“Why didn’t you say anything?”
Frank Sinatra finished his song, holding out that last syllable for what seemed like a week: wayyyyyyyy.
The moment for telling had passed.
I waited a few days before trying again. I decided to take the safe route of the telephone. No actual faces, no not-recognizing debacles, no horrific face-blind implosion while I was trying to broach the topic. I called an old friend from college, Bland Lawson. He’d helped me write my papers for Brit Lit, had a party for me when I got fired from the law office, taught me to dance the two-step and the waltz. He played a concertina.
He was unmarried, wore straw hats, dressed in seersucker, and lived in Myrtle Beach with his mother. Bland was the perfect person on whom to practice weird shit.
“Hello?” he said. His southern accent undid me. I heard ice tinkling. Bland drank mint juleps for real. He ironed his seersucker suits with starch.
“Hey, Pinky,” he said, wide as the sky.
“I’m face-blind,” I said. “Prosopagnosic. Greek. Prosop- is for ‘face,’ -agnosic is like ‘agnostic.’ I’m a face doubter. I can’t see human faces. I doubt them.” I heard his ice cubes shift, fall. “It’s like golden retrievers. Would you be able to pick out your own dog from a lineup of twenty other golden retrievers? No,” I said quickly. “You would not.”
“What?” Bland Lawson said. It was a word he wrung three syllables out of. “You are calling to tell me you can’t find your dog? Or you can’t find my dog.” Bland enjoyed being deliberately obtuse.
“Prosopagnosia?” I said. I hadn’t talked to Bland in over a year. “It’s Greek?”
Long pause. I could see a couple of ways my delivery might be adjusted.
“I can’t pick up my step-kids at school. Honestly. I can’t find the boys when they’re with a group of kids dressed similarly. You can read about it online. I also got divorced from Dave, but I am really just calling to practice telling you I can’t recognize people by face.”
There was another even longer pause, filled with another sip.
“Thoughts?” I said. “Reactions, questions?”
“No,” Bland said. “You don’t have that. I’m a hypochondriac. And I have never heard of it.”
I’d liked telling Bland. It hadn’t gone well but it hadn’t been disastrous, like the Andrea lunch, which made me redden with shame whenever I thought about it. I wanted to tell, and have the person know, really know. I wanted to be believed.
I called a practical, sturdy acquaintance, a professor of photography who taught at a nearby college and had a hearing-impaired husband. She was perfect, I thought: she would have a response, she would share it, and she would enjoy talking about vision and perception; she’d be sensitive to disorder because of her husband.
We met for coffee. She found me at a table in the back.
“Hi, Teresa,” I said. “Ready? I’m jumping in with this thing.”
She leaned forward and laughed. “This seems big.”
“I got divorced. But that’s not why I asked you to come out. I have a rare neurological condition that makes it hard for me to recognize people, including you. It would be helpful to me if you could tell me who you are when we run into each other.”
She burst out laughing. She sipped her coffee. She laughed some more. “You think you have everything, Heather!” she shouted. Because of her husband, she always talked full volume. “You are making this up!” She laughed and laughed. Then she got serious and said in a challenging tone, “How did you recognize me now?”
I took a sip of my coffee. I debated. What would Helder do? Think. Should I tell Teresa that her super-loud voice, her distinctive choppy hair, her distinctive body outline, and her North Carolina-Cuban accent distinguished her in West Michigan, made her easy as a billboard for me? That this ease of recognition was probably partly why I was always so happy to “see” her?
“I knew we were meeting, Teresa,” I said, speaking slowly in my new Teaching Prosopagnosia voice. “You came and sat with me. I’m not stupid. It’s a very specific impairment, it’s just the face.” I drew a circle around my face with my fingertips. “Actually just the interior features, nose, cheeks, eyes, lips, et cetera.”
An aghast frown came over her face and took over her whole body. “Heather Laurie Sellers!” she shouted. “You recognize people, Heather. I mean, you just do. I’ve seen you do that a million times. I don’t think you have this. This is so silly. Have you been on the Internet? I want to hear about the divorce. I told you that you shouldn’t have married that man. Did I not? Do you remember? My husband and I both told you to your face: You are making a huge mistake. When did all this happen? You never tell anyone anything.”
I told her I was working on that.
“You just wanted those kids. You just wanted to be a mother.”
I knew, for certain, so few things and one of them was this: my love for those boys was not a bad thing. So I said so.
There was an awkward pause.
“Usually, Teresa,” I said, “I’m working so hard to figure out who the fuck I’m talking to and what’s happening next, I don’t take a stand. I don’t say anything at all.”
There was another long silence. She finished her latte. I’d never seen her so quiet. She stood to go. She said, her voice suddenly soft, “I don’t feel like we’re really connecting, Heather. You’ve changed.” She said it as an accusation; she sounded disappointed.
I took it as high, high praise. Yes, I wanted to say. I have changed. I have moved closer to the person I meant to be. Sometimes, like now, I can almost even see her face!
We hugged, but our hearts weren’t in it. Tea spilled on my purse, and my purse got my pants all wet.
