Bad Animals (22 page)

ABA therapy is winding down in our house. Cynthia and I are talking more, instead, about Seymour Gutstein's book on RDI or Relationship Development Intervention, the book I promised her and Harriet I would read. This is where these theories about static and dynamic conversation come from. This shift in emphasis from ABA to RDI is an indication, among other things, that Jonah's progress in social interaction has not been what any of us hoped it would be by now. RDI, Cynthia points out, offers more possibilities for improvement in his ability to make friends and conversation.

In the other room, I hear Cynthia and Jonah discussing a trip we took a few years ago to Pare Safari, a drive-through wildlife park about an hour south of Montreal. Jonah seizes the opportunity to ask his mother to answer a question about the difference between zebras and zebus. Zebras, we were warned before we entered the park, were bad-tempered and untrustworthy. “Remember, Jonah,” Cynthia says, “they told us not to feed them because they bite.” Zebus are just fancy cattle; they have that show-offy hump, but they are gentle and yielding and predictable. “Was Jonah two or three when we went to Pare Safari?” Cynthia shouts to me from the therapy room. “Remember,” she goes on, her attention back on Jonah now, “a zebra stuck his head inside the car window looking for food and slobbered all over Daddy before he could roll up the window. And Daddy freaked out. It's lucky you were there, Jonah, to tell him not to be scared. To tell him that zebras are herbivores.”

“Herbivores don't eat people, they eat plants,” Jonah says, sounding a little like he's on a game show.

“That zebra was still planning to take a bite out of me ... for sure,” I pitch in, turning off the water and shouting out my recollection from the kitchen. “You know why? Because I'm sweet; that's why your mother calls me sweetheart all the time. Am I right?” I'm probably a little too anxious to be acknowledged. Neither Cynthia nor Jonah reply, though I can imagine the look that passes between them, the one that says,
There he goes again, misremembering, making stuff up, on a tangent, missing the point, making it all about him.
Frankly, I don't remember this specific incident but I have come to accept the fact that most of the reminiscing my wife and son will do for this project and undoubtedly for upcoming ones will, disproportionately and inevitably, focus on the times I may have either freaked out or was, in their opinion, on the verge of freaking out. I'm not complaining. I'm acquainted with the unreliable nature of memory; I understand the appeal of creative non-fiction. I know every story needs a fall guy. I'm not only ideal for the part, I embrace it.

“Go ask Daddy,” I hear Cynthia say. I turn, and the two of them are standing by the door. Cynthia nudges Jonah.

“Daddy?”

“Jonesy?”

“When can I be a baby again?” he says.

“He wants to read animal alphabet books,” Cynthia says. “But what did we decide?” I get it: this public service announcement is intended for both of us.

“I can't,” Jonah says.

“Why?”

“Because I'm eleven now and you can only read animal alphabet books when you're a baby?” Like most kids, Jonah has a way of making every statement sound like a question. Like most kids, he pursues loopholes with the vigour of a rookie defence attorney in a John Grisham novel. However, unlike other kids, neurotypical kids, he's not always good at concealing this fact. He is an open book, albeit one that sometimes seems to be printed in an illegible font—wing-dings. Being a literalist is a common feature of autism. A friend told me a story once about driving along a country road in the winter with her niece, who was three at the time, and as they got to an icy patch, my friend shouted out to the backseat, “Hold on to your hat!” A moment later she glanced in the rear-view mirror and could see her niece, looking earnest and determined, clutching her winter hat with both hands. Children learn, eventually, to understand that this kind of figure of speech is not meant to be taken literally. Jonah has yet to learn this. He doesn't get sarcasm either. Sometimes, I will say something ludicrous on purpose, like we're going to eat a hippo for lunch, and he will just look at me like I'm crazy. I prompt him to say something like, “Yeah, right,” and he does, but he gets the tone of this rejoinder all wrong. He says it like he means it instead of like he's challenging or mocking me. Still, I keep at it. I keep saying the dumbest things I can think of. This is a technique I picked up from keeping my promise and finally reading that RDI book. The idea is for the parent to be deliberately obtuse, thereby giving the child the chance to think for himself and, ultimately, be the one in the know. Deliberate obtuseness—the consensus is it's another role I was born to play.

“That's right, Jonah,” Cynthia says. “Only babies or maybe toddlers read those kinds of alphabet books and ...”

“And you can't go back in time,” Jonah says. He's been coached on this line, and as he says it I notice Cynthia is staring at me. I shrug, part apology, part excuse. She knows what I'm thinking, the same thing Jonah is:
Why the hell not?

