We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Read Online Free Page B

mostly, split open to their crystal innards like Fabergé eggs.
    Those rocks are mine. I found them on childhood trips to the quarries or the woods,
     and I broke them open with hammers or by dropping them onto the driveway from a second-story
     window, but this isn’t the house I grew up in and this room isn’t my room. We’ve moved
     three times since I was born, and my parents landed here only after I took off for
     college. The empty rooms in our old house, my mother said, made her sad. No looking
     back. Our houses, like our family, grow smaller; each successive one would fit inside
     the last.
    Our first house was outside of town—a large farmhouse with twenty acres of dogwood,
     sumac, goldenrod, and poison ivy; with frogs and fireflies and a feral cat with moon-colored
     eyes. I don’t remember the house so well as the barn, and remember the barn less than
     the creek, and the creek less than an apple tree my brother and sister would climb
     to get into or out of their bedrooms. I couldn’t climb up, because I couldn’t reach
     the first branch from the bottom, so about the time I turned four, I went upstairs
     and climbed down the tree instead. I broke my collarbone and you could have killed
     yourself, my mother said, which would have been true if I’d fallen from the upstairs.
     But I made it almost the whole way down, which no one seemed to notice. What have
     you learned? my father asked, and I didn’t have the words then, but, in retrospect,
     the lesson seemed to be that what you accomplish will never matter so much as where
     you fail.
    About this same time, I made up a friend for myself. I gave her the half of my name
     I wasn’t using, the Mary part, and various bits of my personality I also didn’t immediately
     need. We spent a lot of time together, Mary and I, until the day I went off to school
     and Mother told me Mary couldn’t go. This was alarming. I felt I was being told I
     mustn’t be myself at school, not my whole self.
    Fair warning, as it turned out—kindergarten is all about learning which parts of you
     are welcome at school and which are not. In kindergarten, to give you one example
     out of many, you are expected to spend much, much more of the day being quiet than
     talking, even if what you have to say is more interesting to everyone than anything
     your teacher is saying.
    “Mary can stay here with me,” my mother offered.
    Even more alarming and unexpectedly cunning of Mary. My mother didn’t like Mary much
     and that not-liking was a critical component of Mary’s appeal. Suddenly I saw that
     Mom’s opinion of Mary could improve, that it could all end with Mom liking Mary better
     than me. So Mary spent the time when I was at school sleeping in a culvert by our
     house, charming no one, until one day she simply didn’t come home and, in the family
     tradition, was never spoken of again.
    We left that farmhouse the summer after I turned five. Eventually the town swept over
     it, carried it away in a tide of development so it’s all culs-de-sac now, with new
     houses and no fields or barns or orchards. Long before that, we were living in a saltbox
     by the university, ostensibly so that my father could walk to work. That’s the house
     I think of when I think of home, though for my brother it’s the earlier one; he pitched
     a fit when we moved.
    The saltbox had a steep roof I was not allowed up on, a small backyard, and a shortage
     of extra rooms. My bedroom was a girly pink with gingham curtains that came from Sears
     until one day Grandpa Joe, my father’s father, painted it blue while I was at school,
     without even asking.
When your room’s pink, you don’t sleep a wink. When your room’s blue, you sleep the
     night through,
he told me when I protested, apparently under the misapprehension that I could be
     silenced with rhyme.
    And now we were in this third house, all stone floors, high windows, recessed lights,
     and glass cabinets—an airy, geometric