Just Another Kid (12 page)

As had long been my custom in special classes, I opened the day with “discussion.” Discussion began with a “topic”; topics traditionally explored areas that persistently got the children in trouble, such as cause-effect behaviors, feelings and moral questions. Occasionally the period was used for problem solving. At the beginning of the year, I usually had to introduce the majority of topics we discussed, but as time progressed and the children became used to the procedure, they themselves supplied most of the topics. We set a fifteen-minute limit on the length of discussion of the topic, and everyone was encouraged to participate. Afterward, each child had a few minutes to recount what had happened to him or her in the interim since we’d broken up the previous afternoon and to share any interesting news. Then I passed out the work folders, gave a brief outline of the day’s events, and we knuckled down.

Over the years, I had accumulated a box of props that the children liked to use during discussion. There was a collection of photographs showing people in numerous situations and with countless expressions on their faces. There was an extended family of tiny, plastic dolls and some dollhouse furniture. There were six hand puppets: two girl puppets, two boy puppets, a witch puppet and a knitted dragon. And there was a large set of plastic animals. All the children liked using them.

“I’ve got a topic today,” Mariana announced, extracting two girl dolls from the box. She stood them up and made them move toward each other in mincing steps while the rest of us arranged ourselves comfortably on the floor pillows. But once we were sitting and attentive, she stopped playing with the dolls and held them, one in each hand, and stared at them.

“Do you want to go ahead, Mariana?” I asked.

She regarded the dolls. “I brung in my special eraser yesterday. The one that looked like a strawberry. And somebody’s tooken it.” She did not look up. Instead, she caused one doll to beat the other over the head.

“You’ve looked carefully for it? You’ve searched right to the back of your cubby?” I asked. “And you’re certain you didn’t leave it at home?”

Mariana nodded. “It was my strawberry eraser that smelled like a real strawberry. I showed it to you yesterday, remember? Then I put it right back into my cubby to keep it safe. Now it’s gone. And I know who stolded it.” Mariana glanced in Geraldine’s direction. “She did. That little fucker over there.”

Silence reigned for a brief moment, then Dirkie hooted softly. He leaned toward Ladbrooke and said sotto voce, “She lets us say words like that.
Swear
words. Fucker, fucker, motherfucker.”

Glancing in his direction, I raised my eyebrow, and he sat back demurely. “Hoo-hoo,” he whispered.

Back to Mariana. “You know we don’t use discussion as a time to accuse people.”

“But Geraldine
took
my strawberry eraser. It’s gone and she stolded it and I know she did. I’m not accusing her. I
know
.”

“We’ll handle the matter later, after discussion.”

A crashing silence came down around us, and it became apparent that the children weren’t going to orient to another topic. Shamie, Geraldine and Shemona were all huddled together, like a group of covered wagons preparing for an Indian attack. Mariana glowered at them from across the circle. Dirkie was studying Ladbrooke’s assorted attributes. Leslie, beside me, sat silent and motionless.

“Why do you suppose people steal things?” I asked.

“Because they’re dumb fuckers,” Mariana replied.

“Why else?”

“Because they want things and they don’t have them,” Shamie said.

“Has any of you ever stolen anything?” I asked.

“She has!” Mariana retorted. “Ask
her
. She has.”

“Has any of you ever stolen anything?” I asked again.

No response.

“I have,” I said. “I remember once when I was eight, I took a magazine from my classroom at school. It had Halloween projects in it, and I really wanted to do them. But they weren’t the kind of thing a teacher would let you do at school, so I stole the magazine and took it home with me.”

Everyone looked scandalized.

“Did you get caught?” Mariana asked.

I shook my head.

“Did your conscience bother you?” Shamie asked.

“At the time, no, not very much. I wanted to do the projects too much. And I can remember doing them. One was making this paper-clip skeleton, and it was quite good. But afterward, I was left feeling disappointed. I couldn’t share the projects with anyone. I had to do them alone and then put them away without showing them to anyone. That ruined it for me. The consequences, even though I didn’t get caught, were enough to make me not do it again.”

I looked at the others. “Has anyone else had an experience like that?”

