The Things I Want Most

by Richard Miniter

  “What’s this?”

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “That, Mike, is the fifty-question test you have to pass to get your hunting license.”

  Mike held the page in one hand, staring at it, and his hand, his arm started to tremble. He got a helpless, lost look, which turned to anger, little red splotches on his face, and his eyes closed.

  “I can’t do hunting.” It wasn’t a question; it was a raspy statement.

  “No, Mike, not now.”

  “I want to go to another family.”

  “Mike.”

  I saw movement and turned around. Sue was in the room. I didn’t know how long she had been there or how much she had heard. But she didn’t look very pleased.

  The next morning was Saturday, two weeks till Christmas, and Mike’s behavior when we woke him was more disturbing than it had been at the beginning of the month. He wasn’t screaming or cursing, he didn’t fight; he just refused to react. He got out of bed, took a shower, dressed, and went back into his room. He wouldn’t talk, nod his head, or look anyone in the eye.

  And it was the same again the next day.

  After dinner that Sunday evening Sue was reading the paper and drumming her fingertips on the table at the same time. “Rich,” she said without looking up, “there had to be a gentler way to make your point about hunting than shoving that written test in his face … and anyway, he’s an emotionally disturbed boy. You could have let him pretend a while longer, at least until we were past Christmas. Now it looks like we’re either going to have Mike the monster or Mike the zombie in that room in the morning—all morning, every morning—for a long time.”

  “Sue,” I protested, “he was off on a tangent, and I wanted to bring him back to his problem with the karate test. That’s what’s been causing this behavior; that’s what he has to come to terms with.”

  “No,” she said quietly, “no. I’ve spoken to him endlessly today and yesterday about that, and I’m still not convinced karate’s the problem. Mike is afraid of that test, but when I offer to talk to Bob and let him skip it or take the test another time, he’s just as upset. So there’s something else there—something deeper, that I can’t understand.”

  Then she did look up. “So he needs some professional help. It’s gone beyond the anger and depression or whatever is going on in his head emotionally. He’s not sleeping anymore, he staggers through each day burned-out and groggy—he might even be losing some of the weight he gained.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  Sue put one hand to the side of her head and looked back down at the paper. “But that’s not something we can get done by tomorrow, or even in the next week or so.” Then she was silent a long time before saying in a low voice, “Before all this started I had a heart-to-heart talk with Mike about Christmas.”

  “And?”

  “Well, I almost had to cry. One thing he mentioned several times was that he had never given anyone any real Christmas presents, that more than anything else he wanted to buy some Christmas presents for the brothers, as he calls them, and for us, and for his sister and brother, and so on.”

  “We can handle that, Sue,” I said quietly

  “Yeah, well, I don’t think it’s going to happen now. I think he’s going to slide right on by us on Christmas.”

  Sometimes the hand of providence becomes discernible, like a wisp of pale smoke caught in a sudden beam of sunlight. This was the case when a pile of unforeseen work sailed into Sue’s office the following week and she said, “Rich, you do the cluster meeting tonight. I can’t get away”

  “Ugh.” Once a month Harbour sponsors an evening get-together for the parents of the program. Sometimes there’s a class on paperwork or medical aspects; sometimes it’s just a relaxed forum for exchanging notes.

  But there are far too many females there.

  “Listen,” I said, “when General Douglas MacArthur was running Japan just after the second world war, he changed the Japanese constitution to allow women the vote. His reasoning was that women were more inclined than men to address social concerns.”

  “So?” and her foot was tapping.

  “So,” I said plaintively, “that’s exactly the problem: they address them and address them and address them and address them …”

  “Rich, just shut up and go.”

  So I went, and after half an hour I was bored and hadn’t much to do but listen when two women next to me began a private conversation.

  “We’ve involved John in a half dozen different activities,” said the first woman, “Boy Scouts, 4-H, the after-school book club, horseback riding, and none of them have worked out. Each time he comes to the point where he has to go it on his own or turn in a project, he just automatically drops out, and if we try to encourage him, he gets unbelievably angry and starts to act out his fears. We keep praising him, we keep trying to build up his self-esteem, but he just doesn’t have the basic confidence …”

  “Yes,” said the other parent, “Joey’s exactly the same way in school. We do everything we can to build up his self-esteem, but it’s awfully slow going. I don’t know why—the children’s home told us he participated in many different activities—but now that he’s with us, we just can’t get him to stay with one.”

  Off on a train of furious thought, I spoke to some other people there—a lot of the other people there. It was after midnight when I walked into Sue’s office.

  “Sue, I know it’s not early, but can we talk?”

  “Okay. I’m through, anyway.” Click, snap, click; she shut the computer down and killed the power. “What?”

  I hesitated. I knew she was still angry with me for the way I had talked to Mike about hunting. And that crack about women hadn’t helped.

  “Sue, I learned something tonight.”

  “See,” she said with sweet, sticky sarcasm, “I knew all those nasty, nasty ladies wouldn’t hurt mummy’s little boy.”

  “I learned that they’re all the same way.”

  “Who’s all the same way?”

