Little Panic

I’ve been tested for ambidexterity, amblyopia, astigmatism, auditory processing disorder, focal dystonia, and essential blepharospasm (eye twitching). I’ve been evaluated in language, learning, speech, and motor skills; tested for visual and hearing disabilities; rated on intelligence, cognition, aptitude, personality, development, and functioning. I’ve undergone Wepman’s Auditory Discrimination Test and Auditory Memory Battery, the Beery-Buktenica Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration, the Beery Tests of Oral Comprehension, the Draw-a-Person Test, the Denckla rapid automatized naming test, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, the Detroit Test of Learning Aptitude, the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities, the Spache Diagnostic Reading Scales tests, the McCarthy Scales of Children’s Abilities test, the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children test, Frostig’s Developmental Test of Visual Perception, the Gray Oral Reading Tests, Raven’s Progressive Matrices test, the Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test, and neuropsychological batteries including the Wide Range Achievement Test, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, and the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales test, four times each.

I’ve pointed to pictures of shapes, cartoons, numbers, and letters, hoping my final answer matched what belonged in the empty grid. I’ve told them what was wrong with that picture, what was silly about it. I’ve drawn pictures and written stories. I’ve recited number sequences backward and forward. I’ve reconstructed cube patterns in the allotted time. After a while, all the patterns began to look the same.

My brain has been divided into fourths, eighths, and twelfths. I’ve been measured and sent to labs, measured and weighed against calculations, measured and assigned diagnostic codes, measured and measured and tested and compared to the standards by which measuring was held. I’ve spelled words I’d never heard, guessed their definitions. I’ve suffixed, prefixed, compounded, conjugated, diagrammed, defined, duplicated, reiterated, guessed, multiplied, divided, added, subtracted, elided, recited, confided, lied, cursed, and cried. I’ve repeated numbers, words, and rhymes. I’ve seen doctors, learning specialists, and tutors; I’ve stood on scales, languished in waiting rooms and on examination tables; I’ve raced against stopwatches; I’ve hung upright in trays affixed to the backs of doctors’ doors. I’ve sat at Formica desks and in play areas, and been surrounded by white coats, pantsuits, pearl necklaces, bifocals, year-old issues of Highlights, Cricket, WOW, and Dynamite; I’ve climbed poles, marked on boards, put together oversized puzzles, threw suction darts, sat at low worktables to draw with colored chalk; I’ve met more new receptionists in more clinics than I can recall.

I’ve filled in the blanks: Mary had a _________ lamb. Boys run; babies __________. I’ve been timed, watched, and notated.

I was confused by the tests. I couldn’t understand why adults believed that state capitals, equations, or analogies could determine why I was always afraid. I waited for someone to tell me the answers to what was inside me, but the focus was on what I didn’t know, and never on what I did. The tests didn’t care about my experience of the world; no one asked me questions they didn’t already have answers to. There was a way I was supposed to be, and I didn’t match. I was off the charts I should have been on, below the percentiles I was expected to reach, and outside the limited check boxes inside which I didn’t easily fit. There were norms, categories and particular systems too narrow to include me. There was a single standard used to evaluate everyone, and that meant there was a single standard type of person, defined by a basic human trait that I did not possess: intelligence. I did not match the person I knew I was supposed to be. I feared I was not the right kind of human.

I knew where to go, what time to be there, and the name of each doctor, but I could not tell you why I took those tests, I could not tell you how I scored, or what they were supposed to teach me, my mother, or my doctors. Until I was twenty-five years old, I could not tell you what was wrong with me.

On MacDougal Street between Bleecker and Houston, a row of multicolored houses, dyed like Easter eggs, backs up to a matching row on Sullivan Street. In the middle is a secret garden, reachable only through the homes. Its cobblestone and grass stretch the length of the entire block. Almost thirty kids live here, including my best friend, Melissa, and we think it’s the greatest place on earth. Bob Dylan used to live here, too, but he’s long gone, and besides, I don’t even know who that is. Still, people ring our doorbell and ask for him all the time. I say, “He moved away. Now good-bye to you, home invader!”

On the street side we have an extra-wide stoop, which we share with our next-door neighbor. At night, the local bums, Ciggy and Sasquatch, turn the stairs into beds. Unlike the steps of normal stoops, ours lead up to the street, not down, sinking our house below the sidewalk. During the day, tourists duck down and peer through our kitchen window; we see their maps and wide, curious faces. Ten seconds later our doorbell rings.

“Is this a restaurant?” They crane their necks to look around me.

“Nope.” I can tell they’re trying to see into our secret garden, but I won’t let them.

“What happens here?”

