DURING THE PAST few years, my visits home had grown brief and violent. Violent. Now that’s a word you don’t like to hear in relation to family togetherness, but it’s the only word that begins to tell the truth. When we gathered at our lakeside cabin, my sister would become, at some point in the weekend, out of control. She would scream, bang the table with her fists, and throw things. She might be set off by some minor disruption—a lost CD, a missing trinket, some undetectable change in the environment. Trying to help my sister in her panic has always felt like coming to the aid of a person whose language I don’t speak. She simply cannot put into words the terrible crisis she is in, and I have no way to decipher her need, no matter how dire.
After a while I began to suspect that she wasn’t freaking out about any lost item. I started to think she was freaking out because she’d left the safe and careful routine of her group home to be with the rest of us. She was seeing all of us, who had been absent for most of the year, quite suddenly in the same place. It was crowded, noisy, and chaotic, and it pissed her off and stressed her out. That was my theory.
Whatever the case, Margaret would get upset, and then my father would blow his top. And my mother would let him. Then the rest of us would feel responsible and angry and helpless. The world exploded, and no one ever talked about it. Then all that pain and sadness had nowhere to go. I would climb back on the plane to my home in New Mexico with a headache that lasted for days. I would think about my sister and wonder if it would be better not to see her at all. I would think about the rest of my family and wonder how we could survive this decades-old cycle of destruction.
AS I SAT outside Margaret’s house in my mother’s car, I knew what might happen even if I didn’t know what to expect. The possibilities ran rampant in my mind. Dining out with my sister had always been an exceptionally dynamic experience. To begin with, when we were children, eating out was a rare occasion. My parents were always trying to save a buck so that they could put us all through Catholic high school and then college, thereby getting us the hell out of the house. Our infrequent dining out was motivated by mental health issues, too—namely, that taking their five children out in public made my parents want to kill themselves just a little less than they wanted to murder the rest of us.
And to make the understatement of the millennium, I’ll say that my sister wasn’t at her best in restaurants. Noisy, crowded, unfamiliar places stressed her out. Restaurant dining took her out of her rigid, comforting routine and also away from the short menu of foods she found palatable—spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, and spaghetti.
There was also the matter of interminable waiting at restaurants: waiting to be seated, waiting for menus, waiting to order. Then she had to wait for the food to come, wait for everyone else to finish eating, wait for the check. This entire process was supremely different from Margaret’s preferred mode of dining, what we call the Six-and-a-Half-Minute Meal. Three hundred and ninety seconds is all the time it takes for Margaret to charge the table, fill and empty her plate, chug her drink, scramble into her coat while she is still swallowing, and stand by the door waiting to be driven home. “THANKS FOR THE SPAGHETTI, MOM!” she says in her high monotone voice, waving good-bye to the rest of us, who are still sitting at the table with our forks in the air.
Leisurely dining was never a habit for Margaret, and during our childhood the anxiety she felt in a public dining room was more than palpable to the rest of us. It created a force field of nervous energy that electrified everybody as we waited for, well, everything to fall apart.
With Margaret, not only did these events become greatly accelerated, but sometimes the distinct periods were jumbled out of order. My sister might order dessert in the lobby when the hostess came to tell us our table was almost ready. Or, after clamoring over and over again that she wanted spaghetti, PLEASE, she’d refuse to speak to the waiter who finally came to take our order. And she couldn’t tolerate the time lapse between the ordering part and the eating part of dining in a restaurant.
It’s not that she was particularly ravenous, either, as she fretted, waiting for the food to appear. She just wanted to get on with things. Her autism didn’t let her appreciate the white space, the pause, the invisible transitions between action and rest in everyday activity. So if she wasn’t Ordering, by God, she should be Eating. And if she was done Eating, it was time to Go Home. As a result, every moment of such an evening—from the second we climbed into our twelve-passenger Chevy van and clicked into our seat belts until we were safely back at the house—was well seasoned with family-wide anxiety. The rest of us might have wanted to enjoy everything—or anything—that happened in between, but for Margaret the best part of the evening was getting back to the house. The rest of it, on Margaret’s terms, was simply a period to be suffered through.
