Yo ho indeed. For a year zero has been Elly’s favourite number. [32] She uses it interchangeably with ‘no’ in common speech (‘zero car in garage’), and she has even developed a purely verbal system in which ‘nobody’ and ‘somebody’ (an especially difficult concept for her because indefinite and inexact) become ‘zero-body’ and ‘one-body’, occasionally joined by ‘two-body’ and ‘three-body’, depending on the number of people in question. (Alternatively, the opposite of ‘nobody’ may be ‘yes-body’. ) Elly, in fact, focuses on hard-to-get ideas through systems as she once focused on them through colour. The shifts in such relative notions as dark and light are hard for her, and she has been slow to acquire comparatives and superlatives, but one of her favourite games now is to darken a room, and as she shuts its door the diminishing light from the hall illustrates ‘dark, darker, darkest!’
She is delighted when words exhibit ordering principles. The actual principles behind English word order, being so deeply situational in nature, she grasps (as I have noted in the preceding chapter) less well than a normal three-year-old, but it is quite otherwise with a principle that is not rooted in situations and usage, but arbitrary and devoid of content. We watched, incredulous, as Elly, just turned eight, extrapolated from what she had at long last learned: that the plural of ‘man’ is ‘men’. I had been able to convey it by a picture: the two words first, and below them, one man and several. The next day, Elly, totally absorbed, produced five pictures of her own. One was a reproduction of my man-men original. Next came MAMA-MEME, illustrated, of course, by one mama and several, followed by DADDY-DEDDY, SARA-SERE, and MATT-METT, each illustrated with a single figure and a group. (The single member of the family whose name did not contain the letter A was of course not pluralized. ) The utter divorce from common usage (Elly still does not form conventional plurals, though she knows how to, since S is for her the most difficult of the final consonants), the total disregard of human and situational plausibility are obvious; so too is the spontaneous abstraction and application of an ordering principle. One is no more extraordinary than the other.
Again and again we had felt it; something more than a simple lack of interest in things human — a positive commitment to, a genuine pleasure in that which is abstract, arbitrary, devoid of content. The passive two-year-old Elly saw the parquet formboard out of the corner of her eye and actually madethe effort to go upstairs so she could play with it. Elly four years later could go into an ecstasy that tensed every muscle in her body as she communicated the simple observation that some sleeves are short while others are long. Today she says to me, ‘Do rithmetic?’ and as I sit on her bed and transcribe the sums and answers she dictates, the springs shake as she jigs and bounces, smiles, chuckles, squeals, laughs aloud in the intensity of her pleasure. If an experience is empty of content, of a sort that the average child would find particularly uninteresting, Elly is almost sure to enjoy it. She has just discovered our zip code number — 01267. Of course she loves it.
Of all things in the varied world — cars and houses, animals, flowers, and people — why should Elly be interested in the conventions of notation? At five and a half, as I sat and drew for her, she asked for ‘pea’. Pea? I thought. Peach?Pear? We often drew the forms from her fruit-and-vegetable curtain, and she was so indistinct I could never be sure. I tried out all three. They weren’t right. Elly’s frustration mounted to the point where she made a supreme effort to communicate. ‘Lelluh?’ Lettuce? I wondered, and drew one without calming her in the least. And then I caught on: ‘Letter!’ She laughed, bounced, that was it, she wanted the letter P. From then on I felt less need to defend myself against possible charges that I was pushing my child into activities that would satisfy my own intellectual pride. If I wanted to be proud of a child who — like the rest of her family — liked letters, I had one. Elly had had a set of plastic letters for years — twenty-six capitals and ten numerals. It was with that that, at five, she had spelled her name. When she was seven, in kindergarten and already able to recognize many words, I got her a rather elaborate set of wooden letters — a real compositor’s chest, full of e’s and a’s, enough to spell words in plenty. You could choose between capital letters and small, and I had bought the small, since she had the others. As Elly played with the letters I heard her say some curious syllables. ‘Uh-puh-cay?Uh-puh-cay?’‘Apple-cake?’ I said uncertainly. Though Elly had no special interest in apple-cake, it seemed a possibility; it was the sort of thing a child might say. Perhaps she had apple-cake at school. It was strange, at any rate, how she kept repeating these sounds. ‘Uh-puh-cay?’ Some urgency came into the voice. I looked again at the letters and suddenly I knew. ‘Uppercase?’ No uncertainty now: ‘Up-uh-cay!’ I got the old set of capitals and began to make words, but Elly was not interested in them. Instead she occupied herself happily in producing the set of twenty-six upper- and lower-case pairs.
