Bad Animals by Joel Yanofsky Read Free Book Online Page A

objective. (What I’d realize later is that physical attractiveness is made note of in most of the autism memoirs I’ve read. It is, Clara Clairborne Park writes in The Siege, “one of the inexplicable items” in the disorder, a way, she speculates, of making a family’s burden lighter.) For weeks, maybe months after Jonah was born, Cynthia and I would look him up and down, then assess each other, and shake our heads. It wasn’t just that he didn’t look anything like either of us, he didn’t look anything like the other newborn infants he shared the hospital nursery with, most of whom resembled aliens. Jonah had a full round face and an undented head. He was bigger than the other babies. He cried less. He seemed, when it came to baby behaviour, self-possessed, confident. I dubbed him the Mayor of Babytown.
    The day Cynthia went into the hospital to have labour induced, I read a newspaper story about the movie-star couple Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke and how they were about to have a baby, too. Our private joke, after Jonah was born, was that the infants, theirs and ours, had been switched at birth and that somewhere, in Hollywood or Martha’s Vineyard, our real kid had a nanny and a pony and a swimming pool and was living a privileged, decadent life. He was destined for a career as a child actor, a series of rehabs, and a lifelong flirtation with Scientology. John Travolta would be his godfather. Quentin Tarantino his crazy uncle. We imagined, too, that Uma and Ethan loved him dearly even though they couldn’t figure out how they, of all couples, had ended up with such a dweeb.
    Jonah went from being a beautiful baby to an irresistible toddler to a handsome little boy. Put him on a motorcycle, in a leather jacket, I said the day he turned one, and there you have it: a young Steve McQueen—all right, extremely young. As he got older he only got better looking. It was almost embarrassing. There was no way to account for his exquisite cheekbones, his strong chin, his light brown hair, and his perfectly unobtrusive nose. The pale blue eyes were hardest to explain. So much so, Cynthia kept threatening to punch the next person who made some dumb comment about where exactly he’d gotten “those baby-blues” from.
    In a few months, on Christmas Eve, Jonah will turn eleven. He is not tall for his age, though he will probably end up taller than both his parents. Cynthia and I still find ourselves staring at him and wondering how he ended up looking like he does. We’re not the only ones. Jonah has an affinity for his own reflection, so much so we had to cover the two full-length sliding mirrors in our hall with contact paper and then put up a more discreetly located mirror in his bedroom. The Consultant advised us to designate it “the silly mirror,” and Cynthia made a sign saying as much. This was where he would go, where he still goes sometimes, to make funny faces at himself or say funny words. It was initially intended to be an acceptable outlet, a substitute for the inappropriate bouts of face-making and staring at himself he was prone to—in department stores or the homes of relatives and friends. This has worked up to a point. Now, I’ll catch him posing in the mirror, putting his hands in his pockets, cocking his eyebrow, and shooting himself a sweet, kooky grin. Show time, I think he’s thinking. He can’t seem to take his eyes off himself and won’t until I push him on to the next thing. “Jonesy,” I’ll have to say, “enough cuteness.” But why? In that instant, as he faces the mirror, I watch him and wonder what’s going on in his head. I wonder how he can look at himself for so long and so uncritically. It’s a strange gift, but a gift nevertheless. To not see a gap between who you are and who you hoped to be. Facing “the silly mirror,” my son still looks extraordinarily self-possessed. As if he