Читать книгу Just Another Kid: Each was a child no one could reach – until one amazing teacher embraced them all - Torey Hayden, Torey Hayden - Страница 8

On Monday morning Mrs. Lonrho came in, carrying Shemona. Geraldine was home with the stomach flu. Shemona had been sick over the weekend and was now recovered, but she wasn’t feeling very enthusiastic about the idea of coming to school by herself. I shut the door before Mrs. Lonrho set Shemona down. From the expression on her face, Shemona was considerably less than enthusiastic.

I, on the other hand, was tickled pink. Here was just the opportunity I needed. After Mrs. Lonrho left, I took Shemona over to the table and opened her folder. She sat silently beside me while I reviewed her morning’s work.

“Where’s that other girl gone?” Dirkie inquired when he arrived. I had never heard him ever refer to anyone by name. We were all simply girls, boys, ladies and men to Dirkie.

“She’s home sick today and won’t be here.”

“It’s just this girl then,” he said and grinned. “This girl with the long yellow hair.” He leaned way over the table toward Shemona and her folder. Shemona shot a hand out and swiped at him in an irritated way. Dirkie hooted.

“You got a girl’s pisser,” he said.

Shemona pursed her lips to spit.

“Hey, both of you,” I said. “None of that.”

Mariana leaned forward. “Shemona doesn’t like that boy, Miss,” she said, in a perfect imitation of Geraldine.

Once I had Dirkie and Mariana settled with their work and Leslie listening to a cassette, I took Shemona around the corner of the shelves into the area by the chalkboard. It was gloomy there. The steel shelving blocked off the light from the windows and the overhead fluorescents. Taking out a stick of colored chalk from its box, I handed it to Shemona.

“Make me a seven,” I said.

She did.

“Good job. Now, draw a set of seven squares.”

She drew carefully, making each square precisely and coloring it in. As I had hoped, the colored chalk appealed to her immensely.

We went on like this for several minutes, making numbers and corresponding sets of objects. I drew some too, and had her make lines to connect the sets with their numbers. Shemona was good at numbers. I wanted to relax her, to involve her in the pleasure of this new medium, to please her with her own expertise. It was a trick I’d often used with other elective mutes that had always been very effective, because once involved and relaxed, the child took readily to my increasing the speed of the activity, of making a racing game of it. I then took over more and more of the game, so that I did most of the writing and most of the answers. I verbalized what I wrote. I speeded the pace up even more. And if I did things right, the excitement became enough that when I eventually asked a question and didn’t answer, the child would. It was a simple trick that had worked so often for me with elective mutes that I’d videotaped it and used it in presentations of my research. One colleague, intrigued by the results shown on the tape, maintained it was a kind of hypnosis. I’d never thought of it that way. To me it was simply mental sleight of hand.

It took effort to get Shemona going. She was more interested in drawing with the chalk and wanted to make her drawings carefully. She would erase with her finger and try again in an effort to make her triangles exactly straight or her circles exactly round. So, in the end, I had to take the chalk from her and tell her she could use it afterward.

“Show me an eight. Show me a four. Show me an eleven. Twelve. Six. One. Fourteen. Zero.” I went faster and faster. Shemona was getting caught up in the process by this time. Some of the numbers were written a bit too high for her to reach, and she had to jump to point to them. This pleased her and she giggled. “Six. Nine. Three. Thirteen. What’s this? Five. What’s this? Seven. What’s this? Two. What’s this? Fifteen.”

On and on and on. Faster and faster and faster. The whole board was covered with my quickly scribbled numbers, and Shemona was panting to keep up with me. She was smiling and giggling loudly enough that I could hear sound.

“What’s this? Four. What’s this? Ten. What’s this? Eight. What’s this?”

Silence.

The next answer was six, and Shemona knew it. She’d already leaped up to point in that direction, waiting for me to say six. When I didn’t, she fell back abruptly, her arm still raised. She was panting. An expectant smile was still on her lips, and I was reminded of my Labrador dog and the same enthusiastic, expectant expression he had, when I paused, midgame, with the ball in my hand.

“What number is this?” I asked, pointing to the six.

