A Safe Place for Joey

by Mary MacCracken

  “Is that all right with you, Alice?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she answered quietly.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  We scrunched around the big desk. I sat in the swivel chair they usually used when they worked at the desk, and they pulled up others.

  “Let’s start with the reading,” I said. “Tara, we’re on the first column of the last page of fifth-grade words. You go ahead and try the first ten. We’ll make our usual cards for the words you don’t know.”

  Tara read slowly, stumbling over “continue” and “astounded,” but figuring them out by herself. However, she could not get “opportunity.”

  “Can you help out, Alice?” I asked.

  “Opportunity,” Alice said, without hesitation.

  “Okay, Alice, your turn. You read the next ten.”

  Alice whizzed through the words with elegant elocution.

  Tara regarded Alice with new interest. “How’d you learn to do that?”

  Alice shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just always been easy for me.”

  “How come you come here if you can read so good?” Tara quizzed Alice.

  “I have trouble with math. At least I used to. I’m getting better.”

  “Me too. Isn’t it a relief?”

  Now Alice was the one who was interested. I kept quiet. Nothing is more fun than watching children learn from each other.

  I’d been paying out chips all along, and I paid again as we corrected math sheets.

  “Time’s almost up, but let’s do just a little writing. Grab a pad of paper, any size you want,” I said, pointing to various-sized pads of white and yellow paper on one corner of the big desk, “and hand me a yellow nine-by-twelve, so I can write, too. Good. Thanks. Now just write whatever you want about your favourite place. It can be indoors or out, maybe some place you go on vacation or maybe your own room. It can be anywhere, but just write what it is you like about it. Try to tell what it looks like – try to make me be able to see it. Okay? Now let’s go. We’ll take about five minutes.”

  I wrote about our country house. Tara wrote three sentences with many misspellings about the baseball field and how good she felt out there. Alice wrote three-quarters of a page of printed scratchy words about a place she’d made for herself in the attic where she could go to read and think. Each of us read out loud what we had written, and we were all smiling when we finished.

  As the girls were counting up their chips, Tara said to Alice, “Can I ask you something?”

  Alice froze and looked at Tara suspiciously. “Like what?” My own complacency vanished.

  “Well,” Tara said, “like how come you wear such weird clothes? I really thought that you were weird. But you’re not. You’re really nice. It’s just the clothes.”

  “My mother makes me,” Alice replied, head down, stacking and restacking her chips.

  I was holding my breath.

  “Well, that’s cuckoo,” Tara said. “Why don’t you tell her you need some new clothes like other kids wear?”

  Alice shook her head. “She doesn’t care. She doesn’t even listen.”

  “Well, I’ll tell her,” Tara said, her head up, her black eyes blazing. I could imagine her slamming a home run. Nothing on the baseball field or in the social world scared Tara.

  Alice and I were both staring at her.

  “Well, I will. She’s got no right making you look like an idiot.”

  But when Alice came for her next session she still wore the long green coat with a grey wool pinafore underneath.

  “What happened?” I asked, trying to hide my disappointment. “Did Tara talk to your mother?”

  Alice nodded.

  “Well, come on. What happened? What did your mother say?”

  “She told Tara to shut her fresh mouth.”

  I sighed. “I don’t know what we’re going to do. I’ve tried, you’ve tried, Tara’s tried.” I sighed again.

  “Well, it’s not all bad,” Alice said, smiling. “First of all, Tara’s my friend now, sort of. Mom won’t let her come over to the house, but Tara sticks up for me in school when the kids make fun of me. And we eat lunch together sometimes. I told her about the pill, and she understood how gross it was.”

  Gross? Alice was acquiring a new vocabulary.

  “And we do some of our homework together once in a while. Like, I tell her words she can’t figure out and she helps me with division.”

  “That’s nice, Alice. Really nice.”

  “Wait,” Alice said. “I’m not done. I discussed the clothes problem with Sigmund.” She looked at me closely to make sure I was with her. I nodded without speaking. “And Sigmund suggested that perhaps a compromise could be reached.”

  “There is no question of Sigmund’s brilliance,” I said.

  “So I proposed to Mom that maybe we could have my dresses and coats shortened. Maybe some of them even made into regular skirts. Sigmund said in that way Mom would still feel in control.”

  I wanted to hug Alice. Instead I nodded. “Insightful.”

  “And it worked,” Alice continued. “Everything but what I’ve got on is over at the dressmaker’s getting fixed.”

  “That’s terrific, Alice –”

  “And you know what else,” Alice interrupted, “arithmetic isn’t really all that hard.”

  I kept quiet, loving it, watching it happen.

  One of the pleasures of working with children with learning disabilities is that they can learn so much more easily than they think they can.

  “Do you realize,” Alice said proudly, “that there are one hundred addition facts and one hundred subtraction facts, and that I now know more than three-fourths of both?”

  I smiled at Alice. “How did you manage to do that?” Alice made me feel like smiling a lot these days.

  “Well, Mr. Renner said the way to do it was to learn the easy ones first,” Alice continued, “like the zeros, the doubles, the ten sums, the count ons, the nine pattern. That nine pattern is so neat; anytime you’re adding nine to something, the number in the ones place is one less and you put that one in front of it. I don’t even have to think about it. Ask me one.”

