It must seem strange and precarious to her – a narrow wooden floor built out over water. I turned my back to where Hannah stood on the shore and jumped up and down a couple of times. The boys turned, surprised but not alarmed.
‘Hey, Mary. What’re you doing?’
I raced out towards them, then jumped and landed hard in a squat beside them. If this old dock could stand my running and jumping, Hannah would know that it could stand her cautious weight.
I reached for Jamie and tumbled over on my back, taking him with me. ‘Not a bad way to go to school, eh?’
From flat on my back, I looked down over my sweatshirt and jeans, and there, framed between my sneakers, was Hannah. She was back out on the dock again. This time, though, she had decided on a safer approach. Not daring to walk yet – height making the journey more perilous – she was down on all fours, crawling towards us on hands and knees.
This was no easy task. She crawled inside the long dress, inching it along with her, stopping every few feet to look back over her shoulder to see how far she’d come. As she neared us, we instinctively rearranged ourselves to make room for her. Finally, she arrived and lay down between us, panting; her face sweaty from exertion. But within a minute or two she had her eyes open and was looking through a crack down to the water below. The boys immediately began pointing out things to her.
‘See that log, Hannah? That’s where big fish, really big fish, live.’
‘Over there by the side, where those stones are, there was a penny there last summer.’
‘Look, Hannah, there, look at the fish –’
‘That’s not a fish. Doesn’t move. It’s a rock.’
Suddenly I felt, more than saw, Hannah turn her face towards me. I turned my own head. One side of my face was pressed against the warm wooden boards, and while the fish swam silently beneath us, Hannah and I looked at each other. We were only inches apart, our noses almost touching. I could feel her breath, puffy and warm on my face. We stayed like this for perhaps one full minute. Hannah’s eyes were wide open, the whites clear, almost translucent. The irises were layers of blue, lighter on the surface, then soft deep blue underneath. Bright sunlight framed Hannah’s face as if in a close-up, and once again I was startled by the beauty and intelligence that were there.
Gone were the dumpy body and awkward clothes; her matted hair was only a blurred outline; her skin shone from exercise and the pleasure of success. All the things Hannah could be were clearly visible, and I silently promised her, I’ll help, Hannah, trust me. Let’s try it again, okay?
We could have moved away from each other. It would have been easy for either of us to turn our head, but we stayed, silently looking at each other, until Hannah moved her arm – accidentally, purposely? It was impossible to tell, but she moved her arm until it lay against my own.
Finally the boys tired of watching the fish and ran off to turn over rocks along the water’s edge, searching for snails, the possibility of finding a bloodsucker heightening their excitement.
I got up slowly and stretched out my hand to Hannah. She took it and we took a few slow steps back towards the shore. Then I stopped and rearranged her dress, pulling more of it over the string at her waist so that her legs were free and she could walk more easily. Soon I’d have to do something about her clothes and her hair. So much to do, but for now it was enough just to feel the sun, walk, be alive.
When we got to the end of the dock, we walked down and stood beside the boys on the shore. Hannah watched, and then we followed as they left the water and headed up the mountain, climbing one of the gently sloping trails, walking single file beneath pine trees, birches, oaks. Rufus raced ahead, clambering over fallen logs, sometimes leaving the path to climb a nearby boulder and shout down to us, exulting in his freedom. Brian walked slowly, trying to stay near Hannah while he gathered the golden leaves that had fallen from the oaks. Jamie and I brought up the rear. For these children who rarely left their homes and had never seen a snake or a frog, much less a porcupine needle, each step was an adventure.
At lunchtime we turned and went back to the lake, this time choosing the white sandy beach that bordered the east end, rather than the boat cove. We carried the food and a blanket from the car and spread the blanket on the sand. We ate there with the sand creeping over the edges of the blanket, mixing with the sandwiches, while the lemonade grew warm in the paper cups. It was all just right – a real picnic.
