by Torey Hayden
Geraldine stood. Shemona still huddled on the floor. I reached down and lifted her to her feet. She was trembling. But as usual, she pulled away from my touch. So I herded them together back to the table and pulled out chairs for them. Taking their work folders, I sat down with the two girls and went over their work with them.
Forty-five minutes or so later, when I was at the sink in the back of the room with Leslie, Shamie came back to wash his hands.
“You know Geraldine took that wee eraser, don’t you?” he asked in a very soft voice.
I nodded. “Yes, I know.”
Chapter 10
I was determined to do something about Leslie. All I had been waiting for was some auxiliary help, and now that I had it, I was able at last to get around to the kind of one-to-one work with Leslie—and Dirkie, as well—that I’d wanted to do from the beginning. But my perceptions of Leslie had changed so drastically over the previous few weeks that I was more desperate than ever to intervene with her.
Although I remained convinced that the major basis for Leslie’s disturbance was physiological, I’d gained a great deal more insight into the layers of manipulative behavior that had grown up around it. The in-depth discussion with Ladbrooke had been invaluable; my entire perception of Leslie altered. She took on a Helen Keller aura to me, another example of a brilliant, handicapped youngster who wasted her energies tyrannizing an indulgent family. The annoying thing was, Leslie had achieved pretty much the same sort of relationship with me. I’d cuddled her and coddled her and assumed, like everyone else, that the poor little dear wasn’t capable of much more. The quieter and more withdrawn she was, the more cuddles were forthcoming. She was nowhere near the little dictator here that she was at home, but she still had my personality quite accurately figured out.
One morning after discussion, I sat down with Leslie’s folder. As usual, she climbed into my lap. Normally, Leslie’s folder didn’t include much, as she was unable to work on her own at all and was generally unresponsive to being worked with in a group. However, this morning I’d included one of Shemona’s worksheets. On the left side of the paper were a series of colored shapes. On the right side were the same shapes in different order. The object of the exercise was to draw a line from the one on the left to its mate on the right.
“Look what I’ve got for you today,” I said, as Leslie adjusted herself in my lap. “You have a worksheet, just like everyone else. Isn’t that something? A big girl’s work. You and I are going to do it together.”
I took the sheet out and laid it on the table in front of us. I explained what was to be done. Leslie sat, motionless.
“Here. Here’s a pencil.”
No response.
I looked down at her and saw she wasn’t even looking at the paper. She stared vacantly ahead. I tilted her head down. Then, taking up her right hand, I carefully inserted the pencil and wrapped her fingers around it. It fell out and bounced along the floor. I retrieved it and once again pressed her fingers around it. Again it slid out and rolled away under the table.
“Well, no, that’s not going to do,” I said. “You need to hold the pencil. Here, take it in your hand. Hold it. Or else you won’t be able to draw the lines.”
She had completely evaporated. I was left with just the shell of a kid, flimsy as a paper sack.
“Oh, I see. You aren’t quite in the mood to work. Okay.” I lifted her down from my lap, stood and went over to Shamie. He was practicing his spelling, so I took up his list and began to help him.
Leslie remained standing, frozen into the position I had left her in. Not a muscle twitched. Her eyes were unfocused, her face expressionless. She stood that way for the entire hour and fifteen minutes between my getting up and the start of recess, when she joined the other children as they left the classroom.
After recess, I approached Leslie again. Or rather, she approached me. Coming up to me as I was sitting with Mariana and Geraldine, she attempted to get into my lap.
“Oh, good, you want to work too,” I said. “Just a minute. Let me get your paper.” I reached over and pulled her folder across the table. I lifted Leslie into my lap. “Here.” I handed her a pencil. She didn’t take it. Once again, I took her hand and pressed the pencil into it. The pencil dropped out.
“You don’t feel like working?” I asked.
Leslie had evaporated.
“Oh, well,” I said and put her off my lap. “I’m afraid you can’t sit here then. I’m busy with girls who are doing their work.” I slid my chair closer to the table, so that my abdomen was right up against the edge. Then I proceeded with Mariana and Geraldine.
