To say I cried when I read Kimberly's book is an understatement. I cried buckets. But this is not a miserable book, far from it. It's a gritty, gutsy, moving, sometimes even funny book about the worst and best of life.

It's a book about childhood and innocence, and about entrapment, selling-out and smiling whilst you do the unbelievable, simply because your back is to the wall and you damned well have to.

Kimberly's husband, Howie, develops ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), one of the most challenging of all diseases and one which stripped him of almost every function, with the exception of his intellect and sexuality.

Kimberly, a remarkable woman with Asperger's struggling with life-long selective mutism lives in an invisible cage of her own, struggling with being known, being dependent on others, showing her feelings openly.

Yet in their incredible journey together it is Howie's obvious imprisonment that overshadows Kimberly's own at every turn. In spite of very real anxiety disorders, anxiety disorders her own invisible cage compels her to hide from others, she is expected to 'pull herself together' and function where many non-autistic adults would crumble. The crazy thing is, she does.

There are many on the autistic spectrum who do not feel excruciating social phobia to the degree they are compulsively compelled to hide, lose their natural voice, their connection to their own expressions and actions, but as the author of Exposure Anxiety; The Invisible Cage of Involuntary Self Protection Responses, I know of these things too well and I know where Kimberly has been. Most people with severe Exposure Anxiety as part of their autism don't speak and Kimberly surely struggled and still does, with verbal communication.

We are not all desperate for attention, easily to accept praise, cope with feeling overwhelming gratitude or connection, or want to be known. Some of us are lucky if we manage that with a single friend or partner and Kimberly achieved that, only to lose that partner. What's so much more remarkable is that whilst Kimberly has an obvious natural rapport with others on the autistic spectrum, she was also able to dare to be known by her non-autistic husband who often couldn't see her.

For all his faults (and he is unashamedly portrayed here in all his gritty glory) Howie stands out in this book as a real rough diamond. What she's written here is a monument to him, but also an act of enormous daring and self honesty.

Howie was no monster but he was not politically correct either. He was a 'rough-and-ready' type of bloke from the same raw, tell it like it is, reality Kimberly grew up in. She saw him beyond his often insensitive, even flippant reactions and still saw him beyond what his disease reduced him to. She saw him even when she's stopped seeing herself. And it is this that leaves me so awestruck about Kimberly Tucker. I identify with her in so many ways. I am proud of her. Let her hide from the world if she is safest in such a 'cat corner', but her individuality and humanity will still jump out as long as she allows us that window through her ARTism, through her writing. Dare to read this book. She dared to write it. You won't forget it.

Donna Williams, author of the international bestseller, Nobody Nowhere.

Author’s Note

“Wabi-sabi” is Asian. In a nutshell, it is a feeling of embracing the perfection of imperfection. It can be felt quietly as the humble beauty of the weed in the sidewalk growing. It’s the subtle statement of bubbly seeds in hand-blown bottles and the lovely placement of discarded glass shards into haphazard pattern in a mosaic. It can be a way of life.

When I saw the movie, The King's Speech, I identified with it in a big way. The King's stammering was like the third person in the room. I related to his anger, frustration, humiliation and sadness. Not because I stammer, but because there are horrible times my words are gone unsaid, never expressed. It feels like my tongue swells to monstrous proportions. It seems like my throat is an elevator in freefall and the bottom drops out. It’s like that cartoon about the fire-breathing dragon and it opens its mouth and then nothing comes out but a wisp of smoke.

The title of my book is derived from the camaraderie I share with a special little boy- Jaden. One evening, we stood outside in line at a farm, under a starlit sky, waiting our turn to order farm-fresh ice cream. He was mesmerized by the night sky, and he finally grasped the meaning of the Twinkle, Twinkle song. He discovered that stars really do twinkle.

"What do you think of this beautiful sky?" I asked him.

"I think sometimes the moon is a ball and sometimes it's a banana moon," he answered, and with that I felt that as long as I had banana moons above me, I would have the innocence of the young in my heart. And hope come what may.

In many ways this book is a regurgitation; an attempt to paint a sensitive and bittersweet life onto the quietness of paper. It’s painting the chameleon by hand every day. It’s just another autie-biography in the big scheme of things. It’s wabi-sabi in the details.

PART ONE

Chapter One: The Tooth Debacle, 2005

I was concerned about the tooth, of all things. After he was pronounced dead, I consoled the nurse. “You did everything you could for him,” I said, patting her back. Her eyes were round and moist. I was numb. She kept apologizing, but I knew that lungs operating at less than five percent capacity for so long do not re-inflate. And I was ready to escape the small gallery of mourners and leave for home. Two weeks of living in a hospital by someone’s bedside without leaving the building had me starving for fresh air. I would cry at home, in private cuddled with my little girl. The bedside cot I’d been provided for my two week stay concealed my fanny pack that I’d stashed in its tangle of crisp white sheets.

Or so I thought. I rooted for it. The search went on for an hour. I rummaged through every trash can in the unit. It never turned up. My mourning was mixed with anger. I lost fifty dollars and all my important cards and photos, but I would also mourn the keepsakes from my pack that were stolen at some point as he lay dying. I would miss the bolt I carried everywhere.

Amid all this, the gold tooth glinted in my mind, like the intrusion of an internet pop-up ad.

I was always skilled in doing as I was told, but this time he was telling me like a madcap auctioneer from inside my head, “Will ya’ fulfill my wishes? Do I hear a yes? Do I hear a yes from the woman in the big canary-yellow shirt? Pull the tooth before it’s too late.”

