Beautiful Child

by Torey Hayden

  Truth was, I knew I was engaging her already. The signs, however, were very, very subtle. For instance, she now hung back at recess period. When the recess bell rang at the end of an activity, Venus paused. She didn’t actually go over to the reading corner yet. No response that open. But she didn’t allow herself to be blindly herded to the door by the others either. And she was always checking my eyes, checking the inclination of my body. When I turned to go to the reading corner, she turned herself, and although she waited for me to call her over, she did respond then. She would cross the room now to join me.

  Indeed, what pleased me more was that I noticed her doing the same thing at the morning recess. Even though I didn’t read to her then and she always went out on the playground with Julie, there was now that moment of hanging back. My sense was that she was hoping I might read to her, that she was waiting to see if it was possible. But we were talking subtle here. Very, very subtle behavior changes. If I hadn’t been paying such acute attention to her, I’m sure I wouldn’t have noticed anything but a blank face and immobile body.

  In mid-January, I thought I would try to elevate us to the next level of communication. Instead of picking out one of the books, as I usually did, and commencing to read, this time I chose two. One Frog and Toad book. One Frances book. I held them out.

  “Which story shall we read today?”

  Venus regarded me.

  “You choose. This one? Or this one?”

  No response.

  I waited. Sitting down on my knees, I lay the two books in front of me. “Come down here,” I said quietly.

  Unexpectedly, she did. She knelt down opposite me.

  “Which book shall we read today? The Frances one? Let’s see. It’s called Bread and Jam for Frances. That’s a funny one. Remember? We read it last week. Or shall we read Frog and Toad Together? I like that one too.”

  No response.

  I waited. A minute, two minutes passed. And two minutes feels like eternity in such a silence.

  I pondered the best course of action. More waiting? Or choosing for her? I did not want to make this confrontational but I also did not want to run over any embryonic efforts to cooperate by solving the situation myself.

  I saw her arm move. Very, very slightly. She didn’t even lift her hand off her knee, but her arm twitched. So, I interpreted it, assuming even a wrong interpretation still put the onus of choice on her.

  “That one?” I said, lifting the Frances book. “You want this one?”

  Her eyes met mine.

  I nodded cheerfully. “This one? Yes, I like this one too.”

  So, this became our game. Each day I gave her a choice of books. Each day I asked her which one she wanted. Each day we waited and waited for a response until finally she did something—incline her head, twitch her arm—anything that I could take as an answer. I couldn’t exactly dignify it so much as to say Venus was choosing the books, but I did have the sense that she was making an effort.

  This went on, day after day, without variation.

  Then … the first breakthrough.

  We had gone through the whole palaver of choosing which book. The drawback to this activity was that it always cut quite badly into the twenty minutes we had during the recess period for reading together. On this day, it had taken almost seven minutes to choose Best Friends for Frances, so I settled down to read it.

  As had become our custom, I took Venus on my lap. I felt this was an important part of the process. Working on the theory that she had been a very severely deprived child in terms of attention and stimulation, I always tried to provide her with tactile stimulation when I could—holding her, hugging her, laying my hand on her shoulder, catching her attention by touching her face. I often ran my free hand up and down her forearm as I read. As with my friend who gently brushed her brain-damaged son, I felt the regular, rhythmic sensation would provide valuable stimulation for a contrary brain.

  This had been a distracting day for me. Along with the fact that it had taken quite a while to choose the story, so we were a bit short of time, I was further distracted by the fact that it had snowed heavily outside and I could hear some of the children on the playground hitting windows with snowballs. They weren’t my windows and I assumed the playground staff would be on top of it, but I kept hearing them, kept pausing. Finally, I put my free hand down on the floor and rose a little ways up on my knees, lifting both of us up in the process, so that I could see over the edge of the window. But I couldn’t get a good enough view. So, muttering something about “naughty children,” I went back to reading about Frances the badger and her friendship woes.

  Several minutes into the story, I unexpectedly felt Venus’s hand on my wrist. When I’d risen to try and see out the window, I’d taken my free hand down. Now, very gently, she reached down and lifted my hand back up, placing it on her other arm.

  “You like that?” I said quietly. “You want me to put my arms around you while I read?”

  There was the most imperceptible of nods.

  “Okay,” I said and continued reading.

  That was it. That was all the interaction I had for that day. But I couldn’t have been more pleased.

  And thus it started.

  After almost five months in my classroom, Venus very slowly began to respond. This was, by no means, a miracle breakthrough. She still did not talk. She still did not do anything at all in class. But during the twenty minutes we were together over the afternoon recess, a very subtle form of communication started up between us.

  The next day when I presented her with the choice of two books, she hesitated in the way she always did and I waited in the way I always did. But then very, very slowly she raised her right hand an inch or two away from her body and put her index finger slightly forward. It was impossible to tell which book she was indicating, but it was clear for the first time she was indicating.

  “That one?” I said, holding up the Frog and Toad book.

  An almost imperceptible nod.

