The Shell

I found a vintage shell in the closet of the summer house my family got to share with our Mom’s side of the family every July. I should say that by “shell” I mean sleeveless blouse. It had carved mother-of-pearl buttons, and was a delicate seafoam blue-green, and it had embroidery. The embroidery showed some people somewhere tropical- there were two people, with one palm tree each, and they were tilling the land with hand-held tools. The people were brown. I thought the shirt was charming. I genuinely thought that the people represented were working their own land, and that the thing was from a different time and everyone would see that. I took it home when the vacation was over. 

When I first wore it it was a sweltering day and no one mentioned my brown farmers, so I dismissed the little nagging voice that had been telling me that the garment was perhaps not good for wearing. The next time I wore it I got checked, by a coworker. We had caught the same train together at the end of our shifts. “Where did you get that shirt?” she asked me. “Technically it’s called a shell,” I said, because I can be a real wanker. “I know that, but no one calls them shells except rich white lady grandmamas,” she replied. I thought of my own rich lady white grandmama and it was probably in that moment that the scales started, haltingly, to fall from my eyes: that woman was as privileged as they come, and over the years had collected some truly reprehensible views of certain people. I realized that I had just thought the phrase “certain people”, which made me a little nauseous. How privileged was my grandmother? She was so privileged, she wore sweater sets the way most people wear t-shirts. She was so privileged that my grandfather apologized for buying her an estate sapphire and diamond ring for their anniversary because they were young and didn’t have enough money for new yet. She was so privileged that during the Depression she went with a friend to Europe on the Grand Tour, and when I asked her what it was like she complained about the public toilets. But I wasn’t aware of all those associations going on in my own white lady head yet. My friend pushed me. “Isn’t it a little racist?” she said.  I looked down at my own chest, to where my farmers were working away, and thought: Nah! 

So I did what any defensive white person does in such situations: I accused my co-worker of being the racist. “They’re farmers! They own this land, you’re the one who’s seeing it that way! You racist!” I added, for emphasis. My friend seemed a little chagrined, and though she was completely in the right I felt vindicated. Check out my farmers who own the land that they are currently farming on this shirt! This shell is not racist at all! And yeah, I’m going to keep calling it a shell even if that’s pretentious! I’m not pretentious you’re pretentious!

The next time I wore the shirt I caught the train home from work alone. I sat and immediately started day-dreaming. My commute was a long one and on that trip it took at least a half-hour before I noticed that there was a young woman, younger than me by a half generation at least, who was sitting with her arms crossed, staring at me. She just stared, and it was a little hostile I thought. I looked at her and did this: (MAKES EYES WIDE, LITTLE SHRUG, SMALL MEALY CLOSED-MOUTH SMILE.) She didn’t flinch or change her expression one iota. She did look down at my chest, and since I’d already done this: (SAME THING,) I felt I couldn’t just start daydreaming again, I had to engage her. I touched the embroidery that some lily-white racist hands had so lovingly stitched decades before, and I said the words: “They’re farmers.” I said them. I was on some of the thinnest ice, morally speaking, that I had been on since I’d been caught shoplifting a bikini at the mall when I was twelve, but I said those words. The top layer of my brain kept telling me that since I thought they were farmers- and I genuinely had, it was a first thought when I saw the thing hanging by it’s lonesome in my family’s summer home closet- then any tiny stain of racism was washed away. I was confident in my own white lady thought powers, the simplest of these being that if I thought something then it was true.  

This woman wasn’t convinced. She re-settled herself, tucking her arms together even harder and making her face stony, and I squirmed. If I can be easy on myself for anything in this entire scenario it’s that I didn’t think it was her fault for making me squirm. The commute continued like that and my magical thought powers tried to help me, like a sinking freighter ship pulling a swimming passenger down with it, by throwing up different scenarios, ways this interaction might be less icky. I imagined us talking and me explaining that I’d found it at the family summer home at Seaside Park New Jersey, ever heard of it? Oh you have? The cinnamon buns at Park Bakery are the best on the whole Eastern Seaboard, don’t you agree? Or another scene: Yes, I’m sorry if this offends you but it’s really not a racist shirt- I think that perhaps the bias here is in your own eyes, no offence. Ah, now you see what I mean! Or another: Fine! Even though this shell isn’t racist because I am definitely not racist, I will tear it from my body and throw it in the garbage at my stop, will that satisfy you? You want me to take this shell, it’s called a shell god damn it, and just throw it out, which will deprive me of the joy of wearing old stuff? Fine! (In this last one I even managed to picture myself tearing the thing off and glaring at her, a bit of prime time soap opera on the Red Line at 5:30 PM.)

