by Torey Hayden
I glanced down at my notes. “There is one other thing. I sort of hate to bring this up, but I think I need to. And that’s your drinking.”
She turned her head away from me.
“You’ve got to be sober in here all the time. I’m afraid I am going to have to be very strict about that. As you’ll quickly discover, we need all our wits about us here. So, if you drink, if you want to drink, if you’ve been drinking, I’ll ask you to leave. Understand that I won’t be angry with you. I won’t hassle you. I’ll understand that you need to be gone. But in here, all the time, every time, you need to be cold sober. That has got to be a ground rule. Okay?”
She nodded slightly. A small pause followed. “What time do you want me?”
“Well, your hours are pretty much your own. As a volunteer, it’s easiest if you set your own schedule and then just let me know which hours you plan to be here so that I can arrange things around that. How often do you think you might want to come in?”
She regarded me. “I thought I was going to be here every day,” she said, her voice sounded a little surprised, as if this were a foregone conclusion.
“Well, yes, I suppose, if you want to be.”
“When do you come in?” she asked.
“About 7:30 most days.”
“Well, can I come in then too?”
“That’s probably a little too early. The children don’t start until 8:45. I’ll tell you what, if you’re thinking of working mornings, why don’t you arrive about eight? Then we can use the extra time to go over plans.”
“Okay.” Pushing back her chair, she stood up and reached across the table for her coat.
“Oh, there is one other thing, Dr. Taylor,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Do you have something less formal that we can call you in here? I tend to avoid titles. Seems more egalitarian to me.”
“Sure,” she replied, “it’s Ladbrooke.”
I reached a hand out to her. “I’m Torey.”
Abruptly, she smiled in a very disarming way. It was the first genuine smile I’d ever seen cross her face. “Maybe this will work out after all,” she said cheerfully. “We’ve both got screwball names.”
It wasn’t until I got home that night that I questioned what I’d just done, accepting Ladbrooke Taylor as an aide, and unexpectedly, I found myself awash with misgivings. What the heck had I just let myself in for? How had I gotten from this woman threatening to sue the life out of me to giving her full rein to share my days? The degree of impulsiveness in all this was pretty hard to ignore. My intention had been to simply direct her to someone somewhere who could help her and then get back to my own life. How had I gotten sidetracked into accepting her as a volunteer? My God, I thought suddenly, she wasn’t even a recovering alcoholic. She was still in full swing. What on earth had I thought I was doing?
To her credit, Ladbrooke was punctual. She arrived the next morning precisely at eight o’clock. While she hadn’t quite managed to shed the designer image, she’d obviously tried. The jeans were Levi’s. The fashion boots had been replaced by a rather seedy-looking pair of jogging shoes.
Sitting at the table with my chin braced in one hand, I regarded her. “You’re going to have to take off the jewelry.”
She glanced down at herself.
“You can put it in the top drawer of the filing cabinet. That locks. But you’re not going to want anything that dangles in any way.”
“Why not?”
“So that you don’t get hurt if somebody grabs you.”
“Oh.”
“And can you braid your hair back or something?”
She touched her hair uncertainly. It was still loose. She’d clipped it back with large barrettes so that it stayed behind her shoulders, but I knew that wasn’t going to be enough to deter Dirkie.
“There’s rubber bands over there on the top shelf.”
She nodded. Sitting down across from me, she opened her handbag and took out a comb. She unclipped the barrettes and let her hair fall loose. Shaking it free, she pulled it around over her shoulder and began to braid it. She never spoke.
I hadn’t said much to the children. I had intimated that we might be getting some help, but because I was unsure if Ladbrooke was going to follow through, I hadn’t prepared them in any substantial way. This was a fairly flexible group of children, so I didn’t think that would matter much. However, it did cause some unforeseen problems for Ladbrooke. The last time the children had seen her, she was passed out by our door. Thus, the children were rather more interested in her than either of us had anticipated.
“Are you quite well now?” Shamie inquired, when he was introduced.
Ladbrooke glanced in my direction, a questioning expression on her face. It occurred to me that she might have little memory of that part of that day.
