Fathermucker (8 page)

She's Latina, is my guess, and of indeterminate age—she could be in her thirties, she could be in high school; it's hard to tell. She's petite, and her ramrod posture gives her uniform a military feel. Her long, dark hair is bound tightly in a ponytail, but the few strands that fall into her face are dyed an alluring magenta. There is a thick silver ring on her thumb, the sort of thing you buy from sidewalk vendors on St. Marks Place, and a silver stud on the right side of her face just above her chin. A labret, I think it's called. Amy Winehouse has one in the exact same place.

“Have a great day,” she tells me, no trace of Hispanic origin in her unaccented voice, and as I thank her and return the well-wish, I drink in her image—I've seen her on dozens if not hundreds of occasions, and four times this week alone, but it's hard to get a good look at someone in a drive-thru window—and I realize that she looks a bit like a waifish Rosaria Dawson. If you plucked her from the New Paltz Mickey D's, let down her hair, decked her out in whatever “frock”
Us Weekly
asked a hundred people in Rockefeller Center who wore best, and trotted her out on the red carpet before the Golden Globes, you'd never know she wasn't a secondary player on some new MTV reality show. Her name is Wendy, according to the plastic tag on her (small but perky) left breast. Wendy? Not a Latina name at all—and an ironic choice for an assistant manager (I'm giving her the stripes on account of the uni and the comportment) at a McDonald's.

I wonder what her story is, how she came to be employed at the McDonald's in New Paltz, New York. I wonder if she has kids.

I wonder if she has a boyfriend.

The cars crawl along Main as I wait to turn. The kids immediately complain that we've been stopped too long—red lights and stop signs, waiting of any kind: the bane of childhood. I take the opportunity to unsheathe my Egg McMuffin, take a big bite, and am on the verge of concocting a fantasy, perhaps sufficient for this evening's onanistic fodder, involving Wendy's labret-adorned mouth, a tub of hot fudge, and the McDonald's break room—the lightbulb has gone on in my brain, but the electrical surge has not yet coursed down the length of my spine—when a familiar hunter-green Subaru Forester drives by, its rear panel, like the Tattooed Man, almost completely covered in bumper stickers (
KILL YOUR TELEVISION, WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN SELDOM MAKE HISTORY, COEXIST, GOD BLESS THE FREAKS, GODDESS BLESS, OBAMA/BIDEN, HOME BIRTHS, PRACTICE POLITICAL COOPERATION: I'LL HUG YOUR ELEPHANT IF YOU KISS MY ASS, END THE WAR
, a red-white-and-blue Deadhead, and a good half-dozen more), and Gloria Hynek—the über-est of über-moms and driver of said Subaru-cum-billboard—sees me pulling out of the (evil) McDonald's, my face stuffed with (evil) Egg Mac, and I'm pretty sure, although not certain, that she shakes her head at me and scowls in tsk-tsk disapproval. Busted by the Crunch Patrol! Because, you know, how dare I eat food that isn't organic and locally produced. She's sure to give me shit at the playdate. Worse, I've forgotten to skip the post–“Hotel California” tracks, and Charlie Daniels is now sawing at his fucking fiddle and playing it hot.

Gloria exhibits the gamut of infuriatingly crunchy behaviors known to the New Paltz parental demographic. To wit: attachment parenting. When Haven was an infant, Gloria adhered strictly to this draconian practice, the central tenet being that a baby, like a consecrated American flag, should never touch the ground, lest the momentary separation from the parent, and the resulting feeling of abandonment, scar him for life. Instead, he should be
worn
, in a sling or a Baby Björn, while the mother goes about her daily routine. It's sort of like being pregnant for four extra trimesters, except the infant is heavier, cries a lot, and needs to be fed and changed—although in Haven's case, diapers were not involved, not even the unbleached Seventh Generation kind, because Gloria also practiced elimination communication. (
EC
, as its zealots call it, is a potty-training technique in which the infant uses “baby signs” to indicate a need for going wee-wee or poo-poo, at which time the vigilant parent transfers his or her behind to a potty, toilet, or roadside shrub. While EC does work after a few short years, and it's environmentally laudable, is it really worth the effort and extra loads of laundry to teach your tyke the toilet a few months before the next kid?) The most prominent advocate for attachment parenting—a technique imported from China, the country that popularized foot-binding, lead-painted toys, and female infanticide—is one Dr. Sears, a pediatrician and author who specializes (as too many famous pediatricians do) in making mothers feel bad about themselves. Dr. Sears claims to have employed attachment parenting on all of his own children. He has eight kids, so either his wife is a kangaroo, or he's full of shit. You can't fit eight kids in an Escalade, let alone a Baby Björn.

