by Torey Hayden
There was a flicker of expression on her face. Just enough that I knew what I’d said registered. And that she didn’t want to go back on homebound.
“Did things go wrong before you came to school today?” I asked.
She had stopped crying altogether, although her dark eyes still welled with tears.
Taking a tissue, I reached over to wipe her wet cheeks. She flinched back slightly.
“I’m not going to hurt you. Here. To make you feel better.” I tried again.
Venus was watching me very, very carefully as I lifted the tissue and gently wiped her face. I put my other hand on her shoulder.
I smiled. “You would rather be in here, wouldn’t you?” I asked. “With us. You don’t want to be on homebound. You want to come to school, don’t you?”
She nodded. Very, very, very faintly. I wouldn’t have seen it, if I hadn’t been watching her so closely. But it was a nod. It was a willing gesture.
I smiled more broadly. “You know what would happen, if you didn’t go to school?” I asked and let a teasing note come into my voice.
She didn’t respond except to keep her eyes on me.
“You might grow up to be a mule!” I laughed and then I started to sing one of our favorite songs in the class, indeed, one that I’d used for years in working with children: “Would You Like to Swing on a Star.”
“A mule is an animal with long, funny ears.” I waggled my hands beside my head. “He kicks up at anything he hears.”
This did get a reaction out of Venus. Her eyes went wide in surprise.
I reached down and took her hands. “Here. Step up here. Put your feet on top of mine. We’re going to dance.”
Venus clearly did not expect me to say this. She looked up, startled, then down at her feet.
“Come on,” I said. I bent down and lifted one of her feet onto my shoe. I straightened up and took her hands. “Put the other one on my other foot.”
Cautiously, Venus lifted her other foot and stepped up on top of my shoe.
I continued singing and started waltzing us around the room.
It was a surreal moment, dancing around the unlit classroom with Venus standing on my shoes while I sang an unaccompanied, slightly off-key version of a 1950s pop song.
I hadn’t planned this. Indeed, I hadn’t had even the briefest thought of it beforehand. There had been no “Maybe this will be better for her than the quiet chair,” or “Maybe this will shock a response from her.” There was only that moment of simple connection when I’d said “Do you want to come to school?” and I thought of the words of the song. Then spontaneity took over. Even I was somewhat surprised to discover myself whirling around the room.
We continued. I sang all the verses of the song and we kept dancing. I sang it again. Around and around the room we went.
Originally I was holding her hands in my hands, but as we progressed, I changed. I kept holding her left hand in my right hand, but with my left hand, I clasped her close against me so that I could move more fluidly. I was a lousy dancer. No two ways about that. I had no idea if this was a waltz rhythm or not, but it didn’t matter, as this was definitely not waltz music. So we went here and there with no rhythm at all. But it didn’t matter. When I looked down, Venus looked up to me. And she smiled. It was only a little smile with lips tight, but there was no denying. It was a smile.
Suddenly, the light went on.
“What are you doing?”
I stopped abruptly and turned my head. There was Julie in the doorway.
“It’s almost one o’clock,” she said, gesturing toward the clock, as if she realized she was interrupting something private and needed to explain her presence.
I smiled back. “We were dancing.”
“So I see. And I thought you’d come up to visit the quiet chair.” Julie had a wry smile on her face. “Never do know what production’s playing up here, do we?” She grinned at Venus as she went past.
But it was lost on Venus. She had retreated into unresponsive silence.
When afternoon recess came and Julie took the other children out, I went over to the reading corner. Venus followed voluntarily, as she had done for some days now.
“Would you like to pick a book?” I said. Thus far we had still been working with the two sets of stories about Frog and Toad and about Frances and I had been giving her a choice between two each day. But this afternoon I didn’t pick up any of them.
Venus stopped dead at the edge of the rug in the reading corner when I said that.
“You pick today,” I said. The books we usually used were lying on top of the low bookshelf within easy reach.
No response.
I waited.
No response.
Venus edged a little closer to me. We were perhaps three feet apart when she started. Her steps were minuscule, a few inches at a time, but she came closer. Not toward the books and the bookshelf, but closer to me.
I waited.
We had only twenty minutes, and we used up about ten of them in this agonizingly slow process of crossing the rug. I tried to show no impatience. Indeed, I didn’t feel any, so it wasn’t hard. The natural consequences of running out of time would speak more clearly than I could. I just stood and waited.
By this point, Venus had edged right up to me. She looked up at me. It was a long, searching look, the meaning behind it enigmatic, but it wasn’t blank as usual. Then very, very cautiously she lifted one foot. It hung there, suspended in midair for thirty or forty seconds, before she very, very slowly lowered it on top of my shoe.
“Ah,” I said in sudden understanding. “You want to dance again? You don’t want to read, you want to dance.”
Her eyes still on my face, she gave a small, quick nod.
So we danced. I sang “Would You Like to Swing on a Star” again and swung her around on my feet. Off across the room again, back and forth, holding her left hand with my right, wrapping my other hand around her back to hold her close enough against me so that I could move fluidly. She pressed her face so tightly into the wool of my sweater that I could feel the warmth of her breath through the material.