The funeral director was predictably somber and out of breath for some reason. He wore creased pants that didn’t reach his shoes. I could see whenever he crossed his legs, the silky dark socks that stretched up very high. He took me by surprise every time he spoke, his words pressing air like the low keys on an organ.

I raised an eyebrow and was startled when he said surreal things about a person who he now spoke of as “the body.” My mood state was flat and that was normal for me. I was labeled dysthymic after all; but overall I liked to fancy myself quite composed. Starr sat beside me and Sue sat across from me where she kept falling apart. It was her son after all.

The funeral guy told us he took an actual fingerprint from “the body’s thumb,” and I jumped in my seat but no one else did. They nodded. The funeral director told us we could make jewelry with the body’s thumbprint that we could order from him. (Like kindergarten all over again when I put my hand in the plaster. Only not.)

He asked if we had any questions and whether anyone minded that he removed his coat. We didn't. My mother-in-law’s face exploded. I passed the tissue box. “Excuse me.” She apologized. I was the one who was going to have to apologize to her, after the words that were about to come out of my mouth but it had to be said. I had to silence the auctioneer’s voice.

I had been staring at the tan carpet the whole time but now I looked in Starr's direction for the strength the action might lend me. “Well,” I started, swallowing down any hint of a smile. “There's this funny thing. Starr, remember how he always said that he wanted me to have his gold tooth?” I cleared my throat. I clasped my hands. Somewhere classical music played.

“I do remember that, yeah,” she said. She nodded. She was a frequent visitor at the end of his life, treating us to her good cheer and sunshine aura.

Sue sat up straight and plunked the tissue box down on its side table. “I didn't know my son had a gold tooth,” she said, searching my face and Starr’s. Then she searched the commercial grade carpet with her wet eyes. I wondered if she saw the lint and hair caught there, as I did. “The gold tooth must've been in the back of his mouth.”

“It was,” I said. “A souvenir of when our finances were a little better.” Hooray for me- I made a giant sentence! I was always pretty good at talking one-on-one with people but there were three people in the room so I was doing A-OK! The voice in my head urged me on- “Spit it out, already. Good thing you aren’t paying him for his time.”

I spit it out. “Anyway he wanted me to have it. Is there any chance you could pull-”

Sue swiped for her tissue box. At first I thought she was swiping for me and I almost ducked. Actually I did duck a little. The funeral guy swiveled his chair toward me, nearly spilling the paperwork off his well-dressed lap. “I do not feel comfortable with pulling a tooth from the body, no. I can't do that,” he said, running quickly chosen words together.

Starr spoke up with her usual conviction. “I think if it's something he really wanted her to have and if it means something to the family then there has to be someone who'll get the tooth for them for a keepsake before he's cremated.”

Well you could just pat that silence on the back. You could offer it some paperwork to fill out and watch silence pick up the pen. That’s how palpable it was. But I felt calm. The voice in my head was just- gone.

Sue was a shade lighter than milk. I was sitting there, hands still clasped and wondering if the funeral guy was going to reply to Starr when he finally did. “I- I'm just not comfortable with that. Sounds like he just wanted something to represent his memory, something for the family to cherish of him, and I strongly recommend our fingerprint jewelry. That’s an alternative.” He handed me the brochure.

“But,” I said, experimenting with new ways to cross my legs, uncross them and swing my feet around, “What happens after cremation? Will his gold tooth be left in the ashes? He worried about that. That someone might steal it. Hey…will it be in the ashes that you give me so I can see it and fish it out later for myself to keep?”

Sue leaned forward like she had a stomach ache. The funeral guy explained that the heat from the cremation process was so great that it would obliterate the tooth completely.

“I'll get it,” Starr said point blank. She shrugged and leaned back in her chair.

And then my mother-in-law’s words had to come out. Her dam was only so strong. The words gushed. “What do you mean, you'll get it?” It was admirable. I saw that behind her wet eyes she was trying to have on her smiling public face. But she was a mess. I was sorry for the frightened look across her features. I could not imagine losing a child.

Starr had a plan. With the voice of a conspirator she said, “After the wake I'll go in and get it out.”

“And just how you do you propose to get the tooth out of my son's head?” Sue asked, eyes wider than ever.

“I got some tools in the trunk,” Starr said. I knew she would do it. She once got my dropped dollar bill back from a mean kid at the movies when I was seven. She would face down a bull if she had to and I had no doubt it would back off whimpering.

Within a few days the “body” was on display in a closed casket and I was back inside the funeral parlor. The cremation was going to be held sometime after the wake. The funeral parlor building held uneasy memories for me. When I was twelve, two older girls who smoked and wore a swipe of shiny blue shadow across their upper eyelids chased me past the deli, all the way down the hill, and into the funeral parlor’s parking lot. I dared not go further so I turned and faced them, out of breath and scared. “So,” one of them said, laughing at my tears and lighting a cigarette, “whaddya say we put you in there?” She pointed at the white building with the dark shutters.

His body was in the casket because they couldn’t arrange a cremation right away. After most everyone had left the building, I found myself standing alone in the room in front of the closed casket with a handful of mourners. I wondered if he was wearing the hospital coat or was naked inside the casket.

Flowers were lined up on the floor and more hung from the walls. Some had cursive words in gold script across the fronts of the flower sprays: Loving Brother, Father, Beloved Son, Son-In-Law. At a diagonal, to the left behind the casket was a heart shaped wreath of white and red flowers hanging from the stark white wall. Across the front was the word: Husband. This was the one Sue had ordered for me. With my financial affairs still not in order ever since my fanny pack had been stolen, she had paid for this wreath for me.

