I picked Danny up and held him tightly in my arms. Ellen remarked how attractive he was. Then, her voice reassuming the professional, reflective tone she had maintained throughout the past two hours, she said, “That’s good. That will work in his favor. People will want to help him.”
In the car, Jake and I speculated about what Ellen could have meant by that strange remark. To begin with, it gave us a glimpse of what we would be up against, what a long journey lay ahead of us. Danny would need a lot of help. And this help would not be forthcoming simply because he needed it. He would have to compete for it, wrest it perhaps from other children who were just as needy, but hopefully less attractive.
Before we left, I asked Ellen to let Danny into her school, and when she explained, still smiling, that she didn’t know, all the spaces had been filled, I begged her to make a spot for Danny. Ellen told me not to be so anxious. Everything was going to be just fine.
I asked her what we should do with Danny in the meantime.
“Just relax and enjoy the rest of your summer,” she said.
While I made a living copyediting romance novels, Jake wrote technical manuals for a software company. We both spent all our spare time writing fiction and had progressed from youth to middle age confident that sooner or later one or both of us would achieve some kind of literary success, which was why we had crummy freelance jobs that gave us time for writing, but which paid much less than what my father had earned as the advertising manager for an import-export firm and what Jake’s father had earned as the owner of a small machine shop when we were growing up.
In the parking lot I told Jake that I was going to drop my novel. I knew he couldn’t stop working on his, but would he please work on it at home now, instead of taking his laptop to cafés, as was his habit. He agreed. He said he would go crazy if he abandoned his novel. But yes, of course he would be there; we would work with Danny together.
The idea that we would ever think of putting Danny in a special education school would have been unimaginable to us a few hours ago, but now we were desperate for him to be accepted at this school in Riverdale. One way or another, I would get them to find room for him. I would just have to be persistent.
When I told my friends about Danny, I felt that I was telling them good-bye—not forever, but for now. I was about to go on a long journey, and I didn’t expect anyone but Jake to go with me. I wished my friends well, and they wished me well, too.
I wanted to cancel our next appointment with Stan. I never wanted to see him again. But Jake disagreed. He said that what we were going through would be very stressful and he thought that Stan might be able to help us deal with the stress. I had no idea how Jake could think that Stan could be of any use to us. Perhaps it was a symptom of his distress. Whatever the reason, I didn’t bother to argue with him about it.
Stan’s office was on the nineteenth floor. It wasn’t as nice as his previous office, which hadn’t been all that nice, and when he had moved there about six months into our therapy, Jake and I had worried that he might not be doing well. Had he moved there for the convenience of his clients, since it was closer to the subway station, as he had claimed, or had he moved there because the rent was cheaper?
My sister was waiting for us outside the building. “Hi, Danny!” she said.
He answered, “Hi, Danny!”
There was a row of elevators in the lobby of Stan’s building. Danny would have a tantrum if he didn’t get to ride the same elevator he had ridden the first time we brought him here, and I was relieved to see that his favorite elevator was there waiting for us. Once inside, Danny looked up at the mirrored ceiling and said what he always said when he was in Stan’s elevator. “Shiny elevator.” Jake had to hold his hands to prevent him from pushing all the buttons from 1 to 20.
Trying to push all the buttons was part of Danny’s routine, and having Jake stop him was part of Danny’s routine, as well; he wanted Jake to grab his hands to stop him just as much as he wanted to push all the buttons. To be at an impasse, to have the same argument over and over and over again and to get nowhere with it, that wasn’t a problem from Danny’s perspective; it seemed to be precisely what he wanted out of life.
As the numbers lit up, Danny recited them. “One, two, three, four …” A woman in a yellow dress smiled and said what a bright boy he was. True, we reminded ourselves. The psychologist who had evaluated him had said he was very smart, although he had many developmental delays.
When we got to the waiting room, Stan was in session with another patient. Danny ran to the door.
“No, Danny, don’t go in.”
“Because why?”
“Because it’s private.”
“Because why?”
“It just is, take my word.”
“Let me.”
“No, Danny.”
“Because why?”
“Because I need you to hug me,” I said, and picked him up.
“You’re confusing him, Mimi!” said Ruth. “It should be what he needs, not what you need!” Then addressing Danny, speaking in a soft, gentle voice, she said, “It’s all right, Danny, you don’t have to hug your mother if you don’t want to. It’s up to you who you hug.” Usually a dig like this from my sister would have been enough to set off a major fight between us, but I refrained from saying anything.
Jake and I had both noticed that Ruth was good with Danny. My sister had been insisting for a long time that Danny had serious problems. She was more successful than most people at getting his attention. She spoke to him softly and slowly, she waited for him to answer her, and she always insisted on a response.
A grim-looking young woman contemplating the wisdom she had just received from Stan Shapiro came out of the office, and it was time for us to go in.
