Just Another Kid (24 page)

She caught me staring at her. “What are you thinking about?”

“About you.” I refocused my gaze. “You do realize that the time’s coming when you’re going to have to make the decision to quit drinking, don’t you?”

She nodded very slightly.

“That’s what this whole thing boils down to. You
must
stop.”

“I just couldn’t cope, Torey. It was being sick. And Tom’s not helping. And Leslie. And Tom’s horrible kids. It wasn’t that I meant to drink. I’m
trying
to stop.”

“Then why didn’t you call me instead of Bill? Why didn’t you try to do something constructive about it?”

She lowered her head.

“Tom’s not making you drink, Ladbrooke. I know you have a difficult time of it at home, but it isn’t Tom. Or Leslie. Or Tom’s kids. You’re the one picking up the glass. No one is pouring it down your throat except you.
You
are.”

Ladbrooke’s chin trembled.

I could tell it was time to back off. There wasn’t much point to upsetting her again. There was even less point to getting upset myself, and I was going to if we pursued this. Tired as I was, my patience wasn’t what it could have been.

“Let’s take another tack,” I said. “Let’s look for ways to prevent this from repeating itself in the future.”

Ladbrooke nodded.

“What precisely made this happen, in your opinion?”

For several moments Ladbrooke was silent. Hands pressed against her lips, she stared thoughtfully ahead.

“The extra day,” she said finally. “Friday. Being home from work on Friday.”

“Why?”

“Tom’s kids came over.”

“But Tom’s kids come over almost every weekend. You don’t drink then. What made this time different from all the other weekends when you do just fine?”

Ladbrooke looked into her lap. “You want me to be really honest?”

“Yes, of course I do.”

“Well, I don’t do just fine most weekends. To be honest,” she said very softly.

“Ah.”

“I do okay sometimes. It’s just that if I’m going to slip, it’s going to be then.”

“I see. I hadn’t realized that. I mean, I hadn’t realized you’d been drinking any since that last time in January.”

“Just the weekends, Torey. Just maybe—what?—three times? That’s not much. Not if you count how many days there are in between. And I haven’t really gotten smashed, except for this time. I’ve kept it pretty much under control.”

“That’s not stopping though, is it?” I rubbed my hands over my eyes and exhaled a long breath. “What do I have to do to get through to you, Ladbrooke? You have to
stop
. You have to
want
to stop.”

“I do want to stop. But I
can’t
.”

Silence. Her expression was despondent. The silence persisted several minutes.

“I try,” she said very softly. “You know what? I’ve got this little routine worked out to get me from Friday night to Monday morning. Just stupid things. Like, for instance, usually I get up and have a shower, but on Sundays I have a bath instead. I get up in the morning and have this bath and—you know—do things like shave my legs. I’m thinking about Monday and I do this really thorough sprucing-up job on Sunday morning so that—this sounds stupid now that I’m saying it aloud—so that I look nice … feel good.” She laughed self-consciously. “I mean, I’m sure the last thing in the world you’re going to check is whether or not my legs are shaved. But when Sunday comes around, it’s crucial to me to do it. And quite often, it’s enough to keep me sober Saturday night, because I want to be clearheaded enough to shave my legs the next morning. I feel better if I do it. It makes the weekdays seem a little more within reach, if you know what I mean.”

She sighed and braced her head with one hand. “It was getting that bug that did it. I can usually manage two days on my own. But I’ve got to admit, I don’t seem to be able to manage more than that.” She shook her head. “It was the same at Christmas. I just couldn’t cope with all those days and nowhere to go and nothing to do.”

“Ladbrooke, why on earth didn’t you tell me this before?”

She shrugged.

“We could have arranged to get together. We could have come up with something. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was embarrassed to. I mean, it’s not your mess. Why should you be responsible for me all the time?”

“You’re not going to be able to go it alone, Lad. No matter how much you might want to.”

She shook her head glumly. “I don’t want to. That’s the whole thing. I’m sick of going it alone. I’ve done nothing but make a mess, going it alone. But I’m not quite sure what else to do.”

