I was ridiculously pleased that she kind of remembered the name of my town. You’d think I’d won a trip for two to Maui, the way I was beaming. While I was savoring this sisterly moment, Margaret said, “Okay! G’bye!” and hung up on me. I laughed and said good-bye to the air, said good-bye to nobody, and hung up the phone.
As I stood there by myself in my quiet house, a little bit of peace leaked into the crack in my heart. For a moment I felt as joyful as Tommy and sister Sue on Easter morning with their baskets full of Easter joy. Whatever her limitations, my sister did remember me. She remembered the sister from the recent past, the one I was trying to be. That gave me hope and the courage to keep trying to be part of Margaret’s life.
Things certainly hadn’t turned out the way I thought they would. But some things were much better than I could have ever imagined. We never quite know what lies up ahead. All we have are these minutes and hours we are living right now, and we have to construct our happiness and our cures out of what we’ve got in our own pockets. Margaret had helped me to see things differently and to understand distinctly how we each need to make our own way. When I thought about my sister and our ever-changing lives, I thought about that old saying about the lemons. I thought to myself, If life gives you sheep, sometimes you just need to make hamburger.
7.
friends and neighbors
The Golden Rule is the guiding one when it comes to thoughtful, cooperative living.
—On Neighborliness, EMILY POST’S ETIQUETTE
MY NEW HOUSE in Oregon was just a block from an elementary school that was across the street from a preschool. A few blocks beyond that stood the middle school. From my desk every day I watched a parade of children and teenagers and parents streaming past my house in the morning and again in the afternoon. At lunchtime I could hear the buzz of the playground and the shrieking of little girls testing their power with their voices. If I walked by at recess I could see them having screaming contests with no apparent goal other than to try to be the loudest one. They leaned forward, squinched their eyes shut, and let fly so hard I expected their braids to fall off.
I found it unnerving, this screaming. It made me anxious. I felt the same way whenever I heard a baby cry, because of my own experience with Margaret’s screaming, which often went on all day. The baby might cry itself blue, and the little girls might shriek until night-fall, and I would feel compelled to act. Luckily, I realized that doing anything would have been inappropriate, so I just kept my eyes on the pavement and avoided the playground during lunchtime. The first summer in the new house came as a relief to me, because the children were out of school and it was quiet again. I know this might not seem rational, but for me, at least, it was historical.
Once when I was ten my sister had screamed bloody murder for an entire day about a blue plastic hairbrush. I do mean all day. Hours. So loud and long that someone had called the police. There was a lot of screaming at our house back then, but we lived in the kind of neighborhood where people stayed out of one another’s business. Because of that culture of “don’t get involved,” I know my sister’s screaming must have topped the charts for someone to actually pick up the phone and complain.
It was a warm Saturday afternoon when the police car pulled up in front of our green suburban house with its tidy lawn, white lamppost, and curving walkway. The large picture windows on the first floor looked out on the whole neighborhood peering in at our wild household. The screened-in windows on the second floor were wide open, so it was easy to imagine why someone had called the cops in the first place. You could often hear Margaret screaming for about four square blocks. I knew this because once when she was having a fit, I had walked away from the house to see how far I had to go before I couldn’t hear her anymore. It was a long walk.
One of the cops climbed out of the car and marched up the walkway to the front door, the one nobody used. He rang the bell and, convinced that someone was being flayed alive on the second floor, insisted on coming in. So we all trooped into the bedroom I shared with my thirteen-year-old sister.
“Margaret,” my mother said in her Very Nice Mom Voice—which she somehow almost always managed to use no matter how long Margaret had been screaming or laughing or doing something else that we all really, really wanted her to stop doing—“you were yelling so loud that the policeman came to see if you were okay.” Margaret didn’t even look at her, or the police office, for that matter. Her mind was elsewhere, thinking about the hairbrush and the crisis its loss had caused. The cop crossed the room and squatted down next to the bed so that he was on the same level as Margaret. You could tell he was a nice guy. He was young, earnest, and handsome. He wanted to know if my sister was all right. Everything was going to be just fine, he wanted her to know. Could she tell him what had happened? My sister turned her head to look at him and took a deep breath.
THE DAY THE cops came to our house happened to be the same day that my friend Michaela’s parents decided not to move back to California. I’m not saying these two events were related, but back then this kind of coincidence took on magical significance for me and helped explain away the unending small and terrible crises that autism wreaked on my family. Decades later, I was surprised that I remembered this particular day at all but saw that I was arrested by the power of small kindnesses of friends and neighbors. I saw how they made indelible marks on our lives.
Childhood can seem interminable. When I was ten it seemed impossible that anything in our neighborhood would ever change. The houses of the people around us formed the edges of our universe and delineated how people viewed our family. The redbrick ranch next door was a rental property, usually occupied by people who were friendly but kept a polite distance and never stayed long. Two doors down lived our surrogate grandparents, people who always had time for us and opened the door before we even had a chance to knock; we knew we were loved by the Henrys.
