by Torey Hayden
This was extremely hard reasoning for me to deal with because it made absolutely no practical sense at all. Yet arguing with him over the matter was frustrating because, as I heard myself talk, all my justifications sounded so dreary and banal. How did you argue reality against dreams of beauty and innocence?
Ladbrooke began to cry. Right out of nowhere. I just happened to glance over mid-discussion with Tom and I saw the tears washing over her cheeks as she sat, chin in her hands. Tom, too, looked over when I did.
“Don’t you have anything to say?” he asked. “This is your child.”
She shook her head, got up and left the room.
I told Tom that I intended to persevere in the classroom with what I was doing. Speech first, I said. Then toilet training. And if there was still time, I wanted to see Leslie, if not sleeping through the night, then at least staying in her room so that other people could sleep.
Tom looked scandalized. Leslie can’t do those things, he said. If she could do them, she would do them. It was criminal to force a child like Leslie.
I said I had no intention of forcing Leslie. I intended, rather, to teach her. She wasn’t doing them, I felt, because she had never learned the necessity of doing them. But she could. I was convinced of that. She was a bright child, in spite of her handicap.
I studied his features, his gentle, watery eyes, and I knew I wasn’t succeeding. He wasn’t in the least convinced that I was doing right. He loved Leslie’s feyness. In a way, I suspect he loved her feyness more than he loved the child herself.
Back in the classroom with Leslie, I got underway. I brought up an old desk from the basement and two small wooden chairs. These I put in the blackboard area of the room, up against the chalkboard. I then arranged the daily schedule so that Ladbrooke could handle the other children, allowing me an uninterrupted half hour a day with Leslie.
Although not normally given to highly disciplined approaches, I chose one for Leslie. Reckoning she needed to be taught to speak, rather than made to speak, as in the case of children with purely emotionally based speech problems, I decided to give Leslie small, concrete rewards for any attempt she made to create appropriate sounds. Food was the most obvious reinforcement, although with Leslie’s diabetes, this was difficult. I had to look around quite a while to come up with something that she might like well enough to work for that wouldn’t interfere with her regimen. In the end, I settled on chopped up bits of raw Jerusalem artichoke. Hardly high on most people’s list of popular foods, they weren’t an obvious choice, but they were available, permittable on her diet and reasonably cheap. My real advantage was the fact that food of any kind was a novel reinforcer for Leslie. She had such a tightly controlled diet that she seldom saw food outside highly structured eating times.
I made up three flash cards with pictures of things with simple, single-syllable names—ball, man, dog. I knew Leslie was familiar with all three words and could recognize and identify them on sight.
I laid the cards on the desk between us. “Okay, lovey, can you point to the picture of the dog?”
She did.
“Good job.” I gave her a piece of Jerusalem artichoke. This intrigued her. She held it up, examined it, smelled it. “Eat it,” I said. She did, then gestured for more.
“Point to the picture of the man.”
She did. I gave her a second piece of the vegetable. This time she popped it into her mouth immediately and crunched noisily. She reached across the desk for the plate. I removed it, holding it out of her reach.
“Eh-eh,” she said.
“No, not yet. You’ll have more as we go along. Where’s the ball? Good. Here, have this. Where’s the man? Good. Here, have another piece. Where’s the dog? Good.” Over and over the three pictures we went, and for each correct answer, I gave her a chunk of Jerusalem artichoke.
“All right, something different,” I said, and picked the three cards up off the table. I shuffled them and then laid only one back down. “What’s this, Leslie?”
She stared at it.
“Man,” I said, forming the sounds very carefully. “Look up here, Leslie. Look at my mouth. M-a-n. What is it? M-a-n. What is it?”
Her brow furrowed slightly and she studied the picture.
“Look up here again. See my lips? See how I make the sounds. Give me your hand. Put your fingers here against my lips. M-a-n. Now, fingers on your lips. M-a-n.”
She averted her eyes.