“Would it help if we got together on the weekends for a while? Not for anything big. Just a chat. An hour or so, maybe, on Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning. Would that help?”

“I feel incompetent. I feel like a baby, needing a babysitter.”

“But would it help? Would it make you less likely to drink then.”

Slowly, she nodded. “Yes, I suppose it would.”

“And if anything unusual crops up, like illness or holidays or whatever, we’ll make special arrangements. But the important thing is that we stop you from taking that next drink. Yes? Do you agree?”

She nodded.

“What’s the matter?”

She shrugged. “I feel bad, making you do this.”

“You’re not making me do this. I’m offering to do it, okay? It won’t be forever. Just until you get over the hard part.”

“I still feel bad.”

“Look, you’ve been a lot of help to me in the classroom. Shoe’s just on the other foot, that’s all. Don’t worry about it. I’m not going to.”

She nodded. “Okay.”

The water had begun to boil on the stove, so I got up to put the spaghetti in. Ladbrooke, too, rose from the table. She stretched, then came over to throw away a wad of tissue in the garbage. Afterward she left to use the bathroom. I paused then, resting my hands on the sink and looking out into the darkness beyond the window. Through the condensation forming on the pane, I could see snow falling. The sudden solitude was soothing.

Turning away from the window, I went to take things from the refrigerator to make a salad. When Lad returned, I was tearing lettuce into a bowl. Putting her hands under her hair, she lifted it up off her neck and held it there a moment. She was standing quite close to me, and I could feel the whoosh of air as she let her hair fall.

“You want me to do that?” she asked.

“If you feel like it. Here. You can slice these.” I pushed a handful of mushrooms in her direction.

Ladbrooke reached across me for the cutting board and knife.

“You know, of course,” I said, “that I have no expertise in the area of alcohol abuse.”

“Yeah,” she replied, her tone unconcerned.

“It’s a whole specialty of its own. And it makes me think that maybe you’d be better off if you had a proper professional involved.”

“I thought you just said
you
were going to help me.”

“I did. But I’m not sure I can do enough. No joking, this isn’t going to be easy, Ladbrooke. And I’m simply thinking that you may need someone more experienced than I am.”

She gathered up the sliced mushrooms and pitched them into the salad bowl. “I don’t want anyone else’s help.”

“Yes, I know,” I said.

“Pretend I’m just one of the kids.”

“The thing is, Lad, you’re not one of the kids. You’re an adult and you’ve got adult problems. Cripes, you’re older than me.”

“By what? Two years? Three years? What’s three years, anyway?”

“That’s not the point.”

“That
is
the point, Torey. It’s the whole point. If I were one of the children, you wouldn’t be saying all this. You’d just get in there and keep trying. What’s this garbage about adult problems? Problems are problems. And since when did you have a degree in anybody’s problems? You haven’t a degree in Dirkie’s kooky obsessions, have you? Or in kids whose parents get murdered in Northern Ireland. But you keep trying just the same. I think that’s all that matters. That’s all I want, Torey. It’s enough for me.”

I let out a long breath. “I just don’t want to do wrong by you, kiddo. I want things to get better for you. And I need some evidence that I’m doing the right thing here.”

“Okay. So, I won’t drink anymore. I promise. Will that make you happier?”

“
You
. You, Ladbrooke,
you
. Not whether or not it’ll make me happier. You. You’ve got to be doing this for you, or it’s never going to work.”

She gave a small, slight gesture with her shoulders. “Okay, okay. So, I just won’t drink again. All right?”

“And what if you do?”

“I
won’t
.”

The timer for the spaghetti went off. Grabbing a colander, I took the pot off the stove and drained it. I remained at the sink, regarding the steaming pasta.

“Okay, look, let’s try it this way,” I said. “Let’s have a compromise, all right? You and I’ll try this with just us, like we’ve been doing. We’ll have a good, serious stab at it. But it’s the very, very last time I try on my own. Because I just wouldn’t be comfortable with more than that. It’s the
last
time. If you slip again, Lad, you go to AA. Or a specialized therapist or whatever. But you go to someone else. All right?”

No response.

