“I don’t want to go back there. I can’t go back there. I have it in me to be happy. That’s one thing I learned at that little inn. I still have it in me to be happy.”
As usual, I tried to come up with solutions for her.
“Why don’t you just stuff everything away in a box?” I told her. “Just dump everything in a box! Clear away a little corner of the living room for yourself and get one of those Japanese screens—at Ikea—you could order one online—and go hide yourself away in a corner! Don’t worry about what’s in the boxes! Just paint!”
She smiled at me the way she did whenever I gave her advice. She was always too polite to do anything but smile.
We arranged to meet at our café the following Sunday and we met there for the next three Sundays. Amy had calmed down by then. She was back in her stoical mode. She told me that everyone has a cross to bear and she was determined to bear hers with dignity and grace.
Amy and I never spoke on the phone just to talk, but there was one week when she called me three days in a row. The first time, I could barely make out what she was saying. Gulping for air, she told me that she had yelled at Alec. And then she had slapped him. She had never yelled at him before. And she certainly had never slapped him! He looked so confused. It broke her heart to see her son like that.
The day after that, she called me again in tears. She said she thought she was losing her mind. She had spent the last fifteen minutes sitting in the corner of her bedroom banging her fists against the wall; she banged so hard that she broke right through the plaster to the bricks.
Then, the day before we were supposed to meet, she called and told me that she couldn’t trust herself with Alec anymore. “Remember that collection of pills I told you about, Mimi?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, last night I divided them up: two-thirds for me and a third for Alec. I ground them up with the palette knife I use to mix my paints. And then I put them in two bowls of applesauce. The applesauce turned a light shade of green from the dust of all those blue and yellow pills. Alec loves applesauce. And he was so excited to see green applesauce. Green is his favorite color. When I flushed it down the toilet, he had a fit. He really wanted that applesauce. He loves applesauce. He likes it even better than ice cream. And he really loves ice cream. I hated to disappoint him like that, really I did. And I was so proud of him for wanting to try something new.”
“Amy, I don’t know what to say. I feel I should do something but I don’t know what to do. Please tell me what to do.”
“You don’t have to do anything, Mimi. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. I could never do it. I see that now. I wish I could but I can’t.”
I talked it over with Jake. He told me that I had to call Amy’s husband right away and that if I didn’t call him, he would.
“But she said she could never go through with it! It would be such a betrayal,” I said. I reminded myself that I had suicidal thoughts, too. Not as fully articulated as Amy’s, but I knew what it felt like to cross the street and be seized with the desire for a truck to come and hit me. I wanted to know what it felt like to be hit by a truck and hurled up into the air and thrown back onto the ground. I just wanted to die for a little while. Probably there is a point in everyone’s life where death seems like an attractive option.
“So she says it and that means it’s true?” Jake contended.
We went on like that for several rounds and I promised Jake that I would call Amy’s husband after nine or ten, which was when he usually got back from work, but when I picked up the phone later on that night, I couldn’t go through with it. I had a date to meet Amy in two days. I told myself that I would wait until then to decide whether or not to call Steven.
As usual, I arrived at our little café early enough to be able to secure a table in the corner. After fifteen minutes had passed and Amy had still not shown up, I started to panic and I berated myself for not having taken Jake’s warning seriously enough. But then I told myself I was overreacting. Amy was always late, and she sometimes didn’t show up at all. I don’t know why I waited so long to call her cell phone—habit, I suppose—but when I did finally call her, there was a message saying that the phone was no longer in service. I called her home and her husband answered.
I told Steven that I had a date to meet Amy at twelve and that it was twelve forty-five and she still hadn’t shown up. I told him that she was often late, but what really worried me was that when I called her cell phone, I got a message saying it was disconnected.
“Is she there?” I asked, trying to sound calm.
“No,” he said.
“Do you know where she is?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why is her cell phone disconnected? Do you have any idea where she can be?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a relief, “ I said. “So where is she?”
“She’s gone,” he said.
“Gone? What do you mean gone?”
“Gone as in gone.” He told me that she had left him a note saying that she was going away for good.
“Where did she go?” I asked. “Did she say where she was going?”
“No. She neglected to mention that,” he told me. “All she said was that she was going away for good. Oh yeah, and she signed it ‘Queen for a Day.’ Whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean.”
So Amy was taking a little vacation for herself. Good. Let her have her little break. God knows she deserves it, I thought to myself. I knew she would be back and I would wait patiently for her return. I just hoped that she wouldn’t stay away for too long. Because without her here, I had only myself to pity.
This Time Next Year
I arrived a few minutes after the meeting had begun and was scanning the room for an empty seat when a woman with elaborately coiled copper-colored hair motioned to me from across the auditorium. She was wearing lots of makeup, skillfully applied in the manner of the women one sees strolling down Madison Avenue, gold and silver shopping bags dangling from their slender wrists.
