Beautiful Child (31 page)

No response.

“Pardon.”

“Yes,” she said.

So I did.

B
ecause of her extensive problems, both physical and emotional, Venus had been placed on her own in a foster home, in which the parents were specially trained to deal with the seriousness of her problems. Her other siblings had been scattered among different foster homes around the town. Wanda was placed in a neighboring community where she now lived in a supervised adult group home and took part in a special sheltered workshop.

I was very impressed with Venus’s foster mother, Mrs. Kivie, who came in to see me toward the end of Venus’s first week back. She and her husband had had considerable experience fostering children who had suffered abuse, and while she had not dealt with a child who had Venus’s emotional problems, she felt confident of coping. More importantly, she showed genuine warmth toward Venus when
talking to her and helping her, using the kind of empathic gestures that aren’t put on just to make a good show in front of the teacher. Her smiles, her words, her touches were there for Venus.

In this newfound warmth, I think we all expected Venus to blossom quickly. Cared for, supported, and encouraged for the first time in her life, she was now in a position to make the progress that circumstances had previously denied her. However, as the early weeks of May passed, this didn’t happen.

Venus did now talk, but there was not an overnight change in her speech. Every single utterance was hard-won. She never responded directly to anything without long gaps, whether it was in class or in private with me. And there was virtually no spontaneous speech. She responded when spoken to and seldom said more than one word.

That was the only obvious progress we made. Nothing else happened. Venus remained closed, quiet, and if I had to put a word on it, depressed.

Depressed? Once I thought that, I realized, yes. Depression was what it appeared to be. This caught me by surprise, not only because it seemed so out of context – why would she be depressed now when everything was at last going right? – but also because her behavior had always been so “closed down” that one could have easily mistaken it for depression. However, previously I had never had the sense that it was. Despite her often catatonic behavior
in class, there was an inherent liveliness to her, whether it was in her explosive reaction to the boys or when we shared time playing She-Ra together. Now, nothing.

Venus didn’t want to go back to our She-Ra cartoons. She didn’t react in the playful way she had before to our She-Ra games. She was easier and more compliant in the classroom, doing more of what was set before her, and giving little indication of her previous “dangerous” status, where she attacked without provocation. I’d wanted improvement, but not at this cost.

The day that occurred to me, I stopped by the office after school and phoned Ben Avery, the school psychologist. In the way of most school psychologists, he was far too busy to be able to come over and see Venus immediately. His caseload now extended to almost two thousand students, and he was responsible for overseeing the districtwide assessment testing that always took place in May, so it wasn’t a matter of dropping what he was doing to deal with a child who needed a psychological evaluation. He promised, however, to come over and observe her at the first opportunity. In the meantime, we chatted. He said that depression might be expected in light of all the disruption in her life. I said it seemed strange that going from appalling conditions to a warm, loving family would make someone depressed. Ben replied something about the human mind being even stranger.

I mentioned it later to Bob. I knew Venus was having some kind of psychological help. I didn’t know the details
beyond that because, from my rather lowly status as her teacher, I wasn’t in the position to have such information shared with me, but I thought he could pass it on.

The final person I phoned was Mrs. Kivie. I said I was concerned about Venus’s unusually subdued behavior and wondered if it was depression. She said yes, she’d thought Venus was very quiet but that this wasn’t unusual in her experience with abused children. It took some adjusting to all this change. She told me that Venus was under the care of a psychiatrist from the hospital and he was aware of the problem and that was about all we could do.

And “all we can do” seemed to
be
about all we could do. No one had any particular advice for helping Venus over this new hump in the road. In the end, I could figure out nothing beyond being supportive and patient and continuing to nudge her forward, even when she was unmotivated to try.

Unexpectedly, my best ally proved to be Alice. Alice was not put off by Venus’s remote behavior. Indeed, I suppose if you were used to talking to your hand, talking to a person, even one inclined to totally ignore you, was still an improvement. Thus Alice happily chatted to Venus and interacted with her, as if Venus were participating in everything.

Alice was particularly good about schoolwork. She would whiz through her own, have a little chat with Mimi, and then launch into getting Venus to do her folder.

“Hey, you wanna do this?” she’d ask. “I’ll help you.” She would open Venus’s folder and take out whatever was on top. “Look, a math paper. Adding. You want me to help you?” Alice would then pull her chair right over next to Venus’s and lay Mimi out on the table, palm upward. “Two plus three,” Alice would say. “Here’s how you do it. Mimi, show us three. There. There’s three fingers. Now, you just count two more. Five. See that? See how it’s done?”

Venus often didn’t say a thing. Indeed, Alice not only did all the talking, but she usually did every single one of the math problems herself as well, but she achieved a better feat. She managed to get Venus to write them down. “You write it,” Alice would say. Venus would just sit. “No, you write it. Mimi’s busy, ’cause she’s doing the counting.
You
write it.” And eventually Venus would pick up the pencil and write the number.

I left them to it. On the surface, it appeared neither girl was doing what she was supposed to. Alice was spending much more time on Venus’s work than on her own, and Venus was actually never doing much of the work in her folder herself, but there
was
something going on between these two. While Venus often appeared to be totally ignoring Alice, I could tell this wasn’t so. She
did
write down things Alice told her to. She didn’t pull away from Alice the way she did when one of the boys came around her wheelchair. And during those occasions when Alice was busy with her own activities at the table, particularly when she was engaged in one of her long conversations with
Mimi, I’d often see Venus watching her. It was a furtive sort of watching. Venus watched only with her eyes and almost never turned her head even a little, but she was watching.