Now I was primed for them, the syllables for ‘low-uh-cay’ became recognizable. Where could she have got them? I did not use them. I was sure they did not use them at school. Then I remembered. We had taken her to try the ‘talking typewriter’ at the hospital in Cooperstown, where Dr Mary Goodwin was using it with children with autistic symptoms and getting some strange and interesting results. Elly had enjoyed her half hour with it, and although she had produced nothing strange or interesting in this single visit, Dr Goodwin’s understanding and encouragement had been well worth the trip. We did not repeat it; the five and a half hours in the car was too long, we thought, for Elly and for us. But I remembered the typewriter now. Developed by Dr O. K. Moore for the rapid teaching of reading to prekindergarten children, it combined sound with visual stimuli — when a child pressed a letter or a symbol, a recorded voice identified it. Elly had spent a half hour with the typewriter, six months before. She must have learned ‘upper-case’ then. Without any reinforcement, she had preserved it over the months between. Intrinsically without significance, it was significant to her.
The more meaningless a convention, the more purely formal, the better Elly liked it. She liked punctuation. She liked her letter set, but she liked it far less when I used it to spell the words she knew from cards. She never used it this way herself; she preferred to make arbitrary arrangements, or to mix the letters up together and sift them through her fingers. She was fascinated by a book of different type fonts; predictably, she learned the word ‘serif’ at once, and had I wished I would have had no difficulty teaching her ‘black letter’ and ‘Gothic’. Spontaneously, long before handwriting was introduced in school,she tried to turn her capitals into cursive by supplying florid connections, saying ‘handwriting’ as she worked. She noted that the top of the printed numeral four is closed, whereas most people write it open; from then on she insisted on a ‘different four?’ She took to Roman numerals at once; recently she spent a happy hour typing out the numbers from I to L. Her sisters, having learned the deaf-and-dumb alphabet from their high- school production of The Miracle Worker, taught it to Elly without difficulty. When Sara learned the Greek letters I asked her particularly not to teach them to Elly; I was afraid she’d learn them.
It was difficult enough to put meaning into the symbols Elly knew already. The phenomenon I noted in the preceding chapter is again relevant here: she could learn the look of a new word overnight; the job was not to retain the word itself, but its meaning. None of her words began as rote acquisitions — with pictures and action, I saw to that. But as soon as I abandoned orderly word-card drill (cards set out in rows on a drawing board, print-side up, reversed to show the pictures as she identified each one, correct identification of them all rewarded by a new word-card) and tried to make of words an avenue to meaning, Elly resisted. I would point them out in familiar picture books or assemble them in statements meaningful in her experience, and she’d look away, or shut her eyes, or slow her activity to a crawl. Correctly identifying sixty word- cards according to a settled routine — that was a pleasure. Reading for meaning was not — so definitely that she no longer likes to look at books with me, lest I should ask her to recognize a word.
32
I can imagine one famous theoretician-therapist explaining to me how an autistic child takes hold of a symbolic representation to express its inner emptiness and despair, saying as clearly as it can that the only way it has found to defend itself against its destructive environment has been to make itself a cipher. I supply this interpretation to show that I can do it as well as another. But it was an analyst who warned me against constructs.