Just Another Kid

by Torey Hayden

  This theory also lent insight into her difficult relations at home. Brilliant in his own right and rapier tongued, Tom was a formidable individual in conversation. I knew this from my own experience with him, because he regularly outmaneuvered me, twisting and turning my words, switching subjects, doubling back and often simply bludgeoning me with sheer persistence until I found myself agreeing with him, whether I meant to or not. Such elaborate verbal gymnastics were wasted on Ladbrooke. She was defeated before she started, reduced to fuming silence or noisy bursts of temper that communicated nothing.

  Theirs was a vastly unequal relationship, the inequality perhaps being the most salient aspect to outsiders. First impressions were of Tom as a domineering father to Lad’s sulky, sullen child. However, I came to feel that the inequality was much deeper than that. Ladbrooke wasn’t simply being obstinate or petty. It wasn’t because she wouldn’t talk to Tom as an equal, but rather that she couldn’t. Tom’s reference on that one occasion to Ladbrooke’s being a lioness trapped in human form was a chillingly apt description. Their situation wasn’t a matter of maturity vs. immaturity or dominance vs. submission. They were of two different species entirely. Tom’s role was one of zookeeper, an indulgent master of something he desired but could not control, while Ladbrooke paced restlessly back and forth within the confines of the marriage, trapped and voiceless.

  The rain had been bucketing down all day. The children had had to stay in over the lunch hour, and so everyone was rowdy and unsettled when class resumed in the afternoon. Mariana, in particular, was having a bad day. She hadn’t finished any of her morning work. She’d gotten into fisticuffs with Geraldine at lunch and later with Shemona in the girls’ rest room. She’d encouraged Dirkie into frantic masturbation under the table. And she’d larked about, annoying me the whole day long. I had had her in and out of the quiet chair several times during the morning, and she was in it again after lunch, sitting on the wooden chair, rocking it back and forth to make an irritating creaking noise. The timer I’d set to the number of minutes she needed to stay in the chair went off with a resounding ring, and Mariana got up.

  I was working with Shemona and looked up momentarily from what we were doing. “Okay, Mariana. Your work’s right there on the table. Please get started immediately. There isn’t much time before recess.” I went back to Shemona.

  Mariana returned to her place at the table. She opened her folder and, still standing, leaned over her chair and studied the worksheets. Taking her pencil, she went to sharpen it. Then she returned, seated herself and looked over the worksheets again. She glanced to Geraldine, two chairs away, who was listening to a tape through headphones. Mariana made a face. When Geraldine didn’t notice, Mariana leaned over, touched Geraldine’s elbow and made the face again.

  “Mariana,” I said, “please get busy.”

  Mariana looked down at the worksheet she had taken from the folder. She picked up her pencil and began to write but almost immediately put the pencil down again. She got up, went to her cubby, got out her pencil box and came back to her place. Sitting down again, she opened the box and rooted through it. Out came a big green eraser. She started to erase with it but then picked it up and examined it. With one fingernail, she scraped along the edge of the eraser. She rubbed the eraser under her nose, then stopped, smelled it, smiled, smelled the eraser again. Then she began to rub the eraser back and forth on the Formica tabletop.

  “Mariana,” I said. “Get to work.”

  Mariana stared at her paper. She twiddled her pencil. She drew little wavy lines down the side of the worksheet. Lifting the pencil up, she examined the point again. Then she started cleaning her fingernails with it.

  Annoyed with Mariana’s fooling around, I excused myself from Shemona and her work and went over to sit next to Mariana. “What is your problem today?” I asked.

  “I don’t understand this.”

  “It’s exactly the same kind of sheet you’ve been doing all week. Here, let’s read the directions and go over them so that you do understand.”

  Mariana haltingly read through the directions.

  “So what do they mean?” I asked.

  “That I read these words on this side and then these on this side and draw a line between the ones that go together.”

  “That’s right. So what don’t you understand?”

  She shrugged.

  “Then please get busy.” I stood up and walked around to see what the others were doing. When I next looked, Mariana was spinning her pencil around and around on the tabletop.

