A Safe Place for Joey (23 page)

I told her I didn’t think she needed to worry with Alice, Billy, and Tara around.

“Sorry you had trouble reaching me,” Mr. Martin said apologetically, ducking a little as he came through my office door, surprising me. Somehow I hadn’t expected him to be so large. “I’ve been out of town a good bit the last month,” he said.

I stretched out my hand. “Well, I’m glad you’re here now. Alice
was eager for us to meet.”

Mr. Martin shook my hand, almost pulling me toward him in his eagerness. “Yes. Tell me how she is, how she’s doing.”

“She’s just fine,” I said, smiling. “In spite of everything – your separation, even the discovery that she was adopted – she’s kept on growing, doing better in school and better at home.”

Mr. Martin sat down on the couch, his big, lean
frame collapsing. He sank back against the cushions. “You know,” he said, skipping over the separation and adoption, “I never have understood what’s wrong with Alice. Everybody we took her to, and we took her to a lot of people, seemed to come up with a different opinion.”

I nodded. “That often happens with children who have very mild learning disabilities. The problems are so subtle that
they go undetected until the child herself or himself begins to feel that something’s wrong, and then the emotional problems set in and grow and grow until they disguise the original learning problem.

“In Alice’s case the neurologist was right in her evaluation. Alice does have a mild learning disability; some would call it dyscalculia, which only means the inability to learn math by ordinary
classroom methods. The neurologist called it minimal brain dysfunction – MBD – a term rarely used now. If Alice were seen by a neurologist today, he would probably diagnose ADD – Attention Deficit Disorder. But by whatever name it’s called, it’s not something in Alice’s imagination or yours, but rather some small, very real disruption in the neural connections in her brain, probably in the parietal
lobe. It doesn’t affect her overall intelligence, but it does make processing of spatial and mathematical information more difficult.

“And then, as you know, Alice’s early education was … well … unorthodox at the least, and there were lots of emotional traumas going on as well. But you can really be proud of the progress she’s made … I’m sorry,” I interrupted myself. “I’m talking too much.”

“No. No, not at all.” Mr. Martin leaned forward, large hands clasped between his knees. “I want to know. I want to know everything. I don’t get much news nowadays.”

I sat quietly, finding myself liking this big, open-faced man. “Since you called me at Bob’s apartment – he’s a friend from work – you obviously know I’m not living at home. And knowing Alice as I do, I suspect you know
a good bit more.”

I nodded.

“I call home often,” he went on, and I was interested that he still thought of his former living quarters as “home.” “But nobody is very eager to talk to me. I don’t blame them, but I want them to know I never meant for this to happen.”

Mr. Martin cleared his throat, hesitated, then started again. “Sometimes I wish … I mean I just can’t seem to … I
don’t want to get you involved with personal things, but I just want to make sure they’re all right. Alice and Billy and Edna, too.”

Edna. I realized I had never heard Mrs. Martin’s first name before. I found myself feeling unexpectedly sympathetic toward both Mr. and Mrs. Martin. His concern for his family certainly appeared to be sincere (I had to remind myself he’d gotten himself into
this situation), and I loved Mrs. Martin’s courage in finding a job.

“They’re all fine,” I said.

“Thank you. I wish you could talk Alice and Billy into coming out to dinner with me some night, but I know that’s not fair to ask.” Mr. Martin stood up. “But please tell Alice I love them both very much.”

“I will,” I promised as I followed Mr. Martin to the door.

Alice plunked
her books on the desk, took off her shoes, and sat cross-legged, Indian style, on the couch, feet tucked beneath her.

“Wait till I tell you. First of all, Mom and I went shopping. Mom’s lost so much weight she needed a new bathing suit, and I got one, too, and some other summer stuff. It’s really cool. Even Tara says so. And Mom promised I can have everything new for school next fall. There’s
only two days of school left now, so she said it wasn’t worth getting too much now.

“Anyway, while we were at the mall, Mom decided all of a sudden to get her hair cut. They cut it really short and it looks so good I’m thinking maybe I’ll get mine cut, too, but maybe not. Tara doesn’t want me to. Incidentally, we’re all going to both tennis and day camp so we don’t even have to get a sitter.

“Anyway, more good news. We haven’t got our report cards yet, but Mr. Renner says I’ve passed everything and gotten really good grades in some subjects.”

“Congratulations, Alice –”

“Wait, now listen to this. On Saturday afternoon, Tara and I were up in my bedroom playing some new records I got when Mom and I were shopping, and the doorbell rang. Billy was over at his friend’s
house swimming, and Mom was out shopping with these two friends of hers from work. So I went down to answer it, and it was Daddy.