So: Gloria is a proponent of attachment parenting, and elimination communication, and she breastfed her son until he turned three, and she doesn't let Haven's precious, unsullied eyes gaze upon screen images of any kind, nor does she let him play with plastic toys, or toys that require batteries, or toys that bleep. When she and Stacy go out for drinks, however, she complains and complains and complains about how
hard
it is to be a mother, seemingly unaware that she is herself multiplying the degree of difficulty by being such an inflexible ideologue. Yet Stacy continues to go out with her, because Gloria can be really fun. One-on-one, she's a hoot. But Haven's presence turns her into a deranged, hypermaternal Ms. Hyde. She's one of those people who are great when alone, but insufferable when with her kid.

The other issue with Gloria is that she's a stay-at-home mom—a
SAHM
, as they call themselves on the comment boards at the Hudson Valley Parents website—to a single child. With the first kid, you want everything to be perfect, and you tend to rail against the many forces at work to corrupt the pure, blameless creature in your care.
Little lamb, who made thee?
Once a sibling enters the world, you stop drilling the first kid on his ABCs and his multiplication tables, and charting when they feed and sleep and poop, and you chill the fuck out at playdates.

Gloria is a SAHM. That makes Haven a Son of SAHM.

And it makes me SAHD.

Friday, 9:26 a.m.

A
UTISM IS A GROWTH INDUSTRY
. F
IFTEEN YEARS AGO, ONE IN TWO
thousand children was diagnosed with an autistic spectrum disorder; now it is one in 170, and the numbers keep increasing every year.

No one can adequately explain this unprecedented surge. The consensus is that autistic spectrum disorders are caused mostly by genetic factors—although what those factors are and how they are passed on remain anyone's guess—triggered by changes in the environment. These environmental triggers are just as murky as the genetic factors. Exposure to mercury, lead, Thiomersal, Tylenol, pesticides, ultrasound; deficiencies in vitamin D, in folic acid, in female hormones; complications from “leaky gut” syndrome, viral infection, fetal testosterone, thyroid disorders, gestational diabetes; age of the mother, age of the father, stress, depression, even rain—rain!—have been bandied about as environmental triggers of autism.

When one of these theories finds legs, parents of autistic children hop on the bandwagon. We want to believe that autism is caused by sonograms, by heavy metals in the drinking water, by noxious additives in MMR vaccines, by undetectable by-products in plastic containers, by chocolate shakes from McDonalds—by something external, something tangible, something upon which we can heap blame. This is why the vaccine theory became so popular in the nineties. It made intuitive sense (autism rears its antisocial head around age three, roughly coinciding with the first MMR inoculations), it was refuted by the mainstream media (it's a conspiracy!), it fed into Gen-X skepticism of modern medicine (we're injecting our kids with poison! This must be stopped!), and it was adopted as a
cause célèbre
by the rubber-faced goofball who lit his farts on fire in
Dumb and Dumber
. Never mind that the theory had as much statistical heft as the “Nigerien yellowcake” case for WMDs in Iraq. We still haven't found the nukes in the Babylonian desert, or the cause of the autism spike.

Cambridge University autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen—it's hard not to picture him as Borat; Sacha is, in fact, his cousin—is the author of the “extreme male brain” theory of autism. Men, as we know from decades of scientific (and millennia of anecdotal) evidence, are not as strong as women with respect to relating to other people (if you're an
Eat, Pray, Love
–reading manhater, feel free to replace “relating to” with “giving a shit about” in the preceding sentence). This is hard-wired, apparently, from the days when we had to bludgeon cute animals to death before ripping them apart and feasting on their bloody innards, a process which, while necessary for survival, can be traumatic if you feel sympathy for the cute animal in question. Baron-Cohen calls this ability to interrelate—“the drive to identify another person's emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with appropriate emotion”—
empathizing
. Generally speaking, testosterone is to empathizing what a bottle of Jim Beam is to driving. What men
are
good at is what Baron-Cohen terms
systemizing
—“the drive to analyze or construct systems that follow rules.” This is why, if you need to repair a wireless router, or change your oil, or build an aqueduct, the person whose aid you enlist tends to have a Y chromosome. If men are, generally speaking, strong systemizers and so-so empathizers, autistics are uncannily strong systemizers (
hyper-systemizers
, in Baron-Cohen's jargon) and extremely deficient empathizers. The inability to discern what other people are thinking, feeling, implying, and so forth, Baron-Cohen calls
mind-blindness
.

Roland has Asperger's syndrome, not autism proper, but per the DSM-V (to be released in 2012) he'll be classified as “high-functioning autistic.” The dreaded A-word, a worse scarlet letter than the one worn by Hester Prynne.

The Thornwood School is an early education center for preschoolers with disabilities. The progressive thinking goes that, rather than segregating these children in “special” classrooms, they should be integrated with kids who don't have disabilities—
typicals
, as they're called, in the oh-so PC parlance. Thirty years ago, when the school was established, the focus was on Down syndrome, mental retardation, speech defects, and other disabilities common at the time. These days, “spectrum” kids comprise the lion's share of non-“typical” enrollment.

