“Now, we don’t mind taking on someone with limited experience,” Clayton said. “Not if he’s serious-minded. Not if he wants to improve. But this guy. I get the feeling he’s—he’s—”
“Dabbling,” Manny finished.
“Exactly.” Clayton nodded. “Especially after what he said about origami sheep for Chinese New Year.”
“Well, of course,” Graham said.
He was beginning to have more sympathy for the woman who said Well, that’s news to me all the time. He was beginning to understand how that could happen. He wished Audra was here. Audra could converse with a statue. (In fact, once in the ER she had had a long talk with a man who turned out to have had a stroke and could only communicate by blinking.)
They struggled along for a while, with Manny and Clayton talking about origami and Graham saying “I understand” or “That sounds wise” or “Of course” whenever a response seemed called for. There was a brief bit of something you might call an actual conversation, if your standards were very low, when Clayton asked why Matthew wasn’t at the club meeting on Sunday.
“He’s at camp,” Graham said.
“Origami camp?” Manny asked, looking hopeful.
“No,” Graham said. “Just camp.” He wasn’t about to say special-needs camp. Not in front of these two. Not in front of anyone.
“What do they do at this camp?” Clayton asked suspiciously.
“Well, you know,” Graham said. “Hiking and campfires and stuff.”
“Oh, outdoor camp,” Clayton said.
“Yes, exactly.”
“I never cared for that myself,” Clayton said.
“Me, either,” Graham said, realizing it was true. Why had he sent his child off to do something he himself would have hated? (He kept forgetting that Matthew had wanted to go.)
They made it through lunch, just barely. Graham had the fish and chips, Clayton had a grilled cheese sandwich, and Manny had mashed potatoes with a side of cauliflower and a vanilla milk shake. Graham had forgotten that Manny only ate white foods off white plates. It seemed impossible to forget such a thing, but he had.
“We come here because they don’t insist on garnish,” Manny said. “It can ruin a whole meal for me if someone puts a little colored doodad on my plate.”
Afterward, Graham went back out on the street, feeling sad because he had liked the diner very much and now he knew he would never go there again, for fear of running into Manny and Clayton. This seemed to him sometimes to be the essence of aging: that the places and people you loved were ruined for you, or you ruined them for yourself, or they stopped serving the complimentary breadbasket, and before you knew it, you were left with nothing but memories.
But he wouldn’t go back and risk putting himself through another lunch where he felt like such an outsider. And then Graham felt even sadder than before, because he wondered suddenly if this was what life was like for Matthew all the time. Guessing at people’s meanings and relying on stock phrases to get you through? Knowing that you weren’t connecting but not knowing why, or how to fix it? He had read somewhere that people with Asperger’s had to work very hard to exist in this world, the normal social world, with all its complicated nuances. They preferred their own worlds, but Graham wanted Matthew to live in this world, with him.
—
“I’m finding the no-alcohol thing really hard,” Audra said that night. “And it’s only been three days.”
Graham admired her for avoiding alcohol before they even knew for certain that she was pregnant, but he couldn’t help noticing that even without alcohol, she got a little loopier around seven o’clock every evening. Perhaps she didn’t need alcohol anymore. Maybe she was so conditioned from years of happy hours that her brain was now spontaneously releasing some organic form of a cocktail at the same time every day.
Right now, for instance, she was sitting on the living room couch with him—her bare toes gripping the edge of the glass coffee table—and eating a bag of Cheetos while he drank a Scotch. She said the baby loved Cheetos. Apparently the baby had likes and dislikes now, perhaps even an opinion on Hillary Clinton.
Audra tossed her nearly empty Cheetos bag on the coffee table. “Cheetos are just delicious while you’re eating them,” she said. “But then you feel yucky afterward. Sort of like porn.” She frowned. “I feel like porn is becoming the underlying theme of our lives.”
Graham ignored that. “Do you ever worry,” he said slowly, “that another child would be like Matthew?”
Audra was licking orange dust off her fingers, but they weren’t getting any less orange. “Like Matthew in what way?”
Well, that was a good question. Because Matthew had a million sterling qualities—sweet, affectionate, brown-haired, dimpled, good at math, kind to animals, smelled faintly like maple syrup even though he sometimes went days without a bath. So why when Graham said “like Matthew,” had he only meant “with Asperger’s”?
“Well,” Graham said. “With the same learning differences and challenges.” Now it seemed he was speaking some sort of school missionese.
“Oh, I see what you mean,” Audra said. “No, I guess I don’t worry about that, because Matthew has always seemed to me like a little bit of an outlier. Like, if we had one hundred children, would Matthew represent the minority or the majority? I mean, if we had one hundred children, maybe sixty or seventy would be just like him in all sorts of ways. But I always thought Matthew would be Matthew, unique, and the other ninety-nine would be, I don’t know, sort of standard children. Like child actors from central casting. Not so special. I always feel like Matthew is the child we were meant to have. If anything, I worry that another baby won’t be enough like Matthew.”
They were so different, and Audra didn’t even know it. She didn’t know how often Graham had wished for a more standard son. She didn’t know that sometimes he thought a child actor from central casting would have suited him just fine.
—