by Torey Hayden
In order to keep the party from caving in entirely, I kept things fairly structured. We’d play games for the first fifteen minutes, then we were going to listen to some relaxing music while making a party hat to wear, then eat our cake, cookies, and ice cream the last fifteen minutes. If there was any time left over, I had gotten permission from Bob to let everyone go outside on the playground early, as I reckoned that was just about all the excitement any of the children could cope with indoors without going homicidal.
For the game Billy wanted to play Twister, which he had brought from home. This consternated me a little, as I suspected it was just an elaborate means for looking up Alice’s skirt, but I promised one game. Surprisingly, this came off quite well. Alice was relatively modest in her moves, and the boys seemed preoccupied with twisting themselves up in as many crazy positions as possible. Indeed, everyone was laughing so much that I agreed to a second game.
Venus, of course, did not join in. I encouraged her to call out the colors, but she wouldn’t do it. She did spin the spinner for me a couple of times, but beyond that, she just watched.
Rosa, not wanting to see her sidelined, came over while we were getting ready to play the second game of Twister. “You can come help me make the things ready for our hats, no?”
Venus looked at her.
“We will make beautiful hats, no? You can make a pretty pink one to go with your lovely pink clothes. Doesn’t she look beautiful today, Torey? That pink makes you so pretty. Come on, you come help me, beautiful child.” She took hold of the handles and wheeled Venus’s chair over to the table where the art materials were being laid out.
I started up the new game of Twister. The boys and Alice played enthusiastically and, indeed, very happily. There was a bit of pushing and shoving, but it was all taken in the spirit of the game.
We were just about to the end when Rosa came over to me. She leaned close to my ear and said, “There’s something wrong with little Venus.”
I looked over. I couldn’t see because the back of the wheelchair was toward me.
“She’s crying,” Rosa said. “She started to cry when I took her over. I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ but she will not say. I thought maybe she did not want to leave the game. I said, ‘You want to go back? I don’t mind,’ but she will not say. She just cries. So, I think perhaps it is best to get you.”
I nodded. “Can you finish this off?” I gave her the spinner for the game, rose, and went over to where Venus was sitting.
She was indeed crying, her mouth pulled down in a grimace of tears, her cheeks awash, but she made almost no noise.
I knelt down beside the wheelchair. “What’s the matter, sweetheart?”
She just cried.
Rising, I lifted the box of tissues from the shelf and pulled one out. Kneeling back down, I reached over and wiped the tears from her cheeks. If anything, this made her cry harder.
I caressed her head. “What’s wrong, Venus?”
It was unusual for her to cry. The last time had been in those weeks just before the abuse was discovered and I still smarted with the thought that I had not been sufficiently sensitive to her distress, that if I’d taken a little more time with her then, the horrible episode that had landed her in the hospital might have been prevented.
Nonetheless, the same pressures that had been on me then were on me now. Venus refused to talk. And then the game was over and the other children came bounding over, clamoring for attention.
I rose up on my feet. “Could you oversee this?” I asked, feeling horrible as I did so because it was a lot to ask of Rosa, but I wanted just a little time alone with Venus.
“Sure, muffin,” she said and patted my shoulder in a rather motherly way. “You get on with God’s work.”
I wheeled Venus and the box of tissues out into the hallway. There wasn’t much of any place else to go, what with her wheelchair and the layout of the building.
I knelt down beside the wheelchair again and touched her face. She still cried, softly and inconsolably.
Several minutes passed with me crouched on the floor beside her. It was an uncomfortable position. I was either going to have to sit all the way down on the floor, which put me in a rather awkward position to comfort her, or else I was going to have to stand. Neither worked well. Finally I rose. “Here, here’s what we’re going to do,” I said to her and put the brakes on the wheelchair. Then I reached down and lifted her up into my arms. Sitting down in the wheelchair myself, I set her on my lap. Wrapping my arms close around her, I held her.
She pressed her face into my shirt and cried.
Beyond the door behind us I could hear the other children. Voices went up and down. Excitement made them loud, but I didn’t hear anything that sounded too dangerously near fighting. I murmured thanks to whatever power might be listening for having sent me Rosa.
I looked down at Venus. She was all snot and tears. Taking one of the tissues, I wiped her face.
“Can you tell me what’s wrong?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“You just need to cry?”
She nodded.
“That’s all right. You cry. Sometimes we feel that way.”
She nodded and took the tissue from my hand. She pressed it against her nose.
“Sometimes that’s all there is to do about life,” I said.
She nodded.
Minutes passed. I could tell by the shrieks of glee beyond the door that Rosa had brought out the cake.
I ran my hand across Venus’s forehead, the kind of caress used to push back hair, except that hers was too short.
“You know what?” I said. “I think you are a very special little girl. I mean that. I don’t think I’ve said that to you. I meant to, but sometimes we forget to say things to people. Especially good things. But I think you are so special. I always have. Right from the first day of school. Do you remember that? I do. You were up on your wall. I thought you looked beautiful.”
