later, «Pretend the sun is the parent and the planets are the children and the earth is me!»
Nevertheless, the limitations of autism remained. The Piper Cleaner family were dependent on Batman and Harold for their activities; a year passed, and they were still enacting the same plots. The little people who later lived in our appliances, having no such originals, had no plots. Instead they had elaborate kinship structures, inspired by our lessons on the shifting words for family relationships and by the families of people she knew. «Guess what! The oven is a make-believe family also! Noise of the oven same as the buzzer of the washing machine. This part of the family has only two children and both get married and one of them has children and the other don’t. And there are four parts of the family. Remember our family has two parts. Second part are my cousins. Stove has three sets of cousins. Some of the sisters and cousins are Karens. There are two Karens in two different sets of cousins and both didn’t get married. Too young».
They were lovely to think about. But they did nothing, didn’t go anywhere, even to bed or a party. Lorna Wing’s generalization held good: «imaginative activities», while not, as in some cases, «totally absent», were «copied from other[s]», or «spontaneous but carried out repetitively or in an identical fashion».[28] Jessy couldn’t invent. She could only combine — sometimes in startling ways — what she found elsewhere. Ten years ago I was astonished when she said, «I want to tell what it look like when I am imagining things» — astonished and hopeful. Would she, could she, at last open the window on that mysterious interior? But her next words disabused me: «I saw it on cartoons!»
Strange hypersensitivities, strange obsessions, strange compulsions, strange, explosive reactions. Strangeness can be frightening, especially when it lunges at you suddenly, loudly, hostilely, even with violence. As recently as the seventies, children like Jessy were called psychotic, and the terms «autism» and «childhood schizophrenia» were used interchangeably. In the long centuries before those labels, there was another explanation for such children. We found out what it was when a religious acquaintance told us that there are (still!) church rituals for casting out demons, and that we should have Jessy exorcised. I have seen Jessy’s father really angry only once, on the day it was suggested that his little daughter was in the power of the devil.
So I revert from the dark side of Jessy’s strangeness to what was, and is, far more characteristic, to her quirky, innocent pleasures. «Anna’s dishwasher sounds like music, even run nonstop like music running nonstop. General Electric don’t stop!» She rocks in pure delight.
There is pleasure in transition phrases on the TV. There is pleasure in the fivefold division of Route 7 (including its extension north as Route 133 in Canada). There is pleasure in «astrothings», especially anything to do with Venus, like the shell on which she rises from the waves in The Treasury of Art Masterpieces. «I saw Vena [„Venus“ is too good to say] peeping out at the corner of the science building». Anything that ends in — nus is good — not only Uranus and Cygnus, but minus and Janus and bonus as well. Why? Because NUS is «the greater light backwards», the greater light of Genesis 1, a.k.a. «the great big identified nonflying object», as Jessy grabs at any means to suppress that too-good word. Her world is full of «enthusiasms», which is what she calls these strange sources of delight. «There are many different kinds of happinesses», she tells me. «Enthusiasms, ecstasies, encouragement, enjoyment, bubbly. Joy!»
Part three
Painting
Chapter 8
«The sky is purple-black»
Jessy’s in her room, the door shut. I knock of course the proper behavioral lesson — but it’s years since we heard the angry «Go away!» of her adolescence. Today, though, there’s a pause before the «Come in». I know why; she’s doing «secrets», and she’s putting them away. Though the tubes of acrylics are in place, her table is empty of its usual work-in-progress. It’s three weeks before Christmas — or Valentine’s Day, or Easter — and Jessy is painting her little cards. Each family member will get one; so will former Jessy-helpers; so will the «housemates» who live with her when we are away.
It’s a happy task. The holiday itself is happy to think about, and her chosen subject matter makes it happier still. Twenty years of little cards adorn our kitchen, the multicolored record of Jessy’s «enthusiasms», her obsessions, unalloyed by the lurking anxieties that lie in ambush for them in real life.
Each 3-by-5 card is a miniature painting. There are double- yolked eggs. There’s a whole series of astrothings — solar eclipses, lunar eclipses, the planets in full array. There’s Venus rising, so bright that it casts a shadow. There’s a horizon with a green flash. There are five bees, safely dead. A monarch butterfly is so exquisitely detailed it seems real. A tomato hornworm recalls Jessy’s first pun, and her happy laugh when the hornworm blew its horn.
Time passes; enthusiasms «wear away» and new ones succeed them. No more astrothings, but houses, all sorts of houses. That was the period — it lasted more than a year — when Jessy, her voice tense with pleasure, would tell you, «I’m interested in real estate/» And she was, but not the way other people are interested in real estate; the economics of it meant nothing to her. Rather, her interest was in classification for its own sake. The phrase «starter house» made her shiver with delight. She would go on and on about «luxury homes», «million-dollar homes», though that was a category, not a price, determined not by grandeur of grounds or architecture, but (of course) the number of bedrooms, baths, and half-baths. And now, banks…
But other cards are less autistic, more sociable, as Jessy learns to look for subjects that are appropriate to their recipients. There are cat portraits for her cat-loving sister. Her Scottish brother-in- law, born in Glasgow on St. Patrick’s Day, gets a four-leaf clover for his birthday, for Christmas (my suggestion) the Glasgow city seal. The real estate enthusiasm itself grew out of actual conversations with her friend Anna about the purchase of a starter house. Like her books, her little cards show a progression, unsteady but real, toward engagement with the ordinary world.
What’s art is a matter of definition. «Those are the cookie art», Jessy said of her SING-SANG-SUNG collage. She never applied that term to her books. The Book About the Shadow, about the troubling Light, were in another category, one she could recognize though she couldn’t name it. They were functional records; that was why, I think, she seldom bothered with color, why she took no trouble with her drawing, except when an obsessive anxiety called forth the eerie realism of the science building or the shadow cast by an enormous 78. Color was for beauty, I think, though Jessy wouldn’t have said that either. So she cut out school menus and painted them and pasted them up in pastel strips; she made collages with multicolored silly business and crumpled tissue paper and her own name in string. The books were important, but I don’t think the farthest-out critic would call them art, still less apply the term to the illustrations for the journals she’s kept intermittently since the books were abandoned. As drawings, there is nothing remarkable about them except that they were the drawings of an autistic child and are now the drawings of an autistic adult. Jessy was four when she drew her first crude representation of a human being. She was nine when the comic books began. And since that time her representations of human figures have not changed at all.