“I steal sometimes,” Mariana said. She still had the two dolls clutched in her hands. “When Daddy Jack comes over and him and Mom get to sitting around and drinking, I get mad and I steal tapes out of his car. I steal ’em and break ’em. Then he spanks me. But I don’t care. Him and Mom, they get six-packs and put them on the back porch, and then they sit in front of the TV and drink and drink. They don’t get me or Markie no dinner or nothing. Then I have to make Markie scrambled-egg sandwiches, because that’s all I can cook. ’Cept I can’t now, ’cause the stove’s broke. You know what Markie did last night?”

“What?” asked Dirkie, enthralled.

“He wee’d in the sock drawer. I said, ‘Markie, you stupid ass, don’t do that.’ But he did. So I had to take all the socks out and wash ’em. I washed ’em in the bathtub, but there was other junk in there already, so I thought I better wash that junk too. So I got some soap and I washed it all and hung it on the furniture to dry. And Daddy Jack and Mom were down watching TV, and he says, ‘Hey, Mariana, what the fuck you doing up there?’ And I says, ‘Nothing.’ And he comes up to see and he says, ‘What’s all these goddamned socks doing everywhere?’ I wasn’t going to tell him Markie did that, so I snuck out the back door and hid under the porch till he was done being mad. But I was mad myself. So later I went and got all the tapes out of his car and broke ’em. And I don’t feel bad. I’m glad I done it. I think he deserves it.”

“So you steal to get back at your Daddy Jack,” I said.

Mariana nodded.

“And what about you, Geraldine?” I asked, turning in her direction. “When you were little, did you ever steal anything?”

Geraldine shook her head.

“Liar!” Mariana shouted.

I touched Mariana’s arm.

“Geraldine’s lying,” she said. She had risen to her knees, and tears came to her eyes. “My mommy bought me that strawberry eraser because I was a good girl last weekend. It smells like a real strawberry, and I want it back. It’s mine.”

Unexpectedly, Shemona leaned forward and snatched away the two dolls that Mariana had been holding. Then, extracting one of the girl puppets, she put her hand inside and began pounding the dolls. Bang, bang, bang she went, in silent fury.

Geraldine became agitated by her sister’s unanticipated actions. “Oh, Miss,” she cried. “Shemona’s trying to tell you she took it. She took Mariana’s eraser. And she’s really, really sorry. Aren’t you, Shemona?”

Shemona’s behavior abruptly deteriorated. Grabbing up the dolls, she smashed them down. Then the hand puppet became a weapon to flail things with. She picked up the dolls and hurled them like missiles.

“Hey.” I rose to my knees to catch hold of her. The other children scattered to safety.

When I grabbed Shemona, Geraldine panicked. “Don’t smack her, Miss! Don’t smack her! It’s in my bag. I’ve brought it back. Shemona took it, but I’ve brought it back.” Geraldine was on her feet and across the room to her cubby.

I lifted Shemona high up over the other children.

“Please don’t smack Shemona, Miss. Here’s the eraser. Here it is.” Geraldine had begun to cry too. She threw the eraser at Mariana as if it were a hot coal.

“I’m not intending to smack anyone, Geraldine,” I said, letting Shemona down. When I released her, she bolted to the far end of the room and crouched down midst the pillows. “I don’t smack kids.” Geraldine ignored me and ran to Shemona, flinging her arms around her sister.

The place was in chaos. Leslie was flapping her arms with excitement. Dirkie had dived under the shelves. Shamie, appearing on the verge of tears himself, wrung his hands nervously. Ladbrooke, too bewildered to move, simply stood in the middle of everything. Only Mariana, her beloved eraser in hand, seemed composed.

“Okay, everybody,” I said and went to the table. “Work time. I’m going to start passing out folders. I’ll count to ten and then I want to see everyone in his or her seat.” I counted slowly, then took down the stack of folders from the top of the file cabinet. “Come on, Dirkie. Come out of there.” I squatted down to peer at him, lying flat on one of the shelves. He crawled out slowly and took his folder.

Shamie sat down and accepted his work. Mariana sat. I had to hold Leslie for a few minutes before she quieted enough to sit.

“If you have any questions about your work, you can ask Ladbrooke. She knows what each of you is doing.”

I then went over to Geraldine and Shemona, still in the corner. I put a hand on Geraldine’s shoulder. “Come on, sweetie. Let’s go back to the table now and get you started on your morning’s work.”