  “The Harbour children,” I said. “Most of ’em, it seems. Mike’s not really all that much of an exception. They all pretty much overreact when their parents involve them in long-term activities.”

  Sue groaned, flipped her pen over her shoulder, and began to look around the office for something else to do. Then she said something else under her breath I couldn’t quite make out-something about not letting “him” out again.

  Finally she looked up at me, biting her words. “You sound like you were hatched out of an egg a couple of hours ago. I mean, where have you been for the last eight months? Of course all the children are the same, you idiot. That’s what The Harbour Program is, a refuge for the same type of children— emotionally disturbed children”

  “But Sue, I’m not sure being emotionally disturbed has anything to do with it. Suppose those children overreact because we don’t handle their activities the way they think we should?”

  She heard the question in the midst of another gathering snarl, stopped, and then asked with a puzzled expression on her face, “What? What does that mean?”

  “Sue,” I said, “I admit it was pretty brutal when I rubbed his face in the firearms safety training course test. But I didn’t understand what was going on. I thought he was being flippant about something important to me, something that requires a lot of honest skill and experience. Now I realize he was just doing for himself what in his mind he had every right to expect us to do for him.”

  Sue gave me a tired, guarded look, but she was listening, so I took a breath and plunged in. “I think there are two factors unique to these children—one very emotional, to be sure, but the other simply an expectation that comes from a long period of training. Further, that the effect of the one reinforcing the other results in a very special sort of handicap.”

  “And what does that gobbledygook mean?”

  “Remember back in the beginning of the month, on the first morning when Mike went nuts, we w
ere standing on the porch watching the school bus leave, and you said we had to remember how he has such a frightful lack of pride of place?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course I do.”

  “Well, I think that’s factor number one in this handicap. Mike is special. All these children are special. For his whole life Mike’s been outside looking in at real families, at people with real lives doing real things, and I think to a considerable degree he still feels that way. He knows, for example, that he’s not irrevocably bound to us for life. He knows that with one brief phone call he’s bundled back into a car and off somewhere else. So his time with us still has some quality of make-believe about it, and that must transfer over to everything he does and has. His own room, the dogs, getting on the school bus, karate—it’s all not quite real to him, not yet, not by a long shot.”

  When I looked at Sue expectantly, she nodded, so I continued. “And when I tried to think of how I would feel in that position, an awful simile came to mind. Mike is like the poor relation invited to the ball. A poor relation who’s dressed up as best he can and, while outwardly self-assured, barely has enough inner self-confidence to look on. To Mike, the handsome, well-dressed people confidently sweeping each other around the dance floor aren’t him, have never been him, may well never be him. So he can’t participate, really participate, he can’t ask someone to dance, he can’t take a chance, he can’t ever test his position in that way because he might stumble, make a mistake, step on his partner’s foot, and in his mind, that would instantly translate into people finding out about him, finding out who he is, finding out that he doesn’t belong, and, Sue, that’s got to be why Mike’s so relaxed among strangers, among people who will never ever really know him or anything about him.”

  “Like all those hunters who came to look at your deer?” she said.

  “Like all those hunters,” I agreed.

  Then I continued, “Feelings like that are enough to cripple anybody, and it must be one big part of his problem. But perhaps even more of a factor in how he feels about being tested is the way in which he’s been trained to engage in activities.”

  I was tired myself, pacing as the words came on with a rush. “It all came together for me tonight when I heard a puzzled woman at the cluster meeting complain that in the children’s home, her Harbour child participated in many activities, but that in their home, they couldn’t get him to stick with one. When I thought about what she had said, I realized she had unknowingly identified the one factor confusing her. The problem wasn’t at all that the child was incapable of sticking with one activity, but rather that he expected many.”

  “So?” Sue asked. “Expectations change.”

  “Yes, I guess they do, Sue, but slowly, over long periods of time. And the fact is that nobody’s ever thought out how the endless round-robin of activities in the system that everybody’s so proud of actually contributes to a child’s inability to get beyond the simplest beginning stages of anything in particular.”

  “Huh?” Sue shifted in her seat.

  “Sue, you remember all those ‘activity resources’ the children’s home was so proud of? They had a pool for the children, crafts, art class, puzzles, games, TV time, baseball, basketball, a little natural history museum, a library; they took them fishing, tubing, hiking, had a computer room with games. They even had an activities coordinator who set up weekly trips, and a dozen other resources I can’t remember.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, I remember being terribly impressed, even overawed. But when you think about it, you have to concede that few families on earth can come close to that ideal. In a real family there’s one or two or three things, and a kid spends most of his time on one of them. When I was growing up, the introverts among us had a stamp collection and the extroverts played baseball after school. Oh, we all had bikes and went to movies, and some of us read books and some of us daydreamed a lot, but basically we concentrated on one or two activities.”

  Sue nodded. “With me it was Girl Scouts.”

  “But not Mike. Not only was he shifted from placement to placement over the years; he was also ceaselessly shifted from one activity to another. Year after year, new staff members, new teachers, new placements, and new activities. I feel awfully, helplessly sorry for him. Mike has never, not once in his life, had to do something like he’s being asked to do now—to stay, to just settle down and work with something. Then, when you couple that demand with a test, with an attempt to push him out onto the dance floor, where a single misstep might whip away his disguise and reveal him for what he is, an already difficult transition becomes exponentially more terrifying.”

