Somebody Somewhere (8 page)

Generally the girlfriend was a nice person and she tried hard to be nice to me. But it was like putting a cockatoo in a cage with a finch; she was very present and I felt cornered and overwhelmed.

I needed order. I needed a system. I began compulsively to tidy and sort all of her cupboards and drawers. Things were out of control and I wanted everything in its place. Making everything line up, putting things in categories, and facing things in the same direction put me at peace—a symbol that a controllable world of guarantees is still possible in the agitating presence of chaos.

I thought of it as a favor. The girlfriend found my behavior very irritating. I sorted, cleaned, tidied, and ordered when she wasn't in the room. Her reaction made no sense. Didn't people think of this as being helpful?

My father came home to a frosty atmosphere. His girlfriend sat there with his daughter, the familiar stranger. I was glad to see him. He was familiar. He spoke my language and didn't impose.

“You'll have to do something about her,” my father's girlfriend complained.

“Wow, look what I've got,” my father announced to himself at the kitchen table when he finally got home. He had something in his hands that he turned around and around, focusing closely upon it. It was another of somebody's misplaced objects he'd recovered when cleaning. “Wow, what a ‘specialy,' ” he said out loud, to himself. I was eleven and in my second-to-last year of elementary school. I drifted over near to where he sat, my gaze wandering from one thing to another, occasionally landing seemingly at random upon the tiny object he turned in his hands, still unable to show even to myself that I was interested. I looked at him looking at the object and he caught me. “You know what this is?” he said to himself, his eyes fixed again upon the object. “It's a ‘specialy.' ” The connections—too direct—hurt. My gaze flitted again from thing to thing, settling occasionally
on a spot upon the wall. “No, you don't want to look at this. This is an Angus Buldarum Blackarse Brookenstein Specialy,” he said to himself. The words intrigued me. They weren't words in which the meaning had fallen out. They were words in which the meaning was still yet to be found. The meaning was in finding out what this thing was. I grabbed for it. His hand closed sharply around it. “It's mine,” he said matter-of-factly. “It's mine,” I said back, looking intently at his hand. “I'll let you look at it, but only for a second,” he said, opening his palm. I grabbed it and took off with it to my room. My father gave me lots of “specialies.”

My father came to me. “Can you please try to act normal?” he asked. “What have I done?” I asked.

He explained. “You've ignored her friends. You leave the room whenever she speaks to you. You go out and sleep in the car whenever we try to take you out with us…” His list went on and on. I could see no crime in any of it. According to my rules, I had been entirely unimposing. I had treated her with the same kind of respect I would have appreciated.

The request to “act normal” disturbed me. Mockingly I put on a disturbing minute-long medley of action replays of Carol smiles, poses, and witty lines. I dumped them upon my father to remind him of the monstrosity he had had a hand in creating, all in response to that huge request to “act normal.”

He was torn between understanding me and needing to impress his girlfriend. I no longer gave a damn about the empty value of trying to “act normal” and he was getting the message. He tried to explain how it was for her. I tried hard to hear with meaning and empathy.

I had some things to ask my father, too. I wanted to ask him why people had said I was autistic. I asked him whether I had been seen by any specialists when I was small. I knew my younger brother had. He had been diagnosed as severely hyperactive when he was three.

My father said he thought he remembered me being in a hospital for observation when I was about two but he wasn't sure. “You know what it was like,” he said. “When was I ever there?”

I had remembered tiny fragments of being in the hospital when I
was small: the olive green walls, the smell and the uniforms. Again and again and again in later years I had asked why I had been there. For years I had been told this was because I had been taken for tests. It was thought I had leukemia. I bruised when I was touched, my gums bled, my eyelashes fell out, and I was pale and sort of bluish. Jokingly I had been called “the Frog” because of my color. Sadly, looking back, I realized they were probably sitting about ignorantly joking about the results of a lack of oxygen.

I had given my book to my father to read—my life and theirs, spewed out to the world on two hundred pages. My father had been the first member of the family to read it. You could almost see him squirm.

He seemed relieved that I had left him with most of his privacy intact. I had written about the family only where it had been necessary to writing about my own life. There had been a knife edge to the seemingly blasé attitude of the family toward reading the book. They knew by experience that the only way I'd willingly hand over something personal was if I thought it totally unimportant to them. Otherwise I couldn't risk a potential discussion or response. Every reaction, good or bad, just led to a triggered stored reaction in me. I preferred the stability of self that came with relative indifference from others.

Since writing the book, things had changed. My pipeline to information suddenly seized up. Memories of family members went suddenly rusty and those that were left were polished up to look as good as the sitcom images I had emulated.

The father who had dared to allow me to believe I was sane now denied all accounts of what I had been told throughout my life. It had been okay to tell a nutcase daughter whom no one would believe, but if she was actually sane and people listened to her, what else did she remember?

Every day I hounded my father with a desert thirst for self-confirmation. He wanted the past to be past. He felt it only hurt, worried, and angered people to bring up the past. Everyone had different lives now. Why couldn't I just go and get on with mine?

Finally he told me what I was like as a child. When I was around
twelve months old, my legs were very thin and I couldn't support my weight properly. I began to walk at fourteen months but I couldn't seem to focus. I had had remarkable balance but continued to walk into walls and furniture well into my second year. “You used to take off across the living room,” he said, “and sure enough, every time you'd go straight into the wall and miss the doorway.” Perhaps it was me who walked into walls while that automatic someone could walk a piece of string or find a pin in the grass. Perhaps I might have got to my destination if not for a contradictory bombardment of mental messages from my out-of-control defenses.

