Elly is prone on the floor, legs frogged out on either side of her. She is under a blanket and so invisible, but I know the position and the steady rhythm that goes with it. She is rapt, removed, she needs me not at all. I crouch beside her, ready to enter her world in a way she can appreciate if she will and ignore if she wants to. My finger goes under the blanket, then my hand. No response. My head follows. Elly knows I am there. There are two of us now, withdrawn from the world but near each other. It is very inward, warm, and dark - a physical expression for undemanding intimacy. There is nothing difficult here - nothing to do, nothing to say. The only thing you need is time and the willingness to spend a lot of it with your head under a blanket.
It became possible to make a game out of raising the edge of the blanket. By the time she was two we could get her to play the peekaboo game whose absence we had noticed at ten months, and she even made a little ‘here-she-is’ noise to go with it. As time went on we moved forward, but not far. She began to welcome me into her enclosures. At three and a half she even developed on her own a new discovery game — herself closed in a closet, I to open the door. Better yet, both of us sit quiet in the dark closet, door pulled to, she and I, close together, everything else shut out. We still do that sometimes, even today.
One curious fact helped us as we worked. We saw it happen more than once; something of it has been described in the previous chapter, with Joann. But it had happened before; some big, loud, friendly daddy of a man, passing through town, would visit us, take a look at our pretty baby, and knowing nothing about her to make him wary, would sweep her off the floor, hug and tickle and toss her while she squealed and chuckled with the most ordinary baby delight. During one such visit I watched, incredulous, as Elly - impervious Elly - got up off the floor, went over to the stranger, and crawled on to his lap. A year and a half later, at the time of her second hospital examination, we remembered his magic and took Elly to visit. But he had lost it. He knew now that something was wrong with her and he treated her as any intelligent and sensitive person would - delicately, tentatively, cautiously. Elly never even saw him.
What could we make of this fact - that Elly could be reached by exactly the sort of crude initiative that one would think would most repel her? Invasions are mounted on faith. We have not been people to whom faith came naturally, and there was little here for faith to work on. It helped us, then, in our continual assaults upon Elly’s sheer walls to remember that we had seen her welcome invasion. It sustained us to think that though she could not take the initiative she was glad when initiative was taken. Every time we forced ourselves to force her privacy, taking her hand (as she took ours), lifting it, manipulating her fingers so stubbornly left limp, it helped to think that there was perhaps a friend in the citadel, a fifth column unable to assist us yet hoping for our victory.
There could be no more important help. Of course we had learned for ourselves already that Elly liked to be touched, stimulated, occupied — that she was bored inside her serenity. But what one has learned for oneself is a frail reed if no one strengthens it from outside. Watching the rare people who succeeded with Elly, however temporary all such successes were, we were strengthened in our knowledge of what was necessary if we were to succeed.
What we learned is what actors know — actors and good teachers: that if there is a distance between you and another, whether an audience or a single child, it is you who must make the effort to reach out. You must throw a bridge over the distance, and the only material for that bridge is the force of your personality, such force as you can give it. You must project. You must project in ways that may seem exaggerated or unnatural or artificial to you if you are not an actor already, but you cannot mind that. You must become an actor, if an actor is a person who knows more ways of projecting than most people. You will learn to use loudness and softness, sound and silence, emphasis, change of pace, gesture. And since the distance you are trying to bridge is not, like the actor’s, physical, you can learn to project in ways he cannot. You can surprise by approach, you can fix attention by a dynamics of touch as varied as that of voice. There are many ways; you find them when you look for them. But somehow you send your personality out beyond yourself,into the waiting vacuum. You will be making a fool of yourself. But you cannot mind that either. Sooner than you think, you will get used to looking up at a visitor from the inside of a cardboard carton.
It is seduction, make no mistake about it. You are setting out, with every charm you own, unasked and uninvited, to make another person love you. If what you do is to be more than seduction, you must assume the responsibilities of love. You must accept the fact that love binds. You must imply no promise you do not mean to fulfil. You cannot entice her out and then just not be there. You must be ready to see dependence modify isolation, and to find that one does not drive out the other.
Naturally enough, most of Elly’s games were played with me. Brothers and sisters, and most of all her father, were more gifted players than I, but they were away much of the day. I was the steady companion, and in my first year of work she grew more and more dependent on me. There were no more long naps; no longer did she crawl alone in the yard. First it was I who was where she was; then she began to follow me until it was a rare thing for us to be in different rooms. She actually became intolerant of other children’s sharing her play with me, or her long walks. I watched the dependence grow with mixed feelings, but joy kept uppermost. This was after all what we wanted — that she should be able to relate to another person. She was still all too capable of detachment. If other children were not present to share my attention she could still cheerfully ignore me altogether. I could leave the house and she would take no notice. I could return after a day’s absence and though I might spend several minutes talking to father or sister as Elly, her back to me, played on the floor, the sound of my voice would not make her turn round.
