Prologue Quotes

When you think of two things to say, pick your favourite and only say that, my mother suggested once, as a tip to polite social behaviour, and the rule was later modified to one in three. (Rosemary, about her mother) Prologue

… I have something to say! I’d tell him, and the door would stop midway.
Start in the middle then, he’d answer … (Rosemary, about her father) Prologue

Part 1 Chapter 1 Quotes

So the middle of my store comes in the winter of 1996. By then, we’d long since dwindled to the family that old home movie foreshadowed – me, my mother, and, unseen but evident behind the camera, my father. Part 1 Chapter 1

The middle of my story is all about their absence, though if I hadn’t told you that, you might not have known. (Rosemary, about her brother and sister) Part 1 Chapter 1

My education, my father liked to point out, was wider than it was deep. He said this often. (Rosemary) Part 1 Chapter 1

My father was himself a college professor and a pedant to the bone. Every exchange contained a lesson, like the pit in a cherry. To this day, the Socratic method makes me want to bite someone. Part 1 Chapter 1

I felt … a little migratory myself, just a little wild. (Rosemary, viewing crows) Part 1 Chapter 1

Part 1 Chapter 2 Quotes

She gave every indication of being an old pro at this. I was not. The wildness I’d felt that morning had long since vanished and left something squeezed into its place, something like grief or maybe homesickness. (Rosemary, about Harlow and herself when they are arrested) Part 1 Chapter 2

I was made to remove my watch, shoes, and belt, and taken barefoot into a cage with bars and a sticky floor. (Rosemary at the county police station) Part 1 Chapter 2

The bars went all the way to the top of the cell. I checked to be sure; I’m a pretty good climber, for a girl. (Rosemary at the police station) Part 1 Chapter 2

I felt my worries slipping from me like skin from snake. My father often had this effect on me. The more irritated he was, the more I became smooth and amused, which, of course, irritated him all the more. It would anyone, let’s be fair. (Rosemary speaking to her father from the police station) Part 2 Chapter 2

‘I always thought your brother would be the one to call from jail,’ he added. It startled me, this rare mention of my brother. My father was usually more circumspect, especially on the home phone, which he believed was bugged. (Rosemary’s father) Part 1 Chapter 2

Nor did I respond with the obvious, that my brother might very well go to jail, probably would someday, but he would never every call. Part 1 Chapter 2

Part 1 Chapter 3 Quotes

The idea that we would spend the holiday talking about anything as potentially explosive as my arrest was a fiction, and we all knew this even as I was being made to promise to do so. Part 1 Chapter 3

When he worked like this, he didn’t drink, which we all appreciated. He’d been diagnosed with diabetes a few years back and shouldn’t have been drinking at any time. Instead he’d become a secret drinker. (about Rosemary’s father) Part 1 Chapter 3

Grandma Fredericka was the sort of hostess who believed that bullying guests into second and third helpings was only being polite. Yet we all ate more at Grandma Donna’s, where we were left alone to fill our plates or not, where the piecrusts were flaky and the orange-cranberry muffins light as clouds … Part 1 Chapter 3

Grandma Donna passed the oyster stuffing and asking my father straight out what he was working on, it being so obvious his thoughts were not with us. She meant it as a reprimand. Part 1 Chapter 3

I don’t remember most of what we talked about that year. But I can, with confidence, provide a partial list of things not talked about:
Missing family members. Gone was gone. Part 1 Chapter 3

I loved him because of the way he treated his sister … He was so nice, it hurt to watch. (Rosemary about Peter, her cousin) Part 1 Chapter 3

‘It comes of being tested so often when she was little.’ My mother spoke directly to Bob. ‘She’s a good test-taker. She learned how to take a test, is all.’ (Rosemary’s mother to Rosemary’s Uncle about Rosemary) Part 1 Chapter 3

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. (Rosemary, about Mary) Part 1 Chapter 3

Part 1 Chapter 4 Quotes

Touched as I was, there was nothing I wanted less than my mother’s journals. What’s the point of never talking about the past if you wrote it all down and you know where those pages are? Part 1 Chapter 4

Once, at a parent-teacher conference, my kindergarten teacher had said that I had boundary issues. I must learn to keep my hands to myself, she’d said. I remember the mortification of being told this. I’d truly had no idea that other people weren’t to be touched; in fact, I’d thought quite the opposite. But I was always making mistakes like that. (Rosemary, confused on how to respond to Harlow’s breaking in) Part 1 Chapter 4

Ezra had told me once that he didn’t think of himself as the manager of the apartment house so much as its beating heart. Life was a jungle, Ezra said, and there were those who’d like to bring him down … Ezra saw conspiracies. Part 1 Chapter 4