  “So?”

  “So after Thanksgiving, after that gut-wrenching emotional experience of dealing with our sons, he was smacked in the face by Liam waving this test around, and who knows how Liam handled it? Maybe there was some of a child’s nah-nah-nah-nah-nah in the way he put it to him. But in any event, Mike’s initial feeling must have been abject fear—fear at taking that first step out onto the dance floor with the real people, fear of being found out. Then he must have been angry and confused— why hadn’t we presented him with something else? Why? No wonder he went over the edge; no wonder he then clutched at hunting. He probably even thought or hoped I had purposely engineered that deer for him. That’s why he was so happy and excited, so enthusiastic with those people who showed up, so immediately good in the morning again.”

  “Okay,” Sue said weakly, stunned by the blur of words, “if you’re right or even half right, how do you want to deal with Mike and this test and his feelings? How do we get this kid back?”

  I tried to think through the options as I spoke. “We can’t make the mistake of just letting him switch off onto something else—that just continues the routine and makes him even more vulnerable. At some point in his life, pride and self-confidence have to come to him, and they must come from his own lonely effort in some activity. So I think we must get him to take the test. Let him drop out if he wants to after that, but he should take the test.”

  “No,” Sue said. “Again, assuming you’re right in all this, if you tell him to take the test, he’ll be upset and crazy for the next two weeks. I won’t have that. I won’t have him miss Christmas.”

  “Then,” I said, “we have to find a way to get him to take the test without upsetting him.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know,” I said weakly.

  There was the flash of a sudden thought in Sue’s eyes. “I do,” she said slowly. “You’re not going to like it.”

  “How?”

  “Well,” she said, “perhaps we can get him to the test by announcing we’ve decided to start him in something else. Maybe Cub Scouts—-he has spoken about that before. You could even go out and buy him the Cub Scout Handbook.”

  “You want to lie to him? Think back to Norwich and my promise never to lie to him.”

  “And then,” she said dryly, “the day of the test we tell him he’ll have to come with us because we have to take Liam and don’t have anyone to babysit. That way Mike’ll have a good Christmas under his belt when he’s confronted with a choice— the possible humiliation involved in getting up and taking the test or the guaranteed humiliation in sitting there for three hours in front of his entire class.”

  I was dumbstruck. “Sue, you were angry at me for what I did to him with hunting. But this is even lower. We wouldn’t be telling him the whole truth when we say he doesn’t have to take the test.”

  She shrugged. “He doesn’t … and we will start him in Cub Scouts if he wants.”

  “But …”

  Sue stared at me for a long, long time, then she said, “Rich, sometimes you scare me. What did we do with our other kids besides feed the little ignorant jackals the facts of life one tiny chunk at a time? They’re children, for God’s sake. There’s a limit to what they can digest. If you knew a child was going to have a tooth pulled in a month, would you tell him right away and let him worry abo
ut it every day for four weeks?”

  “Well,” I said doubtfully, “no.”

  “Point made.”

  I sat there silent for a moment or two, mentally wrestling with Sue’s approach to this thing, when she walked around and punched my shoulder.

  “Hey, Rich.”

  “What?”

  “Good job tonight.”

  Christmas was a happy, busy twenty-four hours.

  We had told Mike he was free of the test and off on Cub Scouts if that’s what he wanted to do next. Once we repeated it seven or eight times, he had about a solid two days of sleep and started eating like a horse again. (And yes, I felt guilty about the deception involved.) Finally, we took him shopping and tagged along as he bought little presents for everybody—a paperback book for me (unfortunately Danielle Steel), a paperback for Sue (a rock guide; I guess we’ll switch), little outdoors items for the boys—a fishhook sharpener, a lure, a rubber worm, a tiny compass—a key chain for Susanne, and his big purchase, a screwdriver set for David.

  On Christmas Eve all the boys were back (except Richard, still out west and doing who-knew-what), and Susanne came over to wrap presents. We piled into three separate cars to drive to midnight mass, everyone in suits except Henry and Frank, who wore Norwich cadet gray dress for the long mass. Then it was back to the house at 2:00 A.M., where Sue had a turkey and a ham and lasagna laid out. We ate, opened one present (Mike the Sega Genesis he had lusted after), and then we went to bed.

  “Mike,” I said aloud just before I went to sleep.

  Sue answered drowsily, “I let him stay up on his own. He’ll go to bed when he’s ready. I’m sure he wants to get up early and open the rest of his presents.”

  “Did anyone get him wrapping paper for the presents he bought?”

  Sue had her face in her pillow. “I’m sure Susanne or somebody took care of him.”

  I was first up in the morning and found Mike asleep, still with the Sega control in his hand in front of the TV. Then I walked over to the tree. There was something oddly different there. Each pile under the tree was topped with a tiny new present wrapped in yellow legal paper, carefully folded and fastened with Scotch tape. On each was written the person’s name in pencil, and each had a little Christmas figure—a tree, a reindeer, a little Santa Claus—drawn on it.