Rather than reassure her, this seemed to upset her more. Venus broke into renewed tears.
“I’m glad you’re in my class. I’m glad I got to be your teacher.”
She wept.
I pulled out a clean tissue. Gently, I dabbed her cheeks. “What’s wrong, lovey?”
“I wanna go home,” she cried.
“You want to go home?” I asked.
She nodded.
“What’s the matter? Aren’t you feeling well?”
“I want to go home.”
“Shall we call your foster mother?”
“No,” she said and sat upright on my lap. She looked at me full in the face. “No. I want to go home to my home.” And with that she really started to cry. She fell forward against me and sobbed.
“Ah,” I said and finally understood.
She cried. Cried and cried and cried. Wrapping my arms tight around her, holding her there in the wheelchair in the hallway, I kept her as close as I could.
Reduced at last to snuffles and heavy hiccups, Venus continued to lie against my breast. Damp and rather sticky, I mopped the tears as best I could until we had a small soggy mountain of tissues with us there in the wheelchair.
“I want to go home,” Venus murmured tearfully yet again.
“Yes, of course, sweetheart.”
“I want Wanda.”
“Yes.”
“She calls me ‘beautiful child.’”
“Yes. And is that what happened? Rosa called you ‘beautiful child’ and it made you think of Wanda?”
Venus nodded. “I want her to be here.”
“Yes, I can understand that. It’s very hard for you, isn’t it?”
Venus nodded.
“You must feel very frightened by everything that’s happened. It must be very scary being by yourself in a new home with a new family.”
“I didn’t want this,” she said in a very tiny voice. “I just wanted it to stop, that’s all. I didn’t know they were going to take me away.”
And the enormity of what had happened to Venus suddenly became real to me too. Up until that moment I had seen it all only from my own perspective. It hadn’t even occurred to me that there was another. Here was a child living in the most appalling conditions. Even without the hideous abuse, her home situation had been awful with its poverty, motley assortment of half-siblings and “mother’s boyfriends,” poor supervision, and lack of care. The only solution to us on the outside—we, in the educated middle class—had been to “rescue” this girl. “Save” her from her environment by taking her out, giving her a new home, new parents, new clothes, and in the process, a new identity. This not only seemed right, it seemed desirable. Of course, she would want it. Of course, she would grow and develop normally and everything would turn out fine.
Now, for the first time, I realized that in the process of rescuing Venus, we had also destroyed everything she loved.
“I’m really sorry, Venus,” I said softly. “I really, really am. You must miss your mom and your brothers and sisters very much.”
She nodded.
“Do you ever get a chance to see them?”
She shook her head.
There was a small pause.
“Well, maybe that can change,” I said.
Again the pause while I considered what could be done.
“I can’t say for sure. I don’t know what rules the police and the social workers have about visiting, so I’ll have to check. But shall I do that? Shall I see if you can visit with your brothers and sisters?”
“Wanda?” she asked and looked up at me.
“Yes, Wanda too. Shall I look into that for you?”
She nodded.
A moment or two passed quietly. Venus lay against my breasts. She wasn’t crying any longer.
“I wish I could make magic with my She-Ra sword and magic everything back again, before everything happened,” she said softly. “I wish that could be real.”
“Yes, I can understand.”
“I wish everything was back like it was before and I could go home,” she said. “And my mom would be there and Wanda and everyone and it would be just like it was.”
“Yes. Sadly, what was happening, what Danny was doing to you was wrong. It’s against the law. And when parents or other adults show that they can’t take care of children, then other people have to come to take over that job.”
“I’d take my She-Ra sword and magic him to death.”
“Yes, I can understand your feelings.”
“I’d magic my mom back. My mom never done nothing. I’d magic my mom back and Wanda and my brothers and magic it the way it was before Danny came. I’d magic a special spell so no bad men could come hurt my mom again. Or Wanda. Or me. Or beat up on my brothers. Or my sister Kali. ’Cept I wouldn’t magic her back ’cause she was always nasty to me. I’d magic all that stuff with my She-Ra sword.”
“That’d be good, wouldn’t it?”
Venus nodded.
There was a long moment’s silence.
She sighed heavily.
“I think they’re just about done in the classroom,” I said, listening to the noise beyond the door. “Shall we go back in?”
Venus didn’t respond.
“You could have your piece of cake. Did you see it? I made it in the shape of a train and there’s one whole car just for you. It has your name on it.”
“No. I don’t wanna.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t like chocolate,” she said.
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“You never said. Never in all this time!” I laughed. “Remember clear back in the beginning? Clear back in those first weeks and I was trying to get you to eat M&Ms?” I asked. “No wonder you wouldn’t eat them. And there was me, sticking them in your mouth!”
Venus giggled. It was an unexpected sound, small and tinkly.
“You think that’s funny?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I thought they tasted like throw-up.” I laughed too.
