“Sure, I’ll grab her,” I told the mom. I looked in the play area for Maisie. I called her, like I was calling a cat. “Has anyone seen Maisie?” I sang. I pretended I couldn’t see her; I covered my eyes and walked around, pretending to be silly, singing, “Maisie, Maisie.” A little girl was following me. “Are you Maisie Daisy?” I said, picking her up, closing my eyes, pretending it was a game. She didn’t respond. I put her on my hip. She was a quiet, light little thing. Pale, like a potato chip. Holding her, I looked around at the other children running around the play-ground. Some of them stood out. Phil, with his porcupine hair. Red-haired Allen. But the little blonde girls—some days they were indistinguishable. I was sweaty, shaking. I asked again if she was really Maisie or if she was pretending. She burst into tears.
The mom and the supervisor were talking in the doorway out front; they looked serious, possibly unhappy, possibly horrified. I was afraid of the adults. I let Maisie go and she ran to her mother. I pretended to be distracted, but inside I was panicking. I wondered if I was about to be fired. I was ruining people. Something about me repulsed people. I felt dangerous. I felt like an agent of disease. I went inside and pretended to organize the doll area, where I cried, alone.
The next day I didn’t go to Miss Molly’s. I was going to call in sick, but I didn’t; I just didn’t go back. Ever.
From age seventeen to twenty-seven, I lived in Tallahassee, on the fringe of the university, taking classes and working—tutoring, teaching swimming, babysitting, conducting phone surveys, proofreading, then teaching freshman comp, babysitting, sewing, modeling for the art department. I changed my major from accounting to international relations to art history and finally to English, where, though I would have been unable to articulate it at the time, the students and professors were shabby and individualistic, a little more celebratory of eccentricity and, therefore, easier to tell apart.
I pretended I understood everything; I pretended my life both was and was about to be romantic, novelistic. I felt like I was in the swim of things, in an underwater kind of way.
I simply stayed in school until I’d gotten enough credits and written double enough pages for a Ph.D. and taken all the 9000-level classes: that was as high as the catalog went. Or I would have stayed on and on. I performed poorly on my doctoral exams, mangling dates, authors, and concepts. I wept after the second half-day of orals, I’d done so shamefully. That afternoon I stood alone in my apartment with a cup of Swiss Miss and all my half-read compendiums of literary history, wondering what on earth would happen next, and how. I didn’t feel anything like a Ph.D. It was not the beginning of something and wouldn’t be for a long, long time. I got the degree. I didn’t celebrate. It was only the end of childhood.
Five
I pored over the face-blindness research with a new focus: to convince Helder that his trauma theory was cracked. As children, we are profoundly loyal to our parents, and to their pain: I wanted to be related to my mom, not ruined by her. I found a book by Andrew W. Young, Face and Mind. The day it arrived, I took it straight to bed with a highlighter and a big pot of tea. I read hard. I drew stars in the margins. Like an eager-to-please freshman, I underlined continents of text. The vocabulary—intermodal matching, blindsight, reduplicative paramnesia—was difficult and thrilling. I felt smart, as though nearly knowing this difficult material was the perfection of something.
Andrew Young defined prosopagnosia as “the inability to recognize familiar faces after a cerebral injury.” Prosopagnosics were mostly stroke victims, he said, except for a few extremely rare mental patients who experienced recognition disorders that might illuminate prosopagnosia. More on the mentally ill, he promised, in Chapter 8. Mostly, he said, face blindness affected middle-aged men. I began writing him a letter in my head.
Many of Young’s sentences were impossible to comprehend. But this is what I loved about the way my mind worked, my way of learning: I didn’t mind confusion. I read these sentences over and over and over and let their strangeness wash over me until finally they opened up. For me, reading a hard sentence was very much like recognizing a person. I just kept looking and looking, not letting the not-knowing scare me away, until I got something that made sense.
In spite of the awkward scientific vernacular, I loved Andrew Young: he became my imaginary best friend and colleague in this period of my life. I wanted him to test me. I wanted him to fix, if not my brain, then my spirit. Since the book was already five years old, I assumed his research had progressed. Had he maybe figured out how to insert an updated version of the face processor? Super Face 2.0? Maybe Helder was right after all: maybe there was some kind of patch. I wanted to mail my brain to Andrew Young at his research lab in England, with a little note pinned to the cerebellum: I don’t think I’ve had a stroke. But I can’t remember faces. Call me!
Andrew Young explained how many steps were involved in recognizing a face—and he had flow charts that made the process, at last, clear. He explained that recognizing beauty, gender, age, race, and emotion were all performed separately, by different processors, different systems, all of them using a lot of brainpower but none as juice-hungry as the face recognizer. I loved Andrew Young, and I was beginning to love face blindness. Because of face blindness, I was getting to learn about things I’d never known existed. I was getting a clear look not just at how I saw but at seeing itself. I’d already come to understand that faces present, in their elaborate design, the most significant visual pattern in our environment. I already knew that in the world of objects—chairs, cars, pencils, trees, etc.—faces are special, and they aren’t read the same way as other objects. But now I understood that faces are so important to human beings—social survival being tantamount to survival, period—that we tend to resolve as faces even the chaotic, random patterns made by a scribble, a cloud, a wisp of smoke. I began to appreciate face recognition in a whole new way. It might be weird that I couldn’t recognize faces, but it was astonishing that anyone could! The ability to distinguish hundreds of faces, despite the many similarities between individuals, represents the ultimate achievement in human perceptual classification.
