Tiny Dancer (19 page)

Chapter Eight

If there was any doubt in
Kerrie Benson’s mind about her the ability of her students to embrace Zubaida, it was gone by the end of her first day in school. When she brought Zubaida up before the class to be introduced, she appeared a little shy, but just as she did when she first met Benson, she didn’t shrink away from the situation, either. Benson gave her the same introduction she would have done for any incoming student, then got everybody focused and back to work.

Benson assigned a rotating roster of students to partner with Zubaida each day, making sure to show her around and demonstrate how things work. The kids argued over the chance to spend time with her and pick up some of the reflected attention, so Zubaida rose to the occasion. Her cultural background placed such a high value on family and clan relationships, that the ability to see the importance of relating to other people kept Zubaida in a responsive attitude with the kids in the class. Once the students had a chance to see that this new girl might look different but that she was easy to relate to, even without language, her new place in the class was formed.

Kerrie Benson later spoke of being struck by Zubaida’s eagerness to learn her school lessons as well as her determination to relate to the other kids. She readily joined in on games and activities, and within days she was already beginning to use assorted English words and phrases that she picked up from the other kids. The result was that at the same time she was working on the difference between the words “I” and “me,” and learning not to use phrases such as
me no want to,
in place of
I don’t want to
, she also absorbed language from the other girls even more quickly, so that she rapidly absorbed their knowledge of what was and wasn’t considered “cool.”

Her natural self-consciousness was frequently over-ridden by bouts of insatiable curiosity. She seemed to find the most difficult lesson to be the one about always raising your hand and not just shouting out your answer just because you’re excited that you know it. Before long, several girls in the class began to show a level of interest in her beyond anything that they had been asked to do. And in spite of Zubaida’s rudimentary English, she managed to communicate with the others well enough that she was soon fully enmeshed in the class, as well as the girls’ social group after school.

Benson knew that Zubaida’s life had completely lacked any regular form of daily mental discipline, which made it a concern as to how well she would fit into the structure of classroom life. Another personality with a background like Zubaida’s might find that the social challenge of entering school as a cold plunge would be more overwhelming that the lessons themselves. Zubaida thrived under the daily structure. One game that made her blossom was the point system that Benson used with all of her students, letting them win stars-stickers next to their name on the name board.

Although Zubaida lacked all of the rudimentary skills, Benson was impressed by her native intelligence and by her natural abilities with social behavior. The high regard that she had come to feel for Zubaida’s inner strength was cemented in place when she saw how Zubaida related to Emily, one of the other girls in the class. Emily had been attacked by a dog some time before, and had a scar across her forehead that made her self-conscious about her appearance. She worked to keep it covered with her hair as well as she could.

Benson didn’t know just when Zubaida spotted Emily’s scar, but she watched her go over to Emily and put her arm around her. Zubaida’s manner of relating to Emily expressed what her language wasn’t developed enough to do, making it clear that she didn’t have to fear any sort of judgment from her—and that she knew all about what it means to be afraid to look in the mirror.

And so it went for the foreign girl who had been assigned to Kerrie Benson in the hope that Benson could find a way to help her adapt to an American school room and avoid being a social outcast. Zubaida proved eager to learn, and went on to make it a point to take one of the other girls under her own protective wing. Zubaida and Emily became inseparable friends.

* * *

In a world that was strange to her on almost every level, Zubaida fell into camaraderie with the ease of long practice. The idea of an extended group of trusted friends was a principal concept of her culture and her family background, and the interdependence of her family and their neighbors was so thoroughly interwoven, so essential to their survival, that it was her solitary existence in America which presented the strangest part of her journey.

No matter how well-meaning the adults around her might be, they were all authority figures who had the power to force any sort of awful experience on her, whenever they wanted. However, when Zubaida was in the company of other children close to her age, and those children were accepting and supportive of her, she got a sense of safety in numbers. The feeling had been missing from her life ever since the day of the fire, after which she was left to those long months of existence alone behind closed doors, living as a burned thing made of pain.

Not only did the class kids step into Zubaida’s safety zone with her, Benson was included inside of this bubble of familiarity too, even though she was also an authority figure. To Zubaida, the things that Kerrie asked her to do didn’t feel like useless chores, instead they felt like she was being given exactly what she needed, water in the desert. Her father had left a large hole inside of her with his instructions for her to learn all she could and to bring the knowledge back home to her sisters, who might never see the inside of a classroom. Now, every time she mastered another English phrase, she helped to fill that hole back up with the very knowledge she’d been instructed to bring home.

She was, in a way that she clearly understood, building her own future place in the family. After the crushing experience of watching herself go from being a real asset to the family’s daily survival to being a heavy drag on the chances of survival for all of them, she could happily picture herself occupying a valued position as a contributing member of the family. Every time she thought of it, the very idea soothed her like a kiss on the forehead.

The real problems were at home, away from school. She valued the company of other children so highly that she was able to keep the turmoil stuffed inside of herself, most of the time. School only lasted to a few hours each day, which meant that if something was really bothering her badly, she only had to hold it in until later in the day.

Then, sometimes, the turmoil insisted on boiling up out of her. It felt like millions of needle points poking her from the inside while her chest grew tight. It got hard to take in a deep breath. Sometimes the internal needles spurred her into manic fits of energy, running around the yard and banging through the house. She tried to burn it away just as she once tried to scream away the pain. That didn’t work this time, either.