“He means when you were here. At the beginning of last week.” I gave her a knowing look.
Ladbrooke blushed a brilliant hue. “Yes, thank you,” she replied.
“Are you our new teacher?” Geraldine asked.
“She’s our new helper. Your old teacher is right here,” I said.
“You’re pretty,” Geraldine said to Ladbrooke. “You should be the teacher. You’re prettier than she is.”
Mariana bounced around the corner of the shelving and came to an abrupt halt. She regarded Ladbrooke a long moment and then smiled in a friendly way. “I know where I saw you last,” she said brightly. “You were laying on our floor.”
Another flush of color to Ladbrooke’s face.
And, of course, there was Dirkie. When he rounded the corner into the main part of the classroom and saw Ladbrooke, he screamed as if someone had just plunged a knife into him.
“It’s the dead lady!” he shrieked. “That dead lady is in our room!”
I knocked over a chair in my scramble to catch him before he bolted out of the classroom door. I just managed to snag him, hooking my fingers into the collar of his shirt and pulling him up short.
“Dirkie, she’s not dead. She never was dead. I told you that before.”
“You killed her.”
“She’s perfectly alive, Dirkie. Now calm down.”
“I ain’t meeting no dead lady. Let go of me!”
I pulled him back around the corner and into the main part of the room.
“Make her go away! Make that dead lady go away!”
To say Ladbrooke was looking horrified at this point was a vast understatement. It was doubtful, as I dragged Dirkie up to her, which of them was more likely to run screaming out of the room first.
With my free hand, I grabbed Ladbrooke’s bare arm. “Here Dirkie, feel her arm. Touch it.”
“I’m not going to touch no dead lady!”
“Touch it. Feel her arm. See? See how warm her arm is. Feel mine. Feel your arm. They’re warm, see? How can she be dead? Dead people are cold, aren’t they? Ladbrooke’s just as alive as we are. Feel how warm she is.”
I had to physically place Dirkie’s hand on Ladbrooke’s arm, but as I had hoped, the connection was instantaneously successful. The human warmth of her skin was too obvious. Dirkie’s hand relaxed against her arm. He touched his own arm then. And mine. And back to Ladbrooke’s. His other muscles relaxed. I loosened my grip on his shirt.
Dirkie looked up at Ladbrooke. Then he scanned the rest of her body. It was a very thorough bit of scrutinizing. Then he touched her bare arm again.
“That’s enough touching, Dirkie.”
“Hoo-hoo-hoo,” he said, and a maniacal little smile came to his lips.
“Dirkie? I mean it. That’s enough touching. People don’t like to be stroked like that.”
If possible, Ladbrooke’s expression was even more horrified than before. Every muscle had tensed. She seemed frozen, unable to pull herself away from Dirkie, who was touching her arm in an increasingly provocative manner.
“Take your hand off her now. Dirk. I mean it.” I reached over and removed his
hand. “That is not appropriate.”
“Hoo-hoo-hoo.”
I maneuvered Dirkie away from Ladbrooke and toward his chair.
“She’s got big tits!” Dirkie said with loud enthusiasm.
“Yes, but you’re not going to say anything to her about them, are you? Remember what I’ve told you about personal remarks, Dirkie? People don’t like them. They get upset. And we don’t want to upset Ladbrooke on her first day, do we?” I fixed him with the evil eye. “Do we?”
“But they’re big!”
“Just like the trouble you’ll be in, if you don’t take your seat.”
As had long been my custom in special classes, I opened the day with “discussion.” Discussion began with a “topic”; topics traditionally explored areas that persistently got the children in trouble, such as cause-effect behaviors, feelings and moral questions. Occasionally the period was used for problem solving. At the beginning of the year, I usually had to introduce the majority of topics we discussed, but as time progressed and the children became used to the procedure, they themselves supplied most of the topics. We set a fifteen-minute limit on the length of discussion of the topic, and everyone was encouraged to participate. Afterward, each child had a few minutes to recount what had happened to him or her in the interim since we’d broken up the previous afternoon and to share any interesting news. Then I passed out the work folders, gave a brief outline of the day’s events, and we knuckled down.