  For a week or so we went on like this. I don’t think she was actually choosing a book, per se. She was simply lifting a finger. But I was willing to accept any effort at communication.

  Then, about ten days later we progressed again.

  “This book?” I said after she had moved her index finger.

  There was a long pause, and she did not give her imperceptible nod.

  I waited.

  No response.

  “This book?” I asked again.

  Very, very, very slowly she lifted her hand and leaned slightly forward to tap the other book.

  “Ah, you want the Frances story? Good. I’m glad to know. Yes, of course, I’ll read that.”

  Venus nodded. Indeed, she nodded a second time more obviously. Then she came willingly onto my lap.

  Coming back from our winter break, Julie and I had picked up pretty much where we left off. Nothing more was said about the disagreement on the last day of school.

  This lent a small, continual undercurrent of tension to the classroom. Julie made it apparent that she did not feel she was doing anything wrong. This made me self-conscious about whether we were having real problems or whether this was simply my problem. In the end, I decided to seek Bob’s advice.

  I explained the situation—that Julie and I had a difference of philosophy that we just didn’t seem able to reconcile—and asked him what he thought I should do about it.

  Bob was surprised. I didn’t have a history of colleague problems. I was occasionally regarded with mild suspicion, largely because I was unconventional, noisy, and inclined to speak my thoughts fairly unedited, but I found it easy to get along with people and I’d always had good relationships with the other staff. Moreover, he was surprised to find that, of all people, it was Julie I was having trouble with. Julie was so personable, so self-effacing and sweet. And she had an impeccable record for the time she’d been at the school.

  “I wish you had come to talk to me about this earlier,” he s
aid when I finished explaining. “If it’s actually compromising the atmosphere in the classroom, we should have sorted it out by now.”

  “I think compromising is the wrong word.”

  Bob regarded me.

  I paused. “Well, yes. Maybe ‘compromising’ isn’t the wrong word. I suppose it has. It’s taken such a long time to bring this group together. I mean, geez. There’s only five kids. I think if I’d felt Julie was behind me … And now … if only she would support me.”

  “Support you how? How, specifically, do you feel she isn’t supporting you?”

  I considered.

  The frank truth was that by steadfastly refusing to join in our zillion silly songs every day she wasn’t supporting me. But I felt so stupid for saying that. Nothing in Julie’s job contract had specified she should sing. Yet, by not joining in, she kept herself apart from us. That made her feel like an outsider, as if we were excluding her, while it made me feel like she was excluding us. This emphasized the division between us. I found this hard to tell Bob because it made me sound petty. How could singing a bunch of children’s songs become so important?

  But it was. The songs had become our group identity.

  Haltingly, I tried to explain this to Bob.

  “It doesn’t have to do with how well she can sing. I’m no great shakes myself. Musicality has nothing to do with it. It’s the refusal to join in, to be part of us.”

  “Well, you might be asking just a little bit too much, Torey,” Bob replied gently. “I can think of quite a few adults who would be too self-conscious to go around bursting into song. Even if it was just in front of a bunch of kids.”

  “Yes, I know. But that’s not what I’m saying really. It’s the joining-in part. Not the singing. I mean, she wouldn’t have to sing. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. She’s not simply ‘not participating.’ She’s refusing to participate. There’s a qualitative difference. After all these months of not being able to bring this class together, I’ve finally hit on something that works. If she wanted to be supportive, she could clap the rhythm or hum or dance with the kids or do something to indicate that she agrees, that she’s glad we’ve come together as a class.”

  Bob scratched his head thoughtfully. “I can see this one coming,” he said with a humorous edge to his voice. “Calling Julie in here and saying, ‘Well, if you can’t sing along in Torey’s class, would you please hum or dance, please?’”

  We both laughed.

  “No, seriously,” Bob said, “I do hear where you’re coming from on this. It still surprises me. I will admit that. But then Julie’s only responsibility up to this point has been for Casey Muldrow.”

  “And what about the philosophy issue? How should I handle that?” I asked.

  Bob sighed.

  “To be perfectly honest, I find it creepy,” I said. “I try not to. But it’s like being with a Stepford wife. Julie just does not respond to anything negatively. She is relentlessly positive, like everything is on the same plane. I keep thinking, How can you use the same tone of voice to say, ‘Oops you just dropped the fishbowl and killed all the fish’ as you use to say, ‘I love you’? And she keeps thinking it’s right.”

  A pause.

  “And then I think, ‘This isn’t human. How much rage are you swallowing?’ ‘How terrible will it be when it comes out?’ ‘Will you be a really scary person then?’”

  “Do you think the children feel this way?” Bob asked.

  “I dunno. They seem to relate to her all right. They play her up. She isn’t very good with discipline and they know it, so they can get really obnoxious. But maybe it’s only me who thinks she’s scary. Maybe I’m sensitized by this point.”

  And then silence.

  “So, what shall we do?” Bob asked. “How do you want me to handle this?”

  “Get me another aide?” I said quietly, more as a wish than a question.

