When Bernice had exhausted the subject of how she spent every day in unbearable pain, Mimi asked her about her job. Bernice complained about the heavy course load. She didn’t know how she was going to do it. She was so disorganized. She hadn’t taught in five years and was afraid she had forgotten how.
“Of course you can do it,” Mimi told her. “How many single mothers in their late forties can get a PhD? With honors, no less.”
“That’s only because I’m so gifted,” Bernice said. “You don’t know what I’ve had to overcome to get this far. I have serious ADHD. It takes me forever to focus. You can’t imagine how much I suffer.”
Mimi was trying to think of a suitable response when Danny, who had been looking out the window in silence until now, started talking to Andy about Pokémon.
“Your son talks very loud,” Bernice said to Mimi.
“We’re working on it,” Mimi said.
“He should have been trained out of it by now,” Bernice said.
“We’re working on it,” Mimi repeated, biting the inside of her lip so hard she could taste blood.
“Please tell him to lower his voice. He’s giving me a headache.”
Mimi turned around, and placing her hand on Danny’s chest, she told him to speak with his “inside voice.”
Addressing herself to Bernice’s son, she said that she hoped Danny wasn’t bothering him, to which Andy, a sweet boy, responded that he wasn’t; he was interested in Pokémon, too.
She had noticed it right away, as soon as they got off the train, how good Andy looked, how normal. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him.
“It’s all Danny talks about these days,” Mimi told Bernice. “It’s so nice of Andy to listen.”
“Andy is very good with special needs kids,” Bernice responded.
“What?” Mimi said, at a complete loss for words.
“All his teachers say he’s very gifted.”
“He looks great,” said Mimi, regaining her composure.
“Thank God he takes after my side of the family and not his father’s.”
“So it looks like you don’t have anything to worry about in the height department either,” Mimi said. Her son’s height had been another source of worry for Bernice, and Mimi was surprised to see how tall Andy was.
“They say he’s going to be five foot nine. He lost a couple of inches because of the Ritalin,” Bernice told her.
“Five nine is a good height for a man,” Mimi said.
“Everyone in Marco’s family is tall,” Bernice said. “Luckily that’s the only thing Andy inherited from his idiot father.”
“And the Tourette’s?”
“That’s been gone for a while. It often clears up with adolescence.”
“Looks like you got lucky,” Mimi said.
“It wasn’t luck,” Bernice said. “I’ve put a lot of work into him, you know.”
“So I suppose the autism went away, too,” Mimi said.
“There’s a lot of misdiagnosis going around,” Bernice said. “Apparently he never had it.”
“So he’s fine,” Mimi said. So many of the other children had gotten better.
“Yeah, he’s a good kid. Like I told you. His teachers all say he’s very gifted.”
Mimi looked out the window.
They had left the highway and were in Suffolk County now. A used car lot gave way to half a mile of pine forest. They passed a broad stretch of recently cleared land, where yellow bulldozers and backhoes were scattered haphazardly among heaps of brown earth.
Eventually they were in farmland, where all there was to see on either side of the road were trees bursting with flame-tinted leaves and houses with front porches and wreaths made of twigs hanging on doors. Mimi had grown up on Long Island, and she had never associated it with anything but shopping malls and housing developments and other forms of nothingness, and she was surprised to find herself in such a lovely setting. She had been so preoccupied with the apple picking that she had forgotten about the leaves and she sought refuge in them now.
For years, all the seasons had been the same to her. All that existed were the letters she had to write and the phone calls she had to make and the struggles with The District and looking for schools for Danny and, once she had found one, trying to get them to do what they were supposed to do; the meetings with all the various doctors and therapists and lawyers and the politicians she would beg for help, and the conferences and workshops and the endless succession of tutors she hired to teach Danny the sorts of things that other children learn on their own. Worst of all was the appalling treachery of Teresa Thompson. The rampant anxiety ate away at Mimi like leprosy. Added to that was all the time and energy she spent trying to get the advocate to do her job and then trying to do the advocate’s job by herself, which, hard as she tried, was impossible. On visits to The District’s main office, a security guard would accompany Mimi to meetings with officials.
There were, however, those occasional moments of relief. The time the lilac bush on 181st Street was in full bloom and Mimi stopped to breathe in its sweet scent. Or she would be walking down a street and an old man dressed in ragged clothes and sitting on a stool held together by duct tape would be playing an old jazz tune she loved on a saxophone; or waiting on the subway platform there would be a young soprano, dressed in a lilac tutu with fairy wings attached to her back, singing an aria a cappella in the most beautiful voice Mimi had ever heard. Mimi would stop and listen, and for those few moments, everything else in the battlefield of her existence would disappear and the only thing that would exist for her was all this beauty.
Bernice’s abrasive voice broke through Mimi’s thoughts. “We’re at the potluck,” she said as she pulled into a parking lot full of cars. “We can’t stay too long. It’s freezing out and all I have is this sweatshirt.”
“I brought an extra sweater, just in case. Here,” Mimi said, and taking it out of her backpack, she offered it to Bernice.