She looked at it. The smile faded and she regarded the number a long moment, as if it were written in a foreign script.

“What number is it?” I tapped the board.

She continued to gaze at it.

“What number is this?” I knew the impetus was gone. I knew I had failed. If I hadn’t caught her in the excitement of the moment, I knew I wasn’t going to now. I smiled in an effort to keep the good feelings between us. “It’s a six, isn’t it?” She gave a halfhearted little jump to point to the six, wanting to keep the happiness in the situation as obviously as I did.

I handed her the box of colored chalk. “You did that really well, didn’t you? You know all your numbers. Here. You may use these until recess time.”

Carolyn and I had worked up a system whereby we alternated playground duty at recess. Because of her aide, Carolyn wouldn’t have needed to stay down on the playground during the fifteen-minute recess period. I did, as there was no one else to look after my children. However, Carolyn, understanding the pressures of this sort of job when there was no break, had offered to alternate with me, watching my kids as well as hers. So every day I had a fifteen-minute break, either in the morning or the afternoon.

Usually, I used the period to catch up on miscellaneous tasks, such as running off the children’s worksheets on the mimeograph or setting up art projects. Some days I did no more than collapse in the teachers’ lounge. On this particular morning, I’d gone to get the keys from Bill, the janitor, to open his cleaning closet on my floor so that I could wash out the mucky gray from our easel. I had the tap running, and dirty water was gurgling noisily down the drain, so when Leslie appeared in the doorway of the closet, I jumped with surprise.

My first reaction was to glance at my watch, because I was suddenly alarmed to think I’d lost track of the time and my children were back in the room. But there were still five minutes remaining of the break.

“What are you doing here, sweetheart?”

Leslie was red cheeked from exertion and looking a whole lot more alert than usual.

“What do you need?”

She turned her head and looked down the hallway.

“What is it?” I stuck my head out of the closet and glanced in the direction she was looking.

Back and forth between me and the stairwell Leslie glanced. Her body was taut with excitement.

“You shouldn’t be up here, you know,” I said. “You’re supposed to be down on the playground with Miss Berry and Joyce. Do they know you’ve come up here?”

She raised one hand and pointed down the hall, then she grunted. It was the first intentional sound I’d ever heard Leslie make.

Again, I looked around the corner of the closet door. “What is it?”

“Crying,” she said hoarsely.

“Crying? Who’s crying? Can you show me?”

Leslie took off. I followed her down the hallway, down the stairs, through the fire doors. As we came out of the stairwell, I was accosted by noise. A general hubbub filtered up from the area around the main office.

Carolyn was just inside the office door when I reached it. She had hold of Dirkie by the collar of his shirt and Shemona by her coat. Dirkie was crying angrily. Shemona was hysterical. She twisted and turned, all the while screeching at the top of her lungs.

“Oh, thank God,” Carolyn said when she saw me. “I thought you’d gotten lost.”

“What’s happened?”

“She tried to kill me!” Dirkie shouted. “That girl, that girl with the long yellow hair, she tried to kill me!”

“Dirkie was just being Dirkie,” Carolyn said. Letting go of him, she reached over the top of the barrier to grab a handful of tissues. She held them out to Dirkie. “You were being a bit annoying, weren’t you, Dirkie? You kept wanting to touch Shemona’s hair. I asked you several times to leave her alone.”

“She tried to kill me!” He displayed a scratched cheek.

“I was about to kill you myself,” Carolyn replied. “How many times did I ask you to leave her alone? Five? Ten? It’s not surprising she got fed up.”

Shemona persisted with ear-splitting screams, making it nearly impossible to continue the conversation. Moreover, the other children were milling around inquisitively.

I looked over at Carolyn. “Do you suppose you could spare Joyce to watch my gang for a moment? There’s an art project all laid out up there. Maybe to be on the safe side, you could take Dirkie down with you. But I’d like a private moment to deal with Short Stuff, here.”

Carolyn nodded. Getting a good grip on Shemona’s jacket, I dragged her, still kicking and screaming, off in the direction of the teachers’ lounge. Once there, I shut the door firmly behind us, then pulled her across the room to the sofa and sat down.