  “I don’t think that’s possible. Not if she’s not doing anything really wrong.”

  “No, I realize that. But she’s not any happier about all this than I am, I’m sure. If she could have a quieter, more predictable classroom and I could have a plain, old, ordinary person. Not a saint …”

  Bob smiled. “What if I just talk to her, for a start? Get everything out in the open. See where she stands. See if she can alter her behavior a little. And maybe you can alter yours.”

  “As in?”

  “As in being a little more tolerant of a different approach.”

  I nodded.

  “From the sounds of things, I can hear where you’re coming from on this. And I have faith in whatever methods you are using. So, it does sound like Julie has some problems and I will talk to her about them. But there are a million ways of interacting with people. If she isn’t actually hurting the children, if she isn’t upsetting them or interfering with their progress, then we may simply have to accept that this is a way different from our own, but it isn’t wrong. And so we’ll need to adjust too.”

  Chapter

  17

  Since Venus had returned at the beginning of December, her behavior on the playground had been more controlled. This was due in part to the fact that she was being so closely supervised. She still had her own aide at lunchtime. Julie watched her at morning recess, and I kept her in at afternoon recess. So there was much less chance of her attacking other children. But even so, there seemed to be fewer problems generally. Although there had been some minor scuffles, we didn’t have a serious run-in until early February.

  On this particular occasion, Venus simply seemed to be having a very bad day. She had had a small run-in before school. Wanda had trudged up the many stairs to the classroom slowly, huffing and puffing, her ever-increasing weight making the climb hard work. Venus was coming up behind her when one of the twins, frustrated by Wanda’s slow speed, had pushed on by. This enraged Venus, who let out a howl and took after him, but he had a head start. He shot into the classroom and I managed to snag Venus at the doorway. I plopped her in the quiet chair. Within a few minutes she had collected herself enough to sink back into her normal stupor, so that was the end of it.

  Midway through math we had another incident, this time with Billy. I didn’t know what started it, but I suspect it was something totally insignificant, like Billy’s brushing against her. Venus roared to life and socked him on the side of the head before I could intervene. So back to the quiet chair.

  Then at recess she again had a flare-up. This time Julie interceded before it went too far and Venus retreated to leaning against her wall, even though it was snow covered. She returned to the classroom soggy and silent when the bell rang and resumed her place at the table.

  At lunchtime I was just finishing my soup and sandwich in the teachers’ lounge when I heard Venus’s familiar scream filtering up from the playground. Pam, who was sitting across from me, raised her eyes to meet mine.

  “Here we go,” I muttered and rose from my chair.

  Looking out the window, I saw a crowd gathered over by the spiral slide. From there I couldn’t tell who all was involved, but I knew I better go down. So I packed up what remained of my meal, set it on the side table, and left the room.

  Bob was already on the playground by the time I got there, as were two other teachers, Julie, and, of course, the aide who was responsible for Venus. It was hard to tell what had happened. No one knew exactly what had set Venus off, but she had taken offense at something that a third-grade girl had done and had chased the girl all the way across the playground until the girl had started to climb up the slide to get away from her. Apparently then Venus had grabbed hold of the girl’s legs and tried to pull her off. She hadn’t managed. The aide who was supervising her had caught up with her by this point, but the third-grader was still screaming bloody murder and Venus was screaming even louder. And fighting harder. She thrashed fiercely, struggling to break the grip of the three adults who held her.

  My biggest concern was less Venus herself at that mo
ment than that someone was going to say how inappropriate it was having this girl at school and suggest she be returned to homebound education. Excluding her had happened so quickly on the previous occasion that I was fearful of a repeat. So my focus was solely on getting her off the playground.

  “I’ll take her,” I said when I reached the group. “I’ll take her upstairs.”

  I grabbed Venus under the arms and flung her up over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes. I don’t know if it was my sudden movement or if the position itself had an effect, but when I did it, she immediately stopped struggling. She was still screaming, still crying, but she didn’t fight. Clutching her tightly, I headed off for the school building.

  Venus sobbed noisily.

  I plodded up the stairs, one after the other, and cursed quietly about being on the top floor. She was a child of seven, and so not tiny. It felt like climbing the Matterhorn. At the top, I opened the door into the unlit classroom and set her down.

  She was still sobbing in the strangulated half-screaming way that was her trademark.

  I took a moment to catch my breath. My intention had been to put her in the quiet chair, but I didn’t. Instead, I came down on one knee to be at her height.

  “You’re really having a bad day, aren’t you? Things aren’t going right for you.”

  Venus regarded me through her tears. She wasn’t perhaps quite as blank as usual, but nothing gave me the impression she would respond to me either.

  “I know the children make you mad sometimes. I know they get on your nerves and you feel very angry. But it is important to handle these feelings in a different way, because I want you to stay in my class. Here. With me. But you have to handle your angry feelings differently. If you can’t, Mr. Christianson will say you need to go on homebound again. Then you will have to stay home all the time.”