by Torey Hayden
I mentioned it later to Bob. I knew Venus was having some kind of psychological help. I didn’t know the details beyond that because, from my rather lowly status as her teacher, I wasn’t in the position to have such information shared with me, but I thought he could pass it on.
The final person I phoned was Mrs. Kivie. I said I was concerned about Venus’s unusually subdued behavior and wondered if it was depression. She said yes, she’d thought Venus was very quiet but that this wasn’t unusual in her experience with abused children. It took some adjusting to all this change. She told me that Venus was under the care of a psychiatrist from the hospital and he was aware of the problem and that was about all we could do.
And “all we can do” seemed to be about all we could do. No one had any particular advice for helping Venus over this new hump in the road. In the end, I could figure out nothing beyond being supportive and patient and continuing to nudge her forward, even when she was unmotivated to try.
Unexpectedly, my best ally proved to be Alice. Alice was not put off by Venus’s remote behavior. Indeed, I suppose if you were used to talking to your hand, talking to a person, even one inclined to totally ignore you, was still an improvement. Thus Alice happily chatted to Venus and interacted with her, as if Venus were participating in everything.
Alice was particularly good about schoolwork. She would whiz through her own, have a little chat with Mimi, and then launch into getting Venus to do her folder.
“Hey, you wanna do this?” she’d ask. “I’ll help you.” She would open Venus’s folder and take out whatever was on top. “Look, a math paper. Adding. You want me to help you?” Alice would then pull her chair right over next to Venus’s and lay Mimi out on the table, palm upward. “Two plus three,” Alice would say. “Here’s how you do it. Mimi, show us three. There. There’s three fingers. Now, you just count two more. Five. See that? See how it’s done?”
Venus often didn’t say a thing. Indeed, Alice not only did all the talking, but she usually did every single one of the math problems herself as well, but she achieved a better feat. She managed to get Venus to write them down. “You write it,” Alice would say. Venus would just sit. “No, you write it. Mimi’s busy, ’cause she’s doing the counting. You write it.” And eventually Venus would pick up the pencil and write the number.
I left them to it. On the surface, it appeared neither girl was doing what she was supposed to. Alice was spending much more time on Venus’s work than on her own, and Venus was actually never doing much of the work in her folder herself, but there was something going on between these two. While Venus often appeared to be totally ignoring Alice, I could tell this wasn’t so. She did write down things Alice told her to. She didn’t pull away from Alice the way she did when one of the boys came around her wheelchair. And during those occasions when Alice was busy with her own activities at the table, particularly when she was engaged in one of her long conversations with Mimi, I’d often see Venus watching her. It was a furtive sort of watching. Venus watched only with her eyes and almost never turned her head even a little, but she was watching.
At the beginning of the year because the boys had been so aggressive and unable to control themselves, we’d never developed the habit of having a morning discussion, as I’d always had with my other classes. At that point, they simply could not sit still long enough without trying to kill one another, so we whipped through the necessary role-taking and lunch money collection and got on with activities that allowed me always to keep them at least ten feet apart.
I’d missed this discussion period very much. It was a good transition period between home and school, giving children an opportunity to talk about things that had happened at home or caused problems or upset. It was a good opportunity for communicating among ourselves so that we could deal with any difficulties in the class that arose. And it gave a more democratic feel to what was actually a benign autocracy. But the boys just couldn’t cope.
As the year wore on and the children became more settled, we did eventually develop an equivalent of morning discussion. This sprang up at the end of the day instead. About the time the traffic light system starting taking effect and the boys had begun to work a little better, there was a tendency for everyone to finish up their work a little sooner than I’d anticipated, giving us ten or fifteen minutes left over. To keep the peace, I’d started asking them each to tell me one good thing that had happened during the day and one bad thing. They all enjoyed this. Billy, of course, was the one who kept asking if we could do it again the next day, and soon we had instituted a regular period at the end of the day to “de-brief,” as it came to be known.
“De-briefing” began to fill out. We still did the best thing/worst thing, but we also talked about other things. I used it to introduce necessary discussions about such matters as caring for others’ property, putting oneself in others’ shoes, and the ethical problems with popular playground codes such as “finders/keepers, losers/weepers.” We settled disputes about whose reading book was whose even when they were exactly alike, where you could put your running shoes without making the room smelly, and this didn’t mean out the window, and what precisely constituted “looking at me funny.” We planned parties, acknowledged successes and other special events, and discussed changing certain class rules. And sometimes, if I came across a good activity in a book or teaching magazine that would provide a “thinking experience,” we did that.
One such “thinking experience” posed this possibility: if you could ask anybody in the whole world one question and get it answered, what would it be? I thought it might be the jumping-off place for a good conversation.
Billy leaped in enthusiastically, waving his hand. “Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!” he squealed.
“Okay,” I said.
“Welllll … ,” he replied in a dramatic tone, “I’d ask to God. And I’d ask ‘What really happens to you when you die?’”
“That’s a good question,” I said.
