by Torey Hayden
Ideally, I would have put Leslie into diapers at home too, because that would have disarmed her. Unable to annoy and divide her parents, I think she would have conformed fairly quickly. But as things were, I didn’t even bother to suggest it. Leslie’s toilet behavior was such an integral part of the Considyne family dynamics that I realized I could have little impact. So I withdrew from the situation. Satisfied that Leslie was dry in the classroom, I made no further efforts to see things change at home.
March came at last, with a slow, welcome thaw. I’d grown decidedly tired of winter by that time, and while this March was unlike Wales, with its hillsides of snowdrops and daffodils, I was willing to accept the gray, gritty snow’s turning to slush as a sign of spring.
There were other changes too. The relationship between Shemona and Geraldine was breaking down in the same slow, deteriorating fashion as the melting snow. Geraldine had remained static for several weeks. She fluctuated back and forth between her usual clingy, babyish behavior and arrogant imperiousness, wherein she ordered everyone around and demanded the best place, the best piece, the best treatment. Her petty antisocial behavior continued unabated, as did the spiteful episodes of vengeance. Slowly, these began to extend to Shemona, as well as the others. More and more, she and Shemona fought.
In the beginning, I hadn’t thought much about the fighting. Most of it was very much of a sibling nature. Moreover, Geraldine was going through a pugnacious phase with everyone and was in almost daily knockdowns with Dirkie and Mariana, so I didn’t think much about the old fracas with Shemona. But as time went by, I realized there was more to their fighting. Shemona, I noticed, was increasingly the provoker. She tended to choose safe locations and safe times, but she openly defied Geraldine. A seat wouldn’t be saved for her older sister. A paper wouldn’t be shown to her. A treat wouldn’t be shared with her. Carefully, Shemona managed to extend the same stony unresponsiveness to Geraldine that she had always displayed with the rest of us. In most children I would have taken this as a step backward, but in Shemona, I reckoned this act of slowly shutting out Geraldine was progress. And it infuriated Geraldine, who, if not watched, was regularly giving Shemona a clop around the chops.
The major reason I did not consider Shemona’s increased withdrawal in the classroom as regressive was that she had begun to show definite signs of a strong, stable relationship with Ladbrooke during their time together each day. Shemona, still continually dour and silent with the rest of us, would smile and laugh and play with Ladbrooke.
Once Ladbrooke had become comfortable with the format of the sessions, I’d turned the whole works over to her, allowing her free rein to structure the period as she saw fit. This seemed the only sensible way to assure a natural, free-flowing relationship between them, which was what I was aiming for. Although the two of us discussed what was going on, and particularly the results Lad was getting, I tried not to influence Ladbrooke’s natural inclinations. She was reliable enough and I was always near enough to insure there would not be any serious problems. Because I stayed out of the planning, their program took on an atmosphere very different from what it probably would have done if I’d been involved. Ladbrooke had gotten started some weeks earlier using the dressing-up box with Shemona. From there, she’d gone on to regularly styling Shemona’s hair and putting makeup on her face. The whole period, day after day, revolved around this. Shemona, wrapped up in feather boas and an oversized black dress, netted hat on her head, fifties-style black patent leather high heels on her feet, would parade back and forth in the gloom of the long, narrow blackboard arm of the room. Loosened up by the privacy and, I suspect, my absence, Ladbrooke responded very uninhibitedly to Shemona, popping silly hats and clothes on herself and letting Shemona play with her long hair. In complete contrast to her normal laconic style, Ladbrooke now carried on nonstop monologues with Shemona, as she helped the child dress or did her hair or face for her. “Ooooh, look at you, Gorgeous. You’re a fancy woman now. See? You’re fit to walk down Fifth Avenue. Could go shopping in Saks, looking like that. Here, put this on. Aren’t you something? Look at yourself in the mirror. Oh, wait a minute. Let me fasten that bit of hair up like this. Oh, that’s better, isn’t it? Look at you!”
