by Amanda Stern
My brain has been divided into fourths, eighths, and twelfths. I’ve been measured and sent to labs, measured and weighed against calculations, measured and assigned diagnostic codes, measured and measured and tested and compared to the standards by which measuring was held. I’ve spelled words I’d never heard, guessed their definitions. I’ve suffixed, prefixed, compounded, conjugated, diagrammed, defined, duplicated, reiterated, guessed, multiplied, divided, added, subtracted, elided, recited, confided, lied, cursed, and cried. I’ve repeated numbers, words, and rhymes. I’ve seen doctors, learning specialists, and tutors; I’ve stood on scales, languished in waiting rooms and on examination tables; I’ve raced against stopwatches; I’ve hung upright in trays affixed to the backs of doctors’ doors. I’ve sat at Formica desks and in play areas, and been surrounded by white coats, pantsuits, pearl necklaces, bifocals, year-old issues of Highlights, Cricket, WOW, and Dynamite; I’ve climbed poles, marked on boards, put together oversized puzzles, threw suction darts, sat at low worktables to draw with colored chalk; I’ve met more new receptionists in more clinics than I can recall.
I’ve filled in the blanks: Mary had a _________ lamb. Boys run; babies __________. I’ve been timed, watched, and notated.
I was confused by the tests. I couldn’t understand why adults believed that state capitals, equations, or analogies could determine why I was always afraid. I waited for someone to tell me the answers to what was inside me, but the focus was on what I didn’t know, and never on what I did. The tests didn’t care about my experience of the world; no one asked me questions they didn’t already have answers to. There was a way I was supposed to be, and I didn’t match. I was off the charts I should have been on, below the percentiles I was expected to reach, and outside the limited check boxes inside which I didn’t easily fit. There were norms, categories and particular systems too narrow to include me. There was a single standard used to evaluate everyone, and that meant there was a single standard type of person, defined by a basic human trait that I did not possess: intelligence. I did not match the person I knew I was supposed to be. I feared I was not the right kind of human.
I knew where to go, what time to be there, and the name of each doctor, but I could not tell you why I took those tests, I could not tell you how I scored, or what they were supposed to teach me, my mother, or my doctors. Until I was twenty-five years old, I could not tell you what was wrong with me.
June 1981
Dr. Rivka Golod
Language and Learning Evaluation
Developmental History
Pregnancy, birth, and developmental history were all normal. Amanda has no allergies and no unusual cognitive problems were noted in early childhood. Strengths of Amanda’s include her ability to play piano by ear, her good memory, and acting skills. Amanda’s mother and father separated when she was two years old. Mrs. Stuart is remarried and Amanda currently lives with her biological siblings and three stepbrothers and sister.
Maybe I Am Not a Person
On MacDougal Street between Bleecker and Houston, a row of multicolored houses, dyed like Easter eggs, backs up to a matching row on Sullivan Street. In the middle is a secret garden, reachable only through the homes. Its cobblestone and grass stretch the length of the entire block. Almost thirty kids live here, including my best friend, Melissa, and we think it’s the greatest place on earth. Bob Dylan used to live here, too, but he’s long gone, and besides, I don’t even know who that is. Still, people ring our doorbell and ask for him all the time. I say, “He moved away. Now good-bye to you, home invader!”
On the street side we have an extra-wide stoop, which we share with our next-door neighbor. At night, the local bums, Ciggy and Sasquatch, turn the stairs into beds. Unlike the steps of normal stoops, ours lead up to the street, not down, sinking our house below the sidewalk. During the day, tourists duck down and peer through our kitchen window; we see their maps and wide, curious faces. Ten seconds later our doorbell rings.
“Is this a restaurant?” They crane their necks to look around me.
“Nope.” I can tell they’re trying to see into our secret garden, but I won’t let them.
“What happens here?”