Part 1 Chapter 5 Quotes

Crows were rioting in the trees. Part 1 Chapter 5

Sometimes you best avoid talking by being quiet, but sometimes you best avoid talking by talking. I can still talk when I need to. I haven’t forgotten how to talk. Part 1 Chapter 5

It’s a story I’ve told often, my go-to story when I’m being asked about my family. It’s meant to look intimate, meant to look like me opening up and digging deep. (Rosemary) Part 1 Chapter 5

Part 1 Chapter 6 Quotes

When we were kids, my brother was my favourite person in the whole world. He could be, and often was, awful, but there were other times. (Rosemary) Part 1 Chapter 6

And I just didn’t think I could do it anymore, this business of being my parents’ only child. (Rosemary, happy at the idea her brother has returned) Part 1 Chapter 6

The last time I saw him, I was eleven years old and he hated my guts. (Rosemary about her brother) Part 1 Chapter 6

Part 1 Chapter 7 Quotes

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. (Rosemary) Part 1 Chapter 7

Language does this to our memories – simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. Part 1 Chapter 7

Part 2 Chapter 1 Quotes

Let’s simply 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. (when Fern left) Part 2 Chapter 1

And that right there is the difference between me and my brother – I was always afraid of being made to leave and he was always leaving. (Rosemary) Part 2 Chapter 1

Before, the more I talked the happier our parents seemed. After, they joined the rest of the world in asking me to be quiet. I finally became so. (after Fern left) Part 2 Chapter 1

Please assume that I am talking continuously in all the scenes that follow until I tell you that I’m not.
Our parents, on the other hand, had shut their mouths and the rest of my childhood took place in that odd silence. (Rosemary) Part 2 Chapter 1

Part 2 Chapter 2 Quote

It’s also hard to be the favourite. Earned or unearned, the favourite is a burdensome thing to be. Part 2 Chapter 2

Part 2 Chapter 3 Quotes

There was no one I could reasonably be expected to play with.
Instead I got acquainted with the neighbourhood animals. (Rosemary) Part 2 Chapter 3

‘… if only you had just, for once, kept your goddamn mouth shut.’ (Lowell to Rosemary) Part 2 Chapter 3

If Lowell was angry that Fern had been sent out of our lives, Grandma Donna was angry that she’d ever been let in. I’m sure she’d deny this, say that she’d always loved Fern, but even at five I knew better. Part 2 Chapter 3

Part 2 Chapter 4 Quotes

We each carried the weight of Fern’s disappearance and our mother’s collapse, and occasionally, for short periods, we carried it together. (Rosemary, about her and Lowell) Part 2 Chapter 4

Bed-hopping was an established custom in the house – Fern and I had rarely ended the night in the bed where we’d started. Our parents felt that it was natural and mammalian not to want to sleep alone, and though they would have preferred we stay in our own beds, because we kicked and thrashed, they’d never insisted on it. Part 2 Chapter 4

Lowell’s room smelled of damp cedar from the cage where three rats, washouts from our father’s lab, would chirp and creak in their spinning wheel all night long. In retrospect, there was something incomprehensibly strange about the way any of the laboratory rats could transform from data point to pet, with names and privileges and vet appointments, in a single afternoon. (Rosemary, about Lowell’s rats) Part 2 Chapter 4

Part 2 Chapter 5 Quotes

I spent the first eighteen years of my life defined by this one fact, that I was raised with a chimpanzee. (Rosemary) Part 2 Chapter 5

Fern was not the family dog. She was Lowell’s little sister, his shadow, his faithful sidekick. Part 2 Chapter 5

Our parents had promised to love her like a daughter … I began to pay better attention to the stories they read me … looking to learn how much parents love their daughters. (Rosemary, about her parents with Fern) Part 2 Chapter 5

She was my twin, my fun-house mirror, my whirlwind other half. (Rosemary, about Fern) Part 2 Chapter 5

… she is sharing them with me – one for her, one for me, one for her, one for me. (Fern with raisins) Part 2 Chapter 5

She comes over, rests the rough shelf of her forehead against my own flat one so that I’m staring straight into her amber eyes. (Fern with Rosemary) Part 2 Chapter 5

… As I fall, I hear Fern laughing … (Rosemary, thinking Fern is laughing at her fall) Part 2 Chapter 5

Dad apologized by letting me see the damage on my x-ray. (When Rosemary breaks her arm during) Part 2 Chapter 5

The only thing I do better is talk, and it’s not clear to me that this is a good trade-off, that I wouldn’t swap it instantly for being able to scamper up the banister or stretch like a panther along the top edge of the pantry door. Part 2 Chapter 5

