Beautiful Child

by Torey Hayden

  Gwennie, we were discovering, was very badly bothered by sudden noises. This was particularly unfortunate because of Jesse’s sudden, frequent barklike sounds. Gwennie, in response, would clamp her hands over her ears.

  “Tell that boy to stop,” she demanded one afternoon.

  “I’m sorry it’s bothering you, Gwennie,” I said, “but it isn’t a noise Jesse can help making.”

  She couldn’t screen it out. Hands over her ears, she rocked back and forth.

  “Julie?” I asked. “Could you take Gwennie out in the hallway to work? Maybe for now that’ll help.”

  I went to work with Jesse while Julie and Gwennie went out of the room. Jesse seemed to be going through a stressful period, because his twitches and noises had become much worse over the previous few days. I was making a mental note to phone his grandmother and find out how things were at home when an explosion of sound came from the hallway. Getting up, I went out to see.

  Gwennie was having a full-blown tantrum. I didn’t know what had set it off. Possibly she’d simply had too much sensory input and couldn’t keep herself together any longer. Whatever, she had thrown herself down on the floor, kicking and screaming like a two-year-old.

  “Get her up,” I said to Julie. “Bring her inside.”

  Julie hovered, either uncertain or unwilling to grab hold of her.

  I stepped in and grabbed Gwennie’s arm. “Come on, sweetie. We can’t do this here. It makes too much noise.”

  She didn’t want to be touched. I’d discovered Gwennie was very sensitive to most stimuli, whether auditory, visual, or kinesthetic and today she’d clearly just had it, but I needed to move her out of the hallway because her screaming would disrupt other classes. Even as it was, I could hear classroom doors closing up and down the hall. So I half-pulled, half-dragged her into the room and over across to the reading corner.

  “You sit here for a while. Look, here’s the picture book of Germany. Remember this one, Gwennie? When you’re feeling better, you can have quiet time and look at it for a while.”

  She was too out of control to care, so I left her screaming on the rug.

  Gwennie wasn’t inclined to tantrums, but when she had one, it was a doozy. She was in a rather awkward position—on her knees with her bottom up but bent forward so that her forehead was on the floor rather like the Muslim prayer position—and she had her hands clasped over her head. She screamed and screamed.

  The kids all hated it, understandably, and several of them sat with their hands over their ears. Julie clearly hated it too. She moved nervously around. “Shouldn’t we be doing something for her?” she asked. “Should I try to hold her?”

  I shook my head. “No, I think she’s had too much stimulation. She was probably already wound up when she arrived and couldn’t cope with the added noise in here.” Some children with autistic-type problems often find sensory stimuli more intense than average—noises sound louder; smells are stronger. Same for touch. So I didn’t think she’d want to be touched at that point. She just needed to let off steam. “Why don’t you work with Zane instead?” I suggested. “You could do math flash cards.”

  After recess we were going to do cooking. This was an activity that I often used in my classrooms, since it could be used to teach math and reading, as well as patience, something few of my children had enough of. The added benefit was that virtually all the children enjoyed cooking. It was a freer and friendlier form of learning, and food is a powerful motivator.

  I didn’t think I’d better try anything too elaborate with this bunch, at least not during these early days, so I baked some cupcakes at home and brought them in. All we were going to do was make the icing. Then the children would ice their cupcake and decorate it. We planned to view all the finished results and then, of course, eat them!

  I thought it went relatively well, given this particular group and their normal behavior. Zane did smash one cupcake in anger when he couldn’t get the icing to go on the way he wanted. And Jesse did push one into Billy’s face, and they fell to fighting on the floor, but then Jesse and Billy would probably have fallen to fighting at some point, whatever we chose to do. I helped Gwennie back into the group. She was still feeling a little fragile and did not want anyone to be anywhere near her or even look at her cupcake, but she did manage to get icing onto it before slinking off into the reading corner to devour it. Julie was assigned to Venus, and this, of course, was its own usual hassle. Venus had to be guided to the table, her hand lifted to take the icing knife, her other hand guided to take the cupcake.

  “No,” I said, noticing Julie struggling. “Don’t let her get away with moving back. Make her join. Stand behind her so she can’t back off. Then just take her hand and do it.”

  I wasn’t sure whether, after coping unsuccessfully with Gwennie, Julie was afraid that she might set Venus off or whether she disagreed with forcing Venus to participate, but she seemed very hesitant. It was hard to know with Julie. She was hesitant about everything that involved pushing the children to do something. She was not an initiator. Nor, I discovered, was she very good at standing her own ground in the face of noisy opposition from one of the kids. But we were coping. While our styles were very different, I was so grateful for Julie’s help in the classroom that I could live with the difference. With children like Venus and Gwennie, who needed instant one-to-one attention on occasion, it was invaluable having another adult present.

  We survived cooking, and for the most part the kids loved the activity. When the afternoon came to an end, I was quite pleased. It had been a tiring day, but despite the various upsets, I felt like I’d stayed on top of everything and we’d ended the day in a reasonably cheerful, upbeat mood. I took the kids down to their buses and returned to the room.

