Beautiful Child (15 page)

I started to clap as I sang. Coming up to Zane I clapped cheerfully in front of him. He joined me, clapping and singing. Then finally Shane started to clap too.

I marched. I clapped and sang “Jingle Bells” until everyone, including Santa Claus, was marching around the room, clapping and singing too. Finally we ended up in the reading corner.

Santa went back to the door to retrieve his bag. Five or six minutes of relative peace followed while Santa gave out the presents and the boys whooped with excitement at tearing off the wrapping paper. This distraction gave Gwennie enough time to elude us and start stuffing her face over at the party table. I don’t know how many cookies she had eaten when I noticed her present, lying still wrapped on the floor. Grabbing her by the shoulder, I led her back to the reading corner.

We had all the children sit down on the rug in the reading corner while Julie and I passed out cookies, cupcakes, and punch. Santa pulled over a little chair and sat down to read “The Night Before Christmas” to the children while they ate.

A tiny moment of peace reigned.

Then, just as he got to the “Now Dasher! Now Dancer!” bit, there was a soft burble and Gwennie started to vomit. It just ran out of her like a fountain, down the front of her dress, into her lap, across her shoes, and over the rug. The boys leaped up in surprise. Gwennie started to cry.

“There, there,” Julie crooned, taking hold of her shoulders. “It’s just throw-up. Don’t cry, honey. Did it scare you? Don’t worry. It’s just throw-up.”

It’s
not
just “throw-up,” I was thinking irritably. It’s a great big horrible smelly mess that’s wrecked the one peaceful moment in our Christmas party, and if Gwennie wouldn’t stuff her face so, it wouldn’t happen. I hated myself for having such thoughts, because I knew Gwennie could not
help being sick, but I
did
think it. But, damn it, it
was
more than “just throw-up.” I felt sorry for Gwennie, but I also felt sorry for the boys, the rug, and Santa, who had vomit on his costume-shop Santa boots. And me.

I moved the boys over to the other side of the room, called in the janitor, handed Santa a couple of paper towels to wipe off his boots, and put the remaining cookies out of reach. Julie took Gwennie down to the girls’ rest room to clean her up.

We only had five minutes of the day left by the time Julie and Gwennie returned. Santa was gone and the janitor was there by then, so I decided to call it a day. I told the kids to get their coats on and we’d spend the rest of the time on the playground.

That’s when I turned around to see Shane picking up the gray cat statue again. He wasn’t doing it maliciously. Clearly he just wanted to look at it, but he picked it up and started toward me with it, probably to show me something about it. But the lace on his left shoe was untied. He stepped on it and stumbled. He didn’t fall, but the cat statue slipped from his hands and fell to the floor. It hit with a dull crash and broke into countless pieces.

Billy instantly burst into tears. He didn’t get angry. He didn’t go into his usual attack mode when something went wrong. He didn’t even move. His face just drew down and he started to bawl. My heart melted for him.

Startled by the crash, Shane started to cry too.

In an instant, Julie was there, her arms around Shane.

“Did that scare you? It was just an accident. Don’t cry, sweetheart. It doesn’t matter. Accidents happen.”

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but at that moment, I just lost it.

“It
does
matter!” I said. “Billy bought that. It was his gift to me. It
does
matter it got broken!”

Realizing I was very angry, Shane started to cry in earnest.

Billy rushed to join me. “You stupid motherfucker! You broke my cat. I’m gonna
kill
you!”

This brought me quickly to my senses. “No, you’re not,” I said. I put my hands on his shoulder. “I’m really, really sorry for what happened, but I don’t want you to get into trouble on top of it. Go get your coat on, so you can go on the playground.” I looked at Shane. “I want you in the quiet chair.”

“I didn’t mean to.” Shane was sobbing.

“I’m sure you didn’t, but you shouldn’t have been touching it. It wasn’t yours.”

He didn’t question me. He went over and sat down.

“I’ll stay with him until the bell rings,” Julie said.

I nodded. Turning, I took the other children downstairs to the playground.

Quite frankly, I felt like crying myself. Certainly I didn’t feel like going back upstairs to sort all this out between Julie and me, which is what I knew I had to do once the children had gone home. So once everyone was bid good-bye
and put in their respective cars or buses, I reluctantly returned to the classroom.

