“Where do you think you’re going?” Yolanda asked, grabbing Mimi’s arm just as she was about to run into the elevator. Now it would be at least another four minutes before she would be able to catch another one up to the eighth floor.
Mimi ran back to the desk and scribbled her name in the register, tearing the paper in the process.
“Your ID.”
“I can’t believe this,” Mimi said.
“Rules is rules,” Yolanda said.
Mimi searched her wallet. “I can’t find the fucking thing,” she said, dumping the entire contents of her backpack onto the little school desk, sending loose coins, hairpins, rubber bands, crumpled-up bits of paper and disconnected Tampax holders flying all over the place.
“Please, give me a break, Yolanda. I was supposed to be here fifteen minutes ago! I have a hearing today. It’s important. I finally found a school for Danny.”
“Go, just go,” Yolanda said, rushing to hold the elevator door open as Mimi scrambled to dump everything back into her bag.
Everyone she’d consulted about this hearing had assured Mimi that The District would approve the school, but she could tell as soon as she entered the room that she didn’t have a chance. She could tell by the look on the face of the hearing officer, who was engaged in a spirited conversation with Van Stone and Daisy Hench when she entered the room.
“You’re late,” the hearing officer said, the previously lively expression on her face turning blank.
“Yes, I know, I’m sorry,” Mimi said.
The hearing officer looked at her watch. After dealing with the usual formalities, she asked The District to present its case, which consisted of them stating that Danny was in a perfectly appropriate placement now.
“No,” Mimi said. “It is not appropriate.”
When it came time for her to present her case for the school, Mimi called the principal. The line was busy. She had phoned his secretary five times yesterday, to make sure he would be available to take her call. Without his testimony, she had no case at all. She redialed his number. The hearing officer exchanged exasperated glances with Daisy Hench as Mimi continued to dial and redial the principal’s phone number.
Impatiently, the officer announced: “You have one more chance and that’s it.”
Mimi dialed again. The line was still busy.
“We have other hearings on the schedule,” Dr. Hench said with her frozen smile. “You’re not the only mother in the world, Mrs. Slavitt, who thinks she has found the perfect school for her child.”
When Mimi started dialing again, Daisy Hench, Van Stone and the hearing officer looked at one another, and all at once, the three of them reached to grab the receiver away from her.
“Please,” Mimi said. She held the phone clenched in her fist. “Just one more time.”
“We have other hearings on the schedule,” Dr. Hench repeated.
Ignoring them, Mimi went back to dialing the phone.
“I told you. That’s it,” the hearing officer said.
Mimi knew that if she stayed here a second longer, she would either end up begging them to wait until the principal answered his phone or humiliate herself in some other way, like telling them to go fuck themselves. Her eyes cast downward, she gathered up her documents and stuffed them into her backpack. Getting up out of her chair, she left the room without saying a word.
“Where does she think she’s going?” the hearing officer asked Dr. Hench, who responded with a frown and a shrug.
Van Stone, brushing the dandruff off his shoulders so vigorously that a few white flakes went flying onto the lapel of Dr. Hench’s chocolate brown blazer, responded with a shrug of his own.
Mimi felt like a zombie as she walked down the hall and down the stairs, past Yolanda, who was sitting at her desk in the lobby.
“Mimi! Are you okay?” the security guard called out after her.
Looking back at Yolanda for a second, Mimi started to run down the street. The security guard, leaving her post, ran after her. When she caught up with Mimi, Yolanda pulled her to her breast.
“You’re tired, mami,” she said. “You need to go home and sleep. You’re a good mother. But now you have to go home and sleep. Go home, mami. Go home and sleep. Go to sleep. You need to take care of yourself. You need to sleep.”
Mimi decided she would allow herself to stand in the middle of the sidewalk on 181st Street with her cheek pressed against her old enemy’s big, soft bosom for another second or two. Then she would go home and get on the phone. There was a woman in a high-level position at The District with whom she had recently established a kind of rapport; maybe she would be able to do something to help, and if she couldn’t, perhaps she would know someone who could.
