At the beginning of Danny’s fifth year at Chaim Akiva, the Hebrew Free Loan Society refused to lend Mimi any more money. Honey Moskowitz, the loan officer who had been writing Mimi checks for years, told her that absent signed stipulations from The District, the auditors had forbidden her to make any more loans.
“But Teresa sent you the stipulations,” Mimi said.
“The only signatures on those stipulations were yours,” Honey told her. “I’m sorry to put it so bluntly, Mimi. I know how hard this has been for you. But according to our auditors, without The District’s signatures, those stips aren’t worth the paper they were written on.” The fear that overtook Mimi was so powerful it robbed her of thought and rendered her incapable of action.
Then, a few weeks into the spring semester, she received a registered letter from a lawyer representing Chaim Akiva, informing her that if she did not pay this year’s tuition, her son would not be allowed to return to school. The only option left was to send Danny to the public school up the block.
When Mr. Gotbaum saw Mimi leaving the house with Danny at seven thirty the following Monday morning, on their way to PS 187, he started to approach them, prepared with the question of the day, but as he got nearer, his crooked smile turned into a baffled frown.
“What, no yarmulke?” he asked.
“They kicked him out,” Mimi said.
“What did he do?” Mr. Gotbaum asked.
“He didn’t do anything,” Mimi answered. Mr. Gotbaum looked confused. “They were the ones who did something!”
“Who? What? What did they do?”
Mimi was afraid that Mr. Gotbaum’s feelings would be hurt if she told him the truth, and she was searching for a judicious way to explain what had happened when Danny darted across the street and jumped into the seat of a gigantic electric toy car that was being driven by a four-year-old.
One day the vice principal of PS 187 called to tell Mimi that during recess one of the monitors caught Danny dancing like a monkey for a crowd of children throwing pennies at him. When Mimi asked about Danny’s aide (the “crème de la crème,” The District superintendent, a man in a silk suit with manicured nails and a large diamond stud in his ear, had told her when she’d planted herself outside his office in a last-ditch effort to get them to hire the master’s student from NYU who had been going to school with Danny for the past year), Mrs. Catallozzi told her Latisha had been on the other side of the schoolyard playing potsy with a group of sixth graders at the time.
He doesn’t belong here, the vice principal told her, as she had many times in the past. He needs to be in a special school. She never believed Mimi when she told her that none of the special education schools wanted Danny.
A few weeks after the incident, Mimi’s sister told her about a report she had just heard on NPR about a small middle school for “high-functioning” autistic children that had just opened up on Long Island. It wasn’t on the list of schools The District funded, but Mimi took Danny to visit it anyway, half hoping she wouldn’t like it and half hoping she would.
Years of disappointment with special education should have taught her to be wary, but it wasn’t in Mimi’s nature to be wary, and the visit to the school left her with a renewed sense of optimism. When she called The District psychologist (a woman she despised) to tell her she had found a school for Danny, Dr. Daisy Hench declared that Danny was doing very well at PS 187.
Mimi contended that the school wasn’t “appropriate.” She carefully enunciated every syllable of the word that was written into the law giving handicapped children the right to an education. The term was the rope in the never-ending tug-of-war between parents and The District. Mimi said Danny needed a special education school, to which the psychologist responded with a reprimand. “I think you’re underestimating your son, Mrs. Slavitt,” she said. “He’s getting straight A’s in the honor class. The consensus among all his teachers is that he’s the smartest kid in the school. He even has a best friend.”
“Oh. Howard Brodner,” Mimi said. “He and Danny aren’t friends. They’re just the class outcasts. PS 187 is not appropriate.”
The loathsome woman reminded her that she had the right to call for a hearing.
The only way Danny would be able to go to the school on Long Island was if The District gave Mimi the money they owed her, and having spent the past year exploring every possible option, she decided she would have to go see Teresa Thompson in Kew Gardens and get her to do her job, once and for all. She would threaten to sue the advocate to make her pay back all the promised reimbursements with her own money. She would threaten to sue her for malpractice. She would threaten to tell the newspapers, the parents who worshiped her, every disability organization she could think of, about the advocate’s appalling incompetence and egregious neglect. Mimi would see to it that Teresa never had moment of peace until she followed through on all the promises she had made.
When Mimi arrived at the building, the front door was locked. She rang the buzzer. No one answered. Looking up, she noticed something new—a closed-circuit camera, the kind of security device used by drug dealers and movie stars.
Mimi crossed the street to give herself a better vantage point from which to look up at the windows to see if anyone was there. The lights were on, and Teresa was sitting at her desk, talking on the phone. Mimi went back to the building, and looking into the camera, she put her finger on the buzzer and she kept it there, every now and then, when one finger started to get numb, switching to another. Eventually she started beating out different rhythms to express her feelings of rage, humiliation, hatred, frustration and horror.
Teresa came out of her office and asked, “What’s with the racket?”
“It’s The Pest,” Gail told her. The sound of rhythmic, angry buzzing filled the room.
“After all you’ve done for her, this is the way she behaves,” said Charna. “She called you twenty times yesterday!”