Removing her coat from the chair, she whispered, “I’m Karen.”
When I sat down, I was surprised to see she was overweight, and wearing an oversized T-shirt, sweatpants and running shoes.
“I’m Mimi,” I whispered back.
The principal, a slim woman, fashionably attired in a lime green suit, had just started to speak. As usual, I could barely take in a word that was said. She concluded her speech with a brief film showing an earnest-looking teacher hard at work with a handsome autistic boy.
“They’re always so good-looking, aren’t they?” the principal said with a sigh after she turned off the projector.
“What the fuck,” Karen said to me as the meeting was breaking up. “These people are so full of shit. They’re so in love with themselves, it’s pathetic. Except the joke’s on us. We’re the pathetic ones.”
The by-now familiar dread started burrowing its way into the pit of my stomach. I had come here to see what lay in store for us once we were ready to send Danny to school. In our mad rush to cure our son before he turned five, Jake and I had been spending forty hours a week doing the program with him at home. Our plan was to keep on working with him by ourselves until we thought he was ready for the next step, which was to go to what was known was a “center-based program,” or, “school.”
“Do you know what the ratio of applications to openings is?”
“No, I don’t,” I told Karen. “This is all new to me.”
“Fifty to one. For any halfway decent school. They cherry-pick the kids. It’s easier for them, and they have better outcomes to show their donors. I have one of the hard ones. And he’s dumb as dirt. What about yours?”
Back then I was convinced that it was just a matter of time before Danny would be cured. The experts were always saying
how smart he was. I told her that I didn’t know.
“How about we go out for coffee and I’ll give you a rundown on the whole mess,” Karen offered. “There’s a great café around the corner. It has the best cheesecake in the city. Do you like cheesecake?”
“Yes,” I told her, although the truth is I have never been a big fan of cheesecake.
“Jonathan has been rejected by six schools so far,” she told me as we followed the other parents into the elevator.
Everyone was standing together in their private hells as the yellow numbers kept flickering by. Next to the elevator buttons were clusters of tiny raised dots. The Lighthouse for the Blind had offices in this building, and on the fifth floor the door slid open and we all stepped aside to let in two blind men, each one holding on to the harness of a seeing eye dog. Blindness is worse than autism, I thought, although autism was said to be a kind of blindness; “mind-blindness,” it was called.
One of the blind men, a big, healthy-looking young man in a bright blue shirt, had the most beautiful green eyes I had ever seen. His large black pupils were surrounded by thin luminescent circles of gold. It took me a few moments to realize that I had been staring at him. It made me feel like a trespasser, staring at the eyes of someone who didn’t know he was being looked at and who couldn’t look back.
I turned my attention to the flashing yellow numbers and thought about how loaded with significance the mere direction of a glance can be. This was a form of communication not available to someone like Danny and the man with the beautiful green eyes.
A telltale sign of autism is the lack of eye contact, and when Jake and I got home from the evaluation, we looked at old pictures of Danny and watched old videos of him and there he was, his dimples in full bloom, looking into his father’s eyes as Jake held him up in the air. And on the desk in our office was a photograph of him, looking up at me with his mouth on my breast. I nursed Danny until he was three and a half but I didn’t need a picture to remind me of that moment, or the hundreds of others like it, of him shifting his attention away from my breast to my eyes and back to my breast again.
At some point, Jake and I could never figure out when, Danny stopped looking us in the eye. For Danny, looking at a person’s arms, legs or feet was no different from looking him or her in the eye. He seemed to have no feeling, no instinct whatsoever, for the special role that eyes play in human interaction.
The day after Danny’s diagnosis Jake decided to teach him how to identify what a person is looking at. First he drew cartoon faces, with the pupils of the eyes set in different positions, and he would ask Danny where the eyes were pointing—up or down, left or right. From there he asked Danny to tell him what the cartoon face was looking at, and finally, Jake (revealing a talent I never knew he possessed) drew various scenarios in which the cartoon face appeared and he would ask Danny if the funny-looking boy in the picture was thinking about the ice cream cone on one side, or the bowl of fruit on the other.
Karen and I found a table in the corner, and she told me she would order for us. She came back ten minutes later, carrying two cappuccinos.
“I sprinkled cinnamon on top. I hope that’s okay,” she told me.
“Sure. Thanks,” I said. When I reached for my wallet, Karen held up a hand in refusal.
“Now for the pièce de résistance,” she said, and going back to the counter, she returned with a cake box, tied with thin red string, on which two plates of cheesecake sat balanced.
“This is for you and your family,” she said, offering me the box. It was sealed with a turquoise sticker on which the best cheesecake in the world was inscribed in gold. Her pleasure in giving me this gift was so palpable that I didn’t bother engaging in the usual charade of protest.