This registered with Leslie. She didn’t blank out entirely, but rather watched us, her forehead slightly wrinkled.
After a few moments, Leslie lifted one leg and attempted futilely to wedge herself onto my lap in spite of my closeness to the table.
“Oh no, I’m afraid you can’t sit here, Leslie. I’m busy. If you want to do this paper with me, then you may stay. Otherwise, I need to get on with Geraldine and Mariana.”
In her own noiseless way, she became quite insistent. It was the first time in all these months that I’d seen her truly engaged in an interaction with me, other than that one occasion in the janitor’s closet. With persistence, she attempted to make room for herself on my lap. She got one leg up across mine, which left her in a precarious position. I did my best to ignore her, as she stood like a stork, hopping on one foot. The other two girls were having a harder time.
“Why are you being mean to Leslie today?” Mariana asked.
“I’m not being mean. I’m just busy. She wants to sit in my lap, and I don’t have time for that right now. I’m busy with people who are working hard.”
“Leslie can’t work,” Mariana replied earnestly, clearly concerned at what she was perceiving as maltreatment.
“Leslie can work. Everyone can work. And when she’s feeling in the mood, she can sit on my lap and I’ll help her. In the meantime, I’m busy with you two.”
Leslie, still caught with one leg lodged between mine and the table, balanced silently. When I scooted my chair back, she fell down. I rose and walked off. She didn’t move.
Leslie realized the gauntlet had been thrown down, and she hadn’t gotten where she was through a weak spirit. One day, two days, three days passed with no change, other than the worksheets. Each day I approached her, and she went vacant. Each day she approached me, and I refused her access to my lap. Sometimes three or four times a day we went through this, both of us insistent on things going our own way.
I did hope I was doing the right thing. My spirits were flagging after the third day. I was dreadfully conscious of having Ladbrooke in the room. She never said anything, but by the same token, she certainly didn’t ignore us. Every time I looked, she was watching us intently. That horrific encounter we’d had in early November, when she’d threatened to sue the life out of me, was, never again mentioned. Indeed, I suspected that it might have been something lost in the alcoholic mists of her memory, but I sure hadn’t forgotten it. I kept thinking about it each time I saw Ladbrooke’s eyes following me as I once again pushed her child off my lap. Even worse than Ladbrooke were the other children, particularly Mariana, who were very vocal about the sudden change in my relationship with “poor Leslie.” It was their comments, more than any other thing, that made me realize how much we’d all come to accept Leslie’s withdrawn behavior as normal.
On Thursday afternoon of that week, I went down after school and had a long talk with Carolyn. Had she ever come across anything like this? Did she think it was possible for a child to manipulate withdrawal in this manner? Was I expecting too much out of a poor little mite who couldn’t understand what was going on? Was I depriving her of the warmth and security and physical contact she had come to depend on as a vital part of our relationship? Would I hurt more than help in the long run?
Carolyn hadn’t come across anything like this, but she was reassuring and supporti
ve. Keep trying a little longer, she said. Give it a week and see how it goes.
We got to the following Tuesday and there was a change. We’d started the morning the same way as the others. Again I had the matching-colors worksheet for Leslie, again she refused to cooperate. So I’d put her off my lap and gone on to the other children. It was a hectic morning all around, and I soon became absorbed in what I was doing. So when I turned around just before recess to see what Leslie was doing, I found her gone.
I glanced around the room. Getting up from the table, I went around to the blackboard area. No Leslie anywhere.
“Where’s Les?” I asked, coming back to the table.
Everyone turned and looked.
“Has anyone seen her?”
Then all of a sudden there came a loud rrriiiip from deep within the library shelves. Going around the corner from the table, I plunged into the long, narrow aisles of the library. There was Leslie at the far end. She had next to her a whole pile of shredded journals. When she saw me, she looked me straight in the eye and tore another long strip from one of the magazines.
