Lately, when she got angry at Danny, she would remember the mother she had met at an autism seminar on advocacy a few years ago. The woman had come from Vietnam to New York City on her own, because she had heard that services for handicapped children were better here. Her son, who was eighteen, weighed almost three hundred pounds. He couldn’t talk, was incapable of dressing himself and was constantly leaving his semen everywhere. Mimi had asked her, What do you do when you get angry at him? The woman had told her, I love him so much, so much. When I am angry, I tell him, Hug Mommy, and everything go away.
Mimi couldn’t be like that woman. The other day when she caught Danny cutting the fringe off the Oriental rug in the foyer, she slapped him in the face. She hadn’t hit him very hard, but she had hit him. “Why did you hit me? Why? Why? Why?” he kept on asking her as she embraced him and tried to kiss away the red mark she had left on his cheek.
“No, not that way, Danny,” Jake was saying. “That’s better. Easy does it. Now try again. That’s it, my sunny son son.”
The bike lift hung over the arch outside the bathroom, and for a long time, Mimi would be haunted by visions of it crashing down on them. Weeks after Jake had installed the contraption, she kept on nagging him to take it down. They could go back to storing the bikes in the vestibule. So what if they tripped over them occasionally?
It wasn’t until she heard the rattle of Jake’s key in the door that Mimi got out of bed. Her bladder had been close to bursting for the past half hour but she wanted to avoid witnessing the morning turmoil of getting Danny ready to go out.
Mimi went back to bed. She studied the crack in the ceiling. It had been years since their apartment had been painted, and the walls and ceiling were a mess, with paint and plaster peeling off everywhere. When Danny was little, she would lie down with him and together they would talk about what the cracks in the ceiling looked like. Eventually they decided on a white dachshund running through white clouds in a white night sky. Once, before Danny’s diagnosis, Mimi was in the kitchen doing the dishes, and she heard a crash coming from her bedroom, and when she rushed to see what had happened, she found Danny standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by big chunks of broken plaster. He was laughing and repeating over and over again, “The ceiling is falling! The ceiling is falling! The ceiling, not the sky! The ceiling, not the sky!” Mimi was relieved that Danny was unharmed, and relieved also to see that the section of the ceiling that housed the white dachshund was still there, and that he was still prancing happily around in the white night sky.
The early summer air, with its comforting heaviness, its gelatinous quiet, drifted in through the window. Soon it would be hot, and they didn’t have an air conditioner in their bedroom. To cool off on hot summer days, she and Jake would take lots of baths and lie around naked under the window fans and take turns complaining about the heat. They made a game of it. But Danny was getting older now and she couldn’t walk around naked anymore. Lately, he had become preoccupied with her breasts. He was always trying to touch them and asking to look at them. Jake said it was just adolescence. It was easy to forget that on top of everything else, Danny was also going through puberty. But Mimi didn’t think his sudden interest in her breasts had anything to do with hormones. It had to do with the distance that had been growing between them; it was the gulf she had created and this was how Danny was trying to navigate his way across it.
Mimi had nursed Danny until he was three and a half; it often seemed to her that nursing was the only part of motherhood she had been any good at, and lately she had been wishing that she had never weaned Danny. She missed the lazy peacefulness of lying in bed with her son in her arms. Most of all she missed the easy access it gave her to this child who seemed to be drifting farther and farther away from her with each passing day.
Three and a half years of nursing had wrecked her breasts, but Mimi didn’t care. To her, the stretch marks that now ran up and down them like the tributaries of two big fat round rivers were proud emblems, irrefutable proof, of what now seemed to be her dubious claim to motherhood.
She could still vividly recall the comforting heaviness of the ducts filling up with milk. Occasionally, without warning, they would erupt, saturating her clothes with that wonderful sweet and sour scent. Sometimes when she nuzzled her face in Danny’s hair, she thought she could still detect a ghost of the smell lingering on him like a phantom of her former self.
