by Kay Kerr
I think Aggie might have given Dee that moment too, if her reaction was anything to go by. Dee was like an oversaturated version of herself. She was more Dee than I’ve seen her before. She talked so animatedly about travelling the world, like it was exactly what she needed to be doing, so I know she felt what I felt too. If music is Aggie’s thing, and travelling is Dee’s, I want to figure out what mine is, and I want to let Aggie know how she makes other people want to figure out their own things just by doing hers.
But it’s hard not to think about you, Rudy, when something like this happens, and what your thing might be, and how you were always an oversaturated version of yourself even without trying. So that’s what I’m thinking about tonight, and it’s making it hard to sleep. I’ll sign off anyway though, because I suppose I should try.
Goodnight.
Love, Erin
12 September
Dear Rudy,
Some days it feels like you’re far away, and other days like you’re a little bit closer. Today was a faraway day. I saw Dr Lim this afternoon, and it was a bit of a disaster if I’m honest. Okay, a total disaster. I was probably a little bit itchy and on edge from a crappy day at school, but she was being such a psychologist about everything and it made me want to scream. I know, I know, that is literally her job. She could at least try to act like she knows what is going on and why I’m acting like I’m acting, though. It’s your fault, really, not everything but a lot of it, and Dr Lim won’t even let me have that. She’s too busy making sure I ‘feel’ my feelings, like I would otherwise extract them from my body and put them straight in the bin. Trust me, if that was an option I’d be all over it. But it’s not, so I’m feeling everything.
She says we need to start making more rituals as a family, for healing or something like that. Can you believe it? I can only imagine what you’d say to someone suggesting that to you. I told her we already eat dinner together every night and we see movies together sometimes and we eat a special lunch at Christmas time, but she didn’t really think that was enough. After everything I’ve told her about me and Mum and Dad and you and Ollie, you’d think she would be a little more specific in her advice. Instead it just felt like she was reading from the ‘happy family’ handbook without any regard for us at all. In the end I was down to one-word replies, or nods when I could get away with it. Dr Lim says I need to come back for another talk soon. I was tired, okay? You know, probably better than I do, how much work it is to keep our family running at this very specific level of interaction and dysfunction. It might not seem like a lot from the outside, but the dinners and the movies and the Christmas lunch are Hallmark card-worthy compared to how it has been at various points and how bad it could get if we let it.
Afterwards, I went to visit Amy. Her school is right near Dr Lim’s office so it was easy, but I think I would have gone there even if it wasn’t. I should visit her more often. She misses you, and she can barely talk about you without crying. It felt weird to see her cry and not cry myself. I guess I’m a little more hopeful than she is, or I feel a little less guilty. I hung out with her while she set up equipment for tomorrow. She is trying to find new ways for her students to spend time on their stomachs and sides, so she has these harnesses and soft mats that make her classroom look like a gymnastics hall. I wanted to jump onto the big foam mat, but I have a feeling Amy wouldn’t have liked that. She takes it very seriously, and I suppose it is serious. She doesn’t smile at me the way she does at you, or when she talks about you. I think it’s because I look like Mum.
One of her students, Lucas, was still waiting to be picked up. I’ve met him before—he came into Surf Zone with his dad one time. He’s really small and freckly and cute. He talks about himself in the third person too, which is adorable. He walks with a stick and when he tells a story his face lights up like he can’t contain his excitement. Today he was all about planes. He asked if I’d ever been on a Boeing 747, which I couldn’t answer because I don’t know as much about planes as he does. I told him about our holiday to America, and he wanted to know everything about the plane. I told him everything I could remember, and he seemed fine with that. We talked about the movies on the plane, and the stewards, and what they give you to eat. The little exchange felt easier than any conversation I have with anyone outside my family, maybe because Lucas and I are both on the spectrum, our conversation goes back and forth how I like, and he didn’t think I was strange. Once he was gone I was left trying to find a way to make talking to Amy easy like that.
She asked about formal, and I told her it was fine. She asked about Schoolies, and I told her how excited I am about it. I wanted to tell her more things but I couldn’t find a way in, because she was smiling that way she smiles when she’s not really happy, but wants to look like she is. She smiles that way when Mum talks to her, or when Dad does something ‘dad-ish’ with Oliver or me. I asked her how she was feeling about it being September, and I knew straight away that was the wrong thing to ask. She just kept saying she couldn’t believe it, that she wasn’t ready for it. I nodded but couldn’t think of anything else to say.
It got me thinking about the big things, and if we are ever really ready for them. They’re not usually things you have warning about, are they. Like when we found out we had a sister who was an adult, who we’d never met or heard of before. A secret sister. You were so excited about it, this girl who showed up with Dad’s eyebrows, who was rude to Mum and didn’t even want to meet us. You looked straight past the rudeness and saw her hurt and humiliation and her humanity. You’d forgiven Dad for hiding his high-school love child from us before he even owned up to it. Dad must have been scared, and I don’t think he handled it well. I’m glad we’ve got to know her since then, even though she told Dad she felt like she was ‘the test run’ and we were the benefactors. I know Dad didn’t plan on having a practice family and a real family—it’s just one of those things that happened.
