Wiping her hands on one of the towelettes Joseph always included with his free lunches, Teresa continued. “Now, as Charna told you, my fee is nine-fifty.” The advocate’s usual fee was six hundred, but this case was going to take a lot more work than the others. “Did you bring the certified check?”
“I don’t understand. Linda Frank told me they had you on retainer.”
“We changed the terms of our agreement two weeks ago. Charna didn’t tell you?”
“No, she didn’t.”
“I’ll have to have a little talk with her about that,” Teresa said. “She’s been very forgetful lately. The poor girl is in her ninth month with her ninth kid. Anyway, my dear, you should know that I’m giving you the deal of a lifetime. No special ed attorney would let you through the door until you coughed up at least fifteen hundred bucks. And now I hear some of them have started charging extra if they win. My fee is a lot less than theirs to begin with. And that’s for everything. Flat rate. Flat fee. I make an honest living.”
After pausing for a few seconds, Mimi asked, “Would you be willing to take a regular check? I think I might have one somewhere in my bag.”
“Just this once,” the advocate said.
Mimi had been running across the same peripatetic check in her many long journeys through the mysterious contents of her backpack, but as she rummaged around for it now, she started having second thoughts, so when her fingertips found the check, which had made its way between the pages of a spiral notebook, she hesitated. She told Teresa it wasn’t there and the advocate said she could send her a check in the mail.
“Don’t forget to make it certified, my dear,” she said with a smile.
There were long delays on the subway for the trip back to Washington Heights, and for the entire two-hour trip home, Mimi conducted a debate with herself about Teresa Thompson. She came to the conclusion that it would be stupid for the advocate to lie about something as easy to prove false as a change in her payment policy. True, she didn’t think the advocate was the most soulful person in the world, but there were some things about her that Mimi liked. She liked that Teresa didn’t measure every word she uttered, so as not to offend. And she liked how bold she was. She also liked the uninhibited vigor with which she ate her pastrami sandwich.
As for her harsh manner, Mimi decided that Teresa Thompson was a lot like the waitresses at the Meatball Restaurant, where she had once worked as a cashier during a summer break from college. She had liked those brassy women; they were honest, unpretentious and tough.
The most important consideration of all, of course, was whether or not Teresa could win this case, and the advocate seemed confident that she could, just as she had won all the others. Ever since Danny’s diagnosis, Mimi had felt like a beggar. Maybe with this gutsy woman in charge, she wouldn’t have to be a beggar anymore.
By the time she was on the big escalator that led up to the street at the 181st Street subway station, Mimi was convinced that they should hire Teresa Thompson. Now it would be her husband’s turn to be skeptical.
When she got home, she told Jake all about her meeting with the advocate. She told him about the surprise change in the arrangement with the yeshiva regarding the advocate’s fee and how she had pretended not to be able to find the check. She told him that Teresa reminded her of the waitresses at the Meatball, tough like them, and that she imagined a lot of people found her intimidating, which was good. She said that she couldn’t remember ever having met anyone more sure of herself. Teresa Thompson didn’t seem to have a shred of self-doubt and she didn’t seem to have a care in the world.
“You can’t stand people like that,” Jake said. “What about her education?” Mimi said she didn’t see what difference that made. The woman had a perfect track record.
Together they went into the office and Googled “Teresa Thompson, Education Advocate.” There was an old article about her in a Jewish newspaper.
“That’s good. She has a handicapped child,” Mimi said.
“Big deal. So she found a way to make money out of her son’s disability.”
After Mimi had listened to Jake raise every objection he could think of, he agreed with her that they should hire Teresa Thompson, as both of them had known all along he would. The purpose of their debate had been to create the illusion they were making a logical choice when they both knew that, like every decision they had made about Danny since his diagnosis, this one was just another shot in the dark.
The next day, when Mimi called Teresa to report that the certified check was in the mail, the advocate told her to go to Scarsdale to deliver the first year’s tuition. There would also be a contract for her to sign.