Mimi lay in bed and listened to the traffic on the George Washington Bridge. And the chirping of birds. There was something soothing about the steady whirr of the wheels on the pavement. The cars sounded happy. But the birds sounded miserable. They sounded frantic. They sounded desperate to be released from the prison of the city sky.
The voice of a policeman talking in staccato rhythms into a microphone interrupted Mimi’s thoughts. He was telling a car to turn off the street: “Pull over to the side of the road.” She would occasionally hear these words coming from 181st Street at random hours of the day and night. It had taken her years to figure out that the strange sounds, which made it seem as though the city had fallen victim to a fascist takeover, just came from a policeman enforcing the rules of the road.
At the end of last winter, their car had been towed away. Mimi had neglected to pay hundreds of dollars’ worth of parking tickets, and when she went to retrieve it, the city refused to release it because she had forgotten to pay her car insurance for an entire year. Danny missed having a car. Every day he pleaded, “Get a car. I want a car. I need a car. I can’t live without a car.” “Maybe later,” she would say to appease him. But Mimi was relieved to be rid of the headache of having to keep track of the parking rules in Manhattan and worrying about vandals breaking her windshield and removing her headlights to sell to chop shops in the Bronx.
Jake called at ten o’clock to report that they had arrived safely at their first destination of the day—the Barnes & Noble on West 82nd Street. Although at home Danny would spend hours reading field guides about rocks and minerals, fish, birds, insects and botany; science textbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases, music magazines and a variety of shopping catalogs for everything from camping equipment to element coin collections; books about medicine, etymology, biology, chemistry, gardening, human anatomy, nutrition, and two new interests of his, American slang and the North Pole, the only thing he ever wanted to do at Barnes & Noble was look at the pop-up books. He would gather a pile of them in his arms—they were always the same books. He would bring them to a corner—always the same corner—and play with them. He never tired of pulling the cardboard flaps in and out over and over again. Jake and Mimi knew that anyone looking at him would think there was something weird about a thirteen-year-old in playing with baby books, and this bothered them. But since they were always forcing their son to do things he did not like doing, it didn’t seem fair to be denying Danny a simple pleasure like this.
Jake said they would stay at Barnes & Noble for another half hour. After that he would take Danny out for lunch. They should be getting back on their bikes around three.
Mimi told him to promise not to ride in the street, but Jake refused. Lately he had been growing more and more intolerant of her constant worrying.
“Besides, it’s illegal to ride on the sidewalk,” he told her.
“But you promised,” Mimi said.
“‘The coward dies a thousand deaths,’” he declaimed.
“Ha. Ha. Ha,” Mimi said. Then she heard Jake giving the phone to Danny, telling him to say hello to her.
The telephone confused Danny. Although he knew how it worked from a technical perspective, it flustered him to use it.
“Go on, honey. Talk to your mommy,” Jake said.
“I love you,” he shouted into the phone.
“I love you, too, Danny,” she said.
“How much?” he asked. It was a game they used to play. Every night before he went to sleep, s
he would lie in bed with Danny and tell him how much she loved him. That was how she came to teach him about infinity. He was only four but he understood what she was talking about right away; he had been pondering it on his own for a long time. “The sky goes on forever. But the sidewalk ends. And numbers don’t stop counting.” This was something he had discovered by himself when he was three.
That was also the night she told him about death. They were talking about how some things never end, and Danny asked her about flowers and animals and insects and birds and people. He was inconsolable when she told him that every living thing had to die sooner or later. But there could never be enough room in the world to hold all those living things, Mimi tried to explain. What about the moon? Danny asked. And all the other planets? What about the universe? He calmed down finally when she told him that when he grew up, maybe he would discover a cure for death.
Mimi decided to spend the day sorting through Danny’s clothes and getting rid of the ones he had outgrown. Throwing away all the little T-shirts and little pants and little socks, Mimi felt as though she were betraying Danny, as though by throwing away his old clothes, she were throwing away all hope for the future. If only he could stay thirteen forever. Or twelve. Or ten.
