Just Another Kid (25 page)

“Oh, look,” Lad said. “Look at this one. That would be super, wouldn’t it? It looks like a nurse’s uniform. We could have ourselves some fun with that one, couldn’t we? I could be the patient. Lie down right there. And you could be the nurse and put Band-Aids on me.” There was a pause, and I assumed Shemona was indicating something. “And look at this one. And
this
one. Isn’t this grand. Look, it’s long. And the girl’s got high heels on, just like yours in the dressing-up box. What do you think this is meant to be? A ball gown? I think so.”

Another, longer pause followed. “I’ve worn a dress like this,” Ladbrooke said. “It was long. And it was done up so. And you know what color it was?”

“Gold?” replied Shemona.

Sudden silence.

I had been working with Dirkie at the table and had been half listening to Ladbrooke’s constant monologue, so I heard Shemona’s voice. Dirkie did as well. He turned his head toward the corner of the shelving. I paused, listening hard.

Much to her credit, Ladbrooke did not overreact. After all these months of waiting, it would have been understandable if she had. But there was a long, long pause, and then I heard Ladbrooke say, “Well, no, actually it was blue. But it was very pretty nonetheless.” The tentative note in her voice gave away her surprise, but she continued on with the catalogue. “Oh, look, Shemona.
Here’s
a beauty. It looks like a pink ball gown.”

“It’s a fairy dress,” Shemona said, her clear Irish accent rolling out the r’s.

Because we, on the other side of the shelves, had all been doing quiet work, everyone sitting with me was now listening to Ladbrooke and Shemona. Such a small leprechaun voice, yet we all heard.

Mariana looked over and smiled. “Torey,” she said in a hushed voice, “do you hear that? Shemona’s talking!”

I nodded and put a finger to my lips to keep her and the other children quiet. I didn’t want to break the magic spell that Ladbrooke was weaving beyond the steel shelving.

Glancing down the table to where Geraldine was bent over her work, I noticed she alone had gone back to what she was writing.

“Hey, Geraldine,” Mariana whispered, “do you hear that, Ladbrooke’s made Shemona talk. Do you hear?”

Geraldine shrugged and returned to her spelling workbook. “So? So what?”

And Shemona
was
talking. Unlike the two previous occasions when she had spoken to me, this time it was genuine. For several days afterward, she confined her talking to the sessions with Ladbrooke, but during those periods, she grew bolder and bolder. She not only talked with Ladbrooke, she teased and bantered and made silly noises. I was astonished, listening to her. It was as if there were an entirely different child from the silent, scruffy little thing I encountered away from the safety behind the metal shelves.

Then slowly Shemona began to talk to the rest of us. She seemed to realize that we’d been listening all along and, after a point, no longer felt the need to secrete herself away before speaking. First she spoke with Mariana, who had plagued her mercilessly to talk to her ever since Mariana had heard her speak that first day. Then Shemona began talking to the other children, particularly when they were out on the playground. Last of all, she spoke to me.

With the rest of us, however, Shemona was still constrained. She seldom spoke unless spoken to. I never saw her laugh or tease the way she did with Ladbrooke. If I hadn’t overheard her, I doubt I would have ever believed this other side of her existed. But I was unconcerned by this difference between her behavior with Ladbrooke and her behavior with others. The important thing was that Shemona was finally talking.

Perhaps almost as important was the effect that Shemona’s decision to talk had on Ladbrooke’s morale, coming as it did at such a low point in Lad’s life. I don’t suppose there was anything I could have done which would have had the same uplifting effect that this small Irish girl’s words had. Despite throwing herself into the classroom activities, Ladbrooke had continued to feel like a fish out of water with us. She loved us, I had no doubt about that, and she loved the work. But the fact remained that she was not a teacher, not a psychologist, not even a trained aide like Joyce, and no amount of effort to focus her attention on the very real help she provided me had ameliorated her feelings of inadequacy. But Shemona had managed what I hadn’t: She’d made Ladbrooke feel competent. After the session in which Shemona first talked, Ladbrooke had remained sitting at the small student desk with the mail-order catalogue. When I’d gone around to her, she’d looked up, a bemused expression on her face.

