The Sharp End of Life. Dierdre Wolownick
mine. But not for mom. Down the hall again. I threw some clothes on me, too. My hair could wait.
I couldn’t see Charlie anywhere. He wasn’t in any of the many places that I needed to be to get both kids out the door on time.
“Charlie?”
No answer.
“No, you can’t wear those heavy pants today,” I told Alex when he appeared in his favorite corduroy pants. It was already over ninety degrees, common for September in Sacramento. Off to find another pair.
“Charlie, can you hear me? Are you picking up the kids, or am I?”
Finally, it was time to take them to their respective schools.
I searched the house quickly, one last time.
His car was gone. He had already left for the day. Without a word to anyone.
Each time this happened, a tiny chip of my self was scraped away, like exfoliating granite. Confusion became my permanent state of mind. Why won’t he answer me?! I’d scream inside my head. If only I knew why . . .
Each time this happened, the hardest part was forcing myself to still be mom. To see that he had left without a word, again, and then turn around and be someone else—someone whose heart had not just been ripped out and trampled on. Who didn’t want to scream in frustration and anger. Who loved the two kids waiting for me to take them to school, but who needed the love of someone else even more.
Silence.
I canceled all my appointments and interviews and drove to pick them up at school at the end of the day. When I got there, his car was parked in front of the schoolyard. He was reading.
THE FIRST TIME I considered that Charlie might be suffering from something diagnosable was when my friend Laurie came to our house with her little boy, who was around Alex’s age. I began to notice his odd behavior. He played by himself, not with the other kids. He wouldn’t look directly at anyone, and hardly talked at all.
No matter how many times I tried to engage him, he never replied to me. He spoke to no one but his mother, usually only when he wanted something. It was as if we were all cardboard cutouts in the background of his world. My friend told me how bright and intelligent he was, and about autism and Asperger’s.
Could it be that? A simple illness? Not so simple, though.
In those days, doing research meant a trip to the library with both children in tow. But when we went there, one of our favorite places, I spent my time in the children’s section, reading with them or just keeping an eye on Alex.
I probably could have slipped away and asked the research desk librarian for information. But something always stopped me from going through with it. The possibility that my husband might suffer from something diagnosable, something pathological with a real name, something that was ruining our lives, filled me with even more dread than his sullen silences. I wasn’t ready to accept that.
As long as I didn’t know, there was hope. I had never heard of autism, or any of the other similar disorders, until I’d met my friend’s son. I was sure that Charlie’s parents hadn’t heard of it when he was a child. Even if it was autism, from the little I’d learned from Laurie, there was no cure.
It didn’t matter whether his behavior had a name, really. I still had to live with it.
And both children looked up to their dad, for which I was grateful. Kids should. To them, Charlie was a fun guy, always ready to leave on a trip or adventure. He never insisted on any rules or responsibilities, never made them clean up or do their homework. He was always ready to go play.
But each time I saw my friend’s son—who was on medication, who couldn’t function in mainstream classes, who still would never reply to any of my questions—he reminded me more and more of Charlie.
I tried not to think about what it would mean to live like this the rest of my life.
eleven
EVERY TUESDAY AND THURSDAY afternoon, completely spent after teaching a full day of classes at the college, I threw material for the next day’s classes into several briefcases, cleaned up my office after another day of whizzing in and out, and dashed into the restroom to change into my climbing clothes.
I didn’t dare give myself time to think. Too dangerous. That would have allowed me to think about how tired I was. Two solid class hours in the morning, an office hour, and four nonstop class hours in the afternoon is enough to max out any teacher’s exhaustion level.
Once I’d changed my clothes, I’d rush back to my office so no one would see me in my climbing pants or T-shirt. The more formal attitudes in Japan and New York City, where I’d taught in Brooklyn and the Bronx, had made me wary of letting my students see my nonprofessional side. When I’d started teaching, in the ’70s, women teachers at our high school weren’t even allowed to wear pants to work. Things were different now, and I knew those old rules didn’t apply in California. But habits tend to linger, even after forty years.
After I was out of the office, I’d put my brain on autopilot as I drove a half hour across Sacramento to the climbing gym in the heart of downtown. Walking into the gym was like flipping a switch. Once I met my partner, or partners, we often started by catching up about our work day. But that would quickly fade into chatter about our project—the route we were working on climbing, clean, without falling. Or our climbing shoes. Or our gear. Ropes. Whether our cracked fingers had healed. Our elbow issue. Nothing existed inside the climbing gym but climbing.
“Did you see the new 10b they put up? It’s really fun!”
“Yeah. I sent it last time. Too easy for a 10b. Can you give me a catch on my proj?”
“You didn’t send your project yet?”
“Came off right before the last clip Tuesday. It’s really thin. You have to drop your knee and reach high behind you for this little sloper. Put all your weight on it. I flew right off.”
“Bummer.”
Teaching was another world. No matter how demanding or exhausting the day had been, no matter what condition I was in, mentally or physically, when I got to the gym, it was instantly gone. There was simply no room for both; climbing demanded all my concentration. Each time I got on the wall, I stepped up into my zone, where all of life was completely focused, distilled down to the next hold.
At the beginning, I was reminded of Alex as a toddler. Each time he flew off the little Sit ’n Spin, landing on the floor or against a piece of furniture, he’d bounce back up with a big grin. He knew he’d succeeded at another bit of training. He knew his balance was getting better with each fall, that his tenacity was improving, as well as his capabilities in general. When I started climbing, Alex told me that if I wasn’t falling, I wasn’t trying hard enough.
I’d been going to the climbing gym for a few months and occasionally climbing outdoors, when my climber buddies decided to teach me to rappel.
If you climb outdoors, at some point you’re going to have to rappel. Sometimes you can walk off the back of a mountain or wall, but often you have to lower yourself back down the way you went up. Mark had already showed me, at the gym, everything I’d need to know: how to thread the rope through my belay device to rappel, attach the backup, and tie a Prusik knot. Easy—while standing on the ground.
So back we went to Cosumnes River Gorge one weekend. Mark was going to show two of us newbies how to rappel on real rock. We’d been here many times over the last few months, and each time I had a little more success as a climber, eventually finishing that sloping wall that had stymied me the very first day. Since then, I’d followed my gang up several of the short, but more vertical, walls that rose up from the river canyon. I’d heard them talk about rappelling off this or that piece of rock, but I’d never tried it. This would