But what happened was that I sat there squirming, she sat there glaring, and the stops went by very slowly. I kept hoping that we’d come to hers and she’d have to get off and I could return to my pre-racist-shirt daydreams, but she stayed on the train because she lived further north than I did, or just to continue staying under my skin. I tried to meet her eyes once or twice, and each time hers were the same. They were hard, impenetrable, and they were tired. The tiredness was layered over her whole face, not just her eyes; still, she didn’t stop. Her tiredness reminded me of my own: I was dealing with my own fatigue from lack of quality sleep that comes from being in constant pain, and also undiagnosed other stuff. And since her tiredness looked so much like mine felt- the tension in the brows are all about how we hold our heads when we’re just starting to get the inevitable fatigue headache, the lines at the mouth are all about how, when you’re exhausted, everything seems humorless- the sinking ship of white lady thought powers went all the way underwater. I wondered how many things she saw that were reflections of the US’s institutional bigotry per month or per week or per day. I wondered if she talked about those examples when she got home to her friends and family, sitting around a table with food or sitting on the couch in front of the TV. I wondered how much eye-rolling and grim storytelling she had to repeat, had to endure, all the time. I didn’t wonder about her safety...yeah, it was too soon for me to start grappling with the facts of this woman’s real life and how for as much as I got catcalled and harassed she was catcalled and harassed twice as much, just for starters. 

In my memory now I did the only honorable thing I could have done, which was take the shirt off, slowly and with as little attention as possible so that this woman might know that I was removing it for her peace, not for any after-work street theatre fanfare. I can see her face softening as I unbutton it, take it and fold it and put it in my bag, feeling too bare in my camisole even though it was very hot and no one cared, not even the catcallers. I can see a tiny grin form on her mouth and a sense of satisfaction come over her almost bodily, which makes me relax. I can see myself relaxing, leaning back on my shaped plastic Red Line seat, having achieved some semblance of grace. It’s a false memory. My white lady thought powers are like the Flying Dutchman now, sending up these shimmering visions for me to chase, as if there’s some hope of pulling that vessel out of the deep by willpower alone: You’re not racist, it says. You were never racist. 

But I am, and I always was. There are shades of it. I never spray painted racial insults on anyone’s home or community center, I never raised any boys to spit in the gutter when they see a black person, but I looked away when those stories came up on my phone or before that, on the news. Always, those stories on the news that described spitting and insults were leading up to some bloodletting; I looked away. I always was. 

To the woman on the train with the righteous eyes and the formidable emotional strength: thank you. You made me feel really uncomfortable on the train once.

In The Pool

(Note: I’ve used the pronoun They/Them to describe my child in this piece. I’ve capitalized those instances for clarity.) 

So my child was standing at the lip of the park pool, along with a group of about a dozen other eight and nine-year-olds. For the previous six weeks they and the others had been in it daily, practicing their Australian Crawls and Dead-Man Floats. Also there was choreography that had been the focus for the past week. That bit involved a lot of standing and putting one foot in a hoop on the ground on the pool deck, and then pulling the foot back, and then moving into the hoop and clapping once, and moving out of the hoop. The baker’s dozen of them had finished the pool deck moves and were supposed to be getting into the water. 

The noise in the room was verging on incredible: Not only were there parents with tripods lining the big tiled room, moving their creaky metal folding chairs and talking, and not only were there camp assistants and life guards yelling instructions at everyone, and also more kids waiting for their deep-end display, there was music, and it was fucking loud. My child’s group had the indignity of having to swim in unison and in neat rows to “Tonight’s Gonna Be a Good Night” by the Black Eyed Peas. To compensate for the crowd noise, someone had turned the music up so that the reverb could be followed as it bounced from one end of the almost hundred-year-old pool deck to the other. The back wall had been demolished a few years before to transform it into a movable glass enclosure, and those panels were open to the brilliant daylight. It was dazzling, and the audience was constantly shuffling around with their cameras and their whispering. I was sitting upstairs, where it was more humid but less crowded. I watched my kid, the others watched their kids. I could see that mine was barely holding it together by Their fidgeting hands and feet, and Their tense, inward expression. I could see how hard it was to just be standing there among all this tremendous noise and air and intent, much less moving in time. I told myself that it was inevitable that They would run for it. It didn’t occur to me to be angry about it or embarrassed: It was all I could do to sit there myself, and I was safely on the balcony. 

The pool guard whistled and my kid's group all jumped into the water. Once there, the kids held onto the sides and kicked then flipped over and kicked again, which mine didn’t do. I started to collect my things so that I could meet Them when They flung themselves up and out. I wanted my lovely child to run but not cry, but I expected that They’d do both. As we watched, though, my offspring stood still in the middle of the shallow end, where the group was getting ready to swim in lines. The group leader tried to get mine to move but They stood easily, the tallest in the section. I saw Them smile beatifically. Then They started to lip sync “Tonight’s Gonna Be a Good Night.” 