“Lots of famous people come here,” Karen informed me, running down a list of celebrities she had seen at the Columbus Avenue Bakery. She spoke at such a fast clip that at first I had trouble following what she was saying, but by the time the evening was over, I had grown accustomed to the brisk pace of her speech and the rapid transit of her thought.
“I hate it when they talk to you. They always act as though they’re bestowing some great honor on you or something. That’s the way William Baldwin was with me last week. He gave me this glittering smile, like we were best friends. He doesn’t know me from a hole in the wall. I set him straight about that. He is, by the way, the most gorgeous man I have ever seen. They all have this glow. It’s the facials and other forms of extraordinary skin care. I’m actually in the process of developing a skin care business.”
She told me that for the past fifteen years she had been working as a personal manager for a string of wealthy people, but she was planning on changing careers. Service wasn’t where the money was—goods was where you had to go for the big bucks.
Karen’s plan for her son was to visit every school on the “A” list, and once she had identified one she liked and a principal who could be bought—because everyone had a price—she would schedule a meeting and secure a place for Jonathan in that school. There was no point in going through the usual bullshit of applying to these places, she told me. None of them would ever accept a kid as “involved” as her son. Like she said, they picked the easy ones.
It was open house season for special education schools, and Karen told me we should arrange to go to them together. So that’s what we did.
At the fourth meeting we attended, at a school called The Learning Foundation, Karen decided she had found what she was looking for. She told me on the subway ride over there that the principal had a reputation for being a tyrant.
“No one knows what she does exactly, but whenever a kid acts up, she takes him into her office, closes the door and, presto, the kid is better,” Karen said with the manic laugh that punctuated much of her speech.
“Everyone is terrified of her, especially the parents. The word on the street is that if you want your kid in her school, you have to be willing to drink the Kool-Aid.”
“Wouldn’t that bother you—not knowing what is going on with your son?” I asked her.
“Are you kidding? What do I know about this stuff?” she said. “As far as I’m concerned, Jonathan is one big fat mystery. And I mean fat. The kid is a blimp.” Then, laughing, she added, “If there’s some egomaniac out there who wants to take charge of my son, that’s fine with me.”
The principal, whom everyone addressed by her first name, Cindy, was famous for dressing in short, tight skirts and stiletto heels. She had an upper-class British accent, which the parents said was fake.
“This is good,” Karen whispered.
Cindy glared at us from her podium, so Karen jotted down what she wanted to say in the sparkled little girl pad she always brought to these meetings. “She wants to build new gym,” she wrote in her hieroglyphic hand. “Have client who needs big tax write-off.”
Karen called me a couple of weeks later to tell me that Jonathan was in. She volunteered to cut Danny in on the deal when I was ready to send him to school. I thanked her but told her that I despised the woman and that I knew she would despise me, too. We were natural enemies, I said.
Since neither of our sons had any friends, we thought we should get them together, so one day Danny and I went to visit Karen and Jonathan in their duplex apartment in Chelsea. Jonathan was two years older than Danny. He had a big head and fair skin that was covered with freckles. He didn’t bear any resemblance to Karen, except he had her beautiful copper-colored hair. In his excitement to see us, he started making noises that sounded like a baby’s squeak toy.
As soon as we got there, Danny ran up the stairs to inspect all the rooms—which was what he did whenever he went to anyone’s house. I ran after him. Karen told me not to bother. “Let him get it out of his system. He can break whatever Jonathan hasn’t broken already.” But I had to go after him. I didn’t want him crumpling up Karen’s blinds, as he had cru
mpled up the blinds in my mother’s house and in our apartment; or hiding in the closet; also he might decide to engage in his favorite pastime of trying to crawl through the window guards. Besides, he had to learn how to behave.
I had no trouble getting Danny to come back downstairs when I told him there was cake and ice cream waiting for us in the kitchen. After we’d finished eating, the four of us sat on Karen’s red velvet sofa and ate popcorn and watched Pinocchio, which was Danny’s favorite movie at the time. (Jake and I sometimes wondered if it could have anything do with our relentless efforts to turn him into a real boy.)
About ten minutes into the video, right after the Blue Fairy had made her appearance on the eighty-inch LED screen, Jonathan took me by the hand and led me upstairs to his room to show me his vast collection of stuffed animals. They littered his bed and carpet, they filled his toy chest and closets—this endless assortment of farm animals, zoo animals, dinosaurs and mythical creatures. One by one, he held them up to me and told me their names. It was clearly his intention to introduce me to each and every one of them, but eventually I managed to talk him into going back downstairs to watch the movie.
Jonathan sat next to me on the couch, and before I knew what was happening, he was holding my hand and kissing it, which made me feel a combination of pity, revulsion and guilt.
Karen loved Disney movies—she had never seen any as a child, and she was too engrossed in Pinocchio to notice her son’s assault on my hand. Jiminy Cricket was about to explain to the little wooden puppet what it meant to have a conscience.
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