A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (4 page)

I buy a set so Temple and I can play tea games at home. Temple still won’t look at me, her head is still in the dahlia position, but she catches onto the game.

Though winter passes and the game improves, Temple is still aloof and mute.

March 1950. Temple is two and a half. She and I rake last fall’s leaves out from under the yew bushes. Our twangy metal rake is useless, so together we kneel and claw out the soggy leaf clumps with our hands. Temple is snug in her blue corduroy jacket, but her starfish fingers are turning pink with cold. I take them in my hands and blow on them. She doesn’t laugh at the tickle, as would most toddlers, but she doesn’t draw back. We dump the wet leaves on the compost, put away the metal rake, go in and have tea together in the plastic cups.

But she still doesn’t talk; she doesn’t even laugh. A few months later, when laughter finally arrives, it erupts out of her in uncontrollable spasms, along with spitting. First she spits and then she goes into a paroxysm of giggling. Both trigger her father’s furious disgust.

“She’s retarded! You know it, but you won’t admit it!”

“She’s not retarded.”

“Yes, she is. You just can’t face it.”

“OK, for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right. We’ll call her ‘retarded,’ and I’ll say I’m facing it. Now what? You want to put her in the Salvation Army box behind the A&P?”

Dick chews on the inside of his cheek. He wants to institutionalize her, has been building up to it, but knows I won’t let him near the subject.

“She’s the same little girl she was before you got me to call her retarded. We’re not going to do anything different from what we’re doing right now!”

Dick doesn’t answer.

Why is he so against Temple? Her oddity isn’t a personal threat to him, nor a personal dishonor. Could it be something as simple as the gap between Dick’s recollection of his own childhood and what family life is like today (any family with two growing children)?

I think of Dick’s upbringing. As long as he can remember, his mother has run the family establishment like clockwork—rooms swept, beds made, clothes laundered and folded. If, by some fluke, a hurricane should suddenly whirl out of nowhere, snapping tree branches in the garden and smashing the swimming pier, the next day the garden is raked clean of broken branches and, in a week, the pier rebuilt. Domestic tranquility is so immediately reestablished that one could almost believe a storm never happened. And therefore, never would.

Temple is causing storms for which there’s no quick tidy-up and no immediate answer. It’s a new experience for both of us, but somehow I’m able to weather it. Dick, with his strict rules of procedure, has to pack his emotional baggage very carefully before he can accept the least shift in the wind.

I think of Dick’s Army report, his conviction that he knew best how to fight the war. Right after the war, he’d gone to work for the World Federalists, a group of veterans who believed in Wendell Willkie’s
One World
. Soon, convinced that the Communists were taking it over, he’d fought with the director of the World Federalists and been asked to leave. Next, he’d gone to work for his father, helping with family investments, but he and his father fought. Why, no one’s told me, but for the time being neither father nor son has repaired the break. Dick’s mother stops Dick from arguing further, motioning to him surreptitiously, as if soothing a restive horse.

“Shh. Don’t get your father started.” Later, in her abrupt fashion, she’s summed up the two of them: “Dick and Jay. They both have to be right.”

Dick sees his mother as perfect but has never noticed on what her perfection has to ride.

May 1950. Mrs. Grandin is dead. We’ve all been witness to her slow decline, seen the oxygen tent over her bed, the big red oxygen tank outside the bedroom door. But even under the oxygen tent, she’s looked so much herself that her death comes as a surprise. I treasure the pretty things she’s given me and recall her amused reaction when I’d said to her, “I’m trying to do my best.”

“What do you think we’re all trying to do?”

Even in her casket Dick’s mother looks her usual composed and beautiful self, the breeze from an open window playing ever so slightly with the gray ostrich plumes on her long gown.

I return to Dr. Meyer for help with Temple. This time her manner is formal and brisk.

“We think you are doing a very good job, but will you please explain Mr. Grandin to me?”

What did Dick say to her? Why hasn’t either of them told me? Doesn’t Dr. Meyer notice my alarm? Couldn’t she explain herself? Why am I unable to ask? Am I unwittingly taking on the role of non-confrontational peacemaker, as Mrs. Grandin took it on for her generation? Am I evading Dick’s accusations about Temple? Not looking clearly at the issues? Turning them into jokes? Practicing being vague, even to myself? It will be years before I allow myself to conceive of such questions, years before it occurs to me that Dr. Meyer has decided she’s past the point of explaining Temple to me or discussing Dick, that this is her way of telling me she’s dropping Temple’s case.

