Life, Animated (10 page)

As I’m working on the gala honoring James Carville and Kelly McGillis in 2000 Cornelia is feeling a creep of despair. The springtime victory of Br’er Rabbit isn’t continuing into the fall. Owen is making progress—more than we could have imagined—but the other kids are moving faster. The brightest spot is his art. They let the kids draw whatever they chose and he is beginning to draw characters, including his Disney favorites, with a kind of joyful exuberance. But that’s as far as self-directed passions are expressed at school. The production of the play was a special event; energies that are hard to integrate into the daily curriculum.

Disney is still a controlled substance, the lock in place, and he’s doing less self-talking at school. But with the school not channeling his budding creative urges, Cornelia steps in.

She takes him aside after dinner—a time we often go to the basement for some Disney role-playing. “Owen,” she says, taking his hands and crouching so they were eye to eye. “We’re going to act out a movie, one of your favorites, with all the Kennedy cousins this coming Thanksgiving—and you’re going to be the producer, the director, and the star.”

Owen lights up. He knows exactly what all those jobs are. And he immediately makes his selection, one of his favorite movies of that period:
James and the Giant Peach
, a Disney production of the Roald Dahl classic that mixed live action with Claymation, a technique using intricate clay figures. Move them a smidge, photograph, move another smidge, photograph again. This “stop-action” method has been going on for a while—that’s the way they did
King Kong
in the 1930s, with an eighteen-inch-tall puppet—but with the latest bonanza of animated movies, stop-action—easier, in a way, than drawing countless frames of animation—was taken up a notch.

And Disney’s
James and the Giant Peach,
like Dahl’s book, is a beefy fable, with all the big issues—fear, loss, abandonment, redemption, maturation—and a strong array of evocative characters, led by the orphaned James, whose parents are dead. He is left with a pair of vicious aunts—Sponge and Spiker—conjured by Dahl in a nightmarish reach toward Dickens. Magic intervenes, making a peach tree in their yard grow a single, monstrous fruit. James crawls inside the great, moist vessel as it drifts off to sea and finds inside an array of talking, human-sized insects. James starts out withdrawn, battered, put-upon, but makes discoveries through his new firends—about himself and the wider world—as the peach makes it way to America, the place James dreams about.

Of course, we want Owen to be the star, to be James. We egg him on, Walt included: “Owen, you’re the only one who knows all the songs and dialogue!”

Owen will have none of it. “Brian is James; he’s the right one.” Brian, the son of Cornelia’s older brother Deane and his wife, Kathleen, is a year younger than Walt but having a tough go of it. Some trouble in school. Some discipline problems at home. And playing football with the cousins—games led by Walt—Brian was regularly battered. After a bit, we accede. Owen is the casting director. It’s his choice.

Cornelia had long been wanting to have a colonial Thanksgiving—to have the extended Kennedy clan come to Williamsburg in a kind of reunion and retreat. This is the year, with the play as the weekend’s capstone.

In a large, carpeted social room at the Williamsburg Inn, the family gathers on Thanksgiving Day—in all twenty-seven people with the eight siblings, including Cornelia, their kids, aunts, uncles, and her parents. Owen and Cornelia have made simple costumes, a telling prop or two for each—a hat, a cane, a vest—that identifies each character, and the kids receive some rudimentary scripts to play out scenes.

And then, the metaphorical lights come up. Acting as the narrator/stage manager, I start by introducing each of our players, beckoning them to come forward from the wings, a nearby hallway, to introduce themselves.

Matt—Owen’s confident and smart first cousin, a few months older than Walt—steps up first, cast as the tough-talking Centipede, who, under duress, eventually shows his soft underbelly. With a cap and cigar, Matt describes the character in a few, blunt twelve-year-old utterances and gives way to Walt, who steps up and introduces himself as the Grasshopper, a worldly arthropod who plays the violin but, with his powerful legs, can also pack a wallop. And onward, until all nine characters—boys and girls—have come forward, save one. “Finally, our producer and director is also an actor, playing the Earthworm,” I say with flourish, as Owen comes forward, wearing the rounded glasses of the meekest of the characters, who serves as the story’s improbable protagonist. In the movie and book, the Earthworm is reluctantly used as bait to draw hungry seagulls, who are then webbed by Miss Spider into a flying force that lifts the peach to safety, bound for America.