What happens here is a question that asks what we’re hiding. As though being a family isn’t good enough. I don’t like disappointing people, so I say, “I’m not allowed to tell,” or “You don’t want to know.” This way, they won’t feel I failed them. They might be embarrassed by their question, but that’s fine by me since that’s how I feel most of the time. (Sometimes it’s nice to have a break.) Even when I want to lie and say this is the headquarters of the Members-Only Evel Knievel Fan Club or the Truant Officer School for Juvenile Delinquents, I don’t because then they’d want an explanation I don’t have. People always expect right answers to their wrong questions. All that happens here is us, and we’re not questions and can’t be answered.

“Who is it?” my mom, still in her nightgown, yells from her bedroom upstairs. I can tell from her voice she’s talking on the phone.

“Beats me,” I say, shutting the door on the tourists, shoving my two sucking-fingers into my mouth and hurrying back to her.

The secret garden is where I’m not erased. Some people think I’m funny; the adults call me a character. Outside of Melissa, my favorite garden friends are Marcel and Margaux, and although adults are always smacking my hands out of my mouth whenever I bite my fingernails, I like everyone. Some people fight, but mainly we tromp in and out of one another’s houses, sharing toys, food, and moms. When I’m not cursing, or teaching other people how to curse, I speak with a fake Russian accent or pretend I’m an old-timey spy. Once I cut Marcel’s hair with pinking shears.

We climb trees, read books on the branches, and rope-swing our way down. We tap-dance on the sandbox cover, circle the entire garden on the low balance beam of bricks without touching the ground, play freeze tag, and have chestnut and bottle-rocket wars. We build igloos, and we ice-skate when snow freezes over in wintertime. In the fall, I peel apart the helicopter wings and stick them on the end of my nose. We set up ramps and ride our Big Wheels like they’re scooters and jump daredevil-style from one to the other. On the jungle gym swing, we lay the seesaw across the canvas seat and stand a kid on each end while someone turns us round and round until the ropes are twirled, as tight as they can go. When you unspin, the colored houses, the trees and the fences, the sandbox and the cobblestone all swirl together, mixing up a fast new world in a brand-new color. You can feel the air of that new world whoosh your face, and the tight sensations in your belly are from excitement nerves, not worry ones. I am always happy when my body remembers to feel things other than scared.

There are garden rules and garden meetings and garden gossip and garden life. We’re like a small town with traditions and holiday celebrations. On Halloween we have a haunted house and our own parade with prizes; on Easter we hunt for eggs in the bushes; on Digging Day we plant grass and repaint the green benches and black gates. In winter we have weekly Christmas-caroling rehearsals in different living rooms. My mom throws her own Christmas party every year, even though we’re Jewish.

On the garden side, houses are sun-bleached and worn, the color of faded vegetables. Ivy covers only a couple of house faces, and a lucky few have their own balcony. I take pictures of everything to keep life permanent.

Everyone shares the big garden, but the little garden is your own. Ours has a sour cherry tree. There’s a cobblestone area for tables and chairs, and a small rectangle of grass where you can plant flowers if you like that sort of thing. Sometimes I set out a blanket in our little garden and bring snacks and a book and pretend the blanket is a raft and the grass is the ocean. I crank the crooked pole round and round and watch the awning open, imagining it’s a sail. The dark green cover makes me feel safe. I shut my eyes and feel the raft bob over gentle waves and smell the salt water. In the middle of the ocean, I’m protected from the whole scary world. When I open my eyes, my house is still there. It never leaves me.

When it rains the maple leaves grow heavy and brush against the house like a bedtime back rub, taking care of us. It is a home sound, one that happens only here. In the mornings, we hear birds before humans. Light catches and holds in wide stripes on the wood-planked floors. Kara, Eddie, and I lie sleepily on a couch near the garden doors, listening to the country sounds in the middle of the city, letting the spill of the sun warm our faces. When I was a baby, we lived uptown with our dad and mom. Kara and Eddie remember that, but I don’t. I only remember living here. I want to only ever live here, in my same house, always.

The garden has legends, like Dead Man Smith, who lives under the Lesters’ house and comes out only at night. But even with Dead Man Smith, it’s not dangerous here. If time worked the way it does in the garden, I wouldn’t have any problems telling it. When the high-pitched clamoring of small lungs first shrieks a hole in the weekday quiet, it’s 3 p.m. The quick flick of the bell from Minnie Lester’s wrist chiming Arthur and John to dinner is 6 p.m. When you wake up to voices and running, it’s either the weekend or the summer. When I’m in the garden, I can always feel my mother. If I need her, I know where to find her. The brownstones protect us. Like uptown doormen, they guard us from murderers and intruders, keeping us safe inside our secret world. We’re reminded of the outside only when the subway rolls its vibration under us.