I trotted into therapy bursting with paragraphs of theory for deluded Peter Helder. Trauma wasn’t the cause of my impairment. The chaos in my childhood homes wasn’t to blame. There were so many things that could go wrong with this exquisite, subtle, fragile recognizing system. There could be thousands of reasons mine didn’t function. Sadly, there could be no repair.
Slowly, I was learning to articulate the way I saw faces. It was just like learning how I saw my mother. I’d never had a way to stand outside any of this weirdness I’d taken for granted my whole life and see. Now I’d found, with Helder’s help, a little platform to stand on, so I could look at things that had been, for me, unknowable. I made notes and lists and wrote out little scripts so I could teach Helder about how I saw and didn’t see, so that I could truly know it for myself.
One thing the face processor does is let us see the parts of the face and the face as a whole, simultaneously. Very few people—normal or brain-damaged—would be able to find their lover’s nose in a pile of noses, but on the right face, the brain could magically sort out all the separate features and read them as one unit: my darling, her special little beak. The face processor understands the separate eyes, cheeks, nose, and mouth, but it also “reads” the topography of the whole face all at once.
For me, faces didn’t tell anything special. A nose was a nose, just as a pen was a pen. I didn’t have the ability to commit features to a special kind of memory and store them in a special face place. Instead, I had to study a person to figure out who they were. It took time and patience, and I relied heavily, as did dyslexics, on context clues. That white word on red signs at intersections—you could know it was STOP without truly reading it. That man in my kitchen, doing the dishes, wearing a burgundy polo shirt that was more than a touch too big for him—I knew it was Dave without seeing his face.
The abili
ty to recognize people from context—albeit inconsistently and with difficulty—undercut its credibility. One day I drove down to Kalamazoo to give a reading and meet my friend, an artist, for lunch. I knew who she was right away. But after the reading, I couldn’t find her in the lobby. She found me on a bench, bereft. She had simply put on her coat and hat.
I recognized people all the time—in my own way. I pretended to know people who knew me, and I either figured out who they were or I faked it. Either way, I kept my confusion secret. If I told people I had recognition problems, every time I did recognize them I’d look like I had been lying. Face blindness was too weird. It was unreliable. It wasn’t one thing. And just behind that weirdness stood the secret super-weirdness, my mother, her disorder, and I couldn’t entirely separate the two.
But with Andrew Young in my back pocket, I started paying more attention to what I saw when I encountered someone. I walked into school, and an elfin man cocked his head and did a little tentative nod-grin—Stephen Hemenway, no question. It wasn’t his face that gave him away. It was his look. It was as if lazy, untrained workers deep inside my brain ambled out of the chairs where’d they been playing cards and smoking cigarettes while I stood there, nodding vibrantly and stalling for time, waiting for the reprobates to rummage through my brain and deliver the crucial information I needed—Who is this person talking to me? Janis from History? they flung down. No? Try Barb from your department. Or that friendly woman from church?
The process was exhausting and distracting, and many times a day I just walked right past people because it was so much work, such an effort to stay calm while this frenzy was going on in my head. In public, I was automatically on high alert: Out for a simple stroll, I scrutinized every person I passed, hunting for cues while trying not to draw any attention to myself. I pretended I was in a rush. I made myself seem grumpy, preoccupied.
Helder wouldn’t let up. “By this time next week, I want you to tell someone. One person.” I decided to get it over with, if only to prove to him what a bad idea it was.
At yoga class, an opportunity presented itself. Our instructor, Gingah, said good-bye to Carol, but it wasn’t Carol, it was Carrie. Carrie corrected her and Gingah explained how she was terrible at names but wonderful with faces. “I never forget a face!” she said as students trickled out of the room.
I lingered, holding my satchel. “Could I tell you something?” I said to her as the last student left.
She shined her eyes at me. “Of course,” she said. “Heather, of course!”
“For humans, names are stored in a very different way than faces. Names are abstractions, and they’re difficult to recall. They aren’t sensory, like faces. So names are really hard to remember—for everyone, actually. It’s a completely different process from faces.”
Gingah leaned down and retrieved her little bottle of Fiji water. She slowly crossed her arms. Then she took a sip.
“Name retrieval is very, very difficult for a brain whose main wiring matrix is devoted to interpreting the sensory world,” I heard myself say. I heard how strange I sounded. But I couldn’t stop. I went on in my teacher voice, the slow, perky cadences I used in the classroom. Gingah started packing up her stuff. I kept going. Once the face clicked into place, I explained, the name retrieval process began. It was the last thing to occur during the recognition sequence. Name retrieval wasn’t a visual process; it had a completely different cognitive footprint. Face recognition was like calculus: there was a formula, and you just ran the program. Name retrieval was like history. Advanced history. You had to think.