“I don’t want it,” Bernice said. “We have to make this brief! I’m telling you, I can’t stand the cold.”
“So take the sweater,” Mimi said.
“I told you, I don’t want it. We’ll have to be out of here in ten minutes.”
“Okay,” Mimi said. On the train, she had told Danny that they were going to a real farm with real cows and chickens and turkeys and she was sorry they would have to leave before he had the opportunity to see them, but he was so intent on the apple picking, she didn’t think he would mind.
There was a line of people waiting at a long table laden with food. Everyone had been very generous with their contributions. Mimi let go of Danny’s hand and told him to wait in the line while she went to place the bread she had baked for the occasion on one of the tables, but when she got back, he had disappeared. She found him scraping the icing off a masterfully crafted carrot cake with his fingers.
“You must behave. You must behave,” Mimi said, pulling him angrily by the arm. “How can I take you anywhere if you don’t behave?” Everyone was looking at them now.
“I’m sorry,” Danny said.
“That’s what you always say,” Mimi said. “I don’t believe you.”
“Believe me. Believe me. Believe me. With a cherry on top.”
“Go sit on that bench over there,” Mimi said. “I don’t want you to move an inch. Promise?”
“I promise.”
“I’ll get you some soup and some cake and cookies, okay? But I don’t want you to move an inch. Promise me you won’t move.”
“I promise.”
“Tell me I can trust you not to move from this spot,” Mimi said.
Danny stared back at her blankly.
“Say, ‘You can trust me, Mommy.’”
“You can trust me, Mommy,” he said after a delay of four seconds.
“Good. That’s good. That’s a good boy.”
Just when Mimi was about to ladle some chicken soup into a paper cup, she saw Bernice running toward her. There was a desperate, angry look on her face.
“We’ve got to leave!” she exclaimed. Her arms were wrapped around her shoulders and she was shivering dramatically. “I’m going back to the car. Meet me there right away.”
“I’ll go get Danny,” Mimi said.
He wasn’t on the bench where she had left him. It had been so long since she had been out with her son that she had gotten out of the habit of holding his hand every minute. Mimi ran around the grounds frantically calling his name. Finally she found him sitting on the ground near the barn pulling a haystack apart.
“I’m looking for a needle in a haystack,” he exclaimed with his wonderful smile. His hair and everything he was wearing was covered with hay. Mimi looked at her son looking up at her and she was reminded of what a happy child he was. She and Jake were always telling each other what a good thing it was that Danny was happy; their job was to see to it that he would always be happy.
Instead of scolding him, Mimi took hold of her son’s hand and said, “Let’s go. Apple picking here we come!”
“You’re late,” Bernice said when they got back to the car. “I have to make a stop at the organic egg farm.”
When they arrived at the egg farm, Bernice told Mimi to stay in the car, but Mimi said she wanted to come along. Last week on the phone, she had offered to research what apple orchards would still be open for picking, it being late in the season, but Bernice had told her not to bother. There would be signs posted everywhere. There always were. But all the signs they had passed so far had said the orchards were closed for picking and Mimi was getting worried. She hoped that one of the locals would know of a place that was still open.
“Andy, would you watch Danny while I go out?” she asked. “Make sure he doesn’t leave the car, okay?”
Then turning to Danny, she put her hands on his shoulders, sought out his eyes, and told him, “I’ll be back in a minute. I want to find out where we can go apple picking. I don’t want you to leave this car. Do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me you won’t leave the car.”
Danny was looking out the window. He didn’t respond.
“Tell me you won’t leave the car,” Mimi repeated.
After several seconds of silence he said, “I won’t leave the car.”
“Good boy,” she said, noting with satisfaction that Danny had reversed his pronouns correctly; this had been something she and Jake had been working on for ages.
“I can lock the doors,” offered Andy, who was two years younger than Danny.
“Good idea. Please do that,” Mimi said, and she was off.
When Bernice went to the back room where the eggs were kept, Mimi asked the woman behind the cash register about the apple orchards. She told her that Carter’s Farm on Cherry Blossom Lane was the only orchard in the area still open for picking. It was about a quarter mile up Route 94.
“But all they have left are Macouns and Empires,” she said.
“That’s okay,” Mimi told her. “As long as there are trees for picking. That’s all my son cares about. He has his heart set on apple picking, and once he has his heart set on something, there are no ifs, ands or buts about it.”
“Yes, the young kids love it.”
“I guess so.”
“How old is he?”
“Six,” Mimi said, wishing it were true.
“I have a six-year-old, too, so I know what you’re talking about. They can be very stubborn at that age. Wait until you see what’s coming,” she said with a knowing look. “But they grow out of it. My fourteen-year-old is a perfect little gentleman now, but you should have seen him at six.”
“That’s good to know,” Mimi said, and after thanking the woman, she went back to the car. Danny was talking to Andy about Pokémon.
“I hope you don’t mind, Andy,” she said. And again the perfect specimen of a child told her that it was fine, he was interested in Pokémon, too.
