Sucking Up Yellow Jackets Read online

  Sucking Up

  Yellow Jackets

  Raising an undiagnosed

  Asperger Syndrome son

  obsessed with explosives

  and motorcycles

  A Memoir

  First published by O Books, 2010

  O Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., The Bothy, Deershot Lodge, Park Lane, Ropley,

  Hants, SO24 0BE, UK

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  www.o-books.net

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  Sucking Up

  Yellow Jackets

  Raising an undiagnosed

  Asperger Syndrome son

  obsessed with explosives

  and motorcycles

  A Memoir

  Jeanne Denault

  Winchester, UK

  Washington, USA

  To my children who encouraged me to be myself and made my

  life so much richer.

  Author’s Note

  We all remember an event differently. After so many years each person in the story has shaped their own set of memories. When possible, I asked the people who had been present what these were and changed pertinent details. By asking what was said rather than if someone said what I thought they had, I verified a surprising number of the more vivid statements. Where I couldn’t recollect someone’s name or was concerned the story might embarrass them, I’ve used pseudonyms. In the end, this is what I remember.

  Acknowledgements

  I am grateful to the Rebel Writers of Bucks County who suggested the memoir, gave me endless encouragement and thorough critiques: Marie Lamba, Chris Bauer, Dave Jarrett, John Wirebach. Additional thanks to Damian McNicholl, the Rebel Writer who not only did all of the above but introduced me to Joan Schweighardt who made time to read the manuscript and recommended me to Trevor Greenfield of O-books, who has done a great job of leading me through the publication process. And to Carolyn Burdett, my editor at O-books, who did the excellent final edit. My heartfelt thanks to them all.

  And thanks to S. C. Naugler for his computer knowledge and thorough line edit. To Pete who showed me so much of the world I would never have seen without him.

  To Vicki, Chris, Jody, Jacqueline, Caitlin, Courtney, Emily, Ainsley and Aidan: my extended family. They brighten my life. And to Nan Ross, who always made me feel whole.

  Prologue

  “Max started seeing psychologists when he was three and they never told you he had Asperger Syndrome?” Fran looked surprised. “He sounds like a classic Asperger’s case study. How could they have missed it?”

  “What’s Asperger Syndrome?”

  “It’s a form of autism.”

  “I thought autistic kids started out normal and lost their ability to talk or interact with people when they were still babies. That sure doesn’t describe Max. He’s been talking non-stop for the last 40 odd years.”

  “Yes but does he let you talk? Or talk about things that interest you? Can he look at you and tell when you’re bored with what he’s saying?”

  I felt as though a cartoon balloon with a light bulb in it should be popping out of the side of my head as Fran ticked off each trait.

  “You’ve got Max nailed.” I agreed. “Those are Asperger’s symptoms?”

  “Yes. Like other autistic kids, his brain’s wired differently from allegedly ‘normal’ people. You’re lucky he’s so bright. Silicon Valley’s full of people with Asperger’s.”

  “Is there a treatment for it?” I asked.

  “Behavior modification, special schooling and support networks for the whole family but only if the child’s diagnosed when they’re young enough for it to help,” she replied. “Most Asperger’s kids have obsessions. What’s Max’s?”

  “Explosives and motorcycles.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “No wonder you still worry about him.”

  When Fran left, I stared at the stark painting that had always had a prominent place in my living room. In the bottom right of the tall canvas, two small pajama-clad children sat side by side on a barely suggested bench. White paint laid on with a palette knife filled much of the frame but the small figures of two-year-old Max and his three-year-old sister Linda were so arresting they dominated the picture. Painted by their father, Pete, the strokes of color were so assured, the figures had the accuracy of photographs.

  Max’s blue eyes shone with wide-eyed innocence but his hand was clamped over his mouth. Nothing could get him to take his hand down so Pete painted it just as it was.

  I found the painting troubling. It symbolized the craziness of life with Max. He wouldn’t tell me why he covered his mouth. Each time I looked at it, I marveled that anyone so inherently sweet could cause so much grief.

  Chapter 1

  “I’m sick of this shit. We either have to get married or break up,” my boyfriend said. It wasn’t the sort of proposal you’d see in a romantic movie but it made sense. Pete lived three subway transfers away from me, a mind-numbing trek late at night. He shared a railroad flat with seven men in Brooklyn. And like a train, the only way to get from room to room was to walk through the one before or after it. The apartment was like a people zoo. The only room with a lock was the bathroom in the hall.

  I lived in a small room over a dog hospital in mid-Manhattan. I’d been told that if I ever dared bring a man to my room, I’d be booted on the spot. I didn’t think my landlords had anything against sex; they were just following the rules of the day. I was a young, single female and grown ups protected nice girls against their baser instincts. I had a lot of those where Pete was concerned.

  Had it been today, we would have rented an apartment and lived together to see how we meshed when the pheromones stopped dictating our actions, but in the fifties this was virtually impossible. Even movie stars and the wealthy had to get married if they wanted to live together. Serial marriages were okay but living in sin was not condoned.

