The White Bicycle Page 8
"Walnut was the first of my series of gerbils!" I say, trying to hold onto the words before everything goes white. "After Walnut came June, and after June came Charlotte, and after Charlotte came Hammy. And last fall, before I turned nineteen, I got my fifth gerbil, Harold Pinter. Now Harold Pinter is sharing the nest with Samuel Beckett and I hope neither of them is dead! "
As soon as I say this, I begin to worry that Harold Pinter is eating Samuel Beckett and I want to telephone Shauna, but my mother says it's too early in the morning there for me to call.
"The reason I should call is that if there is not enough fresh water or food in the tank, parent gerbils will consume their babies. Similarly, if there is not enough substance for nest building, or if the mother is stressed, or if Shauna or her husband touches Samuel Beckett and leaves their scent on him so that he is not recognized by Harold Pinter, it could be dangerous. Gerbillus perpallidus, the pallid gerbil, is part of the kingdom Animalia, the phylum Chordata, the class Mammalia, the order Rodentia, the superfamily Muroidea, the family Muridae, the subfamily Gerbillinae, and the genus Gerbillus. Due to their threat to native ecosystems, it is illegal to have gerbils as pets in California— and so we must never move there."
"Taylor, stop the gerbil talk!" says my mother. But I can't stop.
"And without adequate food and water, there can be serious health concerns in addition to cannibalism, including the eating of bedding material, stomach ulcers, dehydration, and starvation. It is conceivable that, if not cared for properly, Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett could starve to death. What if their new environment causes epilepsy and they commence to have seizures?"
My mother starts to speak but I can't hear her. The silence pounds in my ears and it erases everything but my own hands, which I watch as they grip each other and don't let go.
When the world comes back into focus, I stumble up to my room and pick up Jean-Paul Sartre's little gray book. I reread my favorite passage, about how each person is in charge of their world and responsible for their situation. I think that is wrong. I am responsible for nothing. I am waiting for no one and responsible for nothing. These words circle around and around in my brain until all I hear is vowels.
When I start hearing consonants again I think about running all the way to Cassis but that wouldn't be a good idea. I have run away before, when we spent last summer at Waskesiu Lake, and all that happened is that I was late for my job the next morning. Running away was a bad choice then and it would be a bad choice now. Instead of running, I grab a cloth and start to scrub the desk in my room, and then I go on to scrub the walls. Obsessive cleaning is something I am trying to stop myself doing, so as soon as I can, I open my laptop and start to type. This makes use of my hands, but not all of my brain. Sassafras. Iced tea. Chocolate pain. ACEGIJL. Pi =3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511
Controling My Anger
Last winter, the psychiatrist and I talked a lot about anger. We also talked a lot about my family and the things that made me anxious and mad. It's easy to replay our conversations, and I sometimes do that whether I want to or not. I wonder if everyone can see their lives like films replaying in their minds.
"We have been talking about your parents splitting up," the psychiatrist is saying to me. "Was it hard for you to adjust once your father left?"
"Yes," I say. "My father was the third person in our family, and without him, there were only two. It was hard to get used to that. Two is the smallest kind of family and I wanted back into the bigger one."
"I get the picture," says the doctor. Her name is Dr. Salmon but I do not like calling her that. She once told me I could call her Dr. S., but I do not like calling her that either.
I look around her office and I do not know what picture she is talking about. Her walls are beige and bare except for a petit-point wall-hanging of a horse and its colt, and a framed picture of words with a blue-and-red crest at the top. I'm still not sure what she means about the picture but I don't remark on it. My mother has warned me that doctors aren't supposed to be interrogated, and I am trying not to interrogate this one. I also try not to look at her bookshelves. They are yellow.
"What bothered you the most about your father being gone?" she asks.
"The medicine cabinet," I say.
"The medicine cabinet?"
"You are just like the queen," I tell her.
"The queen?"
"The queen knows the way to keep a conversation going by repeating a few words of what the other person says. The queen knows how to do it. When she repeats a few words, the person knows that she is listening and keeps talking. Shauna taught me that."
"Shauna taught you that?"
"You are doing it again. Repeating the words. Shauna was the teacher associate who worked with me in school. She taught me a lot of things, like how to do a conversation and how to use the five w's in order to ask questions. She is married now and living in Edmonton but she and her husband are moving back to Saskatoon at the end of May. She has invited me to visit her when they get here."
"Taylor, what did you mean when you said the medicine cabinet was the thing that bothered you most about your dad's leaving?"
"His shelf was empty," I say. "And when one thing changes, everything changes. When I would get up in the morning and go into the bathroom to brush my teeth, I'd see that shelf and then I couldn't eat breakfast. Because I couldn't eat, my mother would send extra snacks to school with me, and the other kids would steal them. This made me so mad that I could not sit at my desk because it was near their desks, where they had hidden the food that they took from me, but it was not appropriate for me to look inside their desks, even if my food was in there."
