This was the case with the B.s, the autistic family I had visited in California—the older son, like the parents, with Asperger’s syndrome, the younger with classical autism. When I first arrived at their house, the whole atmosphere was so “normal” that I wondered if I had been misinformed, or if I had not, perhaps, ended up at the wrong house, for there was nothing obviously “autistic” about them or it. It was only after I had settled down that I noticed the well-used trampoline, where the whole family, at times, likes to jump and flap their arms; the huge library of science fiction; the strange cartoons pinned to the bathroom wall; and the ludicrously explicit directions, pinned up in the kitchen, for cooking, laying the table, and washing up—suggesting that these had to be performed in a fixed, formulaic way (this, I learned later, was an autistic in-joke). Mrs. B. spoke of herself, at one point, as “bordering on normality,” but then made clear what such “bordering” meant: “We know the rules and conventions of the ‘normal,’ but there is no actual transit. You act normal, you learn the rules, and obey them, but ...”
“You learn to ape human behavior,” her husband interpolated. “I still don’t understand what’s behind the social conventions. You observe the front—but ...”
The B.s, then, had learned a front of normality, which was necessary, given their professional lives, their living in the suburbs and driving a car, their having a son in regular school, etc. But they had no illusions about themselves. They recognized their own autism, and they had recognized each other’s, at college, with a sense of such affinity and delight that it was inevitable they would marry. “It was as if we had known each other for a million years,” Mrs. B. said. While they were well aware of many of the problems of their autism, they had a respect for their differentness, even a pride. Indeed, in some autistic people this sense of radical and ineradicable differentness is so profound as to lead them to regard themselves, half-jokingly, almost as members of another species (“They beamed us down on the transporter together,” as the B.s liked to say), and to feel that autism, while it may be seen as a medical condition, and pathologized as a syndrome, must also be seen as a whole mode of being, a deeply different mode or identity, one that needs to be conscious (and proud) of itself.