After the funeral she announced I needed to decide which flowers to take home. But there were no voices today and I couldn’t answer. She said we could donate them to a nursing home or to the hospital. Howie's sister loaded the Brother arrangement into her car. Everyone, save for us, was already en route to her house for the ‘afterfuneral’ get-together. Since Howie was to be cremated later, there would be no gathering at a cemetery because there would be no burial and no headstone.

Maybe I'd pluck one rose to press in a book next to my four-leafed clovers but no, I shook my head. Maybe I didn’t want any at all. After over twenty years of having a man make every decision for you it was damned hard to decide if you wanted something or didn’t!

And then it happened so fast, landing on the smiling portrait of him and me. The Husband flowers had a life of their own and fell over face-forward onto the casket. That’s not supposed to happen. The red and white heart surged forward on its own.

It landed onto the casket right in front of me. If that sort of thing happened a lot in the old black shuttered funeral home, no wonder the funeral guy always looked like a snail in a weasel hole.

I stood there, frozen to the spot, reading Husband for a moment. We were all alabaster statues fixated on the picture that the flowers had crashed into-and working out in all our minds the impossible route in our heads the flowers had taken.

I broke the silence. “I'll take those home!” I announced to everyone. At least I finally answered Sue’s question. I suspected someone was still trying to make decisions for me.

In the parking lot, I loaded my Husband wreath into someone's car. Starr came up to me, her limp barely noticeable. She would never let M.S. get an upper hand. She hooked a thumb over her shoulder conspiratorially, back toward the intimidating funeral home. I waited for her to speak. She was going to tell a creepy joke or something. I expected she might hum the twilight zone theme close to my ear.

Her eyebrows were up. Uh-oh. A partner-in-crime look. She said, “Should I go back in there and get that tooth? No one needs to know.”

I smiled, at a loss for my true want. I knew his want. He wanted me to have his gold tooth. That want was recorded on his talking machine at home.

The sky was cloudless. It matched my ugly blue shirt with the fake blue rose attached, chosen because it was his favorite color. I knew I would later throw it away as it’d be tainted with the honor of being the funeral shirt. I smiled at Starr’s devotion, avoiding her eyes. “No, I think we'll let it go.” I said, surprising myself. Empowering my self.

“Are you sure? I'll do it if it's important,” she said, “I remember him saying it. Got the tools in the trunk. Not a big deal. When everyone’s gone.” She made a hand gesture in the air, a movement like operating pliers.

Howie would’ve approved. You better believe it. Excuse me, funeral guy. We’d like alone time with the body. Please grant us privacy here. Oh yes, if he were still here long enough to concoct the plan himself he would’ve approved right down to making me be the one who clamped the monkey wrench down on his gleaming three hundred dollar dental atrocity of a molar.

Or whatever it cost. I wasn’t allowed to touch the checkbook. Really, I wasn’t allowed to even touch it.

When Starr asked if I was sure, you better believe I considered it. I looked to the heavens that June day and imagined every detail of the caper right down to the “Mission Impossible” theme music as we lifted the lid of the casket. As we ran out into the parking lot, the gleaming dental prize held high in the air and then the “Laverne and Shirley” song would have to play. Schlemiel, schlimazel!

Yep. In that instant I wanted the caper more than the tooth. “I'm sure,” I said, smiling.

“Okay kiddo,” she said. She pivoted on her good leg and paused to look at me over her shoulder as she headed toward her car. It was as if she hoped I’d change my mind. Maybe she wanted a caper too. I shrugged. She turned and kept walking.

Chapter Two: The First Gray House

My earliest memory: Aunt Nat running around the side of the grey house popping up in front of the window and tapping the glass. I'm giggling so hard I can't catch my breath and then where is she? Pop! There she is! I'm giggling again. I'm laughing so hard tears are flowing and I nearly tip over. There's a separation I don't quite get- a pane of glass that makes it safe between Aunt Nat and me. She ducks down outside: disappears and reappears. But she can't touch me. She can't even hear me laugh.

I have that memory frozen in Polaroid, in shades of grey. My parents took lots of pictures in the grey house back when pictures were black and white, appropriately enough. In grey, you could see Mommy’s cold coffee. You could see dilapidated garages. In shades of grey, you saw the world that was black and white TV. You saw home.

The grey house of my childhood, all two stories of it, stood sentinel on a patchy hill by the highway with its windows for eyes. My crooked curtain beyond the bottom porch was a winking lid. The house on the hill had caterpillars that liked to crawl up over the house where the bare board peeked through peeling paint. In the grey of the grey house, you could see sky colors, and looking deeper, you could see the eye colors of my parents, and of Starr. Most of the cousins' eyes were dark; rich, like fine wood or Vermont dirt, creamy as hot chocolate pudding. Not my eyes. My eyes were hazel. Like the nuts.

My room was ordered clutter, piled as curiously as Picasso's art. I never saw the bottoms of the walls where they joined the floor but I assumed they were there. In a feat that seemed to me akin to scaling Everest, I bruised my girl knees climbing the precariously positioned things that walled the valley path to my bed. Who knew when we would need a salvaged bicycle tire, a coat two sizes too big or a little gold corkscrew in the shape of a wicked faced boy- with the flip-up corkscrew being his wee-wee?

My mother chose the pattern for my curtains and bed canopy. Evermore, blue and white checks meant “mother.”

When I dared to dig into the piles, I usually started at the bottom and hoped against thing-slides and object-launches. I found mysterious outdated gadgets for which I assigned my own uses in the yard. I often smashed thermometers to play with the mercury. Eggbeaters with a jump-rope attached became gas pumps for my bike. With things in my company, I never felt bored or lonely.

