How to Be a Sister by Eileen Garvin (icecream ebook reader .TXT) 📗

do—drink too much, drink and drive, punch people, eat too much, seek the approval of strangers, or some combination thereof.

I’m not going to make any sweeping statements about what Margaret is or isn’t capable of. Generally speaking, it appears to me that she is like everybody else I know, that her sense of the world is not static, and that she can learn and adapt to new situations. But I’m no expert, and I don’t know what she’s thinking. And I just don’t want to pigeonhole her, because people have been doing that to her since we were children.

Nobody knows what causes autism, but the generally accepted notion seems to be that abnormalities in brain structure or function are to blame. One recent study blames a deficiency in “mirror neurons,” specialized brain cells that might contribute to empathy and communication in typically developing children and explain a lack thereof in those with autism. So what could cause the abnormalities in brain structure or function or mirror neurons? Genetics, vaccines, food allergies, and environmental toxins are some of the more common theories, but no one knows for sure. Search the Internet, and you’ll get a different theory every day. One thing is certain: As more and more children are diagnosed each year, a growing number of people want answers.

AUTISM. TO ME, this word has always taken a long time to say. It is a ten-syllable word. The letters spiral out of my mouth and into the air. I’m afraid to finish saying it, because once I let go of the word, everybody will know something about me. When I say “autism,” I feel the weight of the letters resonate beneath my collarbone as if the word is tattooed on my skin. When I hear the word in the mouths of strangers, the mouths of teachers, the mouths of celebrities, my heart constricts. I feel lonely and familiar at the same time, homesick, like someone is talking about a place I used to live. Autism. Look, I’m showing my scar. My sister has autism.

Autism. In my mind I see the word spelled out in red-brown cursive with orange speckles sprinkled across a tan background. Autism smells like bouillon power, like spices, like the lingering aroma of dehydrated vegetables clinging to the empty foil soup packet that Margaret carried around for months one year. She needed to have it clutched in her hand wherever she went, her magic feather for getting through the seemingly insurmountable obstacles of an ordinary day: waking, walking, eating, and being spoken to.

Other talismans followed. For a while it was a red plastic hammer from a childhood carpentry kit. She wandered around the house and yard with that scarlet mallet always at her side. Another time it was the worn scrap of a favorite record cover. She’d hold it in front of her eyes, flipping it back and forth, mesmerizing herself. Later, my sister treasured a worn and tattered hardcover copy of Heidi that sat on the arm of the sofa. Avid readers, every one of us, we never read that story, partly because it was imperative, for several years, that the book be in plain view at all hours on the arm of the couch, preferably at a particular angle. I can remember that when I cleaned the living room, I would carefully dust the arm of the couch and then put Heidi back—just so. Heidi was for spinning.

Margaret spun the book on her knee as she sat on the living room couch, spinning and twirling the book in perfect rhythm for hours as she listened to her music. Twirl, pat, pat. Twirl, pat, pat. Twirl, pat, pat. The book was a steering wheel beneath her quick hands as she seemed to mimic our mother driving the car. She didn’t have to look down to keep herself on course, steering through a confusing world of other people and noise and language. She didn’t seem to hear us as we moved around the house and through our lives while she inhabited her own world and held down that corner of the sofa.

Summers she needed to have the orange corduroy cushion at our lake cabin to spin on her knees and pop into the air with her ankles high overhead, catching it on the tops of her feet, perfectly balanced every time. She’d lie on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, spinning, popping, and kicking for hours if we’d let her as music blared out of the speakers in the next room. She was oblivious to all the people who had to step around her to get to the second floor, where the bathrooms were. She never missed a single catch, and when she wore a hole in the fabric with this routine, she chose another orange cushion from the pile and started over. The cushions were, blessedly, interchangeable in her mind, something that rarely happened in this kind of situation; Margaret usually saw through our efforts at substitution and became inconsolable if a particular item went missing.

I tried the cushion myself once and got nowhere. I couldn’t get it to spin, and I certainly couldn’t catch it with the same finesse. Margaret was the spin master. However, her expertise at cushion popping seemed less cool when I got old enough to realize no one else was doing it. Our friends would stop and stare, puzzled at the sight of one of the “big kids” lying on the floor and ignoring us. “That’s just Margaret,” I’d say, wondering what they were looking at. What was the big deal? As if to say, “We eat cereal for breakfast. What in the world are you staring at?”

One summer the autistic talisman was a cast-off wig that Margaret simply couldn’t be parted from. What must have once looked like hair when it first landed in the toy cupboard now looked like some kind of small roadkill. My sister wore it all day long in the