Sooner or later, she had to go back inside the house and deal with people. They would start bothering her with something or other, which then made it feel like the needle pokes were coming from outside and inside at the same time. When that happened, anything could set her off. The last poke from the last needle could be tiny—insignificant, in the course of her day—but it wouldn’t matter. That last little poke would be just enough to set off the explosion and then all of the accumulated rage from all the millions of needles blew out of her at once.

Peter and Rebecca never exploded back at her, but that didn’t fool her. She could sense their recoil when she burst into tears, screaming and wailing in drawn-out fits. It was the same with them as it was back at home—no matter how calm they remained, she could sense their concern over her behavior. Nobody could hide a thing like that from her. She could practically feel them asking themselves,
Is this girl losing her mind?

She asked Rebecca to call the former host family and arrange for Zubaida to spend the weekend with them. It bothered her to have left the hosts’ home under strained circumstances, so she felt happy when Rebecca came back later and told her that it had been arranged. Whether or not the family was seeing her merely out of guilt, Zubaida was doing so well at stuffing the turmoil during school hours that she felt confident she could keep it up for a couple of days of visiting.

* * *

Peter and Rebecca were both stymied by her state of mind after the weekend visit was over. She came home acting more distant and volatile than she had ever been up to this point. She refused to take part in any activity around the house with Rebecca and would refuse to acknowledge Peter’s presence when he came home from work in the evenings. Both of them could feel the anxiety radiating off of her, and the fact that they couldn’t identify the source or figure out how to relieve her emotions caused the anxiety to infect them, as well.

Since Rebecca was at home with her far more than Peter was, she decided to enter into family counseling to try to sort out her own feelings about the strained situation, hoping to take home some measure of insight that would guide her on how to handle things. The sessions consoled her and helped to restore her confidence in the daunting task of caring for this traumatized girl, but it seen became clear that there was a limit to the amount of progress that could be made unless Zubaida was able to get into counseling and unburden some of the load that appeared to be crushing her from within.

Rebecca searched out a family counselor in Los Angeles who spoke
Farsi
and could appreciate the cultural subtleties involved in earning the trust of an Afghan child who was so emotionally loaded down. Zubaida barely agreed to attend the sessions and sulked on the way to the doctor’s office, but she didn’t refuse to go, and even though the idea of hiring a strange woman as a personal counselor was utterly foreign to her, Rebecca noticed that on some level Zubaida seemed to understand that the process itself was helpful to her. Here was a place where she could display any emotion or mindset that she wanted to, without being condemned or punished for it. She seemed to come home feeling a little lighter inside, but she remained so aloof that neither Rebecca nor Peter could guess at what was going on inside of her.

The answer came before long—the charitable NGO representatives called to tell them that they had received a very disturbing letter from the host family, claiming that Zubaida was
not only
emotionally unstable during her entire visit with them, but that they felt convinced that she was suicidal.

That came as a heavy blow to both of them, since they were familiar with her mood swings but had never witnessed anything that indicated a suicidal state of mind on her part. The hosts’ letter went on to say that they no longer wanted Zubaida in their home at all, not even for brief visits, and strongly suggested that she be sent back to Afghanistan. What the letter didn’t do was say whatever it was that they thought Zubaida was supposed to do once she got back, with her surgical process still incomplete. Would the rage and despair that she displayed be anything other than a perfectly appropriate reaction to the prospects that would face her then?

One aspect of the mystery was solved by the letter, however, when the hosts implied that it was Peter and Rebecca who were actually alienating Zubaida from the hosts, and that this was only one more reason why she should be returned to her people. There was no suggestion as to what she was supposed to do, back among her people, with the combination of her interrupted education and her still-flawed appearance. There was no schooling for girls in Afghanistan, especially in the remote villages where there were not enough learned people to conduct secret reading groups.

By the time that the phone call about the host family’s letter ended, Peter and Rebecca felt that they finally had an insight into Zubaida’s hostility ever since her visit with the hosts. She came back with the idea that Peter and Rebecca had not only snatched her from the host family, but that they had been deliberately keeping her from them. She didn’t seem to know anything about the hosts’ reactions to her behavior or their insistence that she ought to be sent home right away.

It gave Peter and Rebecca place to start, but the road ahead looked even longer, now. Rebecca responded by stepping up the amount of cultural activities for Zubaida that would be familiar to her from her homeland. Through their neighbors, the Moayers, they connected with enough of the Afghan and ex-patriot community to provide a list of parties and social gatherings that would embrace as much of her background as possible.

Slowly, as the days drifted by, she began to see some positive change in Zubaida again. Her forced aloofness began to lighten up and she allowed herself to smile and laugh with them once in awhile. It felt like dialing back the hands of a clock and starting all over again, but at least she could see progress during the daytime, and Peter began to get warmer reactions from her when he arrived home at night.

But by now, neither one of them had any illusions that this situation was going to suddenly become smooth and easy. They knew that they were blazing a path with this child, one that had no precedent. Beyond a certain point, the only counsel available to them was going to be their own. They spent a lot of evening quietly going over hopes and plans for Zubaida’s time with them, while Peter struggled to stay awake, knowing that he had to rise at 4:30 in the mornings to be at the hospital.

* * *

After the last host family visit,Zubaida spent most nights tossing her way into the early morning hours with nightmares chasing her. She refused to sleep in the dark anymore, and spent much of her sleep time unconsciously clinging to the large stuffed doll that Rebecca had given her. The bedroom light and the stuffed doll helped to calm her a little, but the renewed upset over her sense of rejection by the host family remained, even after she accepted that Peter and Rebecca had never done anything except try to help her.