“I’d ask God what’s in the future,” Jesse said. “That’s what I want to know.”
“Yeah, like when you’re going to die,” Billy chimed in cheerfully. “ ’Cause that’d be interesting to know. Did you ever stop to think that, like, one particular day on the calendar is going to be the day you died on? Like, for instance, February first. Say, you’re going to die on February first. But every year you go by February first, not knowing. Not knowing that’s going to be the second most important day in your whole life, except for your birthday. And, like, maybe it’s on a Thursday. So every week you go by a Thursday and that’s the day you’re going to die on.”
“Thank you for that cheerful thought,” Jesse said.
“But isn’t that interesting? Did you ever think of that before?”
“Yes, very interesting,” I said. “And no, I admit, I hadn’t thought of that.”
“But you’re going to die on that day. And it just seems ordinary. We don’t know. It seems like an ordinary day, but it’s going to be so important to us someday.”
I smiled at him. “It is very interesting. I’ll agree with you. Shall we give others a chance to pose their questions too? Alice?”
“I’m asking Mimi,” she said, holding her hand out in front of her.
“I’d ask Mickey Mouse,” Shane said. “I’d ask him if he liked living at Disneyland.”
“I’d ask my grandma what I’m going to get for my birthday,” Jesse said, “because my birthday’s in June and I don’t want to wait!”
“Hey, no fair!” Billy cried. “Jesse already had a turn. If he gets another turn, I get another turn.”
“Billy, settle down, please. We can have more turns, but let’s let everyone have their first turn. Alice, have you thought of anything?”
“The stars shine all over the sky. The wind is gone, like sorrow.”
I raised an eyebrow. The psychologist consulting on Alice’s case said stress caused her sudden weird utterances. I wasn’t sure what she would find stress
ful about this sort of discussion, but then I still had no real idea why Alice could be perfectly appropriate one moment and off in outer space the next. It was so abrupt on some occasions as to seem almost medical. As if she was having an odd kind of seizure. But no one I mentioned this to had ever heard of seizures like this.
“Alice, that’s not actually a question. Can you give more?”
She blinked, as if coming out of a sleep.
Zane raised his hand, a behavior he was learning to imitate from Billy, who had learned it in his AP class. “I’d like to ask Goofy if he liked living at Disneyland.”
“You and Shane will know lots about Disneyland, won’t you?” I replied and smiled. Zane wiggled with pleasure and nodded.
I turned yet again to Alice. “What about you?”
She was consulting Mimi again.
Next to her was Venus. Venus had her head turned and she was looking right at Alice, watching her talk to Mimi. I ordinarily would not have even thought of including Venus in this discussion, but my sense at that moment was that she was very present in the conversation.
“Venus?”
Billy, detecting this irregularity, jerked forward in his seat, no doubt ready to query me on why I was asking Venus something when it wasn’t what we usually did. I put out a hand toward him to silence him, and he fell back in his seat.
Venus looked over at me.
“If you could ask anyone in the whole world a question, who would you ask?”
There was a long pause. I saw Venus draw in a deep breath. Her eyes flitted from me to the others in the room to Alice. Then there was a moment of staring into space and I thought I’d lost her. I didn’t reask the question. I wasn’t too sure how long to wait. I hesitated.
Then Venus looked back to me. “Alice,” she said softly.
“You’d ask Alice?”
She nodded faintly. “I want to know, why does she talk to her hand so much?”
Chapter
33
Venus’s depression remained. It clung to her like a cobweb. She sat hunched over in her wheelchair day after day, as if she were stuck to it. She always seemed tired to me, her movements slow and sluggish, as if everything were too much of an effort.
In spite of this, she was making progress. She was interacting more. She did talk, after a fashion, with Alice. She did answer yes or no, if one waited long enough. And as with the discussion during de-briefing, she did very, very occasionally begin to participate in class. It was still not what I’d term spontaneous, but it was inching closer.
The one thing, however, we could not do was get her to try standing on her feet or walking. She remained steadfastly in the wheelchair, and no matter how much physiotherapy she was given, how much encouragement, how much reassurance from the doctors, her foster parents, me, or anyone else about how she could now try regaining normal movement and no longer needed the wheelchair, Venus refused to try. She was an absolute deadweight on those occasions when I lifted her to her feet. Except for when I took her to the toilet and needed her up enough for me to adjust her clothing, she would not even attempt standing, much less taking steps.
The third week of May there was a big conference over Venus, and everyone met in an effort to coordinate her extended care. It was the first time all the people now involved with her were together in one place, and it included social workers, her foster mother, the child psychiatrist who’d been appointed by the hospital, Sam Patterson, who was still processing the abuse case for the police, two physiotherapists, and, of course, Bob, Rosa, and me. Everyone talked about what kind of progress Venus was making and where we needed to go. I told them about how depressed she seemed, and the psychiatrist said that, yes, this was normal in such a case. It happened quite often. I asked why. He said something rather fuzzy about mourning all that she had lost. At which point somebody else said, “Like what? Sleeping naked in the bathroom? Being beaten until her bones were broken? Not much to mourn in losing that.”
