Just Another Kid (13 page)

But of course, Dirkie’s worst problem was with Ladbrooke’s hair. I had to admit, she did have the kind of hair that would attract almost anybody’s attention. Thick and shiny and always slightly uncontrolled, no matter what she did to it, it invited touching. I knew sooner or later I wasn’t going to intervene in time.

Leslie’s explosion that morning set us all on edge. Even after lunch, when things had pretty much returned to normal, the children were hard to settle. Dirkie, as always, was the most sensitive to disturbance, and as a consequence, he’d spent most of the day hooting quietly from under the table.

After lunch, he came into the classroom hyped up. He giggled and laughed and clapped, all the while mincing around the room on the tips of his toes, like a drunken ballerina.

“Dirk, sit down, please,” I said. The children were making paper chains in preparation for Christmas, three weeks in the future.

Dirkie went to his chair and sat, reaching for a handful of construction-paper strips. But within minutes, he was up again, dancing around. He minced over in Ladbrooke’s direction.

“Dirkie,” I said, my tone sufficient warning, or so I hoped.

He had his hand out, just the tip of his forefinger touching a strand of Ladbrooke’s hair. Half the problem lay with her. She just could not abide the need to keep her hair braided or otherwise bound firmly back, and I don’t think she appreciated how much time I wasted, intervening. I felt petty, reminding her again and again, and resolved to let natural consequences take their course; but when in the classroom, seeing Dirkie on the move, I could never bring myself to just sit by and watch. On this occasion, Ladbrooke didn’t have her hair completely back. The bit around her face was pulled back and held with a barrette but the majority lay loose down her back and over part of the chair she was sitting in. It was this, the bit sticking out over the back of the wooden chair, that was too much temptation for Dirkie. He minced away on his toes and then returned. Another finger went out, and he touched the hair again.

I rose, walked around the table and took him by the shoulder. “Come back here with me,” I said, and sat him down beside me. I gave him part of my paper chain to work on.

“You got nice hair,” he said and reached up to stroke mine.

“No,” I said and put his hand down. “That isn’t appropriate. You don’t touch people’s hair without asking permission first.”

“You’ve got nice, long hair. Are you going to cut your hair?”

Geraldine across from us groaned. “Doesn’t he ever say anything else?”

“Are you going to cut your hair?”

“No, Dirkie. Now help with the chains.”

But he couldn’t. “Hoo-hoo-hoo.” And then he slipped off the chair and under the table. “Hoo-hoo-hoo.” He began to clap.

After Leslie’s explosion, I didn’t like provoking Dirkie into something similar; and I knew I would, if I kept at him. So, instead, I let him stay under the table.

We worked for some time in relative peace. The chain making was an enjoyable activity. Christmas was far enough ahead that the mania hadn’t set in, but the festive spirit was becoming apparent. The children talked animatedly among themselves about presents, traditions and the things they liked best about Christmas.

Shamie, who was sitting next to Ladbrooke, lifted up his chain to see his progress. He’d been beavering away and now found he couldn’t stretch his arm high enough to display the entire length, so he shook it to straighten it out on the table. That sent a flurry of paper strips scattering into Ladbrooke’s lap and down onto the floor.

“Oh, I am sorry,” Shamie said.

“That’s all right,” Ladbrooke replied and leaned down to retrieve the fallen strips beside her chair. That was her fatal mistake. As she bent down, her hair fell forward, and Dirkie, waiting under the table like a lurking piranha, couldn’t resist the opportunity presented him.

I didn’t realize what was happening at first. Ladbrooke had been sitting across from me, then there was a sudden shriek and she just disappeared off her chair. Astonished, I rose up and leaned across the table. Chaos followed. The other children on that side of the table were jumping aside. Chairs went everywhere. Paper chains and construction paper flew about us.

“Dirkie?” I was still leaning over from my side of the table, still not altogether sure what had happened. Then I pulled my chair back and knelt down to see under the table.

Really serious chaos was going on down there. If Dirkie had wanted hair, he had certainly managed to find it, because Ladbrooke’s hair was all over him. He was clutching huge fistfuls of it, rubbing it frantically against his face and writhing in ecstasy. He hooted hysterically.

Ladbrooke was almost as hysterical as he was.

I crawled under the table in an effort to separate them. “Out. Out the other side. Move. Ladbrooke, move back.”

“I can’t! I can’t! I can’t!”

“Dirkie,
stop
that! Now move.”