I tried not to mention you again unless Amy did, and she hardly did. She told me this one story about the week before you left, when she was supposed to hang out with you but didn’t. She had to work late or something like that. There were other little details, but that was the general idea. I kept waiting for there to be more to it, because she told it like it was the most important story in the world. She is clinging tight to that one afternoon when she had to work late. I guess it made me think about whether or not I’m holding on tight enough to little stories like that, or if I’m letting them dissipate. These letters seem like the only place I’m keeping any of this stuff, and it’s not exactly a secure storage facility, is it. I need a backup hard drive or something. I need to make sure I remember.
It’s hard to talk to Amy without you there; we’re two random puzzle pieces without the bit in the middle connecting them. Being around her makes me feel that you’re further away, because it doesn’t feel right to be around her without you there too. But I don’t want to stop being around her either, because even if she never says so, I am her sister. And families need each other when stuff like this happens, even if we are a family that doesn’t have enough rituals. That’s just one of those rules I know is true. Amy misses you, Rudy, and so do I, even if it doesn’t seem that way because only one of us cried.
Love, Erin
13 September
Dear Rudy,
Bad feelings are swarming and I don’t know what to do. I have a feeling you might understand. It’s like lying in bed with the lights off and hearing a mosquito buzzing. You can try to ignore it and go to sleep, but you know you’ll wake up covered in bites. Better to turn the light on, find it and squash it if you can. So I’ve been trying to call Mitch and end this relationship, but he isn’t returning my calls. I’ve called him ten times since our not-quite breakup so I think that’s a nice number to stop at. Eleven would make me look like a stalker. Dee says it’s fine and we are probably broken up, but Aggie says I will still have to have the hard talk. I trust Dee to try to make me feel good, and Aggie
to tell me the truth.
Sometimes I think Dee has taken on my happiness like it is her job. It must be very tiring to try and look after someone else’s happiness at the same time as your own. Do you ever think about your friendships like that? When we were eight, Dee was always trying to get me to laugh, and then when we were twelve and I was diagnosed she was always trying to get me to talk. When we were fifteen she was always trying to get me to ‘loosen up’, and now she seems to be trying to just make me smile. She’s managed her expectations in the past year. I hope I’ve been able to make her laugh and talk and loosen up and smile along the way, because she deserves all of those things.
In biology today Dee and I paired up to talk about brains. Not my brain or hers, but how all brains work and their neural pathways and that kind of thing. It’s for the final exam, so it’s pretty important, but neither of us felt like making it important today. She looked at my head like she was examining it and said: ‘Well, obviously your brain is twice the size of a normal person’s, so I’ve got no idea how you ended up with such a normal-sized head.’ Then she watched to make sure I cracked a smile. I did. For once I was able to think of something funny to say on the spot instead of hours later. I told her: ‘It’s cylindrical so it reaches all the way down to my belly button.’ I hoped she could tell I was joking even though I kept my face the same as when I’m telling the truth. Her snorting laughter told me she could. After a while her face stopped smiling and she looked very serious all of a sudden. She looked out the window and said: ‘I’m so tired of this place, Erin, so freaking tired.’
I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. And now that I’m home I still don’t know what would have been the right thing. Dee’s mum is very quiet, and her mum’s boyfriend is very loud. Dee’s an only child so she doesn’t have anyone to talk to about it, and I don’t think she has any cousins hiding anywhere either. She’s not exceptionally good at school and she doesn’t have any hobbies. She doesn’t have a job and the only thing she knows she wants to do next year is travel. She has lots of friends, but I think I’m the only one who knows all of these things about her. I’m not worried about her, because I think she’ll find her thing, but maybe it’ll take a few years of looking and maybe she’ll have to look in lots of different countries. I don’t want her to go, but I don’t want to be the only reason she stays.
I’ve been reading about minimalism. It’s where you don’t have very much stuff. There’s more to it than that, but I don’t think I need to explain it, and I am lying on my bed at the moment and looking at my walls. I think my walls are contributing to my outbursts because they’re so cluttered. You told me once all my junk gave you a headache. I have an idea, Rudy.
Okay I’m back. I ripped down everything; it’s all in a plastic bin bag. My purple walls are bare, and it feels pretty good. There’s one photo I’m keeping; you would probably like it. It’s a black-and-white shot I took at the circus for an art project last year of an overweight acrobat spinning plates. In my accompanying essay I wrote about how it represented my life, and my art teacher agreed. I got an A.
I remember exactly what I wrote too, my brain is efficient like that. I can’t remember the face of a person I’ve met a dozen times, but I retain whole passages of text, and registration plate numbers, and facts from the news.