When they stood back to back now, the top of his head was less than three inches below the top of hers; last June she discovered a delicate dusting of hair covering the pale skin above his upper lip. As soon as she noticed the mustache, she whisked him into the bathroom to shave it off. “The time has come for you to have your first shave, I’m afraid,” she told him.
“Just make believe,” he told her, remembering, probably, how Jake used to take him into the bathroom and spray shaving cream on his face, and pretend to shave him with the back side of the razor.
“No, I’m afraid it’s for real this time,” Mimi told him. But Danny insisted that there was just a very little bit and that he wasn’t going to go through puberty for a couple of years, at least. He was merely prepubescent, he said. He looked uncharacteristically solemn as she covered his upper lip with shaving cream and got rid of the offending hairs.
It was two the next time Jake called her. They were about to head back on the bike path.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. He could always tell whenever something was bothering her.
She told him that she had been spending the day sorting through Danny’s old clothes. “When did he get so big?” she said, choking back the tears.
“Forget about the clothes,” he told her. “Why don’t you just read a book? Or watch television. Look for something stupid. Be stupid. It’s fun to be stupid. We’ll be home in an hour.”
Ten minutes later the phone rang again. It was Jake, reminding her to turn on the television. She went obediently to their bedroom and turned on the TV. A little box in the lower-right-hand corner of the screen said that the show was called The Bachelor. From what Mimi could gather, it was a reality show about the real-life quest for love and romance—played out for the television audience to see.
Apparently, the bachelor, a generic-looking young man, with vacant eyes and a perpetual grin, had spent the last several weeks sifting through a pile of women and now he had finally whittled his choice of a soul mate down to two candidates. He was presently on the horns of a dilemma, trying to decide which of them to choose. “I think I love them both,” he said with a wholesome grin, bred of his incredible stupidity, Mimi supposed. “They’re both so awesome. They’re both the women of my dreams. I’ve never felt this way before, really.”
Mimi sat down on the bed, fascinated. Jake was right. This was fun. Later, when they went to bed, she would utter those words to him, or some such version. I think I love you. I mean I adore you. I can’t believe the way you make me feel. I think you’re the man of my dreams. You’re so awesome. I’m in awe. You’re the awesomest man in the world. She would go on and on like that, and Jake would keep on telling her to shut up, but she wouldn’t stop until he had wrestled her to the floor. They had fun, didn’t they? Despite everything, they still had fun.
Jake called at four to report that Danny was fishing in the river. On the way home, he had hopped off his bike and run over to a man who was sitting on a rock by the river fishing. Now the fisherman was teaching Danny how to cast his rod.
“But you said you would be home by five,” Mimi said.
“You know how much Danny wants to go fishing,” Jake told her. “I can’t take him away now.” Last spring Mimi had gotten him a fishing rod and a tackle box, and every night before Danny went to sleep, he would dump the contents of his tackle box onto his bed. He would run his fingers up and down the ridges of the silver scaling knife, unwind and rewind the spools of fishing lines and examine his collection of lures, turning them over and over again in his hands and putting them close to his nose and sniffing them, as though he could detect the scent of the sea lingering on the pristine pieces of metal and plastic. Danny had made a list of places within a thirty-mile radius of their apartment where they could go fishing, but they had never gotten around to taking him to any of them. Whenever Danny was asked to fill out one of the questionnaires designed to diagnose what was wrong with him, he always listed fishing as one of his three favorite hobbies. It didn’t seem relevant to him that he had never actually gone fishing.
Jake told her that the fisherman was impressed with how curious Danny was, and how much he knew about fish and the sport of fishing. And he didn’t seem to mind answering all his questions.
“Please, Jake,” Mimi said. “I can’t bear to wait any longer.”
