A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story (8 page)

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“Language is as vital to the physician’s art as the stethoscope or the scalpel…Of all the words the doctor uses, the name he gives the illness has the greatest weight. It forms the foundation of all subsequent discussion, not only between doctor and patient but also between doctor and doctor and between patient and patient. The name of the illness becomes part of the identity of the sufferer.” Jerome Groopman, M.D.
The New Yorker
11/13/2003

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Richard Pollack.
The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim
, Simon & Schuster, NY, 1997.

Chapter 3

Childhood

In the years between 1954 and 1958, years when Temple was very much part of school and community life, what helps most is the “Leave-it-to-Beaver Moms’ Union.” The “Union” is an agreed-upon code of behavior all neighborhood moms expect from every child. The warning, “I’m going to tell your mother,” goes for anyone about to veer into unacceptable behavior, and Temple is no exception.

Yes, Temple still has tantrums and, no, they’re never easy. The tricky part is figuring out what she really can’t manage and when she’s using a tantrum to get her own way. There’s a bit of the manipulator in all of us.

Fifty years into the future, I’ll run into a “union mom” from those days—both of us old ladies now—and thank her from the bottom of my heart for always making sure Temple was included. She recalls how her own child wanted to exclude Temple from his birthday party. “You know the rule,” I told him. “Everybody comes; otherwise, no party.”

Mrs. Dietsch at Dedham Country Day says some children can read by first grade; some can’t. By third grade, she says, learning to read is crucial. Could I help teach Temple?

“I’ll do what I can.”

Back in my own childhood, when I was still too young to go to school, I’d picked up reading without knowing what I was doing. Reading, I’d been told, was something I’d learn in first grade. When I got to first grade we were each handed a copy of
Dick and Jane
which I could read at a glance, but that didn’t seem to be what reading was. Reading seemed to be taking a long time looking at each page, then reciting the words in a funny, halting voice. I couldn’t figure out why, but I’d been raised not to ask a lot of silly questions, so I fidgeted around until it was my turn, then put on the same halting voice. It was terribly hard work and boring beyond belief, but nobody said reading would be easy.

It doesn’t take much to figure that Temple might be going through the same boredom, and it’s blowing her circuits. I look through the bookcase, pull out
The Wizard of Oz,
and show it to her. She likes the pictures, so I read her a bit of it to get us into the story and then stop. “Tell you what: I’ll read the next paragraph, then you can read the one after it.” I cheat a bit at first, reading more than a paragraph to get us further into the story. By the time it’s Temple’s turn, she wants to know what happens next and is eager to sound out the words phonetically, each syllable worth the effort. Next she’s racing along way past her paragraph, caught in the grip of a good yarn.

Clothes are a problem for Temple. There are some she’ll wear and some she won’t, yet curiously, there are clothes she complains about endlessly and wears anyway. She fusses over her scratchy Sunday petticoat but she always puts it on, in fact, she seems to want to wear it. When I ask her why, she says it’s because she knows it’s expected of her, just as she knows she’s expected to sit through Sunday dinner without squirming or complaining. Other people’s expectations have entered her reality.

“Besides, Sunday dinner is quiet. It’s noise and confusion I hate.”

With projects, Temple’s learned that, if she wants the other children to help her with her project, she’ll have to show some kind of interest in theirs. With games, she’s learned that if she doesn’t want to be left out, she’ll have to be a good sport whether she feels like it or not. But, when it comes to table manners, she won’t close her mouth and doesn’t give a hoot if her eating style, or lack of it, disturbs her mother’s prissy idea of Miss Manners. That is, until one lunch hour at Dedham Country Day School when she eats opposite another classmate. “Urp! Blaaah! Yuck! Charlie doesn’t close his mouth, and the food goes round and round. It looks like a garbage truck!” Then a thought. “Is that how I look?”

For the first time Temple’s really looked at another child, seen how he eats and figured out that, if she looks like Charlie, nobody will want to eat with her. From now on she closes her mouth when she eats.

Sportsmanship, however, continues to be a problem. Though Temple’s learned to shape up in the give and take of the schoolroom, she still doesn’t quite grasp the notion of schoolyard games. It’s due partly to a lack of gaming instinct and partly to the praise she’s learned to expect for mastering the daily snags of life. Not surprisingly, she interprets a game as one more activity deserving of the usual praise. When she loses and praise is not forthcoming, she gets furious and doesn’t mind telling everybody. The siblings, mortified by her behavior in front of their friends—who are happy to point it out—break the family rule of limiting outrage to low mutters of “not fair” and yell along with the other kids: “Bad sport! Sore loser!” Temple goes into a major blow-up. The game is OVER!

Nevertheless, she likes to play double solitaire with her father. Double solitaire demands attention, speed, and timing—traits that run strong in the Grandin family, and the point isn’t sportsmanship; the point is to win. They both enjoy the game, and Dick, in spite of himself, finds he has a grudging affection for Temple.

Temple makes up for her lack of sportsmanship with projects. Her bedroom is boobytrapped with them. Anybody opening the door is instantly entangled, garroted or sliced across the face by a series of strings cross-hatching her room. The top red string lowers the shade; the lower red one raises it. The yellow string turns on the light, and the white string runs out a sign that reads: “ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK!”

In the middle of it all stands her wooden bed, either red or a bilious shade of salmon, depending on which side of the bed you’re looking at. That’s because, as a family project, we’d elected one Sunday to paint the bed red and had run low on paint. The Vineyard Haven hardware store wasn’t open, so we’d added white to what was left of the red, thinking it wouldn’t show. It doesn’t show to Temple; it only shows to her mother, whose delicate color sense is deeply offended but not offended enough to repaint the bed.

