When Danny was three, Mimi had asked Norma if she would watch him a few hours a day. She wanted to block out some time for herself to do her copyediting. She had originally thought that she would be able to work while Danny napped, but Danny never napped; he hardly slept at all. Norma had refused. “No, mami. Sorry, mami. All full. All full.” It wasn’t until several years later that Mimi figured out that Norma had lied to her about not having enough space. It wasn’t just the new, ever-expanding crop of children in their bright orange strollers that clued her in; it was the look of pity she would see in Norma’s eyes whenever she ran into her. Mimi hated Norma and her pity; most of all she hated her for knowing all along that there was something wrong with Danny. How long had she known? Mimi wondered.
When Mimi got back to the apartment, Jake’s voice was on the answering machine saying that they were heading back home. She got to the phone just before he was about to hang up.
She asked him where he was.
“We’ll be home soon,” he said. “Danny wants to tell you something.”
There was a pause, during which she could hear Jake prompting their son to talk to his mother.
Danny finally said, “I caught a fish.”
“That’s wonderful, honey,” said Mimi. “Does that mean we are going to have fish for dinner?”
After another three-second wait, he said, “I threw it back.” And after another pause, during which she knew Jake was prompting him to tell her why, he said, “It was toxic. Because of PCBs.”
“But it’s great anyway, that you caught a fish,” said Mimi. “I’m so proud of you. I once caught a fish but I was too afraid to reel it in. Did you reel it in?”
There was another long pause. This was the longest telephone conversation they had ever had. But Danny didn’t respond.
“I’m so proud of you, darling. Mommy loves you so much! I’m so happy that you caught a fish!”
“Hi, honey. It’s me. Well, that was a record! I’m glad Danny got to go fishing at last. Of course I had to tell him to say thank you to the fisherman. And of course I had to thank the guy, too. You can imagine how pleasant the whole experience was for me. We really do have to take him fishing.”
“Okay, now it’s time for you come home,” Mimi said.
Mimi was setting the table when the phone rang. That was Jake. He always called when he was at the door. She would answer the phone, and when she opened the door, there he would be, and they would look at each other and continue talking on the phone; it was like being in two dimensions at once.
Mimi ran down the hall with the receiver in her hand, in her excitement forgetting to answer it. She couldn’t wait to hold Danny in her arms and tell him how much she loved him. But when she opened the door, Jake and Danny weren’t there. She clicked on the phone.
“Hello,” she said. Jake was probably hiding somewhere under the stairwell with Danny, who would be laughing so loud the echoes of his laughter would fill the entire hallway. Recently Danny, with his paradoxical interest in language, had informed her that echoes were disintegrating sound.
“Okay, where are you?” she said. She wasn’t in the mood for playing right now, but she went along with the game anyway. “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” she said, looking for them under the stairwell, but they weren’t there. The phone was still ringing but when she clicked it on all she heard was silence.
“Okay, Jake. That’s enough! This isn’t funny! Talk to me!”
Then, his voice barely audible, there was Jake saying her name over and over again.
“Jake. What is it? Are you okay? Please tell me you’re okay!” she commanded.
“Mimi. Danny. Danny had an accident.”
“What happened? What happened? Where are you? Where are you?” Jake told her they were in the emergency room at New York Presbyterian.
“Hurry,” he said. “Hurry.”
“I’m coming. Tell Danny to wait for me. Tell him Mommy is coming.”
Mimi’s breasts felt heavy as she ran out the door. Bounding down the stairs, and out across the street, she could swear that, defying all reason, she could feel the old familiar tug of her milk descending.
The Boy Who Lived on a Desert Island
When Danny was in the hospital, floating in and out of sleep, Mimi made up stories to tell him. She didn’t know if he could hear them, and she doubted they would mean anything to him even if he could, but it comforted her to have something to do while she waited by his bedside. This was one of the stories she told him.
Once there was a boy who lived all by himself on a desert island. The island was made of paper, and all the trees and plants and bushes on it were made of paper, too, except that when the boy would pick the fruits and berries that grew on the trees and bushes, they turned out not to be paper at all. They were as plump and juicy and delicious as any fruit or berry could possibly be. The boy would spend his days walking around the island, looking at all the interesting trees and plants and insects that inhabited it.
One sunny day when he was sitting under a paper palm tree eating a handful of delicious berries that he had just picked off a nearby bush, watching the waves of the ocean crashing against each other onto the shore in a frothy white foam that made him think of whipped cream, the boy noticed a pile of paper lying next to him. There was a paper rock lying on top of the pile of paper, to prevent them from sailing away in the warm breezes that would blow over the ocean onto the island. The boy looked under the pile of paper, and he walked around the palm tree several times, hoping to find a crayon, or a pencil, or a pen—anything he could use to draw with. But there was nothing there except the paper. The boy sat under the tree looking at the pile of paper for a long time, and eventually, not being able to think of anything else to do with it, he just started folding it.