I remember that time at school as if it were yesterday. It was not a happy time. Instead of sitting in my desk I would go and sit in an empty box that the teacher had left in the back of the classroom. It was because of my preference for sitting in the box and the yelling I often made in there that my teacher asked the school psychologist to come and see me. He referred me to a family psychologist, who prescribed medication. The medication made me feel outside of my own self in a bad way. I've heard that a lot of medications prescribed for children have never been tested on children. You can't be sure something is safe if it's never been tested. I felt somehow disengaged from my body.
I spent the rest of that year, and the next two years, unhappy and not wanting to go to school. For part of a school year I spent time in a class for kids with intellectual disabilities, where all the work was easy. Someone gave me play-dough to keep inside my desk, and to squeeze whenever I felt like it. I remember eating it, which might have been an effect of the drugs.
When I was in grade five, I had an appointment with a specialist who diagnosed me with autism, but my mother didn't tell me this until I was in grade six and back in a regular class. I think the school knew about my diagnosis because they let a woman called Janet help me with my work. That was a relief, except we spent a lot of time outside the classroom in a little room and I don't think I learned very much. I did a lot of coloring.
When I started grade six, I was introduced to Shauna—a new teacher associate assigned to help me translate emotions, which the specialist said my brain had difficulty handling. That's when my mother told me that my brain was different from most people's brains, and it was because of something called Asperger's Syndrome. Later, she asked me if I had told any of my classmates I had that. "No," I said. I mean, who would tell people about their ass burgers?
Shauna, the teacher associate, had me look at picture cards of people's faces, and we talked about the way the people were feeling. I learned to put a name to these emotions, and then, la
ter, to my own. Once the emotions were labeled, I learned strategies to deal with them. When I was angry, I could take a break or ask for help. The school stopped sending me home because Shauna told them that this just taught me to melt down when I wanted to go home. I still had meltdowns from time to time but now there was a safe place I could go to relax, a little room off the supply room. Shauna said the meltdowns were caused by my emotions short-circuiting, and she told me to go to the little room before I melted down, as a preventative action. I wish there were little rooms like that everywhere. Now that I am nineteen I have other strategies when I get angry. It's just hard sometimes to use them.
In class, I still found it challenging to figure out what the teacher was saying if she was giving directions, but Shauna would sit with me and review what I was to do, and provide an example which I could follow. I started getting good marks on my report cards. And I stopped taking those drugs. Instead of taking the drugs, an occupational therapist told me to take walks around the school if I got agitated, which was about four or five times a day. At recess I ran around the track, and I ran again in gym class because I have an impossible time coordinating my body for sports so it was too hard for me to join in with basketball or volleyball.
To help me stay focused while I was sitting at my desk, I could chew gum whenever I wanted and I could drink water from a bottle with a straw to calm myself. Shauna told me that when I was in trouble, I just needed to think of a strategy. "Stop and think," she'd say. "What do you want to do to help yourself?"
I told all this to the psychiatrist last winter and she kept asking questions. She wanted to know if running made me feel calm. I told her that running does not make me feel calm if I am being chased by something, like a big dog. Or if I am in a contest chasing something, like a calf with a bow on its tail that I am supposed to pull off if I want to win a prize. It does make me feel calm if I am running for no reason, and afterward, when I sit down, I just listen to my breath and have no thoughts in my head.
The doctor taught me a couple of other calming strategies, such as deep pressure to the earlobes and a visualizing technique, where I learned to acknowledge my anger and then send it from my core down to the soles of my feet, where it's easier to manage. And she advised me to keep running on a regular basis, to take some of the stress out of my daily life.
"Could running take the stress out without taking anything else out?" I asked the doctor.
"Maybe you could try it and see," she said. And her mouth curved up. I think she was smiling.
Running might be a good strategy to deal with stress, but I don't think that running can help me now. Especially not running away.
Thinking of My Father
It is another rainy afternoon and I have been thinking of my father. Would my father let me go to Cassis if he were here? Probably he would drive me there himself because he doesn't think my mother is a very good driver. She only got her licence after he left home, and even she herself says that she is not a good driver.
If my mother marries Alan Phoenix, which I hope she does not do this summer, he will be called my stepfather, but Alan Phoenix does not have anything to do with steps, although there are steps up to his front door. I know there must be another reason why someone your mother marries is called a stepfather, but I do not know what that reason is. It would be strange to have both a father and a stepfather. Strange and useless. Nobody needs two fathers. Except if one will drive you someplace when the other cannot, because he lives in Cody, Wyoming, and you live in France. When I hear Alan Phoenix come home I have a question I want to ask him about the driving.
My father looks like the singer Cat Stevens, with thick dark curly hair. Alan Phoenix has thin blond hair and does not look anything like Cat Stevens. I have visited my father twice since he moved to Cody, Wyoming. My mother talked about him moving to "the States," but it was really just one state and that is Wyoming. When he moved to Cody, Wyoming, he wrote me letters, but I did not like opening them and I did not want to write him back. He sometimes phoned to talk to me but I lost my voice whenever I tried to talk to him. It was uncomfortable talking to him when I couldn't see him.
Mom said we could go down to Wyoming for a visit, if I wanted to go, and that the ride would take twelve hours. She said she would stay in a hotel and I could stay at Dad's. She hoped Dad and I would work things out, whatever that meant.
