As I forced myself to tolerate Jonathan’s caresses, I remembered that Karen had told me she couldn’t stand how affectionate Jonathan was. That she herself was not an affectionate person at all.
It had been drummed into our heads that autistic children had to learn how to play with other children, so we had two more playdates, first at my apartment, then at the Bronx Zoo. For one reason or another, we never managed to get the boys together again, and soon after we finished our school tours, Karen and I lost touch with each other. I thought of calling her, but I never did. I would often wonder how she was doing. I hoped that the sexy principal with the huge ego had worked her magic with Jonathan and that Karen had succeeded in getting one of the many businesses she had told me about off the ground.
I didn’t think she cared much whether or not we ever spoke to each other again: I had served my purpose for her, and I suppose she had served her purpose for me as well. None of us mothers had time for friends back then.
One day in early spring, eight and a half years after we had first met at that open house, I returned home to find a message from Karen on my answering machine: “This is Karen Renburg. Remember me? Sorry we’ve been out of touch for so long. But you know how it is. Anyway, I’d love to catch up, so give me a call when you get the chance.” She ended by giving me her home number and her cell phone number. “Just in case you lost them,” she said. I remembered that Karen never answered her phone, so it was with a sense of futility that I dialed her number, and I was surprised when I heard her voice on the other end.
We spent the first few minutes bringing each other up to date. She told me that Jonathan, who was fifteen now, liked The Learning Foundation. Just like everyone said, the principal kept the parents in the dark about everything. They didn’t even have parent-teacher conferences, which was fine with her.
I mentioned the two hearings where I had represented myself, and I told her that I had been completely screwed by my advocate, but it was too painful for me to talk about.
“I’ve lost the will to fight,” I was surprised to hear myself say.
“I know what you mean. There’s just so much of this shit we can take. Did you ever think about it—I mean really think about it—that all this trouble and misery is caused by just one single child?”
“That’s an interesting way to look at it,” I replied.
“My psychiatrist tells me that the mothers of children with disabilities have significantly reduced life spans,” Karen said. “So let’s look at the bright side. Maybe we won’t have to deal with this shit too much longer. Anyway, the reason I called was I was hoping you and Danny could come with Jonathan and me to our house in the Catskills. My husband has to be out of town on business. It’s supposed to be gorgeous this weekend.”
I said that I would love to go with her and thanked her for thinking of me but that I wasn’t sure we could make it. I would have to check my schedule and get back to her. I, in fact, had no schedule; every day was exactly the same as the one that preceded it. The truth was, the prospect of spending a weekend away with Danny, without Jake, frightened me.
I told Jake about Karen’s invitation. He said I should accept because Danny loved the country, and he hardly ever got to go anywhere. Also, it was not good for me to feel so helpless with my own son, and so dependent on my husband, and it was time for me to go back to having friends.
Karen told me she would pick us up at eight on Saturday morning, and at seven thirty that morning, we kissed Jake good-bye and went to the courtyard to wait for Karen. I was fumbling around in my suitcase, checking to make sure I had remembered to pack our bathing suits while Danny told me in great detail about his plans to settle Antarctica (one of his obsessions at the moment; it bothered him, the idea that an entire continent should be so sparsely populated) when Karen arrived in her gigantic SUV. Jonathan was sitting in the backseat, watching television. He was much fatter than I remembered him. His face seemed to float over his neck, which was shaped like an inflated rubber tube, and he was dressed in the kind of loose-fitting, brightly colored clothes sold in stores that cater to the Big and Tall Man. Jonathan was taller than Karen, who was very tall for a woman; his head was only four or five inches below the car roof.
“Hey there, Danny,” Karen said. “Your mom tells me you’re a big Pokémon fan. Well, guess what? How would you like to watch Pokémon right now?” She had asked me what Danny’s interests were, the latest and most fanatical of which was Pokémon, and apparently she had gone out and bought the entire series.