Julie was on the far side of the room, straightening up things in the aftermath of the janitor, who had shifted the tables around in order to clean the floor in the reading corner.

“Sit down,” I said. “We need to talk this over.”

“It’s just been a bad day,” Julie said. “I’m sorry if things didn’t go like we planned.”

“No, it’s more than that. We need to thrash this out between us.”

Julie came over and pulled out the chair across the table from me. She sat down. I did too.

“I know we have different philosophies. I can respect that,” I said. “In fact, in many ways I’m very impressed by you. You have many admirable qualities. But what’s going on in here, what you’re doing in here … like with Shane … this is a kind of … emotional lying, Julie. You aren’t responding honestly to these situations.”

“What do you mean?” There was a vaguely defensive tone.

“I mean, you’re behaving the same way toward him when he’s splashing water or throwing paper towels as you do when he’s sitting down and doing his work. You use the same loving, peaceful voice. But you can’t be
feeling
loving, peaceful emotions then. Not when he’s hitting you with a paper towel when he should be helping wipe up the water.”

“Yes, I do,” she replied calmly.

I looked at her.

A silence crept in.

“Yes, I do,” she said again, perhaps a little more quietly this time. “Because I should be loving and peaceful. That’s
good
, Torey. That’s the way we should be.”

“Not all the time.”

“Why ever not?” she asked.

“Because it isn’t honest. People don’t feel loving and peaceful all the time. People feel annoyed or angry or tired or upset sometimes, and these are all part of us too, and while it is important to be in control of these emotions so that they don’t hurt anyone, that’s not the same as behaving as if they aren’t there. And it isn’t wrong that they’re there. We’re telling emotional lies when we act as if we don’t have these feelings.”

Julie just sat.

“That’s not good. It isn’t giving the children the tools to learn how to control these feelings themselves. Instead, it’s making them think we’re different from what they are. Relentlessly cheerful people aren’t real.”

Julie sighed. “You’re the only person who’s ever made me feel that being cheerful is wrong,” she said.

“There’s a deeper level to this too,” I said. “It has to do with right and wrong. I know it’s important to show acceptance and tolerance, to make people feel good about themselves, but the plain truth remains: if we don’t actively teach right and wrong, children don’t learn it. It’s our
responsibility to teach the children how they
should
behave. Not everything they do is right. They need to be actively shown the difference between right and wrong behavior and shown ways to behave better that will eventually allow them to grow into happier, more fulfilled people.”

“Which is your opinion,” Julie responded.

“Yes, my opinion. And it’s also my opinion that this is the way to good self-esteem. We feel better about ourselves when we behave in ways that make others respond positively toward us. We feel better about ourselves when we have a sense of being in control of ourselves. Self-esteem doesn’t come about by people always telling you good things about yourself. How would all these good words even carry any weight, unless you knew the same people would also tell you good things about yourself when the need arose? Self-esteem isn’t passive. It’s active. It comes from mastering your world, from being competent and in control. And how can you achieve those things if people do not help you learn the behaviors involved?”

“But who are we to say what those are?” Julie countered. “I’m not comfortable making all these value judgments. What
is
right and wrong, Torey? I’m not God, so how do I know? And I’m not willing to set myself up as God. There are too many narrow-minded people in this country already as it is, and I’m not going to be one of them. I don’t think that’s our place. Values should be taught in church. Not in school.”

“Values should be taught everywhere.”

“Yes, but whose? We don’t have the right to judge these things,” Julie replied. “This is a diverse school. We have different cultures here. Different ethnic backgrounds. Different religions. Different socioeconomic levels. This matters, Torey, and we can’t make value judgments for people whose lives are different from ours. I’m not African – American. I’m not Latino. Yet most of the kids in this school come out of those cultures. I’m not living below the poverty line. I’m not developmentally delayed. Yet most of the kids in our class are from one of those groups.”