What happens here is a question that asks what we’re hiding. As though being a family isn’t good enough. I don’t like disappointing people, so I say, “I’m not allowed to tell,” or “You don’t want to know.” This way, they won’t feel I failed them. They might be embarrassed by their question, but that’s fine by me since that’s how I feel most of the time. (Sometimes it’s nice to have a break.) Even when I want to lie and say this is the headquarters of the Members-Only Evel Knievel Fan Club or the Truant Officer School for Juvenile Delinquents, I don’t because then they’d want an explanation I don’t have. People always expect right answers to their wrong questions. All that happens here is us, and we’re not questions and can’t be answered.
“Who is it?” my mom, still in her nightgown, yells from her bedroom upstairs. I can tell from her voice she’s talking on the phone.
“Beats me,” I say, shutting the door on the tourists, shoving my two sucking-fingers into my mouth and hurrying back to her.
* * *
The secret garden is where I’m not erased. Some people think I’m funny; the adults call me a character. Outside of Melissa, my favorite garden friends are Marcel and Margaux, and although adults are always smacking my hands out of my mouth whenever I bite my fingernails, I like everyone. Some people fight, but mainly we tromp in and out of one another’s houses, sharing toys, food, and moms. When I’m not cursing, or teaching other people how to curse, I speak with a fake Russian accent or pretend I’m an old-timey spy. Once I cut Marcel’s hair with pinking shears.
We climb trees, read books on the branches, and rope-swing our way down. We tap-dance on the sandbox cover, circle the entire garden on the low balance beam of bricks without touching the ground, play freeze tag, and have chestnut and bottle-rocket wars. We build igloos, and we ice-skate when snow freezes over in wintertime. In the fall, I peel apart the helicopter wings and stick them on the end of my nose. We set up ramps and ride our Big Wheels like they’re scooters and jump daredevil-style from one to the other. On the jungle gym swing, we lay the seesaw across the canvas seat and stand a kid on each end while someone turns us round and round until the ropes are twirled, as tight as they can go. When you unspin, the colored houses, the trees and the fences, the sandbox and the cobblestone all swirl together, mixing up a fast new world in a brand-new color. You can feel the air of that new world whoosh your face, and the tight sensations in your belly are from excitement nerves, not worry ones. I am always happy when my body remembers to feel things other than scared.
There are garden rules and garden meetings and garden gossip and garden life. We’re like a small town with traditions and holiday celebrations. On Halloween we have a haunted house and our own parade with prizes; on Easter we hunt for eggs in the bushes; on Digging Day we plant grass and repaint the green benches and black gates. In winter we have weekly Christmas-caroling rehearsals in different living rooms. My mom throws her own Christmas party every year, even though we’re Jewish.
On the garden side, houses are sun-bleached and worn, the color of faded vegetables. Ivy covers only a couple of house faces, and a lucky few have their own balcony. I take pictures of everything to keep life permanent.
Everyone shares the big garden, but the little garden is your own. Ours has a sour cherry tree. There’s a cobblestone area for tables and chairs, and a small rectangle of grass where you can plant flowers if you like that sort of thing. Sometimes I set out a blanket in our little garden and bring snacks and a book and pretend the blanket is a raft and the grass is the ocean. I crank the crooked pole round and round and watch the awning open, imagining it’s a sail. The dark green cover makes me feel safe. I shut my eyes and feel the raft bob over gentle waves and smell the salt water. In the middle of the ocean, I’m protected from the whole scary world. When
I open my eyes, my house is still there. It never leaves me.
When it rains the maple leaves grow heavy and brush against the house like a bedtime back rub, taking care of us. It is a home sound, one that happens only here. In the mornings, we hear birds before humans. Light catches and holds in wide stripes on the wood-planked floors. Kara, Eddie, and I lie sleepily on a couch near the garden doors, listening to the country sounds in the middle of the city, letting the spill of the sun warm our faces. When I was a baby, we lived uptown with our dad and mom. Kara and Eddie remember that, but I don’t. I only remember living here. I want to only ever live here, in my same house, always.