Two Mothers
Aviva Brodner was putting the finishing touches on the “S” in “Samuels” when the light in the kitchen shifted, turning the shadows her fingers cast on the envelope into talons. She looked up to see the room ablaze with the brightness of the late afternoon. The sun was setting over the George Washington Bridge. She spent a moment admiring the view before getting back to the business of addressing invitations to her son’s bar mitzvah.
Reluctantly dipping the nib of her pen in the inkwell that came with her calligraphy set, Aviva wrote “Danny Slavitt” on an envelope. She hated to admit it, but Danny Slavitt was the closest thing to a friend Howard had ever had. As the kids no one picked to join in special projects, the two boys had been thrown together into an unlikely union. Together they had built a lopsided model of the Empire State Building, graphed the entire course of the Nile River in red Play-Doh, mapped a road trip to Singapore and created DNA fingerprints out of each other’s saliva.
Despite these and many similarly shared experiences, the distinction of being the class outcasts seemed to be the only thing Danny and Howard had in common. Where Howard was fearful, Danny was fearless; where Howard was quiet and timid, Danny said anything that popped into his mind, no matter how outrageous or ridiculous; and where Howard suffered unbearable shame at the hands of the bullies, Danny never seemed to know that he was an object of scorn, or if he did, it was a matter of complete indifference to him.
Howard was always coming home from school complaining about some outrageous thing Danny Slavitt had said or done. Last week during art class, for example, when everyone else was cutting out snowflakes to decorate the walls of the auditorium for the winter concert, Danny had insisted on cutting out silhouettes of his hands; and the other day when the class was asked to recite the poems they had written in commemoration of September 11th, Danny Slavitt stood up in front of the class and sang his adaptation of “John Brown’s Body,” beginning with the words “Three thousand bodies lie a-molderin’ in the grave,” until Mrs. Bolger ordered him to stop. In addition to being stubborn and capricious, the boy was disgusting, and Howard, who himself had a delicate sense of etiquette, disapproved of his classmate’s many disgusting habits: Danny picked his nose and was in the habit of passing gas in class, for which he had earned the name “Human Fart Machine.” Howard’s nickname was Howard the Coward.
Aviva had started planning for Howard’s bar mitzvah a year ago. Sitting in her office in Midtown Manhattan, where she was the vice president in charge of marketing for a large cosmetics company, she would flip through the mind-boggling array of floral arrangements and party favors displayed in the catalogs her secretary had ordered, and later on, at home, after dinner, she would surf the Internet for bar mitzvah themes, cuisines and entertainments. She spent two months going from catering place to catering place, sampling foods of different ethnicities and styles.
While Aviva prepared for the party, her son struggled with the ritual aspects of his bar mitzvah. The living room, where his tutor, Jeff Kessler, worked with Howard on his haftorah, was adjacent to the kitchen, where Aviva labored over dinner. She would try to lose herself in her cho
res, but neither the blender nor the microwave nor the clanking of the silverware could block out her son’s cries of frustration; whenever the job of learning his haftorah proved to be too much for him, Howard would run into the kitchen to his mother and wrap his arms tightly around her waist.
“It’s too hard, Mommy,” he would say through his tears. “Please don’t make me do it. I’m stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”
“You must never, ever speak that way about yourself,” Aviva would say, resisting the urge to slap her son across the face to knock some sense into him as her heart beat with astonishment and despair. Pulling herself together, she would ask, “Do you remember what it means to be a man?” To which Howard, whose sobs had taken their usual course into a series of never-ending hiccups, would shake his head in assent.
“It means being brave and strong. Don’t you want to be brave and strong?”
“Yes, Mommy,” he would say when he finally managed to catch his breath.
“Remember what I told you about Rome?” she would ask.
“Yes, Mommy.”
“Well, the same is true of your haftorah.”