“I didn’t know what to do, but he looked so sort of sad that I forgot about being mad at him, and so I asked him if he wanted to come in. But then once he was in I didn’t know what to talk to him about, so I got Tara to come downstairs ’cause she’s really good
with people, and she found our Monopoly board and the three of us started playing.

“I guess we must have been having a good time, ’cause all of a sudden Mom was back and Billy was back and it was almost six o’clock.

“I was really scared, ’cause I was sure Mom was going to have a fit. But you know Mom. You never know what she’s going to do, especially these days, and she didn’t even
act mad one little bit. In fact, she even asked him to stay for supper.

“Daddy said he was sorry, he couldn’t – but then, listen to this, he asked if he could come back the next day and she said yes.

“Well, he came back and he stayed for dinner and he was still there in the morning, and Billy and I are pretty sure he didn’t sleep on the chaise lounge, either. I checked when they were
all downstairs having breakfast. The bed was all made, but Mom’s book was still in exactly the same place on the chaise lounge that it had been the afternoon before.”

Even Alice had to stop talking for a minute to catch her breath.

I smiled at her. “That’s a lot of good news, Alice. I hope things work out for your mom and dad. He stopped by here, you know, and I certainly got the impression that he missed you all. He especially wanted me to tell you how much he loved you. But no matter what happens with your parents, however that goes, I’m really proud
of you. You’ve sure come a long way, babe.”

Alice smiled back at me, hair glistening, skin glowing. She smoothed the pleat in her new short, split skirt. “You know what I’ve been thinking lately?”

“What?”

“Well, what I think is that maybe the reason I was so easy to fix is that there just wasn’t that much wrong with me in the first place.”

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
A hundred choruses went off inside my head simultaneously. Some days I think I’m going to work forever.

Charlie arrived at our first tutoring session carrying a large piece of paper, dropping it twice on the way up to the office.

At the top of the stairs he handed it to me, peering up through round, foggy glasses, his black hair plastered down on his forehead with water, sections of hair rising slightly upward as they dried into black pointy spikes. Charlie was tall for
an eight-year-old and slightly pigeon-toed, often stumbling over his own feet. Now he stood one foot on top of the other as if to keep them from getting tangled up with each other, looking like an oversized crane. And it wasn’t just Charlie’s feet that got tangled.

“Mom said I should show you this. She said to tell you it was tiptical.”

I had a sudden impulse just to gather Charlie
up and somehow smooth him out and untangle him. But it was too soon for that. Instead I asked, “Typical? Why, Charlie? What is it?”

Charlie shrugged. “Just a story I wrote last year at the end of third. It’s called ‘The Fiery Bird.’”

I looked closely at the paper. There was some sort of yellow, red, and black picture on the top of the wide-lined primary paper with letters printed underneath.
I tried to decipher the words, but I couldn’t.

“Could you read it to me, Charlie?”

“Sure. I’ve already read it to Mrs. Hawes – you know, my last year’s third-grade teacher. She said it was very exciting.”

Charlie began reading. “The fiery bird has struck again at the city. The city is wrecked.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Let me write it down.” I realized that Charlie’s story
was totally incomprehensible without his translation. “Okay, I’m ready.”

“The fiery bird has struck again at the city. The city is wrecked,” Charlie read again. “All the people are evacuating. The president is very mad so all his bodyguards are going there with guns to attack the fiery bird and capture the fiery bird and then put it in a zoo so more people can see it. But the zoo man had
to put it in a giant metal box so he doesn’t melt through. But the president can’t get it so his bodyguards are very mad so they are killing themselves.”

Charlie looked at me when he’d finished.

“What do you think?”

I hesitated. It was a classic example of the writing of a dysgraphic, dyslexic child. Vocabulary and story content were good, but the written words themselves seemed
to come from a foreign planet. Charlie wrote “apen” for “again,” “retk” for “wrecked,” “rea” or “r” for ‘are,” “vakuwede” for “evacuating.” Poor Charlie; I could almost feel his pain and humiliation. What must it be like to be able to use a word like “evacuating” and yet be unable to remember how to write a three-letter word like “are”? No wonder his story had guns and anger and killing, and I
knew that sometime soon I had to try to explain to Charlie why he was having trouble in school.

“Well,” I said. “Your teacher’s right. It is an exciting story, and I sure couldn’t have figured it out unless you read it to me.”

“Yeah. I know. The teacher said spelling didn’t count. She just wanted us to write a good story. But …” Charlie stared at the floor. “Why is it like that? I
mean, the other kids make mistakes, too, but not like mine. I’m the only one that has to read it out loud. I hate it.”

