It seemed that sleep deprivation was not the only thing Audra had forgotten. When she talked about the baby (that word again!), she only said things like, “I definitely wouldn’t get a bottle sanitizer this time,” or “Remember baby food? Remember that sort of liquefied ham?”
Liquefied ham! No, Graham didn’t remember that. He remembered Matthew as an easy but peculiar baby, slow to walk and even slower to talk, but smiley and sweet, obsessed even at an early age with the stroller’s wheels and lift-out puzzles and lining toy cars up in precise rows. But at about eighteen months the constant toddler meltdowns started—over nothing, very close to literally nothing. Taking a different route home or drying Matthew off with the wrong bath towel or missing the first thirty seconds of The Wiggles would cause Matthew to scream and kick and turn nearly geranium-colored with rage. Constant battles over getting him dressed. For one solid year Matthew had refused to wear anything other than a flimsy Spider-Man costume. Audra had even bought a second one, but Matthew could be satisfied only with the original, which grew thinner and limper and more faded as the months and months and months passed. Audra quickly washed it and dried it every night while Graham spun out bath time as long as possible. Surely Audra couldn’t have forgotten that! They had a photo album to prove it, an entire one in which Matthew wore nothing else. My son, Spidey.
The tantrums didn’t go away. The terrible twos seemed to have a magical stretching ability when it came to Matthew. They went on for years. Eruptions over milk served in anything other than the Buzz Lightyear sippy cup, over music that was too “tinkly,” over carpet that was too scratchy, over people who stood too close, over the smell of sunblock, the prospect of butter on biscuits, the sight of cheetahs in an animal documentary. The littlest thing could set Matthew off, and there seemed to be no way of calling him back from the land of the tantrum—in an instant, he would be flat on the floor, back arched, legs rigid, mouth a wide-open circle of angry scream. They would do anything to prevent it. Graham could remember once frantically Scotch-taping the last banana in the fruit bowl back into a banana peel so Matthew could eat it monkey-style. Graham’s hands had been shaking with desperation.
Matthew had woken from all naps in the foulest mood imaginable, yelling with outrage—over what? Graham always wondered. Being pulled back into the waking realm that seemed to so aggravate him? The only solution was to rush into the nursery at the first hint of Matthew beginning to stir and hand him a grape Popsicle. Grape was the only flavor he would eat—they threw away dozens, probably hundreds, of orange and yellow ones. They needed the freezer space for the purple ones. Once Matthew had a Popsicle, he would consent to be wrapped in a blanket and sit in Graham’s or Audra’s lap and be rocked and soothed, gently coaxed into the world again. It was an arduous process. Graham could remember being on vacation once with Matthew sleeping on the hotel room bed, he and Audra out on the balcony, shivering and drinking wine from paper cups because they dreaded the prospect of waking him. Surely, Graham had thought, not all parents lived like this.
Public places were the worst. Once Matthew had screamed so loudly and forcefully during a haircut that they’d been blacklisted from the salon—and it was a place that specialized in children’s haircuts! And at a supermarket one time Matthew had taken a big bite out of a doughnut with jam in the middle and you would have thought he had bitten into a caterpillar from the way he carried on. Other shoppers rushed over to help, but there was nothing to do except scoop Matthew up and carry him out to the car while he wailed like a siren. Oh, how they tried to tell themselves this was normal.
Preschool to Matthew had been like a blowtorch held to a bare foot. He had screamed all the way there, every day, and continued to scream while Graham gently pried Matthew’s fingers from the car seat and the doorframe and carried him into the school, where he handed him over to the sweet, saintlike teacher who ran the place. (It was months before Graham actually heard the woman’s voice—all he saw were her lips moving.) Matthew screamed in the teacher’s arms while Graham left, and the sound of his cries followed Graham out the door and back to the car and all the way to his office, it seemed.
Sometimes Matthew screamed all morning at preschool, although sometimes he calmed down for a while, until something else set him off—a glass breaking, another child using his pair of scissors, a smoke alarm beeping. When that happened, the teacher or one of the assistants would come out and wait to speak to Audra at pickup time—the other children waited inside and were released one at a time when their parents arrived. Audra had told Graham that once she had driven up and seen the teacher standing outside with Matthew and had wanted to keep going. “I thought, Has she seen me? If she hasn’t seen me, I could quick turn around and she’d never know. I could go to Starbucks and have a coffee and wait until I felt stronger.” Could Audra have forgotten that?
And then finally, when Matthew was four, they had taken him to an educational psychologist, someone who had told them gently but firmly that Matthew’s behavior was very similar to that of children with Asperger’s, and had outlined the ways in which Matthew’s symptoms fit the criteria for diagnosis. The doctor had talked about the psychological assessment, and the communications assessment, the long questionnaires filled out by Matthew’s teachers, and by Audra and Graham, too. Hundreds of questions on those behavior forms were boiled down to a few numbers, expressing Matthew’s profile in terms of what is typical for a four-year-old.
The doctor’s voice was soft and soothing and a little bit singsong. “As you can see,” he said, “Matthew’s score on the questionnaires for oversensitivity to stimulation ranked more than a full standard deviation above the average for children his age.” He pointed to the peak on the graph of Matthew’s scores. “His score for social development problems is also elevated, again by more than a standard deviation.”
Standard deviation! Graham was appalled. Was that what they were discussing here—statistics? And who’s to say that there isn’t a standard deviation from the standard deviation? Who was this doctor to say that because of standard deviation, Matthew stood firmly on the stark cracked-earth desert of Asperger’s, that he would never feel the long cool green shade of normal?
Graham had wanted to argue with the doctor. He had wanted to say, Go back and spend a little more time with him! I don’t think you know him well enough to be saying these things.