  “Nine plus seven,” I said.

  “Sixteen,” Alice said immediately. “See. It’s automatic. Oh-h,” she sighed, “it’s so nice when you can count on something.”

  Alice continued nonstop. “The rest of the facts are harder, but Mr. Renner said we’ll just learn a few at a time. What we’re going to do is print them on these Language Master cards; then I run the card through the machine and record it. I will say six plus eight is … whatever it is … one side will have the answer. Mr. Renner says I will remember it better that way because my auditory memory is better than my visual memory. Isn’t that interesting?”

  “Very.” Alice was obviously thriving under Jack Renner’s tutelage, and he was evidently a terrific teacher. Or maybe I just meant that he agreed with me; start at the point where the child actually is, teach to the strengths, respect the child’s intelligence, break learning into manageable components, and build from there.

  “And he says times is going to be just as easy. Do you think that’s true?”

  “I know it is. Maybe easier. There are one hundred basic multiplication facts, too, and I bet you already know some of those without even studying.”

  “No, I would doubt that,” Alice said.

  “Do you know the zeros?” I asked. “They’re different than in addition. In addition you’re putting together. Three plus zero means three plus nothing more, so the answer remains three.”

  “Yes, I understand that,” Alice said.

  “In multiplication you’re working with groups. The first number just tells you how many groups. Three times zero means three groups of nothing.” I went over to the prize basket and took out a plastic bag of sugarless lollipops.

  “Okay, reach in and take nothing. Good. How much have you got?”

  Alice giggled. “Nothing, of
course.”

  “All right. Reach again and take nothing. That’s two. One more time. That’s three. How much do you have now?”

  Alice simply made a face at me.

  “Suppose you reached in eight times?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s right. So remember in multiplication that the answer to anything that has a zero in it is zero.” I wrote 9 x 0 = on the pad of paper and put it in front of Alice, and she quickly wrote 0.

  “The ones are just as easy. What do you think three times one is?”

  Alice reached for the lollipop bag. “I’ll reach in three times and take one each time. Last time I took nothing; this time I’ll take one.”

  Zap! I held onto my chair. I know it sounds a little crazy to get excited about three times one, but that’s what happens to me.

  “Three,” Alice announced. “Three times one has to be three. And four times one has to be four. Oh, I get it. Whenever there’s a one, the answer is the other number. Like one hundred and twelve times one would be one hundred and twelve.”

  “That’s right. And you already know the twos.”

  Alice reached for the lollipop bag again.

  “You can use that if you want,” I said, “but remember your doubles in addition. The twos in multiplication are exactly the same. Two times three means there are two threes. How much are two threes? Three and three?”

  “Six. I know all those doubles. Remember four plus four is the spider fact – four legs on each side. Eight altogether. Yuk.”

  “Yeah. Yuk. But if two fours are eight, how much is two times four?”

  “Two times four is also eight,” Alice said without hesitation.

  “Okay. This is the two-hundred-dollar question. Last one for today.” I wrote 2 x 8 = on the pad, and Alice, without a second’s hesitation, filled in the answer – 16.

  “Pay yourself two hundred, Alice. And a bonus of one hundred for concentration. That was terrific. Mr. Renner will show you how it’s the same with the fives; there’s a trick or two for the nines; and then, believe it or not, there are only fifteen other multiplication facts to learn, and you can do those on the Language Master. Or put them on index cards and tape them to your refrigerator door. Don’t let yourself open the door until you know the answer.”

  My weekly phone calls to Mrs. Robinson, Jack Renner, and Alice’s mother were all positive. In the past month Alice had been getting C’s on math classroom tests, and Jack reported with pleasure her increasing knowledge of math concepts and computation. Mrs. Martin said the best thing that had happened at home was that she had decided to plant a garden in the backyard, and on her own Alice had asked if she could help. Next thing she knew, Tara was out there working with them – and she had to admit that Tara really was a spunky little thing and a hard worker.

  Now Alice stopped just inside the door, and before she took off her moccasins she handed me a folded piece of paper. She wore a yellow turtleneck, her grey skirt ended in the vicinity of her knees, and there was an inch or two of bare skin showing between her skirt and knee socks. Not high style at Bryant Elementary, but not weird, either.

  “Here’s a poem,” she said, holding out a piece of paper. “It’s not very good, but … I guess I wanted to give you something, and you know how unbelievably bad my drawings are. Anyway, don’t read it now, okay?”

  “Okay,” I agreed, “but thank you.”

  I tucked the folded piece of paper in the back pocket of my jeans and patted it. “I’ll save it till tonight when I’m through,” I said, struggling to keep the catch out of my voice. Presents from children always move me. But when it’s something they’ve made themselves, it’s as if they’re giving me a little piece of themselves – saying, “Here, I trust you to take care of this piece of me” and “I have enough of me now so that I can share some of it.”

  But Alice’s mind was on practical matters. She was already at the desk with her book open.

  “Okay if I turn on the light?” she asked.

  I nodded, thinking how pretty she looked as the light picked up the highlights in her hair.

