“I want to go apple picking Todayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy! Not Tomorrrrrrrrrrrrrroooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwww! Todayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!”
“That’s it,” Bernice said. “I’ve had it. I’m taking you to the train station. There’s one right at the next intersection.”
“Stop the car,” Mimi said. “I want to talk to Danny alone.”
Bernice brought her car to a screeching halt by the side of the road. “Okay. But I’m warning you. I’m just giving you a couple minutes. I have to get back to my work.”
Mimi pulled Danny out of the car. His face red and blotchy and wet with tears, he started jumping up and down.
“I want to go apple picking Nowwwwwwwwwww!!!!” he yelled out at the top of his lungs.
“Please calm down, Danny, I beg of you,” she said. “You must calm down. We’ll go apple picking tomorrow, I promise.”
“Not tomorrow, Todayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!” he said.
“Danny, I’m telling you, you have to stop this right now! That fucking bitch is going to leave us in the middle of fucking nowhere and then where will we be? If you don’t stop screaming, I won’t take you apple picking tomorrow. I won’t take you apple picking ever again!”
“I want to go apple picking Todayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy! Not tomorrow! Todayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
“I told you. That fucking narcissistic bitch won’t take us! You must stop this instant! Please, I beg of you, Danny,” said Mimi. “We’ll go apple picking in Mineola, okay? How about that? As soon as we get to the train station, we’ll go apple picking in Mineola. We’ll pick apples off the apple trees of Mineola.”
“In Mineola?” Danny, who had a comprehensive understanding of geography, asked. “But Mineola isn’t the country. It’s a suburb,” he said with a look filled with confusion and hope.
“No, Mineola is different. There are apple orchards in Mineola. There are! There are! There are!” Mimi told him. “And then we’ll go apple picking tomorrow, too. Mommy and Daddy will rent a car and we’ll drive to the apple orchard in Yorktown Heights, the one with the baby goats. And you’ll go apple picking and we’ll go on a hayride and we’ll get a pumpkin and Daddy will carve the face of Pikachu on it. Won’t you like that? Just think of it. You’ll go apple picking twice this year, instead of just once. As a bonus for being such a good boy. Okay?”
“Okay, Mommy,” Danny, in the blindness of his innocence and trust, consented.
“Now remember. Not a peep out of you until we get to Mineola. Promise?”
Danny looked back at her blankly.
“Please say, ‘I promise, Mommy.’ Please say, ‘I promise. Not a peep.’”
Mimi waited until Danny recited the words, “I promise, Mommy. Not a peep.”
“Good boy. You’re my good, wonderful boy,” she said. Mimi took Danny in her arms and she held him so tightly she felt as though she were trying to absorb him back into her body. She buried her face in his neck and submerged herself in the peace that only holding Danny could give her. Then taking his hand, Mimi walked with her son back to the SUV.
“Everything’s settled now,” Mimi told Bernice as she sat down in the front seat.
“I’m warning you, Mimi. My nerves can’t take another second of your son’s screaming. Another word out of him about apple picking and I’m taking you to the nearest train station.”
“I think it’s better not to say anything about that particular subject right now, okay?” Mimi said, reaching back and taking Danny’s hand in hers. “Just take us back to Mineola.” Mimi looked out the window. The leaves were saturated with the last gasp of the sun’s brightness.
They were two hours away from Mineola. Mimi would have to distract Bernice until they got to the train station. She decided she would start with Bernice’s much-reviled ex-husband. Bernice loved complaining about him. When the topic of her idiot ex began to dry up, Mimi struck up a conversation about the female urge to procreate. This led to the issue of abortion. Bernice herself had had five.