Over the years, I had accumulated a box of props that the children liked to use during discussion. There was a collection of photographs showing people in numerous situations and with countless expressions on their faces. There was an extended family of tiny, plastic dolls and some dollhouse furniture. There were six hand puppets: two girl puppets, two boy puppets, a witch puppet and a knitted dragon. And there was a large set of plastic animals. All the children liked using them.
“I’ve got a topic today,” Mariana announced, extracting two girl dolls from the box. She stood them up and made them move toward each other in mincing steps while the rest of us arranged ourselves comfortably on the floor pillows. But once we were sitting and attentive, she stopped playing with the dolls and held them, one in each hand, and stared at them.
“Do you want to go ahead, Mariana?” I asked.
She regarded the dolls. “I brung in my special eraser yesterday. The one that looked like a strawberry. And somebody’s tooken it.” She did not look up. Instead, she caused one doll to beat the other over the head.
“You’ve looked carefully for it? You’ve searched right to the back of your cubby?” I asked. “And you’re certain you didn’t leave it at home?”
Mariana nodded. “It was my strawberry eraser that smelled like a real strawberry. I showed it to you yesterday, remember? Then I put it right back into my cubby to keep it safe. Now it’s gone. And I know who stolded it.” Mariana glanced in Geraldine’s direction. “She did. That little fucker over there.”
Silence reigned for a brief moment, then Dirkie hooted softly. He leaned toward Ladbrooke and said sotto voce, “She lets us say words like that. Swear words. Fucker, fucker, motherfucker.”
Glancing in his direction, I raised my eyebrow, and he sat back demurely. “Hoo-hoo,” he whispered.
Back to Mariana. “You know we don’t use discussion as a time to accuse people.”
“But Geraldine took my strawberry eraser. It’s gone and she stolded it and I know she did. I’m not accusing her. I know.”
“We’ll handle the matter later, after discussion.”
A crashing silence came down around us, and it became apparent that the children weren’t going to orient to another topic. Shamie, Geraldine and Shemona were all huddled together, like a group of covered wagons preparing for an Indian attack. Mariana glowered at them from across the circle. Dirkie was studying Ladbrooke’s assorted attributes. Leslie, beside me, sat silent and motionless.
“Why do you suppose people steal things?” I asked.
“Because they’re dumb fuckers,” Mariana replied.
“Why else?”
“Because they want things and they don’t have them,” Shamie said.
“Has any of you ever stolen anything?” I asked.
“She has!” Mariana retorted. “Ask her. She has.”
“Has any of you ever stolen anything?” I asked again.
No response.
“I have,” I said. “I remember once when I was eight, I took a magazine from my classroom at school. It had Halloween projects in it, and I really wanted to do them. But they weren’t the kind of thing a teacher would let you do at school, so I stole the magazine and took it home with me.”
Everyone looked scandalized.
“Did you get caught?” Mariana asked.
I shook my head.
“Did your conscience bother you?” Shamie asked.
“At the time, no, not very much. I wanted to do the projects too much. And I can remember doing them. One was making this paper-clip skeleton, and it was quite good. But afterward, I was left feeling disappointed. I couldn’t share the projects with anyone. I had to do them alone and then put them away without showing them to anyone. That ruined it for me. The consequences, even though I didn’t get caught, were enough to make me not do it again.”
I looked at the others. “Has anyone else had an experience like that?”
“I steal sometimes,” Mariana said. She still had the two dolls clutched in her hands. “When Daddy Jack comes over and him and Mom get to sitting around and drinking, I get mad and I steal tapes out of his car. I steal ’em and break ’em. Then he spanks me. But I don’t care. Him and Mom, they get six-packs and put them on the back porch, and then they sit in front of the TV and drink and drink. They don’t get me or Markie no dinner or nothing. Then I have to make Markie scrambled-egg sandwiches, because that’s all I can cook. ’Cept I can’t now, ’cause the stove’s broke. You know what Markie did last night?”
