Supernormal. Мэг Джей
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takes what we are seeing and hearing and feeling and puts it into words; then it signals the motor cortex to produce those words. Research on the brain shows that, for some people, when there is greater activity in the amygdala there is less activity in Broca’s area. In the face of terror, as the amygdala fires up, Broca’s area quiets down and so does the individual. This is likely the neurological basis for being scared speechless, and there is clearly adaptive value in not drawing attention to yourself—say, by shrieking and letting a nearby lion know you are hiding terrified in the bushes. This is probably why one boy who was on the school bus that day in Chowchilla reported later that he had simply been “too scared to cry.”
When the brain is overwhelmed with fright, the words do not come and cannot come, and this is especially true for experiences that are unusual or without familiar labels. From both Emily’s story and the children of Chowchilla, it seems clear that often children are not only too scared to cry; they are too confused to cry as well. Even when Broca’s area is active and ready to do its job, we cannot put experiences into words if we do not have the words to work with. Much of life is pattern recognition, as what we see links up with what we know. We call a banana a banana—and we know it is a fruit—because we learned that in preschool. A round orange object could be a different piece of fruit such as a tangerine, or it could be a basketball, depending on its size and on how it feels and smells. All day, every day, our ordinary moments link up with words and categories we already know. This is how we talk about what we see.
Sometimes, though, things happen and we do not have the words or categories to match them. We have experiences we cannot name, and naming can be especially difficult for children who have lived less of life and who have fewer labels at their disposal. In moments like these, children need others to help them articulate their reality. Otherwise, they are left with a sort of alexithymia, or the inability to put feelings and experiences into words. We are all alexithymic as infants—the root in fans means “not speaking”—and as we grow, we label our inner and outer world with help from those around. People in our lives say, “That’s a car!” or “You’re tired!” or “That hurt!” and we say, “Yes!” When complicated grown-up problems do not fit with the words that children have—when no one says, “That’s an alcoholic!”—they are left with the silent awareness that something important and frightening, yet unspeakable, has gone on.
In her graphic memoir, Fun Home, Alison Bechdel details a camping trip she went on when she was ten years old, a weekend that was part of her origin story. While her mother stayed home, Bechdel was accompanied by her brothers, her father, and a young man who was one of her father’s secret gay lovers. Also on this trip, Bechdel stumbled across pornography for the first time, held a gun for the first time, and saw a giant snake in a riverbed. Years later, she would find this diary entry from the trip: “Saw a snake. Had lunch.” The rest of it went unsaid for more than a decade. “My feeble language skills simply could not bear the weight of such a laden experience,” she rightly concluded about her ten-year-old self.
Just as the children of Chowchilla could not begin to understand where they were going when they were driving around in those vans, neither could Emily make sense of why a man would angrily search her kitchen for pickles. No one ever explained that the slurring man was saying “liquor”; nor did anyone know that Emily was so upset by the events of that day. The supernormal child may act as if she hardly notices anything wrong—and besides, she seems “all right.” Yet when we cannot connect what we see or hear to something we have seen or heard before, or when words simply will not do an experience justice—“Trauma mocks language,” says feminist scholar Leigh Gilmore, “and confronts it with its insufficiency”—we literally do not know how to think about it. The unlinkable is unthinkable, and all we can say to ourselves is, “There are no words. I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know where to put that.” Where we put moments like these is off in a separate part of the mind. It is the part of the mind where the unformulated is kept apart until it, eventually, begins to feel like a secret.
***
Weekends at Emily’s house began normal enough. On Saturday mornings, she and her brothers lay on the carpet in front of cartoons and ate bowls of Cheerios as long as they could get away with it. Emily’s mother headed out on errands and Emily’s father cracked open a beer and headed out to the yard. A few hours and beer cans later, he would retreat inside and start pouring brown drinks out of a big glass jug. He stirred these drinks with his finger and then sucked his finger clean, as if he did not want to miss a drop.
When the glass jug came out, Emily’s father put on music in the living room and looked around for a dance partner. As the youngest and the only girl, Emily was always chosen. It made her feel special, the way her dad picked her up and spun her around, at least until he squeezed her wrists too hard or swung her dangerously close to the furniture. When Emily’s father started to draw the curtains and turn out the lights in the middle of the day, Emily’s brothers got squirmy and difficult, almost like they meant to pick fights with their father. This would result in shouting at best, or spanking at worst, so Emily took another approach: She scurried to the piano and played her father’s favorite song, “King of the Road.” Emily could not understand why her brothers never learned to play along.
If the glass jug went empty, the King of the Road took Emily with him when he drove to the store with the big red circles on its sign. Emily hated these trips because this was the only time she was ever left in a car by herself.
“Don’t leave me here, Daddy!” Emily pleaded as her father got out of the car in the parking lot. “I’m scared!”
Then a car door slam.
Emily crouched down on the plastic mat on the floorboard and kept herself busy, searching under the seats for stray pennies or half-eaten rolls of breath mints. Every so often, she looked up and out of the window, glancing anxiously at the door of the store. Like a dog spotting its owner, she perked up with relief and anticipation when she saw her dad walking her way, clutching a brown paper bag with a glass bottle peeking out. Sometimes Emily’s mother got her alone and asked if her father had stopped by the store with the red circles. Emily knew she was supposed to tell her mother the truth but she also knew she was not supposed to tell her father’s secrets. The red-circle store must be a secret because no one ever talked about what it was or explained why she was left alone in the car outside.
When Emily’s father brought home a brand-new bottle of the brown stuff, Emily and her brothers were in a bind. If they stayed inside, they risked doing something wrong and being within reach. If they went outside, they risked doing something wrong and being out of reach. Like the time they told their dad they were going to play at the cul-de-sac. On that day, as Emily and her brothers played with the other kids, they forgot all about their dad, and maybe they forgot all about the time, too, until in the middle of a game of hide-and-seek that stretched across several backyards, there was commotion. Some older kids from the neighborhood pedaled frantically toward the game and called out to Emily and her brothers:
“Your dad is looking for you!”
“He’s mad!”
“You’d better go home!”
“He’s got his belt off!”
At first, Emily stayed crouched behind the boxwoods where she was hiding, hoping this was either a horribly on-target joke or a ploy to get her out of her hiding spot. Then she crept out from behind the shrubs and saw the fear in the other kids’ eyes, and she and her brothers jumped on their bikes and pedaled standing up toward their house. As Emily strained against the hill up to her house, she heard one of the kids yell, “Your dad’s an alcoholic!”
That word again.
When they made it home, Emily and her brothers jumped off their bikes, abandoning them on their sides, wheels spinning, as they ran toward the front door. They were not supposed to leave their bikes out like that but the longer they delayed the worse it would be. When they rushed to their father, he pushed Emily and her brothers up the stairs into their parents’ bedroom. Then they were lying on the bed side by side, screaming as the leather belt cracked down on them hard. Emily had been whipped enough times to be very, very good at avoiding