“Daddy?”

“Jonesy.” A slyness sneaks into the corners of his handsome mouth, a Eureka smile. He's found his technicality, his loophole.

“When,” he asks, “can I be a toddler again?”

ONCE JONAH IS IN BED, Cynthia takes me on a tour of the timeline. We sit on the floor and study the long, narrow piece of brown construction paper that extends from one wall of Jonah's therapy room to the other. That makes it about eight feet long—a work in progress, according to Cynthia. The years of the decade—from just before Jonah's birth to the present, to the most recent occurrence, specifically Daddy talking nonsense in the kitchen about man-eating zebras—are written on the bottom of the paper. There are a couple of pairs of scissors and tubes of glue at the corners, keeping the unwieldy sheet from curling. We are also surrounded by photo albums, which Cynthia and Jonah were rummaging through a couple of hours earlier, looking for old pictures to place in the appropriate year. Like 1998.

“I was so big,” Cynthia says. She's flipping through a series of photos of herself pregnant. “This was just before we went to the hospital. It had to be. Remember when ...”

“I remember.” I struggle to my feet ahead of Cynthia and then hold out my hand to help her up. We are old parents. We have become old fast. I can see it in the photos—how we've aged. I had a lot more hair a decade ago. My beard was black. I smiled easily. If I was worried back then about what the future held, I can't see it in these photographs.

“Look at me, at that belly,” Cynthia says.

“You look
sexy”
I say as I put my arms around her from behind, nuzzling her neck.

“I look like a hippo.”

“You were aglow.”

“A glowing hippo. Did you see this?” Cynthia says, leaning down to retrieve two blank panels from the floor. One has the words “bar mitzvah” on it, the other “high school”; Jonah has written both in his most legible handwriting. “We're going to attach this next time. It's a way of talking about the future. It's a good sign. You know, it's normal for him to talk about what he wants to be when he grows up. Like how he wants to drive a truck. He didn't used to. Remember, just a couple of years ago if you asked him the same question, he'd say he wanted to be a giraffe. Remember, I said I was worried about how he was going to make ends meet. Oh, come on, that's funny.”

“I thought we weren't talking about the future.”

“You and I aren't. Jonah and I are. You and he might also. Has he asked you what ‘grounded' means?”

“A few times, I'd say, a few hundred times.”

“Right, I know. But it's a good thing overall. He's starting to show an interest in who he was and who he will be. How did you explain ‘grounded'?”

“I told him only teenagers get grounded, so as soon as he turns thirteen he's grounded. He seemed to find that funny.”

Cynthia isn't saying so but I know she has big plans for the timeline. Her idea is to go on extending it as a kind of running commentary on Jonah's life. Autism tends to blur temporal concepts like tense and time and context. This is a concrete way to highlight these distinctions for Jonah. Cynthia's goal in working on the timeline is to solidify Jonah's emerging sense of himself as a person subject to change, a person with a past and a future. The idea is also to help him understand that he is an actor in the world, but he is not the only actor—that he has a history he shares with other people. I don't say so, but the timeline worries me. I wonder if Jonah should be dwelling on the past, if it does him any good, if it does any of us any good.

“It's been nice working on this. I mean we're having a good time, the two of us,” Cynthia adds. Among other things, the timeline is also Cynthia's way of setting a good example for me, yet again.
Sweetheart, the kid can be fun, really, he can. Just give him a chance.

“What's happening with the book?” she asks. This seems like a non sequitur, but I fill her in on my plan—my outline, you could call it. First, apply for yet another grant. Second, fashion a suitable chapter from out of the collection of half-finished and almost-finished chapters I already have. Third, look for an agent. Fourth, look for a publisher. Fifth, let Cynthia read what I've written so far.

“And there's something new,” I say, a little reluctantly. “I'm also considering applying to a literary journalism workshop at Banff. But that would mean being away for a month. What do you ...”

“I meant the other book, the one you and Jonah are supposed to be working on—the sequel to
Bad Animals.”

As if on cue, Jonah wanders into his therapy room in his
Madagascar
pyjamas and immediately gets down on the floor with the timeline. He finds a photo of himself at a playground. He's probably two. 2000. The year the world was supposed to implode as everyone's computer crashed. The year we were all doomed, not just some of us. Funny, I don't remember feeling doomed. In the photo, Cynthia and I are both hugging Jonah, kissing opposite chubby cheeks.