Neither of them did. I kicked out the chairs from around the table to give space, but I couldn’t actually move the table much. It was huge and heavy, and there wasn’t much spare space in the room to move it to, but I did manage to slide it back enough to give me easier access to Dirkie.

Not knowing how else to stop him, I climbed on top of him and physically pinned him to the floor. It meant having to climb on Ladbrooke’s hair as well, but I was past worrying about causing her any more pain than she was already experiencing. Sitting firmly on Dirkie’s stomach, I smashed his wrists against the linoleum. Moving a knee onto his elbow, I took one hand and began doggedly prizing his fingers apart and unwrapping the hair from his hand. It was a slow process, because by that time the hair had tangled upon itself and around the buttons of Dirkie’s shirt and even into my clothing. Moreover, we were still half under the table, so I had to hunch forward to keep from hitting my head.

“If I ever,
ever
catch you doing this again,” I said, as I worked, “I’ll make dogmeat of you, Dirkie. I promise you, I will. This is cruel. It hurts.”

He was growing calmer as I sat on him. The hooting stopped, and he lay silent.

At last, I had all the hair disentangled from our clothes. Ladbrooke pulled back and disappeared, while I stayed astride Dirkie.

“Have I made myself clear to you?” I asked. “I don’t want to ever catch you doing this again. Not with Ladbrooke. Not with Shemona. Not with anybody. Is that registering?”

Solemnly, he nodded.

I eased back and stood up. “Okay, get out from under there and go sit in the quiet chair.”

“Are you mad at me?” he asked.

“
Yes
.”

Dirkie, with an injured expression on his face, rose from under the table and went to the quiet chair. I shoved the table back where it belonged and started replacing chairs. Then I looked around for Ladbrooke. Shamie jerked his head in the direction of the blackboard arm of the room. “She’s over there.”

I went around the corner of the shelves to find Ladbrooke at the far end, leaning against the wall. I put an arm around her shoulders. “You okay?”

She nodded. There were tears in her eyes.

“I know. It hurts. I’ve had it happen to me,” I said.

She nodded again.

“Listen, there’s not much time left before recess. Why don’t you go on down and relax in the lounge for a bit. I’ll meet you there once the kids are out.”

“Okay.”

By the time I got down to the teachers’ lounge, Ladbrooke had recovered enough to try untangling her hair. I bought myself a Dr. Pepper from the machine and drank deeply of it. I regarded her over the top of the can. By this point, I was beginning to see the funny side of the situation, and it was hard not to smile, but I didn’t. Ladbrooke wasn’t overendowed with a sense of humor, even on the best of occasions.

She fought irritably with the snarled hair. “I look like a witch,” she muttered, as I came over.

“Do you want some help?”

“No, it’s okay. I’ll get it.”

“Do you want a drink?” I asked, holding out the can of pop.

“God, I could do with one, believe me,” she said, her tone heartfelt. I smiled.

Clearly still a little overwrought, she dropped her hands in frustration, when the bit of hair she was working on refused to untangle.

“It’s going to take you forever that way, Ladbrooke. Here, give me the brush. I can do it more easily from behind you.”

She hesitated a moment.

“Come on, give it here.”

“All right,” she said wearily, and passed the brush to me.

Going behind the sofa, I lifted her hair up and over the back. I paused to try and tease a bit of it free with my fingers, but I couldn’t. It was in a frightful state, and I wasn’t too sure where to start. Pulling over a nearby empty wastebasket, I upended it and sat down. Then, carefully, I started at the bottom and began working my way up.

For a considerable time neither of us spoke. The teachers’ lounge was empty except for the two of us, and the quiet atmosphere was soothing.

“I’m not used to anyone doing anything with my hair,” she said.

I concentrated on a very snarly bit. In the end, I had to pick it apart with my fingernails.

“I’ve never liked that sort of thing,” she said, “people all over me, touching me.”

“I’ve noticed,” I said.

“I just don’t like it.”

Again I teased apart a nasty tangle with my fingers. I could have done with a rat-tailed comb, or even an ordinary comb, because Ladbrooke’s brush was not very effective against such tangles as these.

“Golly, that hurt when Dirkie did that,” Ladbrooke said. “It really surprised me how much.”

“Yes, I know. I’ve had it happen myself. Never as bad as this, but enough to give me plenty of empathy.”

“I think I’ve got your point now—about putting my hair back,” she said, her tone rueful.