The child got Their arms into it, gesturing while the pool mates adapted, as if this was planned the whole time. The two assistants in the pool with the rogue swimmer, tasked with wrangling the entire camp population, made a few passes at getting Them back into formation but not very hard- there were other small people in the water who were in larger danger of drowning, so they focused on that. In a few seconds- five, no more than ten- my only child was the star of Their very own Esther Williams movie, complete with supporting swimmers and contemporary soundtrack. I stood up to get a better look: They were smiling at all of us, welcoming, so happy we were there with Them in that moment. 

I couldn’t see as well as I needed to. Some audience members were reacting: a few people were pointing, there were smiles on previously bored or annoyed faces. I decided to risk losing a few seconds of my only child’s moment to run downstairs and get a seat near the back. The song changed and my kid changed with it, mouthing every word perfectly, waving their arms around like a contestant on Ru Paul’s Drag Race. The other kids did a different stroke, my child held Their spot in the center of the shallow end, the older kids were given the signal to dive into the deep end in pairs. A few in the audience clapped along, and a few of the kids waiting for their group’s turn started to sing along, even though they’d been instructed not to. I’d brought my camera but I decided after a few fuzzy far-off pictures to just let it go so that I could watch this amazing, clever, perceptive, inspiring young person own their overwhelm: my kiddo has ASD. 

Having ASD means that everything carries the possibility of being too much, literally too much. Those on the Spectrum hear the buzz of fluorescent lights so keenly that it’s like a needle in the ear, and things that smell just a little rotten can make them throw up. This isn’t just being sensitive: the world of someone with ASD is a much more intense one than the world the rest of us live in. A lot of people who aren’t in the ASD community already know this; what most people don’t know is how long it takes someone on the spectrum to de-escalate from that state. It can take days or weeks to come down from an event like the camp’s pool show. The emotion that level of life invokes takes days to come back to the normal level of intense that many ASD kids feel constantly, and it’s a rare kid who doesn’t get physically ill from it, having to deal with stomach cramps or opportunistic viruses or migraine or all of those at once. Talking about it to other parents, even supportive ones, who don’t have neurodiverse children is grueling, because just telling them makes you look like the worst kind of stifling parent who wants the rest of society to provide comfy couches in all corners and forgive those children for their yelling or hair-pulling or whining or need to lick everything they see. The short response to that is Yes. Yes, I do. Make with the couches, community! Provide quiet corners in every classroom for the overwhelmed to retreat to, and a fridge for the gluten-free smoothie they need to drink cold! It tones the Vagus nerve, dammit! I don’t ask for this shit lightly- no one but the family of an autistic child understands how much focus is pulled from regular life, no one- but everything I ask for is, really, better for everyone. Who doesn’t need a quiet corner with a bean-bag chair for decompressing after a tense Skype meeting with the boss, or some special smoothie after being trapped in an epic traffic jam? So let’s dim the lighting in public spaces like malls! In fact, let’s tear down the malls and plant woodland parks instead, and populate said parks with the kinds of furry creatures that make humans smile, like bunnies and shit! And what I find most profound about these needs is how they are basically the needs of the planet, now. Those quiet spaces and wild spaces and places with sensitive planning that allow everyone- EVERYONE- the freedom to be alive and well are what we as a species should have been making with our busy little hands all along. 

The autistic kids have been right the whole time. 

At the pool, the songs ended and my kid’s group got out. When mine got out of the pool some of the adults clapped, and they half-turned and waved. I waited for everyone to take their turn, patient as a tortoise, and when it was finally over and the clapping sound was bouncing back and forth so loudly that I couldn’t hear the person next to me when they leaned over to make a comment, I looked for mine. They were nowhere- They’d obviously skipped out on the part where They had to sit on the concrete deck and watch all the older kids go down the slides. I went around to the bigger outside deck and found the offspring in a corner, scratching at the ground with a stick. 

“Hi, honey,” I said, touching Their shoulder gently so that I didn’t startle Them. 

“Mom!” They cried, but didn’t run into my arms as They did when they were happy. “I’m sorry about singing in the pool-” and I hugged Them, trying to make Them stop feeling like They had to apologize. A part of me wanted to cover the kid’s mouth with my hand so that I didn’t have to hear it, because They were already spending too much time doing that when all They’d done was deal with Their environment, right? 

“You were amazing,” I finally got to say. I relished my beautiful child’s face as it changed from worried to delighted- I watched the anxiety dissipate like it was CGI mist. There was still music playing. I don’t remember the songs, but I do remember that we danced in the sunshine and we sang along to them, mumbling where we didn’t know the words, not bothered in the least. Catastrophe had been averted, so now there was dancing. I thought of the planet, of the humans, of how much we had to learn.