Owen looks out at the familiar faces, the aunts, uncles, grandparents, from one face to the next, each looking back with some version of an encouraging smile, knowing and nudging, gentle and ready. In some ways, they’re all here for Owen, something the older kids sense, and even some of the younger ones—down to his four-year-old cousin, Grace, playing Miss Spider. She sees that Owen is standing closer to the audience than the others, only a few feet away, having missed the X taped to the rug. But she doesn’t say anything, knows better, though she’s seen—like everyone—Owen being helped, corrected, guided in doing some of the simplest things.

Because that’s what happens when no one tells you about the moment the “special” kid arrives. How a whole extended family, top to bottom, gets changed by someone who stops the constant drumbeat of me and mine, who’s up, who’s down, the irresistible drama of bloodlines, birth orders, and familial politics. Why? Because the ways he’s different compels a minute-to-minute search, humanizing and heart-filling, for all the ways he’s not different. It’s us at our best.

And now he stands before the group, to address them all, really, for the first time. There’s silence, but he’s looking down, or somewhere inside—the invisible places where he so often lives—to find something, to be the giver.

“The Earthworm,” he says, quiet but steady, “is scared sometimes and confused. And he’s jerlous…jelerous…” There’s a word he’s seeing in his mind and trying to decode, something he must have read, or heard, but never said, and not one of the twenty onlookers, crowded close, can seem to finish it for him; until, after a second of silence, his aunt Marita—who’s especially close and often able to coax things from him—says, “Jealous?”

Owen looks up and nods, the thread restored. “He’s jealous of the Grasshopper and the Centipede and characters who can do things that he can’t. And that’s why I’m the Earthworm.”

It’s good now that he misses cues so he doesn’t see how the eyes of all the grownups are shining with tears.

And the play commences, suddenly everyone in their roles, deep in them, led by Owen—both himself, in the lead, telling them lines they’ve missed; and as the straggling, terrified Earthworm—the two now joined in the fable of journey, adventure, facing fears.

Until a discovery, well along, that they’ve missed a song. Yes, right. Cornelia hustles, passes out the song sheets—mostly for the parents, the kids know this one—of the movie’s theme, all in song.

Take a little time,

Just look at where we are.

We’ve come very, very far, together.

And if I might say so,

And if I might say so, too,

We wouldn’t have got anywhere if it weren’t for you, boy.

The singing is strong, the song sheets allowing the parents to dive in, as Owen, knowing these lyrics and feeling them in ways that remain mysterious, dances in song—arms akimbo, reaching, swinging—at the very center of a crazy celebration that he’s unleashed. And this, with that last lyric—“if it weren’t for you, boy”—seems to cue the Grasshopper and the Centipede, who can do so very much, to lift the Earthworm onto their shoulders as all the kids crowd close, wanting to touch him. Voices rise with him—everyone singing out emotions, hoarded across years, finally freed—suffusing the room with light.

Love is the sweetest thing.

Love never comes just when you think it will.

Love is the way we feel for you.

We’re family, we’re family, we’re family,

All of us and you!

And this is how, on Thanksgiving of 2000, the plot of
James and
the Giant Peach
shifts to make an earthworm the hero. No offense to Dahl, or to James. It is a family using a story to get what it needs. We live, after all, in a society that celebrates the winner; lifting one above all others. We know what that looks like. Though Owen plays a supporting role, we make him a hero of the traditional caste—lifted, triumphantly. He is uncomfortable; this is not his way.

But we are bigger than he is.

On 9/11, Cornelia tries to pry the lock off the television to turn on CNN.

In her panic, with the Pentagon in flames, four miles from Walt at Sidwell Friends and just one mile, across the Potomac, from the Lab School, she can’t remember where she’d hidden the key the day before—a day that suddenly seemed like an eternity past.

I’m far off, on a reporting assignment. She’s on her game. And after grabbing both kids from school, she has a neighbor take a bolt cutter to the lock. There’d never again be a lock on the television. That era is over.

Other eras were ending, as well.

By Thanksgiving, I’m sitting in Sally Smith’s office.