“Shemona didn’t mean to take it, Miss. She wasn’t being naughty on purpose. I don’t know what got into her.”

“I understand, Geraldine. Now, come on. Stand up.”

Geraldine stood. Shemona still huddled on the floor. I reached down and lifted her to her feet. She was trembling. But as usual, she pulled away from my touch. So I herded them together back to the table and pulled out chairs for them. Taking their work folders, I sat down with the two girls and went over their work with them.

Forty-five minutes or so later, when I was at the sink in the back of the room with Leslie, Shamie came back to wash his hands.

“You know Geraldine took that wee eraser, don’t you?” he asked in a very soft voice.

I nodded. “Yes, I know.”

I
was determined to do something about Leslie. All I had been waiting for was some auxiliary help, and now that I had it, I was able at last to get around to the kind of one-to-one work with Leslie—and Dirkie, as well—that I’d wanted to do from the beginning. But my perceptions of Leslie had changed so drastically over the previous few weeks that I was more desperate than ever to intervene with her.

Although I remained convinced that the major basis for Leslie’s disturbance was physiological, I’d gained a great deal more insight into the layers of manipulative behavior that had grown up around it. The in-depth discussion with Ladbrooke had been invaluable; my entire perception of Leslie altered. She took on a Helen Keller aura to me, another example of a brilliant, handicapped youngster who wasted her energies tyrannizing an indulgent family. The annoying thing was, Leslie had achieved pretty much the same sort of relationship with me. I’d cuddled her and coddled her and assumed, like everyone else, that the poor little dear wasn’t capable of much more. The quieter and more withdrawn she was, the more cuddles were forthcoming. She was nowhere near the little dictator here that she was at home, but she still had my personality quite accurately figured out.

One morning after discussion, I sat down with Leslie’s folder. As usual, she climbed into my lap. Normally, Leslie’s folder didn’t include much, as she was unable to work on her own at all and was generally unresponsive to being worked with in a group. However, this morning I’d included one of Shemona’s worksheets. On the left side of the paper were a series of colored shapes. On the right side were the same shapes in different order. The object of the exercise was to draw a line from the one on the left to its mate on the right.

“Look what I’ve got for you today,” I said, as Leslie adjusted herself in my lap. “You have a worksheet, just like everyone else. Isn’t that something? A big girl’s work. You and I are going to do it together.”

I took the sheet out and laid it on the table in front of us. I explained what was to be done. Leslie sat, motionless.

“Here. Here’s a pencil.”

No response.

I looked down at her and saw she wasn’t even looking at the paper. She stared vacantly ahead. I tilted her head down. Then, taking up her right hand, I carefully inserted the pencil and wrapped her fingers around it. It fell out and bounced along the floor. I retrieved it and once again pressed her fingers around it. Again it slid out and rolled away under the table.

“Well, no, that’s not going to do,” I said. “You need to hold the pencil. Here, take it in your hand. Hold it. Or else you won’t be able to draw the lines.”

She had completely evaporated. I was left with just the shell of a kid, flimsy as a paper sack.

“Oh, I see. You aren’t quite in the mood to work. Okay.” I lifted her down from my lap, stood and went over to Shamie. He was practicing his spelling, so I took up his list and began to help him.

Leslie remained standing, frozen into the position I had left her in. Not a muscle twitched. Her eyes were unfocused, her face expressionless. She stood that way for the entire hour and fifteen minutes between my getting up and the start of recess, when she joined the other children as they left the classroom.

After recess, I approached Leslie again. Or rather, she approached me. Coming up to me as I was sitting with Mariana and Geraldine, she attempted to get into my lap.

“Oh, good, you want to work too,” I said. “Just a minute. Let me get your paper.” I reached over and pulled her folder across the table. I lifted Leslie into my lap. “Here.” I handed her a pencil. She didn’t take it. Once again, I took her hand and pressed the pencil into it. The pencil dropped out.

“You don’t feel like working?” I asked.

Leslie had evaporated.

“Oh, well,” I said and put her off my lap. “I’m afraid you can’t sit here then. I’m busy with girls who are doing their work.” I slid my chair closer to the table, so that my abdomen was right up against the edge. Then I proceeded with Mariana and Geraldine.

