when she began to reach out for more ways of understanding the world. Literal- minded like all autistic people, she began to pay close attention to these figurative expressions. «A stitch in time saves nine» made literal sense when she was mending her sweater; it was easy to stretch it to cover other household repairs. Other proverbs were more metaphorical, yet she wrestled them into meaning, recognizing in them the ordering power of language. Proverbs are reassuring for someone who worries obsessively whether the weather will be fair or where my glasses are. More for my satisfaction than hers, I quoted my grandmother to her: «Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof». I didn’t expect her to listen, but she heard it, all right: «Day is sufficient until evil come out». It had surpassed her verbal powers but not her comprehension, for she not only explained it as «Don’t worry too soon», but herself supplied the equivalent «Don’t borrow trouble» and «Don’t cross the bridge until you come to it». She had to work with that one: «Does it mean go over that bridge or go under?» But she got the meaning; when the cat was gone all day («Lost, oh lost!») and came back at midnight: «Unnecessary sadness! And there wasn’t any bridge!» Three months later, the weatherman predicted sunshine but clouds threatened. Jessy began to obsess, then checked herself. «It would be crossing the bridge too early — I would fall in the water».
They are useful, these idioms; they have become idioms because they speak to the human condition. No use crying over spilt milk. Getting off on the wrong foot. Getting up on the wrong side of the bed. So, of the dinner invitation I almost forgot: «If you forgot, then remembered in the middle of the night, then you would get out of the wrong side of the bed in the morning». Yet the application isn’t always easy. «Tracy got out of the wrong side of the bed because her father was in a bad accident». You don’t say that. Verbal patterns help, but they can’t cure.
Still, they help a lot. Waiting is very difficult for Jessy, whether it is for a month or a minute. Is it because predictability, the trustworthiness of the environment, is threatened? Is it because Jessy, so accurate with clocks and calendars, can’t gauge her experience of subjective time? I don’t know, but waiting, at work or at home, is a continual problem. All the more welcome, then, what Jessy’s made of my grandmother’s «All things come to him who waits». They mostly do, and Jessy crows exultantly her own version: «Things come to me when I wait!» It makes it, I think, and Jessy thinks, just a little easier to wait next time.
Jessy is not only reassured by these linguistic patterns, she enjoys them. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it was in the same years she began to use proverbs that she made her first verbal jokes. She has grown up in a joking household; that, I think, has made her less solemn than most of the autistic adults I’ve met. I remember her father, long before she could talk, laying her down on the kitchen floor, saying «Night-night», covering her with a newspaper and giving her some kitchen object to hold as her talisman blanket, teaching her to enjoy the discrepancy between reality and pretend. We thought then that we were teaching the actual difference between the two, but I know now it was the enjoyment that mattered. Even as a tiny child, Jessy never confused the imaginary and the real. Like most autistic people, she operates in the realm of the visible, the tangible, the literally true. What we were teaching was that perceiving the difference between what was true and what wasn’t could be fun. I treasure the memory of her first joke, when she lugged over a snow toy, a «flying saucer» almost as big as she was, offered it to a guest as an ashtray, and laughed.
Still, it took many, many more years before Jessy was at home enough in language to make a joke in words. At first it was hard to tell if they were really jokes, as when, seeing me about to sneeze, she said she’d read, not my mind (we’d talked about that) but my nose. But we laughed, and she did too, clearly enjoying the unexpected thing she’d done with words. Word play became more frequent. Though our cat’s name was Daisy, we often called her «Kitty dear», and Jessy echoed us. One day she saw a daisy in a field and addressed it as «Kitty dear». A simple (mis)association of ideas? A prepun? She laughed, at any rate, and that made it a joke. She was ready for puns; she learned the word at once. «Two days ago I saw somebody cut hair in the mailroom — ‘just a hair.’ That is a pun!» And it was; she’d remembered her father’s way of saying «just a little bit».