She says it just isn’t working out for Owen at Lab. I make my case. He’s making progress in his own fashion, improving by the day. I mention how the club for older kids in the elementary program—Greek Gods—is a cinch for him, building upon an interest he developed by memorizing
Hercules
, Disney’s 1997 feature.

“He’s turning these movies into tools that, more and more, he’s using to make sense of the wider world,” I tell her.

She looks at me sympathetically but doesn’t budge. “Many of these kids are just too hard to teach. Their affinities are too narrow. There aren’t enough handles to grab and use—at least not in a classroom setting.” She pauses. “Look, not picking up social cues is just too great a burden. They can’t engage with teachers or peers with enough ease, enough capacity, to push themselves forward.”

I tell her I’m not going to argue with her. She runs the school. She decides what kind of students it should serve. Of course, we both know everything: that the gala, first created to bring much-needed funding to the Lab School, is now shaping it. The students are looking more and more like younger versions of the celebrated awardees, and less like the son she originally started the school for.

We talk briefly about this year’s learning-disabled achievers: David Boies, the super lawyer whose dyslexia forced him to build the extraordinary verbal memory he used to overwhelm opponents in court; and John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco Systems.

Two of society’s titanic winners. “And learning that they had some struggles early,” I say, trying to not sound bitter, “will change views far and wide about the potential of people with learning differences.”

“Something like that,” she says. “Killing off those negative expectations isn’t nothing. It matters.”

It’s time to go. She says she hopes we can remain friends and that I’ll continue to help with the gala. I rise from my chair. “You started this school so your son, who’d been discarded, would have a place to go,” I say, putting on my coat. Gary, now well into adulthood, has significant challenges, much like Owen. “Do you think he’d be accepted here today?”

Those are fighting words. I can’t help it—I am thinking how difficult this is going to be for Owen. To her credit, Sally doesn’t rise to battle.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she says, quietly. “Times change. We’re serving a need and serving it well. Just not anymore for someone like Owen.”

They plan a small graduation ceremony for early June 2002. Owen’s fifth-grade class will be moving up to the middle school.

Save one.

There are few options. We call Ivymount and tell them he’s been “counseled out.” They’re sympathetic. It’s like a game of musical chairs, with the autistic-spectrum kids not able to hear when the music stops. The assistant director says his old school will gladly take him back.

We tell Owen in early May, a month ahead. We go out to dinner and say he’ll be going back to Ivymount. He’s made a few friends at Lab. They do things together, are starting to form little rituals. Quite a lot about friendship, after all, is ritual. He feels like he belongs there. “It’ll be great, Owie,” Walt says, putting his arm around Owen’s shoulder. “I’m sure you’ll see some of your old friends at Ivymount will still be there.”

Owen gets this look where he raises his eyebrows and presses his face into the widest of smiles. He calls it his “happy face.” He does it when he’s worried he might cry.

On the day of the ceremony, the kids give Owen cards they’ve made for him, wishing him well. He’s been with them for five years. They drew pictures of Mickey Mouse, of the Simpsons, which Owen got into at Walt’s behest. Elizabeth, one of several girls adopted from Russia with developmental delays, wrote, “I am your friend Owen. I will miss you so much. I like helping you to be quiet when we are told to be quiet. I think it is nice you like
James and the Giant
Peach
. I also love Disney movies and characters too!” Another friend, Sebastian, drew a picture of Mickey next to Homer Simpson and wrote, “I will miss you and so will Homer.” Most said they hope he’ll make new friends and the card they signed, all together, wishes him “100 years of Walt Magic in Disney World.”

They all hug him good-bye. Neela Seldin, director of the lower school, hands him a certificate that “acknowledges that Owen Suskind has successfully completed the Elementary Program.” They put a gold seal on it, to make it look like a diploma.

Owen isn’t fooled. He doesn’t say anything or make a sound in the car on the way home. He just looks out the window. All through the “ceremony” sitting on the grass behind the school, Cornelia tried to hold it together. She wasn’t going to let them see her cry. She feels a combination of anger and devastation—not only for Owen, who is being thrown out of a place he loves—a place she has worked so hard to keep him in—but for all the other spectrum kids she feels have been treated unfairly by a school that had committed to educate them.