  Completely fed up, I grabbed a nearby yardstick and without warning brought it cracking down on the table about six inches from the spinning pencil. Mariana squawked in surprise.

  “Work!” I said. And she did.

  Only moments later, the bell sounded for recess.

  It was Lad’s and my break, so after herding the children down to the playground, we returned to the teachers’ lounge.

  “Don’t do that again, okay?” Ladbrooke said, as we were climbing the stairs.

  “Don’t do what?”

  “Hit the table like that, like you did in the room.”

  I smiled. “I was just trying to get Mariana moving. She’s been a right royal pain all day long.”

  “But don’t do it again.”

  “I wasn’t going to hit her, Lad. But she’s been screwing around all day. The whole point of it was to scare the daylights out of her.”

  “It’s not right,” Lad replied.

  At that moment we reached the teachers’ lounge. Brightly lit in contrast to the gloomy corridor, it was also full of people. Bill and Frank and three of the people from speech therapy were in there, drinking pop and laughing uproariously. The conversation between Ladbrooke and me came to an end.

  It wasn’t until after school when Lad and I were working together at the table that the subject reappeared. Ladbrooke paused at what she was doing and braced her chin with both hands. A few moments’ silence ensued as she watched me writing.

  “I remember at school once,” she said quietly, “when I was six and in the first grade and we were doing reading workbooks. There were these spaces, and you had to write the words in. And I wasn’t doing it right.

  “The teacher would walk up and down the aisles, watching us as we worked. She had this long pointer, a blackboard pointer, that she always carried with her, and she’d tap the wrought-iron bit of the desk if she thought you weren’t working the way you should be. I was terrified of her doing it to my desk. I wasn’t a kid to goof off much, but I was always scared that she might be thinking I was.”

  Ladbrooke paused. “I was afraid of her. She was always displeased with me. You know how people get, how they sort of sigh with exasperation. She’d do that. She hated the fact I was left-handed. She was forever threatening to tie my left hand to the desk if I didn’t stop using it. And then I kept spelling my name wrong. Believe me, never, ever give a child a name with a ‘d’ and a ‘b’ right next to one another. Do you think I could remember which was which? I was a dunce at it. And the teacher’d get frantic. She made me stay after school and write pages and pages of my own name. And I was always so scared, because I never had any idea if I was doing it right or not. I just had to do it and pray it was the proper way around.”

  Another pause, and Lad grew introspective. “That’s not what I meant to tell you,” she said softly. “I didn’t mean to get sidetracked.” Pause again. “I guess I just wanted to explain why I was so frightened. I just wanted to be good for my teacher. You know how you are at that age. You want people to like you.

  “Anyway, we were doing this particular worksheet. One of the words to put in the blanks was ‘carry,’ and I’d stuck it in the wrong sentence. The teacher came along and leaned over me and said, ‘What word is this?’ And I’d answered, ‘Carry.’ And she said, ‘Carry doesn’t belong in this sentence, does it? It doesn’t make any sense. What does the word “carry” mean?’ And she waited for me to tell her.
But I couldn’t. I mean, I knew what carry meant, but I couldn’t say it. So she asked me again. And again. And again. I was starting to get upset. I wanted to tell her, because I wanted her to know I wasn’t dumb. I knew. But I couldn’t say it. And she just kept asking and asking, without letting up. I knew I was going to cry and I felt really embarrassed. There was this unsaid thing in first grade that only babies cried, and it was very important to never cry in front of the other kids if you could help it. But she kept saying, ‘Come on, Ladbrooke, you’re a big girl. You know a little word like that, don’t you?’ And I did know. That was what was so awful. But I couldn’t say it; I just sat there like a dumb bunny. Then right out of nowhere, without any warning at all, she brought her pointer down on my desk. Right in front of me, right across my paper really, really loudly. It alarmed me so much, I wet my pants.”

  Ladbrooke shifted slightly in her chair and drew her arms in around her. She looked over. “To this day I can feel the humiliation of that moment.”