The first thing he made with the paper was an airplane, which he sent flying high up into the sky over the ocean. The boy watched the airplane fly off into the horizon, until he could see it no more. He made dozens of airplanes that day, all of which he sent flying away into the breeze over the ocean until they disappeared from sight. He did the same thing the next day and the day after that and the day after that, but after a while making paper airplanes ceased to amuse him, and so he decided to see what else he could make out of the paper. Before he knew it, he was making all sorts of interesting things by just folding the paper. He made giraffes and dogs and bunnies and horses and a mother duck and a flock of baby ducklings. He made other kinds of animals out of the paper, some of them imaginary animals that he made up himself. He made a dog with wings, and a hippopotamus with the neck of a giraffe, and an alligator with human feet. All day long, the boy amused himself making his little folded animals.
He never ran out of paper. Every morning when he woke up, there was always a fresh pile sitting under the palm tree, waiting for him. And this was how the boy spent his time, until one day a ship came, and took him back to live in New York City, where he wrote a book about his adventure on the island. He called his book The Amusing Adventures of a Boy Who Lived on a Paper Island.
After the book was published, when the boy was at Barnes & Noble, sitting behind a table that was piled high with copies of his book, a nice man and woman who looked very much like the parents he had never seen came up to the table and asked him to sign their copy of his book. They asked him if he would mind teaching them how to make things out of paper and he said Sure and he taught them how to make a rabbit and a goose and a flock of geese. The man and the woman liked the boy very much, loved him really, and when they asked him if he would like to come home and live with them, he said that he would, and so they adopted him, and the boy lived happily ever after with his new family.
A Sample Boy
When Mimi went into Danny’s room to tell him lunch was ready, she found him asleep on the floor, under the poster of the periodic table of elements that hung o
n the wall beside his bed. She stood in the doorway looking at her son: the spray of pimples across his cheeks, the shadow of a mustache above his mouth, the unfinished look of his face made him look like any other teenage boy. His room reeked of sweat and farts and pheromones, reminding her of her brother’s room when he was thirteen.
Although it wasn’t especially cold, Mimi covered Danny with a quilt, and after gathering up the laundry, she went down to the basement. The washing machines were all in use. She got back into the elevator. The doors slid open at the lobby. A woman pushing a bright orange stroller stepped in, apparently a new client for Norma’s day care center next door.
Mimi looked at the child in the stroller and thought of Danny at that age. The signs had been there already. She recalled with the usual regret how determined she and Jake had been not to see them. The child looked up at her and waved his hand and said hi.
“What a handsome boy,” Mimi exclaimed. “He has flaxen hair. I guess that’s what is meant by ‘flaxen hair.’ That’s rare, isn’t it? Flaxen hair.” Averting her eyes, the woman nodded and smiled at Mimi politely as she bent down to scoop her child out of his stroller and into her arms. Mimi, anxious to escape, blocked the closing door with her foot, and lifting the blue plastic laundry basket up into her arms, she shoved her way past the baby carriage, startling the young mother even more.
She decided to stop off at her mailbox until the elevator came back down. There was a bill from Con Edison, a bill from the cable company and a letter from the American Jewish Congress, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Borden, the elderly couple who had lived in Mimi’s apartment before she and Jake had moved there, fourteen years ago.
When Mimi turned around to go back to the elevator, she was surprised to see her old landlord standing in the lobby. He was looking up at the recently painted ceiling—a hideous blend of pink and green and yellow—one of the touches the new owner had given the building, along with the new boiler, which allowed him to raise everyone’s rent by twenty-three dollars a month forever.
“Mr. Gotbaum,” she said, going over to him, “what are you doing here?”
“I was in the neighborhood. I thought I would come take a look at the old place,” he said. It had been five years since he had sold the building and a little longer than that since Mimi had last seen him. He looked so pale and so thin. Cancer. She hoped it wasn’t cancer. Afraid to find out, Mimi just stood there being uncharacteristically silent.
“How is the boy?” Mr. Gotbaum asked. Mr. Gotbaum’s affection for Danny remained constant, even after Danny stopped going to the yeshiva. Mimi liked to think that it wasn’t just the honor of having held her son during his bris that had endeared Danny to her old landlord. She liked to think that there was something else, something that this righteous man (this tzadik) appreciated and admired about her son.
Looking at Mr. Gotbaum now, it occurred to Mimi that it wasn’t because of his daughter that he never seemed to realize there was anything wrong with Danny; it was really because he didn’t live in the real world any more than Danny did. He lived somewhere up in the sky with the God he loved so much. Or maybe it was because he was an immigrant, and he had the blurred vision of an immigrant, living in a country whose language and customs would be forever foreign to him; he couldn’t read the signs the way the natives could. She wished that Danny could live in a world filled with immigrants, a world where no one belonged.
“Fine,” Mimi said. “He’s fine now.” Then she told him that Danny had crashed his bike into a tree, going down a steep hill. He and Jake were almost home when the acorn Danny had picked up along the way fell out of his basket, and disobeying Jake, he had turned his bike around and raced down the hill to retrieve it. He had crashed his bike into a tree and had suffered a severe concussion that had left him drifting in and out of consciousness for weeks. “He’s going to be okay,” Mimi said.