“I know. I don’t blame you. That’s one of the things I’m going to try to do – teach you how to write down some of the good ideas you have. Not just write them, but spell the words so that other people can read them, too, and then you can hand in your papers like the other
kids.”

Charlie looked up from the floor and then moved his chair over toward mine, pushing his face close, too close for comfort, to my own.

“Listen,” Charlie said. “I’m not like the other kids. I know it. I’ve always known it. But I want to know why. What’s the matter with me?”

It hadn’t been easy for Charlie from the beginning. He was born six weeks prematurely; he was slow
to walk, slow to talk, and subject to high fevers.

He was referred to me by the headmaster of Chapel School when he was eight years old and just finishing third grade. The hope was that a diagnostic educational evaluation would shed more light on whether Charlie should be promoted to fourth grade or repeat third.

It was a difficult decision. Charlie had transferred out of public school
to Chapel in the middle of second grade. His parents hadn’t wanted to put him in private school. They believed in public education, but, as his mother had explained to me, “We had no choice. It was like Charlie was drowning. Every day he’d sink a little further. He was the one everybody else picked on. I don’t know why – maybe it was his glasses, maybe because he was clumsy, couldn’t seem to
get the hang of how to catch or throw a ball. He couldn’t really read, he seemed to get things mixed up or backward. He was tall for his age, so maybe people, the teacher as well as the other children, expected more from him. Anyway, we knew we had to do something. We didn’t want to move. We’d been lucky enough to buy our dream house the year before. Charlie’s dad is an engineer, but I used to do
some real estate and the agency I worked for let me know about their old estate that was coming up for sale. We made an offer on the stone studio cottage and a piece of land, and it was accepted. We absolutely love it, and we’d never be able to afford anything like it anywhere else.

“So, the only alternative was to put Charlie in private school, even though it was the middle of the year.
He had trouble at Chapel, too, but his teacher loved him and thought that his difficulties were due to ‘lack of exposure’ and that he just had a lot of ‘catching up to do.’

“Now they’re not so sure.”

My formal evaluation showed the same uneven profile that had been noticed by his teachers. His full-scale IQ score was in the high average range. But while the subtests that measured reasoning,
abstract thinking, and spatial relationships were superior, the tests requiring rote memory were very poor. Testing showed that Charlie’s intelligence was in the 90th percentile; his academic achievements were in the 30th and 40th percentiles. His reading was a good year and a half behind, and although his stories were imaginative, his handwriting and spelling were almost indecipherable.
His speaking vocabulary was good, although he often talked in a circumlocutory fashion, calling a knob on a bureau a “drawer puller thing”; a hinge, “one of those thingamajigs that hold the door on.” He had difficulty pronouncing words such as “preliminary” or “circumstantial.” He was unable to skip, confused about left and right, awkward, and distractible, and he had a great deal of difficulty switching
from one activity to another.

If there is such a thing as a classic learning disabled child, Charlie was it. He could talk on an adult level, although he mispronounced the words or couldn’t quite find the one he wanted. When he read out loud, he omitted or substituted words and phrases, skipped lines and lost his place, reversed both letters and words – and yet, somehow, he could answer
eight out of eight comprehension questions correctly. He could do analogies and solve complicated mathematical problems. Yet he scored poorly on math tests because his math facts were not automatic, and when he counted on his fingers he would be just slightly off, or else he would reverse numbers and write down 21 when he meant 12. He could talk at length about the solar system, but he couldn’t say
the months of the year in correct order. He was gentle, appealing, and affectionate, but he was also disorganized and distractible and had no friends his own age.

Charlie could easily have benefited from repeating a grade when he had switched schools. With a November birthday, he was one of the youngest in his class even though he was tall. But now he had been at Chapel for a year and a
half. He was shy and thought of himself as “stupid” and “weird.” “Please,” he begged me, “don’t let them make me do third again. Please! The kids will really think I’m retarded if I repeat.”

In the end my recommendation that Charlie be promoted to fourth grade was based primarily on the feeling that “more of the same” wasn’t going to do it for Charlie. He could repeat third grade three times
and still not know his multiplication tables or be able to hand in a legible book report. Charlie needed to learn new ways of learning. Most of all, he needed to learn to believe in himself.

I strongly urged Charlie’s parents to rethink the idea of moving. Several of the surrounding towns had good public school systems with excellent resource rooms, and I felt Charlie was going to need ongoing
support, at least through elementary school. But the Hammonds couldn’t bring themselves to part with their house, and Charlie was terrified at the thought of moving.

