Just Another Kid (11 page)

“That’s okay,” she said. “I learn from mistakes too.”

“Y
ou’ve lost your ever-loving mind,” Carolyn replied. “Ladbrooke Taylor? In your classroom? What is this? Not enough nuts in your fruitcake already?”

“It was her idea.”

“Her last idea, as I recall, was to come and upchuck all over your table.”

“Look, I’m thankful for another pair of hands, whatever form they come in.”

“For pity’s sake, Torey, that’s like Attila the Hun’s volunteering to teach Sunday school. What does she know about any of this anyway?”

“She doesn’t need to know. She just needs to be fit and hardworking. Besides, there’s no one else volunteering, is there?”

“You’re not getting help, Torey. What you’re getting is just one more kid, a lot bigger and a lot ornerier when crossed. What are you going to do when she comes in drunk?”

“Turn her around and send her back out again,” I replied.

“And you honestly think you’re going to make an aide out of her? Look at the way she dresses, for pete’s sake. You think she’s going to come in, Guccis and Puccis and all, and crawl under the table after Dirkie?” Carolyn suddenly giggled.

“I’m serious, Carolyn. She’s coming back in tonight, and if she still wants to try, I’m going to let her.”

“Get your head examined. You need it.”

On this occasion, Dr. Taylor was not late. At the arranged time, she appeared at the corner of the shelves. She stopped there.

I looked up from where I was sitting at the table and grinned. “You haven’t chickened out, then?”

“No,” she said, without even the hint of a smile.

I tried the grin a second time. “Okay. Come on over. Sit down, and I’ll show you what we do in here.”

She came around the table and pulled out the chair next to mine. She smelled tweedy, and I couldn’t tell if it was cologne or just the scent of her hair and clothes. It was pleasant and outdoorsy. As ever, she was dressed with relaxed elegance: silk blouse, suede jacket, designer jeans. I wondered how she found the time to shop with all her drinking. I was sober and could never find anything that looked like that on me. But then again, I didn’t have a body like that to put it on.

Passing the children’s folders over to Dr. Taylor as I talked, I tried to tell her a little bit about each one. I mentioned Mariana and her sexual precocity, Dirkie and his obsessions. I talked about Shemona’s and Geraldine’s symbiotic relationship and Shemona’s refusal to speak. I spoke of Shamie, sweet and gentle, but so immature.

I also mentioned Dirkie’s fixation with long, blond hair. I didn’t want to make it sound too dire, but I did suggest that it would be better if she kept hers tied back, at least in the beginning. Why? she asked. To keep him from touching it, from needing to touch it. For the first time genuine concern came to her eyes, and I could tell she was having second thoughts about us.

Afterward, I went over the pattern of our day. I explained the kind of jobs aides usually got stuck with and talked about the kind of relationship I’d had with most of my previous aides and what I hoped we could develop, if she found the work suited her. In the beginning, I would try to make her tasks all fairly specific and supervise them carefully, since she had no experience, but it was a gut-level occupation, I said, and I hoped she would come to the point where she felt comfortable enough with us to go without strict plans and simply fill in where the need was greatest without my having to direct her to it. I preferred a team member to a subordinate.

The one child I did not want her to work with was Leslie. I felt very strongly about this, explaining that Leslie already had her own little niche in here. It would be unfair to take that away from her. So, while I didn’t want Dr. Taylor to ignore her daughter, I preferred to be responsible for most of Leslie’s day myself.

“How’s this all sound?” I asked, when I’d run through most of my notes.

“Okay.”

“Is it what you expected?”

Her lips quirked up on one side. “I don’t know what I expected.”

I smiled.

“I think what I expected was for you to tell me I couldn’t do it.”

“I’ve had several parents working very successfully as volunteers in the past. And one of the best aides I ever had was a migrant worker who’d done nothing but pick asparagus before he came into my class. It’s a vocation. Either you’ll love it or you’ll hate it. And you’ll find that out soon enough.”

She nodded.

“But it
is
hard work. Make no mistake about that.”

“Hard work’s never put me off before,” she said, sounding slightly indignant.

I glanced down at my notes. “There is one other thing. I sort of hate to bring this up, but I think I need to. And that’s your drinking.”

She turned her head away from me.

“You’ve got to be sober in here all the time. I’m afraid I am going to have to be very strict about that. As you’ll quickly discover, we need all our wits about us here. So, if you drink, if you want to drink, if you’ve been drinking, I’ll ask you to leave. Understand that I won’t be angry with you. I won’t hassle you. I’ll understand that you need to be gone. But in here, all the time, every time, you need to be cold sober. That has
got
to be a ground rule. Okay?”

She nodded slightly. A small pause followed. “What time do you want me?”

“Well, your hours are pretty much your own. As a volunteer, it’s easiest if you set your own schedule and then just let me know which hours you plan to be here so that I can arrange things around that. How often do you think you might want to come in?”

She regarded me. “I thought I was going to be here every day,” she said, her voice sounded a little surprised, as if this were a foregone conclusion.

“Well, yes, I suppose, if you want to be.”

“When do you come in?” she asked.

“About 7:30 most days.”

“Well, can I come in then too?”

“That’s probably a little too early. The children don’t start until 8:45. I’ll tell you what, if you’re thinking of working mornings, why don’t you arrive about eight? Then we can use the extra time to go over plans.”

“Okay.” Pushing back her chair, she stood up and reached across the table for her coat.

“Oh, there is one other thing, Dr. Taylor,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Do you have something less formal that we can call you in here? I tend to avoid titles. Seems more egalitarian to me.”

“Sure,” she replied, “it’s Ladbrooke.”

I reached a hand out to her. “I’m Torey.”

Abruptly, she smiled in a very disarming way. It was the first genuine smile I’d ever seen cross her face. “Maybe this will work out after all,” she said cheerfully. “We’ve both got screwball names.”