Danny was thirteen now, and Pokémon should have lost its fascination for him long ago. Jake was always telling me that I had to accept the fact that in many ways our son would always be a child of five, but I could never come to terms with it, and it disturbed me that Danny should be so obsessed with a children’s TV show. He was always drawing maps and charts and arcane diagrams of the world of Pokémon; he knew every episode by heart, and for three Halloweens in a row he had dressed up as his beloved Pikachu.
I had warned Karen that Danny was as antisocial as ever, but she said I had nothing to worry about as far as Jonathan was concerned. He was still as eager to please as ever, and he probably wouldn’t even notice that Danny was ignoring him.
“You know how it is with these kids. They don’t give a shit about the rights and wrongs of social behavior. I used to think it was a lot of bullshit too.”
I had never cared much about social norms, either. Whenever the experts told us that Danny’s basic cognitive faculties were intact and that his problems were mostly in the social realm, I would say to myself, Big deal. So he won’t be a social butterfly. I had no idea how much these mere “social” problems would impair every aspect of my son’s life.
Danny, who had not known it was possible to watch television in a car, would have ignored Jonathan under any circumstances, but I told myself that the excitement of sitting in the back of a big van watching his favorite television show could at least pass as a valid excuse for him climbing over Karen’s son as though he were a piece of furniture and buckling himself into his seat without a word or a glance at anyone but Ash, Misty, Brock and Pikachu. According to Jake, the world of Pokémon—orderly, rule-bound, finite—seemed to have been created with autism in mind. I had never been able to bear sitting through a single episode of the series.
“Remember Jonathan?” I said to Danny. Silence. Over breakfast that morning I had spent half an hour coaching him to say hello to Jonathan.
“This is Jonathan,” I repeated. Silence again.
“Say hello to Jonathan, Danny!” I insisted. To which, after a long pause, Danny responded, his eyes never leaving the tiny television screen, with a robotic “Hello, Jonathan.”
As Karen had predicted, Jonathan didn’t seem to mind Danny’s complete indifference to him. “My mom says you like Pokémon!” he exclaimed. “I like Pokémon too! She said we could spend the whole weekend watching Pokémon if you want! She said whatever you say goes!” Danny responded to Jonathan’s friendliness by telling him to be quiet. I turned around to reprimand him, but Karen, putting her hand on my arm, signaled me not to bother.
Karen handed the boys two sets of headphones and Danny spent the rest of the two-hour ride to the Catskills completely ensconced in this cartoon world, which, like some awful computer virus, seemed to have taken over his brain. Danny’s incessant talk about Pokémon bored and irritated his classmates, and lately, in order to curb his obsession with the TV show, Jake and I had limited his television watching to an hour a day. But I decided that since this weekend was supposed to be a vacation for me, it would also have to be a vacation for Danny.
Karen proceeded to give me an abridged version of the story of her life. “We both come from nothing,” she said, explaining that Harold, who had been brought up in the urban poverty of Detroit, was orphaned at age fifteen when both his parents died of cancer within a year of each other, and that
she was an army brat whose father left when she was sixteen, but not before raping her, and whose mother kicked her out of the house when she was seventeen. She disclosed the shocking details of her biography in her typically breezy manner.
“What’s raping, Mommy?” Jonathan asked from the back. He had taken off his headphones.
“Oh shit,” Karen murmured under her breath.
“It’s just something grown-ups do,” she said in a cheery voice, comically raising her eyebrows and crossing her eyes. “Put your headphones back on, sugar-pie. Go back to watching TV.”
We sat there in silence for a moment, and then Karen said in a low voice, “I never thought I would be glad that his word retention sucks as badly as it does.”
She went on with her story. Harold was an orthopedic surgeon, one of the most sought after and expensive in the city. He was a member of that exclusive breed of doctors who refuse to take health insurance.