What made it so hard to get the name was this: Information about a person—age, gender, race, face topography, your feelings toward this person, what they did for a living, who they were to you—got stored separately from the name. The person information was right there, in the front office. The name data was stored down in the basement. It was a long flight of stairs to get there. For most people, those files opened automatically because they contained sensory information. You could taste baked goods and smell dry cleaning, and see all those images in your mind’s eye. The person identification information existed in pictures, in stories. You couldn’t forget it if you tried (the topic of all songs about failed love).
Names, however, were arbitrary; a person named Debra wasn’t a Debra—she just got labeled that because her parents had to pick something. My stepson Jacob could have been called anything; he’d still be himself. Names were labels, stand-ins, substitutes for the thing itself, and that required a different kind of remembering.
Gingah was all packed. She stood up again. “Well,” she said. “That is certainly a lot of information. A lot of interesting information.”
I felt as I had on the edge of the high dive as a second grader. I knew I wasn’t going to jump in. I wasn’t going to tell her that I couldn’t recognize faces. I just couldn’t do it. I helped her carry the mats to the car.
Helder thought the yoga thing was no big deal. Try again, he said. “You have to come out. You do not have to do this alone.”
I had to understand how much people would want to help, and how much easier life could be without all the faking and mistakes. “If you worked with a deaf person or someone visually impaired, you would make the accommodations, willingly, joyfully. You wouldn’t judge them. You wouldn’t think less of them. Tell people you need them to say who they are. Your life will be so much simpler; you’ll be freed up in so many ways. Can’t you see that?”
“No,” I said. “I really can’t see it.”
I wanted to move to a new place again, where people would introduce themselves. It was so much easier to be new. I applied for a permanent position at St. Lawrence, where I had just done a stint as a visiting professor. I applied for fellowships in California, Boston, Texas, and Orlando. I got one interview, at a school on the Mexico-Texas border. It sounded wonderful to me, sunny and new and anonymous.
Helder was shocked. This was a terrible time to move. I was making real progress. There had been so much growth. He asked me whether this move was going to be with Dave or without Dave.
I didn’t know.
I saw Dave for dinner a few times a week. The idea of divorce was out in the open. His position was unwavering. “You know I love you. I’m not going anywhere. And you know how I operate. I’m a Libertarian. I’m not going to try to make you conform to my whack-job—”
“I never said whack-job.”
“You kind of did. But you are going to do what you are going to do. I’m not going to interfere with your business. If there’s some reason you don’t think I’m the person you want to be married to, far be it from me to try to convince you otherwise.”
We didn’t talk about money anymore, or houses, or drinking, or car insurance. We didn’t talk about my job applications to faraway places. We didn’t talk about my therapy or the boys’ homework or missed doctor appointments. After our dinners out, we hugged and kissed, told each other “I love you.” I went home to my bed. He went to his.
Helder asked, “Have you thought more about filing for divorce?”
I thought about it all the time. I couldn’t stay with Dave. But I couldn’t figure out how to leave him.
Helder pressed me to take a step, any step. He said things that made me cringe, like “Author your own life” and “Lean into our relationship, what we have here.” All this uncertainty, he said, was ruling my life.
“I don’t know about that,” I said.
I called my mother on the spur of the moment one morning, surprising us both. “Mom,” I said. “Quick question.”
“What can I do for you, my dear person? You name it!” She was expansive, loud, fresh. I wondered if she knew exactly who I was. Lately it seemed as though she was covering for her forgetfulness, not remembering the last time we spoke or what we had talked about.
“Do you ever have trouble recognizing people, or do you know if Daddy did?”
There was a long silence. It was ten in the morni
ng, a day I wasn’t teaching. I walked, with the phone, to the kitchen, and reached under the sink. I was tempted to pour myself a shot of whiskey. I was shaking all over. Still, she didn’t speak.
“Can I call you back? I am right in the middle of something. I am so, so sorry. Can I call you back, maybe at six, or eight, or eight-thirty? Which of those would be good? I’ll use the signal. Would that be good?”
“I can’t say if I’ll be here, but okay, sure,” I said. I knew the answer before I called. My mother wouldn’t be able to know if she saw faces or not. She didn’t have the ability to witness her own experience. But I wasn’t asking in order to get information. I wasn’t pretending we were normal people having a normal conversation. There was a sliver of a chance my mother would say something useful or important regarding face blindness in our family. I had to know, before I went any further, what she knew and did not know. Even if it was nothing.
I called Fred.
“Do you have trouble recognizing people?” I asked him, shouting into the phone. “Did Mom?”
“Wah?” he hollered back. “Wah?”
I broke the question down. Did he have trouble with faces?
Another round of yelling.
“I’m terrible with names,” he said. “I can’t remember names!” About my mother, he said, stop asking. He wasn’t telling me. If it affected my medical history, my health, I said, he had to tell me. He said no. Not at all the case. He was going to his grave. He was living to be a hundred. He planned to outlive me. He hung up hard.
For the first time in my life, I was relieved that my parents had no idea what the hell I was talking about. I was not an extension of them, and this significant, defining feature was mine alone. Face blindness was kind of my moat. Maybe it always had been. Inside, I was safe.
You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know Page 20