The next day when morning recess came, the bell rang and the boys shot off for their coats. I went out in the hall to supervise the whooping excitement as my children clattered down the stairs after Pam’s. When I turned to shut the classroom door before going down to the teachers’ lounge, I saw Venus was still inside the classroom.
“Hey ho, recess time,” I said from the doorway.
She crossed over.
“Quick, quick. Get your coat. Julie will be waiting for you. She’ll be saying ‘Where’s Venus this morning?’”
Venus stopped.
“Come on. Quick, quick.”
She looked up at me and I could sense the expectancy.
I smiled warmly. “You’re not in a hurry today, I see.”
Very carefully, she lifted one foot and lay it on my shoe. She was farther away from me than before, so it required a bit of deft stretching. Resting it ever so lightly, she looked up.
I grinned. “I see. You don’t want to go outside today. You want to dance.”
A slight, slight nod.
“I see. Hmmm.”
Venus was watching my face very carefully.
“Can you use the words?” I asked. “Can you say: ‘I want to dance’?”
A pause. She was still watching me intently, her dark eyes searching my face. “Dance,” she murmured so softly it was nothing more than a breath.
And so we did.
Chapter
18
Of all the children, the one I felt most concerned about was Jesse. Despite the testing earlier in the year, which substantiated Jesse’s normal IQ, he remained academically low functioning. He could not read even the most basic sight vocabulary. Indeed, his skills were little better than Shane’s or Zane’s, who were both younger and more severely challenged intellectually and behaviorally.
His Tourette’s syndrome c
reated numerous problems in this department. The tics interfered with his concentration and flooded his mind with obsessive thoughts. In particular, he was inclined to get sidetracked repeating words, either out loud or mentally, and this required extra time to do everything. In addition it seemed to incline him to a general restlessness that made it hard for him to sit down. Even when he was concentrating, he fidgeted constantly. But mostly he didn’t sit down. Two minutes with bottom applied to chair was about as long as he lasted before he was up. Often he didn’t wander. He just had to get up, move around, and reseat himself, which, of course, was very disruptive to his work. This restlessness also seemed to feed into a more general tendency toward aggression and irritability. Partly this was caused by the other kids becoming distracted by his movement and reacting, but partly, it seemed to be a sort of global irritability that Jesse felt toward almost everything. I think this was connected to the Tourette’s and to Jesse’s frustration at trying to control the tics enough to get through the demands of the day. Whatever, it took a terrible toll on his schoolwork.
I attempted to deal with this by responding to the positive things Jesse did and ignoring as much as possible the tics and their consequences. The other children were remarkably good about accepting Jesse’s various noises and actions without too much ado. As inclined to fighting as they were, it was seldom personal. Most of the aggression in the classroom seemed to come more out of each individual’s inability to control his own impulses rather than any particular animosity toward others, and hence, the children could be surprisingly understanding and diplomatic. Indeed, Billy sometimes even intervened on Jesse’s behalf on the playground when children from other classes teased him about his tics.
In an effort to address Jesse’s reading problems, I resorted to an old favorite of mine—the homemade game. There is a children’s board game called Candy Land that involves progressing along a long snaking path made up of different colored squares, and the players move forward by drawing cards from a pile and then moving their playing piece to the matching square on the path. When I’d first started teaching, I’d discovered that replacing the colored cards with math problems that the children then had to match to the right answer on the path made a good, quite enjoyable game. This led me to see what a wonderfully adaptable game Candy Land was in general, and I’d created many other variations along the way. In this case, I thought I would adapt it for Jesse, using simple sight words like was and what and saw, things he was always encountering and always confusing.
One of the pluses about Candy Land is that in the real game there are “wild cards” that can advance the player dramatically forward—or backward—in the game, depending on when they are drawn, and this added element of chance always lent excitement for the players. When I designed my own games, I added extra of these cards. Some of them, as in the real game, advanced players toward winning, but additionally, my cards included silly things on them—stand on one foot and hop around the table—or surprise prizes, like getting a bonus star for the star chart or five M&Ms. This not only lent excitement to the game, it also allowed a certain amount of general movement, which cut down on inappropriate restlessness.
One afternoon, I was playing Jesse’s version of the game with him and Billy and another little boy named James, who came in occasionally for reading help.
Jesse had had a bad day in general. His tics tended to wax and wane both in frequency and in strength, and in the previous week or so, some of the noisier, more intrusive ones were definitely on the increase. We were also having to give him more time to do things, like answer questions, because his tendency to get caught obsessively repeating words slowed everything down. Billy was relatively patient with this, but James found it annoying.
“Come on, kid, take your turn,” he kept saying, which only increased the time necessary for Jesse to answer.
I reached across and touched his arm. “That isn’t helpful, James.”
“He takes forever. We could have played this game about six times, if he’d just hurry up,” James replied.
“He’s doing the best he can,” I replied.