“Panini,” Cynthia says. “Remember. We used to squish you and say panini when you were a baby.”

“Again,” Jonah says as he stands. Cynthia looks at me and we squeeze Jonah between us. He likes the pressure. This is a common feature of autism. Less common is Jonah's unusually affectionate nature. Which is, again, why they call it a spectrum: you never know what you're going to get. Still, we shouldn't be indulging in this kind of extended snuggling. He's eleven; he's too old, as we keep telling him when it comes to watching
Sesame Street
or reading animal alphabet books. Then again, this is one of the advantages, “joys,” I'm tempted to say, of autism. You get to hold on to the past a little longer, a little more fiercely, than other parents. The old cliche about kids growing up too fast doesn't quite apply. Jonah isn't growing up fast enough.

“Did you see this?” Cynthia asks Jonah and shows him the photo she and I were just looking at.

“What was I then? A toddler or a baby?” he asks, studying the unfamiliar image of his pregnant mother.

“You weren't even born yet,” Cynthia says. “But you were getting ready to change our lives forever. We were getting ready to love you forever like in the Robert Munsch book.”

“What comes after forever?” I ask Jonah.

He thinks about this for a while and then gives me the silly answer he knows I'm expecting, the one I have set him up for. Sometimes I know my son. Sometimes I know exactly what he's going to say and I know he won't disappoint.

“Five Ever.”

“Very funny. Now it's time for bed,” I pick up Jonah and realize immediately I shouldn't have. My lower back is on fire. How come I keep forgetting? He's getting heavier and I am getting older.

There is neurological evidence that women become measurably smarter once they've given birth. Susan Pinker, a Montreal psychologist, points this out in her book
The Sexual Paradox: Extreme Men, Gifted Women and the Real Gender Gap.
From an evolutionary point of view, this makes perfect sense. It's nature bumping up the odds on our survival, endowing the person most responsible for protecting us in our baby years with an enhanced capacity to do so. Men, on the other hand, are nine months clear of having done everything nature requires of them once a baby is born. (Unless, that is, you intend to hop into the birthing bathtub with a catcher's mitt.) We are, after conception, hanging around, pretending to be useful.

And while Pinker doesn't come right out and say men get stupider when they become fathers, it stands to reason they do. “Stud, dud, thud,” is the punchline one anthropologist, quoted in
The Sexual Paradox,
uses to sum up a man's crucial but abbreviated role in the continuation of the species. My father had a running gag he would drag out whenever he was watching some old movie on television and the hero would do something that would cause his child to look at him admiringly. Like the numerous scenes in
To Kill a Mockingbird
where Scout and Jim gaze at Atticus Finch, stolidly played by Gregory Peck, with unambiguous pride. It was at moments like these that my father would blurt out: “Everybody loves their father.” The joke was in what he was omitting, of course: he meant for us to add “everybody else.” Often, he'd make this remark to no one in particular. He'd say it even if my sisters or I weren't in the same room with him, even if we weren't watching the same movie. It was intended, first of all, to get a laugh. But while it may be true that a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, a joke is never just a joke. My father was also fishing for compliments. He was no Atticus Finch, he knew that. But then, who is? This question was at the heart of his running gag, his ongoing plea for attention, for a little more respect.
Come on,
I imagined him saying,
cut the old man some slack.
Too often, I didn't. Too often, I was openly disappointed in him.

After my mother died, he and I argued all the time. In large part, this was because my mother was no longer around to prevent us from arguing. It wasn't until after she died that I began to understand how often she had served as a buffer between my father and my sisters and me. She'd kept us from seeing how insecure he was, how paralyzed by bitterness. My father had contracted polio when he was thirteen and had been labelled, in the parlance of his day, a cripple. For “a cripple,” he accomplished a lot—he married, started his own business, bought a house in the suburbs, and raised a family, all things no one, himself included, ever expected him to do. But while he managed to overcome his physical handicap, his self-pity never diminished. It just lay dormant. The unspoken question—why me?—was always present. He always believed, like Job or Stanley Elkin, that he was owed an explanation. He knew he could have been so much more. He could have done so much more. My mother could have taken this the wrong way, but she didn't. Instead, she reassured him about his accomplishments. She was a mitigating factor in his life, and after she died, I'm guessing he expected my sisters and me to fill a similar role, to reassure him, perhaps remind him the way only my mother could, that everything was going to turn out all right, as it once had. We were in no position to help. She had left us, too. At that particular moment, we certainly didn't believe that everything was going to be all right. If anything, I resented him for not being able to say something wise and dignified to alleviate my pain, the kind of thing you'd expect from Atticus Finch. I assumed that was a father's job: to be strong, transcendent. To rise above his own hurt for his children's sake. Because if that wasn't his job, well, then, what was? What I didn't know at the time was that my mother's death was more than he could handle. It was as simple as that. This is all guesswork and speculation now. If he were here, I could ask him: Am I getting it all wrong? Am I getting you all wrong?