“I read somewhere—I think it was Carson McCullers—that there are two types of people: lovers and beloveds,” she said. “Harold is the lover type. He adores me and he adores Jonathan. He thanks me at least ten times a day for being his wife.” Karen added that Harold, who was going to be sixty-eight on his next birthday, was both a mother and father to her, the mother and father she had never had.
“Jonathan was his idea,” she whispered. “You should see him with the kid,” she said, adding that as far as her husband was concerned, there was nothing wrong with their son.
“He takes him to the country every weekend, to give me a break. Whenever they come home, they’re always laughing and singing some silly song they made up. Harold gets right down there in that strange little world of Jonathan’s. Just think of it, this hotshot surgeon spending every weekend subjugating himself to the will of an autistic child. That’s one reason Jonathan is so fat. If he wants to eat three hot fudge sundaes in a row, Harold has no problem with it. He says it’s all just baby fat and that it will melt off after he’s done with adolescence. And the guy’s a doctor. His love for his son blinds him.
“Harold is a real gem,” Karen continued. “I hate to think of where I would be if it weren’t for him. He put me through college when I was in my late twenties. I aced all my courses. And then he sent me through grad school. MBA with honors from NYU. He told me he thought having a career of my own would be good for my self-esteem, which believe me was gravely damaged by that worthless piece of shit mother of mine—she could care less that she has a grandson. I never heard back from her when I wrote to tell her that I had a baby. That she, theoretically, was a grandmother. She has an unlisted number, you see, so I had to sit down and write her an actual letter.
“Anyway, Harold wanted me to know that I was a person in my own right. And I’m proud to say I’ve made quite a success of myself. I make over two hundred thousand dollars a year managing the lives of people who are too rich to be bothered counting their money or their houses. I don’t know if you remember—I think I told you about it. That was over eight years ago. Shit! Eight years! Eight fucking wasted years! Anyway, I think I told you that I was planning on getting out of the consulting business.
“I’m getting into a whole different kind of thing. Two rooms of our country house are filled with all the junk I’ve bought off the Internet. Various lines of product packages. I’m going to start with skin care. I’ve assembled selections of products from all over the world for every type of skin. All very high-end stuff, although between you and me, it’s all a crock of shit—nothing beats honey and lemon juice and a good night’s sleep.”
Then glancing at the rearview mirror, she said, “The problem is Jonathan—the kid’s a major pain in the ass. He’s so fucking needy! I’ve hired nannies to be with him—but he’s always running into my office. With him underfoot all the time, I don’t have the focus to get my business off the ground. That’s why I decided”—she glanced in the rearview mirror again at her son, who continued to seem as engrossed in the show as Danny was—“I’ll tell you about that later,” Karen concluded, at which point Jonathan appeared from out of his apparent immersion in the world of Pokémon to ask, “Are you talking about me, Mommy?” His headphones were off again. “What are you saying about me, Mommy?”
“What could I possibly say about you?” Karen said, reaching back and squeezing her son’s leg. “Except that you’re the most wonderful boy in the whole wide world.”
“You love me, Mommy?” Jonathan said.
“Do I love you?” Karen asked him. “Is the sky blue? Is the grass green? Did God invent little green apples with his little green apple inventing machine?”
“You’re funny, Mommy,” Jonathan said with a laugh, at which point Danny ordered everyone to stop talking.
“Danny is right,” Karen said with a whisper. “Go back to watching Pokémon.”
“So tell me about The Learning Foundation,” I said after Jonathan had put his headphones back on.
Flashing me a somewhat guarded look, she whispered, “I’ll tell you all about it later.” Then changing the subject, she said, “I like old people and old music. Do you like the jazz singers from the forties and fifties?”
I told her I did, and with that, she put a CD into the slot in her futuristic dashboard. Then turning to Jonathan, she told him that Mommy wanted to listen to some music and that she didn’t want to disturb him and Danny so she was going to bring the glass wall down.