The reminder of the glories that awaited him if he could just learn to recite those twelve lines of Hebrew was usually sufficient to calm him down, and when Howard returned to the living room, he would do so emboldened with a renewed sense of purpose.
As the day of his bar mitzvah approached, Howard’s expectations of all the wonderful things that lay in store for him became more and more unrealistic and this worried Aviva. She would often catch him staring at himself in the mirror repeating, “Today I am a man,” over and over again. He seemed to attribute an almost magical significance to the words, as though they carried with them the power of some ancient invocation to the gods; for not only did Howard expect to turn into a man, brave and strong, on that day, but he seemed to believe that the Jewish rite of passage would make him taller as well.
Howard’s shortness had long been a source of grief for him; the entrance to his bedroom bore scores of pencil marks, many of them, tragically, drawn one on top of the other. It had always been Aviva’s hope that Howard would take after her side of the family and not his father’s, who with the exception of Frank, himself a passable five foot ten, were on average four inches below average height; but when she took him to visit the top endocrinologist in the city, the bone scan the famous doctor did of Howard’s wrist indicated that her son was destined to live out his life as a short man.
When Aviva asked the doctor about growth hormone shots, he told her that they were used for only the most drastic cases. “They can affect anything in the body with a potential for growth—cancer, for example,” he told Aviva, who couldn’t help thinking that those five extra inches might be worth the risk. There were treatments for many forms of cancer, but for the stigma of being a man of diminutive stature, there were no remedies.
Although she didn’t dare tell Howard what the doctor had said, she would try in a roundabout way to prepare him for life as a short man, sometimes out of the blue running down a list of famous short men in history she had found on the Internet. There were dozens of names on the list, including Hitler (but he wouldn’t do).
“Height isn’t everything,” Aviva would say. “Character is what matters.” She told him that Pablo Picasso, the greatest painter who ever lived, and the great composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were both only five foot four. “And Harry Houdini, a man of enormous strength and the greatest magician of all time—only five five! And Toulouse-Lautrec—remember when you saw his paintings on the class trip to the Metropolitan Museum last year—guess how short he was?”
“Five feet?” Howard said, looking up at his mother expectantly.
“Toulouse-Lautrec was only four foot eleven inches tall! Which is only three inches taller than you are now—and you haven’t even had your growth spurt yet!”
Aviva had chosen a Hawaiian theme for the reception. As far as the music was concerned, this was one time she was grateful for Howard’s extreme sensitivity to sound—the vacuum cleaner, the steam hissing through the radiator, the buzzing of the microwave still had the power to send him falling to the floor with his hands over his ears. There would be no loud band, the likes of which she had had to endure at the bar mitzvahs of the children of her friends and relatives; instead she had hired a ukulele player, who had promised to learn “Hava Nagila” for the occasion. Everything was working out just as she had planned. Best of all, Howard had finally learned his haftorah.
After weeks of frustration, the tutor decided to give up trying to teach Howard how to read the words in the original Hebrew and had him read a transliterated version of his haftorah instead. Aviva had also supplemented the biweekly tutoring sessions with lessons of her own. In addition, she had made a CD of the tutor singing the haftorah and had programmed it to play continuously by Howard’s bed while he slept. Howard knew his haftorah so well he would say it in his dreams. Often, in the morning, he would wake up singing it to himself.
While Aviva couldn’t be happier with the way everything was falling into place, the issue of Danny Slavitt preyed on her mind. Whenever she thought of the boy, her right eye would begin to twitch. Some nights when she turned off the lights to go to sleep, the child’s face would appear to her, like that of a small, brown-haired monster.
Aviva had met Danny Slavitt once. She and Howard were exiting the subway, on their way back from buying his bar mitzvah suit, when Howard spotted Danny walking up the big hill on 181st Street with his mother. The image Aviva had formed of Danny Slavitt had been that of an obnoxious, willful kid, but she could see right away that this was a child with a serious disability. He was walking lopsidedly, oblivious to everything other than the book he was reading, while his mother guided him up the street like a seeing eye dog. He didn’t respond to Howard’s greeting, and continued to ignore him throughout most of the encounter.
