Sucking Up Yellow Jackets

by Jeanne Denault

  He asked me what made them light up and why they didn’t fall out of the sky. I said, “Hot gasses? Maybe they’re too light to fall?” He heard the question in my voice and looked disappointed. I tried to explain my point of view. “I see stars as something beautiful, like a picture I love. I don’t really care what they’re made of, how they got where they are or why they stay there.”

  He turned and looked at my eyes. I wondered if he thought I didn’t know about stars because my eyes were broken. He often stared at my face as though there were something wrong with me. He looked at his father the same way. We baffled him as much as he baffled us. He was clearly intelligent. I assumed he didn’t understand gravity but he had figured out objects didn’t stay up in the air by themselves. He had a large vocabulary and he used words well. He stared at the pages when I read to him and knew if I left out a word. I sometimes got the impression he was reading along with me but assumed he had a good memory for patterns. Two-and-a-half-year-olds can’t read. His sister had just turned four. She had figured out that the octagonal red signs at the street corners said Stop but that might have been because I always said, “Stop,” when I got to them.

  I knew Max understood everything I said when I told him what I expected from him. I stuck to simple things. Stay out of the street. Respect other people’s belongings. Don’t climb on the roof or hang from the gutters. Eat what’s on your plate without saying “yuck.” Don’t pick your nose, or scratch your bottom, or play with your penis in the living room or outside. Say please and thank you. Don’t help yourself to candy when you’re visiting someone. If they offer you candy, never take more than two pieces even if it’s your favorite kind. Don’t sass adults even if you think they’re stupid. Try to keep your face from showing what you’re really thinking if it isn’t polite. The reason for each item was explained. This took a long time because Max debated each rule and demanded exact parameters. Then he ignored every rule unless it was what he wanted to do anyway.

  He became convinced he was being cheated by his brother. He didn’t understand why so he did what he could to even the score. He claimed every toy brought into the house for Seth. Baby toys like rattles, cloth books and soft animals ended up missing. I found them under his bed. Frustrated, I asked him why he took them. He didn’t answer—or stop taking them. I finally just checked under his bed and in his closet to restock Seth’s highchair tray and playpen a few times a day. Each time Max saw the reclaimed objects he stared at Seth and then at me with a venomous expression that chilled me.

  One day he came into the kitchen with peppermint breath. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. Pete periodically tried to stop smoking, stashed mints in his jacket pockets and then forgot they were there when he started smoking again. I propped my hands on my hips and asked Max why he had been going through his dad’s pockets. His eyes popped open. Frantic, he looked around to see who had given him away then stared at me with a spooked expression on his face when he realized we were alone. I was feeding into his belief that I had magical powers. The familiar guilt cropped up but I felt at such a disadvantage with Max because I couldn’t follow his thought processes, I was willing to ignore the guilt and go against all my beliefs of fairness if it would help keep him safe. Maybe if he thought I knew everything he did he might think twice before he did it. So far I had no reason to believe this but I was eternally hopeful.

  I noticed each time Seth made a gain in function Max lost one. By the time Seth first pulled up to a standing position in his playpen and gave a triumphant crow of delight Max was barely speaking. Something was eating at him. Max watched Seth with his eyes hooded and his mouth turned down. I couldn’t decide if his expression meant anger, profound depression, or both. My heart hurt to see this strange but vibrant boy shrinking inside himself and becoming non-verbal. I had to get help. We didn’t have a pediatrician so I made an appointment with the general practitioner who took care of all our medical needs. He was smart, nice and he liked Max. He spent an hour alone with him then he had the nurse take him out to the waiting room and called me into his office.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your son. I wish I had kids that personable and bright. His vocabulary is better than mine. He asked me how all my equipment worked and then listened to my answers. Stop worrying and just enjoy him.”

  Thinking the doctor could help was stupid on my part. One-on-one encounters with someone who would listen to him were Max’s forte. I thanked the doctor and drove home more worried than I was before. The pediatrician who took care of him when we lived in Concord was the only one who seemed to understand there was something intrinsically different about Max. I called his office in Massachusetts. He had just had a cancellation for the following day so I set up an appointment. At two o’clock the following morning, I carried the three sleeping kids out to the VW beetle and drove to Melrose, the town north of Boston where the pediatrician lived. My mother-in-law still lived there and we went back and forth often enough so the kids were used to long car rides. The drive to Melrose usually took six or seven hours. Being cooped up in a small car with three children under five would have seemed to be an invitation to misery somewhere between purgatory and hell. But timing was everything. All three slept most of the way.

  The pediatrician checked Max physically, listened with a bemused expression when the small boy explained what made the stethoscope work then laughed when Max asked if he could have two lollipops without getting a shot first. He buzzed his nurse.

  “Liz, can you please give this young man two lollipops?”

  Max cut in. “Without shots?”

  “Right. No shots please.”

  The doctor watched Max take the nurse’s hand without protest. “Amazing.” He indicated the stethoscope tucked into his pocket. “I’ve been using this thing for so long I’d almost forgotten how it works. So tell me exactly why you dragged your son all the way to Melrose.”