  “What I did with Mariana wasn’t the same kind of thing, Lad. Mariana’s not afraid of me. I wish she were sometimes. But she can do all the work in her folder. She was just horsing around.”

  Ladbrooke frowned. “That’s not the point.”

  “What is?”

  Still the frown. “I don’t know exactly. How to say it, I mean. But it’s not whether or not she can do it. Or if she’s horsing around. It’s treating someone like that.”

  I regarded her.

  She shrugged. “I don’t like to think of you doing that kind of thing, Torey. You’re a better teacher than that.”

  Picking up her felt-tipped pen, Ladbrooke returned to her work. I sat a few minutes longer, watching her, and then finally went back to what I’d been doing. We worked in silence for a very long time, perhaps forty-five minutes or more.

  “Torey?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  I was still writing. “Yes, of course.”

  “Will you tell me the truth?”

  “If I can.”

  “Do you think there’s something wrong with me?”

  Lifting my pencil, I looked over at her. “How do you mean?”

  “The way I am.” She paused. “I’ve been thinking about what I was telling you earlier. I can remember so distinctly sitting there and knowing what that word meant, but not being able to make myself say it. It wasn’t there to say, if you know what I mean. Is everyone like that?” She paused again and leaned forward, her elbows on the table. “Or is there something wrong with me? You’ve got to be really honest with me, because I think I need to know.” She searched my face a moment, but before I could respond, she continued on. “It seems to be the way I think. I mean, not what I think, but how I think. And how I talk. Because, like sometimes, I just … it just … what? Stops? Freezes? Or maybe it was never there to begin with. I don’t know. But I keep watching everyone else and they don’t seem to have this kind of problem. You don’t. Tom doesn’t. Cripes, nothing stops Tom from talking. Is it just personalities, do you think? Am I inhibited or something? Tom says I’m mentally frigid. And although I’d hate to admit it, that’s what it feels like sometimes. Is he right? Or is it some kind of deep-down emotional problem that I don’t know anything about, like maybe down in my subconscious or something? Like Shemona’s got, only different. Is it that? What do you think? You’re the expert in these kinds of things. What’s your opinion?”

  So I told her. I said I thought she had some kind of organic disability that made verbal expression difficult and unpredictable, that this unpredictability had caused a lot of tension and anxiety for her, that the anxiety had magnified the effects of the disability, and that these together had sent out tentacles into many parts of her life. Ladbrooke listened intently, her brow furrowed, her eyes never leaving my face.

  “Has anyone told you anything like this before?” I asked.

  Pensive for several seconds, she then slowly shook her head. “Not really. I’ve been told I have emotional problems, that that’s what caused it. That psychiatrist I told you about before—the one we saw when Leslie was being diagnosed—said it was just a hysterical reaction. I’d told him about this, about how I felt like I didn’t talk as well as other people, and he said I could talk if I wanted to, that I just thought I couldn’t. He said I used silence as a defense to keep from facing my problems.”

  “And what do you think?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t using it to keep from facing my problems. It was my problem.”

  She fell abruptly silent. Bringing up one hand, she began to energetically chew the thumbnail. Eyes down, she gazed thoughtfully at the tabletop. “On one hand, I’ve been desperate for years to ask someone who knows about these things. If I’m honest, I’ve got to acknowledge that’s why I ended up volunteering for this job. Because I thought I might find out. I need to find out. I need to understand what’s going on better. But at the same time, I’ve been scared to. I’ve been frightened to death that if I ever did find out, it would just confirm what I’ve always pretty much assumed the answer was going to be.”

  “Which was what?”

  Tilting her head to one side, she gave a slight shrug and kept her eyes averted. It was an oddly poignant gesture. “That I’m just not very smart. That I think this way because this is the way dumb people think. And talk. Or rather, don’t talk. I’ve always had the feeling that maybe it’s just been some kind of idiot savant thing that I was so good at math and science. Just a fluke, you know? I’ve felt even more like that since I had Leslie, because I’ve seen how she can be so gifted in some ways and still be so totally out to lunch. I’ve just assumed she’s gotten it from me.”