I hesitated. Again, I was aware of having to fight the opposite side to what I normally did and, again, I felt uncomfortable with this. “There are still some basic values,” I said. “Basic values that have nothing to do with what color you are or what language you speak,” I said, “or how high your IQ is or how much money you have. Human values. One of them says everyone has rights. So anytime you are doing something that takes away someone else’s rights, that’s wrong.”

Very cautiously, Julie nodded. “Okay,” she said slowly. “I’ll agree with that.”

“So Shane grabs up the gift Billy gave to me and he drops it. And when you say to him, ‘Shane, it doesn’t matter, that was just an accident’– yes, it
was
just an accident and I realize he had no intention of dropping the statue when he picked it up. So we shouldn’t get disproportionately angry. He was behaving like a kid – but it was
still
wrong that he did that. It did not belong to him. He’d already been warned
off it before. To say it was ‘just an accident’ and ‘he didn’t mean to’ when he broke it might be good for his feelings, but it isn’t good for his morals. Dropping that statue interfered with
my
rights, as owner of the statue, because now I don’t have it anymore. And it interfered with Billy’s rights. Billy spent
his
money. It was
his
gift. It was his heart behind it. It isn’t right to hurt Billy just because Shane ‘didn’t mean to do it.’”

“But he
didn’t
mean to do it. And it
did
happen. Getting mad at Shane wouldn’t un-break the statue,” Julie said. “So why should we damage his self-esteem too? This little boy has so many problems already. He couldn’t help it, so why make him feel worse?”

“Because it
was wrong
.”

“I don’t think it was,” she said.

“And because it was emotionally dishonest. We didn’t actually feel inside like it didn’t matter.”

“It wasn’t to me.”

Silence then.

I regarded her across the table. Finally she shrugged and moved to get up. “I’m sorry, Torey. I wish I could agree with you, because I can tell you think it is important. But the truth is, I don’t.”

A
nd then it was January.

I continued my reading with Venus during the afternoon recess periods. I chose to stay with the same few books – Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad books and Russell Hoban’s Frances series on the idea that familiarity would be a good way to go. There was still little indication of the level of Venus’s intellectual functioning, and given her family history, I knew she, like the twins, might well be in the “educable” range – shorthand for mildly retarded. If we worked with the same ones, then there was a better chance that she would understand and appreciate the stories. Moreover, familiarity allowed her to anticipate the action in the stories. They were all humorous, so I hoped that as she came to anticipate what was going to happen next, this
might evoke a smile or some other indication that I was actually engaging her.

Truth was, I knew I was engaging her already. The signs, however, were very, very subtle. For instance, she now hung back at recess period. When the recess bell rang at the end of an activity, Venus paused. She didn’t actually go over to the reading corner yet. No response that open. But she didn’t allow herself to be blindly herded to the door by the others either. And she was always checking my eyes, checking the inclination of my body. When I turned to go to the reading corner, she turned herself, and although she waited for me to call her over, she did respond then. She would cross the room now to join me.

Indeed, what pleased me more was that I noticed her doing the same thing at the morning recess. Even though I didn’t read to her then and she always went out on the playground with Julie, there was now that moment of hanging back. My sense was that she was
hoping
I might read to her, that she was waiting to see if it was possible. But we were talking subtle here. Very, very subtle behavior changes. If I hadn’t been paying such acute attention to her, I’m sure I wouldn’t have noticed anything but a blank face and immobile body.

In mid-January, I thought I would try to elevate us to the next level of communication. Instead of picking out one of the books, as I usually did, and commencing to read, this time I chose two. One Frog and Toad book. One Frances book. I held them out.

“Which story shall we read today?”

Venus regarded me.

“You choose. This one? Or this one?”

No response.

I waited. Sitting down on my knees, I lay the two books in front of me. “Come down here,” I said quietly.

Unexpectedly, she did. She knelt down opposite me.

“Which book shall we read today? The Frances one? Let’s see. It’s called
Bread and Jam for Frances
. That’s a funny one. Remember? We read it last week. Or shall we read
Frog and Toad Together
? I like that one too.”

No response.

I waited. A minute, two minutes passed. And two minutes feels like eternity in such a silence.

I pondered the best course of action. More waiting? Or choosing for her? I did not want to make this confrontational but I also did not want to run over any embryonic efforts to cooperate by solving the situation myself.