  “He’s stopped speaking in sentences at home. He’s sad, angry and he often seems frightened.”

  He looked at Max’s old chart. “He was unusually articulate for a one-and-a-half-year-old when I last saw him. What do you think is causing him to regress?”

  “I have a new baby boy. He’s ten months old now. Linda obviously loves the baby but she can’t stand poor Max. I’m guessing he thought that her contempt was just part of her makeup. Now he knows it’s aimed at him.”

  “What about your husband?”

  I was torn. I was raised to believe it was wrong to discuss family problems with outsiders. But I needed help. “He’s never been comfortable with Max.”

  “What does your husband do?”

  “He’s withdrawn and overly critical with Max and always easily affectionate with Seth. He tries to like Max. I can see he knows he’s being unfair but he can’t stop himself.”

  “That must be hard on Max.”

  I nodded. “He looks devastated when Pete yells at him then turns around and hugs Seth. When Pete leaves, Max watches Seth with a menacing expression as though Seth were something he hadn’t ordered and plans to send back.”

  “Menacing how?”

  “He looks angry and coldly detached at the same time. I sometimes feel he’s measuring Seth with his eyes to figure out where to stuff his body.” I hunched my shoulders and hugged my elbows.

  The doctor nodded. I had been hoping he would tell me this was ridiculous.

  “How are you doing?”

  I wasn’t used to being asked how I was doing. It took me a second to decide what to say. “I feel like I’m living under a curse. Sometimes it’s hard to breathe. Max seems to suck up all the air in the house. I never know what he’s going to do next so I’m always in a knot.” I could feel my voice thickening. I looked down at my clenched hands. “Sometimes I hate my life.”

  He shook his head. “You’ve got to get help. That’s no way to live. I don’t know who to refer you to in your area but a pediatrician I’ve known since we were residents lives in Philadelphia.” He flipped
open an address book, wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “Give him a call. He’ll know who you can go to for help and give you a referral.”

  Chapter 13

  A month after I got back from Massachusetts, we moved into a house in Center City, Philadelphia. Tired of being stuck out in the suburbs, I had convinced Pete to look at houses downtown. He was weary of the long drive and time restraints of a car pool with four other men in it so it was not hard to convince him. Five months earlier we had found and bought a house in bad shape on Pine Street, a twenty-minute walk from his office. During the period of gutting and rebuilding, I went into town once or twice a week to keep track of the progress and attack odd jobs no one else wanted to do.

  The mother of our favorite baby sitter took care of the kids the days I was gone. I didn’t get the impression she had a sense of humor but her daughter was kind, endlessly patient and liked Max so I decided the baby sitter’s mother knew how to raise children. She had all three children bathed, fed and in pajamas by the time I got home. I loved this. Linda and Seth were happy. Max looked haunted and began having nightmares.

  I knew he didn’t want to move. He wanted every day to be the same. Any change in routine made him edgy. So he followed me around all day long. I literally couldn’t move without tripping over him. He vibrated neediness. I did everything I could to reassure him. I read to him, encouraged him to talk even if he asked the same question repeatedly and didn’t seem to listen to my reply. I knew nothing would have any effect on his anxiety short of cancelling the move. This wasn’t a new problem. He always tracked my every move if he sensed his routine was about to be altered. He even had a problem with weekends and holidays.

  Linda resented his single-minded insistence on having my undivided attention as much as I did, no matter how hard I tried to stifle my feelings. I liked being alone, I liked being able to read an article or a book. Linda could be with me, and play happily without intruding on my every thought. She was good company; she seemed to have an innate grasp of boundaries that Max completely lacked. He felt every person and every object was an extension of him and should be immediately available to him.

  I looked forward to my days in Philadelphia overseeing the house renovations. No matter what I did, it was peaceful to move around without Max attached to my side.

  We wanted to leave the salmon brick party wall in the new house cleaned off and without plaster. The Italian mason refused to chip off the old plaster. He wouldn’t even let his helper do it. So it fell to me. He did agree to re-point it but only if I promised not to tell anyone he did it. He said his reputation would be ruined if it got around.

  Chipping plaster off salmon brick was a difficult, tedious job. The brick was soft. A too vigorous whack on the cold chisel left a permanent divot. At the end of a day, my hands were cramped and achy, my ears rang from the repeated clang of metal on metal and I hacked up brick and cement dust too fine to be stopped by my mask. But I was happier doing this than I was spending endless days cooped up in the house with Max dogging every step and quivering with his impossible to meet needs. I sometimes wondered what it would be like to raise just Linda and Seth. Like Max, they were fascinating. I felt privileged to watch them evolve but every time I tried to do something special with either of them, Max’s never-ending insistence on possessing my undivided time ruined the experience for everyone.

  Shortly after we moved into town, I heard Linda yelling. “The devil’s going to get you if you don’t stop that.”

  I walked into the living room where they were playing. Linda glared at Max, her face flushed, her hands firmly planted on her hips. Max looked frightened. Shoulders pulled inward and head tucked down as far as it could go, he looked like a threatened turtle that couldn’t pull his head inside the shell.

  “Where did you hear about devils, Linda?”