Whatever her reasons I never see Dr. Meyer again. Nor will Dr. Caruthers ever make any further reference to her. A door simply closes.

I practice Bach on the piano. Temple, on the floor beside me, is absorbed in crumpling a newspaper. She squeezes it, watches it slowly spring open, shreds it, gazes at the pieces floating about her. I stop playing and try to entice her with the colored plastic cups. She stares at them for a moment, then returns to her newspaper. Again, I tell myself that children have to find their own playthings, that I mustn’t always be the one to instigate the game. Yet she looks so forlorn, sitting there absorbed in her tattered plaything, sooty with newspaper ink, like a slum child nobody cares for. My pretty baby with her blue eyes and blonde curls, she who would prefer that I leave her alone. The calm, eerie snub cuts deep.

And so for today we each neglect the other. Isolated, numb, we play it safe: I in my world; she in hers. But what is her world? I turn back to the Bach. I’m not very good at it, but it’s better than nothing. She hums.

She’s humming the Bach.

The joy is short-lived. Tantrums are about to begin and Dick will see them as the irrefutable proof he’s been looking for.

Temple rips off her lilac flowered wallpaper in long jagged shreds, digs through her blue plastic crib mattress with its bunny rabbits, claws between the springs, pulls out the stuffing, flings it about, eats it, chews it, spits it in great gray wads. She goes into a spasm of giggling and spitting. I try to calm her; she scratches free and runs out the front door. In the middle of the road, our country road with the stone wall running along it, she yanks off her clothes, squats and poops. Again, I try to scoop her up. She laughs her crazy laugh and squirms from my arms.

Back in her own room, she tears up everything, throws everything—toys, clothes, pillows, wastepaper basket. But she throws them all in the same corner of the room. Is that some kind of organization, some intention, some target she has in mind? Am I the target? I toss her a ball. She lets it bounce past her, poops again and smears her feces on the torn wallpaper.

I repaper her room and fight despair.

The tantrums don’t abate. Finally in a burst of my own rage, I pick up Temple, mid-scream, carry her flailing into her room, sit her down and close the door. Let her demolish the room if she likes; she’ll have to do it alone. Almost as soon as I shut the door, she stops screaming. Is it no sport to have a tantrum without an audience? Or does she really prefer to be alone?

Only in my dreams are we together. In a nightmare that repeats itself night after night, Temple comes to me, my child whom I must hold at arms’ length, even to put her down in her crib. I dream that I cradle her and press her against my heart, but she turns into a rag doll. Her limp, cotton head lolls on my shoulder, no baby strength in her cloth arms and legs. Yet, I can feel her heart beat, there beating against my heart.

Sometimes in the dream she’s trapped under an old wooden float, washing about in the undulating seaweed. I grope under the float, grab her bloated cotton body, and drag her up onto the float. Water streams off her, but in the center of that heap of soggy cotton, I can see her heart beating. I gather her close; I fight to keep that heartbeat going. Fight till I wake, thrashing.

My mother reacts to Temple’s behavior as she might to a fart. Pay no attention and wait for the unpleasant smell to go away. It doesn’t, of course, but the idea that her oldest grandchild is suffering from some sort of distasteful malfunction alarms her, especially since she’s always insisted she couldn’t possibly love her daughters if they weren’t pretty. And, I might add, obedient.

Temple’s behavior is neither obedient nor pretty, and polite pretense is probably the only response my mother can muster. Later, she’ll trumpet Temple’s successes, largely, I suspect, to make up for her early horror. Along with most of the women of her generation, she’s grown up under Victorian constraints and has never encountered any kind of chaotic behavior nor permitted herself even the smallest emotional variety. Her concept of adventure is culled from books. Not heavy tomes. My mother prefers to entertain her mind rather than exercise it. She can’t bear to read Melville: it’s too dark, too difficult, too close to the Puritan bone. She prefers the chatty distance of Dickens or, perhaps, Kipling. Most of all, she loves Anthony Powell, who to me is like foregoing an African safari to take an overnight trip to “Treetops,” where from the genteel comfort of a wicker armchair in an elaborate treehouse inn, you can peer down at the predictable array of animals that turn up at the water hole below.