Much of my initial reaction to Leo’s diagnosis had its roots in my parents’ habit of stereotyping other people, which shaped my values concerning people who were different. If it wasn’t about the color of other people’s skin, it was about their behavior or physical appearance. “Retards” is what Mom called the mentally slow students in the elementary school Dale and I attended. Her stiff posture and the heightened inflection in her voice when she was around them told me that I should stay far away, as if they had the plague. She noticed every stranger with a physical flaw or mental deficit and made a point of telling me how lucky I was to be normal, even though Mom was sensitive enough to their handicap that she would not let me point. Still, her views soaked in and became part of my inheritance from her, just like my olive skin.

I picked up lessons from my father, too. In the basement Dad kept his private possessions in a solid oak rolltop desk next to his workbench. When Mom and Dad got dressed up and went out, I’d scramble down the basement stairs and pull a string attached to a bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling. Then I rummaged through the drawers, not knowing what I’d find. I stumbled across war souvenirs—bullet shells, Nazi badges and playing cards with nude women on them.

There was also a row of books. I wasn’t raised a reader, but I was curious. I reached for the thick book with a plain blue spine. Inside, I discovered medical malformations—giant skin growths and the like. I had no idea why Dad had it. I never asked, and I was glad I didn’t have those problems.

But then, I didn’t have any real problems, and I was constantly assured of this. Mom always compared me and my brother to our cousins as her way of telling us that we were normal—and probably better than average. Frankly, I never thought otherwise and had no clue as to what abnormal meant, other than her rants on the telephone about people who were. Half the time, I didn’t understand her because she talked in Slovak.

Everyone in Mom’s family, all her friends and especially her children were, as she would say, normal. My relatives rarely discussed the one instance of “not normal” on my father’s side of the family, and then the subject only came up in the course of visiting my aunt and uncle in Florida for Christmas. Their daughter, Jennifer, had been born mentally retarded. “What a shame,” Dad would say, lowering his eyes and changing the subject to his favorite, the weather.

I kept quiet when Dad mentioned my cousin, who was about a year older than me. Jennifer was pudgy with thin brown hair and a beauty mark on her cheek. She talked in slow motion, and I wanted to pull the words out of her mouth. She didn’t listen very well to her mom and snuck sweets when she thought no one was watching. Jennifer was friendly enough to me, but I hung out more frequently with her younger sister. We had more in common, since she liked gymnastics and was pretty. Still, I felt sorry for Jennifer, and I thought she’d be lucky to find a job when she grew up.

We stopped going to Florida after I graduated from Lorain High School in 1974. After that, I didn’t see my relatives very much and neither did my parents. My dad called his brother on his birthday and vice versa, but that was about it. I’d ask about my cousins, always saving my questions about Jennifer for last as if she didn’t matter as much. My mom told me that after she moved to a group home for the mentally retarded, she met a boyfriend and left the home to live in a trailer with him. She got pregnant, but my aunt and uncle made her get an abortion and then sterilized her. At the time, I couldn’t believe that they had taken away her right to bear children. But after I had to deal with the burdens of a child with special needs, I began to understand they probably did that because they couldn’t handle anything more.