Following Ezra (12 page)

“Ez, did you touch something?”

He doesn’t respond.

“Ezzy, what did you do?” I ask.

He finally answers: “I touched that box.”

“Why did you do that?” I ask.

He says four words: “It said, ‘Pull Down.’ ”

I gaze up the block at the fire engine and its flashing light, the adults and kids lingering around the doorway balancing paper plates loaded with food and clutching cups of orange juice. And I look at Ezra, at once feeling exasperated and tickled, simultaneously experiencing bewilderment and awe. At the end of this long day of fasting and family, of prayer and reflection, I have stumbled upon a revelation: My son can read.

 

 

He can, but will he? Just as he did in preschool, Ezra often keeps a book nearby as a sort of talisman. When he begins riding a bus to school, he lugs along books to provide comfort and ease the transition between home and classroom. He insists on carrying a different one each day. Occasionally, he breaks his own rule inadvertently, realizing when he is a stride or two out the door that the book in his hands is a repeat from yesterday or last week, and then quickly turning around to rush back inside.

“I need a book!” he says, slight panic in his voice.

I try handing him whatever I come across near the door—a picture book, a volume of animal photos, a silly pop-up book.

“No, I need a
different
book,” he fusses.

“It’s all right,” I assure him. “Take this one.”

“No!” he groans, rushing past me, toward his bedroom. He disappears and I shrug and signal apologies to the bus driver. Ezra emerges with the book he wants—there is a method to all of this, an order that only he understands. From the doorway I watch him run toward the bus with his red backpack over his shoulder and
Dr. Seuss’s ABC
under his arm.

Some children need their ragged blankets nearby; some, their favorite Barbies. Ezra—who once favored a plastic crocodile—now requires a book.

Yet as he gets older, the comfort he finds in the physical objects is matched by the discomfort he seems to encounter in his struggles to read. Ezra can readily decipher the combinations of letters, but his understanding of the words and ideas seems to lag.

On a doctor’s advice, we enroll him in an expensive remedial program aimed at children who share his difficulty connecting words and meaning. It’s an intensive one-on-one approach, with four-hour days, a fresh tutor arriving every sixty minutes to implore Ezra repeatedly to create mental images to match the words in selected passages.

“What are you picturing for
iceberg
?” a tutor asks.

“What are you picturing for
car
?” inquires another.

“Tell me what you’re picturing for
baking
,” says a third.

Ezra, miserable, begins repeatedly posing a question of his own: “When are they going to stop asking me what I’m picturing?”

To his relief, with little apparent evidence of improvement, we pull him out of the program.

Finally, in the third grade, he gets the teacher he needs. That year, Shawn has arranged for a sabbatical, taking a leave from her duties at the university where she teaches. Her plan is to focus on some research and writing projects she has long hoped to accomplish. That November, she attends an autism conference in Washington, D.C., where she feels overwhelmed and inspired by meeting other parents and by what she learns at session after session about therapies, education, and medical developments. Back home, Ezra has been floundering and unhappy in his public school special-education class. From her hotel room, she phones to report an epiphany.

“I looked at my date book, and I have no appointments in the month of December—nothing,” she tells me.

“And?” I ask.

“And I think I should homeschool Ezra.”

“For December?”

“For the rest of the school year,” she says. “He needs us.”

It’s a radical idea, but it immediately makes so much sense that I offer little resistance. Ezra’s school situation isn’t working, and Shawn is a natural and gifted educator with time suddenly on her hands.

I watch as she patches together a curriculum and a team, securing a tutor to help with math and science, and adding sessions with a gym teacher who already knows Ezra. Shawn focuses on literacy, encouraging our son to read aloud with her every day. Often this provokes a tantrum, with Ezra moaning and dramatically sobbing, throwing his body to the floor in protest when she tries to slide next to him on the couch for him to read.