It was very easy to listen to them. They were only a matter of feet away from the rest of us, as we sat just around the corner at the table, and Ladbrooke, in her enthusiasm, could forget herself and talk quite loudly. This tended to catch our attention if the activities at hand weren’t too interesting—that, and the incessant click-click of Shemona’s high heels as she teetered back and forth across the linoleum floor. I certainly had my occasional doubts about what they were doing. The beauty routine, the dressing up, the hair styling, were all light-years away from what my own approach would have been, if I’d been working with Shemona. I doubt I ever would have thought of doing such a thing with her. The other children sometimes verbalized what I was thinking: This is school. How come Shemona gets to play for half an hour every day? But I restrained myself from interfering.
To me, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of these sessions was Ladbrooke and Shemona’s choice of a medium that required a maximum amount of physical contact between them. Neither of them could tolerate the ordinary touching that went on in the classroom, yet both ritualized it into their daily routine and approached it with glee. Shemona would shriek with delight when Ladbrooke smeared makeup on her cheeks or brushed her hair or wrapped scarves around her.
During the course of one of the sessions, Ladbrooke produced a mail-order catalogue. She had brought it in earlier and shown it to me. It was an outdated Christmas toy catalogue from one of the large chain stores and had a huge section of ready-made costumes for children. Ladbrooke had thought this might be of interest to Shemona, and now they were together in their arm of the room, where I could hear them leafing through it, the thin pages being turned rapidly, one after another. Ladbrooke was carrying on her usual patter, enthusing over things in the doll section. Then they reached the costumes.
“Oh, look,” Lad said. “Look at this one. That would be super, wouldn’t it? It looks like a nurse’s uniform. We could have ourselves some fun with that one, couldn’t we? I could be the patient. Lie down right there. And you could be the nurse and put Band-Aids on me.” There was a pause, and I assumed Shemona was indicating something. “And look at this one. And this one. Isn’t this grand. Look, it’s long. And the girl’s got high heels on, just like yours in the dressing-up box. What do you think this is meant to be? A ball gown? I think so.”
Another, longer pause followed. “I’ve worn a dress like this,” Ladbrooke said. “It was long. And it was done up so. And you know what color it was?”
“Gold?” replied Shemona.
Sudden silence.
I had been working with Dirkie at the table and had been half listening to Ladbrooke’s constant monologue, so I heard Shemona’s voice. Dirkie did as well. He turned his head toward the corner of the shelving. I paused, listening hard.
Much to her credit, Ladbrooke did not overreact. After all these months of waiting, it would have been understandable if she had. But there was a long, long pause, and then I heard Ladbrooke say, “Well, no, actually it was blue. But it was very pretty nonetheless.” The tentative note in her voice gave away her surprise, but she continued on with the catalogue. “Oh, look, Shemona. Here’s a beauty. It looks like a pink ball gown.”
“It’s a fairy dress,” Shemona said, her clear Irish accent rolling out the r’s.
Because we, on the other side of the shelves, had all been doing quiet work, everyone sitting with me was now listening to Ladbrooke and Shemona. Such a small leprechaun voice, yet we all heard.
Mariana looked over and smiled. “Torey,” she said in a hushed voice, “do you hear that? Shemona’s talking!”
I nodded and put a finger to my lips to keep her and the other children quiet. I didn’t want to break the magic spell that Ladbrooke was weaving beyond the steel shelving.
>
Glancing down the table to where Geraldine was bent over her work, I noticed she alone had gone back to what she was writing.
“Hey, Geraldine,” Mariana whispered, “do you hear that, Ladbrooke’s made Shemona talk. Do you hear?”
Geraldine shrugged and returned to her spelling workbook. “So? So what?”