That is why I invented Mary, to even the score. Mary could do everything Fern could and then some. And she used her powers for good instead of evil, which is to say only under my direction and on my behalf. Part 2 Chapter 5

‘Monkey girl’, Russell said, a phrase I would come to know well when I started school. (Rosemary) Part 2 Chapter 5

Here is what I heard: that maybe Fern had reached, like a poltergeist, across time and space and destroyed the home in which we’d all lived. (after all the windows are smashed followed a Halloween party) Part 2 Chapter 5

Part 2 Chapter 6 Quotes

We’d never been able to travel with Fern; now we could, and we needed to get away. Part 2 Chapter 6

I saw her everywhere, but I never said so. (Rosemary, about Fern) Part 2 Chapter 6

Was my father kind to animals? I thought so as a child, but I knew less about the lives of lab rats then. Let’s just say that my father was kind to animals unless it was in the interest of science to be otherwise. He would never have run over a cat if there was nothing to be learned by doing so.
He was a great believer in our animal natures, far less likely to anthropomorphize Fern than to animalise me. Not just me, but you, too––all of us together, I’m afraid. He didn’t believe animals could think, not in the way he defined the term, but he wasn’t much impressed with human thinking, either. He referred to the human brain as a clown car parked between our ears. Open the doors and the clowns pile out. (Rosemary, about her father) Part 2 Chapter 6

Part 2 Chapter 7 Quotes

No one knew Fern better than I; I knew every twitch. I was attuned to her. (Rosemary) Part 2 Chapter 7

I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. Part 2 Chapter 7

Surrounded as she was by humans, Fern believed she was human. Part 2 Chapter 7

Contrary to our metaphors, humans are much more imitative than the other apes. Part 2 Chapter 7

Here are some of 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. Part 2 Chapter 7

Part 3 Chapter 1 Quotes

I’ve read that no loss compares to the loss of a twin, that survivors describe themselves as feeling less like singles and more like the crippled remainder of something once whole. (Rosemary, after Fern’s disappearance) Part 3 Chapter 1

Although it had had no immediate impact on the cut of my jibber-jabber – in fact, it took many years to truly sink in – finally I came to understand that all of my verbosity had been valuable only in the context of my sister. Part 3 Chapter 1

Part 3 Chapter 2 Quotes

Ms Delancy said that the qualities making Lowell hard to live with were all very good qualities, some of his best, in fact – his loyalty, his love, his sense of justice. (Lowell’s counsellor) Part 3 Chapter 2

For a brief period in the third grade, I pretended that Dae-jung and I were friends. He didn’t talk, but I was well able to supply both sides of a conversation. I returned a mitten he’d dropped. We ate lunch together, or at least we ate at the same table, and in the classroom he’d been given the desk next to mine on the theory that when I talked out of turn, it might help his language acquisition. The irony was that his English improved due in no small part to my constant yakking at him, but as soon as he could speak, he made other friends. Part 3 Chapter 2

Dad gave me some tips designed to improve my social standing. People, he said, like to have their movements mirrored. (Rosemary changing schools) Part 3 Chapter 2

Part 3 Chapter 3 Quotes

… at some point, I’d mostly stopped talking altogether. … First I eliminated the big words. They were getting me nowhere. Then I quit correcting other people when they used the wrong words. I raised the ratio of things I thought to things I said from three to one, to four to one, to five, to six, to seven. (Rosemary at school) Part 3 Chapter 2

… Mom took Lowell’s disappearance had, worse even than when we lost Fern … I don’t have the words for what it did to her. She’s never even pretended to recover. (Rosemary) Part 3 Chapter 2

Most of the rats Lowell had released were recaptured, but not all. Despite our father’s dire predictions, some survived that winter and the next one, too. They went on to have full lives – sex, travel, and adventure. Part 3 Chapter 2

Part 3 Chapter 4 Quotes

… He said she had to learn her place. She had to learn what she was. … He never once, in all the time Matt had spent there, had called Fern by her name. (when Fern is placed in a cage with four larger, older chimps in Dr Uljevik’s psych lab) Part 3 Chapter 4

‘That’s my sister in that cage’. (Lowell about Fern, to his girlfriend) Part 3 Chapter 4

Matt said they treated Fern like some animal. (Matt, graduate student, about Fern at the lab) Part 3 Chapter 4

Part 3 Chapter 5 Quotes

I came to UC Davis both to find my past (my brother) and to leave it (the monkey girl) behind. By monkey girl, I mean me, of course, not Fern, who is not now and never has been a monkey. Part 3 Chapter 5