Part of the challenge is choosing the appropriate material. She has some luck with a series about a brother and sister whose tree house becomes a time machine, mysteriously transporting them to the Civil War era or ancient Egypt. They take turns reading. The simple prose and illustrations hold his attention, at least momentarily, and Shawn writes questions for Ezra to answer after each short chapter to demonstrate his comprehension.

After some initial promise, though, her reception isn’t much better than what the tutors were getting.

“No more tree house!” he protests.

“Well, what do you want to read?” she asks.

He doesn’t answer, but later that day, he is flipping through a children’s book called
Whiteblack the Penguin Sees the World
, a posthumously published storybook by the authors of the Curious George series. Seizing on his interest, Shawn makes that the next day’s reading material. Somehow—maybe because the illustrations are so plentiful and most of the characters are animals—Ezra is willing to read the book without hesitation or protest. Snuggling on the sofa next to his mother, he reads about Whiteblack, a penguin who has run out of stories to tell and who embarks on a series of adventures aimed at finding new material. Of course, everything goes wrong: His canoe hits an iceberg; he falls asleep in a cannon and gets shot into the sea; he gets tangled in a fishing net.

Ezra is enthralled by the misadventures.

“What do you notice about Whiteblack?” Shawn asks.

“He makes a lot of mistakes,” Ezra says.

“That’s right!” says Shawn. “Why does he do that?”

“Why does he do that?” Ezra repeats.

“Why do you think he does that?”

“He’s different from everybody.”

“Yes,” she says. “Do you know anybody who’s a little bit different like that?”

“I’m different,” he says.

“How are you different?”

“Because I’m a different age from Ami and Noam.”

“That’s true. Is there anything else different about you?”

Suddenly, the whole idea of being different seems intriguing to Ezra—and much more appealing than the siblings traveling in a tree house to meet Abraham Lincoln. He has discovered some version of himself in a book—and now he seems more motivated to read. Instead of forcing books on him, Shawn follows his lead and finds books on the theme of feeling different. She doesn’t worry about grade level or difficulty. She wants Ezra to find himself in the books—to discover stories that reflect his own experience.

He reads about Elmer, an elephant with a multicolored, patchwork hide who tries to fit in with the herd of gray elephants, then is finally celebrated for his uniqueness. He reads about Curious George, the little monkey whose inquisitiveness (not to mention his inability to consider the consequences of his actions) leads him on unexpected adventures and lands him in trouble again and again. He reads about Ferdinand, the bull who opts to lie in a field, smelling flowers while the other bulls dream of fighting a matador; and about Stellaluna, a fruit bat trying to fit in with a nest of birds. As they read the books, Shawn doesn’t pester Ezra with questions about what he’s picturing. She knows that part of what he sees as he reads about these misfits who never quite blend in with the group is himself.

Over time Ezra’s magnetic attraction to books only increases, as he uses his animal encyclopedias and his growing collection of books about animation to accumulate storehouses of data. It’s clear that he can read and absorb fairly sophisticated information about mammals or
Star Wars
or
The Simpsons
. What is difficult to know is whether he has developed the ability to read an ordinary story. Or perhaps the real problem is simply that he hasn’t figured out how to communicate to others what he perceives.

 

 

It’s a chilly April morning when Ezra is eleven, several years after his seven months of homeschooling with his mother. Shawn and I visit his school for a conference with his sixth-grade instructor. When Shawn asks Ms. Williams—young, reserved—how Ezra is doing in English, she shrugs and then describes how, in reading group, he reads aloud with great expression and fluency.

“And does he know what he’s reading?” Shawn asks.

Ms. Williams shrugs again and says nothing. Then she pulls out a manila folder and shows us a series of reading quizzes.

“It’s hard to tell,” she finally says.

Shawn and I flip through the loose pages, most riddled with question marks Ezra has penciled in after questions. On some pages he has sketched Bart Simpson or SpongeBob. Elsewhere he has penciled in cartoons of giraffes and lions.

“If he’s understanding,” the teacher says, “it doesn’t show up on the tests.”