“What do you know,” she said in amazement. “I can do this.”

L
adbrooke was having a brutal winter, despite the supportive environment of the classroom and her genuine efforts to keep herself together. Although Shemona’s new-found speech gave a much needed boost to Lad’s self-confidence, she still careened from one crisis to another, virtually nonstop. I was sadly concluding that this was not an unusual state of affairs. The more I was with her, the more I suspected that this was simply the way Ladbrooke’s life was. The miracle to me was that she had managed to survive thirty-three years of it.

The vast majority of her problems lay on the domestic scene. Tom and Ladbrooke had a relationship that made me shudder. As I grew to know the two of them better, I lost all my admiration for Tom’s persistent desire to keep the marriage together, because it was an evil thing that preyed on them both. Rather than patching it up, they ought to have been attempting to drive a silver stake through its heart.

Tom’s interest in maintaining the relationship was complex, and I never had a chance to understand it well, but the peculiar kind of indulgent contempt with which he always treated Ladbrooke was hard to miss. He had no perceivable respect for her as an individual and he was disdainful of her instability; yet at the same time, he martyred himself putting up with all her outrageous behavior. My gut feeling was that, as with Leslie, he loved the idea of Ladbrooke and her leonine beauty rather more than he did Ladbrooke herself. Reality never seemed to fit very well into Tom’s life. Ladbrooke, on the other hand, had more straightforward reasons for continuing the marriage. It was the closest she had come to a loving relationship. With so few emotional resources, she didn’t dare give it up.

From her February binge onward, Ladbrooke and I met late every Sunday morning. It was easiest to have her come over to my apartment. The quiet privacy allowed us the opportunity to talk, and my not having to go out to meet her made the disruption to my own weekend a little less. The first couple of times, I made an effort as a hostess, but it was a setup that was unnatural to us both. We were accustomed to working together and not much more, so in the end, I just kept on with whatever it was I was doing, and Ladbrooke simply joined me at it for an hour or two. As a consequence, she enjoyed such delectable Sunday entertainments as cleaning the oven and shampooing the carpet. We joked about its being occupational therapy. Truth be known, it probably was.

Whatever it was, it worked. Ladbrooke stayed alcohol free. Day by day and then week by week, she managed to wend her way through her assorted difficulties without resorting to a drink. As I grew closer to her, I realized that Ladbrooke had been fairly astute when she’d told me that what she needed most was someone to hold her world together for her when she was no longer able to. For the most part, she seemed to have the intelligence, the insight and the desire necessary for change, but she was like one of those rapidly spinning stars in far outer space, which, with no stable core, eventually spin so fast that they fly apart.

Over the course of the three or four months that Ladbrooke had been with me, I was slowly coming to terms with what I concluded to be Lad’s most serious problem: her inability to express herself verbally. While things like her alcoholism and her wretched relationship with Tom were much more noticeable, I began to see them as extensions of her difficulty with talking. Indeed, almost all her other problems could be traced back directly or indirectly to this one area.

In the early days I had assumed the problem was one of shyness. Why else would an intelligent, well-educated adult be so inarticulate? And the symptoms fit that sort of pattern. She avoided people in order to avoid talking to them, and she became tense in even very minor social situations. But as time passed and I grew more familiar with her, I saw that while the symptoms fit, Ladbrooke herself really didn’t. She didn’t have that withdrawn, acutely self-conscious type of personality associated with shyness. Indeed, on occasion she could be considerably more uninhibited than I was, and I wasn’t known for my retiring nature. Moreover, Ladbrooke did not perceive herself as shy. And shyness, to my way of thinking was not something likely to be present unbeknownst to its victim.