Telling turned out to be exactly like going off the high dive. The first time was hell. And then, soon, I was running for the ladder, scrambling up, eager to fling myself off, wondering what kind of special spin I could include, how I could make the telling, the falling, more beautiful, more fun, more creative, more interesting and effective.
It wasn’t anything like how I thought it would be. I thought people would ask me questions about the disorder, my childhood, my mother, my family, how long I had it. I thought they would say, Did your parents try to help you? And that I would dissolve into tears or, worse, weirdness in the midst of the questioning. But no one asked anything at all. The disorder itself was such a tricky thing to understand, it stopped people short.
I called my colleague Lorna, a professor in the psychology department. We ran together a few times a week. I was eager to tell Lorna about my condition because she was a new friend and I didn’t want things to go awry. Already there’d been incidents. On campus, more than once, I’d mistaken her for someone I didn’t know. Recently she’d invited me to come swim and dine with her family at their house. When I got out of the pool, I went inside to change. Walking to the bathroom, I ran into a strange little man with his head wrapped in a towel. I screamed. It was Lorna, coming in from the pool.
I wanted to be closer to her. I didn’t want to lose her as I had lost Andrea.
We met for a run on a wide empty road that circled a windmill, passing sheep, ponies, tulip fields. It was early; the sun was still coming up. Lorna was talking about her marriage and how strong she felt with Bruce, her husband, whom she had met and married when they were teenagers. I thought this was as good an opening as I was going to get.
I asked Lorna if we could do a few more laps. I had a couple of important things to tell her. She said of course. I told her about divorcing Dave. She said she was very, very sorry. How was I doing? Actually, pretty well, I said. But there was more. I needed one more lap to get up my courage. “Can we run one without talking? I have to tell you something that is so hard for me to talk about.”
“Of course,” she said. “Absolutely.” And we ran, and I listened to our breath and the sound of our running shoes on the road, and the cadence calmed me down.
We eased into a walk. I sai
d, “I have a condition that’s hard for me to talk about, but I have to tell people. It’s very strange and unheard-of. I am getting ready to tell the whole campus community about it. Before the semester is officially underway, I am sending a mass e-mail. Lorna, this is a very weird thing, but I actually can’t recognize people reliably,” I said. “Sometimes when we run into each other, it takes me a few moments to figure out who you are. I am afraid sometimes I may not know at all.”
“Prosopagnosia?” she said.
I stopped short. I grabbed her shoulders. “You know about it?”
“I was just teaching this to my class last week!” she said. “The students were fascinated. You will have to come to class.”
“You teach this?”
“It’s on the test! It’s in the book! Of course!”
The sky changed from gray-blue to peach melba, streaks of vivid raspberry, and the air was warm and smooth, as though it had been well cared for all night. We ran and ran and ran and ran, and then we walked, still talking. Lorna knew all about face blindness. She said another colleague in Psychology was doing research on it and would want to know all about my experiences at Harvard. I told her how hard it had been, telling people. Lorna said I would find myself repeating the explanation many times. Telling people once would never be enough. Remember how long it had taken me to understand it?
“Yes,” I said. “My whole life.”
“Telling is a process,” she said. “You’ll always be teaching people, Heather. Thankfully, that is something you are really good at.”
Lorna said there were two kinds of prosopagnosics: those who compensated by being friendly to everyone, and those who retreated, hunkered down, avoided interactions. I was, seemingly, both types in one, a super-friendly super-avoider. But people saw me as bubbly and confident and friendly, and it was going to be hard for them to accept this truth about me. I had covered it up so well for so long. I should be prepared for them to be surprised and confused and dubious. “It’s difficult for people to believe you won’t know them. They’ll think you know them because they want to know they are important to you. It will be very hard for some to believe, because it runs so counter to their perceptual experience, but also their experience of you.”
We hugged, at the edge of the river, by the old windmill. I knew now I’d tell everyone. I’d tell them over and over for the rest of my life. And the telling would get better and better. Above our heads, while we hugged and hugged, a great blue heron flew like a slow arrow in the sky. I pretended it was the vulture: a blessing, welcome, welcome. Welcome to the visible world.
Three
“Lay it on me, Heather,” the vice president of my college said. He was one of the important men I hadn’t recognized at the Andrea lunch. He was steely in a friendly way, with perfect silver hair, gleaming skin, a suit so black it was blue. I liked him a lot. He was a cyclist and handsome and fair and effective, well-spoken at meetings, piercing the bullshit like a needle. I needed his okay in order to send, the next day, the day before classes, the e-mail I’d written, announcing my face blindness to the whole school.
I pressed my hands on the notebook where I’d outlined my speech. I looked at my notes. Then I looked him in the eye. “I can’t recognize people by face. I need to tell everyone so they can help me by introducing—”
“Oh, I have that too,” he said. “I’m terrible with names. You aren’t alone. Boy, do I have that.”
“Well,” I said.
He looked at me kindly, nodding.
“This is different.” I explained prosopagnosia. I taught him how to pronounce it. I told him about the difference between vision and recognition, the stages of apprehending a face. I told him how majestic it was that most people could do this. I emphasized that it wasn’t about names at all. I explained how name retrieval came after recognition and identification in the complex sequence associated with simply saying “Hey” to someone. Remembering someone’s name was really hard for everyone to do because names are abstract concepts, not visual images, not physical, like a face.