It wasn’t until I got home that night that I questioned what I’d just done, accepting Ladbrooke Taylor as an aide, and unexpectedly, I found myself awash with misgivings. What the heck had I just let myself in for? How had I gotten from this woman threatening to sue the life out of me to giving her full rein to share my days? The degree of impulsiveness in all this was pretty hard to ignore. My intention had been to simply direct her to someone somewhere who could help her and then get back to my own life. How had I gotten sidetracked into accepting her as a volunteer? My God, I thought suddenly, she wasn’t even a recovering alcoholic. She was still in full swing. What on earth had I thought I was doing?

To her credit, Ladbrooke was punctual. She arrived the next morning precisely at eight o’clock. While she hadn’t quite managed to shed the designer image, she’d obviously tried. The jeans were Levi’s. The fashion boots had been replaced by a rather seedy-looking pair of jogging shoes.

Sitting at the table with my chin braced in one hand, I regarded her. “You’re going to have to take off the jewelry.”

She glanced down at herself.

“You can put it in the top drawer of the filing cabinet. That locks. But you’re not going to want anything that dangles in any way.”

“Why not?”

“So that you don’t get hurt if somebody grabs you.”

“Oh.”

“And can you braid your hair back or something?”

She touched her hair uncertainly. It was still loose. She’d clipped it back with large barrettes so that it stayed behind her shoulders, but I knew that wasn’t going to be enough to deter Dirkie.

“There’s rubber bands over there on the top shelf.”

She nodded. Sitting down across from me, she opened her handbag and took out a comb. She unclipped the barrettes and let her hair fall loose. Shaking it free, she pulled it around over her shoulder and began to braid it. She never spoke.

I hadn’t said much to the children. I had intimated that we might be getting some help, but because I was unsure if Ladbrooke was going to follow through, I hadn’t prepared them in any substantial way. This was a fairly flexible group of children, so I didn’t think that would matter much. However, it did cause some unforeseen problems for Ladbrooke. The last time the children had seen her, she was passed out by our door. Thus, the children were rather more interested in her than either of us had anticipated.

“Are you quite well now?” Shamie inquired, when he was introduced.

Ladbrooke glanced in my direction, a questioning expression on her face. It occurred to me that she might have little memory of that part of that day.

“He means when you were here. At the beginning of last week.” I gave her a knowing look.

Ladbrooke blushed a brilliant hue. “Yes, thank you,” she replied.

“Are you our new teacher?” Geraldine asked.

“She’s our new helper. Your old teacher is right here,” I said.

“You’re pretty,” Geraldine said to Ladbrooke. “You should be the teacher. You’re prettier than she is.”

Mariana bounced around the corner of the shelving and came to an abrupt halt. She regarded Ladbrooke a long moment and then smiled in a friendly way. “I know where I saw you last,” she said brightly. “You were laying on our floor.”

Another flush of color to Ladbrooke’s face.

And, of course, there was Dirkie. When he rounded the corner into the main part of the classroom and saw Ladbrooke, he screamed as if someone had just plunged a knife into him.

“It’s the dead lady!” he shrieked. “That dead lady is in our
room!
”

I knocked over a chair in my scramble to catch him before he bolted out of the classroom door. I just managed to snag him, hooking my fingers into the collar of his shirt and pulling him up short.

“Dirkie, she’s not dead. She never was dead. I told you that before.”

“You killed her.”

“She’s perfectly alive, Dirkie. Now calm down.”

“I ain’t meeting no dead lady. Let go of me!”

I pulled him back around the corner and into the main part of the room.

“Make her go away! Make that dead lady go
away!
”

To say Ladbrooke was looking horrified at this point was a vast understatement. It was doubtful, as I dragged Dirkie up to her, which of them was more likely to run screaming out of the room first.

With my free hand, I grabbed Ladbrooke’s bare arm. “Here Dirkie, feel her arm. Touch it.”

“I’m not going to touch no dead lady!”

“
Touch
it. Feel her arm. See? See how warm her arm is. Feel mine. Feel your arm. They’re warm, see? How can she be dead? Dead people are cold, aren’t they? Ladbrooke’s just as alive as we are. Feel how warm she is.”

I had to physically place Dirkie’s hand on Ladbrooke’s arm, but as I had hoped, the connection was instantaneously successful. The human warmth of her skin was too obvious. Dirkie’s hand relaxed against her arm. He touched his own arm then. And mine. And back to Ladbrooke’s. His other muscles relaxed. I loosened my grip on his shirt.

Dirkie looked up at Ladbrooke. Then he scanned the rest of her body. It was a very thorough bit of scrutinizing. Then he touched her bare arm again.

“That’s enough touching, Dirkie.”

“Hoo-hoo-hoo,” he said, and a maniacal little smile came to his lips.

“Dirkie? I mean it. That’s enough touching. People don’t like to be stroked like that.”

If possible, Ladbrooke’s expression was even more horrified than before. Every muscle had tensed. She seemed frozen, unable to pull herself away from Dirkie, who was touching her arm in an increasingly provocative manner.

“Take your hand off her
now
. Dirk. I mean it.” I reached over and removed his hand. “That is
not
appropriate.”

“Hoo-hoo-hoo.”

I maneuvered Dirkie away from Ladbrooke and toward his chair.

“She’s got big tits!” Dirkie said with loud enthusiasm.

“Yes, but you’re not going to say anything to her about them, are you? Remember what I’ve told you about personal remarks, Dirkie? People don’t like them. They get upset. And we don’t want to upset Ladbrooke on her first day, do we?” I fixed him with the evil eye. “Do we?”

“But they’re
big!
”

“Just like the trouble you’ll be in, if you don’t take your seat.”