When I looked out my window from inside my room, I saw Ilana's weathered porch with its lovely expanse of peeling grey boards jutting out from under my window outside in an interesting linear perspective. Ilana was the woman who rented the apartment upstairs from ours. Later in my life, upon seeing Van Gogh's painting of his room, I would think of the boards of the porch that seemed to distortedly run away from my view. The image of them would remain, as many images do, air-brushed inside my head like a poster.

Ilana greeted these boards daily. Jumping spiders siesta-ed around the porch rails and by the bicycle and old plant pots. One bright day I sat on her porch step thinking about the place between nothing and everything, watching air particles square dance. She came round the corner and greeted me in the eyes. We both looked away. She hoisted up the steps, getting some spiders to hopping. As she passed me, I got an eye-level view of her oversized ankles and legs decorated with purple lines. I couldn't not look at them. Ilana shuffled up past me turtle-like as ever, and across the fine boards, her colorful dress swaying. A puff of white-blonde hair framed her face as she smiled my way with cherry red lips. Her apartment laid spread out on our ceilings like a dark secret. If I could see her things, familiarize myself with the things she surrounded herself with, only then could I, only then would I, know her.

One Halloween, I figured here's my chance! As I stood on the topmost part of her unlit claustrophobia-inducing hall stairs, I knocked on her door. It was incredibly dark. But I sparkled. I was wearing the princess mask with glitter for eye shadow above the eye slits. The door opened a crack, revealing her red painted mouth. Plump fingers crawled through the crack with Chiclets gum. The yellow packet fell neatly into the hollow of the plastic pumpkin.

I strained to see into the room behind her. Was that a stove?! It was crow-black, clunky and so quirky with its funny curving pipe, it reminded me of a type I'd seen illustrated in a storybook. Ilana lived in a cartoon kitchen! Smiling at her doughy hand, she closed her door till it clicked. I heard a clasp latch. My mask dropped a bit on one side. Already the princess was cracked at the single staple that held the elastic band to the yellow plastic hair. But insanely, she smiled. Beneath it, I exhaled hot breath from my no-expression face.

My grey house had a soul and a heart, and also an innards, which was where I lived, where I slept and dreamed and ate and defecated. My house had quiet mystery too. It had skin which swirled with more than simple grey if you bothered to look. I never did see hidden colors inside of blue for instance. Blue’s just blue. But grey; grey was so much.

It was never dull in the grey house. The highway noise lulled me to sleep like no nursery rhyme could. In the daylight hours I'd seen a tractor trailer take down a Lassie dog, and assorted other wildlife and pets alike were smashed into road kill. I'd seen and heard vehicles struck by other vehicles. That Lassie dog jumped up like it was making to catch a high flying Frisbee; its front limbs all flayed out but it caught the headlights of that tractor trailer instead.

“Don't let Kimmy outside! This one she don't have to see. Blood all over the windshield. I don't think this guy's makin' it,” my father said one day. Then he was walking down the hill toward the scene. We were privy to such excitement so often that there were times we could barely get through a Laugh-In or Hee-Haw episode on TV. My mother pulled me away from the screened door and told me to go and do something. I knew better than to ask her just what I should do because she just might tell me to twiddle my thumbs again and I didn’t like doing that. So I froze, thinking. Thinking was “doing something.”

My father, I knew, would be a comfort to whomever had crashed. He knew the tow-truck driver next door by first name and his talent was such that he could take a car apart and put it back together. My father, that is. He was ‘Mr. Reliable.’

“That Joe,” said the owner of the gas station. “He can Mickey Mouse any car into running.” Daddy said that someday he’d own a place called Joe's Garage.

He jogged into the house. “There’s a redhead down there- oh she's a mess, Carol,” he told my mother. “I gotta’ make some calls for her. The other guy- I think he’s a goner.”

The people victims were carried away by ambulances. The animals were flattened until they disappeared entirely, flattened so completely that their remnants could lift and blow across the lanes. I stopped expecting little animal ambulances and animal stretchers to appear on the highway a long time ago.

The black undertakers usually arrived, to make off with entrails and such and rightfully so, in the scheme of things. But they disturbed me just the same. It was something about their voices. The crows cackled. Everything was so damn funny to them. It wasn’t until I met an actual undertaker many years later that I wondered if he too cackled. In private, maybe.

One night I saw something stupid on the big floor model television. “That would never happen. The news isn't true. It’s dumb,” I told Mommy, who was crocheting.

“What's so dumb?” she asked me.

“All that for one person? All those fire trucks? All those people? It’s only one little kid trapped in a house but a TV person comes and they go to all that trouble to rescue one kid with that big ladder! That's a crowd of people to help one person! It could never happen, Mommy!” I told her. I figured cops and the like weighed the importance of rescues.

“It happened. It happens all the time. People help other people; whether it’s one person or ten people who're trapped,” She said with a matter-of-fact air, never putting down her yarn. I looked at her, cocking my head to the side. I had no choice but to believe her. She wouldn't lie.

Chapter Three: Uncle Rooster

I was about five. We were visiting Grandma in Vermont. Relatives were gathered in the country kitchen all around the great Formica table; gabbing, laughing, swearing, eating, and smoking. Cousins darted after each other, more boisterous than I dared to be. I sat on Daddy's lap, blurring and staring into nothing; stuck in good between the table's edge and his stomach. Voices were rising and falling; undecipherable gibberish. I was staring.

I didn't know it was Uncle Rodney's voice asking me a question until I heard my father explaining me in an un-Daddy-like voice. “Here,” Daddy said. He tossed Rodney the cigarette pack. It skimmed across the table neat as a whisper- swoosh! Then Daddy said, “Kimmy won't pass these to ya.” She doesn't touch 'em. Never has. She goes way out of her way to avoid 'em. Heh, heh.”