On the salmon side of the bed, in a metal cage, lives Crusader Mouse, a present to Temple from her buddy, Lyman, who lives next door to us in Dedham. Crusader’s white back is often painted with a red cross of Mercurochrome to make him look like a Red Cross knight. Each morning, as one of her projects, Temple makes Crusader run along her room strings.

One morning the children come to me in great distress.

“Crusader’s lying on the floor of his cage, He looks dead.” We decide to take him to the vet.

“Is he really dead?” The vet nods. “Was it because we painted him with Mercurochrome?”

“No. The Mercurochrome wouldn’t hurt him.”

“We wanted him to look like a Crusader Knight.”

“How long have you had Crusader?”

“A couple of years. He belonged to Lyman first.”

“How long did Lyman have him?” Everybody looks at each other. Nobody can remember.

“A couple of years, maybe. A long time anyway.”

“That’s a very old mouse. Crusader’s lived a long and happy life. He died in his sleep.”

“Oh.” Relief. Then a new idea.

“Can we have a funeral?”

I think we do, though, in truth, I don’t remember. I’m sure it was a grand funeral with a tin cookie box for a coffin and hymns and “Amens” and a long, talky obit. We’re a family of talkers and, by now, Temple is no exception.

Talk isn’t the only family trait we all share. Temple and I both have a tendency to enjoy a somewhat rebellious streak; you might call it a renegade gene. But, to balance it off, we also share a caution gene. If you look at the family tree, you can see that both traits have been around for generations. The renegade gene isn’t a big one. As a family, we’re basically law-abiding. But, if given a chance, we tend to like to go a deviant route. Temple enjoys boasting to me of her minor infractions of the law.

“Where it says, ‘Keep within the line’,” she announces with great glee, “I like to walk just outside it.”

However, there’s a point at which caution takes over. Temple doesn’t like it when Mrs. Dietsch sends her home from school for unacceptable behavior, nor does she like it when her mother and Mrs. Dietsch compare notes. Her caution gene cautions her to shape up, and it talks louder than her autism.

Old Mr. Grandin worries when I allow Temple to pedal her bike down a three-mile stretch of road to the Vineyard Haven Pottery shed where the children make pots out of Gay Head clay.

“She’s a good bike rider,” I tell him. “She watches out for cars. The road’s straight, and anybody coming can see her.” I also know, though autism may flare up under fatigue or tension, I can count on Temple. I recognize her caution as my own.

Temple’s birthday is August twenty-ninth, and her birthday party is always a big summer feature. In the past, old Mr. Grandin has given parties for the Vineyard children, so he enjoys being part of Temple’s celebration. Katharine Noonan, his cook, always bakes and frosts a beautiful birthday cake, decorating it with blossoms from the Rose of Sharon bush in his garden.

This summer when Temple’s birthday rolls round, the striped bass are running early. It looks as if a fishing expedition with Roland Otier would make a great birthday party. Roland is the local fishing expert; he always knows where the stripers are running.

August twenty-ninth dawns gray and windless, but we take off in Roland’s boat anyway. Alas, we soon find the boat is rolling from one listless sea swell to the next. Fishing lines droop. Children droop. The heaving ocean is making them seasick. Roland and I look at each other. Should we give up and go home? No, says Roland, let’s hold out till the tide turns. It seems Roland knows something I don’t know about the nature of tide and fish.

We hold out for the tide-turn and with it, everybody’s line gives a jump. We pull in fish, the like of which none of us has seen before nor will again—one after another, hand over hand, huge stripers, too feisty to reel in with a rod, too weighty for the children to haul in without Roland’s help. The children squeal and hop up and down. The stripers leap to break free, their black dotted backs and silver bellies glistening in the boat’s wake. We have supper of striper for days.

At the Saturday night Vineyard dances, children and grown-ups dance together and play games. Temple’s favorite game is musical chairs. Musical chairs demands no sportsmanship, only those Grandin traits of attention, speed, and timing. However, she has a formidable opponent in a distinguished old gentleman whose enthusiasm for the game sometimes gets the better of his sense of fair play. At such times, a father is delegated to tap him on the back and remind him that, though we all play musical chairs, the game is really for the children.

Once when the gentleman was locked in fierce competition with a child—I like to think it was Temple—his elderly sister rushed to her brother’s defense.

“You have to understand,” she explained to the delegated father, “Gerald wasn’t born in ‘givvy’ weather.”

Indeed he wasn’t. No believer in fair play, he had amassed a vast fortune by never giving an opponent a sporting chance.

Beyond musical chairs and double solitaire with her father, Temple’s a child who never likes to join an organized sports activity if she can possibly avoid it. Summer projects outside of our home have to be devised in order to help her make a connection to other people.

Knowing that Temple likes to sew and is good at it, I visit a dressmaker in Edgartown who alters clothes. I tell her about Temple’s skill with the needle, but I also tell her about her problems. If she’ll take Temple on, she will work hard for her, but, if Temple proves difficult, I will, of course, pay her for having given Temple a chance.

“No pay. I’d be happy to do it,” the dressmaker says. “I could use some help, and I got a kid with problems myself.”

Temple goes to work for her hemming dresses and doing whatever sewing jobs she’s asked to do. The dressmaker pays Temple handsomely. I demur.

“No, sir. Temple earned that money. She worked hard. She was a real help.” Temple is so proud. After she’s grown up, Temple will embroider herself a cowboy shirt with a steer head. I bet she still has it.

And so on and so on. The days of Temple’s childhood in the comfortable, Leave-it-to-Beaver world of Dedham and the Vineyard could be the days from any privileged childhood. What was unique for her was the safe cocoon they provided. There would be other later environments, but those two habitats were Temple’s greatest salvation.