… now I’d achieved it, normal suddenly didn’t sound so desirable. (Rosemary on starting college and trying to make friends) Part 3 Chapter 5

He rubbed my shoulders. This was so kind, since Todd wasn’t a toucher. And I do like to be touched; it’s a monkey-girl thing. (When Rosemary falls and cannot breathe). Part 3 Chapter 5

Part 3 Chapter 6 Quotes

… I could see that Harlow was fundamentally untrustworthy. Simultaneously, she seemed like someone with whom I could be my true self. I had no intention of doing so, and with an equal and counterbalancing intensity, a great longing for it. (Rosemary, on Harlow as a potential friend) Part 3 Chapter 6

I didn’t want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that’s the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me. I handled the situation by not reading more. Part 3 Chapter 6

Ezra had parlayed his paranoid delusions into a very real jungle-commando skill set. It was frightening to think about the things he could do. Part 3 Chapter 6

From the look on Madame Defarge’s face, I could see that everything was going exactly as she’d planned. ‘Don’t spoil my fun’, Madame Defarge said. (Rosemary, on Ezra and Harlow playing with Madame Defarge) Part 3 Chapter 6

Part 3 Chapter 7 Quotes

Dr Sosa ended the last lecture of the quarter by telling us that our preference for our own kind begins at birth. … ‘”Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” is our highest, most developed morality’, Dr Sosa said. … ‘But if you do believe, as I do, that morality starts with God, then you have to wonder why He simultaneously hardwired us against it.’
‘”Do unto others” is an unnatural, inhuman behaviour…’ (Rosemary’s lecturer, Dr Sosa) Part 3 Chapter 7

But I am one of the lucky ones. I’ve never in my life been forced into any sex I haven’t wanted at the time. Part 3 Chapter 7

Part 4 Chapter 2 Quotes

She was sitting on Harlow’s lap, weaving her head from side to side and unhinging her jaw like a cobra. (Madame Defarge) Part 4 Chapter 2

Men were buying drinks for Madame Defarge. Part 4 Chapter 2

Part 4 Chapter 3 Quotes

‘You can train any animal into any behaviour on cue if it’s a natural behaviour to begin with. Racism, sexism, speciesism – all natural human behaviours. They can be triggered any time by any unscrupulous yahoo with a pulpit. A child could do it.’ (Rosemary to Harlow’s boyfriend, Reg) Part 4 Chapter 3

Empathy is also a natural human behaviour, and natural to chimps as well. (Rosemary) Part 4 Chapter 3

Part 4 Chapter 4 Quote

In my head, I finished the grid I’d started in the holding cell, the grid of what was missing and for how long. One, my bicycle; two, Madame Defarge; three, the journals; four, my brother.
Five: Fern. (Rosemary) Part 4 Chapter 4

Part 4 Chapter 5 Quote

‘I hardly knew you,’ I said. ‘And now you’re leaving me’. Her uncanny valley eyes stared up. She snapped her reptilian jaw. I made her wrap her arms around my neck as if she were also sorry. Her knitting needles poked my ear sharply until I shifted her.
‘Please don’t go,’ she said. Or maybe I said that. It was definitely one of us. (Rosemary and Madame Defarge) Part 4 Chapter 5

Part 4 Chapter 6 Quote

Sometime between my salad and crepe, I’d stopped wanting to be Harlow’s friend and started wishing I’d never met her. I felt bad about this – my jealousy, my anger – what with her saying all those nice things about me. Though I was pretty sure she didn’t like me nearly as well as she was claiming. (Rosemary, on Harlow talking with Lowell) Part 4 Chapter 6

Part 4 Chapter 7 Quotes

‘Look at how much I’m talking!’ he’d said, at some point during the evening. ‘I’m more like you than you are tonight…’ (Lowell to Rosemary) Part 4 Chapter 7

It seemed to Lowell that psychological studies of nonhuman animals were mostly cumbersome, convoluted, and downright peculiar. They taught us little about the animals but lots about the researchers who designed and ran them. Part 4 Chapter 7

I recognised Fern right away, he said, but not because I actually recognised her in the dim light, just because she was the youngest and smallest. (Lowell, about Fern in the cage) Part 4 Chapter 7

I could smell the excitement on her, a smell sort of like burned hair. She hadn’t had a bubble bath in a long time or a good tooth-brushing. She kind of stank, to be honest. (Lowell, about Fern in the cage) Part 4 Chapter 7

The other man stayed with Fern. He stood over with the cattle prod. I think he was protecting her from the other chimps, but I know she saw it as a threat. Her signing got sloppy. Despairing. (Lowell, about Fern in the cage) Part 4 Chapter 7