At the beginning of the year because the boys had been so aggressive and unable to control themselves, we’d never developed the habit of having a morning discussion, as I’d always had with my other classes. At that point, they simply could not sit still long enough without trying to kill one another, so we whipped through the necessary role-taking and lunch money collection and got on with activities that allowed me always to keep them at least ten feet apart.

I’d missed this discussion period very much. It was a good transition period between home and school, giving children an opportunity to talk about things that had happened at home or caused problems or upset. It was a good opportunity for communicating among ourselves so that we could deal with any difficulties in the class that arose. And it gave a more democratic feel to what was actually a benign autocracy. But the boys just couldn’t cope.

As the year wore on and the children became more settled, we did eventually develop an equivalent of morning discussion. This sprang up at the end of the day instead. About the time the traffic light system starting taking effect and the boys had begun to work a little better, there was a tendency for everyone to finish up their work a little sooner than I’d anticipated, giving us ten or fifteen minutes left over. To keep the peace, I’d started asking them each to
tell me one good thing that had happened during the day and one bad thing. They all enjoyed this. Billy, of course, was the one who kept asking if we could do it again the next day, and soon we had instituted a regular period at the end of the day to “de-brief,” as it came to be known.

“De-briefing” began to fill out. We still did the best thing/worst thing, but we also talked about other things. I used it to introduce necessary discussions about such matters as caring for others’ property, putting oneself in others’ shoes, and the ethical problems with popular playground codes such as “finders/keepers, losers/weepers.” We settled disputes about whose reading book was whose even when they were
exactly
alike, where you could put your running shoes without making the room smelly, and this didn’t mean out the window, and what precisely constituted “looking at me funny.” We planned parties, acknowledged successes and other special events, and discussed changing certain class rules. And sometimes, if I came across a good activity in a book or teaching magazine that would provide a “thinking experience,” we did that.

One such “thinking experience” posed this possibility: if you could ask anybody in the whole world one question and get it answered, what would it be? I thought it might be the jumping-off place for a good conversation.

Billy leaped in enthusiastically, waving his hand. “Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!” he squealed.

“Okay,” I said.

“Welllll…,” he replied in a dramatic tone, “I’d ask to God. And I’d ask ‘What really happens to you when you die?’”

“That’s a good question,” I said.

“I’d ask God what’s in the future,” Jesse said. “That’s what I want to know.”

“Yeah, like when you’re going to die,” Billy chimed in cheerfully. “ ’Cause that’d be interesting to know. Did you ever stop to think that, like, one particular day on the calendar is going to be the day you died on? Like, for instance, February first. Say, you’re going to die on February first. But every year you go by February first, not knowing. Not knowing that’s going to be the second most important day in your whole life, except for your birthday. And, like, maybe it’s on a Thursday. So every week you go by a Thursday and
that’s
the day you’re going to die on.”

“Thank you for that cheerful thought,” Jesse said.

“But isn’t that
interesting
? Did you ever think of that before?”

“Yes, very interesting,” I said. “And no, I admit, I hadn’t thought of that.”

“But you’re going to
die
on that day. And it just seems ordinary. We don’t know. It seems like an ordinary day, but it’s going to be
so
important to us someday.”

I smiled at him. “It
is
very interesting. I’ll agree with you. Shall we give others a chance to pose their questions too? Alice?”

“I’m asking Mimi,” she said, holding her hand out in front of her.

“I’d ask Mickey Mouse,” Shane said. “I’d ask him if he liked living at Disneyland.”

“I’d ask my grandma what I’m going to get for my birthday,” Jesse said, “because my birthday’s in June and I don’t want to wait!”

“Hey, no fair!” Billy cried. “Jesse already had a turn. If he gets another turn, I get another turn.”

“Billy, settle down, please. We can have more turns, but let’s let everyone have their first turn. Alice, have you thought of anything?”

“The stars shine all over the sky. The wind is gone, like sorrow.”

I raised an eyebrow. The psychologist consulting on Alice’s case said stress caused her sudden weird utterances. I wasn’t sure what she would find stressful about this sort of discussion, but then I still had no real idea why Alice could be perfectly appropriate one moment and off in outer space the next. It was so abrupt on some occasions as to seem almost medical. As if she was having an odd kind of seizure. But no one I mentioned this to had ever heard of seizures like this.

“Alice, that’s not actually a question. Can you give more?”

She blinked, as if coming out of a sleep.

Zane raised his hand, a behavior he was learning to imitate from Billy, who had learned it in his AP class. “I’d like to ask Goofy if he liked living at Disneyland.”

“You and Shane will know lots about Disneyland, won’t you?” I replied and smiled. Zane wiggled with pleasure and nodded.

I turned yet again to Alice. “What about you?”

She was consulting Mimi again.

Next to her was Venus. Venus had her head turned and she was looking right at Alice, watching her talk to Mimi. I ordinarily would not have even thought of including Venus in this discussion, but my sense at that moment was that she was very present in the conversation.

“Venus?”

Billy, detecting this irregularity, jerked forward in his seat, no doubt ready to query me on why I was asking Venus something when it wasn’t what we usually did. I put out a hand toward him to silence him, and he fell back in his seat.

Venus looked over at me.

“If you could ask anyone in the whole world a question, who would you ask?”

There was a long pause. I saw Venus draw in a deep breath. Her eyes flitted from me to the others in the room to Alice. Then there was a moment of staring into space and I thought I’d lost her. I didn’t reask the question. I wasn’t too sure how long to wait. I hesitated.

Then Venus looked back to me. “Alice,” she said softly.