It was a hard thing to decide. I had already filled up his shelf in the bathroom. I had eventually gotten used to the routine of everyday life without him. And I didn't want anything more to change. Then, for an early present for my twelfth birthday, Dad sent me a ticket to the Saturday, October 12, 1995 rodeo, and I knew suddenly that I wanted to go.
We arrived at midnight on Friday, October 11. We went to the door of Dad's new apartment. I was chewing gum like crazy, and I felt as if I was going to throw up. The door opened and there was Dad. He took a step forward and I took a step back. The walls were green. He lifted his hands. If I concentrate I can see the rest of it replaying in my memory.
"Don't hug me," I say. He lets his hands fall.
"It's good to see you," he says.
"Okay," I say. "Do you have an alarm clock?"
Mom puts my suitcase inside the door and then leaves. I follow Dad into the kitchen but I don't want to sit down. The chairs are yellow and I hate yellow. Suddenly I feel like sneezing.
"You look good, Taylor," he says.
"Thank you," I say. Shauna has taught me to say that when someone gives me a compliment.
"I don't have an alarm clock, just this clock on the wall," Dad says. "Will that be a problem?"
"No," I say. "I can manage with that." But this is a lie. I really wish there was an alarm clock here.
He looks at me for a minute, and I look at a chair. Then I sneeze.
"Do you want a drink of anything?" he asks.
"No. I should unpack," I say.
Dad shows me to my room and I go inside and close the door. It is weird, visiting Dad. After a while he calls through the door, "Come out when you like. I'm in the living room." I sit on the edge of the bed. Finally Dad says, "If anything's wrong, we can call your mother. She'll know what to do." I don't answer. In a while, I hear him on the phone. "She won't come out of her room or talk. I think you'd better come get her."
Mom comes in fifteen minutes and opens the door. She has her flowered bag over her shoulder. I am glad to see it.
"Time to come out," she says. I follow her to the living room.
"Transitions are hard," she says to Dad.
"I am very good in math," I say. "I have passed all the work in my grade. I know the way to add, subtract, multiply, and divide fractions, and I can change fractions into decimals. One third, for example, is .33 repeating. A repeating decimal means that it goes on forever. That's why we use fractions for measurement in baking, and not decimals, because it would be impossible to measure something for a recipe if there was a rule for that ingredient to go on forever. One of my favorite numbers represents pi. Would you like me to tell it to you?"
"Not right now," says Dad. He isn't smiling, so I can tell he isn't very happy. I can't think of anything that would make him happy.
"I don't want to sleep here," I say. "Is there an alarm clock in the motel, Mom?" She says there is and I ask if I can sleep there instead. She says I can and Dad asks if I still want to go to the rodeo tomorrow.
"That's what I came for," I say. He checks the time and says we'd all better get some sleep and then he asks what I would like to eat when Mom and I come back in the morning.
"Pancakes," I say.
"Still the same favorite foods," Dad says.
I had never been to a rodeo before. We got there early and climbed onto the grandstand before all the best seats were taken. The best seats are at the very top because then nobody's behind you. I sucked on the straw of my water bottle and tried to get used to the animal smells. Mom had prepared me by telling me all sorts of things about what the rodeo woul
d be like. I knew there were going to be cowboys riding bucking broncos. I knew there was going to be cattle roping. I knew that there might even be a greased pig contest, where people try to catch a slippery pig. She was right—there were all these things.
When I went to visit my dad for the second time, last fall, I went to another rodeo. This makes two times that I have been to a rodeo with my father. I missed Canadian Thanksgiving during last fall's trip, and that was unsettling, but I met my father's girlfriend, Sadie, and that was good. If he marries her, then I will have a stepmother as well as a mother. I really think that one kind of mother is enough. I can see the benefits of having two fathers, if the second one can drive me places, but I cannot think of anything good about having two mothers.
At the second rodeo I went to with my father, the last event was bull riding. I watched as one of the bulls was forced into the pen below us. He was afraid, and I could see the whites of his eyes as he turned and tossed his head. Somebody had what looked like a straightened coat hanger, and was poking the bull in the sides through the wooden slats of the fence. I didn't like this and was just about to yell, "Stop!" when the gate opened and the bull came thrashing out, with a man in the saddle.
The bull was wild, bucking and twisting, with that rider on top. The man didn't last long, and was thrown off before the buzzer sounded. I was glad. The bull kept going and his sides were slick with sweat. Two horses and riders, and a dog, tried to corner him and get a rope on, but he crashed past them and streaked around the ring. His coat was gleaming, and I saw his belly heave in and out with each breath. It was terrible.
The bull finally ran out of the ring and into an adjoining pen, where the gate was shut behind him. Now that was a real freaker, I thought. My dad was smiling, and I was glad that seeing the bull had made my dad happy. I thought that people should not be allowed to beat up animals. The first time and the second time I saw this rodeo, I had such different feelings. This is something that makes me confused, because when I think back to my thoughts on rodeos, I can identify opposite reactions.