Teresa was telling Mimi that as soon as she got the check, she would get the ball rolling when Mimi cut in to remind her that her son’s grandfather had left him that money for college. “I need you to tell me again. You’re sure we will get everything back? I still expect Danny to go to college,” she said. And then, speaking more to herself than to Teresa, she repeated, “I still expect Danny to go to college.”
“Not to worry, my dear. Your case is a slam-dunk,” Teresa responded cheerfully.
On her way back from Chaim Akiva, Mimi decided that going to a yeshiva might be good for Danny. Having been raised according to the conventions of Conservative Judaism, Mimi was very familiar with the Jewish traditions. Mimi’s mother had kept kosher, and every Passover she lined the kitchen cabinets and changed the dishes and threw out all the chametz; she lit candles to welcome in Shabbos, and Mimi’s parents took the family to services every Friday night and on all the High Holy Days.
Although Mimi could never bring herself to believe in any of it, she had always liked being part of this tradition; she thought it was quaint. Then when she was twelve, Mimi decided she was an atheist. As she recalled the day she proclaimed her atheism to her father, it amused, and surprised her, as well, to remember what a precocious and somewhat arrogant little girl she had been.
Her father was driving her home from Hebrew school when she told him that she had come to the conclusion that God didn’t exist and that she thought it was a waste of her time to be learning about things she knew weren’t true. She announced that she didn’t want to go to Friday night services anymore either because she didn’t want to be a hypocrite worshipping a God she didn’t believe in.
“Remember when we were little and you used to tell us that the moon was following us home in the car every night to keep us safe?” she said to her father. “That’s what God is like to me now.”
Her father told her that it was okay if she didn’t believe in God, but it made him sad to think of her life having no spiritual dimension at all, and the next day he gave her a bunch of books about transcendentalism to read. He told her to write an essay in response to them, and he said that if he thought her arguments were persuasive enough, that is, if she convinced him that there was something she believed in, other than God, she wouldn’t have to go to services or Hebrew school anymore.
Mimi’s father had told her exactly what he wanted to hear and she presented it to him in the essay she wrote, which she entitled, “The Flowers, the Trees, the Grass, the Mountaintop and Me.” He liked her essay and told her she had convinced him that being an atheist did not necessarily mean she was spiritually bankrupt.
Since Mimi would no longer be going to services, her parents wanted to find something to occupy their daughter while they were gone. Television seemed to offer the perfect solution, but as intellectuals committed to protecting their children from the corrupting influences of popular culture, they had never owned a TV. In the end they decided that their daughter’s moral sensibility was strong enough for there to be no harm in buying her a tiny television. Mimi’s father told her she couldn’t let her brother or sister know about it and that she would have to find a good hiding place for her little ten-by-ten-inch Philco.
Mimi’
s little black-and-white TV was magic to her. Friday nights, as soon as she heard the car starting up in the driveway, she would take it out of the bottom of her closet, where it had eagerly awaited her all week buried in a laundry basket filled with the clothes she used to wear to play dress-up, and she would spend the next three hours gorging on everything the three networks had to offer.
She would flip from channel to channel, not because she couldn’t find anything she liked, but because everything was so wonderful. Soon she was sneaking it out of her closet whenever she could. She decided that Shirley Booth, who played a maid on Hazel, was a great actress. She had her first orgasm watching Dr. Kildare during an episode in which the handsome doctor fell in love with one of his dying patients, something he apparently had a tendency to do. The weird game show, Queen for a Day, which featured three women competing against each other for the pity of the studio audience, repelled and fascinated her. Their descriptions of the lives that afflicted them were beyond anything she could imagine or comprehend. The woman judged to have suffered the most became the winner, thereby turning the other two women into double losers: having already lost the game of life, now they had lost this game show as well. It was so cruel. Every one of these women was in trouble. Why couldn’t they all be helped?