The Waldrons, across the street, were older and less interested in playing with us, but always kind. The Reimans gave us stale suckers when we came over to watch game shows; their elegant, shabby house was slowly falling apart and smelled of mothballs. Another neighbor always smiled and waved, but she gossiped about us and told people that my parents were getting a divorce because of my sister. The end of one block had a Boo Radley house that scared the beejezus out of me. Huge, overgrown bushes hid the dark front porch. I could always hear the big dogs they kept in the backyard barking as I walked by. But like the house in Harper Lee’s book, it was really just a sad house. In it lived a pretty mom who worked too hard and didn’t have a husband to help her with her two wild boys. I only saw her walking to and from her car on her way to work. She never spoke to us and seemed not to notice if we waved.
There were many other people in between in this quiet middle-class neighborhood—genuine friends of my parents who cared about me and my brothers and sisters and managed to accept Margaret on some level, despite her differences. The Youngs and the Harms, my parents’ sailing friends, knew her and watched out for her, just like they watched out for the rest of us.
Margaret formed her own special relationships with people, too. The Waldrons supplied bananas to my silent sister, who would pop across the street every now and again. The Henrys treated her like the rest of us, welcoming her into the house and spoiling her with soda and candy. So what if she gobbled hers up and forgot to say thank you? They understood.
Years later we found out that she had often dropped in on the Bateses, a family down the block. Their kids were teenagers when we were in grade school and intimidated the rest of us, but Margaret watched TV with them and made herself peanut butter sandwiches in their kitchen.
An older couple down the bay at our lake house later told us that Margaret would come by and make cookies with them when she was an adolescent. Those were the times when she disappeared for what seemed like forever and scared everybody. No wonder she couldn’t hear us calling. She was busy mixing cookie dough.
As a child, Margaret did not ta
lk much and could not explain herself. So I imagine these secret friends of hers had been surprised the first time she walked in without knocking and helped herself to a snack. But for some reason they were all able to transcend the gaps of regular communication and connect on some level. She formed this social network on her own, without any of us knowing. Did she consider these people her friends, or was it more simple: the house with soda, the people with the bananas, the teenagers with the peanut butter, Deanna McRae with the Percy Faith record?
The McRae household next door had a big and long-lasting impact on my sister, and on me, too. Smaller and tidier than our big, crazy place, the McRae house was my extended living room for more than a decade. Vanessa McRae, my age, instantly became my favorite person in the universe one summer day in 1978 when she moved in next door. And I loved being around her family, too. Their household of four was so calm compared to ours, and that order came from the lady of the house—Deanna McRae. At five foot two and one hundred pounds, she scared the pants off me when I first met her.
When Deanna got mad at her kids, everybody in the neighborhood knew it. I can still hear the sound of her voice the day she told Vanessa and her brother, Jason, that they had to be in by five o’clock for dinner. “VanesSA! Ja-SON! FIVE o’clock! Do you hear me!?” I can hear it now as if I’m still perched in the maple tree I had hidden in. She was so mad at her kids that day that I just assumed I was gonna get it, too. But she also loved to laugh, and when she did she was all sunshine. Moreover, as an adult I understand now that she wasn’t exactly angry; she was just setting boundaries and making rules that she expected people to follow. Period. In my house, nobody had time to ride herd on us, and with Margaret’s autism and my Dad’s short fuse, rules were often a moving target.
Deanna McRae, in her typical fashion, approached Margaret as she would anyone else. She set rules and stuck to them, like when it came to her record collection. Unchecked, Margaret would sprint across the driveway between our houses and crash through the side door. Then she’d rush into the living room, throw open the cabinet, and madly thumb through the family music collection until she found what she was looking for. “There’s Percy Faith!” she’d exclaim. “Okay! That’s better!” And then she’d slam the cabinet door shut and speed-walk out of the house, not speaking to anyone and slamming the door behind her.
This just wasn’t okay with Deanna. So she simply explained to Margaret that she needed to knock on the door, be welcomed into the house, ask permission to search the collection, walk into the living room slowly, and carefully look through the records. She actually walked Margaret through it one step at a time, praising her as she went along. After laying out these rules, she usually let my sister in, as far as I can remember. This was the first time in my life I’d seen anyone get Margaret to consistently slow down. Deanna was like a snake charmer. Of course, Margaret couldn’t really slow herself down all the way, and what resulted was a comical mix of fast-forward and pause. She’d sprint across the driveway and come to a screaming halt in front of the door. Then the knock, and when she was told she could come in, she’d throw open the door and fire her request at whomever happened to be sitting there.
Even if it wasn’t Deanna, she’d say, “Doyouwanttochecktherecordsplease, Mrs. McRae!” With permission granted, she would walk as fast as she could walk without actually breaking into a run into the living room to take care of business. Often she would bang the door shut behind her as she left and, remembering, would crack the door, poke her head back in, and say, “You don’t slam the door!” by way of apology before she slammed it again.
Occasionally, of course, my sister forgot and rushed into the house, but Deanna just made her go back outside and start over. And she did. It was like magic.