“Okay? I mean, I’ll support you. We’ll still keep trying too, even if you slip. I’m not saying I’m going to walk out on you. I have no intention of that. But if you slip again, you go to AA as well. Deal?”

Ladbrooke frowned and looked down at her fingernails.

“Deal, Lad?” I asked again.

“Okay,” she muttered. “Deal.”

I
f someone had given me a magic wand that could grant the chance to work full-time with only one child, the child I would have chosen that year would’ve been Leslie Considyne. I loved all the rest of the children, but she, ultimately, was the most rewarding in terms of sheer progress. Of all of them, Leslie had the most potential for change.

The extent of Leslie’s disturbance became fairly evident as I continued to work with her during our daily half-hour sessions. She fell into that rough category of children that was popularly called “autistic,” although by the stricter definitions of that disorder, she didn’t quite fit. She had some classically autistic behaviors. Most evident was her peculiar way of relating to people. While she did relate in her own inimitable way, and more successfully than I’d seen a lot of autistic children do, she still seemed unable to distinguish us as separate from the nonliving world. We were objects of Leslie’s environment, like chairs or can openers, and just as they had to be acted on to get them to provide their services, so did we. She had amazingly refined methods for extracting from people the behaviors she wanted in order to carry on her life as she saw fit, but they were coldly performed. People appeared to be just a rather trickier class of object to Leslie, one requiring a bit more sophistication to master.

Another typically autistic behavior was Leslie’s echolalia. This behavior became much more pronounced as her speech developed. Encouraged to talk, she now did so with increasing frequency, but about 85 percent of it was nothing but immediate echoing. “What’s your name?” I’d ask. “What’s your name?” she’d reply.

Also in autistic fashion, Leslie could self-stimulate for ages if she came across the right circumstances. Balls were her favorite. Rolling one up a slightly inclined surface to watch it roll down again could occupy Leslie for literal hours. Or simply rolling a ball around under the palm of her hand. She’d quite happily spend a morning doing that.

On the other hand, Leslie had some sharp differences from traditionally defined autistic children. She didn’t have the typical aversion to being touched or cuddled. She didn’t lack eye contact. She didn’t greatly mind disruptions to her environment. And in spite of her disturbed interpersonal relationships, she
did
relate. While it was impossible to know if she did in some way perceive us as other individuals, similar to herself, or just extremely useful objects whose services she particularly enjoyed, she did make it obvious that she knew we were there and that she wanted us there. She showed clear preferences for different people and, in her own way, formed stable relationships.

Whatever the precise etiology, I had little doubt that the majority of Leslie’s problems were physiological rather than psychological. In fact, Leslie didn’t appear to have any problems I could label as emotional disturbances. She did have some pretty peculiar emotional behaviors, but within the disturbed circumstances of her family life, they were all amazingly adaptive and made good sense. There was little doubt that the Considyne family itself was seriously troubled, but Leslie, within the confines of her handicap, seemed to have a surprising degree of emotional health.

It did become apparent to me, however, that a lot of previous time had been wasted. If Leslie’s handicap had been identified when she was a toddler and she’d been given an intensive treatment program, I suspected she could have been functioning at a much more normal level by nearly eight. She was an obviously intelligent child, and several aspects of her learning capacity seemed untroubled by her other difficulties. She quickly learned the alphabet and numbers, followed soon by the processes of addition and subtraction. With enough help, I knew she’d be able to read.

Meaningful speech, however, was a long way off. In teaching Leslie things like the alphabet, I was able to encourage a form of meaningful speech. For some reason, she seemed more able to identify abstract symbols by their names than pictures of concrete objects or even the objects themselves. In the same way, she could readily tell me that five was the sum of two and three, but if I asked her another child’s name or even her own, she usually couldn’t answer. To encourage speech, I tried to make hers as verbal an environment as possible, but while Leslie began to freely use words and phrases, there was still little genuine, communication with her.

As Leslie became more responsive in the classroom, I decided to tackle the issue of toilet training. The other children were very aware of Leslie’s diapers and although no one ever said as much, I felt this was a major contributing factor to the others’ continuing treatment of Leslie as if she were a young, helpless child. And of course, Leslie’s incontinence was a major contributor to tensions at home. For her to progress more rapidly toward normalcy, I felt she had to acquire this socially necessary behavior.