The more Mimi thought about it, the more it seemed to her that going to a yeshiva could be good for Danny. Her feelings about religion hadn’t changed much since her childhood, but religion had nothing to do with her calculations. People with autism loved rules, and Orthodox Jews lived strictly according to the rules. There was also the fact that Judaism, with its inexhaustible appetite for pronouncing on every possible contingency of every aspect of life, offered someone like Danny, who lacked the ability to think for himself about so many things, a blueprint for living. More important than all other considerations was the fact that Orthodox Jews embraced anyone who was committed to keeping the ancient traditions of Judaism alive.
Mimi’s thoughts about Orthodox Judaism evoked for her the early days, soon after she and Jake moved to Washington Heights, long before Danny was born. She would often see a man in a black hat and a black suit walking his son to shul. Back then, Mimi had only the vaguest idea of what autism was, but she could tell by the way the boy walked, shuffling his feet, his head bent to the side, his eyes cast upward toward the sky or at nothing in particular, never straight ahead, that he was autistic. He was in his twenties by now, but his father still had the same worried look on his face and he still always held his son’s hand whenever they walked down the street. There was also a teenaged boy with Down syndrome who lived in the small Jewish enclave a few blocks up the hill. Mimi would see his father taking him to services as well. And there was a young boy in a wheelchair; the rabbi of their synagogue gave his father permission to wheel his son to shul every Shabbos.
Mimi decided that if she had to, she would start lighting candles every Friday night and she would keep kosher like her mother had. Or at least she would stop mixing milk with meat. As far as pork was concerned, she had never been able to bring herself to buy pork anyway. It would be up to Danny how kosher they would be. Jake would take him to shul on Saturdays. He would take him to synagogue as often as Danny wanted.
After she and Jake were dead, if Danny wasn’t cured by then—a possibility that in her darkest moments Mimi realized she had to take into account—there would be an entire community ready to step in to welcome him with open arms.
The following Monday, Mimi got Danny up at six o’clock in the morning and dressed him in black pants and a white button-down shirt and a yarmulke and tztizit, and she waited with him for one of the little yellow school buses that take handicapped children to their special schools.
Standing on the corner with Danny, Mimi thought of the joke she had heard a stand-up comic make about those buses. It was a month after Danny’s diagnosis and she and Jake had been lying in bed watching television. Next to movies about serial killers, they liked watching stand-up comedy at the end of each long day. At one point the comic made a joke about someone “riding the short bus.” Mimi had often wondered what those little yellow buses were and now she knew. She had her head on Jake’s chest, where she always staked a claim, even if they were in the middle of a fight. When they heard the joke, neither of them bothered to say anything about it.
Mimi’s landlord, Mr. Gotbaum, did a double take when he saw Danny dressed up like a yeshiva boy. The landlord was a shy, quiet man, with an otherworldly air about him. He served as the sexton for the little synagogue located in the corner of the building. Every Saturday there would be a small parade of elderly European Jews going up and down the corrugated metal steps that led to the shtiebel, as tiny synagogues like this one were called. The steps were also a hangout for neighborhood kids, who would sit there and smoke cigarettes, except on Saturdays and during the Jewish holidays, when this small group of Dominicans would respectfully relinquish the steps to the old Jews.
Six years ago, on the day of Danny’s bris, Mr. Gotbaum had run into the mohel in the elevator. They were both members of the corner shtiebel, and the mohel had invited Mr. Gotbaum to participate in the ancient ritual. It was Mr. Gotbaum who had held Danny during the ritual snipping off of the foreskin, and the experience seemed to have permanently endeared Danny to him.
The day after the bris, he had come to their apartment to check the mezuzah. “It’s very important for everything to be right with it,” he had told Jake. When Jake asked him why, his only response was, “Never mind. Bad things.”
Although the scroll inside the mezuzah was intact, there was something about the case in which it was housed that upset Mr. Gotbaum, and the next morning when Mimi was leaving the apartment to go grocery shopping, she found her landlord standing at her front door with a screwdriver in his hand as he went about the task of replacing the bright white plastic cover with one that was a dull brown.