After lunch we dug hollows in the warm sun and dozed and told stories. Our stories were always make-believe, but make-believe that could be true. There was no one storyteller; we passed the stories around. One person began, another did the middle, and another the end.
‘Once there was a cat with the longest tail in the world. It was so long that when he sat down he could wrap his tail around him three times. It was a beautiful tail, but the cat didn’t like it because all the other cats …’
Here someone would take over the story and continue until he ran out of ideas or wanted to see what someone else would say. We liked it because this kind of storytelling gave us another way to talk. Some of the things that were too big or too scary for regular talk could come out in a story.
After a while, we grew quiet again. Rufus picked up a book and wandered off to read. Jamie began building a castle, or maybe it was a mountain, and Hannah took off her shoes and socks and began to scrunch her toes back and forth in the sand. Then, evidently liking the feel of the sand, she got up and began to walk around us barefoot, in ever-increasing circles. Brian stayed still beside me, turning a small stone over and over in his hand. I sat cross-legged, tracing letters in the damp sand, trying to listen to what Brian hadn’t found words for yet. He got another stick, and after carefully patting the sand flat he drew people inside television sets. People safe in boxes – far away, not close or real. People were what troubled Brian. He could cope with letters, numbers, words, but people were difficult.
Finally he said, ‘What’s school like? Real school, I mean.’
Brian was obviously worrying about next year. He knew that this was his last year here. Twelve was the top age limit at the school.
‘Well,’ I said, searching for words that would be reassuring and still honest, ‘it depends on what school you’re talking about. I can tell you about the school where I went.’ I told him about the classrooms and the gym, the plays we put on, and our newspaper.
The newspaper interested him. ‘You had your own newspaper? How did you make it?’
I told him that in my first school we typed up stories and carved a woodcut for the masthead. By high school we had sports reporters and news reporters; we pasted up galleys, picked type for headlines, and finally had the pages printed by a professional printer.
‘If I go,’ he asked, ‘I mean when I go to school, will they have a paper there?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but if they don’t, maybe you can start one. Just a little one at first, but I bet you could get one going.’
He was quiet, but he seemed satisfied. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘maybe that new school won’t be so bad.’ He paused and looked out towards the lake and men pointed. ‘Look at Hannah. Look at her there. Hannah’s … I think she’s … Mary, it looks like Hannah’s dancing.’
Brian was right. It did look like Hannah was dancing. She was down by the very edge of the lake, just where the water touched the sand, holding up her skirt in her hands, running along the water’s edge. But though the sun was warm, the water was October cold, and when she went too close and water accidentally touched her bare feet, she hopped backwards or sideways to escape. Despite her heavy body, Hannah had a natural grace, and what might have seemed like awkward retreats in another child blended together in a smooth, natural rhythm. I loved to watch her. Inside Hannah, deep down beneath the rage, hurt, and humiliation, there was an indestructible centre of joy. She had a true and natural joyful self.
The phrase stirred a memory, and I suddenly recalled a day when I was in the hospit
al for the birth of my second child. A friend brought me a bottle of wine and held it up before me. ‘For a joyful woman,’ she said, ‘this is how I always think of you.’ I don’t know if it’s true, but I love the quality of joy in other people. It’s one thing that draws me to children. When a child is well and adequately nourished with food and love, almost always the joy tumbles out.
But for Hannah to have kept this through the terrors of her life – the operation, the beatings, the rejection and neglect – showed a quality of joy and strength that was awesome. Hannah had a strong sense of self. She knew who she was. As I watched I again questioned the psycholo-gist’s diagnosis. Autistic children have no awareness of who they are. I couldn’t believe that Hannah was retarded or psychotic.
A cloud passed across the sun and I looked at my watch. Almost two o’clock. We had to hurry now to get back by two thirty, the official ending of our day. Where had the hours gone? I wanted more. It was too soon to go back. I needed more time, but then this was true almost every day.