And Shemona was talking. Unlike the two previous occasions when she had spoken to me, this time it was genuine. For several days afterward, she confined her talking to the sessions with Ladbrooke, but during those periods, she grew bolder and bolder. She not only talked with Ladbrooke, she teased and bantered and made silly noises. I was astonished, listening to her. It was as if there were an entirely different child from the silent, scruffy little thing I encountered away from the safety behind the metal shelves.
Then slowly Shemona began to talk to the rest of us. She seemed to realize that we’d been listening all along and, after a point, no longer felt the need to secrete herself away before speaking. First she spoke with Mariana, who had plagued her mercilessly to talk to her ever since Mariana had heard her speak that first day. Then Shemona began talking to the other children, particularly when they were out on the playground. Last of all, she spoke to me.
With the rest of us, however, Shemona was still constrained. She seldom spoke unless spoken to. I never saw her laugh or tease the way she did with Ladbrooke. If I hadn’t overheard her, I doubt I would have ever believed this other side of her existed. But I was unconcerned by this difference between her behavior with Ladbrooke and her behavior with others. The important thing was that Shemona was finally talking.
Perhaps almost as important was the effect that Shemona’s decision to talk had on Ladbrooke’s morale, coming as it did at such a low point in Lad’s life. I don’t suppose there was anything I could have done which would have had the same uplifting effect that this small Irish girl’s words had. Despite throwing herself into the classroom activities, Ladbrooke had continued to feel like a fish out of water with us. She loved us, I had no doubt about that, and she loved the work. But the fact remained that she was not a teacher, not a psychologist, not even a trained aide like Joyce, and no amount of effort to focus her attention on the very real help she provided me had ameliorated her feelings of inadequacy. But Shemona had managed what I hadn’t: She’d made Ladbrooke feel competent. After the session in which Shemona first talked, Ladbrooke had remained sitting at the small student desk with the mail-order catalogue. When I’d gone around to her, she’d looked up, a bemused expression on her face.
“What do you know,” she said in amazement. “I can do this.”
Chapter 23
Ladbrooke was having a brutal winter, despite the supportive environment of the classroom and her genuine efforts to keep herself together. Although Shemona’s new-found speech gave a much needed boost to Lad’s self-confidence, she still careened from one crisis to another, virtually nonstop. I was sadly concluding that this was not an unusual state of affairs. The more I was with her, the more I suspected that this was simply the way Ladbrooke’s life was. The miracle to me was that she had managed to survive thirty-three years of it.
The vast majority of her problems lay on the domestic scene. Tom and Ladbrooke had a relationship that made me shudder. As I grew to know the two of them better, I lost all my admiration for Tom’s persistent desire to keep the marriage together, because it was an evil thing that preyed on them both. Rather than patching it up, they ought to have been attempting to drive a silver stake through its heart.
Tom’s interest in maintaining the relationship was complex, and I never had a chance to understand it well, but the peculiar kind of indulgent contempt with which he always treated Ladbrooke was hard to miss. He had no perceivable respect for her as an individual and he was disdainful of her instability; yet at the same time, he martyred himself putting up with all her outrageous behavior. My gut feeling was that, as with Leslie, he loved the idea of Ladbrooke and her leonine beauty rather more than he did Ladbrooke herself. Reality never seemed to fit very well into Tom’s life. Ladbrooke, on the other hand, had more straightforward reasons for continuing the marriage. It was the closest she had come to a loving relationship. With so few emotional resources, she didn’t dare give it up.
From her February binge onward, Ladbrooke and I met late every Sunday morning. It was easiest to have her come over to my apartment. The quiet privacy allowed us the opportunity to talk, and my not having to go out to meet her made the disruption to my own weekend a little less. The first couple of times, I made an effort as a hostess, but it was a setup that was unnatural to us both. We were accustomed to working together and not much more, so in the end, I just kept on with whatever it was I was doing, and Ladbrooke simply joined me at it for an hour or two. As a consequence, she enjoyed such delectable Sunday entertainments as cleaning the oven and shampooing the carpet. We joked about its being occupational therapy. Truth be known, it probably was.
