Queen for a Day

by Maxine Rosaler

  “It’s hard,” I said, without thinking.

  “Yes. It’s hard,” she responded. And after a long pause, she continued.

  “You know, we have a friend in common. Karen Renburg. Johnny and Howard are in the same class at The Learning Foundation. It’s a small world, isn’t it?”

  “Yes it is. I haven’t heard from Karen in a long time. How is she?”

  “Well, that’s quite a story,” she said. “Last time I spoke to her, she sounded like she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”

  Just then the Number 4 bus rolled up to the curb.

  “I better get that,” I told Aviva. She hugged me good-bye, and I hugged her back. We hugged each other with sincerity and compassion, even though it was clear to both of us that we could never be friends.

  The first thing I did when I got home was call Karen. I left a message on her voice mail, telling her about my brief encounter with Aviva Brodner.

  She called me back a couple of hours later, and after a few preliminaries she said that before Jonathan went away to the school in Arizona, she’d arranged a trip with him and Harold to Disneyland. “Did Aviva tell you that Harold couldn’t go with us? The day we were supposed to leave, he got a phone call from one of his most famous patients—a halfback for the Dallas Cowboys. A real pain in the ass. He always gives Harold season tickets and club seats.

  “Usually it’s the guy’s knees. He’ll end up in a wheelchair before he hits fifty. This time it was his arm. He’s a big baby. Always insists that Harold be on call for him. No other doctor will do. And then Harold always has to hang around for the post-op.”

  “God,” I said, “that must have been tough.”

  “To put it mildly. Jonathan freaked out as soon as we got there. The sight of Mickey Mouse walking around in the flesh, so to speak, scared the hell out of him.”

  Karen told me that she had decided on their second day in Disneyland that the only way she would ever be able to make it through the week would be to get herself a bottle of scotch, and after the week was up, she had polished off four bottles. She told herself that when she got home, she would go back to AA and get sober again. With Jonathan away at school, she would have so much less stress. That was what kept her going that whole week—the thought that soon Jonathan would be gone—that and the scotch. Whenever things got so bad that she felt on the brink of killing herself and/or her son, she would say to herself, “This time next year.”

  Every night, when Harold called, at nine on the dot, in time to tuck Jonathan into bed from afar, Karen would tell him in a perfectly sober-sounding voice that everything was great, that they were having a wonderful time.

  “We old drunks are very good at covering up for ourselves,” she told me.

  The only thing that interested Jonathan was the food and the gift shop, and that’s where they spent a lot of their time, when they weren’t hanging around their hotel room eating junk food and watching videos—Disney videos, of course.

  “So much for reclaiming my lost childhood,” Karen said, clicking her tongue. “That was tough on me. I really go in for all the razzle-dazzle, you know. One day I hired a babysitter and I spent the entire day going on all the rides and stuff and seeing a couple of the shows. I had a blast. I was tempted to spend the rest of the time like that, but I couldn’t do that to Jonathan. This was, after all, supposed to be his bon voyage present.”

  Karen said that she ended up getting so many things for Jonathan at the gift shop—mostly stuffed animals, of course—that she had to buy a separate suitcase to bring all the presents back to New York.

  As soon as they got home, Karen sent Jonathan to his room with the suitcase filled with the stuffed animals. Harold wasn’t due back from the conference until later that evening—and she sat at the dining room table, searching through the pile of mail the concierge had given her, and set herself up with a big glass of scotch on the rocks—to celebrate—it would be her last, she promised herself—she had even dumped the bottle down the garbage chute before she started looking through the mail.

  She felt so happy when she saw the return address from the school in Arizona with Jonathan’s name hand-printed on the letter that in her excitement to open up the envelope, she ended up tearing the letter in half. Piecing it together, she read: We are sorry to inform you that we don’t have an appropriate spot for your child, but we know that you will find the perfect placement for him.