I rounded up the children and then packed the lunch things. I dried Hannah’s feet with paper napkins and got her shoes and socks on and then urged everyone towards the car. The two-thirty deadline was no joke. Buses arrived, and these buses picked up other children at other schools. All sorts of schedules were thrown off and panic buttons pushed if the children weren’t back on time.
But once in the car, everyone relaxed and all was well. The children, warm and sleepy from their day in the sun and fresh air, dozed or daydreamed. I drove, happy and content at having them all there with me in the car.
After a little while, Rufus roused. He began humming a little and singing to himself. At first it meant nothing, but then I recognised a currently popular commercial:
‘Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Meyer Wiener,
That is what I’d truly love to be.
’Cause if I were an Oscar Meyer Wiener,
Then everybody’d be in love with me.’
Brian opened his eyes and sang with Rufus the second time. The song was an instant success, and the boys got wider and wider awake. Jamie shouted out ‘me’ and something close to ‘wiener’ in almost the right places, and even Hannah turned her head.
Rufus was in seventh heaven. Everyone’s attention was focused on him and he wasn’t about to lose it. He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Want to hear the dirty version?’
If they were attentive before, they were riveted now. Rufus sang:
‘Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Meyer Wiener,
That is what I’d truly love to be.
’Cause if I were an Oscar Meyer Wiener,
Then everybody’d pee all over me.’
The boys exploded in laughter and Hannah giggled. This version was even more successful than the first, and the children sang it over and over with delight.
I was silent driving down the highway, watching the boys in the rearview mirror, glancing sideways at Hannah. What was happening? I didn’t know, couldn’t put my finger on it, but some kind of excitement was building in the car. Something, something was about to happen.
When it did I almost didn’t recognise it. At first I didn’t even hear it. Not till Brian said,‘Shhh’, and Hannah said – Hannah said – ‘I sing song.’
I wanted to pull off the highway, get out, stop traffic. But I knew I couldn’t break the spell.
Hannah’s voice was small and quiet, but it was clear and it filled the car:
‘Oh, I wish I were a General Motors seat belt,
That is what I’d truly love to be,
’Cause if I were a General Motors seat belt,
Then everybody’d shit all over me!’
The boys and I sat in absolute silence. Where had these full-blown, coherent sentences come from? For two months in our classroom Hannah had uttered nothing but grunts and groans and howls. At home she evidently used a few words, but not in school. If Hannah had said ‘Good’ or ‘Sing’ we would all have been jubilant and vociferous with our praise. But to have this, this whole weird song, all at once was too much and we sat in shocked silence, until suddenly Brian came to and said, ‘Hannah. Sing it again. Please sing it again.’
Brian began the song himself and Rufus’s voice joined him and then Hannah’s voice began again and blended with theirs. This spontaneous approval was just what she needed. You never know, I thought. You never know what shape a miracle will have.
This was hardly approved teaching material. But what did it matter? What did I care? Hannah was singing. She had broken through her barricade of silence, and as they finished the second round I joined the cheers.
‘Sing it again, lovey,’ I said. ‘Go ahead and sing it again.’
Now that Hannah had spoken, it was important to keep her language flowing. She had, of course, done much more than utter an isolated word. She had used a complete sentence. ‘I sing song.’ She had taken Rufus’s jingle and adapted it to express an idea of her own, a crude one, but that was not the point. What interested me was her ability to use expressive language.
I had known she had receptive language; that she could hear, perceive, understand what was spoken to her. Now she showed that she could use words to express an idea, if she wished.
With Hannah it was not going to be so much to teach her new words, although I was sure her vocabulary was limited. The crucial thing would be to create a climate in which she would want to talk. Obviously there were all kinds of words in her head. She even had a sense of syntax: ‘I sing song’ – subject, followed by verb, followed by object. But she must have had these abilities before and just not used them.
