She took a deep breath. “And you didn’t have the right to scream those things at Rabbi Roth last year. I don’t mean the stuff about Adam. I mean the stuff about Harry. And . . . and the stuff about me. In fact, I shouldn’t even have been there. Whether Adam went to Hebrew school had nothing to do with me! It had absolutely nothing to do with me! Why did you make me go? Why did you make me hear those things? Why did you make me see you and Rabbi Roth that way?”
Her mother began, “I thought I apologized—”
Alison cut her off. “It’s actually pretty funny, because if I hadn’t gone with you that day, I might not be going out with Harry now. But I couldn’t believe how you dragged Harry in when you were supposed to be talking about Adam. Just like you dragged me in.” She looked up and met her mother’s eyes. “Just like you always drag me in with Adam. Just like you always have.” She looked down. She discovered she was crying.
“Baby—”
“I’m not a baby! And don’t you touch me! Not now. Not until you hear what I have to say.” She had a rushing in her ears. She couldn’t see very well. She needed a handkerchief.
Somehow there was a box of tissues in front of her. Alison blew her nose. She heard her mother’s voice. “I’m listening,” it said.
Alison pulled out another tissue and wiped her eyes. She crumpled the two damp tissues together in her hand. She managed to look up again at her mother. “Please get Daddy,” she said. “I want to tell him too, and I don’t think I can say this more than once.”
Her mother nodded. Alison saw that her eyes were full of worry. I’m sorry, she thought. I never wanted to make trouble, but I have to. She waited.
Quickly, too quickly, her father was there. “Alison, what—” he started, but his wife stopped him with a hand on his arm.
And suddenly they were gone, all the words that not a minute before had been pounding in Alison’s head for release. She closed her eyes. She wrapped her arms around herself.
“Is this about Harry Roth again?” said the professor, after a minute or two. “Because I don’t care who he is, Alison, you’re too young to have a boyfriend. Your mother agrees with me. And that’s final.”
“Jake—” her mother began.
“No,” Alison said. She cleared her throat. “I want to tell you....” She stopped, swallowed. That there’s something wrong, she thought. It’s about Harry, but it’s not. And it’s not really about Adam either.
Inevitably, her mother asked, “Is it something about Adam?”
Alison whipped around. “No! It’s about me! It’s—it’s...” She stopped, stared at her parents.
They stared back. “Honey,” her mother said, “we’re trying to understand.” And when Alison said nothing, she continued, “Sweetheart, look, you’re fourteen. It’s a difficult time, adolescence. Your emotions just take you over. You’re growing up. It’s natural you’re confused.”
“Hormones,” said the professor, nodding. “Not your fault. Really nothing you can do.”
Alison closed her eyes for a moment. “Just listen to me,” she said. “Please just listen.”
Her father looked surprised. “Well, we are,” he said.
Now or never, Alison thought. Whatever comes out.
She walked to the chair near the sofa, where her parents were sitting, and sat down in it, gingerly, on the edge. She spoke to her hands, twisted together, in her lap. “Well, I am confused, but not the way you think. Not about being fourteen; I know all about that stuff. I know I’m in a stage, but that’s not what this is about. And even if it were, you should still listen to me.”
“Well, of course,” said Alison’s mother. “You shouldn’t doubt—”
“Shhh,” said her father.
Alison flung him a quick, grateful glance before looking down again. “I think,” she said, “that I want to talk to you about me. About who I am. About who I am in this family. About what you expect of me. About what I expect of me.” She bit her lip. “I guess this part maybe is about Adam, too. There’s no way around it; I’m Adam’s sister. His twin sister. And...
“And . . . I’ve never felt just like me, just like Alison. I can’t be myself in this family because it’s more important that I be... this person who’s not Adam. Who’s normal. Smart. Good. Who’s not . . .” She paused, swallowed. “Who’s not autistic.”
