I almost lost the peanut butter as Hannah wound her arms around my legs and sat down on my feet.
But we were almost there. I shuffled along with Hannah on my feet. I could see heads watching from doors and I felt like a football player going for the last yard before the touchdown.
Brian had the door open, and once inside I took advantage of the surprise of new surroundings. There were four girls in Patty’s class and all of them crowded around and peered down at Hannah, who was being propelled into the room on my feet. Wanda Gomez, a dark, heavy girl, touched Hannah’s head before she bit her own arm. ‘No legs. Girl’s got no legs. Poor girl.’
Hannah loosened her grasp in surprise for one second and I slid my feet out from under her, raced for the piano in the back of the room, and dumped the contents of Hannah’s lunch bag on the piano top. Sandwich in waxed paper and a chocolate cupcake. I ripped open the wrapper and, with my silver knife, sliced the jelly sandwich into four inaccurate rectangles. Next the cupcake. Then everything back into the paper bag, except one small square of sandwich.
Patty had already set the table, and I sat down at one end and put the square inch of sandwich on the paper plate next to mine. The peanut butter and loaf of bread I put on my plate. Hannah’s bag between my feet. Ahhh! Made it. I looked up for Hannah.
She was on the other side of the table, staring at me.
‘Come on, lovey,’ I said. ‘Time for lunch. See, this is how we do it here. A little at a time. Come on now. Sit here with me.’
I began working on my own sandwich. Hannah came slowly now, not pushing, not clawing. She stood beside me, watching as I spread the cold, clumpy peanut butter on the bread and put another piece of bread on top. Deliberately, I cut my own sandwich into pieces the same size as hers.
Hannah still hesitated beside me. I pulled out her chair, silently urging her towards me, and picked up my own small square of sandwich. I tipped the sandwich towards her in a friendly gesture and then put it in my mouth, bit it in half, and put the other half back on the plate.
Suddenly Hannah sat down, picked up her quarter of sandwich, and put it in her mouth. She didn’t bite it in half, but who cared? Refinements could come later. No crusts or jelly were slobbering down her chin; she was out of the closet, sitting at a table, eating with us. I smiled at her around the cold peanut butter stuck to the roof of my mouth and served us each another square of sandwich.
It was Brian rather than Rufus who first began to move towards Hannah. He was fascinated by her eating, as I should have known he would be.
Brian had had his own eating problems, far more severe than Hannah’s. When he had first come to school four years before, his entire diet had consisted of chocolate milk and saltines. We didn’t know why – though his parents suspected abuse at a child care centre – but Brian had not begun to eat other foods until almost a year after he first came to school. We tried numerous means and methods until finally, in the end, we had forced his first bite and he began to eat. This had proved – to me, at least – not that it is right to force a child to eat but that almost anything can become a learning experience if there is enough caring involved.
Brian now ate normally well, but Hannah’s struggles must have stirred all kinds of memories, and his fascination with her eating was understandable. He began to sit on her other side at lunchtime. He did it quietly, without comment, simply moving in and occupying the seat next to her.
Gradually Hannah’s fears calmed, and by the end of the week she knew what to expect. Each day at noon I lifted down her paper bag and took it to Patty’s room, where I cut her sandwich into squares and gave them to her. Each day as we walked to lunch together I continued to carry her paper lunch bag and my own sandwich. Each day was the same; each day I did as I had promised.
One day in the middle of the following week, I took Hannah’s sandwich from behind the pipe and my foil-wrapped sandwich from my purse and gave them both to Hannah to carry.
Her eyes widened as I handed them to her. She stood very, very still, looking first at me and then at our sandwiches.
I waited. I had given her the sandwiches because I wanted her to know that I trusted her, and trust is something better explained by actions than words. There’s no sure way to know when to trust, but I thought Hannah was ready and I wanted to give her the option: she could run, she could bolt back to the closet with our sandwiches, or she could walk with me, carrying our lunch.
She took her paper bag in one hand and my sandwich in the other and started down the hall. I walked slowly after her. Then abruptly she stopped and turned around, heading back the way she’d come. Had I guessed wrong, acted too soon? Was she off to the closet?