The pun, I was told as a child, is the lowest form of humor, and hers are very simple. «Cold pills is pills that are out in the cold!» «The microbus is the bus with microbes in it!» But this one shows real observation. «Eclipse Rum» — the label caught her eye, at a time when she resonated to anything about eclipses. «Eclipse can eclipse the pain and eclipse the insomnia. That is a pun».
Indeed, and more than a pun. It is a step beyond the literal, into further, richer dimensions of language. No giant step, however; Jessy doesn’t take giant steps. Twelve years have passed since then. Eclipses have lost their fascination; these days it’s anything to do with Merrill Lynch. So we read from the morning paper: the company is downsizing. «A certain number of people are going to be cut». «Cut?!!» The astonishment in her voice makes it plain: the autistic literalism survives. They are to be mastered one by one, the slippery ways of words.
Some, however, she will not master. After forty years we know that. I need to say more about Jessy’s difficulty with pronouns — a difficulty which, though it may seem too specific to be of general significance, points far beyond itself to some of the most important areas of current research, into the psychological and biological nature of autism.
Among the autistic characteristics that Leo Kanner noted in the brilliantly observed paper in which he first identified the autistic syndrome was «pronominal reversal». He based his report on eleven cases; along with literal and stereotyped language, he noted pronominal reversal in eight of them — and the other three had no language at all.
There is no difficulty with plurals and tenses. But the absence of spontaneous sentence formation and the echolalia type of reproduction [have]. given rise to a peculiar grammatical phenomenon. Personal pronouns are repeated just as heard [emphasis his], with no change to suit the altered situation. The child, once told by his mother, «Now I will give you your milk», expresses the desire for milk in exactly the same words. Consequently he comes to speak of himself as «you», and of the person addressed as «I»… There is a set, not-to-be-changed phrase for every specific occasion.[10]
Just so; autistic speech begins as echo. When Jessy at last began to request things, that’s what we’d hear: «You want a cookie?» She was six. She was eight when I finished the first long, slow chapter on her speech, and she still did not refer to herself as «I». By then, however, she echoed the word — and reversed the meaning. «I» was her mother. That, after all, was what she heard me say.
Since then there has been great progress. Her sentences are longer and more complex. They are fairly correct grammatically. They reach beyond herself to other people. Yet even so, these are the kinds of things that may come out when she has to deal with pronouns:
«I think I will eat with us», she says. «I» is securely in place, but «us» is an uneasy surrogate for the plural «you» that should denote me and her father. Even the «I» may get lost: «You wrote you a check». Who did? It was she who had paid me for her share of the groceries. «We will have to borrow our car». It was the neighbor who needed our car. Two pronouns at the same time are just too hard to handle. She speaks of Miranda, her brother’s daughter, and someone asks, «Who’s Miranda?» She hesitates. Then, slowly and carefully, she replies: «I. am. my niece».
Be assured, Jessy knows she isn’t her niece. Although eager psychoanalysts for years took pronominal reversal as evidence of «early ego failure», Jessy has anything but a weak ego. Still, they were right in suspecting that something more significant was going on than peculiar grammar, more pervasive than a mix-up of two pronouns. Yet however tempting «I» and «you» might be to ego psychologists, they are only the tip of the iceberg. Jessy has even more trouble with «we» and «our» and «us», with «they» and «their», with «his» and «hers», even with «he» and «she». I hear her answering the phone, groping for the words to tell a caller her father’s not home. It’s going slowly, so I try to help. «Say he’s not home and can you take a message». Jessy alters the primary pronoun; she’s learned that much. But what results is this: «She’s not home, and can you take a message».
So what is going on? «The pronominal fixation», wrote Kanner, «remains until about the sixth year of life, when the child gradually learns to speak of himself in the first person, and the person addressed in the second person».[11] At six, when Kanner’s children had sorted out their pronouns and had «no difficulty with plurals and tenses», Jessy’s difficulties were just beginning. Obviously, their speech handicap was less severe than hers. Because it was less severe, Kanner could think of pronominal reversal as an isolated — and temporary — grammatical oddity. And because he noticed no difficulties in plurals and tenses, he could not see how closely all these — and other — characteristics of autistic speech are related, or the deeper problems they