“Do you want to sit here beside me?” I asked.

She simply continued to scream.

“Would you like to sit in my lap?”

“No!”

“Oh, all right. Very well. The thing is, however, I can’t let go of you. I need to hold on so that you don’t hurt yourself in here. Or hurt anything else. When you look like you’re more in control, I’ll let go of your wrist.”

This brought a new spurt of anger, and she struggled savagely, clawing at my arm with the fierceness of a tiger cub. Grabbing her free hand with mine, I hung on and said no more.

Shemona screamed. And screamed. Tiredness eventually crept into her voice, but she still managed to carry on shrieking in monotonous, syncopated bursts. Then exhaustion finally overtook her, and her screams faded to squawks and then grunts. At last she was hoarse. Genuine tears filled her eyes at that point, and when she looked at me briefly, I saw the anguish. Sinking down first to her knees and then all the way down, she sat on the rug at my feet. I let go of her wrists.

I smiled. “That was hard work, wasn’t it?”

She gave no response.

“I’m tired now. Are you?”

She fingered the red marks left on her wrists by my grip, then she snuffled and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her blouse.

“This must have been a hard day for you. It must be scary, having to come to school without Geraldine. You must miss her.”

Very slightly, Shemona nodded.

“Geraldine takes good care of you, doesn’t she?”

Tears came back to her eyes. Her lips quivered, and she sucked them between her teeth to keep from crying.

Noisy silence enveloped us. The refrigeration unit on the pop machine came on. The Xerox machine whirred. The heating plate under the coffeepot clicked. The clock jumped the minutes with an audible tink.

“Would you like to sit up here beside me?”

She shook her head.

“It’s very soft, see? They’re nice cushions, these, just the kind for relaxing against. You’d probably find them nicer than the floor.”

Again she shook her head.

“I was a bit upsetting too, wasn’t I? Playing that game with you at the chalkboard. Did you think I was trying to trick you into talking? I didn’t mean it to be a trick, you know. Just a help. Just something to get you over the first time, because it’s the first time that’s so hard.”

She stared at her hands.

“And then there was Dirkie. What an annoying boy he can be. He wants to touch my hair all the time too, and I don’t like it either.”

The tears had begun to run down her cheeks. They dripped off her jawbone and onto the collar of her blouse. She did nothing to stop them.

I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. “Come here, Shemona.”

She shook her head.

I watched her. She watched her feet.

“I’m kind of thirsty,” I said. “Are you? I would think so, after all that screaming. Shall we split a can of pop?”

Lifting her head, she looked at me through her tears.

“What kind would you like?”

No response.

Standing, I pulled a handful of change from my pocket and went to the machine. “Coke? Shall we share a Coke?”

She nodded.

I put the money into the machine, and the can rattled noisily down into the tray. When I turned around to bring it back, Shemona was sitting on the sofa.

I sipped the froth off the top of the can and then handed it to her. Shemona reached up eagerly and put the Coke to her lips. Several seconds were lost in greedy gulping. Then finally she lowered it.

“What do you say?” I asked.

“Thank you.”

That was no breakthrough with Shemona. At best, it was détente. Once back in the room with the others, the veil came down again, and she retreated into silence. It had been a worthwhile time in the teachers’ lounge because it had forced her to acknowledge me as someone to be reckoned with, but I hadn’t made her talk. Exhaustion and loneliness made her talk. That and the Coke. I had the sense to know it wasn’t me.

On the other hand, there had been a major breakthrough, which had been almost entirely eclipsed by Shemona’s tantrum. And that was Leslie. When she had come to me in the janitor’s closet, that had been the first time Leslie had ever made even so much as a communicative grunt. It had startled me beyond reaction when it had occurred, and then I’d become too embroiled in Shemona’s mess to acknowledge it afterward. But once things settled down, I was astounded by the implications. Could Leslie actually talk? Could she control her speech? I’d been so accustomed to her silence that I’d just accepted it as part of her. I had assumed that the deterioration of her speech had been part of her general disturbance and had thought no more of it. That sort of thing was fairly common in children with Leslie’s kind of handicap. But could Leslie really talk?