“Honey, that’s absolutely—”
“I’m telling you how I feel!” Alison shouted, at one of them, at both of them, she wasn’t sure; she didn’t know who’d spoken, and she didn’t care. “Don’t you see when it comes to this, it doesn’t matter how you feel? What I think is what matters right now! Can’t you see that?”
There was silence. Alison got up abruptly and reached for the tissue box. She busied herself blowing her nose again. After a while, she heard her mother’s voice.
“Alison? Are you saying... do you really mean that you think we love you only because you’re not autistic like Adam?”
“Alison?” said her father.
“I’m not saying you realize it,” said Alison quietly. She was suddenly filled with despair. They would deny it. Of course they would.
“Oh, God,” said Alison’s mother.
Even if He’s there, thought Alison, He’s not going to help. She poked with one finger at a small hole in the knee of her jeans. We’re on our own. There was silence. And, then, in it, she heard a peculiar, snorting, wrenching noise, and looked up.
Her father was crying. Her mother had her arms around him, her body against his, her cheek on his head. But her face was toward Alison, and it was frightened and wrinkled and old.
I am a horrible human being, thought Alison. She tightened up, became as small as possible in the chair. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled to her knees. She thought her parents could not hear her, but her voice would not get louder. “I’m so sorry.” She wished she could be somewhere else. She wished she had not started. Why had she thought it was so important? There were children starving in India. In Boston. There were kids whose parents beat them. Or worse.
Did it matter why you were loved? So long as you were? She listened to her father sob. Why didn’t he stop?
Then he did. “Alison,” he said. And again, “Alison.” It wasn’t his voice at all. And then, when she dared look again, she watched him disentangle himself from his wife and get up and leave the room.
Alison’s mother got up too. She stood uneasily by the sofa for a second and then advanced and put her hand on Alison’s shoulder. “We’ll talk more about this,” she said. “Honey?” Awkwardly, she knelt next to the chair and put her arms around Alison. “We love you, honey. We do.” Her arms tightened. “We just have to find some way to explain... love isn’t simple.”
Alison thought of Harry. “I know that,” she said. Her voice croaked.
“Oh, honey,” said Alison’s mother. Alison could hear that she, too, was near tears. “You only think you do. Love gets worse when you get older. It gets even more complicated.” And then she was gone.
Alison stayed, alone, in the chair. She wondered how she would feel if Harry cried.
Dinner that night was brief. Alison almost didn’t join the rest of them. She had a headache. She wasn’t hungry. But Adam came to her door and stood there and looked at her. “There are french fries,” he said, and waited, and finally Alison went with him to the table.
Her mother was there, but not her father. She went out of her way to give Alison another hug, and Alison felt a little better, but not much. “Your father is in the den,” Alison’s mother said. “He’s trying to write you a letter.”
“Oh,” said Alison. She took a small bite from her casserole. “He doesn’t need to write a letter.” The pounding in her head increased. She watched Adam make a house, stacking the fries as if they were Lincoln Logs. “It’s okay. Can we just forget it?”
Her mother shook her head. “Alison? Do you . . . do you feel like you’re”—she glanced at Adam—“just Alison, just yourself, when you’r
e with other people? Like Paulina? I know you’re not such good friends nowadays. But before? Didn’t you feel Paulina liked you for yourself?”
Alison closed her eyes, and then opened them. “Maybe,” she said slowly. “I’m not sure.” She paused. Slowly, she added, “But I don’t think I felt . . . entirely like myself when I was with her. She was always someone who didn’t mind about Adam. That was always more important.”
“Oh,” said her mother.
There was silence. And into it, desperately, Alison found herself saying, “But with Harry, I’m just me. I don’t know why. But I am.”
“Oh,” said her mother again.
Alison stood up. “I’m not very hungry,” she said. “I think I’ll go back to my room.”
Alison went to bed early, but not to sleep. She lay stiff in bed, holding her stuffed crab, Josephine, replaying everything she had said, everything they had said. She could see the hall light; it was a bar of white under her door. They were still up; occasionally she heard a murmur. Finally, hours later, she heard them outside her door. There was a whisper of paper. And a minute later, the hall light went off and she heard their bedroom door close.
