Beautiful Child (9 page)

A
s exhausting and traumatic as the day had been, I went home that night in a buoyant mood. Suddenly, there seemed possibility. Venus
could
talk. Venus
could
respond. Now all that was left was finding a way of drawing her out, of making her
want
to communicate with us.

But what way was this going to be?

I spent the whole evening preoccupied with this question. I cast about my apartment, looking for something to stimulate her, some idea that might work. Pulling out drawers from my file cabinet that contained teaching materials and work from students in years gone by, I forgot about having supper as I sat on the floor and went through folder after folder, looking for inspiration.

Two separate memories kept intruding as I searched. One was of the very first child I had ever worked with.
Her name was Mary and she was four at the time. I was a college student, working as an aide in a preschool program for disadvantaged children. Mary was my first experience of elective mutism, where the individual, usually a child, is able to speak normally but refuses to do so for psychological reasons. In Mary’s case she had been badly traumatized by what I now suspect was sexual abuse, although this was back in the days before such things were generally recognized. Whatever the etiology, she was terrified of men and spent much of her time at school hiding under the piano. I was charged with the job of developing a relationship with Mary. Like Venus, Mary had been very unresponsive too, although not to the degree Venus was. She had also refused all the staff ’s usual methods of involving her in classroom activities. I was inexperienced and idealistic, so I’d never considered the possibility that Mary was too damaged or had too low an IQ to respond. I’d crawled down on my hands and knees under the piano day after day, talking to her even though she never talked back, reading to her when I finally ran out of words. It was a long, slow process over many months, but in the end Mary did form a relationship with me and eventually she did start talking again. I mulled back over the memory, reliving those long-ago moments spent under that piano that even now stood out in my mind for its unusual color – it had been splatter painted, a zillion white points of paint on a dark turquoise background, like snowflakes against the winter twilight.

That
was my memory: Mary’s wary eyes staring out from the turquoise-colored darkness. I had been made to feel really good about succeeding with Mary. The staff had been supportive throughout and very congratulatory when Mary finally started talking and joining in. No doubt, such a positive outcome and such positive feedback put me on the path to my future career. But I remembered feeling just a bit guilty about all the attention. Why? Because truth was, I had
done
nothing. I had used no special techniques, no special training, no deep insights. I’d simply spent time with her. Made it clear I was happy to spend time with her, even if we weren’t doing much, even if I had many other things that were important too. And that was all it took to help Mary.

The other memory that kept intruding over that evening was of a close friend of mine whose son had suffered a severe head injury at six as a result of being hit by a car. I remembered her using a soft-bristled baby brush to brush his arms and legs as he lay comatose in the hospital bed. I couldn’t quite remember what the theory behind this was, something elaborate about realigning the nerve endings that I didn’t quite believe, but the idea of waking him back up to life by softly stimulating him in this way had made sense to me.

Over the course of the evening, the two memories started to integrate. I’d read to Venus. I wasn’t able, of course, to spend one-to-one time with her like I had with Mary, at least
not during the school day, so I was going to have to do it outside class. But that was okay. I’d frequently worked extra time with students. And I’d make it tactile. I wasn’t quite sure how. Brushing her arms with a baby brush seemed a little over the top. Or at least a little strange, because I didn’t suspect she had a brain injury. But I had a very strong feeling that Venus needed this kind of tactile input. Remote as she was, either physically, up on her wall, or emotionally, sitting in my classroom, I sensed she was “out of touch” in the real sense of the word, in the literal sense of the phrase.

I started looking through my bookshelves for children’s books. I chose a few. Then as I was taking down folders from a higher shelf, a comic fell. I picked it up.
She-Ra, Princess of Power
.