“Stop it, Mimi,” Jake said impatiently. “You can’t really expect me to take Danny away now, can you? This is a dream come true for him.”
“What can you do with a fish you catch in the polluted waters of the Hudson?” she argued. Knowing that her fears were unjustified never made them any less real to her.
“You know that’s not the point, Mimi,” he said.
She paced back and forth on the floor and tried to comfort herself with the thought that they had already made it through the most perilous part of the journey—the part where the bike path broke off into the crowded city streets. Now there was only that hill a quarter mile before the river to worry about, the one where Danny had cut in front of her. But Jake said Danny hadn’t done anything like that since the accident. Maybe he really was learning.
She went back to watching television. While she had been on the phone with Jake, the bachelor had made up his mind about which supplicant was really the one and only girl of his dreams. Now the time had come for the girls to find out which of them had been judged to be the most awesomest. Mimi watched as they combed their long straight hair, and dressed their perfect bodies in shiny evening gowns, carefully preparing themselves for the moron’s verdict. After the commercial, the camera showed a stretch limousine pulling up to the curb. The blonde smiled bravely as she climbed out of it, and proceeded to walk up the long stone path to where the bachelor stood waiting in a gazebo. Mimi kind of liked the blonde. She felt a little sorry for her too. There was something sad about the girl. And insecure, as well. Like after she told the bachelor that her parents were Buddhists. She knew the bachelor would probably think it was strange, but it was true, so she had said it.
The sun was about to set, and for several seconds the television screen was burning with the colors of twilight. The bachelor was standing next to a little table on which lay a single red rose. The blonde stood there in a state of suspended animation as he went on and on about how wonderful she was and how amazing she made him feel and how terrific and awesome and beautiful she was, her eyes constantly shifting to the rose (chosen by the writers to be the symbol of true love). When the bachelor failed to pick it up, a look of trepidation passed over the young woman’s face. After listening to him say again how incredible and beautiful and amazing she was, she walked stoically back down the path alone. Next the camera flashed t
o her in the car. She was crying.
“Why does this always happen to me? I’m thirty years old. What’s wrong with me? Why doesn’t anyone ever want me?” she said.
Looking at this beautiful young woman crying in the back of a limousine, Mimi could almost understand what had driven the girl to look for love on a reality TV show. When she was two weeks away from her thirtieth birthday, Mimi had started searching for Jake in the Manhattan telephone directory, calling people named Wiesenthal, which for reasons neither of them could ever figure out she had thought was Jake’s last name.
Next it was the brunette’s turn to get out of the limousine, walk up the path and stand there in front of the gazebo while the bachelor told her how beautiful and awesome she was and how fantastic she made him feel.
Mimi shut off the TV. She decided to do the laundry, but when she got down to the basement, all the washing machines were taken. The Dominican woman who lived with her two children and her mother and father and three brothers and her pregnant niece in a one-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor was using all three of them. One of her neighbors, part of the new crop of tenants who had moved into the building since the housing boom had hit Washington Heights, causing rents to triple and the Dominicans to leave, told her that she suspected the family was using the building’s three washing machines to run a laundry business out of the basement. The woman announced that as soon as she had proof, she was going to report them to the landlord. “Nine people in a one-bedroom apartment. I don’t understand how these people live, do you?”
Mimi wouldn’t be surprised if it was true that Yvonne was operating a laundry business out of the basement. The woman across the hall ran a bed-and-breakfast; there was always a constant stream of people from all over the world coming in and out of her apartment, all of whom she claimed were her relatives. The man in 6A sold wine. The woman below her cut hair for twenty dollars a head. And Mimi’s next-door neighbor ran a day care center. The windows of their kitchens were directly across from each other and Mimi often heard Norma singing to herself in Spanish. She was a tiresomely cheerful woman who took good care of her invalid husband, and seemed to really like the children, whom she would greet with great enthusiasm when their parents delivered them to her door. She was always telling them how much she loved them.
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