She grew slowly more aware of others. But most of the time it was I who was alone with her as the hours passed in the quiet house. It was an environment devoid of events unless I generated them — especially in the long, enclosed Northern winters when few small children can stay outside for long, least of all Elly, who unassisted would throw no snowball, climb into no swing, slide on no sled. Yet though Elly was content to do nothing, she was glad to be occupied. She could not play herself, but she welcomed someone who would play for her.
Most of our play has been described already. But there was one kind of activity which I have not described because it was not a matter of specific skills: our play with toy animals and with dolls. I hoped that doll play might promise a way to bring Elly into the social world of which she seemed unconscious.
The nursery of a fourth child contains quantities of substitute people, some soft, some fluffy, some rubbery, some realistic with nylon hair and eyes that shut. Over the years they have acquired personalities and names. Elly had her own as well as the castoffs of her sisters and brother; she had been a tiny baby when she first smiled at her blue teddy, new then, and ‘teddy’ had been her first word. The single picture she had recognized in three and a half years had been of a blue teddy. She would play with her teddy, freely and often, jumping with him in her crib, throwing him on the floor, cheerfully, casually, with no more sign of feeling for him as a surrogate human (or, indeed, animal) than she had for the real humans (and animals) who surrounded her. I could elicit a friendly laugh by adapting the hand-animal game to doll or teddy — Teddy would walk-walk-walk-go-see-the-baby, and ‘walk’, abstracted from this game, was one of her earliest words. But the initiative was all mine. Moreover I could find nothing better for the teddy to do than walk. It seemed she could understand only the crudest actions attributable to a teddy, and ones that directly approached her. She did not dress or undress him, or put him into situations mimicking those observed in the family, or respond when I did so. Not surprising, certainly; since she herself imitated nothing that anyone said or did, one would hardly expect her to imitate at one remove.
It was the more remarkable, then, the day (she was not quite two and a half) that decisively she took her teddy, set him in a chair next to a row of other dolls, and looked up at me and smiled the way any small child does when it has done some-thing clever. It was one of those swallows that we became familiar with — the kind that do not make a summer. ‘Unprecedented,’ my diary notes. Unprecedented, it set no precedent. Like the single time she swept up after me, the single time she fed her doll, it led nowhere.
Where all progress was slow, progress with dolls was almost imperceptible. Elly was almost three when I succeeded in interesting her in a small baby doll. ‘Interest’ is perhaps too strong a word; she would look on while I dressed it and she would condescend herself to pull the clothes off (still too weak to unsnap the snaps) and choose another costume. It was a step beyond ‘walk-walk’, and time for one; just recently she had considerably diluted the social relevance I had hoped for in that game by taking some new and delightful coloured shapes and making them walk towards her.
The dressing game proceeded mechanically, the clothes chosen at random, put on, taken off. That was all there was to it. This was not surprising; in spite of her exact colour discrimination, Elly took no interest whatever in her own clothes. Two months passed and we were still playing the game every night at bedtime. Even Elly could get bored — she was now cutting short the number of costumes — but my attempts to vary the game or to extend it to mimic social situations met with no success. Yet there appeared to be some small carry-over; it was at this time that she understood when I played ‘this little piggy’ with another doll’s toes. She took a liking to two tiny teddies, small enough to fit in the chairs of our dollhouse. She enjoyed it when I put them at the doll table, and when I set out tiny plates and silver for them, Elly clearly recognized the situation; she took the half-inch doll-knife and attempted to cut their food. Very encouraging, but another dead end. A person trained to it might have seen further ways to connect with the social world so closed to Elly. Or perhaps even a trained person would have found no more to be done with it than that.
Another month passed. We dressed and undressed the doll at bedtime, but attempts to interest Elly in putting the doll to bed met with complete failure. A trained person might be surprised at how slowly an untrained one thinks: it was not until I saw a doll’s crib at a friend’s house that it occurred to me that crib-centred Elly might recognize its function better than that of the conventional beds our dolls slept in.
I borrowed the crib and took it home. The effect on Elly was immediate. She caught sight of it while being diapered for bed; as soon as she was dressed she climbed down, went over to it, and put her own foot in. We sat down by it and were dressing dolls as usual when Elly got up, went over to her own crib, in which she had already placed a book — a normal part of her nighttime preparations — removed the book and brought it over to the doll crib. She tried to put it in — unsuccessfully, since it was twice as big as the crib. I got her a miniature book but she laid it aside. The crib was no toy to Elly. It was not a representation of the business of life, but part of it. She played a little more with the doll clothes, then once more put her foot into the little crib. It is difficult for a three-year-old child to climb into a crib nine inches long, but Elly tried; holding out her hand for support she actually stood in it.
Little interest as Elly had shown before in toy representations of reality, she had never before confused them with reality itself. She had not tried to sit in the doll chairs or try on the doll costumes or eat the doll food. The crib was different, though I did not understand why, and do not. Perhaps it spoke to that deepest part of Elly — the whatever-it-was that craved enclosure. At any rate, it seemed to me that we were in a sensitive area and that I should go slow. I kept on dressing the baby doll — the game was into its fourth month — but I let two weeks go by before I put the doll into the crib.