When Bernice returned to the car, Mimi told her that the woman in the egg store had said an apple orchard off Route 94, on Cherry Blossom Lane, was the only one in the area that was still open for picking. “I was getting worried,” Mimi said. “Did you notice all the signs that said closed for picking?”
“I’m warning you,” Bernice said with a frown. “We can’t spend too much time there. I have a ton of work to do. I should never have gone on this trip in the first place.”
Mimi looked out the window, searching for Cherry Blossom Lane and Carter’s Farm. They had traveled a lot farther than the quarter mile the woman at the farm stand had said they would have to go, and Mimi still hadn’t seen any signs for the orchard or the road.
“Apparently we missed it,” Mimi told Bernice. “I guess we’ll have to turn back. The woman at the egg store said that it’s the only apple orchard still open for picking. She said Cherry Blossom Lane was less than a quarter of a mile away from her store.”
“You told me that already,” Bernice said.
“Yes, well, Danny has been looking forward to this for weeks,” Mimi said. “This is a big treat for him.”
“I can’t turn back,” Bernice replied. “I told you, I have a lot of work to do. I’m very backed up. I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to get any of it done in time. I’m a single mother. My ex hasn’t given me a cent in months. I have to get home as soon as possible. I can’t waste any more time.”
“Please, Bernice,” Mimi said, lowering her voice to a whisper. “You have no idea how much this means to Danny. He’ll be devastated if he can’t go apple picking.”
“I told you I can’t do it. I have too much work to do. My back is killing me. I’ve had four spinal surgeries in the past three years. I should be home in bed. We can’t go. Don’t ask me anymore. I’m not going to change my mind.”
At this point Danny came to attention. “Where’s the apple orchard?” he asked.
“I’m sorry, honey. There’s been a change in plans. We’re going to go apple picking tomorrow instead.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes, darling, tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow and not today?”
“Yes, darling. Tomorrow. But not today.”
“Not today?”
“Yes, darling, I’m sorry. Not today. But tomorrow. I promise, we’ll go apple picking tomorrow.”
“Noooooooooooooooo! I want to go Todayyyyyyyyyyyy!” Danny howled at the top of his lungs.
“Danny, please, don’t scream. I promise we’ll go tomorrow. We just can’t go now.”
“Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo! I want to go Todayyyyyyyyy! Not tomorrow but Todayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!”
“That screaming! I can’t stand it! Tell your son to stop screaming!”
“Danny, please, honey, I beg of you, stop screaming. I told you, we’ll go apple picking tomorrow. Daddy and I will rent a car and we’ll go apple picking tomorrow.”
“Nooooooooooooooooooo! I want to go apple picking Todayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!”
Turning around, Mimi ordered Danny to stop screaming, at which point her son lurched forward and covered her mouth with his hand. Mimi bit him.
“You bit me! Why why why?”
“I’m sorry, darling. I’m so sorry,” Mimi said, the tears welling up in her eyes.
“I want to go apple picking.”
“Danny, we can’t go apple picking now. I told you. She won’t take us.”
“Take us. Take us,” Danny started screaming. “Pretty please, with a cherry on top!”
“Tell him not to ask me,” Bernice responded. “I told you I have work to do!.”
“Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!”
“I can’t
stand this,” Bernice said. “He’s giving me a migraine. My head is splitting in two.”
“Danny, you must stop screaming!”
“I want to go apple picking Nowwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!”
“I told you. Daddy and I will take you apple picking tomorrow.”
“I want to go Todayyyyyyyyyyyyyy! Not tomorrow. Todayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!”
“I can’t stand this screaming,” Bernice said.
“Shut up, Danny!” Mimi said, turning around and angrily grabbing hold of his arm. “Shut the fuck up!”
“I can’t have that kind of language in front of Andy,” Bernice said.
“I want to go apple picking Todaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyy yyyyyyyy!” Danny shouted out at the top of his lungs. “Not tomorrow. Todaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!”
“I can’t stand this anymore. I’m going to have to drop you off at the nearest train station,” Bernice said.
“What?” Mimi said.
“Your son is giving me a migraine. I can’t listen to this anymore. I’m taking you to the nearest train station.”
“You can’t do that! We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere! There won’t be another train for God knows how long.”
“I want to go apple picking Nowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!”
“I have work to do. I’m very behind. Your son’s screaming is disturbing my equilibrium. I’m a single mother. I can’t afford to lose this job. I’m going to have to drop you off at the nearest train station,” she repeated.
“Danny. You must stop this instant,” Mimi said, turning around again. “She’s going to kick us out of this fucking car if you don’t stop. Please stop. I beg of you.”
“I want to go apple picking Nowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!!!!!” Danny said, tears streaming down his face. Mimi couldn’t remember the last time she had seen her son cry. Even when he split his chin open on the playground when he was five, he hadn’t shed a tear.
“Tomorrow, we’ll go apple picking tomorrow. I promise. We’ll rent a car and go to Upstate New York like we did last year. I promise. Remember how much you liked it? We’ll go on hayrides and we’ll go the country store and you can have as many cinnamon donuts as you like.”
Queen for a Day Page 16