My son has a love/hate relationship with his school. He likes the other kids and the teachers, and he likes the toys and the books, and he especially likes the rigid structure. But during free periods, such as when he first arrives, he can get a little nutso. He'll race into the room like a Thoroughbred at the gate, his head tilted back, and spin around, taking it all in, everything from ceiling to floor, like a sophisticated surveillance camera. He'll run his fingers along the wall. He'll tap his cubby, the table, the chair, the walls, the other kids as they come in, some of whom recoil from him with unvarnished aggravation. He'll chatter nonstop, excitedly providing the play-by-play, like Marv Albert calling a Knicks game.
Here comes Olivia. Hi, Olivia. Olivia has a pink shirt on today. She wore that shirt last Friday. She wears pink on Fridays. Oh, boy! Olivia's going to wash her hands. Now she's sitting in her spot for snack. She's sitting next to Tyler!

Dropping Roland off at school is the most nerve-wracking part of the day for me. Like Marlin releasing Nemo from the anemone, I'm forced to expose him to the outside world. I'm never able to predict how he'll do, if he'll integrate seamlessly into the pack or fall by the wayside, if he'll put away his backpack and lunchbox like he's supposed to or run around like a maniac, pushing the other kids and knocking over their block towers and ripping stuff off the walls. Sometimes he has a great early morning, only to get to school and have it unravel. Sometimes he wakes up pissed off and crabby, only to recover by the time I drop him off. There's no discernible rhyme or reason to it (although if Eugenia Last gives him five stars, he does tend to have a five-star day).

But my deepest fears are not realized, not this morning. Without saying goodbye, or even turning back to me and Maude—if Orpheus had Asperger's, Eurydice would have made it all the way back from Hades—Roland stows his bag in his cubby, takes out his lunchbox, heads to his appointed seat at the table, and begins speaking with Lenore, the prettiest of the aides. The topic: floor-plans.

“Bye, Roland,” I tell him, although he isn't paying attention. “See you for the pumpkin patch.”

In the back of the room, I notice, Zara Reid is drawing something with an oversized purple crayon. She's always here when I get here, even when I get here a few minutes early. I've never seen her parents at drop-off or pick-up, not once. Does a nanny take her? An au pair? A Circle of Fists fanatic?

In the hall, I bump into Roland's teacher, a white-haired battle-ax named Mrs. Drinkwater. Sounds like the name of a Vonnegut character, Drinkwater, but according to census data, there were approximately fifty Drinkwater families in the United States in 1920. The surname, according to Ancestry.com, “may have been given in irony to a noted tippler.” Like calling a fat guy Skinny. If her ancestors were noted tipplers, the alcoholic gene seems to have bypassed Mrs. Drinkwater, who is as sober as they come, although dealing with Roland every day would give her temptation enough to drink more than water.

“Oh,” she says, “Mr. Lansky. Hello.”

I've told her ten or fifteen times to call me Josh, but she's too old-school to switch to the familiar form; most of the other teachers are younger, and go by their first names.

“Mrs. Drinkwater. Hello.”

“Have you by any chance noticed a change in Roland's behavior of late?”

“Not that I know of. Why?”

“He seems . . .
off
this week. Moody. Distracted. More prone to tantrums than usual. More prone to violence. On Wednesday, he told Irene he was going to ‘weapon her with Alabama.' Yesterday he told Lenore that he wanted to ‘kill her and cut her up and eat her arms and legs.' ”

“Well,” I say, suppressing a smile, “he says stuff like that sometimes. He doesn't mean it. It's just that, you know, he can't edit himself. He can't filter his thoughts. It all comes out.”

“Oh, I know,” she tells me, although there are times that I question the depth of her Asperger's knowledge; the disorder has only been on the books since 1994, and Mrs. Drinkwater's been teaching special ed since the
Titanic
went down. “I wondered if something might be going on at home. I thought his behavior might be due to external causes.”

“Well, Stacy's away this week. So . . . I mean . . . ”

“Yes, that could be it. Roland does not take well to change.”

“That's putting it mildly. But I know he's looking forward to the pumpkin patch.”

“Will we see you there, Mr. Lansky?”

“You will.”

She nods approvingly, her enormous teeth giving her a bunnyish look. “It's so wonderful when parents attend the field trips. Roland does love it so.”

“You don't happen to know if Daryl Reid will be there, by any chance?”

“Zara's father? I'm not sure,” she says. Mrs. Drinkwater, I'm fairly certain, has no idea that Daryl “Duke” Reid is anything more than a well-inked behemoth who is the father of one of her tiniest students. “In all likelihood. He usually does attend—he or his wife. She's so lovely.”