Elly paid no, apparent attention. She had made no further attempts to get in the crib herself and seemed now to take it for granted. But a readiness was silently building. Four days passed, each of which I ended by putting the doll in the crib. The fifth evening Elly decisively went and got the old doll bed from the cupboard where it was kept. Ignoring the crib, which was in plain sight, she crouched over the bed, attempting to get in it. The crib, perhaps, had brought it to her attention, but I suppose she had always known what it was for. Accident plays a large part in progress; it happened that the wooden frame of the bed was old and partly broken, and I took it away for repair without objection from Elly. The mattress remained. Idly, I placed the doll pillow on it, and the small quilt. To my surprise, Elly at once took another quilt and carefully put it in position on the first one, adjusting it to perfect congruence and smoothing it down with satisfaction. Encouraged, I put the baby doll on the pallet she had prepared, only to find to my astonishment a small teddy already hidden under the quilt. This time there was real comprehension and admitted pleasure. Elly laughed, patted the quilt, and even said ‘ni-ni.’ — her twenty-first word. We put her into her crib in triumph.
I cannot overemphasize the gradualness of this process. It was as if we were trying to conceal, Elly and I, even from ourselves the direction in which we were moving. What was too much to accept in the crib could be accepted in the bed, and perhaps even better in the dismantled mattress on the floor, for when the bed returned, repaired, Elly would not allow the mattress to be put back. Twice in one week Elly made up the pallet on the floor. But we seemed no nearer the proper use of the crib, though Elly was if anything more fascinated by it than she had been. She carried it about with her. She carefully collected all the tiny doll shoes and put them in it. She filled it with animal crackers. But if I put a doll or an animal in she removed it at once in her characteristic businesslike manner. It was as if — as if-she knew quite well what we were getting at, but, as one of her baby-sitters had expressed it, ‘She won’t give you the satisfaction.’
How to proceed? It was impossible to predict the ploys that could slip through that massive resistance — impossible for me, though someone trained to the work or more naturally gifted in the nursery might have been able to formulate a plan for progress. We lurched forward by accident. One day, weeks later, an idea came out of the nowhere where all my ideas come from. It came to me to put in the crib a doll that was too large for it. Its head stuck out at an uncomfortable slant; the whole set-up was clearly disproportionate, wrong. Elly saw the doll and as usual automatically removed it. But in a few minutes she returned. She looked straight into my face and laughed, and put the doll back in the crib — not the baby doll or the little teddies that fitted so nicely, but this outsize interloper that clearly didn’t belong there. For this doll she got blanket, spread, and pillow, laughing like anything, happy and delighted — as was I. Finally, laughing even more (the joke’s on you, I won’t give you the satisfaction) she dismantled the whole business.
This was the culmination of a process that, from the time she first caught sight of the crib, had taken fifty-seven days.
‘She doesn’t want to give you the satisfaction.’ The baby-sitter had noticed that Elly would sing, unnoticed, in the back seat of the car, but would stop if you looked at her. We had all noticed that when she heard a new tune she almost never sang it immediately afterwards. However difficult the intervals, however tricky the rhythm, she did not need to repeat it to fix it in her memory. Days afterwards, sometimes weeks, unpractised but perfect, the tune would appear. Yet she seemed completely to lose her ability to render a tune on the rare occasions when she requested one. She would stand by the piano, her voice moving vaguely up and down; she would put my hand on the keys and I would not know what to play. I recalled the way we had learned to ignore, not congratulate, when she first held spoon and cup. I remembered the circles she drew, but only the day after I had drawn them. I began to think about imitation. ‘Imitating is innate in men from childhood. Men differ from other animals in that they are the most imitative, and their first learni
ng is produced through imitation. Again, all men delight in imitations.’ What had Aristotle ever remarked that was more just, more obvious than this? But my child did not imitate. What was there involved in the process of imitation from which Elly held herself back? It seemed clear that she could imitate — the few words, the tunes, the figures, the rare activity were proof of that. Why wouldn’t she? What is the difference between copying a circle immediately after your mother has drawn one for you, and reproducing it after a day or a week has gone by?
The obvious difference is that the latter is much harder to do.
Many children could not do it at all; it was remarkable that Elly could, not that she did not do it often. The time to imitate an action is immediately after it has taken place. Elly was handicapping herself by this delay. What function could the time lag serve?
It could, it seemed to me, function to preserve isolation. If you draw a circle immediately after someone, you are acknowledging that the two of you are in contact. Someone sends, you receive. If you wait, the connection is successfully obscured. Your action can seem to come from yourself alone.
I began to focus on the problem of imitation, but it was a long time before I thought of anything to do about it. When I did it was not much — nothing more than that I should do what she would not. If she would not imitate me, we would make the current flow the other way. I would imitate her.
I began the fall that she was three. There seemed to be a general readiness to move forward — the first exercises in picture recognition began then, the work on switches and faucets, the play with dolls. Elly was not silent. Her words were rare, but she often made noises — ordinary, relaxed baby sounds. These I imitated as closely as I could, not systematically but on occasion.
The Siege Page 10