As they entered the more developed areas of Long Island, Mimi shifted the topic to demographics. Bernice was in the middle of a disquisition on the recent socioeconomic changes in Mineola when they reached the train depot, at which point Mimi jumped from her seat, and grabbing Danny by the hand, she unbuckled his seat belt, pulled him out of the SUV and carried him to the tracks, where, as luck would have it, a train had just pulled into the station. She was happy that she had had the presence of mind to remember to say good-bye to Andy, who really was a great kid. She didn’t say good-bye to Bernice, or even look at her when she left the SUV, although she caught a glimpse of her out of the corner of her eye. She was gazing at Mimi in bewilderment, perplexed to behold yet another person betraying her trust, her generosity and her goodwill.
The Bike Path
Jake left the apartment to take Danny bike riding at 9:00 in the morning. He had promised to check in with Mimi at 10:00, and when the clock struck 10:05 with still no call from Jake, Mimi felt the familiar dread creeping up on her. By 10:08, she was dialing and redialing his cell phone. Ten minutes passed, with still no call from her husband, just four rings followed by the eerily posthumous sound of his recorded voice. Mimi had imagined it hundreds of times before: the inconsolable grief, the unbearable loneliness, the inconceivable misery of life without Jake. And what about Danny? What would she do about Danny? She could never take care of Danny on her own.
Finally at 10:14, Jake answered the phone. “Where the hell are you?” she said, relief giving way to anger.
“Stop it,” Jake said. Now he was the one who was angry, and his anger always outstripped hers. Mimi retreated.
“I’m sorry, but please try to understand how worried I get.”
“Stop being so irrational.”
“Maybe if you thought about how you are about heights.”
“You mean the way you are about everyfuckingthing else.”
Mimi laughed. Her husband had come back from the dead.
“I couldn’t call you. The signals were out,” he explained.
“Where are you?”
Jake told her they were on the bike path, which he had just found out about this morning. As soon as they left the apartment house, Danny had blown out his front tire, running over a nail, and they had gone to the bike shop on Bennett Avenue to get the flat fixed. Their neighbor, whose father owned the shop, had told him about the bike path, which ran along the banks of the Hudson down the entire length of Manhattan.
“You mean Hector?” Mimi asked.
“I don’t know his name. He’s the kid who’s always doing wheelies in the courtyard.”
“Hector. His name is Hector.” About five years ago, Mimi had hired the boy to play with Danny. And for a few weeks, every Sunday he and Danny would sit at the dining room table, where Mimi could keep an eye on them, and play battleship. Danny was very good at games and he always won. Mimi didn’t think that was why Hector stopped coming over. She knew it was his mother, who had called to tell her that Hector was too busy with schoolwork to come over and play with Danny anymore. After that, the woman always avoided looking at Mimi whenever she encountered her in the laundry room, or in the lobby, or in the elevator, or on the street.
“What’s it like? The bike path?” she asked. Then interrupting herself, she said, “Are you riding? Don’t talk to me if you’re riding.” Jake could get so lost in his thoughts that the physical world would cease to exist for him. Two years ago he had almost walked straight into the path of an ambulance that was racing down 49th Street. He said he had been trying to remember a line from “Tithonus” at the time. She didn’t respond when he quipped that his last thought in his life on earth would have been “Here at the quiet limit of the world” if a young man in army fatigues hadn’t pulled him out of the way.
Her husband hadn’t changed much
since the first time she had seen him, in his cousin’s house in Upstate New York, where they were attending the same college. She had gone to the house to borrow a book from a girl in her Romantic poetry class, and that was when she first saw Jake. He was sitting at the kitchen table reading a paperback and eating a turkey leg (which, Jake told her years later, his mother had sent via his cousin, who had just come back from a visit home). The image of him sitting there so completely ensconced in his contented little world was as vivid to her now as it had been twenty-five years ago.
Mimi loved seeing this boy, so immersed in his simple pleasures. She could never imagine herself ever feeling that content. It was something she wanted to know, something she had always wanted Jake to teach her.