The garden has legends, like Dead Man Smith, who lives under the Lesters’ house and comes out only at night. But even with Dead Man Smith, it’s not dangerous here. If time worked the way it does in the garden, I wouldn’t have any problems telling it. When the high-pitched clamoring of small lungs first shrieks a hole in the weekday quiet, it’s 3 p.m. The quick flick of the bell from Minnie Lester’s wrist chiming Arthur and John to dinner is 6 p.m. When you wake up to voices and running, it’s either the weekend or the summer. When I’m in the garden, I can always feel my mother. If I need her, I know where to find her. The brownstones protect us. Like uptown doormen, they guard us from murderers and intruders, keeping us safe inside our secret world. We’re reminded of the outside only when the subway rolls its vibration under us.
The world is scary on the street side of life. Even my mom thinks so. When people don’t look right at her, she stiffens her body and rushes us past, her mouth set tight, her eyes propped wide and straight, holding back her blinks. When we walk through Washington Square Park, she clutches her purse to her chest, and she walks so fast I have to run behind her to keep up. My dad tells us stories about people who go missing and three days later they find them dead. The news tells you what happens. The radio too. People disappear without a trace and are found strangled in Boston. If you go on the subway, people push you onto the tracks and escape as the train splurts out your bloody guts. My mom is afraid of the subway, but Kara and Eddie still take it to school, even though they are only eleven and nine. When you’re too famous, people come to your door and shoot you in the face. Who wants to grow up when there are so many ways to get killed?
I ask my mom all the time if these things will happen to us, but she says no, absolutely not. Things like that just don’t happen to children, she says. That makes me feel better, but I still worry about what will happen to me when I grow up. My mom’s a grown-up, and she’s afraid of the world, too. I can tell.
From my bedroom window, through my rainbow decal I watch the days unfold into evenings on MacDougal Street. Legs bent under me, I study the street side of things: the smoking adults, the kids practicing tricks on their skateboards. The church bell chimes, and wood cracks against a baseball in the Houston Street playground across the street, signaling the end of the day.
Across the street is Caffé Dante, where the artists go; and next door to that is Joe’s Restaurant, where Vito serves vodka to the grown-ups and Tony slides plates of fried zucchini piled high like green volcanoes. In the morning when we’re walking to school, and in the afternoon when we’re returning, Vito stands outside and makes sure the St. Anthony’s kids don’t beat us up. Whenever I pass him I yell out, “No black eyes yet!” so he knows he’s doing a good job.
At Al’s Candy Store kids run in and out, while teenage hoodlums shop for drug equipment at the head shop next door. Al sells Tootsie Rolls for a penny, and I load up on those, as well as Swedish Fish, with the prize money I receive for finding my mom’s lost things. She loses earrings, glasses, rings, to-do lists, books, and even the glass she was just drinking from (which is always right in front of her). She doesn’t look for anything before she starts yelling out that something’s missing, but if she did, I wouldn’t have so much reward money right now. No one else in the house is as good at finding things as I am. When I’m searching, no area goes unexamined, except for at night, when I will not go down to the basement. Not even with Jimmy, my mom’s boyfriend, whom I like because he lets me climb all over him even when he’s reading the newspaper. His kids, Holly, Daniel, and David, told me Norman Bates lives in our basement. Norman is a psycho who killed his mom, and I am not going to let him kill mine. He doesn’t live there during the day, though.
Sometimes in the evenings, we walk up Sixth Avenue to Brentano’s. None of us ever wear shoes, including my mom. We walk around the Village barefoot, and sometimes people look at us weird or yell, “Someone’s gonna get hurt!” On special occasions, we go to Canton restaurant on Division Street where the owner, Eileen, orders things for us that aren’t on the menu: lettuce wraps, sautéed Chinese broccoli, and salt-and-pepper shrimp. We are allowed to have whatever we want, including sugar, and Eddie and I always order orange soda. Afterward, we walk down the block to the Chinese arcade and pose like strongmen in the photo booth and feed dimes to the dancing chicken. Sometimes we go to Guss’ Pickles on Delancey Street, where they let us stick our dirty fingers into the cloudy barrels and pull out a sour that’s too heavy for just one hand. When we want a snack we go to Balducci’s, where we stand at the openmouthed crates and pop raw vegetables into our mouths, one fast sugar snap pea after another. On the way home, Eddie and Kara walk together, trading secrets they don’t share with me. They do it because I’m the youngest. When I’m left out, I feel erased. We pass Jimmy Alcatraz, who sits outside the mafia store with the red curtain.