Fathers are, it turns out, easy targets—fish in a barrel. I'm thinking about all the books I've read in recent years that, put together, constitute a kind of literary sub-genre—call it the disappointing-dad memoir. Well-known examples include Geoffrey Wolff's
The Duke of Deception,
about his father's life as a con man; Frank McCourt's
Angela's Ashes,
about his drunken, dissolute father; and Kathryn Harrison's
The Kiss,
about her sexually abusive father. For a writer, fatherhood can be an irresistible subject, one you can't help returning to. I've written about my father repeatedly, more than I ever intended to, and each time I've tried to couch my version of his story, our story, in sentimental anecdotes. But something darker invariably creeps in, unintended, as it probably has here, something about my father's extraordinary capacity for self-pity and disappointment. I always end up blaming his chronic bad attitude on bad breaks—polio, financial struggles, the loss of my mother. But I wonder now if those are just convenient excuses for other flaws, if there was something else in his makeup at work, something in the makeup we share.

Past a certain point, fathers, alive or dead, have little or no influence on the theories their sons are bound to devise about them. I can only guess what Jonah will think of me one day. In the last couple of months, I've been spending more and more time in the basement, so it may turn out he will have this book to investigate for examples, evidence of another man who couldn't quite cut it. Every son is entitled to their disappointing-dad memoir, so I am writing this on Jonah's behalf. Which raises another question: Will this book do us more harm than good?

JONAH'S SCHOOL YEAR IS almost over. There is less and less homework, as his teachers coast through June, getting a head start on their summer vacations. Jonah brought his report card home today for us to sign. And while other kids would have had a song and dance ready to explain why they got a D in physical education—“I lost my running shoes”—Jonah is blithely indifferent to the contents. There's something admirable about this. I'm glad he somehow knows now what only growing up teaches the rest of us—that we fretted over our grades for nothing, that there will come a time when no one will care how you did in grade five or grade ten or, for that matter, grad school. Still, Cynthia and I make a point of sitting Jonah down to read him what is, all things considered, pretty good news. He's been promoted to grade six, first of all. There have been improvements in French and math; his work habits are getting better; his computational skills are great; and he's a heck of a speller, or words to that effect.

“How about that?” Cynthia and I ask him in unison.

“Where are we having supper?” he asks in return.

“No supper tonight,” I say. “Your report card is much too good.” Jonah and Cynthia both stare at me, at which point I whisper in Jonah's ear, “Yeah ...”

“Yeah, right!” he says, picking up his cue.

“Sarcasm 101,” I say to Cynthia. “See he's getting it. You won't learn that in school.”

“Don't be silly, Daddy,” Cynthia says, reassuring him and shaking her head at me. “We're going to celebrate, right?”

So we do. We go out for pizza and ice cream. Of course, there are, despite the reassuringly average grades on his report card, raised flags we ignore, at least for tonight. Like Jonah's persistent problems with reading comprehension and problem-solving. I also find myself puzzled by a “general comment” tacked on to the final section by Jonah's homeroom teacher. What exactly does she mean by this: “I continue to encourage you to always demonstrate dedication and
hard effort
in your
everyday challenges.
Demonstrating this will result in a successful and
rewarding life.”
The italics, incidentally, are mine.

“This doesn't sound odd to you?” I ask Cynthia after we're home and Jonah's in bed. “I mean, ‘everyday challenges.'”

“Do you really think she's being sarcastic? His grade five teacher?”

“All right, tone deaf.”

“You know you're over-analyzing this. Don't you think she says more or less the same thing to everyone?”

“No. This is a weird comment, trust me, I can read between the lines. It's my job.”

“Sweetheart, let it go. School is over. We made it. We survived.”

But I can't let it go. I read and reread the report card like it's a Michael Ondaatje novel. I'm pretty sure there's a hidden meaning waiting to be uncovered, but, for the life of me, I can't figure out what it is.