I saw her arm move. Very, very slightly. She didn’t even lift her hand off her knee, but her arm twitched. So, I interpreted it, assuming even a wrong interpretation still put the onus of choice on her.

“That one?” I said, lifting the Frances book. “You want this one?”

Her eyes met mine.

I nodded cheerfully. “This one? Yes, I like this one too.”

So, this became our game. Each day I gave her a choice of books. Each day I asked her which one she wanted. Each
day we waited and waited for a response until finally she did something – incline her head, twitch her arm –
anything
that I could take as an answer. I couldn’t exactly dignify it so much as to say Venus was
choosing
the books, but I did have the sense that she was making an effort.

This went on, day after day, without variation.

Then … the first breakthrough.

We had gone through the whole palaver of choosing which book. The drawback to this activity was that it always cut quite badly into the twenty minutes we had during the recess period for reading together. On this day, it had taken almost seven minutes to choose
Best Friends for Frances
, so I settled down to read it.

As had become our custom, I took Venus on my lap. I felt this was an important part of the process. Working on the theory that she had been a very severely deprived child in terms of attention and stimulation, I always tried to provide her with tactile stimulation when I could – holding her, hugging her, laying my hand on her shoulder, catching her attention by touching her face. I often ran my free hand up and down her forearm as I read. As with my friend who gently brushed her brain-damaged son, I felt the regular, rhythmic sensation would provide valuable stimulation for a contrary brain.

This had been a distracting day for me. Along with the fact that it had taken quite a while to choose the story, so we were a bit short of time, I was further distracted by the fact that it had snowed heavily outside and I could hear some of
the children on the playground hitting windows with snowballs. They weren’t my windows and I assumed the playground staff would be on top of it, but I kept hearing them, kept pausing. Finally, I put my free hand down on the floor and rose a little ways up on my knees, lifting both of us up in the process, so that I could see over the edge of the window. But I couldn’t get a good enough view. So, muttering something about “naughty children,” I went back to reading about Frances the badger and her friendship woes.

Several minutes into the story, I unexpectedly felt Venus’s hand on my wrist. When I’d risen to try and see out the window, I’d taken my free hand down. Now, very gently, she reached down and lifted my hand back up, placing it on her other arm.

“You like that?” I said quietly. “You want me to put my arms around you while I read?”

There was the most imperceptible of nods.

“Okay,” I said and continued reading.

That was it. That was all the interaction I had for that day. But I couldn’t have been more pleased.

And thus it started.

After almost five months in my classroom, Venus very slowly began to respond. This was, by no means, a miracle break-through. She still did not talk. She still did not do anything at all in class. But during the twenty minutes we were together over the afternoon recess, a very subtle form of communication started up between us.

The next day when I presented her with the choice of two books, she hesitated in the way she always did and I waited in the way I always did. But then very, very slowly she raised her right hand an inch or two away from her body and put her index finger slightly forward. It was impossible to tell which book she was indicating, but it was clear for the first time she
was
indicating.

“That one?” I said, holding up the Frog and Toad book.

An almost imperceptible nod.

For a week or so we went on like this. I don’t think she was actually choosing a book, per se. She was simply lifting a finger. But I was willing to accept any effort at communication.

Then, about ten days later we progressed again.

“This book?” I said after she had moved her index finger.

There was a long pause, and she did not give her imperceptible nod.

I waited.

No response.

“This book?” I asked again.

Very, very,
very
slowly she lifted her hand and leaned slightly forward to tap the other book.

“Ah, you want the Frances story? Good. I’m glad to know. Yes, of course, I’ll read that.”

Venus nodded. Indeed, she nodded a second time more obviously. Then she came willingly onto my lap.

Coming back from our winter break, Julie and I had picked up pretty much where we left off. Nothing more was said about the disagreement on the last day of school.

This lent a small, continual undercurrent of tension to the classroom. Julie made it apparent that she did not feel she was doing anything wrong. This made me self-conscious about whether we were having real problems or whether this was simply
my
problem. In the end, I decided to seek Bob’s advice.

I explained the situation – that Julie and I had a difference of philosophy that we just didn’t seem able to reconcile – and asked him what he thought I should do about it.

