by Torey Hayden
I gave a slight shrug. “I never planned this either. I got my degree in biology. I was going to be a wildlife biologist. Study bears in Yellowstone Park. I love Yellowstone. I’ve spent some part of every year of my life there, and that’s just what I wanted to keep doing.”
Her eyes widened. “So how did you end up doing this?”
“I was poor. I took a job to see myself through college and it just happened to be in a program for special ed. kids. I walked through the door and that was it. I never left.”
“How come?” Julie asked.
“The first day I arrived, the director said, ‘There’s this kid you can work with,’ and he pointed out this little four-year-old girl who was hiding under the piano. And I said, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ And he said, ‘You’ll think of something.’ And I was scared shitless. I mean, what did I—some eighteen-year-old biology major—know about doing this? And I said that. I said, ‘Whatever am I supposed to do? What if I make a mistake?’ And he said, ‘At least try. Your mistakes will still be better than her life is right now, over under that piano. And nothing can change until someone tries.’ And so that’s what I did. And by the end of it, I was thinking, there is nothing—nothing—that I could enjoy doing more than this.”
“You’re lucky,” Julie said. “Most of us don’t live such a charmed life.”
Chapter
25
The following Monday Venus again did not turn up for school. This angered me. When I hung out the attendance slip, I underlined Venus’s name and wrote “AGAIN!” in big red letters, hoping it would spur someone in the office into checking on what was going on. However, with the other children there, at that point I was unable to look into the matter myself.
After morning recess I was settling the boys with their folders to do math. It was about 10:40 and I was with Zane, doing counting, when there was a heavy knock at my door. I rose and went over.
Wanda stood in the hallway. She was totally inappropriately dressed. Even though we had reached mid-March, the temperature remained below freezing and there was still snow on the ground. Wanda, however, wore what looked like an old-fashioned housedress—the sort made of printed cotton that snapped up the front—and a cardigan. No coat, no hat, no gloves. And on her feet she was wearing pink fluffy slippers. This, however, was nothing compared to how Venus was dressed. Venus did have a coat on. However, underneath it she wore a red polyester football shirt about three sizes too big and what looked to be the flannel bottoms of a pair of boys pajamas. That was all. She wore overshoes on her feet.
“Her come to school,” Wanda said. “Beautiful child come today.”
“Yes, you’ve brought her. Thank you, Wanda. But it’s late this morning.”
Wanda looked at me blankly.
“Did you oversleep?”
“Beautiful child come to school,” Wanda replied.
“Where are your proper clothes, Wanda?”
A baffled expression crossed her face. She looked down at herself.
“Where are your gloves?”
Wanda looked at her hands. “No gloves.”
“No, I see no gloves. Remember I gave you gloves last time you were here? Where are they?”
“No gloves.”
Giving up, I sighed. “Okay, thank you for bringing Venus. Good-bye now.” I closed the door gently on Wanda, who was still standing in the hallway. Putting a hand on Venus’s back, I guided her over to the little area beyond my desk where the hooks were for outer clothes.
“Here, let’s take your coat off.”
Venus stood, unresponsive.
“Can you help me? Hold out your arm, please.”
She did nothing.
I was cursing to myself as I lifted her arm to remove her coat. This is what always happened. I’d make a little progress with her, then she’d be absent and lose it all. This was a hopeless situation.
I knelt down. “Let’s take off your overshoes.”
Because Venus was in her totally unresponsive mode, this meant I had to lift her leg myself and pull off the boot, but when I did, it came off easily. That’s because there was no shoe inside. There wasn’t even a sock. She was barefoot inside the plastic overshoes.
“Oh dear, look at this,” I said. “You left the house without your shoes on.”
I looked up at her, shabbily dressed in the oversize shirt and flimsy flannel bottoms, and now, no shoes.
“What happened? Did Wanda put out your clothes?”
It occurred to me to wonder for the first time how she got ready for school in the morning. I had yet to discern if she was as unresponsive at home as she was at school. There seemed no reason to think otherwise. If so, she’d have to be dressed because she wouldn’t do it for herself. Most days she came with reasonably appropriate clothing, so either she was doing it herself or someone was laying the clothes out for Wanda. Or maybe Teri dressed her. Whatever, the system had failed this morning.
“I think you’re going to have to leave your boots on,” I said. “It’s too cold to go barefoot in the classroom.”
Venus watched me as I spoke. Her eyes weren’t vacant. It had actually been quite a while since she’d given me the absolutely vacant stare. Now, even when she was totally unresponsive, she still gave the impression of someone being home in there behind her eyes. At home. Just not answering the door.
Lunch was a familiar round of conversations with Bob after I told him about how Venus had arrived an hour and a half late and dressed inappropriately. What was the status with Social Services? Was the truant officer following up on these absences? What was happening with Venus’s older brothers and sisters? Were they absent as much as she was? What could be done for Wanda, who seemed to be simply wandering around miserably?
