

As the train approaches, Rosemary says that she knows that as children, Lowell blamed her for Fern leaving and that she is not actually sure what happened. Lowell tells her that she forced their parents to choose between keeping her or Fern. He says that she was young and no one should blame her. After he leaves, Rosemary is upset and exhausted. Mary comes to speak to her for the first time in years, telling Rosemary that she does love Fern. Rosemary comes to realize that she always has, and always will, love Fern, but she has also always been envious of her. This envy arises again as Rosemary realizes that her brother’s intention in finally seeing her was to make sure that Fern would be okay. All this time, she has missed Fern. She is shocked to know that she was the one who made Fern leave. 

Before he left, Lowell told Rosemary about his bus ride to South Dakota all those years ago. Next to him had been a mail-order bride who told him about her husband-to-be. Another man on the bus talked erratically about sexist conspiracy theories. The mail-order bride repeated the phrase, “I’m seeing so much of America today” (225) as the bus drove. Since then, Lowell has used this phrase to express when things are going poorly.

As Rosemary walks home from the station, memories of Fern and Lowell pop into her head. She dreads seeing Harlow and dreads thinking of her brother as a player. She tells the reader that she has, until this point, made her interactions with Lowell seem fairly normal as a way to preserve his dignity. In reality, she informs the reader, Lowell seemed wild when it was just the two of them, or at least out of sorts. She plans to tell Harlow this so that she does not think of him as a player. Rosemary feels woefully unprepared to take on the job of watching over Fern. She thinks that what she needs is a ton of money. Then, she thinks about how stupid the concept of money is, and how chimps trade with meat which makes much more sense. Approaching her home, Rosemary sees two cars and thinks it must be the FBI. One of the cars is just Reg, trying to find his girlfriend. She and Reg agree that he needs to break up with Harlow. Inside, Madame Defarge is sprawled on the couch; Rosemary brings the doll with her to Todd’s room and passes out.

Rosemary shares another piece from her reunion with Lowell that she neglected to repeat earlier: all of the disgusting stories of animal abuse he told her about. She knows that Lowell believes that everyone should have to hear of these horrors, so she repeats some for the reader. As Lowell told his sister about the endless cruelty against nonhuman animals that humans enact, he never included himself in the category of human, opting to use “they" and “them" pronouns rather than “we" and “us.”

Unable to get these awful stories out of her head, Rosemary eventually writes them all down for her “Religion and Violence” final. Dr. Sosa tells her that her final is completely irrelevant. Rosemary tries, unsuccessfully, to convince him that her final is relevant because “science could be a sort of religion” (234). Dr. Sosa gives Rosemary an incomplete in the class, much to her parents’ dismay.

The tenant who lived below Todd and Rosemary moves out, leaving a mess in his wake. Ezra allows Harlow to live in the unit while it is being fixed up; of course, she spends most of her time in Rosemary’s apartment because hers is under construction. Harlow has not said anything about Reg since Lowell left. She is completely obsessed with Lowell and believes that he will come back. She asks Rosemary all sorts of questions about him. Eventually, Rosemary breaks, informing Harlow that her brother is wanted by the FBI for working with the Animal Liberation Front and will never return. She tells Harlow that Travers is not even his name. Rosemary worries that she has said too much; Lowell was caught the first time because he said too much. The ALF is notoriously hard to stop because of its lack of governing body. So long as an individual is following the rules of ALF and actively working towards the liberation of animals, they can become a member. The organization will not stand for harm done to people and animals but supports damaging property.

Harlow is deeply upset. Rosemary does not comfort her friend because she feels that Harlow should be the one comforting her. Rosemary reflects on her lifelong tendency towards jealousy and wonders if other people are also so stuck in their ways. Current studies claim that behavior has more to do with circumstance than with character, but Rosemary prefers to think that the ways that people treat one another have to do with themselves, not with the other. Science, she says, is always changing. Maybe someday science will agree with her. Rosemary is packing for winter break, thinking about what to tell her parents, when an officer knocks on the door and tells her to come with him.