“Young lady, what’s this?” I pulled her to her feet. Bits of Psychology Today fluttered everywhere.
“This is not what we do with magazines.”
Leslie glared, not at me but simply straight ahead. Her forehead furrowed, her eyebrows formed a grim line.
“Go get the wastebasket so we can clean this up.”
She did not move.
“Go get the wastebasket, Leslie.”
More furrows on the forehead.
“Go. Now.”
“No!” she shouted and ran down the long aisle with her arm held out, causing every single journal she touched to fall on the floor. At the far end, she paused, grabbed what she could reach and flung it everywhere.
I leaped over the things strewn in my path and caught hold of her. She screeched with a volume I’d not anticipated, writhed and sunk her teeth firmly into my hand. I let go of her, more from surprise than pain.
Leslie shot off around the corner and into the main part of the classroom. Wiping blood on my jeans, I shot off after her. Everything she could get her hands on, she threw down. Work folders, books, coats, art materials all went crashing to the floor. With a final lunge, I caught up with her in the far corner, grabbing hold of her clothes. I lifted her physically off the floor by the back of her overalls and, wrapping my arms tightly around her in a confining bear hug, I sank down to the floor.
She was not screaming, not crying, just fighting. Grunt. Gasp. Flail. Kick. Twist. Turn. She kept at it and at it, trying to break my grip, so I enveloped her further, bringing my knees up to pin her in closer to me. We wrestled for a matter of minutes before she finally gave in. In the end, she collapsed wearily against me. I let go of her then, and she fell from my arms to lie, panting heavily, with her fact against the brown-and-white linoleum.
I rose and went over to the quiet chair, a large wooden chair in the back of the classroom. Mostly, I sent children to sit there until temporarily lost tempers were recovered, but I also used it for plain old time-out. “Leslie, sit here,” I said.
She looked up at me, and for a moment, I knew she was weighing the challenge. But in the end she rose and came over without further urging.
“I’m going to put the timer on for five minutes. When it rings, you may get up and rejoin the rest of us. Until then, sit here.”
I turned and came back to the others. Blood from where Leslie had bitten me had gone all over my blouse. I went over to Ladbrooke, who was sitting white-faced and wild-eyed at the table. She was trembling. “I’m going to go down to the office and get a couple of Band-Aids. I’ll be right back.”
“No. Don’t go,” she said.
“I’ll be right back.” And I was, even before the timer had gone off. I returned, sat down with Dirkie and began to help him with his work. When the bell rang, I looked over to Leslie. “You may get up now.”
She didn’t. Her body remained on the chair; the rest of her had disappeared.
At recess time, Leslie got off the chair when the other children started putting on their outdoor clothes. She headed for her cubby and her own jacket but hesitated as she passed her usual place at the table, where her work folder still lay open. Without so much as a glance toward the rest of us, she reached over, took up one of Mariana’s pencils and drew unfaltering lines between the colored shapes. Then she put the pencil down and continued on to get her clothes. I said nothing, neither to Leslie nor to Ladbrooke, who was bent down beside me to help Shemona with her jacket. But I did smile.
Both boys developed fairly obvious crushes on Ladbrooke during the course of her first weeks with us. Ladbrooke’s beauty was the sort of thing one didn’t acknowledge noticing, but it wasn’t really possible to ignore. However, lumping it into that broad category of things which people can’t help about themselves, I’d not given it much more thought. I suppose I should have weighed the matter before allowing her into the classroom with pubescent boys, but the wholesale silliness I was letting us in for never really crossed my mind.
Shamie’s reaction was that of any red-blooded male. He was besotted, plain and simple. Making calf eyes, trying to sit next to her at any opportunity, falling over himself to accommodate her every whim, he did nothing more than make a lovable nuisance of himself.
Dirkie, on the other hand, was something else again. He kept wanting to touch Ladbrooke. This was particularly unfortunate, as Ladbrooke, I soon discovered, was uncomfortable even with normal amounts of physical contact. She couldn’t bring herself to casually touch the children and she barely tolerated their touching her. She’d go motionless, all muscles tensing, and wait breathlessly for the child to take his or her hand away. So Dirkie got to be a bit of a menace.