  So we got married. The next line is supposed to be “and lived happily ever after.” But fairy tales never tell how the wife and children of Prince Charming fare when the early glow fades.

  Before I agreed to marry him, I told Pete I didn’t want children for years. I had other things I wanted to do first, such as establishing a career I enjoyed so I could be independent. He said he’d had mumps when he was seventeen and was probably sterile but he didn’t care because he wanted to be free to paint.

  I don’t know if that was what he really thought or if he assumed I couldn’t possibly mean what I said. People rarely took me seriously. I was small, my voice was soft and I was inclined to placate rather than argue. Most people looked jolted when I said what I was really thinking so I smiled a lot and kept my thoughts to myself.

  For a year, we had what I considered a near-perfect lifestyle. We lived in New York City, in Greenwich Village, in a rent-controlled apartment with a working fireplace, a skylight and French doors opening onto the top of a fire escape. We roamed the city and shared an equal fascination with the weird things we saw. Our friends wanted houses and babies. We wanted to see Europe before the Russians wiped it off the globe.

  We rode third-class trains all over Europe for so little money we were able to hop off at will when a town looked worth exploring. We drank beer in England, Holland and Germany, wine everywhere else. I carried a small bag with a liter bottle we refilled with wine in each town, the way the locals did. We lived on bread, cheese, sausages, apples and pears with an occasional hot meal in a cheap restaurant.

  In Italy we joine
d the Communist Party. This had nothing to do with ideology; we both had student cards and had discovered that students who belonged to the Party got excellent seven-course meals with wine included in the “student and worker” restaurants in all the large cities. This was too good to pass up. We decided we would ignore Senator Joseph McCarthy’s bizarre reign of fear over Americans with Communist affiliations.

  We got visas to travel through Russian territory in Austria. Russian soldiers lined the platforms at every stop to make sure no one but locals disembarked. We were met in Vienna by an official from the American Embassy. We were the only Americans on the train. The official gave us a list of things forbidden in the Russian Sector of the city, waited until we read every word, then made us sign an agreement that we wouldn’t contact the American Embassy for any reason before they allowed us to leave the train station. As the embassy official said, “The United States doesn’t plan to start World War Three because a couple of dumb kids thought it would be fun to take a picture of a Russian soldier and ended up in prison.”

  We wandered through the Austrian Alps and down to Trieste where my college room mate and her army officer husband were living with their colicky two-month-old baby. The fourth day we were there, Pete told me he wanted six kids, none more than eighteen months apart and he wanted to start his family right away.

  He never told me why he suddenly wanted one child, let alone six. I assumed there was something that had brought about this abrupt turn-around but if so, he kept it to himself. If I hadn’t been there I might have thought he had gone all soft and gooey inside at the sight of my roommate’s baby, but I saw for myself that he had regarded her with the same lack of interest he might have shown if the baby had been a new pair of shoes. Nice enough but nothing he would wear.

  I was outraged but I couldn’t even tell my former room mate how I felt. She was enthralled with motherhood. Telling most people I wanted a chance to grow up and test my wings as an individual before I took on the responsibility of children would have had few favorable listeners. This was the fifties when women’s lib didn’t exist and a woman who didn’t want children was considered an aberration.

  The billion-dollar spending spree the American government had launched trying to get women back into the home “where they belonged” so returning GIs could take their jobs was waning but it was still pervasive. In the atmosphere of the time, declaring I wanted a life parallel to my husband’s was like saying I wanted to be a serial killer.

  For the next six weeks, Pete was the only friend available. With few English speakers outside of American Express offices, we were more dependent on each other than we had ever been in New York City.

  Whatever caused his change of heart, Pete was persistent. I tried to reason with him but he couldn’t seem to grasp my point of view. I think he was genuinely bewildered. Regardless of what I said, I was a woman; women liked babies. Periods of tenderness alternating with irritation when he barely spoke to me wore me down. I felt as though I were living with my mother again, only I had picked this one so I couldn’t escape responsibility.

  Unfortunately for me I still found him physically attractive. My pulse still accelerated when I saw him. Errant hormones were lousy at intelligent choices.

  With a few witty barbs, he made me felt like a backward child full of dumb ideas about real life if I disagreed with him.

  When I continued to insist I didn’t want children yet, he finally turned on me, his face twisted with frustration as he said, “What kind of a woman are you?”

  This was way below the belt. I had made the mistake of sharing my childhood disappointment at discovering I was a girl. I told him how dismayed I had been when I realized I might end up like my unhappy mother who sighed a lot, rarely finished anything, hung around the house all day in shapeless cotton house dresses and smelled like unwashed hair. I wanted to be like my exciting dad, who went to work wearing suits and starched shirts and smelled of the bay rum and witch hazel aftershave he always used.