Danny ran out of the waiting room into Stan’s office, where he tried to climb on the windowsills. Jake, as always, ran after him. “No, Danny.” Below was the industrial-looking roof of the neighboring building with a much lower elevation, on which stood something that looked like a giant fan whirling. “What’s that?” Danny asked as always. “I don’t know,” Jake said as usual. “What’s that?” Danny asked again. “What’s that? What’s that? What’s that?”
Stan had never approved of Jake following Danny around like a “nervous Nellie.” What a nervous father. What a couple of nutty parents.
Stan affected a more casual air than usual during that last session. He sat the entire time in his reclining chair, his feet up, the soles of his new shoes staring out at us. Whenever I think about that encounter, I always remember the soles of Stan’s shiny new shoes. I remember thinking, irrelevantly, that this must have been the first time he was wearing them since there were many parts where the leather was shiny, clean and unscratched from the dirty concrete sidewalks of the city below. Stan had recently purchased a new wardrobe, a sign, I had speculated, that he might have a new girlfriend. Or boyfriend. This was something that Jake and I would have fun talking about during our after-session breakfasts at the Kiev—whether Stan was gay.
I sat down in the chair nearest the door; I wanted to be as close as possible to Danny, close to where he was waiting with Ruth in the tiny room outside Stan’s office. Jake kept on pacing up and down the floor, and when Stan asked him to sit down—he was making him nervous—he sat down on the couch. Jake sat the way he always sits when he is on edge about something, leaning forward with his neck stretched out, his hands on his knees.
He told Stan about the books we had been reading, about our efforts to learn as much as we could about Danny’s condition and what could be done to help him. One phrase that kept cropping up was “brain plasticity.” Had Stan heard of this? It seemed that the human brain created neurons much more easily in early childhood.
If Stan was paying any attention to Jake’s little lesson on brain development, he might have thought that Jake was implying that i
t was his—Stan Shapiro’s—fault that we had wasted a year and a half of our son’s precious time. But I knew Jake: it wasn’t like him to hint or to insinuate; I knew that he had simply retreated into the realm of reason, his usual refuge in times of stress, and that in his abstracted state of mind he was inviting Stan, that asshole, to join him there.
Jake was the opposite of me that way. I could never distance myself from anything. It was as though I had no skin.
The fact that Jake and I were so different from each other was at the root of many of our problems. I’m not the same as you, he was always telling me. I’m not you and you’re not me. It was a concept that was almost impossible for me to grasp.
Jake got up and started pacing back and forth as he spoke about the evaluation. “Why don’t you sit down?” Stan said. “You’re making me dizzy.”
“Well, we’re upset, you see,” Jake said.
To which Stan responded, “You sound hysterical. There’s nothing to be upset about.”
That was what he had told me when I called him after the Riverdale evaluation. That I sounded hysterical.
“Oh, I think there’s plenty to be upset about,” I spat out.
Stan pretty much ignored me and directed most of what he had to say to Jake. He reported that he had called the psychologist who had evaluated Danny, and although she did not yet have the results, from what she said, it sounded to Stan as if Danny had Asperger syndrome. He did not seem to be the slightest bit embarrassed or apologetic.
One thing I had learned, as I traversed the different time zones, calling everyone I could lay my hands on, running our phone bill up into the hundreds of dollars in those days before free long-distance, was that autism was treatable, in some cases even curable, if caught early enough.
My biggest fear was that it was too late for Danny, and one day I got up the nerve to ask the mother of an eight-year-old I had been calling for advice, sometimes as often as two or three times a day. She lived in Ohio and also happened to be named Mimi. Maybe that was why I had become so dependent on her.
Mimi, who had quit her job as a professor of neuroscience to devote herself to taking care of her son, told me about a form of behaviorism recommended in a memoir written by the mother of two autistic children who had been cured. The therapy hadn’t cured Mimi’s son, but she believed that it was the only one out there that made any sense. It was the only one with any science behind it. In her book the woman cited studies that claimed a nearly 50 percent cure rate. However, in order for that 50 percent cure to be a possibility, the program had to be started before the child turned five. After five, there would be no chance of a 50 percent cure.
“Danny is four and a half,” I told her. “Are we too late?”
“You have to get in there right away,” Mimi answered. “You have to turn him around. Point him in another direction.”
I started to cry.
“This will change you,” she told me, saying something I would hear time and time again over the course of the next several weeks. The terrible thing that happened to other people, the thing that changed their lives forever, had happened to Jake and me. And here was this asshole in shiny new shoes claiming that nothing had changed and therefore he had done nothing wrong.
“You knew something was going on before, didn’t you?” Stan was saying. “Now you have a label for it, that’s all. Don’t you think you’re attaching too much significance to the label?”
“No, we don’t,” I said.
“Well, I think you are. Your child is the same child he was before the evaluation.”
“But now we know something about him that we didn’t know before,” Jake said.
“But what you know is just a word that’s been applied to him to describe the behavior you’ve been witnessing all along.”
