Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from “Borderline” by Kathleen Norris (©1995 by Kathleen Norris).

Since my book Dakota became a surprise bestseller, I've received thousands of letters responding to it. Along with the reviews, these responses have been, for the most part, positive, and often so enthusiastic that I wonder if the person has read the same book that I wrote. I was enormously relieved, then, to receive the following from my sister Becky: “How are you? Everyone here talks about you and your book. I feel left out. I tried to read it, but it was boring.”

Not for the first time in our forty-two-year relationship, my sister Becky had acted as a kind of amma for me, a desert mother who challenges my complacency and allows me to see the world (and myself) in a new light. I was reminded of a saying by Amma. Synclectica, a desert monastic of fourth-century Egypt: “Just as it is impossible to be at the same moment a plant and a seed, so it is impossible for us to be surrounded by worldly honor and at the same time to bear heavenly fruit."

Synclectica sums up, I believe, the difficulty writers have in America in surviving success: to keep bearing fruit, one must keep returning, humbly, to the blank page and not pay much heed to the “noted author" the world wants you to be. Becky's letter was a godsend. Reading it over, I laughed myself silly, and found myself released from much of the tension induced by sudden notoriety and too much literary hoo-ha.

Becky's life has been a kind of desert. When she was born, the doctors gave my mother too strong a dose of sedative. Having already given birth to two children, she knew something was wrong. Precious oxygen was lost. My sister's brain was irreversibly damaged.

Becky is diagnosed as “borderline.” She is intelligent enough to comprehend what happened to her when she was born. She is not intelligent enough to do mathematical computation. A tutor my parents hired when Becky was about ten years old told us that Becky could grasp a concept long enough to work out several problems in the course of an hour-long session, but that by the next week she'd have forgotten what she'd learned and have to start from scratch. Her elementary schools were just passing her along; there were no “special ed" programs then, and no one knew what to do with her, where she belonged. Becky's life has been lonely in ways that most of us could not comprehend.

Our parents decided when Becky was very young that she didn't belong in an institution, but with us. I believe that being raised with myself and a brother, both older, and one younger sister was good for Becky; I know it was good for me. Very early on, I had to learn to respect Becky's intelligence, although it was very different from mine. I also came to respect her tenacity.

When I was in high school I began to discover how much my 'sister and I had in common. We were both in difficult situations—I was a shy, ungainly new-comer at a school where many of the students had been together since, kindergarten, and Becky had a particularly unsympathetic teacher. On coming home from school, she'd immediately go to her room and play rock music while she danced around her room (and sometimes on her bed). She talked to herself, incessantly and loudly. The family accepted all this as something Becky needed to do.

One day, as Becky carried on her usual “conversations,” with her teacher, with other girls in her class, with a boy who'd made fun of her, I was doing homework in the room next door and realized that I, too, needed release from daily tensions, a way to daydream through the failed encounters and make them come outright. Usually, I lost myself in reading or practicing the flute, but sometimes I listened to music and imagined great careers for myself, great travels, great loves. I didn't have the nerve to stomp around my room and yell, as my sister was doing, but our needs were the same.

We were both struggling with our otherness, although I suspect I did not know this then. Now thatI'm a writer, it's clear to me. Rejection comes to everyone, of course, but for those who are markedly different from their peers, it is a daily reminder of that difference. To most people, my sister and I didn't seem to have much in common; but I knew from that day on that we were remarkably alike.

If nothing else, this insight helped me to survive my new school. I knew that getting a C was not the worst thing in the world. And when I got an A, I could put it in perspective. I knew there were other kinds of intelligence that were just as valuable; needs that could not be satisfied in school.