After school, I waited up in the room with Leslie in an effort to lure Dr. Taylor out of the protection of her blue Mercedes and into the classroom. Within five minutes of the other children’s departing, Dr. Taylor was there.

“Do you suppose I could speak to you for a few moments?” I asked.

Her brow furrowed and her expression grew wary. I wondered if she thought I was going to get after her for having missed the conference on the previous Friday. Or perhaps her husband had clued her in about what we’d discussed.

There was a long, expectant, thoroughly uncomfortable pause in which we regarded one another. When I didn’t look away and she couldn’t stare me down, she finally dropped her gaze. Almost imperceptibly, she nodded.

“Let me take Leslie downstairs to stay with the other teacher here.” I guided Leslie toward the door. “Do you want a cup of coffee? I’m going to stop and get myself one on the way back.”

Dr. Taylor shook her head.

Back upstairs, I sat down at the table. Unlike her husband, Dr. Taylor did not sit down next to me. Instead, she sat across the table and three seats down in the chair nearest the doorway. I couldn’t have touched her, even if we’d both extended our arms.

“I’m sorry you couldn’t come the other night. I had everything out to show you then, and I’m afraid I don’t now. This was a sort of spur-of-the-moment idea, asking you in. But it helps me tremendously to talk to both parents. Also, we had a most extraordinary thing happen in here today, and I was curious to find out how it compares with Leslie’s behavior at home.”

Dr. Taylor simply sat, regarding me as I spoke. She had the most disconcerting ability to maintain eye contact, and she had the most exceptional eyes, which increased the discomfort caused by her staring. While her eyes were not unusually large, she had a way of widening them that made them seem enormous to me. The whole iris became visible, giving her that kind of cold, unblinking expression reptiles have. Or perhaps it came more from the crocodile color. Whatever, her gaze made me feel continually obliged to look away, and I was annoyed with myself for doing this.

“How is Leslie at home? What’s she like to live with?” I asked.

This caused Dr. Taylor to finally take her eyes off my face. She looked down, up, around, then back to me. She shrugged slightly. “Just Leslie.”

“Listening to some of the things your husband was telling me on Friday, I get the feeling she must be quite a handful sometimes.”

Another shrug.

“Do you find the going a bit hard sometimes?”

A pause, then a slight nod.

“Can you tell me in what ways?”

Another shrug.

“Your husband says she doesn’t sleep very well.”

She shook her head.

“What happens?” I asked.

“She gets up.”

“Then what?”

“Wanders around.”

This conversation was like pulling teeth. In all my other encounters with Dr. Taylor, she gave me the impression that deigning to talk to me was something that she just couldn’t bring herself to do. It felt less that way now. I wondered if she was feeling threatened by this situation, or if she was guarding her private life.

“Who gets up with Leslie when she wakes?” I asked.

“I do, mostly.”

“Do you just put her back to bed?”

“If she’ll go.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

“Then I need to stay up with her.”

“How often does this occur?” I asked.

She shrugged slightly. “Every night.”

“Every night?”

Another shrug. “Every night I can think of.”

“More than once a night?”

Another shrug. “Sometimes.”

“How often did you get up with her last night?”

“Three times.”

“That sounds exhausting,” I said.

Dr. Taylor nodded slightly.

“Do you do all the getting up then? Or does Mr. Considyne help sometimes too?”

“He doesn’t usually hear her.”

“So let’s see if I’m getting this right,” I said. “You correct me, if I’m not. You get up every night, two or three times. Sometimes you just resettle her. Sometimes you have to stay up with her.”

“Well, not all night. Just until she goes back to sleep.”

“I see. How much sleep do you get?”

A shrug. “Enough.”

“What if you just left her alone, instead of getting up each time to put her back to bed?”

“She makes a big mess.”

“I see. Have you considered using something like a Dutch door or a screen door to confine her to her room?”

“My husband feels Leslie needs to do this. He says it makes her feel secure.”

“Do you agree?”

She shrugged. “I guess so.”

A pause came into the conversation. I glanced down at the notes I’d hurriedly scribbled on my pad.

