Somebody Else's Kids (28 page)

“She isn’t?” Great surprise in his voice. Then his face lit up. “Can I help you?”

“Nope.”

Lori came a little closer.

“But this is school,” Claudia said. “You have to have reading.”

“Nope,” I said. “No more reading for Lori. No more writing. No more spelling.”

Tom’s eyebrows rose. “But what’s she going to do?”

“Plenty.” I finished pulling out the last page and tearing it into quarters. “There.”

Lori edged closer. The other children stared a moment longer and then went back to their work. Finally Lori came all the way over and peered into the garbage can. I smacked my hands together. Her eyes came to me. They were not happy.

“You worried?”

She seemed on the verge of saying something, or at least wanting to, but did not speak.

“I know how much you want to learn to read. And write. And all the other things kids learn to do in school. I know that. And I’m not giving up on you. I think you’ll learn. Just not now. It isn’t the right time.”

Still the furrowed brow, still the well of unhappiness in her eyes.

I pulled the chair over and sat down. Grabbing her under the arms, I set her on my knee. “I need you to trust me.”

Her head was down. With one finger she explored the corduroy of my pants.

“Let me give you a little example, okay?”

She looked at me.

“Remember back in December when we planted the hyacinths?”

A nod.

“Remember how we had to put them in the refrigerator all those weeks to make them grow?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened to them while they were in the refrigerator?”

Lori thought a moment. “They made roots.”

“Yup. But did you see them making any roots when you looked? Did it look like they had done anything in the fridge at all?”

She shook her head.

“But did they? And did they bloom afterward?”

“Yes.”

I smiled. “So tell me, Lor, what would have happened if you had decided that you wanted them to bloom right when we got them in December? What if you had gone in with your fingers and peeled back the bulb and yanked up the little embryo flower? Could you have made it bloom?”

“Uh-uh. It’d die.”

“That’s right. It would die. No matter how loving you were, no matter how much you tried. The flower wasn’t ready to bloom and you only would have killed it.”

Her eyes searched my face.

“People are like hyacinth bulbs. All we can do is make a good place for people to grow, but each person is responsible for doing his own growing in his own time. If we get in there and mess, all we do is hurt. No matter how well meaning we are. And sometimes growing is a very silent thing, like the bulbs in the refrigerator. Sometimes we can’t even tell it’s happening, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t.”

Still the solemnity as she watched me. She did not speak.

“So trust me, Lor. I want to give you a little more time to grow. You’ll read, but in your own time. Do you understand that?”

She nodded earnestly. “You’re putting me back in the ’frigerator to make more roots.”

And so the Great March Reading Crisis was over. Lori, now with me most of the day, turned to doing other things. Math, science, whatever we could do with manipulatives. For those assignments that absolutely needed reading, when I could devise no way around it, I appointed Tomaso Lori’s official reader. It became his responsibility to read to Lori anything she needed read. Likewise, if she needed anything written down, Tom did it. I explained to Tomaso that Lori was totally dependent on him for this skill, and, as with a blind person and a guide dog, it was his duty to make sure Lori never got into a bad spot without him. Tomaso took the job to heart.

Every day Lori and I worked together on the many little things she was still slow at doing, which, while not exactly in the same category as reading and writing, seemed either affected by the same part of her brain or crippled by her inability to recognize symbols. Tying her shoes was one example. Telling time was another. I even went so far as to obtain a braille clock to help her learn to tell time by the approximate position of the hands rather than by the numbers.

Any extra time was filled with nonacademics. Lori became our chore person. She helped Boo with his Montessori boards, she fed the animals and cleaned their cages and watered the plants; she distributed and collected papers. I color-coordinated the files of the morning resource children, and Lori became responsible for taking their assignments from my desk, putting them in the correct folders, sorting out the folders at the end of the day and filing them. We staked out a corner of the playground to make a garden, and Lori raked and spaded and chose seeds from a seed catalog. She helped Tomaso set up a weather station in the middle of the garden to measure rainfall, temperature, humidity and wind direction. None of the things she did were great things, not things that would probably destine her to be first woman president or make the maiden journey to Mars. They were instead things that I hoped would make her simply Lori, growing girl in Room 101. That, in my opinion, was worthy enough.

Yet while the reading crisis had ended for Lori, it had begun for me. I had made the commitment and taken the action. Now I skulked in the hallways, terrified that Dan or Edna would discover what I had done. Lori was still designated Edna’s pupil, and I knew I stood in grave danger by not teaching her the curriculum that Edna had given me. Edna would be furious. And Dan would not be happy with the way I had gone about it. My days until a confrontation came were numbered.

Worse, I think, than my fear of Dan and Edna was my fear of myself. Would I be able to stand up for what I thought was best? Making the commitment to Lori had been relatively easy. And I had known it would be. Lori still had faith in my omnipotence, and when we were in our classroom with the door to the outer world closed, I knew there was nothing I was not willing to try. All things seemed possible there.

I had used that knowledge to secure the courage to carry out what I believed. Now I feared. I dreaded that when the moment of confrontation came, that courage would not be enough. Living according to one’s convictions, I soon discovered, was not nearly as soul satisfying as the novels make it out to be.

Lori had so absorbed my thoughts over the previous weeks that I had not devoted as much headwork to the other children as I normally did. However, I did not forget them.