“He’s got tics,” Billy offered. “That’s how come he’s taking so long.”
“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” Jesse muttered.
“Yes, you’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry. Can you take your turn now?”
Jesse’s shoulders twitched. He held out his card and studied it carefully. I could tell by the expression on his face, he was mentally repeating something. There was this huge sense of expectation. He was just on the edge of speaking, but—
“Geez,” James finally said. “This is taking forever.”
That was it. Jesse exploded. He leaped up abruptly from the table, knocking the playing board off with one swift movement. The cards fluttered everywhere. Within the space of a breath, Jesse was over the table and had hold of James.
“Hey, hey, hey!” I said and pried them apart. “Jess. Over there. At your table. Get your folder out and start your work. James, here. Sit over here. Billy, to your table, please.”
“Geez! Do something to him, would you?” James squawked. “He’s not getting away with hitting me.”
“You let me take care of this,” I replied. “You sit here. You’ve only got ten minutes left anyway.”
Jesse couldn’t sit down. He tore around the classroom in a way that I knew would end in mayhem if I didn’t physically reorient him. I looked over to Julie, who was working with Gwennie. “Could you get him? Help him sit down and get on with his work?”
“I could help him,” Billy offered cheerfully.
“Thanks, Bill, that’s kind of you, but I think it would be more helpful if you just sat down at your own table and started your folder. When you’re done, you can check to see if Zane needs help with his work.”
“I don’t!” Zane replied testily.
“Yes, well, whatever,” I replied. “You do your work and Billy can do his. And you, James, on with yours.”
Julie managed to catch Jesse and get him seated, although this meant leaving Gwennie, who was trying to work on a report on peanuts for her other class. This was proving a real trial for her. Gwennie clearly had no idea what the whole point behind doing a “report” was. Even as basic as the requirements for a third-grade report were, they were too abstract for her. The previous time she’d had to do such a report, she’d simply reproduced what she’d read verbatim, so Julie and I had been trying to get the concept of summarizing across to her. Not easy. And Gwennie found it stressful. She resorted to numerous distraction techniques and persistently endeavored to get the conversation around to her favorite topic: foreign countries. And the more stressed Gwennie felt, the more likely she was to engage in autisticlike behaviors, such as spinning her pencil or echoing back words and phrases said to her.
Julie got Jesse to sit down and open his folder, at which point one of the twins needed attention and she went there. I stayed with James, as his time in the room was almost over. Peace reigned for three or four minutes, which was about as long as I’d expect peace to reign with this group.
“Fuck you!” Jesse cried out. I could tell by the way he said it, it was a tic and not actual swearing. This wasn’t a common tic for Jesse, but it did happen occasionally.
I ignored it and bent back over the work with James.
“Fuck you!” Jesse cried out again.
“Aren’t you going to stop him?” James asked in amazement.
“He can’t help it,” Billy said. “Just like you can’t help being a nosy bastard.”
I put a finger to my lips and looked over at Billy. “But you can. So get back to your work.”
“Fucker!” Jesse cried again.
And then suddenly, “Fucker!”
We all looked up. It was Gwennie. She had her head down and continued concentrating on her work. But just as Jesse barked out his swear word, Gwennie echoed it.
A surreal moment followed. Back and forth they went. Over
and over. Jesse was aware of what was happening, but the stress and the attention made him unable to control his tic. Gwennie was blithely oblivious.
“Fuck you!”
“Fuck you.”
“Shithead!”
“Shithead.”
Billy started to laugh. “Listen to you guys!”
“Man, you’re crazy in here,” muttered James, who had clearly had enough of us for that day. He collected his stuff together and prepared to go.
“Poophead!” Zane shouted, not wanting to miss out on this fun.
“Yeah, Poopyhead!” said Shane.
It deteriorated from there. All the boys were laughing uproariously by that point. Even Jesse, who was still barking out swear words, joined in. Gwennie started to laugh too. They all laughed. Raucous laughter. Lots of swear words. More laughter. More swearing. Everyone was holding their sides with hilarity.
I laughed too. And let them play noisily with the various words until everyone fell panting into their seats.
The only person who didn’t find this merry was Julie. She stood apart and smiled tolerantly and waited for all the hoots to subside before she said very tactfully, “It probably isn’t very kind to laugh at Jesse’s and Gwennie’s challenges.”
Billy turned to look at her. “It felt good. That was fun.”
“How would you feel if someone laughed about something you couldn’t help doing?” Julie asked.
“Well, sometimes you shouldn’t. But sometimes, I think it is okay. Because just now we weren’t laughing at them. We were laughing because it was funny,” Billy replied.
There was a moment’s pause.
Billy continued, “If we stopped laughing when Jesse said something funny because he’s got something wrong with him and we don’t want him to feel bad, then what we’re really thinking about is that Jesse’s got something wrong with him. But that’s not what we were thinking then. All we were thinking was that he said something funny. Which means we forgot he wasn’t just like everybody else. So, I think that’s okay. Sometimes you got to laugh. Sometimes stuff is just funny.”