by Torey Hayden
On the whole, I felt happy with everyone’s proposed future. Most years things didn’t work out so neatly. I was always stuck with one or two who didn’t seem to fit in anywhere, but with this group, it all looked promising, which made the upcoming end easier to face.
The square peg in the round hole, of course, was Ladbrooke.
I had devoted a fair amount of my spare time to thinking about Ladbrooke and what to do with her. Tim’s suggestion of introducing a new therapist had remained the most sensible alternative, but sensibility still did not govern a lot of what Ladbrooke did. I suspected that she would be more likely to accept the idea of therapy and a new therapist now than she would have been earlier in the year, but I knew it was still an issue needing very diplomatic handling. As it turned out, it was Carolyn who brought the matter to a head. She stopped by the room one afternoon after school with a whole armload of brochures, which she promptly dropped onto the table in front of Ladbrooke and me.
“I thought you could use these,” she said to Ladbrooke. They were course prospectuses from the nearby university.
“I’ve got to get six credits in this summer if I want to have my master’s done by January. I was thinking of taking an overview course on emotional disturbance.” Carolyn looked over at me. “Even if I never teach E.D. kids, I’m thinking that after that incident with Geraldine, it might be helpful to know more.”
I nodded.
“Anyway, I thought I’d drop these by. You might as well have them, Ladbrooke.”
Lad’s expression was questioning.
Carolyn smiled in a friendly fashion. “I mean, I assume you’re going to want to get some certification.” Then she turned to me. “She is staying on, isn’t she? We’re not losing you both, are we?”
“I haven’t quite decided,” Lad replied.
“You could get quite a bit of course work done over the summer, if you wanted. That’s how Joyce is doing it. And I’ll be there. We could have our own contingent,” Carolyn said cheerfully. “And we could have a car pool. It’s sixty-four miles round trip. But if we were all going, we could split the driving.”
Ladbrooke nodded.
“Anyway, I’ve got to run. See you two around.”
I looked over at Lad after Carolyn had left. “Does she know something I don’t?”
“Don’t feel bad. She seems to know something I don’t.” And Lad burst into giggles.
A small silence followed while Ladbrooke pulled over a prospectus and opened it. I remained sitting but didn’t go back to what I’d been doing. It occurred to me once again with poignancy how blinkered my relationship with Ladbrooke still was. Busily plotting her future with the same detached concern I had for the children’s well-being, I had never asked her about her intentions regarding the actual work we’d been sharing. How did we spend all this time together, I wondered, and never talk about things like that?
“You are good at this,” I said.
Ladbrooke didn’t look up from the brochure.
“It’d make sense, your going for certification now.” I snagged one of the course listings and pulled it over in front of me.
“I never said anything to give Carolyn this idea.”
“I suppose Carolyn was just assuming that you liked it, considering the time you’ve spent in here. And she could see for herself that you have an aptitude for it, because you do.”
“No,” she said, her voice quiet. “I wouldn’t want to do it without you. I stayed for you, Torey. If it had just been the work, I probably would have walked out the moment Dirkie told me I had big tits. I’d have walked out and never come back. I was terrible at all of this.”
“You weren’t.”
“I was. Don’t try to flatter me. Maybe I’m okay now, but I was terrible then. And I knew it.”
I didn’t reply.
“I just stayed to be near you and the children. The chemistry in this place was phenomenal. You could feel it coming in the door. I just wanted to be part of it.” A slight, self-conscious smile touched her lips. “And after a while, I just stayed to prove I could, to prove I was worth all this trouble, but I’ve never really belonged.”
“Of course you’ve belonged, Ladbrooke. What a thing to say.”
“No, you don’t understand what I’m saying. You let me belong. I’ve loved it; I’ve felt really good. But it isn’t mine. You and the kids made it alive. It would never live for me on its own.”
“So what are your plans?”
“I want to go back to my own work.”
I looked over.
She smiled in a faintly apologetic way. “Have I disappointed you?”
I shook my head. “No. To be perfectly honest, I haven’t even managed to think that far ahead. I haven’t got much future sense.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do exactly, but I’ve definitely decided I want to go back. This here, like you’re always saying, is real. This is the real world in here. God knows, my stuff’s all in the ivory tower, but it’s what I’m good at.” She smiled gently. “And it would be so wonderful to be back with something I feel competent at.”
A long silence followed. Ladbrooke gathered the brochures and prospectuses up into a pile and set them to one side. Then she returned to what she’d been doing before Carolyn had come in. I picked up my pen but did not resume work. Instead, I just sat, staring at my plan book.
“Lad?”
“Hmmm?”
“I’ve been thinking?”
“What about?”
“Do you remember James McCann? He was the psychiatrist who came down from that project on the reservation. He observed in the classroom for those few days in January.”
“Yes, I remember him.”
“He’s a super therapist. I’ve seen his work. I’ve seen videos of him in therapy. And he’s a personal friend of mine …”
She knew what I was leading up to. She lowered her head a moment and touched her eyes, as if she had a headache. Then looking over at me, she shook her head.