“We had something unusual happen in here today,” I said. “There was a fight out on the playground this morning. I wasn’t down there because it was my break; I was upstairs. Then all of a sudden, there was Leslie. She’d come all the way up to get me, which alone would have been a surprise to me, but more extraordinary, she actually spoke to me. Meaningfully. It was just one word, ‘crying,’ but it was very appropriate to the situation. That’s what two of the other children were doing, and she wanted me to come down.”

Dr. Taylor, who was watching me, displayed no change of expression whatsoever, as I told her this. She appeared neither surprised nor delighted.

“She does that sometimes,” she said finally.

“She does? I had no idea she talked at all. No one’s ever mentioned it to me.”

“It isn’t very consistent.”

“But she does speak?” I asked.

“If that’s what you call it.”

“How often?”

Dr. Taylor wrinkled her nose and thought a moment. “Once a month, maybe. I don’t know.”

I contemplated the matter. It had suddenly begun to rain outside, and I was briefly distracted by the sound against the windowpane. When I looked back at her. Dr. Taylor was staring at me again.

“I think there’s a whole lot more to Leslie than meets the eye,” I said. “I wish I could work with her more intensively. I’m absolutely desperate for some auxiliary help in here. With all the cuts and everything in education, there doesn’t seem to be a way that the district can afford me an aide, which is a crying shame, really, given kids like Leslie. And unfortunately, I haven’t managed to track down any willing volunteers yet. But when I do, Leslie’s going to be right at the top of my list for some one-to-one work. I think she’s got more potential than she’s letting on.”

Dr. Taylor had begun chewing vigorously on her thumbnail. She still regarded me steadily, and I had the impression that she was intending to speak, but seconds slipped by and the silence began to grow noticeable.

“Did you want to say something?” I asked.

This appeared to unnerve her. She looked away quickly and snapped her hand down from her mouth in the gesture of someone suddenly aware of indulging in a bad habit. She shook her head slightly.

Another pause intruded. She was no longer watching me, so I took the opportunity to study her. In spite of her guarded aloofness, I was finding it harder to dislike the woman. There was something vaguely pathetic about her, sitting as she was, nearly the whole distance of the table away from me. Shoulders hunched, arms in close around her body, her steely beauty gilded over her like chain mail, she looked less the aggressor than the victim.

“I was wondering,” she said very quietly, “what you thought might cause Leslie’s problems.”

“You mean her handicap in general?”

She nodded.

“It’s hard to say. There’s a lot I don’t know about Leslie.”

A slight nod, as if I’d given her an answer.

“My gut feeling is that it’s some kind of organic dysfunction. Like autism. Her behavior’s somewhat similar to that of other children I’ve worked with. But I don’t really know for certain.”

Her long hair had fallen forward against the side of her face, and she took a strand and twisted it. She glanced over briefly. “What’s that mean?”

“What? Organic dysfunction?”

She nodded.

“It means that something isn’t working right physically. Because we still don’t know much about these things, we don’t know why handicaps like Leslie’s happen, but evidence seems to indicate it’s an inborn matter. It’s not the result of an emotional disturbance.” I looked over at her. “I don’t mean to say such children don’t have emotional problems. Often they do. These are inordinately hard kids to live with. They can upset even the most well-adjusted family, simply because it’s so difficult to accommodate their needs. I mean, look at your case. From my reckoning you’ve had about five years of continually broken nights. No one functions well under such circumstances, so it’s fairly understandable when things get in a twist, as a result.”

She looked down, and for a flicker of an instant, I felt she was near to tears. It was just a sensation I had, more than anything concrete in her behavior. She was still twisting her hair around her fingers, releasing it, twisting it again.

“We’re coming out of an era of psychiatry and psychology that has been very cruel to the parents of children with these kinds of handicaps,” I said. “There’s been too much emphasis on whose fault it is when the child has a problem, and I don’t think it’s done anyone any good. Blaming’s a pretty fruitless exercise all the way around, to my way of thinking. I don’t care what did it. It’s happened and become history. What I care about is the present. What’s the problem now? What can I do to help make it better? That’s all I’m really interested in: making it better.”

She nodded slowly without looking up. “I was just wondering.”