This left me puzzled for a very long time. Then, slowly, patterns in her behavior grew more apparent. I’d known all along that tension gave her a massive amount of trouble. The more anxious or stressed she was, the less likely she would be to speak well. And if she did manage to speak at all past her habitual yes, no or I don’t know, she would often make a hash of it, saying silly things or things she didn’t really mean or didn’t want to say or even, occasionally, that made no sense at all. Because she became anxious so quickly in any kind of social situation, even those as mundane as the gatherings in the teachers’ lounge, this had been a very easy behavior for me to observe. However, as time went by, I started noticing other, less obvious occasions when Ladbrooke also was not very articulate. Odd things, like background noise, soft music or other people chattering, could give her trouble. Being rushed affected her, even if it was innocent and she was feeling friendly and secure in the situation. Being very tired was yet another cause. I grew able to recognize the nights Leslie had been up frequently by Ladbrooke’s confused speech the following morning.

These patterns would have been more obvious to me, I think, if it were not for the few converse situations when Ladbrooke could be surprisingly eloquent, such as the occasion when she’d told me about her childhood Christmas. Because such situations didn’t occur often, I had to spend a great deal of time with her before I realized that they, too, tended to happen only in set circumstances: we were alone, the immediate environment was totally quiet, the emotional setting, if not relaxed, was always secure, and lastly, they were always monologues. Ladbrooke never showed the same kind of eloquence in conversation.

Mulling over these patterns, I eventually concluded that Ladbrooke’s inarticulateness was not so much the result of an emotional problem as a type of aphasia, a dysfunction of whatever part of the brain it was that controlled expressive speech. From that point of view, a huge amount of her behavior suddenly made sense, and it became easier to understand what was happening to her the rest of the time. For some while, I’d been aware that in many social situations she was having paralyzing anxiety attacks. Now the cycle became clearer. Tense, she became less articulate. Frightened at finding herself unable to say what she wanted, she panicked. The panic destroyed whatever bit of expression she was still capable of. Ladbrooke had found only two ways of coping. Either she avoided people altogether and discouraged further social encounters with her hostile, aloof behavior, or she drank. When drinking, she relaxed. Even if she didn’t make much sense, when Ladbrooke had had enough alcohol, she could talk. Or at least not care if she couldn’t.

This theory also lent insight into her difficult relations at home. Brilliant in his own right and rapier tongued, Tom was a formidable individual in conversation. I knew this from my own experience with him, because he regularly outmaneuvered me, twisting and turning my words, switching subjects, doubling back and often simply bludgeoning me with sheer persistence until I found myself agreeing with him, whether I meant to or not. Such elaborate verbal gymnastics were wasted on Ladbrooke. She was defeated before she started, reduced to fuming silence or noisy bursts of temper that communicated nothing.

Theirs was a vastly unequal relationship, the inequality perhaps being the most salient aspect to outsiders. First impressions were of Tom as a domineering father to Lad’s sulky, sullen child. However, I came to feel that the inequality was much deeper than that. Ladbrooke wasn’t simply being obstinate or petty. It wasn’t because she wouldn’t talk to Tom as an equal, but rather that she couldn’t. Tom’s reference on that one occasion to Ladbrooke’s being a lioness trapped in human form was a chillingly apt description. Their situation wasn’t a matter of maturity vs. immaturity or dominance vs. submission. They were of two different species entirely. Tom’s role was one of zookeeper, an indulgent master of something he desired but could not control, while Ladbrooke paced restlessly back and forth within the confines of the marriage, trapped and voiceless.

The rain had been bucketing down all day. The children had had to stay in over the lunch hour, and so everyone was rowdy and unsettled when class resumed in the afternoon. Mariana, in particular, was having a bad day. She hadn’t finished any of her morning work. She’d gotten into fisticuffs with Geraldine at lunch and later with Shemona in the girls’ rest room. She’d encouraged Dirkie into frantic masturbation under the table. And she’d larked about, annoying me the whole day long. I had had her in and out of the quiet chair several times during the morning, and she was in it again after lunch, sitting on the wooden chair, rocking it back and forth to make an irritating creaking noise. The timer I’d set to the number of minutes she needed to stay in the chair went off with a resounding ring, and Mariana got up.

I was working with Shemona and looked up momentarily from what we were doing. “Okay, Mariana. Your work’s right there on the table. Please get started immediately. There isn’t much time before recess.” I went back to Shemona.