OUR REGULAR ABA TEAM MEETINGS are a thing of the past. That's because we're no longer a team. In the first few years after Jonah's diagnosis, his therapy schedule couldn't have been fuller. There were sessions after school every day as well as sessions on weekends and throughout the summer. We were always juggling timetables, double-booking, losing track of who was going to be where when. Now, there is really only The Consultant and Jessica to keep track of. The Consultant will be available to us if and when she is needed. Jessica will keep doing a couple of sessions a week with Jonah and look in on him at day camp now and then to see how he's managing. After the summer, we'll be seeing even less of them. Starting in September, we will have no one in his school to support him. Jonah will be on his own; we all will. Grade six is likely to be tough, and while this is a reality Cynthia and I have been dreading for years, we're also getting used to it. It's time to just be his parents again. And time for him to just be our kid.

“Its true, isn't it?” Cynthia says. “I almost feel like I'm on vacation.”

She is standing, arms crossed, in front of our bulletin board, staring at it. “That's the trouble with these things,” I say. “You have to watch them all the time.” I wave my hand in front of her face, but she doesn't blink. I know that look; it means everything is up for grabs. It means a fresh start.

Cynthia has taken down Jonah's first-term report card and pinned up his new one. She got me to stop obsessing about it by pointing out that not far from the homeroom teacher's enigmatic and, I'm still convinced, secret put-down, there is a smiley-face sticker. I'm not sure what that proves; still, I wonder how I missed it.

Our bulletin board is, incidentally, out of control. It's cluttered with a school year's worth of missed appointments and lapsed opportunities: September to June. There's Jonah's now out-of-date therapy timetable. There's also the usual blizzard of scrap paper, reminders about Wednesday swimming lessons Jonah no longer takes, a Thursday play date that either did or didn't happen a month ago. It may be my imagination, but we seem to get stood up a lot. That's the bad news. The good news: I am starting to take this fact in stride.
It's not a fact, sweetheart, it's paranoia.
I don't break down or rant or suspect conspiracies on the part of his classmates and their parents the way I once did. There's also a yellowing newspaper clipping about the link between autism and aging parents pinned to the bulletin board as well as other clippings about research into autism and environmental causes, autism and art, autism and Yoko Ono (recently named autism's first global ambassador), autism and the recovered child, autism and you name it. Alongside those clippings, there's Lovaas's letter and a pseudonymous letter to the editor Cynthia wrote, criticizing our local school board for not providing parents of special-needs children with proper and promised services. She's had a few of these missives published over the years, and I can't remember if this one is recent or goes back to the beginning of this school year or another. If, in other words, it did any good or still might. Jonah's contributions to the board include a riddle—a drawing of a sleepy lion with a caption under it that reads: “What do you call a jungle beast who's tired all the time and never tells the truth? A lying, lying lion.” Cynthia has also put up a recent school composition he wrote about the people who inspire him. He chose us—“My parents inspire me to go to school”—then ratted us out: “My parents also inspire me to watch TV because they watch a lot of TV.” There's also the obligatory
New Yorker
cartoon, which shows a couple in bed engaged in an intimate conversation. The caption reads “How to Drive Your Man Crazy in Bed.” The illustration is of a woman, up on one elbow, bombarding her sleep-deprived husband with questions. “Which is better, plasma or hi def?” and “Did you ever have this ringing in your ear?” And, of course, the inevitable: “Do you love me as much as you did when you married me?” I can't remember who's responsible for the cartoon: me or Cynthia. I had photocopies of “Welcome to Beirut” and “Holland Schmolland” up for a while, but they didn't last long. The bulletin board is no place for harsh reality. Who wants to be reminded of that every day before Cheerios?

Still, you can tell a lot about the current state of our household by keeping track of what comes and what goes. Earlier this year, for instance, you would have found lots of tips about the ABCs—ANTECEDENT, BEHAVIOUR, CONSEQUENCE—of ABA therapy. Now, there are just the words
STOP, THINK, CHOOSE
in bold block letters, on an oversized index card, which Jonah has decorated with a drawing of an eight-legged, eight-humped camel. There are directives to
CATCH HIM BEING GOOD.
And messages which require extra head-scratching on my part. Like: 80-20, which is, it comes to me eventually, a breakdown of how our daily interactions with our son should go. That's the ideal anyway. Eighty percent of the time we should be having or attempting to have a simple, ordinary conversation with him. Twenty percent of the time we are permitted to ask him direct questions and expect—in fact, insist on—direct answers.