Susan Senator

As I was falling asleep last night I thought about the perils of not knowing and of not being able to find out. You see, what happened is that Nat got off his bus yesterday and the driver handed me a small green saran-wrapped package. With Nat running up the walk with two heavy bags, I had no time to ask what this was and who it was from. I shouted a thanks and waved, which I hoped would be adequate for this nice gift, whatever it was. Of course, it may not have been from the driver at all (but maybe it was, because I had given her a gift last week. The drivers, the House staff, and the teachers are THE MOST IMPORTANT people on my lists, right under family; they take care of Nat, after all). The gift might have been from the school, the House, or something Nat himself made that the teachers handed to the driver for safekeeping. Who knows?

I got inside and set the package down on the counter while Nat whirled around me, unpacking loudly, throwing backpack down and duffel bag up, stuffing clothes into drawers so old and full that they can’t even shut. (Our house is, alas, furnished mostly from cast-offs repainted, yard sale treasures, college day finds. The boys’ dressers, and mine, are rickety but perhaps charming old things that are totally inadequate for our needs. Sometimes over my 25 years as a married woman I have been able to splurge and buy something new, but, with Autistic Adulthood and College For Two looming, those days are over.)

Once downstairs, I opened the little bundle and saw what looked like a broken gingerbread cookie, resting on shredded green and red paper. It had a string through it. But — no tag, no card, no note in the bag. Who was it from? I forgot it, busied myself with fixing Nat and Ben lunch, and finishing whatever it was I was doing prior to the universal early dismissals, when the world suddenly shifts, black to white, routine to the great vacation void.

Sometime later, Ned took Ben out and Max went upstairs, leaving me downstairs with Nat. I was tidying up as I seem always to be doing, when I noticed the broken brown cookie thing sitting there. I picked up a tiny piece of it and threw it into my mouth without thinking.

As I started to chew, a dry spiciness on my tongue. Instantly my mouth filled with an intense cloud of clove. Burning, minty, clovey flavor everywhere, tasting less and less like a cookie and more and more like wrong. “Ew!” I shouted, and spit ferociously into the sink. “Ew!” I rinsed and rinsed and the weird dust storm persisted even through the drenching. I ran upstairs to brush my teeth, gagging now.

Okay. It was not a cookie. Or it was a really badly-made cookie. “It was an ornament, probably made out of plaster,” Ned said, a small smile on his face.

“But –? Am I going to die? I had this in my mouth!”

“You’re not going to die,” he said, laughing a little.

But I did want to know, who had made it, what it really was made out of, where it had come from. I couldn’t ask Nat, he would have said, “Nat.” Meaning either he had made it or he had brought it home made by ___?

This made me think once again what it must be like to exist in a world where things happen to you and remain an utter mystery either because you don’t know who to ask or you don’t know how to ask.