Stern - Little panic: dispatches from an anxious life

The images and IQ test questions that run throughout this book came from a variety of sources. The first is, believe it or not, my memory. When you take as many IQ tests as I have, they stick to your anxiety and never let go. Where I drew blanks, I turned to the actual tests and their guidebooks. They include: WAIS Object Assembly (The Psychological Corporation, 1955); Measuring Intelligence: A Guide to the Administration of the New Revised Stanford-Binet Tests of Intelligence by Lewis M. Terman and Maud A. Merrill (Houghton Mifflin, 1937), 102 (Form L / 4); WAIS Manual, Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale by David Wechsler (The Psychological Corporation, 1955); WAIS Object Assembly H (The Psychological Corporation, 1955). The images that appear are renditions inspired by Stanford-Binet and WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale) picture-completion and design cards.

Other books I read to refresh my memory and accurately portray the sequence of testing include: Capturing the Essence: How Herman Hall Interpreted Standardized Test Scores by James Shapiro (Joukowsky Family Foundation, 2004); A Method of Measuring the Development of the Intelligence of Young Children by Alfred Binet and Th. Simon (Chicago Medical Book Co., 1915); Emotional Disorders of Children: A Case Book of Child Psychiatry by Gerald H. J. Pearson, MD (Hayne Press, 2011); Diagnostic Psychological Testing by David Rapaport, Merton M. Gill, and Roy Schafer (International Universities Press, 1968); Foundations of PsychologicalTesting: A Practical Approach by Leslie A. Miller and Robert L. Lovler (SAGE, 2015). Since 1977 I have kept journals, and I also used those as reference.

Time sticks numbers on the world and marks spaces I cant see. My teacher says the hands do this, and clocks are how we know when to come and go, but I am not a clock, and I always know when I have to leave my mom.

I dont have a watch. My best friend, Melissa, does. When I learn to read time on a clock, I can get one, too.

See? The small hand is on the two. The big hand is on the three, Melissa says. And if you cover it, you can see it glow.

I nod. We are standing next to the bright light of the baby chicks cage, across the room from the fluffy red reading rug, and Im hot. Does time glow when you hold your hand over its numbers, or only watches? I dont ask in case Im supposed to already know the answer. I sneak a quick glance at our classmates, who are playing a clock game I dont understand. Our teacher, Allegra, asked Melissa to help me, but I know Im being left behind.

Melissas fingers are gummed with orange juice from recess. I duck my eyes down to the trapped neon, green under our cupped hands. The raised black plastic surrounds the clock glass like a medieval fortress, but the numbers are just horses standing in a circlethey mean nothing to me. I like the watchs buckled bigness and I want one around my wrist for the comfort, the extra weight when my body turns into a leaf and floats away. Maybe Melissa will let me try hers on.

When I look back, Melissas face is bigger than before. Shes pushed in close to me, warming the air with her nearness, making energy out of the nothing between us. The sudden change reminds me of the truth about time only I seem to know: It cant be trusted. To me, time feels good or bad, but to everyone else, time isnt a feeling, its something outside their bodies they can see; it doesnt hurt them. If time is visible to others, why wont anyone catch it and make it stop, so I never have to leave my mom? Maybe the meaning of time is taking people away from each other.

Sowhat time is it? Melissas nose is an urgent inch away. Her eyebrows are impatient. I feel the dread before school every day; I feel the dread leading up to weekend visits with my father. I know something is wrong with me. I feel the dread all the time.

Our classmates are running clockwise on the reading rug, calling out minutes and hours from the center of the room. Their clapped vibrations catch in the middle of my body; their carefree jumps pass from the floor into my feet and knees.

Allegra claps twice, and everyone freezes. In the corner of my eye, I watch Naomi whispering to Kyra, eyes locked on me. Melissa asks again, but I still dont know the answer. Once I understand what they do, we can join the game, but until then, Im keeping Melissa stuck. My lungs feel tight. What if shes worried Ill never let her go?

You can play with them if you want, I tell Melissa. You dont have to stay with me. I dont mean it. The instant I say it, I am homesick for her.

I cant, Melissa says, frustrated. Not until you know the time. She lifts her wrist to my face and lumps out my view. How bout now? What time is it now? Shes not even looking at me. Outside of my mother, my sister, and my brother, Melissa is my favorite person. Her hair is always a little tangled, and her dresses are always the wrong size, so she looks messy, like me. We have lots in common. When I dont understand something, she waits for me. When I accidentally suck my fingers at school, she knocks them out of my mouth or signals from across the rooma tug on her hair; but now something sounds gone. Shes not being motherly, and her voice rings the emergency feeling in my body telling me to hurry up, hurry up. This makes the world speed up and everything goes double.

Is it a.m. or p.m.? Melissa thinks shes helping, but shes not.

I look at the board where a chalk sun rises over a.m., and the moon sinks down to p.m.

Its a.m., I say. There is too much going on around me. I am in nineteen different places at once.

No, its p.m.

But the sun is out, I say, pointing.

At twelve things turn p.m., she explains.

Then what turns everything a.m.?

Twelve, she says. There are two twelves. One turns everything p.m., and the other turns everything a.m.