The psychiatrist gave a faint shrug in understanding and then a quick gesture of helplessness with his hand. “I guess it’s all she had.”
The physiotherapists discussed how important it was to get her walking again because her muscles were deteriorating from lack of use. Her feet were going to cause her problems if she did not start bearing weight on them, because the areas where the toes had been amputated were healing without the feet being allowed to create a new weight-bearing configuration. A long discussion ensued about the psychological ramifications of recovery from amputation.
In the end, I think we all got a bit waylaid by the idea that Venus was missing these amputated toes. Someone suggested this was behind her depression, and several others nodded sagely. She was mourning her loss of wholeness. That made sense.
Not to me. Undoubtedly this loss was distressing to her, but I couldn’t imagine it was all that was behind such an all-encompassing depression or her refusal to stand or walk. Indeed, we got waylaid generally while discussing depression and the physical importance of getting her back on her feet until we finally lost the plot. People started into long discourses on theories of depression, and the conversation locked into party lines, the psychiatric people supporting psychological reasons, the physiotherapists supporting physical reasons, the social workers going off on some completely different tangent involving care in the community. Despite the skills of all these high-powered professionals—the kind of people I’d so wanted involved with Venus from the beginning, indeed, the kind of professional expertise I would have wished for all my children—we found it hard to identify the source of real problems, much less come up with any real solutions. I was glad to attend the meeting and glad to see so many people from different disciplines involved, but I came away frustrated.
Life in class went on. Four of us—Jesse, the twins, and I—had birthdays in late May or early June, so we decided to have a group celebration. We made plans for a big party of the kind we hadn’t even dared contemplate at Halloween or Christmas. I promised to bake a special cake. Rosa was going to bring ice cream. As Shane and Zane were birthday boys, their mother volunteered to bring cookies, and we were going to stir up our very own fruit punch as part of cooking in the early afternoon.
Because we hadn’t managed any really serious parties earlier in the year, I wanted to go all-out and give the children a day to remember. So on the afternoon before, I allowed the last thirty minutes before going-home time to be spent “decorating,” which was a bit of a recipe for disaster, as it involved a lot of leaping around from table to table to hang streamers, which resulted in some wild behavior from the twins, who needed no encouragement to jump and climb on furniture, and a lot of bossing from Jesse, who, since Billy was away at his AP class, claimed this chance to run the show. But we managed it, and the bell rang before anyone killed anyone else. Or themselves.
The day of the party, the twins showed up in ties and little suits. I hadn’t meant it to be that kind of party and was worried that they might spoil their clothes if things got rowdy, which I feared inevitably would happen, but they were both anxious to show off their “dress-up” clothes.
“This is my wedding suit,” Shane said proudly.
“What? You got married?” Billy asked and laughed. “Who’d you marry? Alice?”
Shane made a fist and shook it fiercely.
I pointed to the traffic lights up on the chalkboard. Less and less often I was actually carrying the disks. The boys were more able to control themselves now without my having always to reward or punish with the disks, so I wanted to ease us away from such a highly structured approach. Nonetheless, the threat of the traffic lights still worked well. All I had to do was point and the more controlled children, like Billy, would get the message.
“Take it back!” Shane shouted.
“I was just joking,” Billy said and looked over at me with an expression of disdain. “Nobody here can take a joke. You guys would never last a minute in my AP class. There, everybody jokes.”
> “Take it back!” Shane shouted again.
“I wouldn’t want to marry pukey old you anyway,” Alice responded from her seat.
“Billy,” I said menacingly.
“It was just a joke.”
“Jokes only work if everyone finds them funny,” I said.
“Okay, sorry, Shane. I didn’t mean it,” Billy muttered.
“Guess what,” Zane said. “At the wedding, Shane peed in his pants. Right in the church and it went on the floor.”
“Take it back!” Shane shrieked in horror.
And so the rest of the morning went.
Venus too had arrived at school dressed for a party. She was wearing a lovely little frilly pink top and matching pants and she did look really pretty. Alice commented on it when she first saw Venus arrive in the morning, but it was Rosa who made the big fuss when she came in the afternoon.
“Look at you, little blossom! Aren’t you just the beautifulest thing?” She swooped down and kissed Venus on the cheek. I would have expected Venus to pull away in surprise, but she didn’t. Indeed, I think there might have been a smile touching Venus’s lips then, just slightly.
We tried to carry on a normal day for as much of it as possible. We intended to have the party in the forty-five minutes between afternoon recess and going-home time, so it wasn’t until recess itself that Shane and Zane’s mother arrived with the cookies and I laid out the cake I’d brought. It was chocolate and made in the shape of a little train. To avoid too much squabbling, I’d made an individual freight car on the train for each child, putting his or her name on the side of it and decorating each car with exactly the same number, color, and kinds of candy and frosting. I put my name on the engine and Rosa’s on the caboose.