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

a special education program. So Margaret climbed onto the public school bus every morning in her “play clothes,” and the rest of us marched down the hill in our matching red cardigans and blue corduroy pants. In music class we droned our way through churchy dirges like “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace” or shouted “THE KING OF GLORY” at evening concerts. We stood shoulder to shoulder with the other little soldiers of Christ, dutifully singing the praises of our Lord in the dark, damp cafeteria, which smelled eternally of warm bologna and bananas from our brown bag lunches.

Not Margaret. Her set list was full of happy, God-free tunes. This was public school, after all. So while our Easter season brought songs of the joy of resurrection from the dead, Margaret’s class sang about retail:

Here comes Peter Cottontail. Hoppin’ down the bunny trail.

Hippity hoppity Easter’s on its way!

Bringing every girl and boy baskets full of Easter joy.

Things to make your Easter bright and gay!

There are jelly beans for Tommy, colored eggs for sister Sue.

There’s an orchid for your Mommy and an Easter bonnet, too!

The song was entered into Margaret’s hard drive, and there it stayed. Margaret loved that song and sang it often, and not necessarily at Easter. She’d pull it out any old time, just as she would put on a Christmas record in July, which always made the summer days seem hotter.

One day, when Margaret, Larry, and his friend John were sitting in our twelve-passenger Chevy van waiting for our mother to come out of a store, “Peter Cottontail” morphed into something completely different. The boys grew hot, then bored, as you do when you’re a kid waiting for an adult to finish some eternal and meaningless errand. Margaret became anxious, as she often did when she had to wait. Her anxiety turned to impatience, and she started singing “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” to voice her frustration, clapping her hands to keep time. Her singing turned irritated and then angry.

To pass the time, Larry and John started teasing Margaret, which really pissed her off. She started singing louder and louder and clapping harder and harder. Soon she was banging her hands together and yelling, “Here comes Peter Cottontail!” Then, “Here comes Peter COW-ten-table!” All the time, Larry and John were needling her, asking, “Which Cottontail, Margaret? Which Cottontail?” After they got her all wound up about Peter COW-ten-table, they decided to try to get her to say, “Here come the cops! Hide the pot!” Somehow, by the time my mother got back to the van, these two phrases had merged, so now when the boys asked my sister, “Which Cottontail?” she’d say, “Here come the cops! Hide the pot!”

On the day in question, of course, she was in a bad mood. But as the months and years passed and we kept asking her this question, she would laugh right along with us, and so “Which Cottontail?” became a shared joke. It’s impossible that Margaret understood why we thought it was funny, but she seemed to think it was funny to make us laugh. Even our straitlaced mother, who wouldn’t recognize marijuana if she found it growing next to her petunias, thought this was hilarious, although she scolded us as she laughed. The last thing she needed was to have my sister pull out this doozy in public.

The question remains: Why would we do such a thing to a person made so vulnerable by her disability? How could we, raised to be good young Catholics, take advantage of our poor, handicapped sister? We weren’t trying to be mean; we were just being ourselves. So was Margaret.

About 40 percent of children with autism don’t speak at all, so Margaret was luckier than some, even with her limited communication. She didn’t say a word until she was about four years old. And then she said only about four words, two of which she made up herself, “quadee” and “ninga-ninga.” When she did speak, she exhibited echolalia, repeating what had been said to her. She first learned to talk by echoing things her speech therapist had said. At some point she also picked up the habit of cupping her hand and talking into it. My mother theorizes that this might have helped her hear the sound of her own voice better. Whatever the reason, when she does this, she looks like a covert CIA operative talking into the little microphone wired down her sleeve. She still has this habit; sometimes I’ll catch her circling a room and whispering into her hand like she’s trying to figure out where the shooter is so she can communicate with head-quarters.

As I mentioned earlier, Margaret has trouble with pronouns, too, which is also common for people with autism. For example, if you ask her “Do you want breakfast?” She is apt to nod and say, “You want breakfast.” All of this is to say that communication has always been difficult for my big sister and that her teachers, staff members, and family have tried all kinds of things over the years to help her with the give-and-take of conversation and information.

Educational props sometimes failed, as was the case with a book that was supposed to explain prepositions by illustrating different objects being next to, over, under, and beside each other. My mother didn’t like this book, partly because it didn’t make any attempt to illustrate objects that might be next to each other in the real world. There was a particularly onerous series about a sheep, a table, and a hamburger that were all the same size and scale. Whoever was working with Margaret would point to the page and ask, “Margaret, where’s the sheep?” and she’d respond, robotically, “The sheep is between the table and the hamburger,” as she’d been taught. She never said, “It’s in the middle.” Or “The sheep is next to the hamburger and also next to the table,” or “My, that hamburger