“I haven’t even said anything yet,” I protested.
“No.”
“He’s good. You’d like him. You got on well enough with him when he was here. He’s no different in private.”
She shook her head.
I frowned.
“Look, Torey, I’ve thought about it quite a lot and I’ve decided I’m not going to see anyone.”
“Laa-ad,” I moaned.
“I think I can manage. I mean, I know things were rough. I know I was a mess, but they’re a lot better now. And I think I can cope with them on my own.”
“He’s really very good. You’d like him. You’d like his style.”
“But it’s not going to be the same, is it? Some therapist. Sitting around talking in some dinky office for an hour a week. It’s not going to be like in here, is it?”
“It doesn’t need to be,” I replied. “It just needs to help. You’ve done so well. I don’t want us to have come all this way just to lose everything we’ve gained.”
She studied my face. “You are a funny person. You’ve got so much patience, but you’ve got no faith at all.”
“I’ve got faith.”
“No, you don’t. You’ve got no faith in me whatsoever. You don’t think I can do it. Just like you didn’t think I could make it through the Easter weekend. Just like in February, when I said I’d stop drinking. You had no faith in that either.”
“I’ve got no expectations. That’s different from no faith.”
She shrugged. “Whatever you want to call it.”
I fell silent.
“Now you’re upset.”
“I’m not upset,” I replied. “I’m just trying to figure out what next.”
“Listen, here’s how I’m planning it. I’m going to get hold of my old advisor back at Princeton. I want to get back into the spectroscopy work; that’s what I’m interested in. I suspect our old project’s kaput by this time. It nearly was when I left it, so I don’t expect to get
back on that. But I thought I’d talk to John and see what’s around.” She paused. “It means having to ask him for references …”
She smiled then, dipping her head to catch my eye. “See how far I’ve come? I never thought I was ever going to be able to face those people again in my life. Now I think maybe I can. I know I can. Or at least I’m willing to try.”
I smiled back.
“So aren’t you proud of me?”
Still smiling, I nodded.
“And if something’s going on, if John can put me onto something, then I’ll go back to work.”
I nodded again.
“And if I can get back to work, I’ll be okay. I’ll have something to do and I’ll keep myself together. I wouldn’t be here to see a therapist anyway.”
I didn’t know what to say. Here we were, taking opposite sides of the same discussion we’d had in early April. Then, it had been Lad protesting and me reassuring. Now the roles were reversed. Had things changed that much in four weeks? Or was this simply a new example of Ladbrooke’s old tactic of making a good offense the best defense?
“What about Tom?” I asked. “What about Leslie and everything at home?”
Lad took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Well, I was just coming to that,” she said softly, her voice flat. “I’m thinking maybe I’ll go back East and work a while. If not Princeton, then probably M.I.T. I’m thinking I’ll get my work sorted out first, and then I’ll take a look at this thing with Tom.”
“By ‘this thing,’ do you mean your marriage?”
She nodded.
A pause came, and she looked over, searched my face for a moment or two and then looked down at her work. She raised her shoulders as if to shrug but then slowed the gesture down, keeping her shoulders up several seconds before finally dropping them.
“I don’t know, Torey. I guess the only way to say it is that I’ve pretty much concluded that Tom and I can’t stay together. At least not for the moment. I won’t stay sane if we do. I still love him. And I know he still loves me. But I’m not sure we’re meant to live together. I’m not sure we’re good for each other.”
As I listened, I had an absurd recollection of her conversation about Bobby, of her telling me how stunned she’d been to think she knew him so well and yet had missed all the internal activity that had led up to his suicide. I was having the very same kinds of startled feelings. All these plans for major change turning over in Ladbrooke’s head, and I hadn’t had a clue she was thinking them. Being with her so continually and having become so much at home with her still largely laconic nature, I’d grown over-familiar with her silences. It had become too easy to assume that there was never anything going on behind them.
“I don’t think Tom likes the new me,” Ladbrooke said, her voice resigned. “It’s been sort of a hard conclusion for me to come to, but I think that’s what it boils down to.”
“When are you planning to implement all this?” I asked.
She shrugged. “June, I suppose. I’ve been drafting letters, but I haven’t sent any.” She glanced over, a sheepish expression on her face. “I was hoping you might help me, that you might look at the letters and tell me if they’re okay. You’re a lot better writer than I am.”
I smiled.
She smiled back. “I’ve got to confess, it’s still hard to do. I’m afraid I couldn’t find the guts to phone John, not right out of the blue. But I am up to writing a letter, if I can make it sound, well, professional.”
Still a little overcome by this deluge of information, I didn’t know quite what to say.
“You told me back at Easter that nine weeks was going to be enough. Remember that? I didn’t believe you then, but you know, maybe it is going to be enough.”
“Good; I’m glad,” I said.
She studied my face a moment. A slight smile touched her lips. “You’re not any good, are you, about not being in control.”