I held up a piece of Jerusalem artichoke enticingly. She reached out for it, but I kept it just out of her grasp. “M-a-n, Leslie. What’s this picture? What is it? M-a-n.” With my other hand I gently pushed her lips together to sound the letter M. “M-a-n.”
At last she grunted. It wasn’t a word. It wasn’t even an M sound, really. Just a grunt. But I grinned. “Good girl. Here.” And I gave her the piece of Jerusalem artichoke.
The other child I was increasingly concerned about was Geraldine. As the months passed, I realized her problems were much more complex than I’d initially perceived. While on one hand, she was by far the most compliant child in the group, usually presenting a clingy, babyish desperation to please; on the other hand, she nursed an almost unbelievable vengefulness. She could extract cruel, very personal revenge without showing any remorse for the act whatsoever.
I didn’t know what to do with Geraldine on either account. Her whiny, clinging behavior drove me to distraction, irritating me and making me not want to be with her at all. Her darker side was unnerving because it was so secret and I didn’t ever seem to be able to get effectively at it. If anything, she seemed to be getting worse as the year progressed. More and more often she was caught stealing, lying or inciting Shemona to carry out hostilities on her behalf. When confronted with any of this, Geraldine categorically denied all involvement, even in the face of very obvious evidence. I tried every approach to dealing with these infractions that I could think of, from totally ignoring them to treating her misdemeanors very strictly indeed. Nothing gave me the results I was looking for.
Once I had Leslie in hand and was working easily with her each day, and once Ladbrooke was fully back into the swing of things after her Christmas disruption and able to cope well with the children, I decided it was time to carve out a bit of special time for Geraldine.
The antisocial behavior was far and again the most serious of Geraldine’s problems, but I didn’t know quite how to approach that directly. So I turned my attention to the clinginess. I hated that behavior to the point that it was disrupting my relationship with the child. It brought out the very worst in me, since I lost patience with it so easily. Certainly I had to acknowledge that the problem was as much mine as it was Geraldine’s, because this was just one of those things that personally got right up my nose. My preference was for rowdy, gutsy, aggressive kids, the sort with that desperate bravado against all of the odds—which was lucky, because these kinds of kids made up probably 95 percent of most of my special education classes. I also liked the quiet, troubled, complex ones who stayed in my thoughts after hours, who kept me thinking about them days and weeks and sometimes years after meeting them. But for the clutching, grasping, whining little toadies, I had no affinity whatsoever. This made me feel obligated to work overtime with Geraldine, because I was conscious of needing to compensate for my testy irritation.
So one January day during recess, I brought a rocking chair into the classroom and set it in the long, narrow blackboard arm of the room near Leslie’s desk. And I didn’t have to wait long to try the chair out. Later that same afternoon, the children were all gathered around the table, doing their individual work. Sitting across from Shamie, I was giving him words for his spelling test. Geraldine and Mariana were making scrapbooks in connection with their reading work. Back and forth they went between the table and the back of the classroom to get magazines for pictures. Geraldine kept stopping to put her arms around my neck. She caressed my hair.
“Honey, please don’t,” I said. “You and Mariana
have your own work to do. I’m helping Shamie right now.”
“Mariana’s got the glue. I need more glue.”
I slid my chair back to see where Ladbrooke was. Geraldine sat down in my lap. She put her arms around my neck and nuzzled against me. “Go ask Ladbrooke to get you some more glue. I need to finish with Shamie.” I gently pushed her off my lap.
“Noooo,” she whined, still clinging to my neck. She slipped back onto my lap before I could scoot closer to the table.
“Geraldine, please get off. I need to finish with Shamie; he’s waiting. Take your glue pot over to Ladbrooke.”
“Noooo. I want to sit here. With you, Miss.”
I pushed Geraldine off my lap and unhooked her arms from behind my neck, then quickly slid in against the table so she couldn’t reseat herself.
