Social service agencies have a good bead on Alex. Somewhere in the photocopied, crooked lines of one of his service plans, for instance, is the line, “Alex Stimpson doesn’t have a best friend.”
Alex does ask for Ned, for daddy and mommy and Aunt Julie and for grandpa’s lake house. In that house Alex can glance at most of his loved ones in one convenient corral and then go back to the iPad until it’s time for his drive to Michaels.
We headed to the lake house for the Fourth. Ned brought a friend to go swimming in the lake, canoeing and tipping over the canoe followed by more swimming in the lake. Aunt Julie brought a friend, Carl. Carl comes for many Independence Days. Ned also likes Carl very much as Carl lives in the South and usually brings explosives.
Alex notices fireworks. This year he seemed edgy, refusing to sit on the dock and continuing to try to tug me and Jill back to the house. In the glow of Carl’s explosives Alex’s face is sharp and attentive; his eyes catch the sparkly details against the summer night sky (and this year anyway, chose to disregard them) and he looks like an otherwise normal teen who just happens to rarely speak sentences.
You need sentences to get by in this world; you need sentences to make friends. “Autistic individuals typically have problems interacting in normal social environments. This leads some parents and professionals to think that they are naturally antisocial,” reads the abstract of “Six Principles of Autistic Interaction” (http://www.jamesmw.com/sixrules.htm) by James Williams, a Chicago-area writer with high-functioning autism.
I wouldn’t call Alex antisocial, more like social in a skewed way. He seems to speak someone’s name more when he’s not with that person. When school’s out, he often speaks names of classmates, usually preceded by “Bye bye!” or “Have a good weekend!” (He also frequently speaks his own name with those phrases.) “Bye, Ju-ann. Bye, Eloran” he says over a video of kids and a school bus; his finger touches the picture of the boy boarding the bus. “Bye, Eloran.” (Alex stresses the bye, puts a spin on the word as if to say, There. I took care of that.) Is this part of Alex truly friends? Part of him arranging classmates in his memory the way he lines up little plastic animals on all the furniture? Or just part of his general unraveling during school breaks?
When kids from the building drop by to see Ned, Alex hangs around, too, bobbing and weaving to a song on his iPad. If one of the visitors is a girl and it’s around Alex’s bath time, I position myself nonchalantly near the bathroom door to make sure Alex doesn’t fling it open stark naked. If Jill asks Alex to dance and share his music, he will for a moment, dutifully, then take his device and his joy and politely disappear into his bedroom. All for interacting,, he seems to say, to a limit. If something goes wrong Alex will come to pat your arm (sometimes a little hard) and pat and pat and say, “I’m sorry” even when it isn’t his fault.
“Non-autistic people often forget how complex social skills are, and how long it takes to learn them,” they write on the site Autism Helps (http://www.autism-help.org/communication-autism-making-friends.htm). Skills to make friends include knowing how to enter into other children’s activities or how to welcome other children into games or activities, and recognizing when and how to help others and seeking help from others. “Autistic individuals, if allowed to interact with other autistic individuals, develop complex friendships that are based on social rules that are unique to autistic relationships,” Williams writes. “When two autistic people who are fit for each other interact, there typically are several principles they use when socializing.”
At a New Year’s Eve party, Alex met Eric, who is also solidly on the spectrum. Alex had been weaving person to person, displaying his pretzels, strapping paper hats on guests both willing and un-, heaping chips on flimsy plates and scanning the kitchen for a back door to bolt through. When Eric arrived, Alex paused as if spotting an expensive hoodie of his favorite football team. He looked into Eric’s face and touched his arm.
They separated quickly but I don’t often see that spark of connection between Alex and most strangers. Maybe Eric reminded Alex of a classmate? Bye, Eric, bye…
“Their impaired ability to perceive and respond in socially expected ways to nonverbal cues can lead to conflict or being ignored by others,” adds Autism Helps.
“Maybe you can take Alex to the Mac store,” we tell Tina. “He can teach people how to use iPads.” He asks for the adult companions Jill and I hired to watch him and keep him company when we’re working: Tina (not her real name), Danny (not his real name) and Abby (not even close to her real name). He always asks for them by his name for them, his way of asking when he’ll see them again. He seems to look forward to seeing them, maybe because with them Alex is never something he is with many people. Alone.