Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [11]
My cousins weren’t average. They were orphans who eventually all got to be over six feet tall. My sister Edie could draw like Leonardo da Vinci and seemed never to have worked at being able to do that. My mother said Edie’s hands looked very old. It was like this little girl was going to be born and Leonardo’s hands were sewn onto her at the last moment to some great purpose.
I learned how to play chess young and could beat just about everyone I played, but it was mainly a party trick I didn’t fully understand. Being a good chess player in Barnstable didn’t mean much. I didn’t see any real advantage in being smart. I worried that bigger, less smart people might figure out what I was thinking and beat the crap out of me. I honestly couldn’t understand why so many people played chess so poorly.
My father thought it was fine that I didn’t have friends or play sports. I didn’t know what to think about it. Friendships and sports were like spelling and handwriting—things that were supposed to be easy and that were easy for most people but mysteriously inaccessible to me.
I didn’t want to beat my father in chess because it put him in a lousy mood. So I’d have a pretty good attack going and then try to back off. But I couldn’t make a completely stupid move because he played well enough to catch me at that. I’d sometimes end up with two or three good attacks going and he’d all of a sudden see it and realize that he was utterly cooked. He could throw the board pretty far. I think it was a joke, but my sisters and cousins took it seriously enough to urge me to find a way to lose. Surely I could figure out how to throw a game or two, but it was more complicated than that. I was at least a little afraid to play him until he was about sixty, when his game and mood around chess improved quite a bit.
Once, my parents went out to dinner and on the way home they went to King’s to pick up a mop and some lightbulbs. My father noticed that the music being played over the PA was a waltz. He asked my mother to dance, and they waltzed in the aisle. Before the song was over the music changed to a fox trot, which they handled no problem. The music changed again. Fast, slow, rumba, tango, whatever, my parents danced to everything that was thrown at them. After fifteen minutes of trying to stump the dancers, whoever was watching them through the shoplifting surveillance system gave up and the PA went silent. My parents paid for the mop and the lightbulbs and came home. When they walked through the door they were laughing so hard they were crying.
I had a lot of hope, and in the end I was right, that good things would come out of having my cousins come live with us. Steve was just three months older than me, tall, blond, blue-eyed, and destined to become captain of the football, basketball, and baseball teams, as well as class president. So I learned how to do sports and say hi to people. It was Steve who discovered that I was so nearsighted as to be legally blind. I found out later that when he was pitching in Little League, Steve would go into the woods before games and throw up.
The cousins were a breath of fresh air. I was glad for the company. In my own way I became socialized enough to talk to girls on the phone and play middle linebacker and keep playing even when I had a broken wrist.
When I was eleven my mother sat down on the edge of my bed and explained to me the difference between egoist and egotist. I didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about. I resolved to remember it in case it turned out to be important.
There seemed to be a lot of winking going on when I was growing up. I assumed there must be some good reason why people couldn’t just come out and say things.
When I was sixteen I met Lonnie Crews, a serious kid who wore a black leather jacket and told me he thought he might die young and that once you died you couldn’t learn anymore.