  It took a few moments for the whole thing to sink in, but when it did, she let out a howl so loud it sent Jonathan running from his stuffed animals to see what was wrong. He went over to Karen and started stroking her arm. She was sitting there, banging her head on her huge mahogany table, screaming, “NO, NO, NO,” the tears running down her cheeks. Then she started hitting herself in the face and scratching her arms so hard that she drew blood.

  Jonathan stood there, trying to calm his mother down, taking her hands in his, kissing her on both cheeks, telling her how much he loved her. Karen just sat there, with her head on the table again, not banging it anymore, just laying it there, wondering how she could go on. And hating the kid and loving him at the same time.

  “Because you know I really do love the little fucker,” she told me.

  Then Jonathan went back to his room and brought her his twenty-four-inch Dumbo, who Karen said happened to be her favorite Disney character, even though she couldn’t help being jealous of him for having had such a wonderful mother.

  “Oh, Karen,” I said.

  “Don’t worry. I worked everything out weeks ago. Jonathan will be going there in a month. Right after spring break is over,” she told me. “It’s like I always say. Everyone has a price.”

  After I got off the phone, I went down to the lobby to see if the thief who had been stealing packages left there had stolen my shipment of vitamins yet. My neighbors had been taping notes to the elevator door pleading with whoever took their package (“by mistake”) to please return it. Lately, the notes had become more dramatic. There’s a thief in our midst! Who could stoop so low to steal from their neighbors? Some of the notes were translated into Google Translate Spanish. The elevator was broken, and as I was climbing back up the stairs to my apartment, my box of vitamins cradled in my arms, it occurred to me that before Karen told me that she had worked everything out, I might have said something like, “Well, maybe it’s just as well. Now maybe you’ll be able to find a place closer to home.”

  But I knew I wouldn’t have said anything to her, even if it had occurred to me at the time. Her mind was made up. And if she ever had any doubts about what she was doing, she would have talked herself out of them long ago. Besides, I have always hated people who impose their moral judgments on others. I never feel I have the right to presume to tell anyone (except Jake) that I think what they’re doing or what they’re thinking of doing or what they have done is wrong.

  The image of Jonathan bringing Karen his precious stuffed Dumbo was as clear to me as though I had actually witnessed the scene of poor, lonely Jonathan trying so hard to comfort his poor, orphaned mother. I thought about Dumbo and his mother, and how she was put in prison just for trying to defend her funny-looking child. I knew the movie by heart. When Danny was five years old, he had watched it so many times, the tape snapped. I thought about the scene where Dumbo had been teased and poked by kids in the circus audience, and the way his mother had stood up on her hind legs, trumpeting and bellowing, and that she had been put in a cage with a sign that said, mad elephant. She suffered because her child suffered, and then all her unhappiness disappeared when the nice little mouse brought Dumbo to visit her. It makes me happy to remember the delirious smile on Dumbo’s face when his mother reached out from between the bars of her prison and swung her funny-looking child back and forth on her trunk, all his unhappiness wiped away in an instant, and his mother’s unhappiness wiped away, too, because her child was happy now, and they were
together again, and I thought about how their love was all they needed to sustain themselves in the cruel world, from which they emerged triumphant, in the end, when Dumbo learned how to fly.

  Route 94

  When Danny came into her room that morning, Mimi ignored him at first, roaming the bordertowns of sleep, where dream and reality lie down together, mysteriously intertwined.

  “Wake up, wake up,” he was saying.

  Then she remembered. Today they were going apple picking. Mimi had been dreading this day almost as much as Danny had been looking forward to it: there would be the hayride with children less than half his age, the mothers of those children, the apples and pumpkins that cost twice as much as those sold at the bodega up the street, the animals Danny would want to pet, the tractors he would want to drive, the haystacks he would want to pull apart, the trees he would want to climb. And to top it all off, this year, Bernice Weinstock.