Deanna was tough, but I always knew where I stood with her, and so did Margaret. By the time we were in middle school, most of our parents’ friends were used to Margaret, but I had the sense that many of them didn’t really know what they were supposed to do with her if she misbehaved around them. It wasn’t their fault. We didn’t know what to do, either. We just tried everything, and nothing seemed to work, so we tried something else. Deanna had somehow found something that worked.
As for me, Deanna never told me to stop coming over every day, although she would tell me when it was time to go home. She never told me to stop decimating the candy jar, which sat on the counter, always full of Hershey’s Kisses and Rolos, and made me edgy with its constancy. At my house it would have disappeared forever in five minutes. She just told me to stop leaving my balled-up wrappers in the jar.
There were other things Deanna never said to me. She never congratulated me for being such a good sister, which many adults did when I was growing up. I think they must have felt so uncomfortable about Margaret’s weirdness that they needed to make a hero out of me. “You’re a very good sister!” they would say with tight smiles. I never knew what to say to that. Deanna also never commented on the chaos at my house, which the entire McRae family was privy to given the proximity of our homes. She never mentioned the screaming or slamming of doors. She never said anything about what she couldn’t have failed to notice—that we other Garvin kids were getting the short end of the stick because Margaret’s autism took up so much of my parents’ time and energy.
My childhood did eventually end, although some nights when I drifted off to sleep, I still thought of that perfect hiding place for kick the can that I discovered down by the Youngs’ trailered sailboat. Unfortunately, I found it just about the time the adults decided that we boys and girls were too old to play games that involved hiding in the bushes together in the twilight.
By the time I moved to Oregon, I hadn’t seen many of our old neighbors in decades. Some of them were dead, others had moved away, and a few, like my parents, still occupied the same familiar houses of the South Hill. So much time had passed since we were children that most of the days we lived through had been forgotten. Others were indelible, polished and worn like coins and arrowheads of childhood treasure, many involving Margaret and how people treated us because of her.
MICHAELA’S FAMILY, WHO lived up the block, moved to our neighborhood from California when I was in the fifth grade. Michaela’s dad taught English at a local community college. I remember thinking there must be something wrong with him, because he didn’t scare the crap out of me like dads were supposed to. He was goofy and liked to make his kids laugh. I never saw him wear a tie, either, which made him even harder to take seriously. I once watched with incredulity as he worked a can opener and made us sloppy joes. A cooking dad was something I’d never seen before, like a dancing bear, right there in the kitchen. I wasn’t even sure my dad knew where the kitchen was, let alone how the thing worked.
Michaela’s mom also “worked outside the home,” as they said back then. She always looked really nice and carried a briefcase. I felt sorry for her because she had to go to work instead of staying home as my mom did in her T-shirts and jeans. It never occurred to me that she might have liked her job or that my own mother might have sometimes prayed to Jesus for a professional life that would help her escape a houseful of children.
Whatever the case, these parents were a different breed than I was used to. On the day that the police marched up our front walk, I’d been over at Michaela’s house all afternoon. Right before dinner her folks announced that they would walk me home, which struck me as odd. They had never walked me home before, so I figured I must be in some kind of trouble. Nobody walked children home in my neighborhood. (The closest thing for me was being regularly escorted to the front door by one particular mom who had a harder time hiding her irritation with me when it was time to go home.) Back then we ran to and from our friends’ houses, morning or evening, and nobody worried about us. Sandy Young and I regularly stood at the pine tree between our houses in the hard dark, one foot on the trunk, and raced each other home, thrilled and terrified to be alone in the darkness, but at the same time knowing we were safe.
Maybe Michaela’s parents just wanted to get some exercise, even though this was the eighties, before people knew that exercise was good for you. Whatever the case, there they were, strolling down the hill with their daughter and me on a warm spring evening as if it were something they did every day. That was a Californian for you. They were also holding hands, which made me feel really sorry for Michaela.
Looking back I have to wonder if I said something to make Michaela’s parents feel like they should walk me home and see for themselves what was really going on at the Garvin house. It wasn’t like me to talk about Margaret’s behavior and how it often made me feel like I was roller-skating on a tightrope near the edge of a cliff. It was such a part of my life back then that to talk about it would have seemed as superfluous as telling someone that my family was Irish Catholic—why state the obvious? But maybe when I went to their house that day seeking a little peace and quiet, I happened to mention that someone had called the cops on my sister. Ha, ha, isn’t that funny, I might have said.
MOST PEOPLE, I imagine, are alarmed by screaming. That’s the point, after all; this is how we human beings sound the alarm. The difference between my sister’s screaming and the other screaming I’ve heard since is a measure of quality and quantity. When Margaret had a tantrum, she could hold out for hours.
As a child I spent a lot of time watching her, trying to calm her down, wishing she would stop, but nothing I did seemed to make any difference. I tried comforting her, but often found it difficult to speak in a soothing voice when she was yelling, “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAHHHHHHHHHH! NOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOO!” in my face. I felt like I did when a fire engine went by, only this fire engine wasn’t going anywhere, so the blaring wasn’t getting any quieter. Standing there next to my own personal four-alarm fire, I struggled to figure out how to turn off the siren. I’d alternate between pleading with her to be quiet and yelling at her.
How to Be a Sister Page 11