“What I think is, I’d be even dumber in a new school. I’d be scareder and I wouldn’t even know anybody. At least here me and Sam can go exploring the woods after school.”

It was true that Charlie got great pleasure and
comfort from his quiet, familiar neighborhood and from Sam, a six-year-old who lived on the next street.

Finally, we worked out a compromise. I’d see Charlie over the summer and twice a week during fourth grade. Charlie’s mother felt that she could handle the cost by once again doing a little real estate work.

Charlie had three major problems interfering with his learning. His auditory
processing was exceptionally weak, although examination by a pediatric audiologist found his hearing acuity to be within normal limits. Try as he would, he could not match letters and sounds. He would make the sound of
p
when trying to spell “put” and then write a
b
, or even reverse the
b
and write “dut.” The differences between the short vowel sounds were too subtle for him to discriminate between
them.

Second, Charlie became overwhelmed when too much material was given at once. If there were thirty math problems on a page, he might do the first one or two and then just push the paper aside. If four directions were given at once – such as “Take out your reading workbook; turn to page seventeen; read the top half of the page; and then use your green and red crayons to do the puzzle
at the bottom” – Charlie either turned to the wrong page, or used the wrong colour, or had to go to the teacher and ask her to say it all over again.

Because Charlie was so unsure of himself, he had gotten in the habit of trying to forget his problems instead of trying to solve them. His teacher told me that he rarely completed assignments. When I talked to Charlie, it became clear that
what happened was that he would “forget” that he had to read the book by the end of the month until two days before his report was due. Then panic struck, and he turned his household upside down while his mother tried to help him get it done.

Third, Charlie was lost in time and space. He could not remember the months or even which day of the week it was. He could not remember which was the
right or left side of the football field. He could not judge the distance between himself and other objects, so he tripped over obvious obstacles and missed even the easiest of the balls that were thrown to him.

But how was I going to explain all that to Charlie? He still had his face close to mine, and he was breathing hard. He peered at me from behind the foggy lenses of his glasses. The
only thing I was sure of was that I had to be honest.

“There aren’t any windows in your head, Charlie. I can’t look in and say, ‘Ah hah! There! That’s the spot that makes it difficult for Charlie to spell things right. And sure enough, that big area over there is why he can reason and think things out so well.’ Someday soon there will be instruments that can see inside our brains and report
back just how we learn –”

“Well, tell me what you know now,” Charlie interrupted. “You must have found out something after all those tests you gave me. And you’ve talked to Mom and Dad. I got a right to know, too.”

“Okay. First of all, I know that the troubles, the failures you have in school, are not because you’re dumb. You’re plenty smart enough.

“Also, I know you’ll remember
things better if they make sense to you rather than just strings of unrelated words and numbers – and that you remember what you see better than what you hear, and you’ll remember best of all if you see it and hear it and then say it out loud or write it. We call that multisensory learning.

“Next, I know you learn better when things are presented to you a few at a time, so you can digest
them. Your brain sort of goes on overload if you put too much in all at once. Like, say you have a TV, a toaster, and a microwave oven on the counter in the kitchen all plugged into the same circuit. If you turn them all on at once, you blow the fuse and none of them work. If you turn them on one at a time, they’re all okay.

“And I know you get mixed up about right and left and which way
is which, and that you will have to teach yourself to be constantly alert for clues to give you the right signals.”

Charlie took a deep breath. “But why? Why me? What happened to me? Is it like when kids used to get polio?”

“No. It’s not a disease. Educators like me call it a learning disability, or dyslexia, if we’re forced to put a label on it. A friend of mine who’s a pediatric
neurologist – that’s a doctor whose specialty is studying children’s nervous systems and brains – doesn’t think there are any good labels. She says it’s due to a lag in neural development, and then she describes it like this: ‘Everything’s fine in New Jersey and things are all okay in New York City, but there’s some kind of tie-up on the George Washington Bridge.’ I like that, because I know you can
always use the Lincoln Tunnel as an alternate route.”

Charlie smiled, and his body relaxed a little.

“It won’t get any worse,” I said. “In fact, if anything it will get better as you learn new ways to learn. I don’t think anybody knows for sure exactly why it happens to some people and not to others. I could pretend I did, but I don’t want to pretend with you.”

Charlie nodded.
“Yeah. I know. I don’t want you to, either.” He shook his head. “It sure is confusing, though.”

“Well, Charlie, remember we do know this. You’re smart enough to learn whatever you want to learn. There are reasons for the failures you’ve had, and something can be done about it, but you’ll have to work longer and harder than some kids because you have to make the imprint on your brain very
clear and very strong so you can remember whatever it is you need to remember.”