I smiled. “Carolyn and I go down to the spa at night and sit around in the whirlpool, comparing bruises. You get so you can go down your legs like a road map. This one’s from Shemona, when I made her get ready for lunch. That one’s from Mariana, when she pushed the swing into me. It’s the main reason I wear pants all the time. My legs are a mess.”

“You’re really laid back about all of this, aren’t you?”

“Doesn’t bother me, if that’s what you mean,” I replied.

“It’s more than a case of simply not bothering you, Torey. You really get turned on by it, don’t you? All this blood and guts.”

I smiled. “Yes, I suppose.”

Finally, I got to the point where I could brush most of the hair out in long, straight strokes. Ladbrooke slowly began to relax. Taut muscles along her neck and shoulders loosened, and she leaned back into the saggy sofa cushions. I ran my fingers through the hair to see if I missed any tangles.

“Yes, I like all this,” I said. “Not this particular part, mind you. I mean, I don’t like seeing anybody get hurt, but in a relative sense, I like all this. I like the unpredictability, the volatility. I like the sense of living on the edge that’s always there.”

“And the people part,” she said. “You like that.”

Again I smiled. “Yes, and the people part. I like all of that. I think because it’s real. I know what I’m doing’s real. I know I’m alive.”

This made Ladbrooke come the closest yet to smiling. “Yes,” she said and tenderly touched her head. “After this episode, I’m pretty convinced I’m alive as well.”

C
hristmas fever struck during the first full week of December. Since we were not in a regular school, with all the excitement of other classes preparing for the season as well, and the traditional round of panics and performances, I hadn’t anticipated much of a brouhaha. Carolyn and I had discussed having a small last-day-of-school party for the two classes combined, before the Christmas break, but that was all. And by and large Carolyn’s children were not much of a source of stimulation. Being two floors away from us, they were too far removed physically, and being mentally handicapped four- and five-year-olds, most were not very aware of what was going on anyway. However, regardless of all these deterrents, my lot still caught the contagion.

When it became apparent that Christmas was becoming a major topic of conversation in the classroom, I tried to discourage the excitement from fermenting into full-blown delirium. We put up our paper chains and a few placard Santas, but otherwise, I restricted art projects to fairly abstract areas and kept the Christmas-related stories/films/ activities to a minimum.

All this effort at life-goes-on-as-usual went unappreciated. Shamie was the worst one for upsetting the equilibrium. He kept asking when we were going to do this thing or that thing. He stirred up the others into a frenzy with tales of what went on at his school in Belfast. And of course, it was he who brought up the whole business of a Nativity play.

We were all sitting together at the table one morning, supposedly working, except that Mariana had developed an annoyingly loud case of the hiccups; which provided just enough distraction to keep anyone from concentrating. Finally, I sent her back to the sink to get a drink of water.

“Are we going to have a Nativity play?” Shamie asked, right out of the blue.

“We don’t usually have them in American schools,” I replied.

Geraldine’s brow puckered. “But you’ve got to have a Nativity play, Miss. Else it wouldn’t be Christmas, would it?”

“We’ve got enough people for the parts,” Shamie said. “Geraldine and I, we were talking about it at home. We could have one of us boys be Joseph, and then there’d be Mary and the Angel of the Lord, and then there could be one shepherd and one Wise Man.”

“There’s supposed to be three Wise Men,” Ladbrooke put in.

“Well, yes, I know. There’s supposed to be more shepherds too. But we could just pretend.” Shamie ducked his head. “I’m sort of big for this kind of thing anyway. I told Geraldine that. It’s for the wee ones. But I wouldn’t really mind doing it. Shemona hasn’t ever had any Nativity plays. We should have one for her.”

“Miss, we’ve got to have a Nativity play,” Geraldine insisted.

I grimaced and shook my head. “No.”

“Please?” Shamie asked.

“It’d be too much work, Shamie. And how would you include Leslie and Shemona, when they don’t even talk? How could we make it work out? It’s a nice idea, but we’d need more children.”

“We wouldn’t, Miss.”

“More importantly, we’d need an audience. And we don’t have an audience.”

“Sure we do,” Shamie replied, warming to his subject. “We could invite Miss Berry’s class. We could invite the secretaries. And Mr. Cotton. And Bill, the janitor. And we could invite our families. That’d be enough. Come on, Miss, please? Do it for Shemona’s sake. She’s never had a Nativity play.”

“Do it for
your
sake, Shamie,” I replied.

He giggled self-consciously. “They’re fun, Miss. I like them.”