This registered with Leslie. She didn’t blank out entirely, but rather watched us, her forehead slightly wrinkled.

After a few moments, Leslie lifted one leg and attempted futilely to wedge herself onto my lap in spite of my closeness to the table.

“Oh no, I’m afraid you can’t sit here, Leslie. I’m busy. If you want to do this paper with me, then you may stay. Otherwise, I need to get on with Geraldine and Mariana.”

In her own noiseless way, she became quite insistent. It was the first time in all these months that I’d seen her truly engaged in an interaction with me, other than that one occasion in the janitor’s closet. With persistence, she attempted to make room for herself on my lap. She got one leg up across mine, which left her in a precarious position. I did my best to ignore her, as she stood like a stork, hopping on one foot. The other two girls were having a harder time.

“Why are you being mean to Leslie today?” Mariana asked.

“I’m not being mean. I’m just busy. She wants to sit in my lap, and I don’t have time for that right now. I’m busy with people who are working hard.”

“Leslie can’t work,” Mariana replied earnestly, clearly concerned at what she was perceiving as maltreatment.

“Leslie
can
work. Everyone can work. And when she’s feeling in the mood, she can sit on my lap and I’ll help her. In the meantime, I’m busy with you two.”

Leslie, still caught with one leg lodged between mine and the table, balanced silently. When I scooted my chair back, she fell down. I rose and walked off. She didn’t move.

Leslie realized the gauntlet had been thrown down, and she hadn’t gotten where she was through a weak spirit. One day, two days, three days passed with no change, other than the worksheets. Each day I approached her, and she went vacant. Each day she approached me, and I refused her access to my lap. Sometimes three or four times a day we went through this, both of us insistent on things going our own way.

I did hope I was doing the right thing. My spirits were flagging after the third day. I was dreadfully conscious of having Ladbrooke in the room. She never said anything, but by the same token, she certainly didn’t ignore us. Every time I looked, she was watching us intently. That horrific encounter we’d had in early November, when she’d threatened to sue the life out of me, was, never again mentioned. Indeed, I suspected that it might have been something lost in the alcoholic mists of her memory, but I sure hadn’t forgotten it. I kept thinking about it each time I saw Ladbrooke’s eyes following me as I once again pushed her child off my lap. Even worse than Ladbrooke were the other children, particularly Mariana, who were very vocal about the sudden change in my relationship with “poor Leslie.” It was their comments, more than any other thing, that made me realize how much we’d all come to accept Leslie’s withdrawn behavior as normal.

On Thursday afternoon of that week, I went down after school and had a long talk with Carolyn. Had she ever come across anything like this? Did she think it was possible for a child to manipulate withdrawal in this manner? Was I expecting too much out of a poor little mite who couldn’t understand what was going on? Was I depriving her of the warmth and security and physical contact she had come to depend on as a vital part of our relationship? Would I hurt more than help in the long run?

Carolyn hadn’t come across anything like this, but she was reassuring and supportive. Keep trying a little longer, she said. Give it a week and see how it goes.

We got to the following Tuesday and there
was
a change. We’d started the morning the same way as the others. Again I had the matching-colors worksheet for Leslie, again she refused to cooperate. So I’d put her off my lap and gone on to the other children. It was a hectic morning all around, and I soon became absorbed in what I was doing. So when I turned around just before recess to see what Leslie was doing, I found her gone.

I glanced around the room. Getting up from the table, I went around to the blackboard area. No Leslie anywhere.

“Where’s Les?” I asked, coming back to the table.

Everyone turned and looked.

“Has anyone seen her?”

Then all of a sudden there came a loud
rrriiiip
from deep within the library shelves. Going around the corner from the table, I plunged into the long, narrow aisles of the library. There was Leslie at the far end. She had next to her a whole pile of shredded journals. When she saw me, she looked me straight in the eye and tore another long strip from one of the magazines.

“Young lady, what’s this?” I pulled her to her feet. Bits of
Psychology Today
fluttered everywhere.

“This is
not
what we do with magazines.”

Leslie glared, not at me but simply straight ahead. Her forehead furrowed, her eyebrows formed a grim line.