  While I was down at the buses, Julie had endeavored to clean up the room in the aftermath of the cooking activity. She had the back sink full of soapy water and dirty dishes.

  “Hey, don’t bother with that,” I said. “We’ll just put them in that cardboard box over there and I’ll take everything home and put them in the dishwasher.”

  It was an innocent remark, made because I didn’t want to see her working so hard on something that didn’t really need doing. I was well aware by that point that Julie, like Gwennie, had just about had it with the day. And as with Gwennie, an innocent remark proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

  There was an extended moment when the muscles of Julie’s face pulled tight and she stood, frozen, all her concentration focused on keeping control. It was one of those odd slow-motion moments, because it felt long even though I knew it was short. I was aware of her expression, aware of what was happening, but not able to react fast enough to do anything helpful. Julie threw the paper towel down into the sink and left the room.

  I went after her.

  She didn’t go far. She stood just outside the door, taking deep, noisy inhalations to keep herself from crying.

  “Hey, kiddo,” I said and that proved too much for her. She dropped her head and dissolved into tears.

  I reached out and put an arm around her shoulders. “Come on back in the room.”

  Back at the table in the middle, where we usually did our after-school work, Julie flopped down. I lifted over the box of tissues and then sat down myself across from her.

  “I can’t do this,” she said. This made her cry in earnest again. She’d had her elbow on the table, hand bracing her cheek, but she opened her hand to cover her face and turned slightly away from me.

  “No, I think you’re doing fine,” I said softly. “It was just a bad day.”

  Julie shook her head. “No, I can’t do this. I thought I could. I thought I’d like it, but I hate it.”

  “It was just a bad day,” I said.

  “They’re all bad days for me, Torey. I can’t do this. I can’t be what you expect of me.”

  “No, I’m not expecting, Julie. You’re doing well. I’m happy with how you are in here.”

>   “You are expecting. Maybe you don’t know you are. But you are. You expect me to be as good as you. You expect me to be you. And I can’t be.”

  I’d been aware there were problems. I knew Julie found the daily rough-and-tumble a little too rough and tumbly sometimes. And true, I was aware of relying on her more than she was really trained for. But I had no awareness of expecting her to “be me,” as she put it. This took me a bit aback because these sounded very much like the words that come right before “I quit.”

  “What do I do that makes you feel this way?”

  “You want me to be you.”

  “In what way?”

  She snuffled and wiped her eyes with her fingers. “You want me to think like you. You want me to do things your way. If I don’t, if I fail … I feel scared to fail because then I know you’re going to be thinking, ‘If she’d done it my way …’”

  “That’s not really what I’m thinking at all, Julie. If you fail, what I’m going to be thinking is: ‘How can we get this sorted out?’”

  Julie didn’t respond. She wiped her eyes again.

  Unfortunately, as I considered what Julie said, I realized it was partly true. I did find her permissive attitude toward the children out of sync with my philosophy, and when she got herself into trouble I was sometimes aware of thinking that maybe now she’d see the value of my approach. So, yes, there probably was an element of that. But they were normal kinds of thoughts, natural thoughts that come up whenever there are differing points of view. There’d never been any intentional control freakery involved.

  The awful aspect of this discussion was that Julie was not saying she found it hard to cope with the kids. She was saying she found it hard to cope with me. This made me feel guilty and unexpectedly defensive.

  “What do you think would help?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said pessimistically. This brought the tears back. She struggled with them a moment, the muscles of her face taut.

  Watching her, I was distracted yet again by the thought of how young she looked. She could have been fifteen or sixteen from her appearance. I was overcome with an urge to ask her how old she was, which was hardly appropriate at the moment, but it led me to ponder how difficult it must be to establish any type of credible authority when you looked like a teenager. With kids or adults. It also occurred to me that such youthfulness brought out a maternal response in me. I wanted to give her a hug and tell her I’d make it better. I didn’t really want to say maybe she was more right than I was and we’d try it her way.

  “This is a lot different from working for Casey Muldrow,” she said in a very heartfelt way.

  “Yes, I’m sure it is. And I’m sorry for my part in this. I’ve been expecting too much out of you,” I said. “I shouldn’t have done it.”

  “It’s not your fault. It’s me. I thought this would be fun. I thought it’d be an interesting challenge, because I thought I was ready for something more challenging....” Her words trailed off.

  “I’ve been acting like this is your field and you’re fully trained,” I said. “Which is my mistake, not yours. You’re doing all right. I’m happy with what you’re doing. I know it looks like Chaos City in here most days, but, really, we’re doing well. The boys are coming together.”

  She dropped her head down and braced it on her hand.

  “And, listen, I’m aware we have different philosophies,” I said. “We have different approaches. That’s not a bad thing. Certainly it’s something I can live with, so I don’t mean to make you feel that you should change.”

  Julie reached over for a tissue, took it, blew her nose. “Yeah. Okay,” she said. She gave a long sigh and then shrugged. “I guess it’s just been a bad day.”

