A Safe Place for Joey (25 page)

I gave him three more nonsense words to make sure he was writing out of his new understanding of sound-symbol relationships.

“All right, now, this is the last one. ‘Zatbam.’ Now, think about it, say it to yourself. How many times did you open your mouth? How many
syllables? Remember, a syllable is just a short word and it has to have a vowel. Okay, go ahead and write it.”

Charlie worked industriously, saying it, hearing the sounds, writing them down.

“One hundred percent right, Charlie. Pay yourself ten chips for each word and a bonus of fifty for ‘zatbam.’”

I also gave Charlie two easy workbooks for homework – one math, one reading –
with an assignment in each. He wrote the assignments in his own sweet style in his assignment book, counted his chips, bought a pack of sugarless gum, stuffed half the pack in his mouth, and at the door turned back. He shoved the gum to one bulging cheek and said, “Zatbam.”

“Zatbam?” I asked.

“Yeah. Zatbam. That’s how they say good-bye in Martian. Remember?”

“How could I have
forgotten? Zatbam to you, too, Charlie.”

I loved working with Charlie. He was intelligent, gentle, and thoughtful, and he understood that continuing on to fourth grade at Chapel was going to require a lot of hard work on his part. I promised I wouldn’t ask him to do anything he didn’t understand, but he would have to practice what he did understand in order to improve. He wouldn’t have to
do it alone; I’d be there and so would his family, but the major part of the work would be his.

Charlie wasn’t turned off and he wasn’t hyperactive, but it was true that he did lie. The lies grew smaller, though. As his reading improved and he felt better about himself, the need to exaggerate diminished, and what was left I used in language experience stories. For a few minutes of each session
I had him dictate a story to me – anything and everything was okay. No limits. I wrote down all Charlie’s thoughts; whatever he wanted to say was what I wrote. The resulting stories were an odd mixture of immaturity and sophistication, war and peace, but he loved it and so did I.

By the fourth week in July, Charlie was able to decode and encode (read and write) all phonetically regular words
of one or two syllables (including silent
e
words). He had learned and internalized another seventy third-grade sight vocabulary words. He had learned the days of the week, the months of the year, and the zero, one, two, and five times tables.

During the last session before he left for a two-week vacation, Charlie asked, “Are you going to give me homework to take down to the shore?”

“Do you want some?”

“No-o! But Mom said you’d make me. Because there’s so much I have to learn.”

“Your mom’s right, Charlie. You will remember the things you’ve learned better if you keep practicing every day. Like baseball players. The more they practice, the better they get. The more you work, the more you practice, the more you’ll remember. That is really true.

“But, on the
other hand, there are a lot more things to learn than arithmetic and reading. Things that are much more important.”

Charlie looked straight at me, his eyes widening behind his glasses. “Like what?”

“Like friends. Nothing’s more important than learning how to be a good friend. People sometimes give it fancy names, like they call it learning ‘socialization skills.’ But what it really
means is learning how to have fun with other people, caring about them, helping them when they hurt, sharing things, telling the truth, brushing your teeth and changing your socks so you smell good, keeping your promise, showing up when you said you would. Things like that.”

“Could you say that over again?”

“I’m sorry, Charlie. I think I kind of got carried away.”

“No. I liked
it, but I just can’t remember it. Could you make a list?”

I studied Charlie. He was obviously entirely serious. “I can certainly try.”

After I’d written down as much as I could remember, with Charlie reminding me about the socks, he went over each item carefully.

“I’m pretty good at most of those. Like with Sam – you know, he lives across the street – I share and keep my promises
and stuff. But I don’t know if he’s my friend. Dad says he’s only six. That’s why he puts up with me.” How many times can a child be hurt and stay intact, whether the hurt is intentional or not? How many walking wounded kids are out there aching, hurting, feeling inadequate, with nobody to talk to? Where’s the immunization for interior pain? Where’s the pill for loss of confidence? “Well, I don’t
know, Charlie. I don’t think it matters how old somebody is if you enjoy doing things together. It’s the liking each other that counts.