  Mimi had hoped that, by thirteen, Danny would have outgrown the annual apple-picking excursion, but Danny never outgrew anything, so when Bernice offered to take her and Danny apple picking in the North Fork of Long Island, Mimi had accepted. Putting up with Bernice just seemed easier than renting a car.

  “Wake up, wake up,” her son kept on saying as he tugged at her sheet.

  “We don’t have to leave for another two hours,” Mimi said. “Bernice won’t be there to pick us up if we leave now.”

  “Ri-ise and shi-ine and give God your glory glory,” Danny started to sing, tugging at her quilt. Through half-open eyes, Mimi saw that he had dressed himself. His shirt was buttoned crookedly and his fly was unzipped. But he was dressed.

  “It’s six in the morning.” Mimi was wide awake now. “Let me sleep.”

  “I can’t wait. I hate to wait. I can’t bear to wait. I refuse to wait.”

  “I told you, Bernice won’t be there to pick us up if we leave now. You don’t want to take the train to the station and have no one there to pick us up, do you? Now go back to your room and let me sleep. Please, just let me sleep.”

  Mimi sidled up to Jake. Resting her head on his chest, she wrapped herself around him, savoring his skunk-like scent; his inexplicable tranquility. How could he be in love with the same bewildering child and not let his life turn into one gigantic tragedy, too?

  Bernice lived on Long Island, forty miles away from the city. Mimi had met her at an autism conference five years before. She hadn’t seen her since then, but she would hear from her constantly, sometimes as often as five times a day. Bernice, whose life consisted of one crisis after another, had appointed Mimi her personal advisor. It was something she tried out on everyone, but Mimi was the only one who was enough of a sucker to respond to her incessant cries for help.

  “It’s Ber—niiiice,” she would say whenever she called, turning the syllables of her name into half apology, half lament: she had bad news to report, some crisis that required Mimi’s immediate attention. “I have to run something by you. It will just take a minute. I promise.”

  Bernice’s astonishing self-involvement had become a running joke with her and Jake. He would stand with the phone pressed against his chest and tell Mimi, “It’s Ber—niiiice.” Once, Bernice reported with bitter incomprehension that her best friend had cut her off without a word of explanation. “I don’t understand how she could do that to me,” she said, going on at some length about how much she had enriched her friend’s life by sharing her “complex, multidimensional perspective.”

  A few years earlier, Mimi would never have put up with anyone like Bernice; back then there had been no time for anything except Danny. But when Bernice arrived on the scene, except for Mimi’s endless fight to get The District to pay back the money they owed her, the major battles were all pretty much over. The war to save Danny had been fought and lost.

  Bernice had been working on a PhD in psychology for five years, and her unfinished thesis was her major topic of conversation. She was a single mother; her house was a mess; her son was driving her crazy; her deadbeat ex-husband had stopped paying child support; her professor was refusing to grant her another extension. How would she ever be able to find the time to get her dissertation finished? Was she such an awful person that people should treat her this way?

  After Bernice finally finished her thesis and got her PhD (she had written about women and narcissism, a subject on which she had un-ironically told Mimi she was an expert), she complained that she would never be able to find a job; she was too old. Mimi told her to have faith in herself. Bernice, whose thesis had been published by a major academic press, was incapable of writing a coherent sentence, and she would call for help with her letters of application. Mimi would dictate paragraphs over the phone, and when Bernice found a job at a small college in Queens, Mimi helped write her lesson plans and her course synopses.

  Sometimes Mimi wondered why she bothered having anything to do with this woman for whom she had no real affection or sympathy. Maybe advising her was just an easy way to pass the time as she went about her household chores or while she lay in bed, exhausted from the day’s travails. Also, with Bernice, she had found herself falling into a familiar role. It was comforting to be doing something she had always done, something she was good at; perhaps accepting the role of Bernice’s advisor was her way of trying to reclaim part of herself.