  I nodded.

  “I didn’t mean to lose it. That’s probably the last thing you need. First the kids, then me.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  “Yeah, well. It probably is just me.” She rose from the table. “Anyway, I think I’m going to go home. I’ve had it for today.”

  “Okay.”

  I really would have preferred she stayed. She was still clearly upset, and I knew she’d be in tears again once she got to her car or wherever. I would have preferred us to have talked until everything was hashed out between us and we ended up with, if not agreement, then at least a companionable understanding of our differences. I had to accept, however, that I was probably not someone she wanted comfort from, at least not at that moment. Indeed, I was probably who she wanted to get away from.

  Julie picked up her things and left. I sat glumly.

  Oh well. At least she hadn’t mentioned quitting.

  Chapter

  11

  Hell broke out two days later. It was over the lunch hour, and I actually wasn’t at school at the time. I had a friend teaching at another school nearby and it was her birthday, so I’d popped out to join her for a celebratory double cheeseburger at Burger King. I was only gone thirty minutes of my forty-five-minute lunch hour, but when I pulled my car back into the parking lot, I was greeted by the sight of an ambulance and a great furor on the playground. Given the rush of people toward me when I got out of my car, I had no trouble discerning one of my kids was involved. And, of course, it took no great genius to guess it was Venus.

  The details leading up to the event still weren’t clear, but apparently Venus had gone into one of her rages and taken after a little boy in the first grade. He fled to the climbing bars for safety with Venus in hot pursuit. In his haste, he missed one of the bars, fell off, broke his arm, and hit his head.

  To say the school staff were in an uproar was a vast understatement. Complacent as Bob normally was, on this occasion he had gone absolutely ballistic. It came from fear mostly, I think, because the little boy was from a fairly well-to-do family—the kind to know lawyers personally—and Bob’s first thoughts were of a lawsuit.

  “That child has to go!” he was crying. “We can not keep her here. She’s dangerous. She’s going to kill somebody sooner or later and she just can’t be here.”

  The playground aides were in a panic. The little boy’s first-grade teacher was angry to the point of shouting at me, as if my being off the school grounds was the sole reason this had happened and I was personally responsible. I should have been controlling her, the teacher yelled.

  Venus had been taken inside. She was still screaming. I could hear her through the doors, through the partition of the office, through the walls. I moved past the people on the playground to go in to her, but Bob put a hand out and touched my arm.

  “No,” he said. “Don’t bother.”

  I looked at him.

  “Just leave her. Go on up to your room.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s not going back into your class. She’s done here. We’ve called her mother,” Bob said. “So just go up to the kids you’ve got.”

  “But—”

  He shook his head. “No. This was an incident too far. She can go on homeschooling or … I don’t know. Frankly, I don’t care. As long as she’s out of here.” His eyes met mine. There was a small pause and then he shrugged. “Anyway, your kids are all upstairs waiting, so it’s best if you just go on up.”

  I was in a state of shock. It had all happened so fast. Before lunch Venus was part of the class. After lunch she was gone.

  The boys were sitting wide-eyed. Julie hadn’t even made an effort to occupy them. Probably she couldn’t have, if she’d tried, as the hubbub down on the playground was too much to ignore.

  “Man, what did I tell you!” Billy shouted as I came through the door. “Said Psycho was gonna kill somebody someday, huh? I said that, didn’t I? I was right.”

  “Billy, sit down, please,” I replied and took off my coat. “Everybody. Find your seats.”

  “Mine’s not lost,” Billy piped up.

  I shot him the evil eye. “I’m not having a good day. It would not take much for me to feel very angry, Billy.�
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  Billy pulled his head down between his shoulders.

  “So, what’s going to happen?” Jesse asked.

  I knew he meant Venus.

  “Okay. Look, guys. Come here. Pull your chairs over into a circle right here. Because I know you’ve probably got lots of feelings about what just happened out there and lots of questions. So, let’s have a talk about it, okay?”

  Just then, Gwennie arrived.

  “Gwennie, you too,” I said. “We’re going to start the afternoon with a discussion instead of what we normally do.”

  “Yeah, we’re going to discuss how Psycho Girl killed some poor kid in the first grade,” Billy added.

  For this group they were pretty cooperative. I didn’t make the circle too close, so as not to infringe on anyone’s personal space, but I did get them to put their chairs in a semicircle in the middle of the room—the first time I’d tried such a thing with them—and no one immediately committed mayhem. I put Julie between Billy and Jesse. Indeed, I sat on the other side of Billy with the hopes that between Julie and me, we could keep him halfway restrained. Gwennie did not like this change in her routine. She was the hardest to settle. “Gwennie, sit down, please.”

  She sat, but within two seconds she was on her feet again.

  “Gwennie, sit down, please.”

  “It’s time to do programs. Time to do my folder.”

  “Today we’re doing it a little differently. Then we’ll do folders. Sit down, please.”

  She sat, but within two seconds she was again on her feet.

  “Geez, sit down, would you?” Billy squawked.