She stopped when she reached me and stepped in front of me, forcing me to stop as well. Then, with her head bent down, never looking at me, she opened the paper bag and dropped my sandwich in with hers. Still not looking up, she reached out for my hand with her free one and we walked down the hall together, while my heart boomed with such excitement that I could feel it in my head.
Days pass like minutes in a school like ours where each child is such a fascinating, intricate individual. At lunch a few days later, I suddenly saw Hannah reach out and grab a handful of Brian’s spaghetti. I grabbed too, covering her hand with mine, prying open her fingers so that the spaghetti fell back on his plate and both our hands were covered with the red, sticky sauce.
‘No, Hannah. Not that way. You eat spaghetti with a fork.’
But Brian knew better. Quickly he dumped some of his own spaghetti on to Hannah’s plate and chopped at it with his fork, trying to cut the spaghetti into pieces small enough to stay in a spoon.
‘Help her, Mary. Help Hannah eat the spaghetti.’
He pushed his spoon towards me and I picked it up, put it between Hannah’s greasy fingers, and put my own hand over hers, guiding the spoon down into the food.
Brian began to eat rapidly from his plate with his fork, so excited that his thin, wiry little body bounced off his chair after every two or three bites.
I felt Hannah’s fingers tense under my hand and gradually I relaxed my own fingers. She was holding the spoon by herself now. Then, her eyes on Brian, she began to eat.
I called Mrs Rosnic immediately after lunch, unable to wait till school was over. I told her what had happened and asked her not to send lunch any more. From now on Hannah would eat whatever we did. No longer would she sit in the closet eating her solitary sandwich; no longer would she have special food. From now on she would sit at the table with us and share our meal. She was one of us and we would eat together.
Chapter 7
Those next few weeks, the middle weeks of October, flew by and Hannah flew with them. She was out of the closet most of the time now, literally dancing around our classroom, touching, turning, examining everything in the room while the rest of us watched and still tried to do our work. Still not speaking, still in the long cotton housedress, yet she was entrancing. Somehow Hannah was getting prettier. She was cleaner, for one thing. As the layers of grime came off, it was possible to see her fine creamy skin.
Since Hannah was eating with us now it was fair to expect her to wash – or perhaps it is more accurate to say ‘be washed’. Each day before lunch I filled the bathroom sink with warm water and washed her hands and face. At first I had washed only her hands, using a thin washcloth because it wasn’t as hard or slippery or scary as soap and also because I could gradually move the washcloth to her neck, her face.
I called Mrs Rosnic again to report this and to urge her to try the same thing before supper. She agreed to try and added that yes, she thought Hannah was doing a little better, but her voice seemed sad. When I asked if anything was wrong, she said that the baby had a cold and that she thought maybe she was getting it.
Two days later when I was washing Hannah’s face, she whimpered and pulled away and I saw that under her matted, dirty, reddish hair, which I still hadn’t touched, her right ear was covered with a thick yellow
crust.
I took Hannah to the office at once. We didn’t have a doctor at school (or rather, the only doctor on our staff was the psychiatrist), but Dianne, one of our teachers, was a registered nurse and the Director called her down to the office to look at Hannah, She confirmed what we had suspected and the Director telephoned Mrs Rosnic immediately to tell her that Hannah had a badly infected ear and should be seen by a doctor. I took Hannah back to our room and kept her quiet and close to me for the rest of the day.
Hannah was absent for ten days, and when she came back she acted as though she barely recognised us. She headed straight for the closet, not only sitting there but closing the door except for a tiny crack. She didn’t bring her lunch but now, instead of eating, she threw her food or pushed it away.
What was wrong? Was this just the aftermath of illness or had something else happened while she was home? I talked to Mrs Rosnic, but she couldn’t tell me anything, except that the doctor’s examination and the ear infection itself had both been very painful. Did Hannah blame me? In her mind had the earache somehow risen out of school? I tried to talk to her a little through the crack in the closet door, but it seemed doubtful that she heard me.