Rosemary is put in an interrogation room alone. She thinks that the officers are trying to put her in her place. A pill bug catches her attention and she remembers Fern eating these creatures. When the officer returns, he places a pile of papers between them. The top of the pile is a profile about Fern and herself that The New York Times had run, which Rosemary never knew about. Rosemary and the officer are silent, trying to get the other to talk first. Eventually, the officer tells Rosemary that she is here because of Lowell. Rosemary asks to go to the bathroom and get a lawyer; she is afraid of further jeopardizing him with her words. The officer tells her that she is not being arrested.

After using the restroom, Rosemary returns to an empty room. She is brought a gross sandwich, the smell of which makes her think of cats. She remembers a stray cat that her mother had tried to capture many times. When cats and chimps become upset, their hair rises. Now, Rosemary’s hair rises into goosebumps. Rosemary believed, as a child, that Fern wanted a kitten. When the stray had kittens, Rosemary stole one of them. She knew that this would make the mother upset, but she couldn’t help herself. Thinking about this makes Rosemary start to shake. Afraid that the officers are watching her, she asks for a jacket to make it appear that she is cold. Freud, Rosemary tells the reader, came up with the concept of a “screen memory,” which is a memory that is created to replace another early memory that is too emotionally significant for the young brain. This memory of the cat, she thinks, is a powerful screen memory.

Rosemary has a flashback. She and Fern played by the creek. When Fern climbed higher in a tree than Rosemary could go, she pretended that there was something else important for her to do by the creek. It was here that Rosemary found the kittens and took one. Rosemary brought the kitten to show off to Fern. The mother cat would not have let Fern touch her kittens, but Rosemary handed the kitten to Fern anyway. The mother cat and Fern both became agitated; their hackles went up, and suddenly, Fern smacked the kitten on the tree and used her hands to open it up. Rosemary ran to find her mother but found Lowell instead. They found Fern who washing her hands in the creek. There were no cats, alive or dead, around. Fern tried to get Lowell to play with her. Lowell suggested to Rosemary that Fern might have not understood her strength and not intended to kill the kitten. Rosemary thought that Lowell believed that she made this story up to get attention. At Lowell’s urging, Rosemary promised that she would not tell anyone about this incident. She was partially to blame, after all, for picking up the kitten. It was only a few days later, when Fern accidentally hurt Rosemary while they played, that she told her mother that she was afraid of Fern because of what happened with the kitten.

After having this memory, Rosemary feels suddenly present and prepared to talk. She picks up the bug so that when she is released, it can come too. Rosemary is released without any further interrogation. Todd, his girlfriend, and his mother are waiting for her. They tell Rosemary that it was not Lowell but Ezra who had been captured. The night before, Ezra attempted to release all the monkeys from the UC Davis Primate Center; the chimps were traumatized and many of them did not leave their unlocked cages. Todd was able to prove that Rosemary did not leave their apartment that night, so she was not considered a suspect. Todd’s mother is also a high-profile civil rights lawyer, which helped get her off. Ezra had been with a woman the night before and Todd argues that the woman must have been Harlow because she would want a man to go to jail for her.

Rosemary thinks about how Fern went to jail for her. Although she is not technically supposed to leave town, Todd’s mother tells her to go home for Christmas. After the holiday break, Todd and Rosemary return to a loud, dirty apartment building, and they realized Ezra had done a good job as apartment manager. Todd and his girlfriend are fascinated by Rosemary’s life and think that Lowell convinced Harlow to join him in the ALF. Rosemary agrees that either he convinced Harlow to join, or she joined to try to get him back. She wonders whether they have found one another and thinks that Harlow would need to change her personality for her brother to like her. Looking in the suitcase again, she finds that Madame Defarge is gone.