At the time, Mimi was sharing an apartment with a nasty girl, a film major with delusions of grandeur, like so many of the film majors she knew, and when a friend of hers moved out of the rooms she was renting in a house at the edge of town, Mimi moved there, and one day when she was hitchhiking to school, she ran into Jake, who turned out to be living across the street from her. She would visit him in the crummy apartment he shared with a friend of his from high school. They took LSD together once, and wandered around the hideous Binghamton College campus, which seemed to them to be as glorious as the Emerald City of Oz. They made out on a nearby hill, and later spent the night lying in his loft bed reading to each other from the Norton Anthology of Poetry. The words came out of their mouths in colors, and the ceiling above them kept changing shape, expanding and contracting and moving up and down; at one point she could feel the weight of it covering her like a blanket. They didn’t sleep together that night. The next day they sat on the bank of a nearby creek, and Jake, with his antiquated sense of honor, told her that he had not wanted to take advantage of her in her drugged state. They had sex right after their talk, and when Mimi, who spent her entire college career moving from apartment to apartment and college to college, decided to change apartments yet again (this time to a converted funeral parlor in another part of town), they had sex a few more times, the way people did in those days, casually and on the spur of the moment.
At the end of the semester, they both transferred to different colleges, and they didn’t see each other again until they were both standing in line waiting for a table to open up at the Odessa restaurant in the East Village. Mimi, addressing the boy standing in front of her, asked him if he was waiting for a table, and he turned around and looked at her rather rudely, she thought, and nodded his head yes. Then Mimi said, “Jake?” and Jake said, “Mimi.”
They started living together right after they met.
Mimi had always hoped some of Jake’s eternal calm would rub off on her, but quite the opposite turned out to be true. There was too much Jake in Jake for there to be any room left for Mimi to appropriate any of that inner peace for herself. Someone had to do the worrying. And the worries kept piling up. Ever since the incident with the fire engine, Mimi would worry about Jake every time he left the house. It had gotten to the point where she was afraid for him to go across the street by himself to get a quart of milk. He was absentminded—like Danny. Or rather, Danny was like him. Only more so. Tragically more so.
“We’re off our bikes now,” Jake said, explaining that Danny had stopped to pick a bed of dandelion puffballs he had seen growing in a field by the river. He wouldn’t be satisfied until he had picked every last puffball and until he had watched every last filament scatter in the air under the force of his breath. Mimi could see him methodically clearing the field of all the dandelions while Jake stood by, patiently watching. Her husband took such pleasure in Danny’s innocent appreciation of the things of the world; he got a kick out of “his little idiosyncrasies,” as he called them. She used to get a kick out of them, too, but they were just a conglomeration of symptoms to her now.
“I feel as though we’ve discovered a secret passageway to a whole other world,” Jake told her. “I can’t believe this has been here all this time and we didn’t know about it,” he said, describing the sights they had passed so far—the tennis courts and the river and the bridge and the stretches of green grass and the old railroad tracks that reminded him of the rundown towns in Upstate New York they used to visit before Danny was born.
“Maybe we could go hiking in New Paltz next weekend. Danny would like that. I’ve been thinking it’s time to start living our lives again. We can’t let autism rule us forever, you know.” Then he went back to telling her about the bike path. “I wish you were here with us. We’ve got to get you a bike.”
The following Monday, when Jake was coming home from working on his novel at the Starbucks that had just opened up at the top of the hill, their next-door neighbor Manny was sitting on a milk crate in the corner of the hallway that served as his workshop, repairing a bike he had found on the street. Manny was a tiny man with a glass eye and a talent for fixing things. He had been a car mechanic in Ecuador and he always wore blue denim overalls with Emanuel Mecánico embroidered in big red letters across the front. Retired now, Manny occupied himself picking things up off the street and fixing them—a typewriter, a paper shredder, a high chair, a fax machine, a computer desk. The small studio apartment he shared with his wife, Amada, was piled high from floor to ceiling with things he’d found on the street. Once or twice a year they packed up all their little treasures and sent them to Ecuador, to be distributed among the various members of their extended family.