“Geraldine, we’ve talked about this. This isn’t appropriate, and it’s making me cross. I’m working with Shamie right now. If you need something, ask Ladbrooke.”
Shamie, across the table, groaned with annoyance. “Mii-iisss? Next word?”
“No, Geraldine. Don’t put your hands there. No. Stop it, please. This isn’t a time for kissing. I don’t want to be kissed. I’m working with Shamie.”
It was like fighting off a giggling octopus. As fast as I disentangled her from one part of my body, she reattached to another. Lad materialized behind me and unhooked Geraldine’s arms from my neck. This interference irritated Geraldine, and her laughter turned to a snarl. She elbowed Lad’s stomach.
“Hey,” I said, turning in my chair.
Shamie drummed his pencil impatiently on the table.
Geraldine obviously expected to end up in the quiet chair for that, because she was already halfway there before I’d managed to hand Shamie’s spelling words to Ladbrooke and get up.
“Geraldine, come here, please,” I said. She returned to the table. I put a hand on her shoulder and guided her around the corner of the shelves. I knelt down to look her in the eye.
“How many times have you and I discussed your hanging all over me?”
She averted her eyes.
“How often?”
A shrug.
I waited.
“A lot,” she muttered.
“Yes, a lot. It bothers me. When you climb on me and hang on me and kiss and touch me all the time, I feel angry with you. It’s my body, and I don’t like people using it without my permission.”
Geraldine studied the floor.
“But my telling you how much it upsets me doesn’t seem to be making much of a difference. You still do it. And sometimes I get fed up enough with it to make you sit in the quiet chair, but that doesn’t seem to make much difference either.”
“I don’t know I’m doing it, Miss,” she mumbled.
“You do know, Geraldine. You’re inside your body. You know what it’s doing.”
She shrugged.
“So I’ve decided we need to try something else. You want to touch people and you need to make people touch you, and I’m beginning to think that’s so important to you that the consequences of people getting angry with you don’t matter. So I’m thinking maybe we need to set aside a special time especially for you—for me to hold you and for you to cuddle. What do you think?”
She shrugged.
“Let’s make a deal. Let’s arrange things so that you make an honest try not to hang on me quite so much, and in exchange, we’ll set aside a special time for holding and hugging. See the rocking chair? What we’ll do is sit together in the rocking chair at the end of the day, just you and me. We’ll have a special time just for ourselves.”
I stood up. “Come here. We’ll try it out right now.” I went over, adjusted the position of the rocking chair and sat down. Geraldine, with a disconcerted expression on her face, remained standing by the corner of the shelves.
“Come here, Geraldine.”
“I’m too big, Miss.”
“Too big for what?”
“Too big for sitting in your lap, Miss.”
“You were sitting in my lap a few minutes ago, Geraldine. Right around the corner in the classroom.”
She regarded me.
“Come here, Geraldine.”
She shook her head.
“Would it be better if I brought over one of those chairs from Leslie’s desk, and I could sit in that and you could sit in the rocker? Then we could just sit side by side.”
She shook her head again. “No, Miss, I don’t want to.”
“Why?”
“I’m too big, Miss.” She turned. “I’ll go sit in the quiet chair instead.”
Chapter 17
Shamie’s notes and files arrived from his school in Belfast the final week in January. They confirmed what I had pretty much concluded all along, that Shamie was not much of a scholar. My experience with him in the classroom showed that he was behind in virtually all subjects and would need resource help in math and probably in reading in a normal junior high.
I was hoping to mainstream Shamie part days at a nearby school within a month’s time. He was neither sufficiently disturbed nor sufficiently dysfunctional to merit full-time placement in special education, so I was trying to give him as many experiences close to those of a regular classroom as possible.
One area in which Shamie did excel was history. He was fascinated by the past, and history was the only area in which he could be enticed into doing extra reading. I’d put him on a course of studying medieval Europe and then tried to coordinate as many other activities to the subject as possible. We did tied-in math projects, spelling lists and art activities. We even created a special medieval meal one lunchtime for Shamie to serve to the other children.
