The Ride Together; A Brother and Sister's Memoir of Autism in the Family

by Paul Karasik; Judy Karasik

• ISBN13: 9780743423366
• ISBN10: 0743423364
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-01-07
• Publisher: Washington Square Press

Summary

Meet the Karasiks, a typical middle-class 1960s family: one mother, one father, one daughter, and three sons, one of whom, David, has autism.

The Ride Together is an extraordinary family memoir told in alternating chapters of comics and text.

Author Biography

Judy Karasik was for years a book editor; her authors included Julius Lester and Edward Whittemore. She has also worked for nonprofits and government. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review and The Boston Globe Magazine, among many others. She lives with her family in Tuscany and Maryland.

Table of Contents

Contents

Part One: 1995
1 Family

Part Two: 1953­1966
2 Diagnosis
3 Superman in the Living Room
4 A Quiet Evening at Home with the Karasiks
5 Playing Poker with Miss Murphy
6 Bizarro World
7 Kurt Mo Has Done It Again

Part Three: 1967­1980
8 Independence
9 Secret Agent Man
10 The Fire
11 The Stooges
12 The Big Yellow Balloon

Part Four: 1990­1996
13 My Real Brother
14 Memory Believes
15 Haircut
16 And Now, a Final Word from Monroe
17 Rudolph's Airplane

Part Five: 2001
18 The Ride Together

Excerpts

Chapter One: Family We looked like a cup of human fruit cocktail dumped onto the top of the house, each piece different but all out of the same can: Mom, David in his pajamas, Michael and his wife, Paul and his wife, various children, and me. Everyone present and accounted for, as Pop would have said -- and come to think of it, he was probably up there too, like the ghost in Hamlet, the late King Monroe wandering the castle parapet.We were together there for one last time, up on the roof, as though sitting on top of the old house would make it easier for the family to remember everything that had happened there. After thirty-eight years we were leaving; the place was sold and Mom was moving on to something smaller.Each of us had climbed a rickety ladder in the attic; the ladder rose straight to hook onto a metal bar under the trapdoor. One by one, we'd emerged through the trapdoor onto the widow's walk, a square platform surrounded by a wooden guardrail, right in the center and at the very top of the roof, up high, above three tall stories.This was the first time our oldest brother, David, had ever been on the roof. Although we had lived in the house for nearly forty years, over all this time nobody had thought to take him up, creating one of those gaps in ordinary experience that are scattered throughout the life of a person with autism.We gazed toward the other houses on Lenox Street, visible through wind-shifting leaves, like ocean boulders appearing and disappearing with the waves. It was a late afternoon in April of 1995, in spring, that pale, open, sweet time of year when new and unexpected things seem about to occur. This did not make me happy.I was forty-one years old and unlike Michael and Paul, I was single. I was terrified of what the future would hold. The house was where it had all happened. The house was where we had gathered, where we had been children, where we had grown up, where grandparents and other relatives and friends had come to live, some of them for years, with our strange, proud, ordinary family, in the country inside our house. This was the place we had returned to and left again, reminding ourselves of who we were. The house had kept our faith, but now it couldn't protect me. If it were gone, what would remind Michael and Paul of who we were, how we lived our lives?I saw myself holding my brother David's hand, leading him through his days, big emptiness all around me.We had a couple of bottles of good champagne. While Paul's two teenage stepdaughters, Gia and Cleo, watched, I showed first Henry, Michael's three-year-old son, then Nora, Paul's five-year-old daughter, how you gently ease the cork out of a champagne bottle, and the great noise it makes, and how the cork flies, shot out of the thick cannon of the bottle's neck."I used to come up here and see whales," I told Henry. "Sometimes I would come up and instead of trees and streets, there would be an ocean filled with fish and whales." And our big rock on Lenox Street became a schooner and we could sail away, we could voyage forever in the beautiful day, into the starry night.I was drunk on champagne and all I wanted to do was make trouble. "Mom," I said, innocent-like, "you know, I used to come up here and go out onto the roof. Just walked out on the roof. Not like you and Pop -- you used a rope. I just walked out."For many years, until Joan and Monroe were both well into their sixties, my parents had cleaned the gutters of the house together. My mother tied a rope around my father's waist, looping it several times around the posts of the widow's walk, belaying Pop as he inched out down the roof, which sloped at a steep pitch in all four directions, scooped out the crud from the gutters, and carefully threw the debris down onto the lawn."Well," my mother commented, "what we did probably wasn't all that safe, either, when you get right down to it.""It was nuts, Mom," Michael