Bob was surprised. I didn’t have a history of colleague problems. I was occasionally regarded with mild suspicion, largely because I was unconventional, noisy, and inclined to speak my thoughts fairly unedited, but I found it easy to get along with people and I’d always had good relationships with the other staff. Moreover, he was surprised to find that, of all people, it was Julie I was having trouble with. Julie was so personable, so self-effacing and sweet. And she had an impeccable record for the time she’d been at the school.

“I wish you had come to talk to me about this earlier,” he said when I finished explaining. “If it’s actually compromising the atmosphere in the classroom, we should have sorted it out by now.”

“I think
compromising
is the wrong word.”

Bob regarded me.

I paused. “Well, yes. Maybe ‘compromising’ isn’t the wrong word. I suppose it has. It’s taken such a long time to bring this group together. I mean, geez. There’s only
five
kids. I think if I’d felt Julie was behind me … And now … if only she would
support
me.”

“Support you how? How, specifically, do you feel she isn’t supporting you?”

I considered.

The frank truth was that by steadfastly refusing to join in our zillion silly songs every day she wasn’t supporting me. But I felt so stupid for saying that. Nothing in Julie’s job contract had specified she should
sing
. Yet, by not joining in, she kept herself apart from us. That made her feel like an outsider, as if
we
were excluding her, while it made
me
feel like she was excluding us. This emphasized the division between us. I found this hard to tell Bob because it made me sound petty. How could singing a bunch of children’s songs become so important?

But it was. The songs had become our group identity.

Haltingly, I tried to explain this to Bob.

“It doesn’t have to do with how
well
she can sing. I’m no great shakes myself. Musicality has nothing to do with it. It’s the refusal to join in, to be part of us.”

“Well, you might be asking just a
little
bit too much, Torey,” Bob replied gently. “I can think of quite a few adults who would be too self-conscious to go around bursting into song. Even if it was just in front of a bunch of kids.”

“Yes, I know. But that’s not what I’m saying really. It’s the joining-in part. Not the singing. I mean, she wouldn’t
have
to sing. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. She’s not simply ‘not participating.’ She’s refusing to participate. There’s a qualitative difference. After all these months of not being able to bring this class together, I’ve finally hit on something that works. If she wanted to be supportive, she could clap the rhythm or hum or dance with the kids or do something to indicate that she
agrees
, that she’s
glad
we’ve come together as a class.”

Bob scratched his head thoughtfully. “I can see this one coming,” he said with a humorous edge to his voice. “Calling Julie in here and saying, ‘Well, if you can’t sing along in Torey’s class, would you please hum or dance, please?’”

We both laughed.

“No, seriously,” Bob said, “I do hear where you’re coming from on this. It still surprises me. I will admit that. But then Julie’s only responsibility up to this point has been for Casey Muldrow.”

“And what about the philosophy issue? How should I handle that?” I asked.

Bob sighed.

“To be perfectly honest, I find it creepy,” I said. “I try not to. But it’s like being with a Stepford wife. Julie just does
not
respond to anything negatively. She is relentlessly positive, like everything is on the same plane. I keep thinking, How can you use the same tone of voice to say, ‘Oops you just dropped the fishbowl and killed all the fish’
as you use to say, ‘I love you’? And she keeps thinking it’s right.”

A pause.

“And then I think, ‘This isn’t human. How much rage are you swallowing?

“How terrible will it be when it comes out?’ ‘Will you be a really scary person then?’”

“Do you think the children feel this way?” Bob asked.

“I dunno. They seem to relate to her all right. They play her up. She isn’t very good with discipline and they know it, so they can get really obnoxious. But maybe it’s only me who thinks she’s scary. Maybe I’m sensitized by this point.”

And then silence.

“So, what shall we do?” Bob asked. “How do you want me to handle this?”

“Get me another aide?” I said quietly, more as a wish than a question.

“I don’t think that’s possible. Not if she’s not doing anything really wrong.”

“No, I realize that. But she’s not any happier about all this than I am, I’m sure. If she could have a quieter, more predictable classroom and I could have a plain, old, ordinary person. Not a saint…”