The woman shakes her head. “I think it’s best if I leave,” she said. “Perhaps I can come back another day.” She heaves her too-large child into her arms; the girl collapses into them like a rag doll and wraps her bare legs around her mother’s waist. “I’m sorry about the books on the floor,” the mother calls over her shoulder.
I rush ahead of her to open the door. The girl is playing with her mother’s hat, still moaning softly. “Is she . . . I know it’s terribly rude of me to ask, but is your daughter . . .” I stop talking, because I don’t know what else to say.
The woman gives me a sharp look. “She’s autistic,” she says. And then she strides through the doorway and does not look back.
Autistic.
I have heard of that, I think. I know it is some sort of mental disorder. But I am not sure exactly what it means.
Luckily, I have a convenient facility at my fingertips for finding out.
The store is silent as I head for the psychology section. This is not a big section; we are an all-purpose shop, but a small one, and we carry only the basics in most nonfiction. Only those items that might appeal to the general reader. We can order anything, and often do for our regulars. But as for the stacks, we keep them stocked with what appeals mainly to the browser, the woman reader, the casual intellect. Nothing too studious.
I scan the psychology volumes. Unlike our fiction section, which is organized by author, Frieda and I arrange the nonfiction shelves in our store by category—such as psychology—and then by book title. Over the years we have learned that customers are more likely to find what they seek there by title rather than author, because the names of many nonfiction authors are unknown to the general reading public.
I select a book entitled A Basic Introduction to Modern Psychology. Turning to the index, I locate the topic in question and find a few paragraphs that suit my purpose.
Autism, also called infantile schizophrenia, is a disorder exemplified by limited social and communication skills in infants and young children. In numerous documented cases, sufferers also exhibit excessively constrained, overly rhythmic behavior. Autistic infants and toddlers generally do not respond when called by name. Such infants and toddlers rarely smile or make eye contact; nor do they imitate other children or adults. As autistic children grow, they appear to be incapable of understanding basic social cues and norms. They frequently find it difficult to share and take turns with others. They generally do not understand or enjoy imaginative play. Autistic children are often subject to emotional outbursts when no clear cause for such outbursts exists.
Fair enough. Sounds like Michael, and like the little girl in my store today.
The next line, however, stops me in my tracks and leaves my heart cold.
The causes of autism are unclear. However, autism is commonly thought to be caused by emotionally distant parenting, generally on the part of the mother.
Chapter 15
Mama.”
I am startled into consciousness.
“Mama.” This time, the tone is more insistent.
I turn my head and see him. The frightening little boy. Michael. I attempt to meet his eye, but he refuses to look directly at me. Nonetheless, I can tell that behind the glasses, his eyes are blue—like Lars, like Mitch and Missy. Evidently, no one in this dream world inherited my hazel eye color. I don’t know if it’s the thick lenses or if Michael’s eye color is simply not as saturated as that of the others—but in either case, behind the glasses, his eyes seem cloudy, unfocused.
He shakes my shoulder. His long, thin fingers dig into me; it feels like tiny knife blades burrowing in my flesh.
I reach up and rub my shoulder. “Ow. Michael, that hurt.”
He ignores this. “Mama, I was saying your name and you weren’t answering.”
“I’m sorry,” I tell him, although I don’t feel sorry at all.
I look around. We are sitting on a bench near a playground, with a small lake to our left. I swivel my head, looking for the mountains to the west—that is the best way to orient oneself in Denver. Finding them, I trace directions for the nearby landscape. The lake is north of us. To the east and the west, I see residential streets, rows of houses. To the south is a barren field, patched with snow, and another, equally small lake beyond it. I can barely make out the tall chain-link fences around a cluster of tennis courts at the southern lake’s far end. In the distance, a red-brick clock tower rises above the trees.
I realize we are in Washington Park. The clock tower belongs to South High School, the secondary school from which I graduated more than twenty years ago. The school is across the street from the southern edge of the park; we students used to walk across to the park for our PE classes, to run laps on the roadway that winds through the park or take practice shots on the tennis courts.
It is probably a good five or six miles from here to the house on Springfield Street that I share with Lars and the children in my imaginary life. But it is only a few blocks from the park to my parents’ house on York Street. The photograph hanging in the hallway of the Springfield Street house—the picture of my parents, with me as a baby, picnicking—was taken in this park. I haven’t been here in years, but I spent many a happy hour in Washington Park as a child, both at this playground and swimming in the lake. Smith Lake, it’s called; when we were kids, the neighborhood children and I would scare each other with tales of sea monsters who lived in Smith Lake. “Don’t go out too far,” we’d tease each other. “A one-eyed monster will get you.”
The park and playground have changed over the years. The swings look new, and the city closed the swimming beach a few years ago; the lake was too small, too many people were using it, and the water had become murky. Perhaps, I think now, my friends and I were right about a monster living in that dark, dim water.
Michael and I are the only people at the playground. The lake is partially frozen over, the air is cold, and the sky is gray. Snow is not falling, but it hangs in the clouds. I lift my nose and smell it, the way a watchdog might sniff out an approaching intruder.
Whatever are we doing here? And where are the other children?
“Michael,” I say. “Where are Mitch and Missy?”
He rolls his eyes—not at me, because he doesn’t look at me, but at the swings a few feet from us. “You know where they are, Mama. Where they always are during the daytime.”
“And where is that?”
Now he grins; he must think I am joking with him. “Honestly,” I implore. “Where is that?”
“Mama!” He laughs out loud. To my surprise, I find the sound delightful. His laugh has a joyous, ringing tone; it reminds me instantly and incongruously of my mother’s laughter. “Silly Mama. They’re in school, of course.”
“Oh.” I place my kidskin-gloved hands on either side of me, on the green bench. “And you?” I ask. “Why aren’t you in school, too?”
He laughs again and hops clumsily off the bench. “Well, now you’re just being crazy,” he says. “You know I don’t go to school, Mama.”