Whatever it was, it worked. Ladbrooke stayed alcohol free. Day by day and then week by week, she managed to wend her way through her assorted difficulties without resorting to a drink. As I grew closer to her, I realized that Ladbrooke had been fairly astute when she’d told me that what she needed most was someone to hold her world together for her when she was no longer able to. For the most part, she seemed to have the intelligence, the insight and the desire necessary for change, but she was like one of those rapidly spinning stars in far outer space, which, with no stable core, eventually spin so fast that they fly apart.
Over the course of the three or four months that Ladbrooke had been with me, I was slowly coming to terms with what I concluded to be Lad’s most serious problem: her inability to express herself verbally. While things like her alcoholism and her wretched relationship with Tom were much more noticeable, I began to see them as extensions of her difficulty with talking. Indeed, almost all her other problems could be traced back directly or indirectly to this one area.
In the early days I had assumed the problem was one of shyness. Why else would an intelligent, well-educated adult be so inarticulate? And the symptoms fit that sort of pattern. She avoided people in order to avoid talking to them, and she became tense in even very minor social situations. But as time passed and I grew more familiar with her, I saw that while the symptoms fit, Ladbrooke herself really didn’t. She didn’t have that withdrawn, acutely self-conscious type of personality associated with shyness. Indeed, on occasion she could be considerably more uninhibited than I was, and I wasn’t known for my retiring nature. Moreover, Ladbrooke did not perceive herself as shy. And shyness, to my way of thinking was not something likely to be present unbeknownst to its victim.
This left me puzzled for a very long time. Then, slowly, patterns in her behavior grew more apparent. I’d known all along that tension gave her a massive amount of trouble. The more anxious or stressed she was, the less likely she would be to speak well. And if she did manage to speak at all past her habitual yes, no or I don’t know, she would often make a hash of it, saying silly things or things she didn’t really mean or didn’t want to say or even, occasionally, that made no sense at all. Because she became anxious so quickly in any kind of social situation, even those as mundane as the gatherings in the teachers’ lounge, this had been a very easy behavior for me to observe. However, as time went by, I started noticing other, less obvious occasions when Ladbrooke also was not very articulate. Odd things, like background noise, soft music or other people chattering, could give her trouble. Being rushed affected her, even if it was innocent and she was feeling friendly and secure in the situation. Being very tired was yet another cause. I grew able to recognize the nights Leslie had been up frequently by Ladbrooke’s confused speech the following morning.
These patterns would have been more obvious to me, I think, if it were not for the few converse situations when Ladbrooke could be surprisingly eloquent, such as the occasion when she’d told me about her childhood Christmas. Because s
uch situations didn’t occur often, I had to spend a great deal of time with her before I realized that they, too, tended to happen only in set circumstances: we were alone, the immediate environment was totally quiet, the emotional setting, if not relaxed, was always secure, and lastly, they were always monologues. Ladbrooke never showed the same kind of eloquence in conversation.
Mulling over these patterns, I eventually concluded that Ladbrooke’s inarticulateness was not so much the result of an emotional problem as a type of aphasia, a dysfunction of whatever part of the brain it was that controlled expressive speech. From that point of view, a huge amount of her behavior suddenly made sense, and it became easier to understand what was happening to her the rest of the time. For some while, I’d been aware that in many social situations she was having paralyzing anxiety attacks. Now the cycle became clearer. Tense, she became less articulate. Frightened at finding herself unable to say what she wanted, she panicked. The panic destroyed whatever bit of expression she was still capable of. Ladbrooke had found only two ways of coping. Either she avoided people altogether and discouraged further social encounters with her hostile, aloof behavior, or she drank. When drinking, she relaxed. Even if she didn’t make much sense, when Ladbrooke had had enough alcohol, she could talk. Or at least not care if she couldn’t.