Uncle Rodney looked at me as if for the first time ever. Shaking, I dared see his face. A long man who tended to dart about quickly, he had a gravelly voice that tumbled out of a pasted-on Cheshire cat grin. My father's word for him was “cocky.” I thought of “rooster” when I heard that word and so my father's word seemed to fit Rodney.

“That so? Doesn't touch 'em?” said Uncle Rodney. He shoved the pack across the table toward me as if we were playing some game together. I jerked my hand away in time. From the missile. The pack skidded across the table right to where my hand had been moments before!

“I asked Kimmy to pass 'em,” Uncle Rodney said, grinning.

Yikesyikesyikesyikes. I couldn't breathe.

“Let it go, Rod. Heh, heh,” My father laughed. “She won't. She never has. I don't know why she's like that.” Good. It’s all explained. Get on with playing, all you cousins.

I tilted my head to see into my father's face and saw the stubble there. He was smiling cockeyed lopsided at me. What was worse, Daddy was averting his gaze from everyone. An outgoing man, he always looked people in the face. When we were out in public together and he held my hand, I wore his essence like a familiar mitten. The aunts and uncles were looking at me now too, not just Daddy. Even the cousins had ceased their darting about to glare at me. The humming voices stopped.

I tried to make my get-away but I was wedged in too tight. My throat felt constricted. It happened so fast! Uncle Rodney leapt up, the sound of his metal-legged chair screaming the way I should have. He rubbed the crinkle of that pack all over my arms and face. Bits of tobacco, the antithesis of the flower stamens I loved to dissect, were sprinkling out and tainting me. I whipped my face from side to side to avoid contact with the cigarette pack. He towered over me, grinding it into my cheeks. And my hair. My ears. Soon my face was wet with waterfall tears. The sound of the pack crinkling in my ears was more than I could stand. I dared not swat at it for fear of touching it.

“Gonna git you! Bad ciggie gonna git you!” Uncle Rodney taunted. I willed the cousins and aunts to swarm him like a mad sci-fi thriller plot and reveal hidden stingers from their backsides. No one heeded my thought vibes.

Then nothing. Grandma’s rooster clock made a startlingly loud click. Click. Click. Uncle Rodney sat down and leaned back against his chair, lighting a bent cigarette from the wadded pack he'd terrorized me with. He smoked like a cartoon villain. Silence reined in the kitchen except that I could hear his amusement. He was laughing. It was high-pitched like a shriek. He asked my father something then, quite seriously, “How long she been like that, Joe? If that ain't the damnedest thing.”

Always the wonder in the voice when the people tried to figure me out. I did not hear my father's answer if there was one. I managed to wriggle onto my feet at last. I could hear no more and see no one. I spun in a slow circle with my soiled arms held straight out and I cried with no sound. I was a deaf, mute and blind kid.

Chapter Four: Blond Mommy

For the most part my beautiful mother was tolerant of my behaviorisms. I couldn't step on the torn places on the living room floor where the grey swirls in the linoleum were turned black. That was the bad territory. I’d probably get a disease and have to squeeze my fingers a hundred times then run outside till my breath came in hitches to erase the black from my feet and that wasn’t even a surefire cure.

I couldn't sit in the chairs at Starr's house. The embossed swirlies in her chairs were called “vinyl” and were intolerable. They made my blood stop flowing. They didn’t have that effect on anyone except me. I was the only one the chairs disliked.

Styrofoam coolers were a top secret operation. I wasn’t sure who was behind that; but it had to do with the spies who invented the sounds in dog whistles. I didn’t know who was behind that plot against me. I was in the process of reading the book Harriet the Spy and I was keeping an eye on everybody.

“I won't wear this shirt,” I told my mother one day.

“It'll go with your eyes. It’s your color! Try it on, stubborn kid,” she said, handing the “paisley” shirt to me. She held it up. It had long sleeves and a wild pattern. I'd checked it out already but rendered it unwearable.

“Didn't you read the label, Mommy?” I said.

She read the name on the tag aloud, “Marlboro Clothing Company. Aren't you taking this smoking thing of yours a little far? This is a clothing company, for cryin' out loud!”

It was more than just boycotting cigarettes. Intellectually I did know that the clothing company was coincidentally named the same as the cigarette company. Or was it? I couldn't wear loud shoes either. Couldn’t step on bumpy things. Couldn't speak when expected, my vocabulary was large but words got stuck. I didn’t think of my self as shy. Not having words was far different than being shy.

I knew what I liked. Diarrhea medicine from the refrigerator had a superb chalk taste. I knew that because I enjoyed actual chalk. I scooped spoonfuls of white creamy shortening straight out of the can and in fact I tasted anything in the house labeled ‘non-toxic’. Not something I’d recommend.

For a long time I loved newspaper. The smell. The feel. Taste. Silky texture as the paper melted on my tongue. I swirled the wet goo around till it was mush. Then chewed. Not quite the same taste as paste, but similar. I gave up eating newspaper when I thought there was bleach in the paper making my teeth sensitive to hot and cold. I licked rocks to see them change color. I could not touch anything associated with bad smells. Not cigarettes, matches or lighters, ashtrays, or cigarette packages or cellophane wrappers from cigarette packages, and not labels on shirts that mentioned the cigarettes’ names.

My mother knew all this and still persisted that day about the shirt. “At least wear it long enough for me take your picture with you holding Duchess’ puppies. You can sit by the pool in the grass,” She said. Duchess the hound was the new dog; a heart on a string. Now she had puppies. I took the shirt from her as if it were maggot-infested.