“You screamed all the time,” he said. “But it was not like a baby crying. It sounded frightening, like you were sick and in pain.” Also, I had begun, at about the age of two, to cough compulsively, speckling the pillowcase with blood. People blamed it on domestic violence. From the time I was six months old, the house had shaken with rage and the smell of gin. A mother in need of help got none.

Professional assistance had come in the form of uppers and downers. In the sixties, male doctors generally weren't so good at counseling on women's issues. Community support came in the form of a non-English-speaking mother who accepted looking after the tot left in a stroller by her gate. She didn't have enough grasp of English to ask why or refuse.

Later there was the welfare center with bodies that walked back and forth past open doorways, and a frosted-glass window with crisscross wire running through it up above the cot. Later, community support came in the form of blue uniforms and closed blinds.

“The hospital kept you for two days I think,” said my father. He couldn't remember which one. “Where were you at the time?” I asked. “I don't remember,” he said. “That was over twenty years ago. I'm not even sure if it was you who was seen or Tom.”

Nevertheless he went on to tell me what he remembered.

The doctors had found that I was tensing up my stomach muscles and coughing against them over and over to the point of coughing blood. They had found nothing physically wrong but declared that I was doing this to myself and didn't seem to feel the pain. I was also tested for deafness.

Although I could memorize and mimic entire conversations with the accents of the people in them, I hadn't responded to being spoken to. My parents experimented with loud noises next to my ear without getting so much as a blink in response. They thought I was deaf. I was not. Unconvinced in spite of my huge vocabulary, my parents took me for tests again when I was nine. People had no concept of being “meaning-deaf.” In terms of the effect on one's life, it largely amounts to being deaf. One is robbed not of sound but of the meaning of sound.

“If you ever mention any of this, I'll deny ever having told you,” my father finally warned. “After all,” he went on smugly, “I remember nothing.”

I couldn't understand. Of all the injustice, this support for denial is possibly the only part I find unforgivable. What was the crime? Is guilt, shame, or responsibility so hard to bear? I looked at him as though he had been a passive co-persecutor. Refusing to acknowledge what was under his own nose erased the need or responsibility to do anything about it.

Denial was a family game. “Don't talk to her, she's fucking mad,” “she's a wongo,” “leave It alone, don't talk to It,” “look at the spastic”—The phrases play and replay like scratched records and I try to make sense of them. When I was growing up, the price of this had been to convince me almost daily that I was mad, bad, stupid, or not human at all. Though my father was not the perpetrator, I don't know of any action he took to stop it. Being too busy is no excuse. If his own leg was lying across the railway line as the train came, nothing could have made him too busy to move it.

I used to delight in my memory, which was acute, sometimes perfect to the finest detail. I could set off one part of it and it would run like a serial as I described the pictures, became the narrator of a silent movie, the verbal animator of a recorded soundtrack. This was part of what I considered conversing and I felt proud of it as a sign of ability and, therefore, intelligence. I had no “talking with,” but at least I had “talking at.” With almost every memory I had been told that this was not my own life that I was remembering. I was “sick
in the head.” I was “possessed.” I was to “shut my fucking mouth before it was shut for me.”

I came to mistrust my own perceptions, and the fear of expressing them as myself was intensified. At the same time, it had totally justified the compulsion to be everyone else except myself. The words came out even if I remained oblivious to them as “self-expression.” They were emitted more than spoken. They came from a stored mental repertoire of a “theory self,” a kind of composite mental script of the part played by someone people called Donna.

By the age of seventeen, when I had first gone to see a psychiatrist, it was as though I actually had no memories. Though my self was around somewhere, I had lived in a state of daily, if not hour-by-hour, spiritual suicide and rebirth.

Each day was unconnected from the last except for my serial memory. Even this could only safely continue to remain if all of my memories were thought of as dreams. Here, there was no future and no need for real dreaming. In the company of others there was only the moment.

When this first psychiatrist had wanted me to speak about my memories (and Freudians are inclined to take this angle), it seemed to me a bizarre and dangerous request. Some months into our appointments, it had been finally confirmed that these were not dreams, but memories and that the memories were my own, whoever I was. I looked at my father. No, for this, I could not forgive.

“Is there anyone else in the family like me?” I asked him. My father smiled to himself. “There is?” I prompted. “Yes, there is,” he replied, a bit embarrassed. “You have a cousin who was a bit like you. She hardly spoke and hid behind her hand till she was about eight.”

My father had been fifteen when he babysat his sister's children. My cousin was one of the youngest of the seven and stood out from all the others.

“Why didn't you ever tell me?” I asked. “Your mother would have said it was to do with my family,” he replied. “Do you think it is something in your side of the family?” I asked. “No,” he snapped quickly. “Her mother used to bash her. That makes 'em like that.”

“It's not true,” I said to him. “There are children like this born into families who never lay a hand on them, and children who are not like this who have been abused just as bad.” “Anyway,” he went on, “the abuse caused it.”

Easy for him to say, I thought. His role as father had barely extended beyond bringing in the money to support us and remembering our names and faces.

The outdated idea that abuse causes autism came from a time when most men had little to do with the day-to-day care of children, and a woman's place was thought to be in the home. It was a time when children's problems were blamed on upbringing before genetics (for which fathers are half responsible). It was a time of the blame-the-mother syndrome.

There were victims of this syndrome. But I think most of them were mothers. Autistic children probably suffered indirectly from the effects of societal ignorance and lack of community support. Mothers who did seek help from these kinds of professionals were often scrutinized and left to feel shame and guilt. If they admitted to shouting, shutting the child in its room, tuning out to try to relax, or even just getting respite care, these were taken to be reasons for their children's problems rather than the consequences of handling a difficult child without support. The other way left open to mothers to handle the problem was to try to deny it or get rid of the evidence and institutionalize the child.