“Well, like I say, the woman’s a little cuckoo,” Teresa said, making a face that elicited ripples of laughter from her staff.
“What do you want me to do?” Gail asked.
“Just ignore her,” Teresa said.
“That buzzing. It’s driving me crazy,” Charna complained.
“Put on some music,” Teresa said.
Gail turned on the radio, which Teresa, who liked seeing how far she could go to get these women to let their hair down, so to speak, had set to the Golden Oldies station. Little Richard’s “Good Golly, Miss Molly” was playing. “Come on, girls, let’s dance,” Teresa said, and the women, following Teresa’s lead, tentatively started to move their hips to the furiously happy beat.
Teresa stood there, watching the women dance. She turned the music up louder, and the women danced faster, some of them dislodging their sheitels in the process. They looked ridiculous, even more ridiculous than Nathan had looked last week at the church bazaar. He had been sitting on a chair in the corner, looking glum, and when the band started playing “Roll Over Beethoven,” Teresa pulled him out of his seat and started to twirl him around on the dance floor. Everyone was staring at them, but she didn’t care. Her son was laughing and having fun, and that was all that mattered to her.
Yolanda
Yolanda, the security guard, sat in a tiny chair behind a school desk at the entrance of the rundown building on West 181st Street that served as headquarters for The District offices. An enormous woman with breasts the size of throw pillows straining the coarse blue fabric of her uniform, she wore her hair pulled up on top of her head in a tight bun; the style fit the determined expression carved into the cool black marble of her face. She hated her job, and probably was surly to everyone, but Mimi took it personally, because Mimi took everything personally.
Searching through the various compartments of her backpack, Mimi finally found her driver’s license. “Sorry. I’m very disorganized,” she sai
d with a nervous laugh.
The security guard’s face was a mask of disapproval. After inspecting Mimi’s ID, Yolanda told her to sign her name in the log, a child’s composition book from which dangled a pencil attached to a frayed piece of dirty twine. Mimi’s large, unwieldy signature, made clumsier by her irritation at the unnecessary delay, lapped over the signature of the person above hers and over the empty spaces reserved for the people who would arrive after her.
“You’re messing up my book,” Yolanda said.
“I’m sorry,” Mimi said, “but that’s how I sign my name.”
“You should sign it different,” Yolanda said.
Upstairs on the sixth floor, Mimi found herself in a large room. It was painted hospital green. On the walls were posters, most of them in Spanish, warning pregnant women not to drink alcohol and listing phone numbers for victims of domestic abuse. Lining the walls were a dozen mothers, sitting on plastic chairs of assorted colors, shapes and sizes. The women sat staring into space while their children sat in the corner, playing with a broken-down dollhouse and a scattered assortment of similarly disabled toys laid out for their amusement.
Whenever Mimi brought Danny here, he never showed any interest in the toys. It was only the bathroom with its boarded-up bathtub that captured his attention. Explaining how such a fantastic thing could come to be, Mimi told her son that the office used to be an apartment. This fascinated Danny, who declared his determination to get a sledgehammer and restore the apartment back to its original state, and continued to do so every time he came here.
After signing her name in another notebook, Mimi rushed to the bathroom to adjust her pantyhose, which having begun their descent down her thighs shortly after she left her apartment, had migrated a few inches above her knees. Returning to her seat, she stared at the children and wondered what was wrong with each and every one of them.
An hour later a sad woman with a stooped back and frizzy hair came to deliver her to the conference room, where a group of people sat around a large metal table. Like so many of the children they were supposed to serve, there was something odd-looking about the people who worked in The District office. The head hit man, Dr. Daisy Hench, had large veiny hands and a gigantic jaw, and when she spoke, only her lips moved, reminding Mimi of a character in a cheap animated cartoon. The learning specialist, Fredda Doverspike, had the strangely elongated look of stretched-out Silly Putty. Dr. Hench’s ally, backing her every play, was Van Stone. He had some kind of chronic migratory rash on his neck, psoriasis, Mimi supposed, and a bad case of dandruff, which kept him busy brushing white flakes of dead skin off his shoulders.
Today was four weeks before the start of summer and four weeks away from the end of Chaim Akiva’s school year. Mimi had come to ask The District to pay for a summer camp for Danny, who was now nine. Dr. Hench, after spending a few seconds flipping through the papers Mimi had given her, said with her dead face, “The documentation does not support your son’s need for a summer program.”
Mimi felt the familiar pain in her throat, the burning behind her eyes. Before Danny’s diagnosis she had never cried in front of strangers; she had never cried in front of friends; she had never cried in front of anyone except her parents and her husband. Now she cried in front of everyone. The District people hated it when she cried. Displays of emotion disgusted them. Still, Mimi had managed to win more battles than she had lost. Lately, however, she seemed to have reached an impasse.
“I don’t understand. Please read the documentation,” she said.
Why after years of meetings like this did the cruelty and indifference of these people still hurt so much? Speechless, Mimi pointed to the pile of research studies and journal articles she had assembled; the letters she had carefully crafted for doctors to sign.
Dr. Hench spent another second flipping through the papers and then she said again with her hateful smile, “The documentation does not support your son’s need for a summer program.”
