A Wild Ride Up the Cupboards; A Novel

by Ann Bauer

• ISBN13: 9780743269490
• ISBN10: 0743269497
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-08-23
• Publisher: Scribner

Summary

Edward is nearly four years old when he begins his slow, painful withdrawal from the world. For those who love him -- his father, Jack, and mother, Rachel, pregnant with their third child -- the transformation of their happy, intelligent firstborn into a sleepless, feral stranger is a devastating blow, one that brings enormous ramifications not just for Edward and his parents, but also for their younger son, Matt, and soon-to-be-born daughter.A Wild Ride Up the Cupboards follows this nuclear family as Rachel and Jack try to come to terms with their son's descent into autism (or something like it) and struggle to sustain their marriage under this unanticipated strain. Threaded through the novel, too, is the story of Rachel's deceased uncle Mickey, who may have suffered from a similar disorder at a time when parenting, pediatrics, and ideas about child psychology were entirely different from today's. As Rachel delves into her own family history in search of answers, flashbacks to Mickey's life afford moving insight into the nature of childhood disorders and the coping mechanisms of different families.A spellbinding, brilliantly nuanced portrait of a marriage and a family, this compelling drama also poses provocative, real-life questions: How much should a mother sacrifice for her children? How much intervention is too much? When do parents' ambitions for their offspring become counterproductive, even destructive? Who should decide what is best for the child? Is it ever worth sacrificing a marriage for a child?A Wild Ride Up the Cupboards is a carefully crafted, compulsively readable, emotional page-turner that reveals a remarkable gift for language and storytelling and enormous insight into the complexities and dilemmas of domestic life and parenthood. It is a striking exploration of love, faith, and sacrifice that will resonate with readers everywhere.

Excerpts

Chapter 1: During the winter of Edward's first-grade year, I would often dream that he was dead. These were long,complicated nightmares from which I would awaken -- gasping,wild with grief, my heart pounding -- into total darkness.It was early January,a night so cold I had piled four blankets on the bed before getting in just hours before. I opened my eyes and lay still for a long time,letting my dream fade and listening to the ticking of snow crystals against the windowpane.Gradually,the rapid drumbeat in my chest died down. My eyes focused and shapes emerged: fuzzy gray outlines against black air.For weeks I had awakened every morning around three-thirty, but I had never once succeeded in falling back to sleep.Jack turned and sighed, a gust of warm air against my neck. My husband could sleep through anything, including my thrashing and the stiff terror that followed.Edward could sleep through nothing,not even perfect silence.Now,I could feel him in the next room, alert and anxious, twitchy, concentrating hard on trying not to move. I imagined his thoughts streaming through the wall between us, spangling like stars.A ghost of vapor hung over the radiator and the window above us was covered with rime. For a moment I burrowed backward into Jack, who radiated heat like a furnace. Still sleeping, he slipped his arms around me and I stayed inside them,contented,for a few minutes. But when my back began to perspire against his bare chest, I knew it was time to get up.My body was so large at this point,my stomach so distended,I had to set myselfup in order to vault out of bed. I twisted to the side ofthe mattress and flattened a palm squarely against Jack's top shoulder, then shoved hard against his immovable bulk and made it over the edge on the first try. I stood,panting,and reached out to the wall to steady myself.The wooden floor was hard and cold and my feet immediately started to ache.I needed socks,which presented a problem.Finding the socks wasn't difficult.We'd given the larger bedroom,the "master,"to the boys, and set up a nursery in the smaller bedroom across the hall. Jack and I slept in an alcove meant for storage,or a tiny office.It was L-shaped,roughly the size of a Ping-Pong table with a little air pocket attached to the top.I could stretch out one arm and retrieve a pair of socks from the dresser. But putting them on was a different story.During the day, Jack helped dress me: I would stand in line along with the boys as he moved from one of us to the next, folding white socks neatly over our ankles and tying bows on our shoes. Rather than wake him now,which he had told me to do,I decided to apply the socks myself. I took a deep breath and held it, bending over and reaching for one foot,terrified that I was squeezing the baby to death. After slipping the first one on,I rested for a few seconds before repeating the maneuver on the other side.I knew I should let Edward alone but it was as if there were an invisible cord strung between us,pulling me toward him.I shuffled softly down the carpeted hall and pushed open the door. Jack had hung special room-darkening shades in the boys'room so the blackness was even thicker than in ours.Stepping inside was like moving through cloth and it took a full minute for me to see the outline of Matt sleeping under his covers, his breath sounds smoothly puttering, his humped-up body a miniature version of his father's.Edward didn't raise his head from the pillow but the air was full of him, tight and crackling with his energy. Every night he waged the same battle with sleep: mind racing,eyes blinking.For twelve straight nights now he'd lost."Sweetheart, try to relax."I knew this was pointless but found myself saying it every time I stared down at him.What I wanted was to walk over and smooth back his hair,or lie down on the bed and pull him in, cradling him as I did when he was a baby,when he would relax a