We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

The final quote from “A Report to an Academy” refers to the zoological garden as “a new barred cage.” The protagonist avoids going there at all costs.

After Fern left, the Cookes started to travel every Christmas. After Lowell left, this tradition, and holidays as a whole, almost completely stopped. Rosemary decides to bring up seeing Lowell to her family after Christmas Day has passed. They have Christmas dinner at the Cooke grandparents’ house. Rosemary gets cramps and lies down in the same room that she lived in the summer her parents sent her away. She starts to think about her memory of Fern and the kitten, wondering if it is real or not. If she made the story up, she thinks, that was good reason for Lowell to hate her.

Lying in bed, Rosemary tries to access her younger self. She remembers extreme guilt for stealing the kitten, for pretending that it had all been Fern’s fault, and for telling on Fern after promising Lowell she wouldn’t. She feels grief for making her brother hate her and for being sent to her grandparents’. Rosemary forces herself to think through the memory again.