“If I was diagnosed with diabetes, a doctor would prescribe insulin for me and tell me that I should stay away from sweets,” said Jake. “So a label does make a difference. It makes a difference in the—”
“This is such bullshit!” I shouted. “There is something wrong with my son’s brain, and you’re talking semantics!”
“I don’t see any reason for you to raise your voice,” said Stan.
The conversation went on like that for the rest of the session, with Stan becoming more and more defensive and more and more insistent that it didn’t matter when we got Danny evaluated, because there was still plenty of time, and labels didn’t matter.
Near the session’s end, when we were standing at the door, me with my backpack on my back, Jake with his, Stan said, “I could give both of you labels if I wanted to, but what would it mean?”
“Go on,” I said. “Tell us, Stan. What are our labels?”
“Honey, stop,” Jake said.
“This is silly,” said Stan.
“Go on, tell us our labels.”
“Stop, Mimi,” Jake repeated.
But I wouldn’t stop, and finally Stan said, “Well, all right. Since you insist. If I wanted to give you a label, I would call you a histrionic personality.”
“And Jake? What’s his label?”
“If I had to give Jake a label, I would call him a schizoid personality.”
(A couple of years later, Jake and I were waiting for Danny to come out of the office of a new psychiatrist who had been recommended to us. There was a copy of the DSM-IV on the cocktail table. We looked ourselves up and discovered that, in Stan’s opinion, Jake was a cold, unemotional loner and I dressed like a whore and demanded a lot of attention.)
Danny was in the vestibule with Ruth, twisting his body into the shapes of letters, a favorite game of his, when we made our exit from Stan’s office. I picked him up and hugged him tightly to me, kissing him, and burying my face in his neck and breathing in his sweet and sour smell.
“How’s my baby! Did you miss me! Did you miss your mommy!”
Ruth said, “Mimi, stop it! You’re overwhelming him!”
After what I had just been through with Stan, I was ready for a fight, but just as I was about to begin my rampage, Danny started to squirm in my arms. The door to Stan’s office was still open, and he managed to wriggle his way out of my arms, and to run back into the office.
He headed straight for the couch and started burrowing his way under the cushions. He ignored every effort I made to capture his attention. Stan was standing with his arms folded over his chest, observing the scene with the same detached expression that hadn’t left his face during the past fifty minutes.
I looked at him, and then at Danny. All of a sudden, I found myself asking Stan Shapiro, of all people, what we should do about the way Danny never listened. I felt that desperate, and Stan was the only person there.
Stan nodded, acknowledging that, yes, it was hard to be a parent. “You just have to try harder,” he said.
As we were walking to the car, which was parked across the street from Stan’s office, I said to Jake, “Well, that was a complete waste of time.”
“Okay,” said Jake. “You were right.”
“We don’t need any more metaphysical discussions about the meaning of the word ‘label,’” I told him.
“Okay.”
“I told you I didn’t want to come here.”
“Yes, you told me. You told me. Okay.”
On the way to the car I spotted a short, muscular man with thinning brass-colored hair. He was wearing a well-tailored gray suit and thick aviator glasses that magnified his eyes to twice their size.
“Look. There’s Phil,” I told Jake.
“Oh God, yes.”
“Why ‘Oh God’?”
“I don’t know.”
“Say hello to him.”
“Sure, okay.”
“What’s wrong?”
“What do you think?”
Phil was one of Jake’s two friends;
Jake has had other friends in his life but there were only two friends he was in contact with now, two he actually spoke to on a regular basis, which for Jake meant every six months. Phil worked near 14th Street and we had run into him once or twice before on the way to Stan’s office, which was right across the street from the Outerspace Bookstore, one of Phil’s favorite hangouts. That had been bad enough, having to say we were seeing a marriage counselor. This was not a good Jake-Phil topic.
Jake and Phil, both in their forties, usually confined their conversations with each other to the same kinds of subjects they had been talking about, with other conversational partners, since they had been nerdy non-sports-playing adolescents thirty years ago: books, ideas, sex. The question “What are you reading now?” would always come up right away. In a recent conversation Jake had been reading a book about quantum physics for nonscientists and Phil had been reading about the Jacobites. Phil, like Jake, could be witty and amusing if he was in the mood. And, also like Jake, in another mood he could be horribly informative. He could go on about the Jacobites until it seemed—even to someone like Jake—that facts had no purpose and life had no meaning.
Eventually, after their interests of the moment had been explored, one of them, usually Phil, would enter into the part of the conversation set aside for feminine topics: How is Mimi? How is Danny? Jake would ask about Sandy, Phil’s wife, whom Jake and I had never met because, according to Phil, she refused to meet any of his friends. Sometimes we would wonder if Sandy could be an invention of Phil’s peculiar mind, buit on further thought, we concluded she had to exist since she caused Phil too much trouble not to be real.
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