“What?” asked Dirkie, enthralled.
“He wee’d in the sock drawer. I said, ‘Markie, you stupid ass, don’t do that.’ But he did. So I had to take all the socks out and wash ’em. I washed ’em in the bathtub, but there was other junk in there already, so I thought I better wash that junk too. So I got some soap and I washed it all and hung it on the furniture to dry. And Daddy Jack and Mom were down watching TV, and he says, ‘Hey, Mariana, what the fuck you doing up there?’ And I says, ‘Nothing.’ And he comes up to see and he says, ‘What’s all these goddamned socks doing everywhere?’ I wasn’t going to tell him Markie did that, so I snuck out the back door and hid under the porch till he was done being mad. But I was mad myself. So later I went and got all the tapes out of his car and broke ’em. And I don’t feel bad. I’m glad I done it. I think he deserves it.”
“So you steal to get back at your Daddy Jack,” I said.
Mariana nodded.
“And what about you, Geraldine?” I asked, turning in her direction. “When you were little, did you ever steal anything?”
Geraldine shook her head.
“Liar!” Mariana shouted.
I touched Mariana’s arm.
“Geraldine’s lying,” she said. She had risen to her knees, and tears came to her eyes. “My mommy bought me that strawberry eraser because I was a good girl last weekend. It smells like a real strawberry, and I want it back. It’s mine.”
Unexpectedly, Shemona leaned forward and snatched away the two dolls that Mariana had been holding. Then, extracting one of the girl puppets, she put her hand inside and began pounding the dolls. Bang, bang, bang she went, in silent fury.
Geraldine became agitated by her sister’s unanticipated actions. “Oh, Miss,” she cried. “Shemona’s trying to tell you she took it. She took Mariana’s eraser. And she’s really, really sorry. Aren’t you, Shemona?”
Shemona’s behavior abruptly deteriorated. Grabbing up the dolls, she smashed them down. Then the hand puppet became a weapon to flail things with.
She picked up the dolls and hurled them like missiles.
“Hey.” I rose to my knees to catch hold of her. The other children scattered to safety.
When I grabbed Shemona, Geraldine panicked. “Don’t smack her, Miss! Don’t smack her! It’s in my bag. I’ve brought it back. Shemona took it, but I’ve brought it back.” Geraldine was on her feet and across the room to her cubby.
I lifted Shemona high up over the other children.
“Please don’t smack Shemona, Miss. Here’s the eraser. Here it is.” Geraldine had begun to cry too. She threw the eraser at Mariana as if it were a hot coal.
“I’m not intending to smack anyone, Geraldine,” I said, letting Shemona down. When I released her, she bolted to the far end of the room and crouched down midst the pillows. “I don’t smack kids.” Geraldine ignored me and ran to Shemona, flinging her arms around her sister.
The place was in chaos. Leslie was flapping her arms with excitement. Dirkie had dived under the shelves. Shamie, appearing on the verge of tears himself, wrung his hands nervously. Ladbrooke, too bewildered to move, simply stood in the middle of everything. Only Mariana, her beloved eraser in hand, seemed composed.
“Okay, everybody,” I said and went to the table. “Work time. I’m going to start passing out folders. I’ll count to ten and then I want to see everyone in his or her seat.” I counted slowly, then took down the stack of folders from the top of the file cabinet. “Come on, Dirkie. Come out of there.” I squatted down to peer at him, lying flat on one of the shelves. He crawled out slowly and took his folder.
Shamie sat down and accepted his work. Mariana sat. I had to hold Leslie for a few minutes before she quieted enough to sit.
“If you have any questions about your work, you can ask Ladbrooke. She knows what each of you is doing.”
I then went over to Geraldine and Shemona, still in the corner. I put a hand on Geraldine’s shoulder. “Come on, sweetie. Let’s go back to the table now and get you started on your morning’s work.”
“Shemona didn’t mean to take it, Miss. She wasn’t being naughty on purpose. I don’t know what got into her.”
“I understand, Geraldine. Now, come on. Stand up.”