One morning, he arrived carrying a book about castles. His assignment had been to read three books of interest relating to the medieval topic, and this one he had located in the public library. It was a beautifully illustrated book, full of incredibly intricate drawings of every possible aspect of castle building.
“Can I read this book for my assignment?” he asked, showing it to me. I paged through it.
Ladbrooke was beside me, and she leaned over my shoulder. “May I see it?” she asked, when I closed it.
I handed it to her. Laying it down, she leaned forward, one hand braced on the edge of the table, and turned the pages slowly. “You know what we could do?” she said, her voice thoughtful.
“What’s that?” Shamie asked.
“We could make a model of this castle.”
“How do you mean, Miss?”
Ladbrooke considered one of the pictures. “We could take some cardboard and a protractor and a compass and then build this. See, like this. You’d measure that bit there and then transfer it, because, see, it says here that these are scale drawings.”
“Could we?” Shamie asked, awed. Then he turned to me. “Could we, Miss?”
The classroom suddenly became a depository for every conceivable bit of paper rubbish there was, as Shamie collected together enough material to build his castle. In the beginning, it took form on the end of the table, which was generously large and could accommodate the eight of us with plenty of room to spare. But the castle quickly outgrew these lodgings. Very carefully, Shamie disassembled it, piece by piece, and reassembled it on the floor, back by the sink.
Ladbrooke wasn’t satisfied, however, with the way the castle was taking shape. She arrived one morning with a set of what looked like architect’s tools, including a compass that should have been classed as a lethal weapon. Cutting open one of the cereal boxes, she flattened it out with the unprinted side upward. Taking the castle book down on the floor beside her, she found an explicit picture of a rampart and tower. “See this,” she said to Shamie. “Here’s how we make it.” And she proceeded to show him how to take precise measurements and transfer them exactly to the cardboard.
The castle became an exercise not only in medieval history but in mathematics. Ladbrooke had an eye for detail and a need for precision that led h
er to long periods on her hands and knees with Shamie, measuring, cutting, measuring again. Ladbrooke didn’t simply go at it with ruler and scissors the way I did. She had to use the protractor and the architect’s curve and the craft knife to get a perfect edge. And Shamie, because he loved Ladbrooke, learned to love these things too. She got after him if he wasn’t precise enough. She made him measure over, cut again, retape, and he did it without protest. He would probably have done it for her regardless, but he was also enough of a perfectionist himself to appreciate Ladbrooke’s need for precision a bit more than I did. The castle became an exact scale model of the one in the book. Although still constructed chiefly of cast-off boxes and bits of Styrofoam packing material, it was no longer a makeshift affair. It became a real, recognizable castle.
Mariana and Geraldine were drawn into the process too. Dirkie wanted to help, but he was relegated to the ignominious tasks, like painting bricks on the cardboard walls, while Shemona watched wistfully from the side-lines. Sometimes Shamie let her paint the cardboard gray before Dirkie drew on the bricks, but for the most part, she was deemed too small and too incompetent. This was a “big-kids’ project,” as Mariana put it. So Shemona and I used “castle time” for doing other things together.
The castle grew. It had inner walls and outer walls, ramparts and turrets. Inside were stable blocks and feasting houses and grain stores. For more than two weeks, its construction dominated our lives. Every spare moment became “castle time.” In fact, it even began to intrude on life after school. I came back from a meeting one evening to find Ladbrooke flat on her stomach on the floor, peering in through the castle entrance, trying to insert a small portcullis made out of floral wire. Up, down, up, down she moved it, trying to get it to lift on its own with the aid of a small piece of dental floss. She was too absorbed to talk to me. I came over and thumped the soles of her jogging shoes as they waved in the air.
“Are you going home?” I asked. “It’s quarter after five.”