  Both children whirled and faced me. They looked as though they had just been caught robbing a bank. Linda pursed her lips. Her head bobbed side to side. “The baby sitter said Max had the devil inside him. She prayed to make the devil go out of him. But it didn’t work. He still takes all my best things.”

  She was a gifted mimic. I recognized the cadence of the baby sitter’s speech.

  “Devils don’t exist, Linda. They’re just something people made up a long time ago to scare everyone else into being good.”

  Linda’s eyes got that opaque look I would see frequently when she started kindergarten next fall. The “what do you know—you’re just my mother” look.

  “He is too real. The baby sitter showed us a picture of the devil in her Bible. He was stabbing people. And they got really deaded when he stuck them with his sword. She goes to church every Sunday so she knows about devils.”

  I was furious with the baby sitter but I knew talking to a religious zealot who believed she knew the only road to heaven was a waste of time. It was a moot point anyway; I would never see her again.

  From Linda’s guilty reaction when I overheard her talking about devils, I knew she wouldn’t have told me what was going on even if I had known what to ask. I was irritated with myself to realize I so easily assumed Max’s increasing anxiety was caused only by the threat of moving. I had noticed that the baby sitter was a neat freak but hadn’t bothered to consider how she would deal with a three-year-old who was essentially uncontrollable. I opted to ignore how she was keeping Max under control because I loved coming home to peace and folded clothes.

  Chapter 14

  I was thrilled with the move. Downtown Philadelphia with its bustle, its easy to use public transportation system, its sidewalks that went somewhere I wanted to go and its child-friendly parks full of interesting people was the real world. The world I wanted to experience. No matter how many bathrooms it had, a tract house thirty miles away from town was my idea of hell.

  As soon as we were settled enough so we could all leave the house fully clothed, I followed up on the Melrose pediatrician’s referral and made an appointment with his doctor friend. His office was up near Temple University. It was a hard place to find. I was at my wit’s end by the time I found a place to park.

  Max was his usual hard to control self. He wasn’t interested in the toys. He wanted to find out why the three-way table lamp wouldn’t turn from on to off and kept trying to turn the switch backward. I had Seth on one hip because there was no place to put him down. Nothing I said had any effect on Max. The doctor watched this with a disgusted frown on his face.

  He examined Max then said, “What the boy needs is firm discipline.” He gave me a referral to a group of child psychiatrists in West Philadelphia. “This group is the best I’ve run into. I think you both need help.”

  Ten days later, a psychiatrist, a psychologist and a social worker at the Child Study Center in West Philadelphia questioned me and gave Max an exhaustive battery of tests. It was a slow process. I kept checking my watch. Linda and Seth were home with a baby sitter from the nurse’s registry. The nurses were capable and expensive. This was going to be a macaroni and cheese and tuna casserole week.

  The male psychiatrist did most of the talking. “Do you have any idea what Max’s IQ is?” He sounded affronted. As though I had just flunked a simple parenting exam.

  I hated it when someone discovered how bright Max was and immediately assumed his inability to behave the way they thought such a gifted child should was the direct result of bad mothering. I clumped them together as the “If you only…” people. Add your own ending. Some form of “taught proper discipline” usually headed the list—it was certainly my mother-in-law’s favorite. “Spent more constructive time with him” was a close second.

  It was hard enough dealing with the guilt I felt on my own each time I got angry with Max because I couldn’t begin to understand why he repeated the same destructive behavior over and over. I didn’t need these allegedly top-notch experts starting out with an accusatory statement. I had hoped they would understand that what I did or didn’t do seemed to have no effe
ct on Max’s actions. But they never quite got that aspect of his personality.

  I tried to keep my frustration out of my voice but I didn’t do too well. “No, I don’t know what his IQ is. And I don’t want to know.” This was clearly the wrong response. They looked at each other with identical expressions. As though they were all thinking, is this one stupid or what?

  I was defensive. “Look, Max’s IQ isn’t the issue. Whether it’s high or low, he’s out of sync with the rest of the world. He’s bright enough to see something’s wrong with his understanding of what’s going on around him—God knows he’s been told often enough—but he doesn’t know what it is or how to fix it. He believes anything he’s told because he can’t imagine the mind set of a person who would lie to him. This makes him easy to bully. He’s small for his age. Imagine how irritating it is to any aggressive child when this kid half his size starts to talk and sound like a college professor. This is making Max frustrated and angry, interfering with his development and screwing up the rest of the family to the point where no one is happy. All I need to know is whether you can help him learn how to cope successfully in the real world.”

  There was a pause. They looked at me then at each other and then back to me. The psychiatrist said, “We’ll have to get together for another meeting before we can diagnose Max’s problems accurately and help you begin to solve what’s going wrong and why. Doing this will require a lengthy commitment of time and money from both you and your husband. We also have to meet with Max’s father before we decide if Max can be admitted to our program.”

  This turned out to be a problem. Pete told me the kids were my job. He wouldn’t have time for meetings. He would have to use any free time he had to take on freelance jobs if I planned to put Max in a private school. However Pete finally agreed to a meeting with the three experts.