Part 5 Chapter 1 Quotes

‘She’s already making up signs of her own. Tree dress for leaves. Big soup for the bathtub. Smart as can be. …
‘Just like her mom,’ Lowell said. (on Hazel learning to sign from mother Fern) Part 5 Chapter 1

But as far back as I could remember, I’d also been jealous of her. I’d been jealous again, not fifteen minutes past, learning that Lowell’s visit had been for her and not me. But maybe this was the way sisters usually felt about each other. (Rosemary jealous of Fern) 5 Chapter 1

Part 5 Chapter 2 Quote

‘I’m seeing so much of America today …’ (Lowell’s catchphrase on learning new things in society that opposed his values) Part 5 Chapter 2

Part 5 Chapter 3 Quote

‘The world runs,’ Lowell said, ‘on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look.’ Part 5 Chapter 3

Part 5 Chapter 4 Quote

But I was still angry with her. Harlow, I felt, had no right to such grief, no real claim on Lowell. She’d known him for what? Fifteen minutes? I’d loved him for twenty-two years and missed him most of that time. Harlow should be taking care of me, is how I saw it. (Rosemary, on Harlow sick and missing Lowell) Part 5 Chapter 4

Part 5 Chapter 5 Quote

Poor Mom and Dad. All three of their children incarcerated at once; that really was bad luck. Part 5 Chapter 5

Part 5 Chapter 6 Quote

And that’s when I told.
And that’s when I got sent to my grandparents.
And that’s when Fern got sent away. (Rosemary) Part 5 Chapter 6

Part 5 Chapter 7 Quote

Weeks later, I asked Todd if we were friends. ‘Rosie! We’ve been friends for years,’ he said. He sounded hurt. Part 5 Chapter 7

Part 6 Chapter 1 Quotes

… 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. (Rosemary realising she had not created a false memory) Part 6 Chapter 1

So this is what I should have said to Mom; this is what I meant to say –
That there was something inside Fern I didn’t know.
That I didn’t know her in the way I’d always thought I did.
That Fern had secrets and not the good kind.
Instead I’d said I was afraid of her. That was the lie that got her sent away. That was the moment I made my parents choose between us. (Rosemary) Part 6 Chapter 1

Part 6 Chapter 2 Quotes

‘The secret to a good life,’ he told me once, ‘is to bring you’re a game to everything you do. Even if all you’re doing is taking out the garbage, you do that with excellence.’ (Ezra) Part 6 Chapter 2

‘But it’s just not like her,’ her father said over and over again … ‘Breaking in somewhere. Taking things …’ (Harlow’s parents on finding out Harlow had been trying to release monkeys from their cages with Ezra) Part 6 Chapter 2

Part 6 Chapter 3 Quotes

‘When a guy takes a girl …’ I hadn’t know it was a date. (Rosemary, going out with Reg, still learning social cues) Part 6 Chapter 3

Next time, I’ll put things right between my father and me. Next time, I’ll give Mom the fair share of blame for Fern that her collapse forestalled this time around. I won’t drop the whole of it onto Dad next time. (Rosemary) Part 6 Chapter 3

Part 6 Chapter 4 Quote

Mom’s notebooks are not scientific journals. Although they do include a graph or two, some numbers and some measurements, they’re not the dispassionate, careful observations from the field that I expected.
They appeared to be our baby books. (Rosemary) Part 6 Chapter 4

Part 6 Chapter 5 Quotes

I told your dad I didn’t see how the two of you could be compared when your world had been so gentle and hers so cruel. But there was no turning back by then. I was deeply in love with you both. (Rosemary’s mother to Rosemary about Fern) Part 6 Chapter 5

‘… I worried about what being Fern’s sister would do to you, but I wanted it for you, too.’… ‘I wanted you to have an extraordinary life,’ she said. (Rosemary’s mother to Rosemary) Part 6 Chapter 5

‘Where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail,’ I said. (Rosemary remembers her father’s words) Part 6 Chapter 5

Part 4 Chapter 6 Quote

Once upon a time, there was a happy family – a mother, a father, a son, and two daughters. The older daughter was smart and agile, covered in hair and very beautiful. The younger was ordinary. Still, their parents and their brother loved them both. (Madame Defarge performing Fern’s life) Part 6 Chapter 6

Part 6 Chapter 7 Quote

My brother and my sister have led extraordinary lives, but I wasn’t there, and I can’t tell you that part. I’ve stuck here to the part I can tell, the part that’s mine, and still everything I’ve said is all about them, a chalk outline around the space where they should have been. Three children, one story.
The only reason I’m the one telling it is that I’m the one not currently in a cage. Part 6 Chapter 7