“You nod like you know what I’m talking about,” our workshop teacher, the famous novelist, says. My hand stops writing.
Was I nodding? Must have been. My body cannot absorb her spoken words and the deer outside the window, phone screens popping on, lightbulbs buzzing, classmate hands flicking tea bags that steam mint and chamomile and bergamot. Too much, this room, so inviting and difficult to inhabit. I wish I could direct my sensory perception, send it to the brackish bay downslope, to oyster farm lines, not soap smell from everyone’s washed hands. Point it to the call of Tule elk across the water, not the peppermints in someone’s real leather bag. Autumn. Rutting season.
The famous novelist’s words passed into shorthand my grandmother taught me, on rainy days so long ago I have long written like a court reporter, verbatim dictation recorded for a later place and time where I can read, begin to learn, most of my senses quiet. I look at my automatic, abbreviated cursive. Hdln, headline, is the last word. It sits on its own line, undefined.
“Why don’t you tell us what you think it means.” She has interpreted my nodding as knowing, a reasonable teacher assumption, but it’s related to stimming, what people often think of when they think of autism: a softly banging head on a wall, a child erratically clapping its hands.
A clean start with new people slips away. I have two choices, each with learned consequences. I can out myself, try to explain this form of Autism Spectrum Disorder, formerly known as Asperger’s, but it sounds like an excuse. Worse, it directs attention to me, compounds the distraction I have already caused. I have considered wearing an “invisible disability” pin, they have those now, but they, too, distract. They invite the reader into the story: What’s the invisible disability?
The second choice is to maintain the frame, to reinforce the teacher. It is easier for all of us if I am a nodding know-it-all. Hdln. Headline. “Aboutness?” I wager.
“No,” she says.
It is over. My hand resumes writing. Headline: the most pressing issue for you, distilled down to a topic heading like arc, point of view, the ending. Tomorrow, we are to say the headline first when we give feedback on someone else’s piece.
I stand at the parking lot edge, waiting for my husband, buoys singing below with incoming tide. The workshop group follows the famous novelist up the hill to dinner. I stay off site, safe from cocktail receptions and roommate chit chat mistakes. If my body must betray me, then the necessary workshop will be its only opportunity.
“How was it?” my husband, Ian, asks. He witnessed my weeping over the famous novel that brought me here, assumed it was a long, difficult read because I read it twice in a row. I explain. He rests his hand on my knee while our dog, Dude — 90 pounds of failed livestock guardian, the runt — rests his big old wolf head on Ian’s shoulder. Dude protects us, often intensely, but misplaces his instincts into poorly timed barks, panics at trivial things. “You don’t have to come back,” Ian reminds me. Sometimes I forget I have the power I lacked as a child, the ability to physically remove myself.
Once, I abandoned a shopping cart in the aisle of a fluorescent-lit grocery store slinging pop music, broadcast announcements, and chemical detergent scents. Motion-activated ads spoke, excessively bright, at my passing. I closed my eyes and walked out, whispering, I am sorry about the cart, but a sensory meltdown threatens.
These pandemic days, my husband goes to the grocery store, the designated, masked shopper for our household, showering afterward. Since lockdown, there is deep, wide silence, no city vibration. The dog sleeps through the night. The East Bay hills shine in smog-free, sunset relief.
Tonight, Santee Frazier reads poetry on Zoom. With Speaker View selected, I see only him. Microphone muted, I am my screen name, two white words on a black background. I knit, a repetitive visual spatial task, experts call it, socially acceptable stimming no one can see anyway. Santee speaks the epigraph to his new book, Aurum, from Eduardo Galeano: The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied. I smile and catch myself nodding yes, no body.
Stephany Wilkes is a sheep shearer, writer, and the author of Raw Material: Working Wool in the West. She lives in San Francisco with her beloved husband, Ian, and not-so-failed livestock guardian dog, Dude. Her writing appears regularly in the Ag Mag and recently in Mother Earth News, Next Avenue, The North American Review, and more.
STORY IMAGE CREDIT: Flickr Creative Commons/glasseyes view