“Hi, Jimmy Alcatraz!” We wave.
Jimmy Alcatraz is the mafia; he keeps our neighborhood protected. Even though he knows our names, he and all the other Italians call the garden people the Americans.
A few buildings over, in the late afternoon, old Italian women in their nightgowns call down to kids below and lower metal pails filled with grubby loose change and warm fistfuls of crumpled dollar bills. “See how many Loosies these’ll get me!”
Melissa and I inflate with pride at their husky shouts, as though they’ve been waiting just for us. When we return, out of breath, and drop the change and goods back into the pail, Ciggy appears out of nowhere and lunges his arm in, but he’s never fast enough.
“Get your filthy mitts outta my pail, Ciggy!”
Off he goes, scouring the curb for stubs the Italian women throw out their windows. Unlike Ciggy, the other neighborhood homeless man, Sasquatch, never asks for anything. Ciggy’s gray hair is unraveling and his nose is a fistful of warts. Sasquatch is a redheaded ogre, but they are our bums, and when they disappear for days at a time, we notice and worry, and when they die, we’ll miss them.
Every moment in my neighborhood is fun and sad at the same time. Sadness is my regular temperature and joy is a lucky surprise, one I feel mainly in the garden. I wish I could feel something else, something better. Even now, sitting on my own bed, safe at home, the soothing sensation of my house rectangled around me, I feel the spot in me where homesickness fills. Even when Melissa is here, I am always sad for something, but I never know for what. Ordinary things, like the dimming sun, lowering lights, the fresh spray of stars, or the first smell inside a new season’s breeze, fill me with grief, a pressing dread, although I can never figure out what I’m mourning. Even when there is nothing to feel afraid of, I feel a fear, like something very terrible is about to happen. My chest and stomach fill with butterflies, a heat presses up under my skin, and my body vibrates like someone’s drawing a chaotic black-and-white scribble and won’t stop. I feel like this almost all the time. I wish the sky, the timer that sets the world, that sets the days and hours and weeks, that sets you and everyone I know, didn’t unset me. Every day, when the sun starts to lower and the colors thicken the sky, my chest clogs. When the pink smears its sadness across the sun’s cheek, that same pink sadness streaks in me.
The church bells chime. One, then two, all the way to the chime of now. The clouds smell like smoke, firewood burning. The bells chime and the sun dies. It dies every day, a
nd the chimes tell the whole world why.
I want to feel safe, but I don’t know how. One day I’ll have to live on the street side of life. On the garden side we look after one another, making sure that all the children are here, that no one is missing or lost. We have each other’s backs. I wish our secret garden were a real little town with its own bank and post office and school. Then maybe our father could live here and I wouldn’t have to leave my mother in order to visit him, in order to do anything. If only this were the entire world. If only the garden could hold us all.
June 1981
Dr. Rivka Golod
Language and Learning Evaluation
Presenting Problem
Amanda was referred for a language and learning evaluation because of her low scores on the E.R.B. Intelligence Test done on February 24, 1981. Amanda performed particularly poorly on the subtest of verbal reasoning and there was concern about “language processing problems.” Amanda is also reportedly “terrified of tests” in general. Other behavioral difficulties include a notable problem separating from her mother and a general fearfulness. Teachers report that Amanda has difficulty understanding concepts and struggles to extract meaning from abstractions—parents state that Amanda had difficulty learning to tell time. There is no question that Amanda is a learning disabled child.
How to Say What’s Wrong
A gray-haired lady stands on the corner of MacDougal and Houston where the playground fence meets in the shape of a stick figure’s nose. Unlike Sasquatch and Ciggy, whose hair has grown tangled into something that isn’t hair, the gray-haired lady’s bob is always the same length; even her bangs never get long. Do homeless people get haircuts? She stands on that corner every day, all week, every week, all month, every month, waiting. I know she’s different from Ciggy and Sasquatch; I know she has a story hanging over her. But no one else seems to see it.