Although Mimi’s views about God hadn’t changed all that much since she was twelve, she often felt nostalgic about the trappings of Judaism. Oddly enough, she had many close friends who were devout believers in God. Her best friend was an ultra-Orthodox Jew. Giselle contended that Mimi, whether she knew it or not, was, in fact, very religious, and throughout the course of their long friendship she had been on a mission to persuade her to embrace Judaism. It was Giselle who had given her the white mezuzah that Mr. Gotbaum had turned to brown. The day before every Rosh Hashanah, she would slip a piece of paper under her door, listing, in her tiny, meticulous handwriting, all the times the shofar was scheduled to be blown. And every Friday, half an hour before sundown, Giselle would call to remind her to light Shabbos candles. For Mimi’s fortieth birthday, her friend had given her forty Shabbos candles, all forty of which still remained unlit.
If anything could have driven Mimi to seek comfort in religion, Danny’s diagnosis would have. But it didn’t.
Mimi was happy to see how happy Mr. Gotbaum was to see Danny in his yarmulke. She kind of liked seeing her son dressed that way, too. She told her landlord that Danny was starting his first day of yeshiva. She didn’t tell him they had decided to become religious, nor did she tell him that the only reason he was going to a special education yeshiva was because no other decent school was willing to accept him.
Danny kept on taking off his yarmulke—he said it tickled his head—and Mimi kept on telling him to put it back on. Mr. Gotbaum told Danny that it was a mitzvah to wear a yarmulke—that it was a symbol of God watching over you.
Mr. Gotbaum had a severely disabled daughter. Mimi didn’t think he knew that she knew about Wendy. His wife worked in the management office, and she and Mimi had developed a kind of friendship over the years, because of their children. Sometimes they would talk about their problems with The District. Susan once told her that The District psychologist had justified his decision to reduce their daughter’s occupational therapy hours because, according to the occupational therapy report, Wendy
had finally learned how to wrap her fingers around a spoon. Susan and Mr. Gotbaum were so upset they had yelled at the psychologist.
“We were very ashamed of ourselves for having been that rude,” she told Mimi, explaining that they had never before raised their voices in anger at anyone.
Susan never said exactly what was wrong with her daughter; there didn’t seem to be a name for it, but it was so bad that next to Wendy, Danny must have seemed like a regular kid to Mr. Gotbaum.
That first day at Chaim Akiva, Linda Frank called Mimi several times to complain about Danny. During morning prayers he refused to stand up when he was supposed to; he was always taking off his yarmulke and would try to take off the other boys’ yarmulkes as well; he made a lanyard out of the fringe on his tzitzit; during a lesson on kashruth, he announced to everyone that his favorite dish was shrimp lo mein. The phone calls continued over the coming weeks.
After several failed attempts to reason with Danny, Mimi tried bribing him with ice cream, and for a while it seemed to her that it worked because she stopped receiving frantic calls from Linda Frank every day.
Later, Mimi would regret that she had never bothered to consider how Danny might feel about going to a yeshiva. Her son, who always wanted to know the reasons for everything, must have been confused to be learning things that he knew couldn’t possibly be true—like a bush burning forever or like a sea splitting in half (which, according to Danny, would have created a “temporary isthmus”). But her son never complained. And even if he felt inclined to complain, he wouldn’t, because he didn’t know how to express how he felt about anything.
Danny seemed to enjoy learning a new language with an alphabet all its own, and Mimi was grateful for that. He knew all the Hebrew prayers. He knew that fruits that grew on vines required different prayers from those that grew on trees, as did vegetables that grew underground versus those that grew aboveground. Whenever Mr. Gotbaum saw Danny, he would quiz him on one thing or another having to do with the arcane laws of Judaism, and it delighted him that Danny always knew the answers.
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