In our school, a language difficulty was not unique. Over two thirds of our children had grave problems with verbal communication; it was one of the things that set them apart from other children. The world takes speech so for granted that people are shocked, even frightened, by a child without words.
In our own classroom, Jamie, Brian, and Hannah had each had severe language problems when they came. Rufus was different. He had used bizarre language when he was frightened, sitting behind his briefcase chanting weird nursery rhymes. ‘Little Jack Homer sat in a corner. He put in a thumb and pulled out – a tooth. Shouldn’t eat pie. Should brush your teeth or you’ll get cavities and your teeth will fall out.’ This wasn’t a language problem. In fact, language helped because it gave Rufus a way to get some of his fears from the inside to the outside. But the other three all had real language problems. Jamie had had no words at all. He had less than a hundred now, and he had struggled hard to learn to say each one. But at least he knew his name, his address, his phone number and could say and write them all. If he should run again, if anger or fear exploded inside him and he ran, at least he could get back home.
Brian had been an elective mute, capable of speech but refusing to speak or, rather, refusing to speak coherently. Rather than trust us with his words, he had taught himself to speak in a weird jumble, like a speeded-up phonograph record. As he became more sure of himself, Brian was able to give up this cover of garbled speech and talk to us in normal sentences.
All three boys were growing – dealing with their problems, gradually overcoming them. Now Hannah. Could we keep Hannah talking to us?
The day after our picnic Hannah sat beside me at Best and Worst and Rufus said, before all our feet were even under the table, ‘Well – the best thing is easy. The best thing that happened since last time was the picnic. I sure do like those old picnics. I could go on a picnic every day, every single day; maybe even twice a day.’
We all sat looking at him, remembering. I waited a minute to see if anybody would ask a question, but the children were silent, so I said, ‘What part did you like best, Ruf? Was there one special part of the picnic that you liked better than the rest?’
‘Sure. I always like the fish the best. Someday I’m gonna go up there and catch one of those fish. Boy, would my father ever be surprised if I brought home a big old fish.’
Brian said,
‘Not me. I liked –’
Rufus stood up. ‘It’s not your turn. I didn’t even do the worst thing yet.’
Brian ducked his head, rebuked, too easily hurt. I had one arm around the back of Hannah’s chair in case she should decide to bolt. With my free hand I touched Brian’s arm. ‘It’s your turn next, Bri. Okay, Rufus. Go ahead. Do the worst thing.’
Rufus picked up the father from the box in the centre of the table that held the doll family. ‘The worst thing was my father yelling last night. I hate it when he yells.’
‘Me too,’ Brian agreed, revitalised. ‘I hate it when they yell.’
‘He yelled and then my mother yelled back. She said he thought he knew everything. Is that right, do you think? Does he know everything?’
‘Does it seem like he does?’ I asked.
Rufus thought. ‘Not everything. Sometimes he just acts like he knows. Sometimes it’s like he’s scared we’ll find out he doesn’t know everything.’
I leaned towards Rufus. ‘You think it’d be scary –?’
‘Time’s up, Mary.’ Brian pointed to me clock, ‘He’s had his five minutes. It’s my turn. Right?’
There was never enough time. There were so many thoughts to follow. It was important to know all about each child, everything, the details as well as the main currents. But it was true that everybody had to have a turn. Circle lasted from nine thirty to ten, by the time the kids got back from the bathroom it was well after ten, and now it was already past ten twenty. There were still three more children to go – and we hadn’t even begun reading or maths.
‘You’re right. It’s your turn, Bri. But Rufus, remember, and maybe we can talk after lunch.’ Reluctantly Rufus relinquished the father doll to Brian.
‘Put them all back,’ Brian said. ‘Have to put all the dolls back in the box when your turn’s up.’ He carefully arranged the dolls so that the boy doll was close beside the mother. ‘The worst thing,’ he said, ‘was that the mother didn’t come in to watch TV with me. Had to watch all alone.’
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