 

 

Several months after that, it’s a Friday evening, near the end of a lengthy dinner our family has shared with Shawn’s parents, Del and Sandey. Most of the family—Shawn, the other boys, and her father—have left our dining room to stretch out in the family room. Ezra lingers at the table, lured by a Tofutti Cutie and some grapes—to sit with his grandmother and me. We are trying to ask him about his week in school, and he avoids the question—as usual—but then says something I don’t quite hear.

“Did you say ‘Amelia Earhart’?” I ask.

“Yeah, Amelia Earhart,” he says. “First woman of flight.”

“How do you know about Amelia Earhart?” I ask.

“Amelia Earhart flew around the world,” Ezra says.

“She did.”

“Yeah, and her navigator was Fred Noonan.”

I listen.

“Then her plane went down near Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean, yeah,” he continues.

“Where did you hear about that?” Sandey asks.

“That was in ‘First Lady of Flight,’” he says.

“Where was—”

“That was the first story in the theme ‘What Really Happened?’” He’s talking about the reading textbook his class has been reading all year—the one the teacher wasn’t sure he understood. Before I can ask him anything else, Ezra keeps talking. “And then the story ‘Passage to Freedom.’ That was in the theme ‘Courage.’” He begins detailing the characters in the story about Mr. Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat who saved Polish Jews during the Holocaust.

Sandey and I listen to Ezra, a smile on his face, review aloud the details of every story his sixth-grade class has read—the title, the characters, which section of the textbook contains which stories. He has been reading all along. I think of how Ms. Williams shrugged in the conference, how she told us she simply didn’t know how much Ezra understood. I think of the test sheets with the blank spaces and the scrawled question marks and doodled cartoons. All this time, Ezra has been taking it all in—the characters, the stories, the themes, and the details. He just didn’t know how to show that—or, more likely, just didn’t feel like it. I wonder how much my son has been stowing away without being able to share what he was absorbing. I pause to ponder what potential Ezra has that he has been keeping hidden all this time.

And I think of that afternoon many years earlier, when Ezra sat on the floor paging through a book that Elana told us he was reading. I am beginning to think she was right.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I’m walking with Ezra in Westwood—though if I had thought the plan through even a tiny bit more, I probably wouldn’t be doing this at all. It’s a warm spring evening. Ezra is eight, and we’re on our way to a store called Aahs!!, a gift shop near the UCLA campus. The store’s name sounds like “Oz,” as in the Wizard, but it’s spelled A-A-H-S, with two exclamation marks for emphasis. As in “oohs and aahs,” indicating, perhaps, that it’s a place one might find overwhelming, or where you might come to a realization.

For Ezra, it will be the former; for me, the latter.

Aahs!! is a gift shop in the way that Las Vegas is a town—a novelty store with psychedelic Day-Glo posters in the back and Halloween costumes year-round and shelves piled high with whoopee cushions. I should have known that for Ezra to encounter all of those doodads in one place might trigger disaster.

At this point, he has shown a not yet unhealthy fascination with
The Simpsons
, a sharp contrast to the Nickelodeon and Disney fare he has generally favored. His interest was kindled by an old foot-tall plastic Bart Simpson among the wooden blocks and Beanie Babies crowding our playroom bins. Ezra started spotting that same face, with its bulging eyes and serrated flattop, around town on billboards, and then in a comic book we had bought for Ami. Passing notice has escalated to intrigue, fascination, and finally something like obsession. He has never viewed a single episode on TV, but the Simpsons—simple, bright, yellow, distinctive, ubiquitous—are natural objects for Ezra’s attention. Day and night, he spouts information, data, and questions about Bart and his compadres.

This is the closest his taste has ever come to my own. I was a
Simpsons
fan from early on—partly because I had interviewed the show’s creator in the program’s first days, learning in the process that we had attended the same schools as children. This is a first: Not only is Ezra’s taste veering toward what other eight-year-olds find appealing, but it is intersecting with my own. As a reward for good behavior, I have offered to take Ezra on a father-son shopping quest. The goal: procuring a small
Simpsons
toy.