  “See,” Alice said. “We’re working on division now, and I remember what you said about the four operations and division being the one that meant sharing, and I understand that – four cookies, two people, each person gets two cookies when they share them, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I even get harder ones, because I know the multiplication facts now. Twenty-eight pennies, four people, they get seven pennies each, four times seven is twenty-eight, twenty-eight divided by four is seven, and also twenty-eight divided by seven is four.”

  “Good, Alice –”

  “Yes,” Alice interrupted, “but what I don’t get at all is long division. I mean there are so many steps or whatever you call them, I can never remember what to do when.”

  “That’s not hard,” I said, pulling an index card out of the drawer. “Just keep this card taped in the back of your math book till you’ve memorized it. Think of a family first:

  There’s the big old Daddy – D for (÷) division.

  Next to him is the Mother – M for (×) multiplication.

  Then comes the Sister – S for (–) subtraction.

  And then the Brother – B for bring down.

  “And then when you’ve done all that, just start over again. Here. Try it.”

  I wrote on a piece of paper:

  Alice said, concentrating hard, “First is D, so I divide. Five can’t go into two because it’s bigger, right? So twenty-one divided by five is four, and I put that over the one … like this”:

  “Right?”

  “Right.”

  Alice checked the card. “Mother. Multiply. Let’s see. I guess I multiply the four by five and put it here:

  “Now, subtract, then bring down. Uh-oh. Now what?”

  “Same old thing. Just go back up to the top of the card and start again. Daddy, Mom, Sister, Brother. Actually, it’s just like your own family.”

  Alice turned and looked at me. “Yes,” she said, “except we hardly ever see Daddy anymore. Do you think he’s mad at me maybe? I mean because of school and everything.”

  “I doubt it. Especially since you’re doing better and better and better. Do you realize how much you’ve accomplished in just a little more than half a year? You’ve worked out your pill problem, your clothes problem, you’re getting good marks in school …”

  “Well, not exactly ‘good’ in math and not new clothes.”

  “But much better. You’ve made a friend, you look terrific …”

  “And I don’t have those temper tantrums before school anymore, so that can’t be why Daddy doesn’t come home at night sometimes.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Whatever the reason that he’s away, it sure isn’t you. Probably it’s his new job and traveling. Maybe you should ask him.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe,” Alice tilted her head so that her sweet, serious face was close to mine, “maybe you could.”

  I didn’t forget about Alice’s poem. I was conscious of it all afternoon as I worked with other children, but I waited until I was alone before I took it out of my pocket.

  She had centered the lines in the middle of the paper, and the printing was the neatest and clearest I’d ever seen Alice do. Surrounding the printed words was a border of little hearts and flowers.

  Spring

  All winter – the ground has been frozen,

  And the brook covered with ice,

  Hard and white and still,

  As if the world was dead.

  But yesterday spring came,

  The dirt in the garden is warm,

  Seeds are sprouting,

  Buds are bursting.

  Winter is gone – spring is here,

  And everything is growing.

  I love you, Alice

  I sat reading and rereading Alice’s poem, smoothing it with my fingers, thinking about her and her own growth, and also about her father and
her mother. Alice – sensitive, high-strung, intelligent, brave, lovely, still out of fashion, and always vulnerable. And her mother. I wondered if Mrs. Martin had made any friends yet and made a mental note to follow up on my lunch invitation.

  If Alice hadn’t talked about her father in the preceding months, she made up for it now.

  “You know what he says? He says he’ll always take care of us.” Alice took off her shoes and slammed them on the floor. “Well, I don’t want him to take care of me. I can take care of myself.”

  I waited. Knowing Alice, this was just the beginning.

  “See,” she continued, “they don’t know it, but I can hear every single thing they say at night now. Saturday night they had this big fight downstairs, and I couldn’t hear that too well, but when they came upstairs Mom told Daddy not to touch her and she didn’t want to be anywhere near him. And he told her not to go so fast, that they had to think of the children, and she says it was a fine time for him to talk about thinking about the children. Anyway, for the last three nights, he’s been sleeping – or anyway lying – on this chaise lounge thing where Mom reads in the afternoon. It’s way across the room from the bed, so they have to talk loud to hear each other. They think we’re asleep, but I can hear everything.”

  I shook my head. “Are you sure you want to? People say things they don’t mean when they’re angry.”

  “Yes, I want to. I want to hear every little thing. I’m mad, too. You know why he hasn’t been coming home? He has a girlfriend. He says he’s in love with her and wants to marry her – that’s when he said it was nobody’s fault and that he’d always take care of us.”

  Alice’s rage slipped away as quickly as it had arrived, and now tears welled in her eyes. “What are we ever going to do now? You know what Mommy’s like. She doesn’t know how to do anything, I mean like anything besides take care of the house.”

  I sat beside Alice, smoothing her hair, thinking how crisis after crisis arrived in some children’s lives. Just when things seemed to be straightening out – crash, something worse happened.

  “I’m sure he meant it,” I said. “I’m sure he will take care of you and see that the bills are paid, but that doesn’t make it any less scary for you and Billy. How is Billy doing?”