Of the three, Claudia visited my thoughts most frequently. She continued to remain around the edges of the class. Three months now and still I hardly knew her. She stayed with me frequently after school, but we seldom really talked. Just small talk. All the time. Our whole relationship reminded me of an occasion in college when I was on a zoology field trip. We were all out in a swamp one night in the moonlight watching the courtship dance of cranes. That was Claudia and me, two cranes dancing: up, down, back, forth, fascinated, frightened, always coming close, never touching. I thought sometimes that perhaps this was just the way it was with “normal” children. Perhaps a teacher never did get to know them with the brutal familiarity one achieved with disturbed children. Perhaps never touching was usual. I could not tell; my experience with normal children was too slim. Whatever the truth of the matter, I wanted more of a relationship than we had. She seemed so hungry for something I did not appear to be giving her. Or at least not enough. But I could not identify what it was or how to increase it.

Over the previous month Claudia had begun to gain tremendous amounts of weight. Although I did not know it at the time, this apparently is common with very young mothers. At home Claudia became the proverbial lunatic relative locked in the attic. She had no friends to come to see her. Her father forbade her to go out except in special circumstances. Claudia’s world was bound by school, television, books and her four-year-old sister Rebecca.

My own knowledge of prenatal activity and care was limited. My only resources were books from the library and what I could pry out of a girl friend’s husband, an MD doing his residency at the hospital – unfortunately in orthopedics. I never found a support group of any sort for Claudia and I finally realized that I probably never would in time. If there was going to be any support, it would have to come from us. That was a miserable position for me, without knowledge, without experience, without even an intimate relationship with Claudia. Of all the kids, she was the one I brought home most often in my head, I think, just because she left me feeling so helpless and because I knew she needed help.

“Tor?”

After school, mid-March. I was at the worktable as usual making out the next day’s lesson plans. Claudia had stayed to make some learning materials for Boo and Lori. She had been over at her desk near the bookshelves. I looked up when she called my name.

“What’s this?” She took a magazine from inside the desk. Opening the magazine up, she came and sat down across the table from me.

“What’s what? What have you got there?”

“This.” She handed it to me. It was a copy of
Cosmopolitan
. She had it open to a psychiatrist’s question-and-answer column. The letter Claudia was pointing to told of a woman who could not now achieve orgasms.

I read the piece.

“What I want to know,” she said, “is what’s an orgasm? Exactly.”

Wow. They never told me about questions like this in teachers’ school.

“Well, it’s kind of hard to explain. I guess you’d say it’s a sensation, a physical feeling, that starts in your body when you get sexually stimulated. Usually when you’re having intercourse.”

“But what’s it feel like? Does it hurt?”

“No. It’s sort of an electric feeling. Rhythmic.” I paused to think of what to say next. “A really, really pleasurable feeling. It’s one of the main reasons people like to have sex together.”

“It feels good?”

I nodded.

A confused and rather skeptical look came over her face and she took the magazine back from me and reread the column. “You mean, it’s supposed to feel
good
to have sex with a guy?”

Again I nodded.

Claudia shook her head in disbelief. Still she stared at the open magazine as if it would suddenly clear up this odd bit of information. “Golly.” Another shake of her head. “You’re supposed to
want
to have sex? Wow. I sure never knew that.” Back to me with her incredulity. “I thought it was just something you did because you had to, to get a guy to like you and not leave you for somebody else. I sure didn’t know you were supposed to feel good doing it.”

A soft, aching sadness came to me as I watched her cope with this heresy I had proposed. Claudia sagged down into the seat wearily. “Boy, I sure didn’t like it. It was awful. It hurt.”

“Things went a little wrong for you,” I said. “You didn’t understand. There’s a lot more to sex than just anatomy and being old enough to do it. You were too young, Claudia. Your body was ready but your head wasn’t. It might even have been the same for Randy. I hope when you’re older it will be different.”

Claudia’s head was down. She bent the corners of the magazine. “You know, they make you think sex is such great stuff, all those shows on TV and stuff. They make you think it’s easy and if you do it with a guy, everything will be all right. You’ll be happy and junk. And you’ll live happily ever after. Really, it’s a lot different from that.”

“Yes, it is.”

The room was filled with the small ripping sound of her fingernail running along the edges of the magazine. “I get so lonely sometimes. I think maybe I’ve been lonely all my life. I think I was born that way. Sometimes I think of myself as a little dot on a piece of paper – you know, just a little black speck of nothing and all that emptiness around me.”

She sighed. “Randy was so nice. You know what? He’d buy me milk shakes and stuff at McDonald’s just for the fun of it. I didn’t even have to ask. Randy, he was good to me.”

Selling her soul for the price of a McDonald’s milk shake and here was a girl whom no one thought needed help.

A powerful, although not altogether uncomfortable silence grew up around us. I could not think what to say that would carry sufficient meaning, so when she stopped talking, there was only the silence. I turned briefly and looked out the window. Windy and gray. When I turned back, she was watching me.

“Tor?”

“Yeah?”

“Am I a bad person?”

I shook my head. “No. There’s no such thing as a bad person.”

She braced her head with one hand. The silence came again. This time, however, it was diseased. I did not want it there but I could not make it go away. Claudia was self-absorbed, looking somewhere within herself and not at me.

Finally she looked back at me. “You think I’m dirty, don’t you? Because of what I’ve done.”

“No.”

That silence again. “I do,” she said slowly. “Sometimes I take three showers a day and still I feel dirty.”

T
he day following my discussion with Claudia, I renewed attempts to get her parents to find psychological help for her. It was not so much what Claudia had done but why she did it and how she felt about it that made me feel help was essential. I wanted her family to understand that the kind of help Claudia needed could not be provided for her in the schoolroom. I was a teacher and my jurisdiction was only over those things that happened during the time the child was with me. Claudia’s problems were much more far-reaching, and they needed intervention if we were not to end up confronting more serious problems down the line. The mother was willing to agree to my face that Claudia needed help but she would not carry through with it. The father was much less tactful. And because Claudia was presenting no problems at all in my classroom, my hands were tied when it came to initiating any action myself.