  My heart melted as I listened to her. She spoke in such a soft, matter-of-fact manner. What an evaluation to be carrying around inside oneself.

  “You’re not dumb, Lad. Idiot savants don’t ponder about their condition. They don’t hold down research positions at Princeton. There’s nothing wrong with your IQ.”

  She sighed quietly.

  “I’m not just saying it. You’ve asked my professional opinion and that’s it. There’re plenty of things for you to worry about, but your IQ isn’t one of them. Neither is the fear that you’ve given Leslie her handicap. In her case, I’m afraid Fate was just in a malevolent mood.”

  Ladbrooke continued to regard the tabletop. She simply stared at it, bracing the side of her head with one hand.

  “I’m not saying I have all the answers either, kiddo. No one does in these kinds of things. But having you with me all these months and seeing how things go for you, I’d be very surprised if this wasn’t a physical problem. That’s not to say there haven’t been emotional side effects. It’s no secret to either one of us that you’re being eaten alive by anxiety on occasion. And there’s plenty of other things causing you grief. But for the most part, I think it’s your inability to express yourself easily that’s setting you up for the emotional problems and not the emotional problems making you unable to talk.”

  Ladbrooke was chewing her nails again. Removing her hand from her mouth, she examined her fingers thoughtfully. She picked at one. Then cautiously, she nodded. “Okay. If what you say is true, then what? What can be done about it?”

  “Well …”

  She looked over.

  “This is the hard part. I’m afraid I don’t have any answer. Except learn to accept it. Come to terms with it as a part of your physical self—your body—that just doesn’t work quite as well as it should and learn to live with that fact, the way epileptics or diabetics do.”

  She said nothing.

  “Probably the thing to concentrate on is lowering the stress and getting rid of the panic you feel when you find you can’t talk as easily as you’d like.”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “Yes, I’ve got to admit you’re right about the panic. I hadn’t realized I was being that obvious. I’ve tried to keep it to myself because I know it’s just in my head. I know it�
�s just me—being stupid. But Jesus, Torey, sometimes I feel like I’m having a heart attack, I really do. I think I’m going to die.”

  “It happens quite a lot, doesn’t it?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Has it been going on for a long time?”

  Again she nodded. “Yeah. For years and years now.” She sighed. “All it takes is strangers.”

  A small pause came into the conversation. I momentarily lost myself in thought, pondering what it must feel like to experience such agony in the kind of special encounters I normally didn’t even give full conscious attention to. Which in turn led me to thinking what hard work her academic accomplishments must have been, not only in terms of her learning problems, but also emotionally.

  “How on earth did you do your doctorate?” I asked.

  “I was okay with that,” she said. “It was all in an area I’m good at, so I never had any problems.”

  “I wasn’t thinking so much from an educational point of view. I was thinking of your oral exams for your dissertation.”

  “I knew my examiners pretty well. And I did know my material.”

  “I’m sure you did, but it must have been a nerve-racking experience nonetheless, with your examiners asking questions and your having to defend your research orally. Did you drink?”

  A faint, sheepish smile followed. “I took Valium. About fifteen milligrams, as I recall. I was hardly awake.”

  “I see.”

  The smile faded, and she shrugged. “That,” she said softly, “and I slept with my advisor.”

  Ah, well, I didn’t have much of an answer to that.

  “But I did know my material. It wasn’t cheating. Not really. I’d earned the doctorate. I just needed to make sure I got it, that’s all.”

  Chapter 24

  Over the next several days Ladbrooke and I spent a vast amount of time discussing her problem with expression. Once the topic was opened, Ladbrooke seemed to have an insatiable need to explore it. Mostly, she wanted to talk about the experience of being trapped inside a brain that refused to cooperate. Episode upon episode came flooding back, and she wanted to relate all of them in minutest detail. What rose from this sudden flood was the poignant specter of an unwilling captive, locked inside a cage no one else saw. Isolated, unable to make herself understood, frenzied by the humiliation of perpetually being thought stupid, she’d grown angry both with herself and with others. And she sought relief where she could find it. Considerably before she mentioned discovering alcohol, she had found another powerful weapon: her appearance.