At this point, Mariana rejoined us. “What’s a natibby play?”

“You know. With Mary and Joseph and Baby Jesus,” Geraldine said.

“I could be the director,” Shamie offered.

“You’d have to be director, scriptwriter and actor all rolled into one,” I said.

“Please, Miss? It wouldn’t be Christmas, would it? I mean, that’s what Christmas is all about.”

Shamie and Geraldine had obviously discussed this at great length before bringing the subject up, because for every reason I had not to do it, they had a counter reason for doing it. The other children quickly caught their enthusiasm, although I doubt any of them actually knew what was being discussed. Mariana clearly had no idea what the whole thing was about. Dirkie just wanted to do what everybody else was doing, whatever it might be. But soon there was a small, pleading chorus.

“Okay, look,” I said, “if you want the play, Shamie, this is what we do.
You
write the script. You may use the time you usually have for English to do it and you can have Geraldine or anyone else you want to help you. But you can’t waste time. This’ll have to be done quickly. Probably by Friday at the latest. Okay? And then we’ll see if we can make a play out of it.”

“Hooray!” Shamie cried, throwing his pencil way up into the air. “Hip-hip-hoo-goody-ray!”

By that week in December, Ladbrooke had been with us for nearly a month, and she was proving to be a real experience. I hadn’t taken her very seriously when she first started. My concern for her and her difficult circumstances was genuine enough, but I must confess that deep down I’d felt she wouldn’t be worth two hoots in the classroom. Part of my feelings were no more than pure prejudice. I found it hard to look at someone like her and really take her seriously. There was just too much of the glitzy, upper-class bimbo about her. And part of my feelings were based on past experience. This was demanding work, both emotionally and physically, and as a consequence, very few people found it really suited them. Volunteers had a habit of coming and going with monotonous regularity. That was just a fact of life. So, once the going got tough, I expected we’d lose her.

We didn’t. On Ladbrooke’s second day, she showed up at precisely 8:00 a.m. just as she had the first. And so she did the third day and the fourth and the fifth. Every day, exactly at eight, there she was. I kept assuming she’d go home sooner or later during the day, but she never did that either. Once arrived, she stayed through the morning session, through the lunch period, through the afternoon session, through my after-school prep time and right up until I myself clocked out at five. She never left a moment before I did.

This caused me no small amount of surprise. The entire first week I did nothing whatsoever except wait for Ladbrooke to leave. I’d never envisioned having a full-time colleague, and it took me a while to adjust to the fact that I suddenly had one. Yet I didn’t really know how to go about inquiring into the matter without sounding ungrateful for such a generous donation of time.

Ladbrooke squashed what other prejudices I might have had by proving to be a remarkably hard worker. Within hours of her arrival on the first day, she was already locating materials for me, putting things away, responding to the children. I never had to tell her twice that a thing needed doing. Indeed, Ladbrooke demonstrated a disconcerting ability to anticipate what I needed, sometimes even before I was aware of it. Suddenly, there were no more piles of unsorted papers, unassembled materials or uncorrected work. The files in the filing cabinet became alphabetized, color coded and filled with the things that belonged in them. I found myself in a hitherto unknown state of wonderful organization.

Ladbrooke had more difficulty falling in naturally with the teaching side of things. Her drive to be useful often overwhelmed her sense of timing, and as a consequence, we stumbled over one another a lot, both figuratively and literally. I think it was caused mostly by the lack of experience, because otherwise, Ladbrooke appeared to have the instincts of a natural teacher. She was comfortable with the children, talked to them without talking down, showed respect for their individual differences. More importantly, in our circumstances, she was able to maintain a modicum of discipline if I needed to have a private moment with a particular child.

Ladbrooke’s real contribution, however, came from her expertise in mathematics. I knew how numbers worked; Ladbrooke knew why. A chance question would bring diagrams on the chalkboard or little three-dimensional constructions out of erasers, pencils or even borrowed journals from the library. With a handful of building blocks, she gave Shamie more insight into long division than I had managed all year long. Whatever else the gossips might have said about her, they’d been close to the mark on this occasion. She was a fair genius in math.

In light of such substantive contributions to the class, it would have been nice if Ladbrooke’s advent into our lives had been smooth. Unfortunately, it was anything but. Along with her industry and abilities came Ladbrooke’s personality as well, and that was another matter entirely. Tense, guarded, and anxious, she proved more of an emotional challenge to me some days than the children did.