Manny didn’t speak English, although Mimi knew he liked American movies. The sound of his television traveled through the thin wall that separated their two apartments. Once when the tenant in 5D forgot about a pan of oil she had left on the burner and it caught fire, filling the hallways with smoke, the building had been evacuated by the fire department at one in the morning, and they found themselves standing next to each other in the elevator. Manny had looked at Jake, and nodding his head enthusiastically, he told his wife, “Como Paul Newman en la película.” Jake was wearing a sleeveless undershirt, like the one Paul Newman wore in The Sting. Mimi always thought Jake looked great in sleeveless undershirts. He was past forty, but his body was firm and strong.
Jake managed to convey to Manny that he wanted to buy the bicycle—and after some negotiation, which consisted of Manny saying that Jake could have the bike for treinta dólares and Jake, who didn’t want to take advantage of Manny’s ignorance of the cost of things in America, offering him cincuenta dólares, Mimi had a bike, and the next day she went out with him and Danny on the bike path.
Riding along the banks of the Hudson, the George Washington Bridge rising like an optical illusion out of the sky, Mimi could see that the bike path was indeed a wondrous thing but she was too worried about Danny to enjoy it. He was so impulsive. He had no sense of danger. There was no telling what he would do from one minute to the next. Once, when he was five, she had woken up to find him hanging halfway out the window between the child guards. It was incomprehensible to her how so completely in control of herself she had been, that with the force of her will she had managed to make time stand still as she got up out of bed and pulled her son into her arms.
“Just ride ahead of us. I’ll take care of Danny. Try to enjoy yourself, goddammit,” Jake told her. He said she was spoiling everyone’s fun, yelling at Danny to watch out at every turn. “Give him space,” he said. “How can he learn with you breathing down his neck every second?”
Shortly after she took the lead, just as they were going down a steep hill, Danny cut in front of her, causing her to lose her balance and fall down, scraping layers of flesh off her arm. Danny was delighted to be able to observe firsthand the different stages of healing he had read about in his medical textbooks. The first thing he did every day when he came home from school was to check her arm; he seemed completely oblivious to her suffering; perhaps because he wasn’t particularly sensitive to pain himself. The doctors called it “hyposensitivity.”
After Mimi’s arm got better, Jake kept on trying to convince her to go out on the bike path with them again. “Danny has learned his lesson,” he told her.
Since when does Danny ever learn his lesson? Mimi wanted to ask him. But Jake hated when she talked that way.
Ever since the accident, the thought of Jake and Danny going out bike riding terrified Mimi. For reasons that were clearly irrational to her, it was now only Jake she worried about, never Danny. She wished she could go out with them so that she could protect her husband from harm. Once or twice she had gotten as far as the door. But she could never bring herself to go with them. Every weekend the days were sunny and bright. Sometimes it felt as though the sun, the sky and God were all conspiring against her. Soon it would be November, and Mimi tallied up the number of weekends before winter arrived, when it would be too cold for bike riding. Jake could take Danny to the Museum of Natural History on the weekends, and the movies. Maybe Mimi would go with them. She would force herself to go out with them.
Jake didn’t say good-bye when he left for the bike path that morning. He didn’t want to wake her. But Mimi wasn’t sleeping. She was lying in bed listening to him get Danny ready to go out. She used to be the one to set the household in motion in the morning, rising before the sun, anxious to start the day. There was always so much to do. But lately she could barely bring herself to get out of bed. It was Jake who woke Danny every morning and made sure he combed his hair and brushed his teeth; it was Jake who checked to see that his shoes were tied and that his fly was zipped and his shirt was tucked in. It was Jake who made him breakfast and packed up his lunch. It was Jake who walked him to the school up the block, where Danny spent the day being led around like a puppet by an aide who had never been trained to work with him.
Mimi listened as Jake told Danny how to release the bike from the lift in the ceiling. He was so gentle with their son; his patience reminded her of how impatient with Danny she had become.
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