I was full of angry frustration. I told him that here it was March, almost April, and not only had we made very slow progress with Venus, I had not even managed to determine what her problem was. Despite having visited the home, despite having talked to Teri, I didn’t even know yet if Venus was as consistently unresponsive at home as at school. After all this time. No reliable test data had been acquired. Teri’s answers had always been vague and disorganized, never giving useful information. I had no idea of her academic abilities, no understanding of the source of her problems, nothing, really. How was it I could see this child day in and day out and still know so little? How was it we could have a child registered in the school and targeted by Social Services and goodness knows how many other government bodies and we still never accomplished anything? Something had to be done for this girl.
Bob was as frustrated as I was. He said this was an instance of bureaucracy tying itself in knots. He told me how he’d been onto Social Services again about Venus. The social worker told him she’d been out to their place about something else. She hadn’t seen Venus but she had talked to Teri and she brought up Venus and her irregular schooling. That was about as close as we were probably going to get with Social Services, Bob muttered.
Bob said at the end of the day, this was a “poverty problem.” He said he knew this was difficult for us to deal with, but sadly about as much was being done as could be done in the circumstances. Which was probably true. Other than the bothersome truancy problem, there was no concrete evidence of law breaking. Just careless or inept parenting. And a lot of stuff that “shouldn’t” happen. But in the real world it did because society had yet to come up with effective, civilized ways of dealing with people who were overstretched by too many children and too little money, of dealing with the subculture surrounding many of them, which was so misunderstood by the middle classes, of dealing with the complex machinations of the modern family, which often contained related and unrelated combinations, including adults who sometimes had little interest in providing a stable home for children who were not theirs. When Bob said it, I knew his term “poverty problem” was not derisive, either of Venus and her family or of the local Social Services. It was just a statement of the facts. Our town, largel
y built on the steel industry of the nineteenth century, had been in decline for decades as steel prices fell and contracts had gone elsewhere. Unemployment ran almost three times the national average. The downtown area was full of vacant buildings. Across the railroad tracks were empty, crumbling factories. Venus and her family were not exceptions in our community and certainly not in our school, which drew largely from the poorer part of town. These were things one just couldn’t think about too closely; otherwise it was a temptation to give up before one ever got started.
When I came downstairs after my lunch, there was Venus, waiting for me by the door. I opened it and let her in. She came willingly, clomping along in her shoeless galoshes. With the black humor one tends to develop in circumstances like these, I thought, At least I don’t need to worry about her attacking anyone today. If she tried, the boots would trip her up and she’d fall flat on her face.
Upstairs, I took one of the She-Ra tapes out of the file drawer and held it out to her.
Venus had stopped just inside the door. She looked at me and at the tape in my hand.
“Do you want to put it in the VCR?” I asked.
She didn’t move.
“Come here.”
She didn’t move.
I crossed over to her. Kneeling down, I put my hand on her arm. “What’s the matter?”
She regarded me.
I reached up to touch her face. There was a faint movement from her, a very slight pulling back, but she did let me touch her. “My feeling is that something is wrong. Can you tell me what’s the matter?”
Unexpectedly, tears welled up in her eyes and they were down over her cheeks before I even realized what was happening.
“Come here, lovey. What’s wrong?” I pulled her against me.
With that, she let out an enormous, noisy sob.
“Hey, hey, hey, poor you,” I said. I sat down on the floor right there by the door. Pulling her onto my lap, I wrapped my arms around her.
Venus cried in loud, inelegant sobs.
This was the first time I had seen her cry thus. Previously she’d only cried angrily in response to being thwarted in the middle of one of her explosions.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” I put my hand on her forehead. “Are you not feeling well?”
She wouldn’t answer me. She just sobbed.
Then the bell rang. We were still on the floor by the door. The sound of children pounding up the stairs began to fill the hallways. Venus tensed. She pulled away from my arms. Although I had the box of tissues down with us, she rubbed her forearm across her face, quickly mopping up her eyes and nose. And she closed back up. It was quite amazing to see, because it was an actual phenomenon, like a time-elapse film of a flower closing. The tears vanished. Her eyes shaded. By the time the boys burst through the door, she looked as if nothing had happened.
After school Bob stopped by my room. I was on my own, as Julie had had to rearrange her schedule that week to accommodate a day care problem with Jon-Paul and had thus left right after the bell.
I assumed he was coming in to talk to me about Venus. One of the plans we’d come up with over the lunch hour had been to try and pull together some kind of coordinating conference with Social Services, the police, and everyone else who was involved with the family to see if we could get some agreement not only about how to proceed, but also about how to communicate better with one another.
Sitting at the middle table, I was grading work and preparing the children’s folders for the next day, so I shoved out the chair across from me with my foot and invited him to sit down.
“About Venus …,” he started.
I looked up.
“Well, not about Venus. This isn’t a continuation of what we were talking about at lunch,” he said and sat down. “There’s another matter with Venus.” He paused. “I’ve had word about there being a … well, sort of … a racial concern.”
My eyes went wide.