I could appreciate the fact that Ladbrooke wasn’t going to feel immediately at home with us. She and I had a negative relationship to put behind us. She was in a field she wasn’t confident in and she was working in a subordinate, low-status position. And of course, there was the usual amount of apprehension among strangers. But in her case, it all ran rather deeper than that.

Ladbrooke’s most glaring problem was her extraordinary defensiveness. She seemed to operate under the belief that everyone’s raison d’être was to do her harm. And clearly, she felt the best defense was a good offense, because she was on the offense a fair share of the time, day in, day out. Either that, or if very upset, she bolted for the safety of the girls’ rest-room or some other isolated location. I found this continual fight-or-flight attitude very tiring to cope with for long stretches, but whatever difficulties such behavior might have caused me in the classroom, they were only hiccups compared to her problems with strangers. Appearing devoid of all the usual social minutiae one takes for granted in minor interactions, Ladbrooke reacted to every arrival at the classroom door as if personal attack were imminent. Someone would appear and, instantly, she’d clam up. The cold crocodile stare would return, and she’d emanate a bristly, hands-off kind of hostility that was so manifest it was almost palpable. This, of course, gave her the charm of a porcupine. Within days of her arrival, she had so thoroughly turned off the rest of the staff that no one dropped by the room any longer just for a chat. Indeed, no one came at all, unless absolutely necessary. It was like sharing quarters with Typhoid Mary.

Eventually, this behavior spread to me, in a knock-on effect. Being in a group with Ladbrooke, when she was so purposely alienating, was sheer hell for me because she upset everyone. Feeling responsible for having introduced this social monstrosity into our midst, I had to retreat. Although I continued taking my daytime breaks in the teachers’ lounge, I refrained from going in there before and after school, when it was likely to be crowded. And I gave up on Enrico’s entirely. My stomach just couldn’t cope with that kind of tension. So I ended up eating packed lunches in the classroom, alone, except for the company of this cuckoo I’d allowed into the nest.

Honestly, I didn’t know what to do with Ladbrooke in such situations. In the classroom she was nowhere near as antagonistic as she was in public. Certainly her defensiveness remained a huge problem for us, but it was fairly superficial. Once reassured, she usually relaxed the bristly guardedness and became tolerable again, but in public, absolutely nothing seemed to reassure her.

Ladbrooke’s other major shortcoming was her poor verbal ability. What I had initially mistaken for a nervous reaction, I soon discovered was a fundamental part of Ladbrooke’s character. Even in the best of moments, she was a taciturn person. There was none of the pleasant chitchat I was accustomed to in my relationships, particularly with other women. There was none of the quiet sharing of thoughts and feelings which usually accompanied familiarity. Instead, we would often spend the entire ninety minutes of prep time after school without exchanging more than a handful of words.

While obviously a good part of Ladbrooke’s silence was her particular personality, I also suspected some of it sprang from genuine inarticulateness. When she did talk, even in relaxed and familiar circumstances, Ladbrooke seldom expressed herself well. She had a poor speaking vocabulary for someone of her apparent intelligence. Indeed, in most instances, she didn’t seem to command many more words than Shamie did. And she could be quirkily unfluent. Quite often she would grind to a halt right in the middle of a conversation, or she’d come up with peculiar responses which, while close to the subject at hand, were strangely out of context. These had a most disconcerting effect, because while they sounded like non sequiturs on one hand, they seemed more like Freudian slips on the other. And on a few occasions, she said things that made absolutely no sense whatsoever. The words would be transposed or completely incorrect, and I’d be left baffled, yet Ladbrooke never heard them. When I kept asking her what she meant, she seemed to feel I was playing a poor joke on her.

But, in spite of everything, we did manage to survive one another. Loath as I was to admit it, Carolyn had been right. Ladbrooke, weighted under all her emotional baggage, had more in common with the children than with me. Good sense told me on more than one occasion to move her on, and I probably should have, but I didn’t. I’d gained what I needed most: a committed, hardworking aide, and I let that justify my actions. The truth, however, was that she had the same compelling impact on me the kids did. By the end of the first month, I was hooked. If she’d left us then, I would have missed her.

The next Monday got off to the kind of start only Mondays seem to be capable of. The hot water in my apartment gave out mid-shower, leaving me to finish washing the shampoo from my hair with cold water. The zipper on my jeans broke, and I hadn’t been to the laundromat yet that week. On the way to school my aging Fiat expired with a shudder in the middle of a five-way intersection, causing me to come struggling into the classroom only minutes before the children.