The Things I Want Most

by Richard Miniter

  I explained all this to my son-in-law david when he, sue, henry, and i were eating a late dinner together. Being an orphan himself, i thought he might have some insight i lacked.

  But what he said was confusing.

  “Look,” david said, “i think homework is a big symbol to him. It’s something normal kids in normal schools do, and the fact you’re insisting he do it means you care about him. The combination is deadly.”

  I looked at david, feeling stupid. “that can’t be right.”

  David shrugged. “I think it’s even worse than that. I think you’re facing this sort of issue right now because you went to all the trouble and expense of building him a new room.”

  “Okay,” i said. “now i’m thoroughly confused.”

  David grinned and settled down into the discussion. “mike is starting to care, and he doesn’t ever want to think about that. But showing you really care forces him to confront the beginning of his own feelings, and that makes him very angry. What he wants to do is have you back off. Then he’s relieved of any obligation to care in return.”

  “Are you sure, david?”

  “Well,” he said, “i can only tell you how i felt. I was so angry, so bitter over what had happened to me that when i was placed with my adoptive parents i resented every nice thing they did for me. I wanted to stay bitter and angry.”

  “What happened?” i asked.

  David made a dismissive gesture with his head. “I finally understood that my adoptive parents were just two people doing their best.”

  “How long did that take?”

  He laughed. “about ten years.”

  “So then none of this is really about tv or homework?”

  “Sure it is.”

  “Huh?”

  David tapped one finger on the table. “If he can get back to the tv, he can avoid you and mom, avoid what he’s feeling, avoid this whole little world here that you’re trying to move him into.”

  March had arrived. We were looking forward to some blue sky, a thaw, any sort of change in the weather.

  Mike got up all right on the first day of march, but then didn’t do what he had to do (take his sheets down to the washer, etc.). when i asked him to put a belt on, i got the same old “i don’t have to.” when he got home this afternoon, was uncooperative, and said he wanted dinner early, we set a time and gently explained to him how important his health and regular habits were to us. Then, when we left the kitchen, he came back in and cooked himself four hot dogs. We took them away and made him wait the half hour for dinner. He ate dinner with david. Then, when david left, he refused to do his homework again and wound up sitting at the table until bedtime, when he tore up his assignment and said, “i’ll just lie about it.” then he went upstairs and smashed the glass in his door. Again.

  Sue and i were beyond anger.

  But it got worse.

  The second week of the month i walked into a strangely quiet house. Stepping through sue’s empty office, i called her name—no answer.

  When i walked down the hall toward our bedroom, i passed the downstairs foyer where the two doors were open leading into the hallway outside mike’s room. I saw him look out, then silently withdraw his head. There were shards of glass everywhere.

  I pushed the bedroom door open, and sue was lying facedown on the bed, her head in a pillow.

  “Sue.” when i shook her shoulder, she rolled over and sat up, her eyes red and bleary, her face puffed. She put her head on my shoulder and started to cry. “Rich, He broke the glass in his door again, then brendan’s glass, then he smashed the clock in my office and said he was going to wreck my computer.”

  “Sue, let’s talk.”

  “No!” she screamed and pushed me away. “I don’t give a damn. He has to get out of here. He has to leave.”

  “What set it off?”

  Sue stood up and started pacing, sobbing, wiping her face with the arm of her sweater. “set it off? i just asked him to help me carry in the groceries, and when he did i gave him a little hug and a kiss.”

  “Mom?”

  I turned around. Henry was in the doorway, his eyes flicking back and forth between our bedroom and the glass in the foyer, seeing his mother cry. Then he headed in the direction of mike’s room.

  “Henry” i called after him, but sue grabbed my arm.

  “Let him go, Rich.”

  Henry didn’t beat mike up, but he did scare the bejesus out of him. Then he had mike sweep up the glass, vacuum, and mop. Then henry put him to bed.

  After sue’s last client that night, we sat down in the barroom and shared a pot of very strong tea.

  “Rich,” sue said, trembling, “there’s not a nerve that hasn’t been stripped right out of my body. He will smash my computer; he will set fire to the house. This place and our kids are what we’ve worked for all our lives. I won’t give it up. I won’t.

  I was a choppy mix of emotion myself, wanting to just walk away from everything and have our life back the way it was.

  And then henry came into the room, walked behind the bar, opened the refrigerator, twisted the top off a bottle of sam adams, and thirstily downed half the bottle.

  “I’m beat” he said. “I was up and down bonticue crag today and then up on the cliffs on the east face—ten miles in the snow. I’m drinking this beer and then hitting the sack for about twelve hours.”

  “Henry,” sue said quietly, getting down off her barstool, “i’m thinking about sending mike back.”

  Henry shrugged. “well, that’s your decision. Good night.” then he started to walk off.

  Sue stopped him. “but do you think that’s right or wrong?”

  Henry looked at her, deadpan. He just stood there for a few moments, broad shoulders, head turned, hands on hips, in a thick green flannel shirt with the collar turned up.

  Then he said, “it doesn’t matter what i think.”