“Well, shall we go in and have some punch then?” I finally said. “And some cookies? They’re sugar cookies with pink icing. You do like sugar, I hope.”
Another giggle. “Yeah.”
I rose and set her back down in the wheelchair. “Okay, then. Let’s go have goodies.”
Chapter
34
Since Venus had returned, I’d endeavored to continue the special time we’d spent together during afternoon recess, even though she no longer required this kind of supervision to keep her out of trouble. I did it in part because I felt Venus needed this continued one-to-one, which she just could not receive in the hurly-burly of the classroom, but I did it also because I enjoyed it myself. My favorite part of teaching was this intricate process of connecting with a child, of looking for, finding, and bringing the phoenix from the ashes.
We never really went back to the She-Ra cartoons or the comics. No doubt this was partially due to her confinement in the wheelchair. Soon after her return to class, I realized how physical our interactions in regards to She-Ra had been. It had not simply been a matter of reading the comics or watching the videos. Much of our relating had revolved around the games of chase with the sword or Venus’s twirling change into She-Ra. There was no way to duplicate this without watering it down in a way that did nothing but emphasize her current disability. Above and beyond this, I remained sensitive to the issues Julie had brought up about the quality and racial suitability of She-Ra. I had to admit, she wasn’t the best heroine I could find, and this rather ruined her for me.
As a consequence, what we usually ended up doing during that twenty minutes each afternoon was reading. I lifted Venus down onto the floor in front of the bookshelf and she went through the assortment of storybooks there to choose one. Then we cuddled up on the pillows and read. She liked this. And I think she liked the freedom and comfort of being out of the wheelchair for a while too. She wouldn’t crawl in front of the other children, but she did quite happily there alone with me. She also snuggled up with me on the pillows in a way she’d never done in earlier times.
We read quite widely from among the books—Greek myths, picture books, and the whole of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh—but Venus’s favorite was a thin book of verse called Father Fox’s Pennyrhymes. It was liberally illustrated with humorous little pen-and-ink drawings of foxes dressed in old-fashioned country clothes and getting up to some very silly antics. Venus loved to pore over the drawings, which were very detailed.
It was during these times that Venus began to speak with genuine spontaneity. “Look at the little bugs there,” she’d say and run her fingers over four teeny little bugs standing on a tree branch. “And lookit, there’s some more there. And there’s some worms.”
“How many bugs?” I asked.
“One, two, three, four,” she replied, counting them very precisely with her fingertip. “And then there’s one, two, three, four here.”
“How many all together?”
“One, two, three, four,” she said, counting over. A pause while she located the others. “Five, six, seven, eight. Eight.”
“How many worms?”
“Two.” She ran her finger along the picture. “There’s a lot of things on that branch. Those bugs. I think they’re ants. And then there’s a ladybug. And mouses. And worms. And birds. And the foxes. And …” She leaned closer to the page. “I don’t know what those are. What are those?”
“Squirrels, maybe?” I suggested.
Venus nodded. “Squirrels. And then more mouses. And birds. And bugs.”
“Can you count them all?”
“One, two,” and she kept counting right up to the correct number of twenty-four. And thus it was with Father Fox’s Pennyrhymes that I discovered Venus really did know her numbers and, indeed, could manage simple adding and subtraction.
The verses themselves had the strong rhythm of nursery rhymes. Mister Lister sassed his sister. Married his wife because he co
uldn’t resist her. Venus quickly learned them and enjoyed saying them in a lilting singsong.
Her favorite of all the rhymes was one called “Dilly Dilly.”
Dilly, Dilly, Piccalilli. Tell me something very silly. Well, there was a chap, his name was Bert. He ate the buttons off his shirt.
Every time we came to that, Venus laughed. Every time she said it, she laughed. No matter how gloomy the day had been, no matter how sad she had seemed in class, “Dilly, Dilly” always cheered her up.
So, Father Fox’s Pennyrhymes was the book Venus pulled out most often.
Then, on the Monday following our birthday party, Venus was going through the books on the shelf when she came across a paperback. It was a follow-up to Father Fox’s Pennyrhymes called Father Fox’s Feast of Songs. It was a thin little paperback songbook. Several of the popular rhymes from the first book had been set to music, plus a few new songs. This book had never proved very popular with the children for the understandable reason that most of the pages were musical score, and in my classrooms I’d almost never had any instruments other than a tinny xylophone that could play that kind of music and even fewer students who knew how. I’d let it stay in the bookshelf because it contained more of the same marvelous pen-and-ink illustrations and kids always enjoyed those, but for the most part, this was a book that ended up shunted to the bottom of the pile or the back of the shelf.
“I didn’t know you had this,” Venus said as she opened it. “What’s this?”
“Musical notation. That’s a songbook. They’ve written music to go along with some of the rhymes from the other books. That’s how you write music down.”
Venus crawled over to me with the book and sat down. “Sing the songs,” she said.
“I can’t.”