Dirkie’s reaction was to stroke himself, which was, if anything, more embarrassing to Ladbrooke. “Oh, beautiful lady,” he’d say, running his hands down the sides of his face. “Beautiful lady, beautiful face.” Which was a whole lot better than his “Big tits, big beautiful tits,” while he caressed his shirt.
But of course, Dirkie’s worst problem was with Ladbrooke’s hair. I had to admit, she did have the kind of hair that would attract almost anybody’s attention. Thick and shiny and always slightly uncontrolled, no matter what she did to it, it invited touching. I knew sooner or later I wasn’t going to intervene in time.
Leslie’s explosion that morning set us all on edge. Even after lunch, when things had pretty much returned to normal, the children were hard to settle. Dirkie, as always, was the most sensitive to disturbance, and as a consequence, he’d spent most of the day hooting quietly from under the table.
After lunch, he came into the classroom hyped up. He giggled and laughed and clapped, all the while mincing around the room on the tips of his toes, like a drunken ballerina.
“Dirk, sit down, please,” I said. The children were making paper chains in preparation for Christmas, three weeks in the future.
Dirkie went to his chair and sat, reaching for a handful of construction-paper strips. But within minutes, he was up again, dancing around. He minced over in Ladbrooke’s direction.
“Dirkie,” I said, my tone sufficient warning, or so I hoped.
He had his hand out, just the tip of his forefinger touching a strand of Ladbrooke’s hair. Half the problem lay with her. She just could not abide the need to keep her hair braided or otherwise bound firmly back, and I don’t think she appreciated how much time I wasted, intervening. I felt petty, reminding her again and again, and resolved to let natural consequences take their course; but when in the classroom, seeing Dirkie on the move, I could never bring myself to just sit by and watch. On this occasion, Ladbrooke didn’t have her hair completely back. The bit around her face was pulled back and held with a barrette but the majority lay loose down her back and over part of the chair she was sitting in. It was this, the bit sticking out over the back of the wooden chair, that was too much temptation for Dirkie. He min
ced away on his toes and then returned. Another finger went out, and he touched the hair again.
I rose, walked around the table and took him by the shoulder. “Come back here with me,” I said, and sat him down beside me. I gave him part of my paper chain to work on.
“You got nice hair,” he said and reached up to stroke mine.
“No,” I said and put his hand down. “That isn’t appropriate. You don’t touch people’s hair without asking permission first.”
“You’ve got nice, long hair. Are you going to cut your hair?”
Geraldine across from us groaned. “Doesn’t he ever say anything else?”
“Are you going to cut your hair?”
“No, Dirkie. Now help with the chains.”
But he couldn’t. “Hoo-hoo-hoo.” And then he slipped off the chair and under the table. “Hoo-hoo-hoo.” He began to clap.
After Leslie’s explosion, I didn’t like provoking Dirkie into something similar; and I knew I would, if I kept at him. So, instead, I let him stay under the table.
We worked for some time in relative peace. The chain making was an enjoyable activity. Christmas was far enough ahead that the mania hadn’t set in, but the festive spirit was becoming apparent. The children talked animatedly among themselves about presents, traditions and the things they liked best about Christmas.
Shamie, who was sitting next to Ladbrooke, lifted up his chain to see his progress. He’d been beavering away and now found he couldn’t stretch his arm high enough to display the entire length, so he shook it to straighten it out on the table. That sent a flurry of paper strips scattering into Ladbrooke’s lap and down onto the floor.
“Oh, I am sorry,” Shamie said.
“That’s all right,” Ladbrooke replied and leaned down to retrieve the fallen strips beside her chair. That was her fatal mistake. As she bent down, her hair fell forward, and Dirkie, waiting under the table like a lurking piranha, couldn’t resist the opportunity presented him.