“Dr. Smith,” I said. “I recognize people all the time. But the disorder makes it difficult for me to reliably recognize people. It’s been hard on my social life. It’s a factor in the classroom. You may have noticed I’ve avoided sporting events, graduation, commencement, the pre-college conference—and anything where people are in uniform. I avoid small groups of familiar people. The entire committee structure of the college is, for me, a nightmare. I need people to know about this,” I said. I sounded so calm and clear. “I need their help.”
The vice president slowly wrote the word prosopagnosia on his fresh yellow legal pad. He was quiet for a moment. Then he told me a long story about his son and his son’s learning disabilities. At first I didn’t understand. Then I realized, as he recounted the years of testing, the behavior problems, the family’s struggles, that the vice president wanted to show he was with me, next to me. He was providing a matching story.
The sun poured into the spacious wood-paneled office and I felt strong and empty and grown up. I almost fit. I couldn’t even imagine anymore how I’d ever been convinced I was mentally ill. The girl who’d thought that, the girl who tried so hard to please her parents, to fit with them, was faded, a specter.
And then he asked me, as if he’d read my mind, “What did your parents do about this when you were a kid? What did they try?” I could feel him speaking as a kind and good parent.
I smiled. I said, “Here is what I’d like to share.” I handed him the e-mail I’d drafted. He read it. He didn’t ask me any more about my parents. I wasn’t hiding them. I wasn’t ashamed of them. They simply weren’t relevant to this action I was taking.
He asked me some more questions about my condition and what I’d learned from my research. I’d never felt more clear about prosopagnosia or who I was—and wasn’t—in relation to it. I felt like I was describing my arm, why it looked the way it looked. I smiled and I heard my teacher voice, pleasant, calm, a little loud, but in a good way, festive. Until you can explain a thing clearly to someone else, you don’t really know it, I was always telling my students. I said, “I just want people to know about it. When I pass them without saying hello, not to take it personally. To feel free to say who they are. My working relationships are so important to me.” Smooth, I thought. Team-player-ish.
“By all means,” he said, rising from his chair. He swept the e-mail across the table toward me. “Send!”
I walked across campus. I could see myself, friendly and tall, long dark hair, sandals: a new student would see me and think, She looks like a nice professor. In the August heat, students were unpacking tubs and duffel bags from vans while grumpy fathers frowned at flustered mothers and younger siblings sat on the grass, bored.
Up in my office, I turned on my computer. I assembled recipients from my address book and then copied my e-mail. I took a breath and hit Send.
It felt like dropping myself off in a new place, all alone. Who would I be now? Who would I become? I wanted to take the message back. What had I done? People will think I am nuts. They’ll think I’m making this up. My hands and feet were pouring sweat. We know you’re alive, I heard Helder whispering. I wiped my palms on my blouse.
I turned off my computer as though that would quiet things down, stop the sending. I took the elevator downstairs and went out the back doors of Lubbers Hall. “That’s not it. That’s not it. That’s not it,” a girl said. There on the sidewalk, backs to each other, each with her arms firmly crossed, stood a mom and her daughter. I walked up to them and said, “Can I help you find something?”
The mother said yes and the girl said no, but she held out her orientation folder. “We’re, like, totally confused.” She was nearly in tears. She could tell me, a stranger, anything. She could not, in these hours of leaving home for good, look to her mother.
“My daughter is Sarah VanderVeen, and we just learned there’s another Sarah VanderVeen here. Do you think there’
s going to be confusion? We’re looking for the dining hall. Phelps? Felts? How do you even say that word?”
“We don’t have the dinner coupons,” Sarah VanderVeen said. “Mom.”
I looked at the mom. She was trying so hard. I looked at the daughter, one of the Sarah VanderVeens. Yes. There would be confusion. There would always be so much confusion. Many, many things would go wrong.
“I know where you’re going,” I said. “It’s Phelps. And it’s on my way.”
I felt the mom breathing out, wanting to talk to me. She looked so kind and normal. I bet she was from Illinois or Indiana, lived on a farm, quilted, helped with 4-H, belonged to a book club. But she held back, and her daughter, Sarah VanderVeen, walked next to me. I looked at her little printed schedule of classes and her dorm assignment. “Girls love Dykstra,” I said, though I heard mostly the opposite. “And you have great classes, you’ve gotten so lucky. Gibbs is an outstanding history teacher. You’ll love her.”
“Sarah loves history!” the mom said. Then she covered her mouth; I could feel her doing it, like I had eyes in the back of my head.
Sarah shuddered.
I told her how perfect it would all turn out.
“I wish she could have you as her teacher,” the mom said.
It wasn’t until later that evening that I realized I would not recognize that Sarah VanderVeen if she came to my office or if I saw her again on campus. I was still getting used to not-faking. I was still getting used to me as I really was, as I had been all along.
A couple months later, Brad Duchaine called me from Harvard. He wanted to know if I would be willing to explain my condition on television, if I would be willing to appear on the Today show. The very next day.
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