  The last few weeks we were in Europe were spent in Paris. Pete caught a bad cold. He would have liked me to hang around and wait on him all day but I had other ideas. I was happy to care for him but knew I could do it without sitting on the edge of a sagging bed in a musty smelling room watching him sleep. I bought a thermometer. It was calibrated for Celsius but it had the usual red line that indicated what was considered normal. I showed him how to read it and shake it down then made sure he had food, drink, aspirins and American and English newspapers to read, and then I spent ten blissful days wandering around Paris by myself.

  Pete was an exciting traveling companion, full of ideas and endless curiosity. Yet this time on my own was the part of the trip I dreamed about for years. It was the first time during the four and a half months of our wandering when I could move at my own pace and go where I wanted. I enjoyed Pete’s company so much I hadn’t realized we always ended up going where he wanted and we always left when he said it was time to go.

  For years after that trip, I dreamed of walking along the Seine looking across the river at the sun-lit houses on the Ile de la Cité.

  In mid-November the late afternoon light had the crystalline transparency of lemon ice. I always wakened from these dreams with a profound sense of loss. And guilt, because part of the hold this brief respite had on my mind was the realization it was the last time I could have made different choices and fervently wished I had.

  Sometimes I ate breakfast or lunch with Pete while he was sick but I always ate dinner alone. The concept of take-out food brought a stunned glaze to restaurant owners’ eyes. I brought Pete bread, cheese, fruit and wine but after a day of roaming, I wanted a hot sit-down meal. Knowing I was content to eat in a restaurant without him drove Pete crazy. I couldn’t figure out why. He insisted there had to be something wrong with me. No normal woman would be comfortable being alone in such a public place. He used the ‘normal’ word a lot, generally to describe what I wasn’t.

  When he started to feel better, he bathed, shaved, resumed his “let’s make a baby” campaign and turned on his considerable charm. After ten days of watching him do nothing but feel sorry for himself, cough bad breath at me and blow his nose, he was irresistible. Paris was a romantic place. Our room was on the top floor, with windows looking out over moonlit rooftops. I wavered. Once was enough. I was pregnant before I had time to reconsider.

  Chapter 2

  Two hours after we arrived in New York, we got an urgent phone call from Melrose, Massachusetts. Pete’s mother had been diagnosed with kidney cancer and was scheduled to have the diseased kidney removed the following day. We grabbed our still-packed bags and took the next train to Boston.

  The cancer turned out to be a particularly virulent form. She was given six months or less to live. (She lived cancer-free for forty more years but that’s another story.) I assumed we would be in Melrose just long enough to arrange for her care and would visit her on weekends. We had jobs waiting for us and an apartment we had been paying rent on for the last five months.

  Pete was a wreck. His relationship with his widowed mother, Ada, was difficult even when she was healthy. Knowing she was going to die what would probably be a long, agonizing death, triggered a touching need to finally do something to please her. But what? As far as she was concerned he had never done anything right.

  She was a strange woman. I sometimes wondered if she had some sort of disconnect between her mouth and her mind. Shortly after she told me her older son, Max, had died in a plane crash, she said, “Why did he have to be the one who died?”

  Since Pete was the only other person in the family, this was such an appallingly cruel comment I should have beaten a rapid retreat from him and his strange mother, but I just felt unbearably sorry for him. He had heard his mother say this many times before. As I watched, his face assumed the wooden expression I had seen before when he wanted to ignore what I was saying. For the first time I realized this ability to shut out another person was something he had l
earned as a way to survive his mother.

  Our situation with Ada was complicated by the fact that the doctor insisted we not tell her or anyone else she was fatally ill. Ridiculous as this might sound today when complete disclosure is mandated, secrecy was the accepted practice with cancer in the fifties.

  Pete decided we should be there when his mother came home from the hospital. I was getting anxious. His marrying me was currently near the top of Pete’s major failures in his mother’s eyes. I was the last person she would want taking care of her. It would have been easy and relatively inexpensive to hire a live-in companion for the period of time when she was still mobile and a nurse when she finally needed one as she went downhill, but Pete insisted his mother would be more comfortable having family stay with her until she could manage on her own. Any suggestion that we should direct her care but get on with our own lives earned his insistence that ‘normal’ families put aside their own needs and took care of each other.

  I felt used when it became clear he expected me to be the primary care-giver not just of my mother-in-law but of the house, yard, laundry and even the garbage. I didn’t have the selfconfidence to fight back. I knew I could do everything Pete expected of me and do it well. I just didn’t want to. This attitude was crossing the line into selfishness: a deadly sin second only to murder in my needy, self-centered mother’s opinion. Twenty years of having it drummed into me that I was a bad person if I was selfish enough to put my own needs ahead of my mother’s had trained me well.

  Here was this poor woman with a death sentence over her head. How could I be so cavalier about her care? I stifled my feelings and tried harder. Just below the surface, a part of me simmered. I knew I had become my own worst enemy but I didn’t know what to do, short of walking out, and I wasn’t ready for that.