Unexpectedly, Lad didn’t greet this announcement from me with much enthusiasm. Tom had never allowed Leslie to wear diapers at home since she was a toddler under the belief that they were “humiliating” to her. Not only had this left Ladbrooke with a five-year-long clean-up job, but it had also shifted responsibility for the toileting act from Leslie to her mother. If there was an accident, Tom got angry with Ladbrooke. Only while discussing my plans for toilet training did Lad admit the intense relief she had felt being in the classroom, because I’d insisted on diapers. The thought of losing this small bit of peace with her daughter troubled Ladbrooke. Consequently, I had taken the occasion of Lad’s being ill with the stomach virus and then absent on her binge to start Leslie off. It was a rotten time to do it, as we were still in the thrall of the tummy bug ourselves and I was in and out of the toilets with some of the other children more often than I would have cared to be. And of course, as the following week dawned, I was up to my eyeballs in Ladbrooke’s problems, which, added to Leslie’s, made me feel as if there were no one else in the world but the Considyne/Taylor dynasty. I was also handicapped by Leslie’s diabetes, as it limited my usual technique of stuffing the kid full of drinks and salty foods to require more drinks so that there were a lot of opportunities to visit the pot.

But we managed. I got Geraldine and Mariana to demonstrate for Leslie what it was all about. We spent several fun hours in the toilet stalls, flushing, pulling off toilet paper, inspecting the toilet lid and flipping it up and down. I backed up any type of success with copious amounts of Jerusalem artichoke.

It was an advantage, I think, having five days with Ladbrooke absent in which to tackle the problem, partly because it was a rather puddly experience the first few days, as Ladbrooke had feared it would be, and partly because Lad’s presence might well have reminded Leslie too much of home and what she did there. As it was, Leslie became reliably dry in only a handful of toilet-obsessed days. She still needed to be taken to the toilet, because if I waited for her to indicate a need, she was inevitably too late. But that, I figured, would improve, and otherwise, we were all cheered by her progress.

This success in the classroom, unfortunately, did not transfer. Ladbrooke, still recovering from her own problems and quite unsettled through the rest of February, found the whole thing too much to cope with; she was in no shape to implement my approach at home. Moreover, she took my speed success in her absence as a personal affront. Leslie and I had ganged up on her to prove her incompetence as a mother. Then Tom got into it. What was going on? What was I doing to upset Ladbrooke so much? What was happening to Leslie? We had another one of those irritating conferences where Ladbrooke ended up in tears in the girls’ rest room, while Tom and I argued. Thoroughly fed up with the lot of them, I tossed up my hands in despair. And Leslie, little fox that she was, loved every minute of it.

Ideally, I would have put Leslie into diapers at home too, because that would have disarmed her. Unable to annoy and divide her parents, I think she would have conformed fairly quickly. But as things were, I didn’t even bother to suggest it. Leslie’s toilet behavior was such an integral part of the Considyne family dynamics that I realized I could have little impact. So I withdrew from the situation. Satisfied that Leslie was dry in the classroom, I made no further efforts to see things change at home.

March came at last, with a slow, welcome thaw. I’d grown decidedly tired of winter by that time, and while this March was unlike Wales, with its hillsides of snowdrops and daffodils, I was willing to accept the gray, gritty snow’s turning to slush as a sign of spring.

There were other changes too. The relationship between Shemona and Geraldine was breaking down in the same slow, deteriorating fashion as the melting snow. Geraldine had remained static for several weeks. She fluctuated back and forth between her usual clingy, babyish behavior and arrogant imperiousness, wherein she ordered everyone around and demanded the best place, the best piece, the best treatment. Her petty antisocial behavior continued unabated, as did the spiteful episodes of vengeance. Slowly, these began to extend to Shemona, as well as the others. More and more, she and Shemona fought.

