The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [35]
Becky is diagnosed as “borderline.” She is intelligent enough to comprehend what happened to her when she was born. She is not intelligent enough to learn mathematical computation. A tutor my parents hired when Becky was in third grade told us that Becky could grasp a concept long enough to work out several problems in the course of an hour-long session, but that by the next week she’d have forgotten what she’d learned and have to start all over. Her teachers had been passing her along; there were no “special ed” programs then, and no one knew what to do with her, or where she belonged. Becky’s life has been lonely in ways that most of us could not comprehend.
Yet our family ties are strong, and for years we’ve acted as Becky’s advocates within the educational and medical establishment, sometimes taking consolation in the fact that Becky is a good enough judge of human nature to wrap psychiatrists round her little finger. Several times, when she’s been given a tranquilizer or some other drug she didn’t like, she’s learned enough about the contraindications to fabricate symptoms so that the doctor would be forced to change her prescription. When she realized that alcoholic families were fashionable—or at least “in” with therapists—she convinced one psychologist that her mother was an alcoholic. (My mother is the sort of person who, on a big night out, might order a bit of crème de menthe.) In order to survive in her desert, my sister has often resorted to being a con artist: you get what you want by telling people what they want to hear.
She learned all this, of course, in the bosom of our family. Our parents decided when Becky was very young that she didn’t belong in an institution but with us. I believe that being raised with myself and a brother, both older, and one younger sister was good for Becky. I know being raised with Becky was good for me. Very early on, I had to learn to respect her intelligence, although it was very different from mine. I also came to respect her tenacity. When she was two years old, and learning to walk was still beyond her capabilities, she became adept at scooting around the house, always with a security blanket in hand. I also had to learn to discern the difference between what Becky was truly incapable of knowing and what she was simply trying to get by with. When she destroyed my first lipstick by writing with it on a brick wall, I took off after her. She yelled, “You can’t hit me, I’m retarded.” She learned that she was wrong.
When I was in high school, I began to discover how much my sister and I had in common. We were both in difficult situations—I was a shy, ungainly newcomer at a prep school where many of the students had been together since kindergarten, and Becky had a particularly unsympathetic teacher. On coming home from school, she’d immediately go to her room, and play mindless rock music—“Monster Mash” is one that I recall—while she danced around the room (and sometimes on her bed). She talked to herself, incessantly and loudly. The family accepted all this as something Becky needed to do.
One day, as Becky carried on her usual “conversations,” with her teacher, with other girls in her class, with a boy who’d made fun of her, I was doing homework in the next room and realized that I, too, needed release from daily tensions, a way to daydream through the failed encounters and make them come out right. Usually I lost myself in reading or practicing the flute, but sometimes I listened to music—Joan Baez, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra, Verdi overtures—and imagined great careers for myself, great travels, great loves. I didn’t have the nerve to stomp around my room and yell as my sister was doing, but our needs were the same.
We were both struggling with our otherness, although I did not know it then. Rejection