“Anyway, down at the shore, you’ll be fishing or out on the beach, and even though it’s early, there’ll be other kids around. It would probably be a pretty good place to work on making a friend.”

Charlie sat without speaking and then finally said,
without looking up, “I can’t work on that. See, working on something is like practicing it, right? Practice is when you know what to do, but need to get better at it. But I don’t even know how to start. Making a friend, I mean.”

Charlie was right. He needed someone to show him what to do, not just tell him. I searched for some practical advice.

“All right, let’s see. The first thing
is just to look around. You don’t have to say anything. You just look at the other kids on the beach, and you look for somebody who is doing the kind of thing you like to do.

“Say you like to fish or collect shells. Look and see if there’s anybody else doing that. Just keep on walking and looking around, and if after a while the person seems nice, then go over and do your fishing or collecting
somewhere near him. See, first you sort of do it near each other. Each of you doing your own thing. And then after a while you get so you do it together.

“Anyway, Charlie, have fun, and I’ll see you in two weeks.”

On the second Thursday in August, Charlie arrived at the office sunburned, nose peeling, but grinning from ear to ear. He put a shoebox in front of me.

“It’s a present,”
he said.

Inside the box was a slightly fishy-smelling double length of green yarn about two feet long with shells glued or tied to it at even intervals.

“One for each day I was there,” Charlie said. “See, this is a horseshoe crab. This one is called a double sunrise. They’re some of my best ones.”

I stood on a stool to hang the shell-studded yarn in a swag across the wall and
then stepped down and back to admire it. “I love it, Charlie. It’s just exactly what this office needed. Thank you.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said, admiring it too. “And I made a friend. I mean a real friend, and I made him on purpose.

“He’s nine and he’s going in fourth – just like me. He lives down there at the shore all year long, and he knows everything there is to know about that ole beach.

“I saw him out there the first day, walking along picking up shells. Most of them he put back, but he’d keep one or two. I mean, he wasn’t just grabbing any ole thing. He knew what he was doing.

“So the next day I did like you said. I sort of started picking up shells further down the beach, and then after a while he got down to where I was and we were both doing it. Then he showed
me a sand dollar he’d found, and before he went home he gave me a snail shell, a good one, ’cause he already had a lot of them.

“Then the next day we did it again, and then he said whyn’t we go over to his house so he could show me the rest of his shells. He came back to Gram’s house with me so I could ask if I could go, and it turned out she knew his mom from church and right where his
street was.

“His name’s Eddie, and I’ll see him again when we go down Labor Day weekend. He said he’d write, but I don’t know about that part of it. Most people can’t read my letters so good.”

“Charlie, that’s terrific. Of course you can write to him. Anybody who can make a friend that fast can write a letter. Just make a one-line note every night in your notebook of something that
happened that day – like it rained, or your teacher got sick and you had a substitute, or you watched your favourite TV show, or your fish died. Then after a couple of weeks you can put the lines together, add a couple of words here and there – I’ll help with the spelling – and you’ll have a great letter.”

“Yeah. Well, maybe,” Charlie said. “There’s only one trouble.”

“I don’t have
a fish,” we said in unison.

Charlie had a very concrete approach to life.

We admired the swag of shells one last time, and then I said, “Okay, Charlie. Time to get back to work.”

After five or ten minutes of review, it became obvious that Charlie had forgotten at least 25 percent of the sight words he had learned. Multiplication was shaky, too. He mixed up 2 x 7 and 2 x 8 and
got lost somewhere in the middle of the five times table. I wasn’t particularly concerned. Kids with learning disabilities are notorious for knowing it one day and not the next, so it wasn’t surprising that Charlie had forgotten some things during the two weeks he’d been away. What he’d learned was far more important.

But not to Charlie.

Gone was the sunny, confident boy who had walked
in less than a half hour ago. Now his arms were on the desk, his head on his arms.

“See, I am stupid. I’ll never be able to do it. I can’t remember anything. My brain’s like a sieve. Everything falls right out of it.”

“I know,” I said. “It feels that way sometimes, but it will come back. I promise you. And learning how to make a friend is one hundred percent more important than two
times seven. But I know it’s frightening when you try to remember something you knew just a few days ago and you can’t think of it at all.”