  Sue blew out her breath, exasperated, then said, chopping each word into an individual statement, “henry, darling, if you were us, would you send him back?”

  There was the hint of a grin on henry’s lips. “no, i would treat him a lot differently.”

  “how differently?” i asked.

  “Look, dad,” henry said patiently, “i heard what david had to say, and i know if you think it through, you’d agree with him and mom would, too. The fact is, though, whenever you deal with mike, you’re one hundred eighty degrees off in the other direction. You know the kid has a problem with your caring for him, you know it’s going to take a long time for him to come to terms with that, but whenever you deal with him you don’t do anything except pile on more caring and understanding than he can digest.”

  “Henry,” i said, protesting, “we do care, and we’re just trying to treat him like a reasonable human being.”

  “But, dad,” henry said, “this isn’t a reasonable, a reasoning situation. It’s all emotion, all feeling. Mike doesn’t understand reason or reasonableness in his current state of mind.”

  “Doesn’t understand?” sue asked. “piling on more caring than he can digest?”

  “Mom,” said henry, “would you put fifty pounds of steak down in front of a dog and expect him to just eat what he’s comfortable with? well, mike is just like that dog. Day after day he’s eating it all and then getting sick all over the carpet.”

  “So then, how he’s acting now is our fault?” she asked.

  Henry nodded. “yep. If you want him to stay here, back off. Remember what david really said. Stop acting like brand-new parents.”

  Then he walked out and upstairs.

  Sue put her head down on her arms for a few moments and then sat up straight and pushed the pot of tea away. “Rich, I want you to make me a real drink.”

  Sitting at the bar, she quickly downed a stiff vodka and orange juice and asked for another.

  She drank the second one just as quickly, then rapped her knuckles on the bar for a third.

  “Whoa,” i said.

&nb
sp; “Whoa, yourself,” and she took a big sip from the third.

  She sat there silent for a long ten minutes or so before her body began to shake and quiver. Then she had an attack of the giggles.

  I let her run on and on until she was laughing out loud to herself before i said glumly, “okay, are you going to let me in on the joke or what?”

  She struggled for breath and gasped out, “Yes. Yes. Rich, think about this. Here we are, two experienced parents, having raised six children, almost at the point where we want to start putting together our retirement, and we decide to take in a child who drives out most of the guest income we depend on, eats up all of our time, breaks forty or fifty windows, defecates in his pants, wets the bed, makes it difficult for us to leave and see our friends, steals, lies, has us do reams of paperwork for harbour, and the best suggestion we can get out of anybody, the best suggestion, is to ignore him.”

  I had to laugh, too.

  “Well,” sue said, struggling off the barstool, “i certainly wouldn’t have any problem at all acting distant and unemotional.”

  Late march, and it was forty degrees and raining. You couldn’t see shawangunk across the valley. It was hidden in thick, woolly blankets of wet cloud. The snow was melting, running away in silver, ropy streams off the roof, exposing the stone walls and then draining off into large black, icy pools on the walks, on the lawn, down in the hay meadow.

  One more week until trout season, and it had been almost three since mike settled down and stopped fighting with us.

  I was standing outside, dressed in knee-high gum boots and a slicker, sipping at my coffee, gulping down great drafts of the wet, warmer air, when he walked up to me. Mike had on rubber boots with laces, his yellow rain jacket, and a sodden-wet knit cap. The two of us had been searching the property. The oddest things turn up when the snow melts.

  “I’m all finished,” he said.

  I tried not to smile, forcing myself to develop an indifferent expression. It was getting easier after two or three weeks of practice. “okay,” i said blankly, but wanting to hug him, punch him lightly in the shoulder, tousle his hair.

  “What about you?” mike said. “are you going back inside?”

  I knew I was going to smile then, maybe even start laughing, so i turned my back to him and walked off. “yeah, in a few minutes.”

  Sue and I had replenished much of our strength as march melted away into april and the middle of the month—the end of sue’s tax season—approached. Mike was still quiet, and suddenly we could think about spring. There were house repairs, we had to buy a new car, we had ads to put up so we could start filling the guest rooms again—things to do, positive things.

  But then mike escalated the homework issue to a new and higher level.

  It was sunset and we were at dinner in the barroom. Sue was studying another tax publication open on the table next to her, while mike was quietly looking down at his plate and not eating, just listlessly stirring his food together.

  I nudged sue, and she peered over the top of her glasses. “mike, aren’t you hungry?”

  Mike hesitated for a moment and then lurched his head up. “when liam was twelve, did he go to a normal school?”

  Sue swallowed hard and then put a heaping forkful into her mouth. Her eyes said, “rich, your turn.”

  The school? i didn’t want to talk about the school!

  I had settled into a certain accommodation with the special program mike was attending, but at most it was a live-and-let-live-at-dagger-points arrangement. For months now there had been no further “restraining” incidents, and i was more than willing to concede that they had a daunting range of conduct to contend with, but overall, they spoke too much of a murky, wordy jargon i didn’t understand. What are social peer interactions? dysfunctional groupings? what is transitioning or aging out? i had been getting in there and trying to talk to them for a few minutes now and again, but it was difficult to keep a pleased, plastic smile on my face when i felt like i was being bumfoozled.