The not knowing is one of the most difficult things about working with non-verbal children: not knowing what goes on when they’re away from you, not knowing what goes on in their heads when they’re with you.
Regressions weren’t new to me. I had seen them many times before and worked them through with other children. After every vacation there was almost always some sort of backsliding; after an illness mere was more. It was never easy. Each tiny step of progress had been gained at such high price that to see it lost, even temporarily, was difficult. But no learning experience is a constant upward climb. There are always peaks, plateaus, and valleys. This wasn’t what bothered me about Hannah. It was the anger.
She would have nothing to do with any of us. Everything anyone tried to do was wrong. Even the doll family and Best and Worst failed to bring her out of the closet. We were back where we started, or worse. Again, if it was hard for me, it was harder for the boys. They had been pleased and excited about her progress. There had been a sunny loveliness to Hannah as she explored the room. Sometimes she’d had the air of a clown as she experimented with new materials, imitating one or another of the boys. This was all gone now, and again the added dimension of difficulty for the boys was that this could happen to them. Their own emotional stability was still frail. If Hannah could change so much, it was possible that they would too.
I tried hard all week to regain lost ground with Hannah and at the same time to reassure the boys. Nothing worked very well, and by Friday afternoon I was not only discouraged, I was tired.
Well, there were only a few hours left to the week. I’d just try to get through the afternoon as painlessly as possible. I put a record on and got out paint, paper, brushes. Perhaps painting would give us a respite or a chance to express some feelings. The boys were pleased, and in a little while we were all involved.
Everyone was working on his own thing. Brian was painting the sides of a refrigerator carton to make himself a telephone booth. Jamie was finger-painting on a portion of the floor covered with newspaper, happily moving the wet, bright colours over the slippery paper and himself as well. Rufus didn’t know what he felt like doing, and he watched first one and then another. Finally he decided to join me.
I’d taken our pumpkin from the counter, the dried cornstalks from our outside door, and an old yellow pitcher from the furnace room and put them together on a table by the window. There were no oils in school, but I had orange, red, white, yellow, and brown poster paints and I mixed new colours as I needed them. I was no artist, but I loved to sketch and paint. It helped me to see, made me more aware of line and colour and reality. I was fascinated by perspective, continually amazed that half of what I saw was supplied by my mind’s eye.
Rufus got his own paper and brush, commandeered the orange paint I’d mixed, and began to paint an orange pumpkin. ‘Can I make a face on it?’ he asked. ‘Even if it doesn’t really have a face?’
I glanced at him. ‘It’s your pumpkin. You can do anything you want with it, Ruf.’
I had looked away for only a minute. But that minute had been long enough for Hannah to come out of the closet, pick up the red and yellow paint jars, and pour the contents on my paper.
Anger flared inside me and I turned abruptly, ‘Cut it out, Hannah. What do you think you’re doing, anyway? Stop it now. That’s enough.’
My voice was loud and Jamie burst into tears as Hannah threw the yellow paint jar at me. It shattered against the tile floor by my feet, and my dreams and plans for Hannah seemed to shatter with it.
Chapter 8
But a paint jar is only a paint jar and never worth a dream. Besides, a teacher’s dream dies hard and is easily refurbished, and by Monday morning I had a new plan.
The plan was simply to get out of the classroom. I’d been trying too hard, pushing Hannah too much, attempting to recapture growth, and it didn’t work. Hannah herself had put the final period to a poor week’s work when she had thrown the paint. We needed to leave the classroom, the work, the mistakes behind us. We needed a fresh start.
For me, Indian summer is one of the loveliest times of year, the best of summer mixed with autumn, and that’s what we had that Monday morning: bright Yale-blue October sky with sun shimmering, bouncing off every glossy surface that it struck so that there seemed to be twice as much sunshine. The world shone and the temperature was just right for sweaters and a picnic.
I waited in the parking lot for the children and gathered them into my car as they arrived so that they wouldn’t have to relive the incident of Hannah’s rage on the previous Friday. Soon everyone was settled in the car – the three boys in the back, Hannah in the front seat beside me.