Mariana returned to her place at the table. She opened her folder and, still standing, leaned over her chair and studied the worksheets. Taking her pencil, she went to sharpen it. Then she returned, seated herself and looked over the worksheets again. She glanced to Geraldine, two chairs away, who was listening to a tape through headphones. Mariana made a face. When Geraldine didn’t notice, Mariana leaned over, touched Geraldine’s elbow and made the face again.

“Mariana,” I said, “please get busy.”

Mariana looked down at the worksheet she had taken from the folder. She picked up her pencil and began to write but almost immediately put the pencil down again. She got up, went to her cubby, got out her pencil box and came back to her place. Sitting down again, she opened the box and rooted through it. Out came a big green eraser. She started to erase with it but then picked it up and examined it. With one fingernail, she scraped along the edge of the eraser. She rubbed the eraser under her nose, then stopped, smelled it, smiled, smelled the eraser again. Then she began to rub the eraser back and forth on the Formica tabletop.

“Mariana,” I said. “Get to work.”

Mariana stared at her paper. She twiddled her pencil. She drew little wavy lines down the side of the worksheet. Lifting the pencil up, she examined the point again. Then she started cleaning her fingernails with it.

Annoyed with Mariana’s fooling around, I excused myself from Shemona and her work and went over to sit next to Mariana. “What is your problem today?” I asked.

“I don’t understand this.”

“It’s exactly the same kind of sheet you’ve been doing all week. Here, let’s read the directions and go over them so that you do understand.”

Mariana haltingly read through the directions.

“So what do they mean?” I asked.

“That I read these words on this side and then these on this side and draw a line between the ones that go together.”

“That’s right. So what don’t you understand?”

She shrugged.

“Then please get busy.” I stood up and walked around to see what the others were doing. When I next looked, Mariana was spinning her pencil around and around on the tabletop.

Completely fed up, I grabbed a nearby yardstick and without warning brought it cracking down on the table about six inches from the spinning pencil. Mariana squawked in surprise.

“
Work!
” I said. And she did.

Only moments later, the bell sounded for recess.

It was Lad’s and my break, so after herding the children down to the playground, we returned to the teachers’ lounge.

“Don’t do that again, okay?” Ladbrooke said, as we were climbing the stairs.

“Don’t do what?”

“Hit the table like that, like you did in the room.”

I smiled. “I was just trying to get Mariana moving. She’s been a right royal pain all day long.”

“But don’t do it again.”

“I wasn’t going to hit her, Lad. But she’s been screwing around all day. The whole point of it was to scare the daylights out of her.”

“It’s not right,” Lad replied.

At that moment we reached the teachers’ lounge. Brightly lit in contrast to the gloomy corridor, it was also full of people. Bill and Frank and three of the people from speech therapy were in there, drinking pop and laughing uproariously. The conversation between Ladbrooke and me came to an end.

It wasn’t until after school when Lad and I were working together at the table that the subject reappeared. Ladbrooke paused at what she was doing and braced her chin with both hands. A few moments’ silence ensued as she watched me writing.

“I remember at school once,” she said quietly, “when I was six and in the first grade and we were doing reading workbooks. There were these spaces, and you had to write the words in. And I wasn’t doing it right.

“The teacher would walk up and down the aisles, watching us as we worked. She had this long pointer, a blackboard pointer, that she always carried with her, and she’d tap the wrought-iron bit of the desk if she thought you weren’t working the way you should be. I was terrified of her doing it to my desk. I wasn’t a kid to goof off much, but I was always scared that she might be thinking I was.”

Ladbrooke paused. “I was afraid of her. She was always displeased with me. You know how people get, how they sort of sigh with exasperation. She’d do that. She hated the fact I was left-handed. She was forever threatening to tie my left hand to the desk if I didn’t stop using it. And then I kept spelling my name wrong. Believe me, never, ever give a child a name with a ‘d’ and a ‘b’ right next to one another. Do you think I could remember which was which? I was a dunce at it. And the teacher’d get frantic. She made me stay after school and write pages and pages of my own name. And I was always so scared, because I never had any idea if I was doing it right or not. I just had to do it and pray it was the proper way around.”