  And it was particularly difficult to be pleasant when i knew what mike really thought about it.

  Not that he’d ever told us. Mike didn’t talk about his likes or dislikes, except in the most trivial way. He was really vocal about what breakfast cereal he liked or what tv show he wanted to watch, but that was about the depth of it. If you wanted to know what he was really thinking, you had to trail along behind him and snag any clues that happened to drop.

  If we’d learned anything at all about the kid, we’d learned that.

  But regardless, we’d still managed to assemble a crystal-clear picture of what he thought about school.

  He hated it! he didn’t hate the idea of going to school or the concept of academics itself, but what he’d come to see as the exacting, day-in day-out humiliation of a “special needs” program.

  It started with the “special” van that picked him up. Not only was there a bus driver, but there was an assistant bus driver who strapped the kids in as they boarded. Adding to mike’s discomfort was the fact that he could not wait by himself outside like the other children up and down the road—the rattling little bus would not load or discharge a child unless the parent was standing outside observing, and as a result, you could actually see mike cringe and set his shoulders before he’d walk over to it.

  Then, once there, he had to contend with the shoulder-sagging focus of the “special needs” program itself, a program that he viewed not as compassionate or helpful, but rather as a fairly nasty brand of differentiation in its emphasis on “socialization” and peer-group behavior interspersed with “reward playtime” or “quiet-room time,” instead of the “normal” classwork he could see going on through glass walls in other classrooms with other children—“normal children.”

  And regardless of what we saw as real intelligence and ability in mike, we couldn’t nudge the program into doing anything else with him.

  The dictionary incident was a good case in point.

  Mike questioned a word, so we handed him a webster’s dictionary and walked away.

  An hour later: “mike, are you having a problem finding that word?”

  “No.”

  Of course not. His room could be on fire, with lightning crashing in the window on the heels of a burglar following a charging water buffalo, and when we called in to ask him if he needed any help, he’d just as calmly answer no.

  “Here, let me see what you’re doing.”

  It seems he knew enough to go after the correct starting letter, but beyond that was lost. In searching for a word beginning with s, he would turn to the beginning of the s section and then proceed to examine each and every entry that followed. So half amused and half angry, i workshopped with him until he thoroughly understood the organization of the dictionary and could find any word he chose.

  Later i wrote a complaint letter to the school, saying in essence that we should have a little forward motion on academics here, that “being eleven years old, almost twelve, and not knowing how to use a dictionary” was unacceptable.

  When, a few days passed without an answer, i followed the letter with a telephone call and was promptly dismissed with a short, condescending lecture. They knew mike had big “gaps” in his learning, but in their professional judgment it was much more important to focus on his behavior—particularly his behavior in group settings.

  That got my fur up. Behavior in group settings? what in god’s name did they think we were doing? ahhh! why couldn’t they just teach him to read and do sums?

  In fairness, my paranoia could have been working overtime again. What i took as an all-too-typical reaction to foster parents—that we can be blithed off as a temporary “residential resource,” untrained, uneducated, perhaps taking in children for “sniff” money—might in fact really just represent a sincere desire to be left alone to do what they had to do. Yet on the other hand, the school system—the boces system, rather—when not amused by our prodding, invariably seemed to whet its response
with a suspicious degree of indignation.

  So i tried to avoid it, and i tried to avoid discussing it. There was just nothing i could do about it then, no matter how hard it was to watch mike trudge over to that “special” bus each morning.

  Harbour felt more or less the same way. Whenever we tossed these issues at joanne, she bounced them right back with a grimace and a standard comment. “when the cse meeting rolls around, we’ll get our chance to vote on what they’re about. Meanwhile, you guys have enough to do focusing on family issues and, hey, mike looks great. Whatever you’re doing, keep it up.”

  The last time she said that i waited until we were alone and then asked sue, “i forget. What does cse stand for?”

  “Committee on special education.”

  “How many people are on this committee?”

  “I dunno, five or six—his special education teacher, maybe one of his assistants, the boces therapist, the social worker, a couple of people from the special education department of the school district, maybe the nurse.”

  “Well,” i rumbled back, thinking it through, “i don’t even need to take my shoes off to add that one up.”

  Despite my belief that mike’s school should be helping him use the intelligence he obviously had to catch up on academics, deep down i felt that in the most perfect of worlds mike wouldn’t be going anywhere outside this house for a long, long time—not even to a “regular” school. I remember when henry first began classes. The kid had a lot of problems. When we finally sat down with the principal and pressed her on what was wrong, she said, “look, there’s nothing wrong with henry. What’s wrong is his being here in the first place. We should go in there right now, pick him up, and put him back in the sandbox for a year.”

  And that’s sort of the way i feel about mike. This was too much on him. If he had to be educated at all this year, it should have been in front of the fireplace reading the wind in the willows with the two dogs snoring next to him. Let him read, learn on his own; let him nap, eat, get up and talk when he’s moved to. Leave him alone!