I sat cross-legged in the damp grass alongside the pool, trying to keep three black and white puppies from bumbling off my lap. The suffocation intensified with every movement my body made. I could not send an expression to my face. Click! Went the camera. My arms were stiff rods for the photo. She seemed content enough to take my picture without benefit of a pleasant facial expression to enhance the photo. Click! It went again.

My fingers went under my nose to detect whether the smell of the shirt was coming off on my skin. The tag against the back of my neck was a reminder taunting me: The Marlboro Company has designed this shirt for you and all its workers chain smoked while sewing the teeny buttons on. Their nicotine stained fingers were all over this thing!

I spilled the puppies into the grass and made for the house, careful not to run because when I was agitated I didn’t turn out my left foot correctly and I tripped over it. I didn’t register any pain, just a tearing that I could hear as well as feel; as my wart was clipped clean off on the screened door’s bad nail; the seed wart that used to rub against pencils when I wrote things. Soon I would be rid of the shirt too! In the bathroom I fumbled with too-tiny buttons, unable to remove the shirt fast enough. Crying silently I feared I was soiled forever.

Red rivulets in a watercolor painting couldn't have been prettier than that which trickled over my hand and down my wrist as I turned it. The color was pure; mesmerizing. I studied the spot in the linoleum that I could not let the bottoms of my feet touch. The ashtray was on a table next to the toilet. A lot of mapping went on in this small room to avoid bad things. When I left the bathroom, bleeding all over myself; I said to her, “I hope you're satisfied. I'm never wearing that shirt again.”

But the pear tree was a delight to my senses. With its golden fruits, like the partridge song, it was a silhouette against the sky near the picnic table. I heard it growing. I saw it hyper-visually, in symbols.

If I were a driver on the two-lane highway at the bottom of the scraggy hill, surely I'd wreck the car! I'd be craning my neck to see such a wonder as these golden pears: food presented- no, sprung really from mere wood.

Oh the pear tree with its golden fruit heavy and mottled, affixed on its intricate branches. It was like so many Christmas ornaments, it seemed. Christmas under the sun. Pears in piles, pungent, soft upon the ground, nested in leaf litter. The tree was noisy. It buzzed with bees that endlessly twirled through and around it; busy, busy, all this silhouetted against the sky. My favorite sky, grey.

Starr would feast on the fruits one after another while contemplating the dissymmetry of her posterior against my splintered picnic table. I never bit into a pear's flesh. Never did I plan to. I ate glue, sand and shortening, but I much preferred ketchup sandwiches and nothing but ketchup sandwiches at home. If there was even a smear on the plate below my sandwich of red glorious ketchup, I licked my plate till it shone with my spit. Variety was not my strong suit. I wanted toast cut into three strips with butter going all the way to the edges. And nothing but toast cut into threes.

My parents were concerned about my limited diet but the good doctor told my mother not to worry, I was only seven and I would somehow get the nutrients I needed; even if I was known to lick the occasional rock and chew driveway grit between my teeth, savoring the glass-like crunchies.

My parents hoped I would one day try a vegetable, or juice, or meat. They followed the doctor's advice. No one mentioned to the doctor my staring spells, my mutism, my lack of interest in friends, (that were not rocks, bugs, trees, or otherwise invisible) my need to control my cousins when I did play with them, my sleepwalking, need for structure and routine, or the fact that I was in grade school and my mother still put me on the table and dressed me because I couldn't do buttons. That's not to say that the doctor would've picked up on it back then anyway. But today when a kid has a cluster of behaviorisms a trained professional should look at the overall picture. Not just one aspect. Oh well. I wasn’t hurting anybody.

I got good grades but I was drawing the attention of the teachers who worried that I never spoke spontaneously except when called upon; and then monosyllabically. I never interacted with the other kids. And I stared a lot in class.

I spoke to Starr, but not if others were present. Not at school. Some relatives had never heard my voice.

Starr tolerated me. She lived in close proximity. Sometimes I thought if there were other girls to choose from by the highway, she would prefer playing with them and forget me altogether. But mostly I gave her more credit than that and felt she really liked me.

Starr’s mother thought us to be “too close” and requested to the school that Starr and I never ever have any classes together. She sensed something off about comical me who didn’t speak among groups, and she couldn’t wait for her daughter to form other friendships. There were things that happened which bonded us; like the untimely death of her little sister and a man who lived nearby and lured us into his house with the promise of sourball candy. He called me Timmy. I guess he couldn’t pronounce the K sound.

I asked Mommy and Daddy why I didn’t have a little brother like Starr, and was told they were “trying.” Whatever the process, I figured it was pretty delicate, pretty difficult to make people. Then why did the Aunt and Uncle have four kids? My mother chided me as I lay on the living room’s swirly linoleum at night, coloring with carefully chosen crayon colors in my coloring book. There were no popular TV character or movie coloring books then. The pages had practical scenes: kids on bicycles, Daddies with hammers. Mommies baking cookies or rocking babies.

Mommy said sternly, “Why?! Why do you make all the Mommies with black hair? Why?” She kneeled on the floor long enough to put a yellow crayon into my fist and to toss the black crayon I'd been using. It went rolling away.

“There, there. A blond Mommy,” she said. “Do a blond one.” She started the picture with her own lemon crayon. I assumed she thought the Mommies should have hair like she did. I closed the book across her hand. I was dark-haired and everyone should be. I knew how disappointed she was by my long horse tail black hair and my height. The doctor had said I would be taller than the both of them.