There had been a slight delay over seat belts, Hannah at first refusing to fasten hers, but now everything was snug and we were off to Thunder Mountain. Sandwiches, lemonade, apples and cookies were packed in the trunk along with blankets and storybooks.
My own spirits began to rise as we left suburbia behind and drove into farm and orchard country with the mountains just beyond. We sang as we drove. We always sang in the car, and today Rufus began:
‘She’ll be comin’ round the mountain
when she comes (giddy-ap – whoa!),
She’ll be comin’ round the mountain
when she comes …’
At least the boys and I sang. Hannah sat silently beside me.
Once Brian leaned forward and said to Hannah, ‘Why don’t you sing, Hannah? Why don’t you talk? Please talk. Just say your name.’
Rufus chimed in. ‘Yeah, Hannah. It’s better when you talk. Then we can fix you up better. See? Look at me. I talked, and Mary made a new man out of me.’
‘Whatever you did, you did yourself, Ruf,’ I interrupted. ‘How about a game? Alphabet? Ghost?’ I didn’t want the boys to begin pushing Hannah, but Rufus was hard to sidetrack. Resentful of Hannah in the beginning, then indifferent, Rufus was now like the rest of us, unable to resist her as she began to grow. He persisted now.
‘Listen, Hannah, I know you can talk. I just have this feeling. And if you talk and tell us what the matter is, then we’ll fix it. See, I used to be scared all the time, but not anymore, and it’ll be the same for you. See – your biggest problem is not talking – and if you talk, that’ll fix the problem.’ Rufus smiled, pleased with his logic, but Hannah put her hands over her ears.
To distract Rufus I said, ‘Hey, Ruf, what did the big firecracker say to the little firecracker?’
‘Don’t know,’ said Rufus. ‘What?’
‘My pop’s bigger than yours.’
And now Hannah’s smiling. Good. We’re going to be all right. I sang again:
‘She’ll be drivin’ six white horses
when she comes (clippety-clop),
She’ll be drivin’ six white horse
s
when she comes (clippety-clop) …’
We arrived at the tollbooth of Beardsley State Park. Thunder Mountain was only our nickname. Brian handed the toll keeper our two dollars and he waved us through. ‘Nice day to get out of the house with the kids.’
I waved and called back, ‘Beats scrubbing floors.’ The kids dissolved in laughter. They loved having us mistaken for a family.
We drove past the old wooden lodge and empty parking lot, down to the lake. During the summer it was possible to rent rowboats and canoes, but now the place was deserted, except for two green boats bobbing beside the dock.
As soon as I parked the car, the boys were out, running for the dock. We had been here several times in May and June of the year before, and they headed now for one of their favourite spots: out on to the dock and then flat on their stomachs, then faces pressed against the boards, their eyes peering down into the shadowy water world below, searching for fish. All children are intrigued by animals, but for my children, whose coordination was often awkward and difficult, the easy, effortless movements of fish were all-absorbing.
I walked towards the dock, stopping halfway between the boys and Hannah. She was still in the car, but she had the door open, her seat belt unfastened, and her feet over the edge. She was on the verge of getting out, so I walked on to the dock to give her a little more room.
The boys were calling to each other, their voices hollow echoes in the empty space beneath the dock.
‘Look at that fish. Boy, is he big.’ That was Rufus.
‘He big,’ echoed Jamie.
‘No. That’s no fish. A rock, that is a rock,’ proclaimed accurate Brian.
‘It is too a fish. Hey, Mary, look – isn’t that too a fish?’
I laughed at Rufus. ‘You figure it out. You’ve got better eyes than I have.’ I had learned not to get trapped into taking sides in a minor argument.
Hannah was out of the car and all the way down to the beginning of the dock. She put one foot tentatively on the wooden boards, then slowly, carefully, the other. Just then Rufus jumped up and the dock swayed under his sudden shift of weight. Startled, Hannah retreated quickly to solid ground.
Lovey Page 5