I wasn’t quite sure how I’d acquired this particular comic. Probably taken from some child in a former class and forgotten about. She-Ra was the sister of He-Man, who was some toy manufacturer’s massively popular marketing dream in the early 1980s. Stimulated by a cartoon called
The Masters of the Universe
, these toys may not have actually ruled the universe, but for several years they’d come darned close in my classroom. Ever present in the form of comics, Saturday morning cartoons, and small plastic toys, He-Man, his companions, and his assortment of arch enemies had dominated my boys’ free time, generated a million recess games, and provoked a mania of obsessive collecting and trading.

To me He-Man had seemed a pale imitation of the old-time superheroes, like Superman and Batman, copied shamelessly right down to the cowardly secret identity. Moreover, the skills of the marketing men targeting their prey irritated me. Nonetheless, while He-Man was rather one-dimensional, I found he and the other characters engaging and decent enough, and there was no denying how much the little boys in my classroom loved following the adventures or acting them out on the playground. As a consequence, I’d lived peaceably with He-Man when he was at the height of his popularity and had become as conversant in the details of his life and that of his followers and their arch enemy, Skeletor, as any gossip columnist following the private lives of the stars.

On the other hand, I’d remained rather more dismissive of She-Ra, He-Man’s sister, as she seemed a little too transparent an effort to cash in on little girls, given that the toy manufacturers had already captured the hearts, minds, and pocket money of little boys. An exact replica of her brother in female form – secret identity, arch enemies, and superpower in the form of a magic sword – She-Ra had never really caught on in my classes the way He-Man had anyway. My girls had all been “My Little Pony” addicts in that era.

I opened the comic and paged through it. There was a momentary sense of nostalgia as I saw the old, familiar
Masters of the Universe
names. These characters had once been such a part of daily life and now I hadn’t brought them to mind in years. The memories filled me with the sensation
of warm sun – that smell of sun on linoleum, that baking feel of sun through glass, all, I suppose, because the year
Masters of the Universe
was at its height was also the year I taught in a classroom with huge windows facing west. So, maybe it was simply a sense of old times’ sake that made me put the comic in with the books I was going to bring to Venus.

Gwennie, we were discovering, was very badly bothered by sudden noises. This was particularly unfortunate because of Jesse’s sudden, frequent barklike sounds. Gwennie, in response, would clamp her hands over her ears.

“Tell that boy to stop,” she demanded one afternoon.

“I’m sorry it’s bothering you, Gwennie,” I said, “but it isn’t a noise Jesse can help making.”

She couldn’t screen it out. Hands over her ears, she rocked back and forth.

“Julie?” I asked. “Could you take Gwennie out in the hallway to work? Maybe for now that’ll help.”

I went to work with Jesse while Julie and Gwennie went out of the room. Jesse seemed to be going through a stressful period, because his twitches and noises had become much worse over the previous few days. I was making a mental note to phone his grandmother and find out how things were at home when an explosion of sound came from the hallway. Getting up, I went out to see.

Gwennie was having a full-blown tantrum. I didn’t know what had set it off. Possibly she’d simply had too much
sensory input and couldn’t keep herself together any longer. Whatever, she had thrown herself down on the floor, kicking and screaming like a two-year-old.

“Get her up,” I said to Julie. “Bring her inside.”

Julie hovered, either uncertain or unwilling to grab hold of her.

I stepped in and grabbed Gwennie’s arm. “Come on, sweetie. We can’t do this here. It makes too much noise.”

She didn’t want to be touched. I’d discovered Gwennie was very sensitive to most stimuli, whether auditory, visual, or kinesthetic and today she’d clearly just had it, but I needed to move her out of the hallway because her screaming would disrupt other classes. Even as it was, I could hear classroom doors closing up and down the hall. So I half-pulled, half-dragged her into the room and over across to the reading corner.

“You sit here for a while. Look, here’s the picture book of Germany. Remember this one, Gwennie? When you’re feeling better, you can have quiet time and look at it for a while.”

She was too out of control to care, so I left her screaming on the rug.