“What?” Mimi asked in a voice so soft she seemed to be talking to herself.
Addressing the wall above Mimi’s head, Dr. Hench said in the slow, even tones of a person gifted with endless patience, “If you disagree with our conclusion, you have the right to a fair hearing.” Then she smiled again. They always smiled. They smiled but they hardly ever looked Mimi in the eye. This was something she and Jake had worked so hard to teach their son. For months following Danny’s diagnosis, they had sat him down at his baby table and said to him, simply, “Look at me.”
Visions of Danny at home for the summer piled up in Mimi’s mind: there she was keeping frantic watch over him on the playground, making sure he didn’t dive off the top of the monkey bars like a bird; and later, at home, she stood in the doorway of his room, yelling at him for pulling the tassels off the throw cushions on his bed, or carving Jewish stars into the soft pine of his desk with a knife he had taken out of the kitchen drawer.
“But how will my son spend the summer?” Mimi asked.
“He can do the same things that other children do over the summer,” the psychologist replied.
“But my son isn’t like other children,” Mimi said.
Dr. Hench, still with that vile grin, again informed her of her right to bring the matter before a judge. By which time, of course, the summer would be over.
Every time Mimi came to this building, there would always be Yolanda sitting behind the little school desk in the lobby, insisting that she produce her ID. Being forced to prove her identity to the same person over and over again was a source of increasing irritation to Mimi, and the more irritated she became, the more time Yolanda would spend examining her driver’s license, copying down each number in her round, childlike handwriting with painstaking precision and care.
As the years passed, Mimi’s resentment grew and eventually she was pouring all her frustration out onto the security guard; she hated her and Yolanda hated her in return. Mimi liked hating Yolanda, and Yolanda seemed to like hating Mimi. There was an intimacy to their hatred, a kind of freedom. They scowled and gestured angrily at each other. Muttering under their breath, they called each other names.
Then on a day that happened to be Danny’s eleventh birthday, Mimi was signing her name at the front desk and she noticed that Yolanda had changed her hairdo. It was done in a short pixie cut, instead of the severe-looking bun that usually sat on top of her head.
Without thinking about it, Mimi said to the security guard, “You changed your hair! It looks great!”
Mimi was by nature an amiable person. Whenever she noticed that a woman had a new hairdo or that she was wearing a new dress or hat or shoes—she always complimented her, whether she liked the alteration the woman had made in her appearance or not. In fact, the more hideous the change, the more effusive Mimi would be, in an effort hide her embarrassment over what the woman had done to herself.
Although the pixie cut was completely wrong for a woman as big and fat as Yolanda, Mimi liked it because it made the security guard seem less forbidding, maybe even a little vulnerable, innocent even, since Yolanda could have no idea how silly she looked in this ridiculous new hairdo.
Yolanda appeared to be confused by Mimi’s compliment, but she seemed to be pleased by it as well.
After going through the usual routine of signing the log, Mimi went to the elevator. As she stood in front of it, keeping careful watch over its suspenseful descent from the eighth floor, she found herself getting lost in a long meditation about hair and the power it had to affect a woman’s looks, more than makeup, clothes, jewelry or facials. Mimi’s last haircut, five years ago, had left her in such a state of despair she had vowed to never let a hairdresser near her again as long as she lived.
When Mimi and Yolanda met again on opposite sides of the tiny desk in the lobby a few weeks later, the security guard was almost friendly, although she continued to insist that Mimi produce her ID before si
gning the book.
In February, Mimi brought Danny with her to The District office. He was scheduled to undergo the same useless battery of tests every year. When Mimi arrived at the entrance with him, she greeted Yolanda, and searching his eyes, she put her hands on Danny’s shoulders and told her son, “This is Mommy’s friend Yolanda. Say hello to Yolanda.”
“Hello to Yolanda,” Danny said.
“Hello to Danny,” Yolanda responded and asked him if he would like to write his name in the ledger. When he did, she complimented him on his handwriting.
“It’s a lot neater than your mother’s,” she added. To which Danny responded by asking, “A phalange is what?”
“A phalange,” Yolanda said. “That’s a big word. I don’t know such big words.”
“A phalange is what?”
“Danny,” Mimi said. “What did we say about asking rhetorical questions?”
“A phalange is what?” he repeated.
“Why don’t you tell me what it is, Danny?” Yolanda said.
“Honey,” Mimi said, putting her hands on Danny’s shoulders again. “What is a phalange?”
“A phalange is a finger bone or a toe bone,” he said. “There are fifty-six phalanges in the human body, fourteen phalanges on each hand and foot. Three phalanges on each finger and toe, except for the thumb and large toe.”
“What a smart boy you are,” Yolanda said.
“A phalange is what?” Danny asked.
“Danny!” Mimi said.
“It’s a finger bone or toe bone,” Yolanda said with a wink.
One day Mimi rushed past the security desk, hoping that she would be able to make it to the elevator before Yolanda could catch up with her. She was late; she usually didn’t care whether or not she was late; they always kept her waiting forever anyway, but today she was going to be arguing her case before a judge. Mimi had come to ask The District to approve the school on Long Island.
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