“That she is.”

I give Maude, who is clinging to me, her face buried in my neck, like a tiny vampire feeding, a little shake. “Okay, Maude. You ready to go to Emma's house?”

“No,” she shoots back, her voice surprisingly loud for someone who appeared catatonic a moment ago. “I don't
want
to see Emma
ever again
.”

I had to ask.

Back in the Honda, I call the exterminator (Joe Palladino, Paladin Pest Control) on my cell phone. He answers on the first ring, and agrees to come to the house this afternoon to, as he puts it, “rid your dwelling of rodent life once and for all.”

The best-laid schemes of mice and men.

M
OST OF THE HOUSES IN
N
EW
P
ALTZ ARE ON THE SMALL SIDE.
Cape Cod, bi-level, split-level, ranch, raised ranch, Craftsman, and what Roland's
Field Guide
would characterize as “folk style,” but what I call—and my term is more accurate—shoeboxes. Three bedrooms, two baths, flood-prone basement, dilapidated detached garage, small rutted yard of equal parts crabgrass, rocks, and weeds. As you get further away from the Village—toward the low-flung valley of Gardiner, over the wooded hills of Esopus, and across the Wallkill toward Mohonk and Lake Minnewaska, where the vacation homes of well-to-do weekenders lurk behind trees and beyond dells—the size of the lots increases, the view of the rough-hewn Shawangunk Ridge becomes more dramatic, and the landscaping shows more care. The few new developments in New Paltz can be found here, on the outskirts of town. Giant manses raising their bulk over the gentle green slopes like something out of Melville, each house visible to every other; unguarded, vulnerable to attack. Long, meandering driveways of still-sticky asphalt baking in the still-warm October sun, Palladian windows gleaming uselessly. A paucity of trees; instead, vast verdant lawns, upon which swing-and-slide sets, built to the same mammoth scale as the planet-sized houses they orbit, their tall turrets shaded by red-blue-and-yellow tents, slowly decompose.

The Holbys live in a McMansion in one of these developments, south of New Paltz proper, off Yankee Folly Road (the pervasive rumor that Derek Jeter owns a house on this oddly named street proved, alas, apocryphal). Their McMansion is the smallest McMansion in the neighborhood—no ostentatious stone façade, no bonus room above the garage, no shrubbery flowering gaudily around the perimeter—but it's still big and cold and museum-like.

Time was, I abhorred architectural monstrosities like this. But after spending the last five years in our thirty-year-old Cape Cod—and a small fortune on windows that don't let the bugs in and the heat out, and appliances that work properly, and toilets that flush, and a new water tank, and a million other things—with no central air, and no garage, and mice amassing their squeaky forces behind the walls, I'm beginning to come around on the whole McMansion thing. Yes, the cycloptic window over the door is purely cosmetic, illuminating an unused upstairs alcove, and for something born of form not function—a vestigial descendent, in fact, from Diocletian's Palace, an architectural masterpiece beloved by Robert Adam, on whose eighteenth-century designs modern McMansions are based—an abject failure. Yes, it screams nouveau riche to have twenty-five-foot ceilings in the great room—or, for that matter, to have a room that deserves the “great” prefix in the first place. Yes, it's soulless and boring. But who cares? Everything is brand-spanking-new, the washer and dryer are right off the kitchen, there's a mud room, and walk-in closets, and a Jacuzzi tub with jets, and a yard that isn't built on a sixty-degree incline.

Put it this way: I don't think I'd ever
buy
a McMansion, but for playdates, there's no better venue.

Jess Holby greets us at the door. She's a twig of a woman, as curvy as a stick figure—in fact, the stick-figure drawing her daughter, Emma, made of her, the one magneted to the stainless-steel refrigerator door, is a pretty good rendering of her actual shape—and not much taller than Emma, who is at the moment helping Gloria's son, Haven, into a pink faerie dress complete with gossamer wings, a duplicate of which she already has on. Just what the poor boy needs. The costume, it must be said, becomes Haven more than it does Emma.

Although Jess has two kids, a part-time job in the admissions office at the Culinary Institute, and a home almost as big as the Vanderbilt Mansion to maintain, she always looks put together. I've never seen her without her (fake, but expensively so) blonde hair flawlessly done, her make-up perfectly applied, and her dressier-than-the-occasion-calls-for outfit (today: black cardigan sweater over white blouse; smart gray slacks; tasteful black pumps) amply (and not untastefully, if you're into that kind of look) accessorized by earrings, bracelets, rings, necklaces, and unseen clouds of perfume (the brand escapes me, but it's one of the good ones, although to me it is redolent of little old ladies, and Jess is only thirty-four). “Why, hell
-o
, Maude,” she says, in an exaggeratedly kind and slow voice adults often use when addressing children not their own. “Emma and Haven are playing dress-up. Would
you
like to play?”