“Go get the wastebasket so we can clean this up.”

She did not move.

“Go get the wastebasket, Leslie.”

More furrows on the forehead.

“Go.
Now
.”

“No!” she shouted and ran down the long aisle with her arm held out, causing every single journal she touched to fall on the floor. At the far end, she paused, grabbed what she could reach and flung it everywhere.

I leaped over the things strewn in my path and caught hold of her. She screeched with a volume I’d not anticipated, writhed and sunk her teeth firmly into my hand. I let go of her, more from surprise than pain.

Leslie shot off around the corner and into the main part of the classroom. Wiping blood on my jeans, I shot off after her. Everything she could get her hands on, she threw down. Work folders, books, coats, art materials all went crashing to the floor. With a final lunge, I caught up with her in the far corner, grabbing hold of her clothes. I lifted her physically off the floor by the back of her overalls and, wrapping my arms tightly around her in a confining bear hug, I sank down to the floor.

She was not screaming, not crying, just fighting. Grunt. Gasp. Flail. Kick. Twist. Turn. She kept at it and at it, trying to break my grip, so I enveloped her further, bringing my knees up to pin her in closer to me. We wrestled for a matter of minutes before she finally gave in. In the end, she collapsed wearily against me. I let go of her then, and she fell from my arms to lie, panting heavily, with her fact against the brown-and-white linoleum.

I rose and went over to the quiet chair, a large wooden chair in the back of the classroom. Mostly, I sent children to sit there until temporarily lost tempers were recovered, but I also used it for plain old time-out. “Leslie, sit here,” I said.

She looked up at me, and for a moment, I knew she was weighing the challenge. But in the end she rose and came over without further urging.

“I’m going to put the timer on for five minutes. When it rings, you may get up and rejoin the rest of us. Until then, sit here.”

I turned and came back to the others. Blood from where Leslie had bitten me had gone all over my blouse. I went over to Ladbrooke, who was sitting white-faced and wild-eyed at the table. She was trembling. “I’m going to go down to the office and get a couple of Band-Aids. I’ll be right back.”

“No. Don’t go,” she said.

“I’ll be right back.” And I was, even before the timer had gone off. I returned, sat down with Dirkie and began to help him with his work. When the bell rang, I looked over to Leslie. “You may get up now.”

She didn’t. Her body remained on the chair; the rest of her had disappeared.

At recess time, Leslie got off the chair when the other children started putting on their outdoor clothes. She headed for her cubby and her own jacket but hesitated as she passed her usual place at the table, where her work folder still lay open. Without so much as a glance toward the rest of us, she reached over, took up one of Mariana’s pencils and drew unfaltering lines between the colored shapes. Then she put the pencil down and continued on to get her clothes. I said nothing, neither to Leslie nor to Ladbrooke, who was bent down beside me to help Shemona with her jacket. But I did smile.

Both boys developed fairly obvious crushes on Ladbrooke during the course of her first weeks with us. Ladbrooke’s beauty was the sort of thing one didn’t acknowledge noticing, but it wasn’t really possible to ignore. However, lumping it into that broad category of things which people can’t help about themselves, I’d not given it much more thought. I suppose I should have weighed the matter before allowing her into the classroom with pubescent boys, but the wholesale silliness I was letting us in for never really crossed my mind.

Shamie’s reaction was that of any red-blooded male. He was besotted, plain and simple. Making calf eyes, trying to sit next to her at any opportunity, falling over himself to accommodate her every whim, he did nothing more than make a lovable nuisance of himself.

Dirkie, on the other hand, was something else again. He kept wanting to touch Ladbrooke. This was particularly unfortunate, as Ladbrooke, I soon discovered, was uncomfortable even with normal amounts of physical contact. She couldn’t bring herself to casually touch the children and she barely tolerated their touching her. She’d go motionless, all muscles tensing, and wait breathlessly for the child to take his or her hand away. So Dirkie got to be a bit of a menace.

Dirkie’s reaction was to stroke himself, which was, if anything, more embarrassing to Ladbrooke. “Oh, beautiful lady,” he’d say, running his hands down the sides of his face. “Beautiful lady, beautiful face.” Which was a whole lot better than his “Big tits, big beautiful tits,” while he caressed his shirt.