Tears stood in Charlie’s eyes. “You know what one kid told me when I was in second grade in that public school? He said somebody fed me ground-up glass when I was a baby and that was what made me retarded.”

I pushed the tissues toward Charlie and
said, “And you know that’s not true. Right? You remember I showed you your test scores that showed you are smarter than ninety percent of the kids your age.”

“I remember,” Charlie said, blowing his nose. “And I believed you. Things seemed like they were going to be all right for a while. Like, I was doing pretty good before I went away. But now, I’m still the same.”

“Yes. You are still
the same and that’s good. You’re you and you’re going to stay you always. You don’t want to be somebody different every day, that would be too confusing. You’ll grow, you’ll learn how to do new things, you’ll get bigger and older, but you’ll always be Charlie Hammond. Nobody else can be you.

“It’s true that it’s harder for you to remember some facts than it is for other kids. That doesn’t
mean you can’t learn. You just have to use different techniques, and not get mad at yourself if it takes you a little longer or you forget sometimes. Gradually, it’s going to get easier, believe me, and then the parts that you’re good at will take off – whammo – and you’ll be right on grade level or above.”

A car honked in the driveway, and Charlie walked to the lookout window. “It’s Mom.
Does she know all this stuff about me?”

“Yes. I’ve told both your mom and dad everything I’ve told you. I’ve told you before, too, Charlie – it’s just hard to remember it all.”

“You’re telling me,” Charlie said.

I walked out to the car with Charlie. June Hammond looked rested and tan and pretty.

“A good vacation?” I asked.

“The best we’ve ever had.” She smiled.

“Good. I came out because I wanted to tell you that we didn’t get Charlie’s homework written down in his assignment pad this time. We got talking about why Charlie has trouble remembering things sometimes, and time ran out before we got to the homework. So would you just review the cards in his word bank with him? Divide the words he doesn’t know into piles of five and go over them, a pile
at a time. If he forgets, just tell him the word and have him say it, trace it, and use it in a sentence. And if you could get a dollar’s worth of pennies and nickels and let Charlie practice counting by twos and fives, that would be a real help. Thank you. We’ll be back in the groove next time.” I touched Charlie’s shoulder. “See you then.”

Charlie’s mother called early the next morning.
Her voice certainly didn’t match her sunny face of the day before.

“I know how busy you are,” she said, “but I wondered if I could make an appointment to come in and talk to you sometime this week?”

“I have time up until eleven thirty today. There isn’t anything open tomorrow, but I have lunch time on Friday.”

“Would ten this morning be all right?”

“Yes. Fine. I’ll see
you in a little while, then.”

Mrs. Hammond’s eyes roamed across my desk and then around the room. “Uh … what I wanted to talk to you about … uh. I’m sorry, would you mind terribly if I smoke? I’m trying to give it up, but …” her voice trailed off.

“I’ll get you an ashtray,” I said. “Just let me bring one up from downstairs.”

Cigarette smoke was already curling to the ceiling
when I got back, and she dropped the used match into the ashtray.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “It’s just that I didn’t sleep much last night. We … uh … had a big scene at the house. Charlie’s father is very upset. He says Charlie is worse now than before he came here. I know that’s not true, but I don’t know what to do about it. He wants Charlie to stop coming.”

“When you say scene,
do you mean argument?”

Mrs. Hammond nodded. “Yes. Worse. We were all yelling. Charlie was crying. So was I after a while.”

“How did it begin? What happened?”

“Well, you know how you said to get the pennies and the nickels. It was too late to go to the bank, I mean the bank was closed and I wanted to get started right away. I do that sometimes. I want to help Charlie so much that
I try too hard or go too fast or do too much and just end up making things worse.

“Anyway, when I got home I began going through my purse, and then we opened Charlie’s piggy bank and we found some nickels and a bunch of pennies, but you had said a dollar’s worth and we still didn’t have enough. When Charlie’s father came home I asked him for his pennies and nickels, and he wanted to know
why, and when I told him Charlie was supposed to count them, that’s when it started.”