“I hate to bring this up with you, Torey, but I’m afraid I need to. I need to be clear on this. What’s the scoop about your using racially inappropriate material with Venus? Is this the cartoons? Those videos?”
“Julie?” I asked back.
Bob paused. Then slowly he nodded.
“She’s been bearing tales to you?”
“Not ‘bearing tales.’”
“No, it is bearing tales. And quite frankly, Bob, that’s what I consider inappropriate.”
“She says she has talked to you about it, so she wasn’t coming to me without having spoken to you first.”
“Well, yes. She did speak to me but I thought we were over it. She’s reading into things what isn’t there,” I said. “It’s more a difference in style than anything else.”
“Fine line here, Torey. Because while I don’t dispute that you’re a good teacher, I must say, your ‘style’ is very much your own. And I’ve been aware of this. It isn’t simply a matter of Julie bearing tales. I’ve been aware of it on my own.”
I regarded him. “Such as?”
“Let’s take your classroom singing, for example. Now, I think what you’ve done is really cool in a way. I mean, it is like one of those stories out of Reader’s Digest or something. A bunch of tough little boys who have been tamed by music. A behaviorally disordered class that works like an operetta. I mean, that’s cool. It sounds cool. But out in the real world, how much of it is going to transfer? Are they actually learning to control their behavior? Do I need to give all my other teachers singing lessons? Or more to the point, inhibition lessons, so that they can happily burst into song anytime they need to interact with one of your students? Because that’s the ultimate goal here—to get these children out of your class and into theirs. You’ve hit on a very creative way of gaining control in your classroom, but is it a way that will allow these children to rejoin regular education?”
If I was honest, such questions had never even crossed my mind once. I was surprised and, indeed, a little hurt that Bob should consider this innocent activity unsuitable. It had never occurred to me that our singing would be thought of as anything other than positive.
“And now I’m hearing that you are using some toy-company cartoon character as practically your whole way of interacting with Venus. She’s spending her time at school—a sizable chunk of her time at school—indulging in a fantasy world that is both educationally and culturally questionable.”
“Oh geez,” I said angrily. “This is Julie, saying this. Doing this.”
“No, no, don’t go off. Yes, it is Julie saying this, but it’s me too, Torey. I’m the one in charge here. I’m the one who has to meet the parents and the school administrators and the people raising the mill levies. I’m the one who has to justify what’s happening in my school building. And so I’ve been watching you too. I know about the cartoon videos and all that.”
“Because I haven’t tried to hide them. Of course, you know. Because I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong.”
“But is it appropriate?” Bob asked.
“It is, if it helps her talk. It is, if it brings her out of her shell. Bob, you know how this works. Geez, you taught me how to be this way. You taught me to think laterally to help a child. So how can you question it now? This is just a means to an end. Venus showed an initial interest in this cartoon, so I just picked up on it. I needed a hook. And this one seemed as good as anything. I didn’t think, ‘Let’s find the whitest, flimsiest charactered creation Hollywood has ever come up with and use it to subvert this child’s mind.’ I just took what was there and worked with it for my own purposes.”
“This is a fine line, Torey.”
“It’s a means to an end.”
“And that still makes it a fine line. I’m not sure I am comfortable with you reading comics and watching cartoons with this girl, because you are a teacher and this is a school and there are hundreds of rounded, well-portrayed, characters full of vigor and integrity in the books in your classroom. Somewhere, somehow, we have to
draw the line on what makes appropriate role models for children, and as educators, we have the responsibility to elevate that when we can.
“I’m even more concerned to hear the term ‘culturally inappropriate’ rear its head in regards to role models. This is a serious issue, Torey. We are in a racially mixed school here and I’ve worked many long years to meet the needs of my students equally, whatever their background. I don’t want anyone leveling accusations at us on this account.”
“Race has nothing to do with this,” I said. “It doesn’t now. It never did. The whole thing was just a hook. Honest. Venus showed an interest in a She-Ra comic I’d brought into the classroom, so I leapt on it. Period. It went no deeper than that. For the first few months this girl was here, nothing got a reaction out of her. So I simply thought here’s something that interests her. Let’s build on that. Let’s use the positive characteristics shown and help her see them in herself. It never even crossed my mind that because her skin color was different from She-Ra’s, I might be being racist. And it still doesn’t make sense to me. I’m working with the kid. Not her skin.”
“No, I know,” Bob replied. “And I know you didn’t have that intention. But this is why I’m bringing it up. It is a complex issue and we’re often blind to how these things can be perceived. And as I’ve said already, this is a fine line.”
“But it shouldn’t be,” I said. “We shouldn’t come to the place where we are so sensitive to the possibility of offending each other that we therefore fail to help each other. It’s gone too far when that happens. Venus is important to me. Her well-being is important to me. She matters. And finally … finally I’ve got something that allows me to start relating to this kid. And now you want to hog-tie me with political correctness?”
“No, I just want to raise your awareness. I’m not saying stop, Torey. For the time being, carry on. I’m just saying, be aware of what you’re doing. Start thinking of alternatives. If you can, switch. We’re better people for being aware.”