I knew her disappointment because once I hid in secret behind my father’s mother’s curtain which separated the kitchen from the sewing room where toys were kept when I heard my mother crying. We were in Massachusetts; I was holding a one-armed doll with roll-back eyes in one hand and a small tractor with no wheels in the other when I overheard her say, “Why couldn’t she at least look like me?” And later in the conversation, “She never hugs back.” She was bawling.

Chapter Five: Sidekick

Every morning I knew that my Daddy disappeared into a factory where he was a foreman and he dyed patterns onto cloth. Sometimes he brought home “flawed” material. He said that his factory would only have chucked the flawed stuff in the trash compactor. Oh we were a family of trash rescuers. I knew that much. I may not have been too savvy about people rescues. But there were no things that went to their demises in our house. Not if we could help it!

In the mid-evening we sometimes picked Daddy up from work when only one car was running and they had to share one vehicle. I liked to look down in the crap-brown canal in front of the factory where eels lined up in flowing dark ribbons near the banks when Mommy and me would park in front of the factory. Daddy would come bounding out with his arms full. He would store bundles of cloth in the trunk for later.

My father had his arms full with bolts of fabrics with the so-called ‘misprints’ on them. Grayed-down colors where the dye had not saturated the cloth, zigzags that were not lightning sharp- but foggy instead, double struck anchors laid one upon another. Teacups, cornucopias and vegetables were overlapping where they weren't intended to overlap. I could cut out all the pictures and make them have parties with each other! Who was the judge of flaws and mistakes? My father made pattern and color when he left for work! How many fathers could do that?

I followed Daddy under Ilana's hall staircase, where the indoor entrance to the cellar was. The bundles would be piled down there with the rest of the flawed pieces. I followed him; I wanted to see what we had in storage. My father's footfalls on the wooden steps were heavy but sure. I saw a blur flash from the depths. The staircase creaked as we descended. I froze halfway down. What's that?” I asked him, knowing full well what ‘it’ was that had leapt from one lopsided clothes barrel to another.

“Just a rat, Booby,” he said. “They're more afraid o' you than you are o' them.” Daddy laughed.

“I change my mind Daddy!” I said. I zipped back up to the dark linoleumed hall from which I'd come, listening to my father's hooting laughter follow him into the cellar.

I accompanied him bowling too, doing my puzzles till it was his turn to throw the ball, then I set down my maze book and watched. I sat in the curved plastic orange seats while Daddy bowled with his league friends: Long Earl, Paul, and the others. Those seats were almost as good as the Laundromat seats with their bump in the middle made just-so, to fit my hiney, how did they know? Those sleek and spectacular seats, all alike but the Laundromat ones somehow different from the bowling ones. How I liked collections of things that were alike but different too. Every Friday night I got to see Daddy's name up in lights over the place where the shoes were kept in cubby holes. He held the record score. His picture had been in the newspaper several times, shaking hands and receiving trophies.

The accomplishment was his, but he made like it was mine when, ball in hand, just before his turn to bowl, he faced me and asked, “Should I win you a trophy?”

I liked the ‘alleys’. The owners, a red headed woman who drew on her eyebrows and a short reserved man with black pasted on hair and glasses, let a dog and a cat roam free inside the building, and the animals knew to stay off the lanes. I liked following the pets over to the couch and TV area to pet them. The kitty liked to rub her scent over the long line of bowling balls. The dog often roamed into the owners' back room. They let me follow her in there and sit with her while my father bowled. Among a desk, a dog bed, bowling posters that punned the words “spare” and “strike,” framed black and white photos and cartoon bowlers, I was never at a loss for something to look at or to read. I sat in the windowless, cluttered room next to the dog bed, tolerating the stack of cigar boxes, and I read the puns over and over again, giggling silent laughs with a hand held over my mouth: “Think you can spare a strike?”

Daddy taught me to bait hooks, to cast a line. I learned the importance of catching and releasing. We walked upstream in a quest for better fishing spots, and the bank would turn to shrubs, vines, or pricker bushes. It became necessary to cross the streams to the other side. Daddy tested the rocks in the stream with a steel toe, prodding for loosened ones that might upend me. If enough rocks did not exist to precipitate my safe crossing, he rearranged rocks into quaint lines of stepping stones. He warned me of the mossy or slick ones that nearly upended him.

Sometimes he ‘fell in’ up to his shin or knee and hooting with laughter, he announced, “Better me than you, Poopsie!” Always he guided me with a big callused hand held lightly over mine; sausage fingers over smooth little white ones. Usually the stepping rocks, however smartly placed, were a bit too far apart for my legs and he would tell me, “Just hold on. I'm not gonna' let you fall in...” I trusted him and let his hand swallow mine.

When we had to cross logs, suspended where they crashed over streams during storms, sometimes several feet in air over the rushing water, it was the same. He held my hand. We walked sideways over the fallen trees, slowly, and I wasn't too afraid. “I got your hand. Pretend you're walking on level ground. Don't slow up. Just walk steady now. Almost there. Don't look down”, he’d say. So the trick to this was in the pretending.

Chapter Six: Grandma

I had an older cousin who liked to shampoo her long red hair in Grandma’s brook. I had no concept as to why she'd do that. Nevertheless I admired her free spirit and her long flowing sunset hair that tried to follow the water downstream. I was happy enough with faucets. Grandma had a perfectly good bathtub in the house.