It horrified Aviva to think of her son being identified with a child who was so clearly impaired. She knew Howard wasn’t the most popular kid in the world, but that was just because of his natural timidity, so much of which was changing now. Nothing was wrong with him that a little more work and a little growing up couldn’t fix. Certainly he bore no resemblance whatsoever to this strange child.
“My bar mitzvah is going to be in less than two weeks, can you believe it, Danny? Just two more weeks! And today I got a real suit. It has a vest, like a man’s vest! It cost two hundred dollars!” Howard exclaimed as Danny settled himself onto the sidewalk with his book.
“And I got real leather shoes, too, not boy’s shoes, but man’s shoes! And a real tie, not a clip-on tie, but a real man’s tie! My father is going to teach me how to tie it when he gets home from work tonight! Do you want to see it, Danny? I could show it to you if you want to see it!”
Danny didn’t bother to look up from his book. Fortunately Howard was so caught up in recounting the details of his bar mitzvah that he didn’t seem to notice that Danny was ignoring him.
The boy’s mother, who had introduced herself as Mimi, gave up trying to get her son to respond to Howard, although it was clear to Aviva that Danny’s rudeness distressed her. She just let him sit there on the piss and spit of bums, flipping through the pages of what appeared to be a field guide to rocks and minerals.
“I can’t believe it! I can’t believe I’m going to be a man! In just two weeks I’m going to be a man!” Howard exclaimed. “Can you believe it, Danny? In just two weeks I’m not going to be a boy anymore. I’m going to be a man. A real live man!”
Suddenly coming to attention, Danny looked up from his book. “That’s just an expression,” he told Howard. He spoke in a loud, annoying voice. “Thirteen-year-olds aren’t men! Some thirteen-year-olds don’t even have secondary sex characteristics yet. You’re not a man until you’re eighteen. Thirteen-year-olds are just boys!”
Aviva looked at her son, whose face
had turned red with confusion and doubt. She despised this boy Danny Slavitt and was anxious to get her son home as soon as possible and undo the damage this revolting child had just inflicted on her sensitive son. Holding Howard’s chin in her hands, she told him not to pay attention to what Danny Slavitt had just said.
“Well, I have to get home to cook dinner,” she said, putting her arm around her son, who stood there, limp with shock, clutching the shopping bag that held the emblems of his impending manhood.
“Your mother’s right, Howard,” Mimi Slavitt said. “You know the way Danny is. That’s just something he says. It has nothing to do with you. It doesn’t mean anything, really.” Then she turned to address herself to Aviva, who wished she could just tell the woman to shut up.
“Ever since we brought up the subject of a bar mitzvah with him, Danny has been fixated on the idea that technically it would be false to say that he is a man. He has no objection to being bar mitzvahed, per se. But I don’t know,” she said. She spoke very fast in a loud voice, like her son.
“He simply refuses to say, ‘Today I am a man,’” she said, interrupting herself for a moment to reprimand Danny, who had been digging his index finger into his nose and then putting that finger into his mouth. She laughed self-consciously and continued.
“He’s quite adamant about it, and when Danny makes up his mind about something, there’s never anything anyone can do to change it. I can just see Danny standing there before the congregation saying, ‘Today I’m not a man,’” she said. “Danny just likes everything to be true. That’s good in some ways,” she said, her words trailing off and her eyes beginning to wander. “But I don’t suppose it makes much difference anyway—”
Then catching herself, she added, “I don’t mean to say that getting bar mitzvahed is insignificant. I just don’t think it would be all that significant for Danny. So my husband and I have decided to skip it, at least for the time being. Danny won’t turn thirteen for another year anyway. So who knows? Maybe he’ll feel different in a year. But I doubt it. One thing about Danny. He never changes. No matter how much we try, he stays stubbornly the same.”
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