In the beginning, I hadn’t thought much about the fighting. Most of it was very much of a sibling nature. Moreover, Geraldine was going through a pugnacious phase with everyone and was in almost daily knockdowns with Dirkie and Mariana, so I didn’t think much about the old fracas with Shemona. But as time went by, I realized there was more to their fighting. Shemona, I noticed, was increasingly the provoker. She tended to choose safe locations and safe times, but she openly defied Geraldine. A seat wouldn’t be saved for her older sister. A paper wouldn’t be shown to her. A treat wouldn’t be shared with her. Carefully, Shemona managed to extend the same stony unresponsiveness to Geraldine that she had always displayed with the rest of us. In most children I would have taken this as a step backward, but in Shemona, I reckoned this act of slowly shutting out Geraldine was progress. And it infuriated Geraldine, who, if not watched, was regularly giving Shemona a clop around the chops.

The major reason I did not consider Shemona’s increased withdrawal in the classroom as regressive was that she had begun to show definite signs of a strong, stable relationship with Ladbrooke during their time together each day. Shemona, still continually dour and silent with the rest of us, would smile and laugh and play with Ladbrooke.

Once Ladbrooke had become comfortable with the format of the sessions, I’d turned the whole works over to her, allowing her free rein to structure the period as she saw fit. This seemed the only sensible way to assure a natural, free-flowing relationship between them, which was what I was aiming for. Although the two of us discussed what was going on, and particularly the results Lad was getting, I tried not to influence Ladbrooke’s natural inclinations. She was reliable enough and I was always near enough to insure there would not be any serious problems. Because I stayed out of the planning, their program took on an atmosphere very different from what it probably would have done if I’d been involved. Ladbrooke had gotten started some weeks earlier using the dressing-up box with Shemona. From there, she’d gone on to regularly styling Shemona’s hair and putting makeup on her face. The whole period, day after day, revolved around this. Shemona, wrapped up in feather boas and an oversized black dress, netted hat on her head, fifties-style black patent leather high heels on her feet, would parade back and forth in the gloom of the long, narrow blackboard arm of the room. Loosened up by the privacy and, I suspect, my absence, Ladbrooke responded very uninhibitedly to Shemona, popping silly hats and clothes on herself and letting Shemona play with her long hair. In complete contrast to her normal laconic style, Ladbrooke now carried on nonstop monologues with Shemona, as she helped the child dress or did her hair or face for her. “Ooooh, look at you, Gorgeous. You’re a fancy woman now. See? You’re fit to walk down Fifth Avenue. Could go shopping in Saks, looking like that. Here, put this on. Aren’t you something? Look at yourself in the mirror. Oh, wait a minute. Let me fasten that bit of hair up like this. Oh, that’s better, isn’t it?
Look
at you!”

It was very easy to listen to them. They were only a matter of feet away from the rest of us, as we sat just around the corner at the table, and Ladbrooke, in her enthusiasm, could forget herself and talk quite loudly. This tended to catch our attention if the activities at hand weren’t too interesting—that, and the incessant click-click of Shemona’s high heels as she teetered back and forth across the linoleum floor. I certainly had my occasional doubts about what they were doing. The beauty routine, the dressing up, the hair styling, were all light-years away from what my own approach would have been, if I’d been working with Shemona. I doubt I ever would have thought of doing such a thing with her. The other children sometimes verbalized what I was thinking: This is school. How come Shemona gets to play for half an hour every day? But I restrained myself from interfering.

To me, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of these sessions was Ladbrooke and Shemona’s choice of a medium that required a maximum amount of physical contact between them. Neither of them could tolerate the ordinary touching that went on in the classroom, yet both ritualized it into their daily routine and approached it with glee. Shemona would shriek with delight when Ladbrooke smeared makeup on her cheeks or brushed her hair or wrapped scarves around her.

During the course of one of the sessions, Ladbrooke produced a mail-order catalogue. She had brought it in earlier and shown it to me. It was an outdated Christmas toy catalogue from one of the large chain stores and had a huge section of ready-made costumes for children. Ladbrooke had thought this might be of interest to Shemona, and now they were together in their arm of the room, where I could hear them leafing through it, the thin pages being turned rapidly, one after another. Ladbrooke was carrying on her usual patter, enthusing over things in the doll section. Then they reached the costumes.