Grandma was a fragile woman with a playful air about her. It seemed she could read everyone's lips but mine. The beloved but prim Aunt Hannah who lived with Grandma, liked to say I didn't “e-nun-ci-ate” clearly. Sometimes I thought she just enjoyed the opportunity to use the word “enunciate” in a sentence. But no matter, Grandma and I had our own way to communicate. I wrote her long sprawling notes in my grade school scrawl and she read every word silently to herself. Then she answered me aloud, a cigarette balanced in her trembling hand.

“Were any new kittens born since last time I was here? How old are they? Which cat is the mother this time?” This and more I jotted on paper. She began the ritual of pulling a cigarette from the pack, coughing, lighting it, clearing her throat. Then she winked and began answering me aloud. With my elbows on the table and my hands supporting my chin, I watched her talk. I watched her lips, her fingers, I savored her presence. When it appeared she'd answered every question, and she checked the notes to see that she did, I wrote some more notes to her. We carried on for hours.

With Grandma it was always a delightful task for me to choose which utensil to write with, from the washed soup can on the table. Another group of things that were alike but somehow different. There were stubby pencils in the can that wrote rich and darkly like smooth liquid grey velvet and some pencils were yellow with long silvery points. I tested pen after pen on paper. Some did not give out ink at all. These I put aside. Other pens appeared brand new and made red or green marks. Sometimes if I was giddy I alternated pens; making colorful notes.

I wrote on the paper plate I'd used for my toast strips: “Grandma, I have to throw these pens away. They don't write anymore.” I held the dry pens in my fist for her to see.

She read the words on the plate, winked, nodded. I threw them away. “Don't throw the paper plate away! Just brush the crumbs off. You can use the plate again,” she told me in her crackly Grandma voice.

I kept Grandma busy while my mother chatted with her sister, Hannah. My mother drank coffee, smoked, helped Hannah solve her beloved crossword puzzles from the newspaper, and read her dog-eared paperback romance novels. Often simultaneously! We always visited Grandma in the kitchen.

Hannah lived in the big white house with Grandma. Hannah had a grown son Louie who had darting eyes and fuzzy hair and who only sometimes slept in one of the many rooms of the house. There were always lots of cats milling about outside and sunning themselves on the roof levels. The house had enough charm to be a Matisse painting. It was as if the shingles themselves were brushstrokes. I had the set of World Book encyclopedias at home so I knew about such things. The faces of relatives were Matisse’s subjects; sometimes ‘jumbled’ but interesting.

I had an all-white cat at home that was born in Grandma’s shed. Before we took her home to Connecticut, Hannah had had her checked by a vet who said the cat was deaf. My deaf cat Puff did not like to touch the floor. We even kept her food dish on the counter. Puff liked to sleep on top of the refrigerator. The higher up she could get, the better. She had creative ways of hopping from cabinet to television to table to stool to counter to refrigerator. People thought this to be odd but I could relate to her altering her behavior to make her environment more tolerable. Her disability challenged her; she developed agility to compensate. When she was up high, she had some control. No surprises. She could see everything coming. She never touched the floor. I never touched smoking things. Or the vinyl chairs in Starr’s kitchen, or cotton or sauces, seafood or torn spots on linoleum.

I'd heard say that when the cat population at Grandma’s got too numerous, Cousin Louie drowned some in a pillowcase in the brook over the hill.

I was designing a puzzle one day when Aunt Hannah left for the race-track where she sold hot dogs. I was startled in my kitchen chair when Louie jumped up, shaking the table. He was inches from Grandma’s face, yelling, his mouth so wide open I could see his pale gums and holes where teeth should’ve been. I continued to write words for my puzzle. Mommy was acting normal too. Louie was raving about Grandma finding his expensive pot and pipe in his pocket and throwing it out. When his hand clenched into a fist I tensed. His spittle flew. He paced for a bit then got into her face again. She held her cigarette as best she could with her hand tremor and the acrid haze of her smoke made me hold my breath. She would not look at him. When the gun flashed I put down my pencil.

My pencil rolled and I let it go. Grandma swatted at the handgun touching her forehead with a shaky but determined hand. Louie put it up against her head again. His eyes were big and wild. His finger caressed the trigger. Grandma swatted again; but the gun returned. She swatted. It was as if she were shoeing a pesky horsefly buzzing around her head and not the nose of a gun. Her forehead never looked more fragile to me and frail with its blue veins and receding hairline of grey hair so thin that her entire head of hair could be rolled up with a total of only ten of Mommy’s soft pink curlers! Mommy closed her book; surprisingly calm and quiet as we watched Grandma rise and head for the black wall phone with the big dial. He followed her, gun waving through the air. She meant to use the phone, I thought, something I had never seen her do, and a ripple of an unnamed feeling surged through me. She was going to dial the phone. She had the receiver in her hand. He raved some illiterate nonsense but I didn’t understand. I did hear, “Try it old woman!"

What he did next was unexpected. Grandma was seconds away from dialing, her finger was almost there and then with two hands Louie ripped the whole boxy unit right out of the wall. A molar couldn’t have been extracted such precision! Multicolored wires were hanging, exposed. Who would’ve guessed at the colors of a phone’s intestines? And then he grabbed the receiver from her. Slammed it against the edge of the table. The circular mouthpiece flew off and spun up. Whizzed up into the air. We all watched that whirling mouthpiece. Even Louie, with his gun hanging loose in his hand, saw it come down neatly. It made a wet splunk! It was resting in Mommy’s cold coffee. It was that comical splunk that froze everybody. Louie shut his raving mouth and he too was studying the mouthpiece half submerged inside the cup. I ran for the bathroom and soon after I heard Louie slam the front door. He was gone. For awhile.

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Author’s Note

Chapter Two: The First Gray House

Chapter Three: Uncle Rooster

Chapter Four: Blond Mommy