She sat up in bed and turned on her bedside lamp. There was an envelope on the floor near the door. After a moment, she went and got it, and climbed back into bed with it. She held it between her hands for a moment, and then reached into her night table drawer for the flashlight. She turned off the lamp and got way under the covers with the letter, the circle of light from the flashlight, and Josephine.
She opened the envelope and took out the pages. They were written out in longhand. She recognized her father’s writing on the first sheet.
Dear Alison,
We do love you. I love you. Your mother has told me that you understand that love is complex. But it’s simple, too, and what I feel for you began before you were born and long before you were who you are today. Maybe it’s just biology, but fathers love their daughters, and it doesn’t much matter who they are. Your mother doesn’t want me to say this, but I love you because you’re my daughter and that’s all there is to it. That’s rule number one. And Adam is my son, and I love him, and that’s all there is to that, too.
But I also understand that, at least in our family, it isn’t really that simple. You said you felt that you were just the one who wasn’t autistic. Well, I am very, very, very glad you’re not. I can’t apologize for that. I can’t tell you how surprised I was to hear you say that you felt we didn’t love you for you. That was always so easy. The hardest thing for me has been learning to love your brother for who he is. But you—Alison, for me the whole world always lit up every time you smiled at me and called me Daddy. Maybe it was sweeter because your brother didn’t. In fact, I know it was. But I don’t know what to do about that. I’ve been staring at this paper trying to think of what else to say, and coming up empty. I’m afraid I can’t help you. I don’t know how.
I love you enough, and I respect you enough, to be honest with you, Alison. I don’t know what else to do, at least not right now. Maybe later.
Love,
Daddy
The handwriting became her mother’s.
Darling Alison,
I’m not like your father. We’d do better to talk, face-to-face, and I hope we can do that soon. But I wanted to have part of this letter, too. To say what I could to help you now. I wish I could help more.
You know that we were very shocked at what you said this afternoon. I have thought since that maybe I shouldn’t have been.
You’re right, in a way. You and Adam are twins, and from the time that we first noticed Adam was different, we’ve measured his progress against yours. You were cuddly; he wasn’t. You talked; he didn’t. It was so clear that he needed us more than you did. I look back, and I see that we’ve spent far, far less time with you than with your brother. So maybe it was inevitable that you’d come to believe we love you only because you’re normal. It’s the thing you’ve seen us focus on.
But, honey, it’s not true. I just don’t know how to convince you. I’ve thought and thought. I hope I’ll find the right words later, when we talk. I don’t have them now. I’m sorry.
Something else. You mentioned that you don’t like it when I yell and scream about my opinions. I’m sorry that it upsets you. But what I think I would like is if you would yell and scream back. Like today. I’m proud of you, honey. I’m proud that you stood up and told us what you were feeling. I think it’s one of the most important things that happened today. That was you being you, wasn’t it? I don’t remember you ever letting go like that before. You’ve been hiding how you felt from us, but not anymore. So I think you can be you—just you—in our family. It’s already beginning.
About Harry. I do feel uncomfortable about him. It’s hard for me to forget the past. And you’re very young. I’d like us to talk about boys sometime. You probably don’t want to, but I insist. I suppose if Harry helps you feel good about being yourself, then I will try to get used to him. I can’t promise more than that.
Let me know when you’re ready to talk. It doesn’t have to be right away. Whenever you’re ready.
What your father said about love and children. That goes for me too, honey. So much.
Love,
Mom
P.S. I hope this helps.
It did help, Alison thought. It did help some, even though she knew that they still didn’t understand, not fully. And maybe never would.
They had their own worlds, separate from hers, and they understood things differently. But they did love her, their way. It was something. Maybe it was enough.
It would have to be.
And, anyway, tomorrow she would see Harry.
Nancy Werlin, Are You Alone on Purpose?
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