In my plate-spinning act, I struggle to keep every saucer in the air. I have to study for good marks because I want to attend a reasonable university, but not too hard that I miss the beach trips, parties and concerts that are mandatory in my circle of friends. Good marks are fine, but trying hard to get them is not. I have to exercise and eat well to keep my anxiety under control, but not so much that I start obsessing about numbers on a scale again. I have to spend time with my family to work on our relationships, but not so much that we drive each other insane and argue. Spend time with Mitch, but don’t ditch my friends for him. Read, watch movies, earn money, find time to sleep. In between all of that I have to update my social media so it looks as though I’m doing all of this with ease. It is worth it for those rare occasions when all the plates are spinning and time slows down enough to give me just a moment of clarity, but all too soon one of the plates tumble and I have to start all over again.
Dee called me a teacher’s pet when she read it and saw my mark, but she also stopped pressuring me to go to every party with her like she used to, so I think she might have understood.
I’m going to go now. I’m restless. I want to minimalise my wardrobe and my cosmetics and my keepsakes and my letters. Maybe I’m distracting myself from exam prep, but also I’m a little bit sick of thinking about exams, so it’s nice to have something else to think about. I’m hoping I can throw away some of the bad feelings with all of the crap. The only things I think I won’t minimalise are my books. They’re not the kind of thing I can get rid of.
Love, Erin
14 September
Dear Rudy,
I’m too tired really to write about it, but I had an outburst today. It was shit. The end.
It’s ridiculous but I feel like you’d be mad if I sent the letter like that, so I’ll tell you a bit more, but only because it’s September and I want you to understand. It’s maybe the one thing I need more than anything this month, because it was this month a year ago that it all happened. I don’t know where to start, so let me try even if I get it wrong a few times.
The Erin that you and Mum and Dad and Ollie and Dee and everyone else interacts with is not the person I am on the inside. It’s like that trick where you pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time. Patting my head is being polite and making the right facial expressions and asking the right questions and knowing which things are acceptable and which things are rude to say in a social setting. Patting my head is making sure I seem like a normal person to everyone else. Meanwhile, I’m rubbing my stomach. That’s the inside bit. That’s the bit where I like to find patterns and add numbers and I can sometimes see how things smell and I like to be quiet. It’s how flicking my wrists feels nice when I’m stressed and someone touching my arm without asking feels deeply uncomfortable. All of this, the inside stuff, feels good to me and wrong to everyone else. And it’s the constant need to keep both going at one time that means I’m part distracted most of the time. When I get tired, like I did in class today, it is so much harder to do both things at once. So I stopped doing the head patting. I got up and left without telling the teacher why, and I went to sick bay, and that didn’t make things any better so I kicked the walls a few times and I got to come home. I guess what I’m saying is that the parts of me you saw, the parts where we clashed or couldn’t connect, weren’t the only parts of me. You didn’t see the inside bit. I like to think I didn’t really see yours either. It makes things feel a bit better when I think that.
I saw Dr Lim today and she talked about how September is a hard month. She was better today, and by the time I got to our appointment, so was I. It’s amazing what a few hours of lying in a dark room can do. I know you know that. Mum let me stay in my room until my appointment and I hid under my covers like I used to when I was a kid. When I got to Dr Lim’s, I lay down on her couch, which felt very much like I was in a scene from a movie even though it was a sofa and not a chaise longue. Usually I just sit in the armchair. All the furniture is grey or wooden, and all her books look fake. I say that because they’re all the same height and mostly the same colour, when my bookshelf at home is such a mix of colours, sizes, well-worn paperbacks and special collectors’ hardbacks. I have arranged them in so many ways over the years:
Alphabetically
By genre
Colour
Size
Date they were printed.
None of those ways worked for me and so now they’re a mess, like nothing else in my life could be or has been before. Dr Lim told me to try not to let my mind wander too much this month and to try to feel everything. I assured her I am. I’m feeling it all. She asked what I was thinking about Scho
olies, and how I was feeling. I told her I was excited about it, but I wasn’t really thinking about it much. I’m not imagining myself there like I did with formal, and I’m not counting the hours or days anymore. She asked when I stopped counting and I told her it was when I got my new job. I couldn’t say why. But the big moments just seem to want to let me down. There’s too much pressure, or too many people, or something like that. My shifts at Robins are small and quiet, and I like them best of all.
At home Dad was making rissoles, his barbecue special, with a secret recipe that he knows we all love. He was on the deck watching the birds and grilling away. He looked a bit happy. September is maybe the hardest for him, because he doesn’t let himself feel it. I wonder what the inside of his head sounds like, if he says as much to himself as I do, or if it’s as quiet as he is on the outside.
Watching him out there on the back deck with the birds, I wonder whether I’ve approached things the wrong way with Dad all this time. I’ve been waiting for him to say something, to do something to show he’s accepting of my different brain wiring and my habit of saying the truth and my outbursts and my quietness. Maybe he’s just waiting for me to accept all of that so he can follow my lead.
You and him, well I’d like to know what you have to say about that, because it has always felt like you were hiding yourselves from each other. It was easier for him to be tough on you than to admit he admired you for going a different way, and it was easier for you to be mad at him for that than to admit you were worried about disappointing him. Easier. We do so many things because they’re easier. I’m trying not to be mad at you, but being mad feels easier right now. The hardest month makes us all want to take the easiest path. But if the roles were reversed I know you would do the hard things.