Sadly, the episode over Geraldine’s hand did not prove to be the catalyst or change that I had hoped it might be. Despite its bringing about much-needed psychiatric intervention and also acutely focusing my attention on my own lack of communication with Geraldine, nothing altered. She returned to school during the first week of May, her hand still in a large bandage, and went on much the way she always had.
My children all went down to the gymnasium over the lunch period and ate with Carolyn’s children, where they were supervised by two aides specifically hired for the lunch hour. This period was considered sacrosanct by Carolyn, Joyce, Ladbrooke and me. Unless all hell broke loose, the children were the responsibility of these two lunch aides. The two women employed in this position were big, burly and experienced and could handle most crises that came their way, so we generally enjoyed a trauma-free forty-five minutes to ourselves. But the ultimate punishment for any of the children was first to be reported to us by one of these lunchtime Brunhildes and, if that didn’t improve things, to be sent up to the classroom. Dirkie was our worst culprit in this regard and had been sent up to spend the rest of his lunch hour with Ladbrooke and me on a handful of occasions.
On Thursday of the week Geraldine returned to class, Lad and I were eating our lunches as usual. Ladbrooke was trying to wrestle open one of the incorrigible milk cartons that the dairy supplied us with and, in the process, spilled most of the contents across the table. She left the room to go get paper towels from the girls’ rest room and returned with a dismayed expression.
“Something’s going on down there,” she said, and set the paper towels on the table.
“Where? In the lunch room?”
She nodded. “Somebody’s screaming blue murder.”
“One of ours?”
“Sounds like it.” She bent to wipe up the milk.
Within moments noise approached our door. I put down my sandwich and went to see what was going on. One of the aides had Geraldine by the collar of her dress. In her other hand was Geraldine’s lunch box.
I held open the door to let them in. “What’s going on here?”
Geraldine wasn’t crying, just hollering. “I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!”
The aide shoved Geraldine in ahead of her and around the corner of the shelves to the table, where Lad and I had been eating. She pushed Geraldine into a chair. “Look at this,” she replied, flicking open the latch on the lunch box. Out fell a large collection of cookies, candy bars, cupcakes and the like. The box had been crammed completely full of them.
“Where did all this come from?” I asked.
“She’s stealing them off Miss Berry’s children again. She’s got a regular little racket going. We’ve gotten after her and after her for doing this kind of thing, and I’m fed up with it. I told her if I caught her doing it one more time, she was going to have you to answer to.”
I looked at all the things.
“She traps the other kids. Outside in the hall and in the bathroom, mostly. She makes them give her these things out of their lunches or she beats on them. Regular little mini-Mafia going here.”
“I didn’t do it!” Geraldine screamed, and she lunged across the table. Picking up Ladbrooke’s milk carton, she pitched it viciously in the direction of the aide. It missed and milk went splashing across the floor.
Dragging Geraldine over, I yanked out the quiet chair and shoved her into it. “You sit there until you’ve settled down. Then we’ll discuss all this.” After seeing the aide out, I returned to my half-eaten lunch and sat down. Ladbrooke was on the floor, mopping up what had been left of her milk. She rolled her eyes when I looked over.
Geraldine fumed and fussed, determined to disrupt our lunch as much as possible. I didn’t like having to sit there and eat, because I was providing a ready-made audience for her antics. Disgruntled, I wrapped up the other half of my sandwich and stuffed it into my lunch bag. Ladbrooke, also trying to avoid encouraging Geraldine’s behavior, stood around the corner, leaning against the filing cabinet and cramming the remains of her salad into her mou
th. I nudged her aside and opened the top drawer to put away my lunch.
“Come here,” I said to Geraldine, as I came back around the divider. She rose from the quiet chair and approached me at the table. “So what is this?” I asked, “What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“No, not ‘nothing.’ Mrs. Anderson found all these things in your lunch box and they don’t belong to you. I want to know why you took them and what we’re going to do about it.”
Geraldine shrugged.
I waited.
“Shamie took my two cookies away from me. Last weekend. When we were sitting outside having our snack, he took my two away from me and ate them.”
“You’re saying you’ve taken, what, let’s count them—nine, ten, twelve, fourteen things away from Miss Berry’s children because Shamie took two cookies away from you last weekend?”
“It wasn’t fair he took them. They were my cookies. Auntie Bet gave them to me.”
“Do you think it’s these children’s fault that Shamie took your cookies?”
“No.”
“So that reasoning doesn’t quite make sense to me.”
“They’re retarded, those kids.”
“Which means they need our special help, doesn’t it? Rather than our taking advantage of them.”
“But they’re stupid.”
“That’s really immaterial, Geraldine. The fact we need to examine is that you were doing something wrong. You’re bullying people who are weaker than you are. You’re using fear and force to take things that don’t belong to you. And this isn’t the first time, is it? You’ve been caught doing this kind of thing again and again.”
“But they’re stupid.”
“That’s not a reason to take advantage of people. How would it make you feel if someone did that to you? If a bigger child stopped you in the hallway and demanded that you give her a nice piece of your lunch every day?”