There had been tubes going down Danny’s throat and up his nose, and attached to his arm. The right side of his face had blown up to three times its natural size.
They said that, according to the MRI, her son would be back to “normal” within three months. Mimi paused as she thought about all the days and nights she had spent by the hospital bed, watching Danny breathe, entreating a vaguely imagined, yet cruel and demanding, God to give her back her son, exactly as he had been before the accident. Later, when it became clear that Danny was going to be all right, she hoped that God had not taken her too literally. She hoped He understood that in pleading for her son’s life, she had not relinquished her earlier request that Danny be given the chance to live a normal life, like all those lucky children who all those lucky mothers had written books about; children who had been cured by miracle treatments the medical establishment was too arrogant to recognize. Mimi wanted Danny to be one of those children.
“Danny will be graduating high school in five years,” Mimi told Mr. Gotbaum.
“That’s good,” Mr. Gotbaum said, his eyes shifting up to the ceiling again.
Something terrible had happened to her old landlord, she was sure of it.
“How are you, Mr. Gotbaum?” Mimi blurted out. “How is Susan? How is Wendy? Mr. Gotbaum, is everything okay?”
Susan had told Mimi that it was a second marriage for both of them. They had had their families; all their children were married with children of their own; they were in the clear; but they wanted to have a child together and now they were burdened with a girl who at age fourteen still didn’t know how to tell time or tie her shoes.
Mimi used to feel guilty whenever she and Susan talked about their children. Danny was making so much progress then. He was going to recover, she was sure of it. Probably, he would always be a little strange. So what? He would have a career—most likely something having to do with science, and one day maybe he would find a girl to marry him, someone odd like him, or maybe someone who had a thing for weird guys. That was eight and a half years ago. Now at thirteen, Danny still couldn’t be trusted to go outside by himself; there were days when he didn’t say anything except the same things he had said hundreds of times before; he was still incapable of carrying on a simple conversation; he had never had a friend.
“Wendy is gone,” Mr. Gotbaum said.
“Gone?” Mimi asked, thinking that she must have misunderstood him. His English was not very good.
“Gone,” Mr. Gotbaum repeated.
“Oh … ” Mimi said. “Mr. Gotbaum.”
“She had a heart condition. No one knew.”
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Gotbaum.”
“There’s no one up there,” he said pointing up to the ceiling. “An angel. He does this to an angel?”
“Oh, Susan, how is Susan?” Mimi asked.
“Not good.”
Mimi said she would like to call his wife and she asked him for their number. He reached into his pocket and found a pen, but he couldn’t find anything to write on. Mimi tore a corner off a flyer advertising a couch for sale in apartment 4F and gave it to him.
“This is just for you,” Mr. Gotbaum said, explaining that since he sold the building, he had gotten an unlisted number; the tenants were always calling him, complaining about the new landlord.
“Send Susan my love.”
“I have to go. She doesn’t like it for me to be away for so long.”
Mimi watched him walk out the door and to the corner, where he stood waiting for the light to change. Then, as though he had just remembered something of vital importance, he turned around abruptly, and when he saw Mimi, he rushed back into the building. There was an odd expression on his face, a cross between euphoria and madness. “Do you have a minute?” he asked Mimi.
“Of course.”
“I want to tell you something.” He was breathing heavily, and Mimi waited for him to catch his breath. And then the words rushed out of his mouth.
“I saw it on the television. They say
the universe, it began with one single atom,” he said, his eyes widening. “Everything, all the planets, the moon, the sun, the earth, the stars, they say it all started with this thing that you can’t even see. Billions of years ago. There’s a thing called the Hubble Telescope. They looked through this telescope, and you know what they saw?” he said, putting his hand to his chest. “They saw the universe, there’s an end to it. It doesn’t go on forever. And it won’t go on forever either. One day, everything will end. The earth will get colder and colder and human beings, they won’t be able to survive. Everything will be gone. The earth will be gone, all the planets will be gone, the sun will be gone and the stars and the moon and whatever else that is out there will be gone, too. And human beings. Forget it. Human beings will be gone, kaput, like everything else.” He stood there for several seconds, not saying anything, trying to catch his breath again, looking at Mimi, the crazed look still in his eyes.
“How old do you think I am?” he asked.
“I don’t know, Mr. Gotbaum. I couldn’t say.”
“Guess.”
“I don’t know,” Mimi said. She figured he was in his eighties. “Maybe in your seventies?”
“I’m going to be eighty-five on my next birthday. Eighty-five years old. I should have been in the ground long ago.”
As Mr. Gotbaum went on his way, Mimi wanted to run after him. It made her sad to think of him abandoning his beloved God. The same God who had given him the strength to survive three years in Auschwitz-Birkenau and everything he had witnessed there. She refused to believe that the apocalyptic vision of the world he had painted for her was all he had left to comfort him.
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