Gwennie wasn’t inclined to tantrums, but when she had one, it was a doozy. She was in a rather awkward position – on her knees with her bottom up but bent forward so that her forehead was on the floor rather like the Muslim prayer position – and she had her hands clasped over her head. She screamed and screamed.

The kids all hated it, understandably, and several of them sat with their hands over their ears. Julie clearly hated it too. She moved nervously around. “Shouldn’t we be doing something for her?” she asked. “Should I try to hold her?”

I shook my head. “No, I think she’s had too much stimulation. She was probably already wound up when she arrived and couldn’t cope with the added noise in here.” Some children with autistic-type problems often find sensory stimuli more intense than average – noises sound louder; smells are stronger. Same for touch. So I didn’t think she’d want to be touched at that point. She just needed to let off steam. “Why don’t you work with Zane instead?” I suggested. “You could do math flash cards.”

After recess we were going to do cooking. This was an activity that I often used in my classrooms, since it could be used to teach math and reading, as well as patience, something few of my children had enough of. The added benefit was that virtually all the children enjoyed cooking. It was a freer and friendlier form of learning, and food is a powerful motivator.

I didn’t think I’d better try anything too elaborate with this bunch, at least not during these early days, so I baked some cupcakes at home and brought them in. All we were going to do was make the icing. Then the children would ice their cupcake and decorate it. We planned to view all the finished results and then, of course, eat them!

I thought it went relatively well, given this particular
group and their normal behavior. Zane did smash one cupcake in anger when he couldn’t get the icing to go on the way he wanted. And Jesse did push one into Billy’s face, and they fell to fighting on the floor, but then Jesse and Billy would probably have fallen to fighting at some point, whatever we chose to do. I helped Gwennie back into the group. She was still feeling a little fragile and did not want anyone to be anywhere near her or even
look
at her cupcake, but she did manage to get icing onto it before slinking off into the reading corner to devour it. Julie was assigned to Venus, and this, of course, was its own usual hassle. Venus had to be guided to the table, her hand lifted to take the icing knife, her other hand guided to take the cupcake.

“No,” I said, noticing Julie struggling. “Don’t let her get away with moving back. Make her join. Stand behind her so she can’t back off. Then just take her hand and do it.”

I wasn’t sure whether, after coping unsuccessfully with Gwennie, Julie was afraid that she might set Venus off or whether she disagreed with forcing Venus to participate, but she seemed very hesitant. It was hard to know with Julie. She was hesitant about everything that involved pushing the children to do something. She was not an initiator. Nor, I discovered, was she very good at standing her own ground in the face of noisy opposition from one of the kids. But we were coping. While our styles were very different, I was so grateful for Julie’s help in the classroom that I could live with the difference. With children like Venus and Gwennie, who needed instant one-to-one
attention on occasion, it was invaluable having another adult present.

We survived cooking, and for the most part the kids loved the activity. When the afternoon came to an end, I was quite pleased. It had been a tiring day, but despite the various upsets, I felt like I’d stayed on top of everything and we’d ended the day in a reasonably cheerful, upbeat mood. I took the kids down to their buses and returned to the room.

While I was down at the buses, Julie had endeavored to clean up the room in the aftermath of the cooking activity. She had the back sink full of soapy water and dirty dishes.

“Hey, don’t bother with that,” I said. “We’ll just put them in that cardboard box over there and I’ll take everything home and put them in the dishwasher.”

It was an innocent remark, made because I didn’t want to see her working so hard on something that didn’t really need doing. I was well aware by that point that Julie, like Gwennie, had just about had it with the day. And as with Gwennie, an innocent remark proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

There was an extended moment when the muscles of Julie’s face pulled tight and she stood, frozen, all her concentration focused on keeping control. It was one of those odd slow-motion moments, because it felt long even though I knew it was short. I was aware of her expression, aware of what was happening, but not able to react fast
enough to do anything helpful. Julie threw the paper tow el down into the sink and left the room.