  On the A train to Penn Station, Danny squeezed himself into the seat between two women who were blocking his view of the subway map. He could draw the New York City Subway map by heart, along with all the street grids of Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens. It was the first thing he did when he came home from school. He would head straight for the office, take paper out of the printer and go to his room, where he would lie down on the floor and draw maps. Every now and then Mimi would collect the looseleaf pages of the maps Danny was always leaving scattered around the apartment and put them in a folder. He could tell you how to get anywhere in the five boroughs by public transportation—still, whenever he was in the subway he always had to look at the maps displayed under glass on the walls of the subway cars.

  The women glowered at him at first, but after doing a double take, they whispered to each other and smiled at Mimi sympathetically. It was only when they were out in public that Mimi realized how obvious it was to everyone that Danny was a child with a serious handicap. Mimi hated the pity more than she hated the intolerance.

  She told Danny to apologize to the women. Apologizing to people was something that Danny had picked up very quickly. Probably because she was always yelling at him. Embracing her son, she kissed him on the top of his head and said in a quiet voice that he could look at his subway map at home, or they could pick one up at the station in Mineola. At the next stop, a giantess who had been occupying two seats got up to leave, and Mimi, noticing that the woman had been sitting in front of another subway map, took Danny’s hand and she told him he could go look at that one instead.

  The plan was for Bernice to pick Danny and Mimi up at the train station in Mineola, and from there drive two hours to a farm where Bernice’s food coop was holding its annual potluck picnic; after that, they would go apple picking. When they got off the train, Bernice was there waiting for them in her SUV. She had lost thirty pounds since Mimi had seen her and she looked terrific. Bernice was always bragging about what a knockout she used to be, but Mimi had never believed her. Beholding her transformation into a beauty had the effect of making Mimi actually happy to see her. However, when she went over to kiss her hello, Bernice stiffened.

  The other day, when they were talking on the phone, she had sensed a negative turn in Bernice’s attitude toward her. In a display of the excessive gratitude that Mimi could never manage to restrain herself from expressing, she had been saying for the tenth time how much she and Danny were looking forward to the trip and Bernice had interrupted her to point out that she sounded obsequious. She went on for quite some time lecturing her abo
ut the deleterious effects of projecting a negative self-image. When Mimi told her she didn’t have a negative self-image and that she didn’t like being told that she did, nor did she need anyone to tell her how to behave, Bernice said she was only trying to help. She told Mimi she understood, because she, too, suffered from low self-esteem.

  There had been a brief period of time right after Bernice got her teaching job when Mimi thought Bernice might actually turn out to be a friend. One night when they were on the phone, Bernice stopped what she was saying and asked, “So, how are you?” She had never before asked Mimi anything about herself, and at first, Mimi thought it was a mistake, the result, perhaps, of a misfiring of some cortical neurons. But over the course of the next several conversations, Bernice continued to ask her about herself, and after a while, Mimi started talking to her about Danny. Bernice always had something useful to say. A couple of times they had even had conversations about something other than their children (and other than Bernice). Once they talked about politics. Recently they had talked about Virginia Woolf, who was one of Bernice’s favorite writers.

  Now, at the Mineola train station, Bernice was saying, “Andy has a cold. I don’t know if you want to expose Danny to him. Maybe you shouldn’t come.”

  Astounded that Bernice could suggest this after she and Danny had made the two-hour-long trip from the city to meet her, Mimi assumed a casual tone and responded, “Oh, don’t worry about that. Danny never gets sick.” She wished she could tell Bernice to go fuck herself and take the next train back to Penn Station, but Danny had to go apple picking today. It was the end of October and next weekend all the apple orchards would be closed.

  “So how is your trigeminal neuropathy?” Mimi asked, steering Bernice onto one of her favorite subjects. She would spend the entire trip listening to Bernice’s problems, Danny would go apple picking, and then after Bernice dropped them off at the Mineola train station, Mimi would be done with her once and for all.