“No!” Jonathan said in a plaintive voice. “Please don’t, Mommy!”
“Mommy will be right here,” she told him, blowing him a kiss. “Okay?”
“Don’t go away. Mommy! Please don’t go away!”
“Where would I go? Do you think I’m a bird? Do you think I can fly? That would be fun! I wish I could fly! Don’t you wish you could fly?” she said, and blowing him another kiss, she told him to say, “Okay, Mommy.”
Reluctantly Jonathan said it was okay.
“He hates when I do this,” she said, and pressing a button, she brought a glass wall down between the kids and us. We spent the rest of the trip listening to the music of my parents’ generation, which has always been more familiar to me than the music of my own.
“I love this crap,” Karen said. “It makes me remember what it was like to be young and stupid. I cry when I hear these songs. It’s fun to cry about this stuff. It makes you forget all the heavy shit we have to deal with all the time.”
I told her I was happy that these songs still got to me. “It shows me I haven’t been broken yet,” I added.
“Broken?” Karen said. “I could tell you about broken.”
When the voice of Billie Holiday emerged from the van’s surround sound speakers, singing with greater clarity than I had ever heard her sing before, I told Karen that Billie Holiday and I were born on the same day.
“Every April seventh, WKCR plays Billie Holiday for twenty-four hours. That’s how I celebrate my birthday. Listening to Billie Holiday on the radio.”
“I never celebrate my birthday. I don’t want to have anything to do with the cunt that spawned me. Do you know what she named me? Cinnamon! I swear that woman hated me before I was born. I changed it after she kicked me out of the house. As soon as I turned eighteen.”
Karen was so easy to be with, I didn’t feel my usual compulsive need to make conversation. It felt good having nothing to do but look at the signs marking the highway and the digitized white lights that kept reassuring us that traffic was moving smoothly for miles ahead. The nearby trees whizzed swiftly by as the mountains drifted slowly toward us and drifted slowly away.
Whenever Jake and I took Danny on a car trip to visit my mother in Oceanside, or Jake’s mother in Plainview, or to try out a new doctor who was developing a reputation for helping children with this thing that no one seemed to know much about, or for an occasional excursion across the George Washington Bridge to go hiking when we felt Danny could a
fford to take a break from the rigors of the behavior program we had such high hopes for, Jake would look out the window and describe the sights to me. Danny would sit in the back, looking out the window, too, asking, “What’s that? What’s that? What’s that?” This was something he had done for years whenever we went anywhere, until one day we noticed that he had stopped—we have no idea why or when; he just stopped.
We were well out of the city by now. The faces pasted on the billboards belonged to DJs and politicians I had never heard of. A monstrous trailer-truck with a dozen cars heaped precariously on its back cut in front of us. I hated driving anywhere near trucks; they were all bullies. Whenever I managed to find the nerve to pass one on the highway, my little Honda Civic would sway helplessly from side to side as I fought my way through the wind tunnel that had been created because I had finally forced myself to make my getaway from the hulk that had held me in thrall for miles. The car carriers completely unnerved me. I was always certain that at any minute the cars would tumble loose and bury my little Honda in an avalanche of twisted metal. But Karen seemed fine driving behind it.
When the trailer turned off at the exit, the stuffed animal that must have been attached to its front fender came flying onto the road; it was crushed beyond recognition by the time we drove past it from the middle lane.
At the end of the exit ramp, slumped against the sign post, there was a hitchhiker dressed in dirty, baggy jeans, a dingy white T-shirt and a sports jacket that was three sizes too big for him; he wasn’t wearing any shoes and he was very skinny. From the distance, it looked as though he had enormous bruises or birthmarks on his cheeks and forehead, but as we approached him, I saw that his entire face was covered with tattoos. Underneath all that, he couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old.
I told Karen that I felt sorry for the boy’s mother.
“His mother? What kind of mother do you think he had?” Karen scoffed. “He probably did it to spite her.”
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