I regarded my cheese sandwich glumly. This was the kind of thing you liked to hear about people you didn’t really know, not the parents of the children in your schoolroom.
“Trash with class, that’s what it boils down to,” Carolyn said. She leaned across the table and helped herself to my grapes. “She puts on all these airs. I mean, look at this silly business about Dr. Taylor. She thinks she’s too good to even talk to the rest of us. She’ll never even say hello. And who is she? What would she be if she weren’t Tom Considyne’s little bimbo? He’s the one who’s famous. He’s got all the money. But he’s nice. He’s real friendly, if you run into him down at the Co-op or something. If he’s been introduced to you, he’ll always remember your name. If he’s got any fault, it’s that he’s too casual about things. He tends not to follow through. He drove Rita wild last year. She was Leslie’s first-grade teacher. She was always arranging things with him to try and help Leslie, and he was always promising to do them, but he never did. That, and also he never answers his phone. If their help’s out, you’ll never be able to contact him, short of knocking the door down. He’s got a studio out in back of his house where he does his painting, and last year when Leslie went into a diabetic coma, Rita stood outside his studio knocking on the window, and he never even bothered to turn around and see who it was.”
“This sounds like a soap opera, Carolyn.”
“Ooooh, it’s better,” she said, with a gleam in her eye. “It’s real.”
I grimaced.
Carolyn smiled knowingly and pulled over the rest of the files to look at them. “You want me to fill you in on these too?”
“You know about them?” I asked incredulously.
She laughed. “No. But I’m sure I could think of something.”
We both dissolved into giggles.
After Carolyn left, I opened the Considyne file. There was nothing in there that hinted at the steamy stories Carolyn had been telling me. Dr. Taylor was a physicist. Mr. Considyne was listed simply as a painter. The first time I’d read it, I’d thought it meant house-painter. The only thing to have caught my eye initially was Dr. Taylor’s first name: Ladbrooke. The peculiarity of it had not struck me so much as idle curiosity over what, in intimate moments, one would call someone with such a formal name.
There was a fairly extensive sheaf of papers on Leslie and her disturbance. As in so many cases of severe handicaps of this nature, there was little certainty about exactly what her problem was and what had caused it. Apparently her birth and early infancy had been normal. She was a full-term baby and, while placid and not particularly responsive, she’d been easy to care for. Her progress past the usual milestones had been slow, but within normal limits. Then, somewhere around two and a half, she had begun to deteriorate. What little vocabulary she did have disappeared. What progress she’d made in terms of toilet training and self-care was lost. A futile round of doctors and psychiatrists started soon after Leslie was three. Autism, one report said. Mental retardation, said another. Childhood schizophrenia, said a third. No one seemed to know for sure, but everyone was willing to guess.
Amazingly, to my way of thinking, Leslie had had no special treatment program and, indeed, was kept in a regular classroom for two years. She had, in fact, spent more time in the classroom than had Mariana. There were a few acerbic jottings from Rita Ashworth, Leslie’s previous teacher, about the challenges this presented, and I got the impression that in the end, Leslie had been left pretty much to her own devices.
There was nothing written anywhere to suggest how Leslie’s parents had come to terms with their daughter’s handicap nor anything about what the home situation was like. There was a brief mention of two older stepchildren and how the younger of them, a teenaged girl, had a poor relationship with Leslie, but there was nothing else.
The first week passed. The three children were very different from one another, and I did nothing more than scuttle among them those first days, trying to keep order. Both Leslie and Dirkie could have done with a teacher apiece. Dirkie was fairly advanced in comparison to many other schizophrenic children I’d encountered. He was toilet trained, could express himself quite well, could follow simple instructions, and even had mastered a fair number of academic skills, although at a level way below what would have been expected for his chronological age. However, he still needed virtual one-to-one teaching to stay on task.
Dirkie’s worst problems came from an assortment of obsessions with things that were very commonly encountered, such as cats, hair, old men and women, fire engines and door hinges. Discharging the excitement generated by the obsessions took the better part of most days. First, an obsession would come to mind—perhaps he’d see a picture or hear a sound, and that would start him off. Then he’d become excited, then agitated, then frenzied, needing desperately to fulfill elaborate rituals before he could free his mind and think of something else. I became able to discern when one of the obsessions was overtaking Dirkie, because he would begin to talk in an odd voice. He spoke in a weird manner most of the time, with his voice deep and gravelly, like a child imitating its father, although Dirkie did have a normal speaking voice, rarely used. However, when one of his obsessions overtook him, Dirkie’s voice grew deeper and became urgent sounding, taking on a tone that made him sound permanently appalled. Then, as the excitement increased, he’d lose control and be unable to form words. He hooted instead. Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. No other sound, just that. And he’d begin to clap. Physical excitement took over from there, and he could no longer sit still. On his feet, he’d adopt a mincing, disjointed sort of locomotion, like a marionette with a very bad operator, and usually, he’d end up under the table, where he’d sit, clapping and hooting, and frequently, masturbating frantically on the table leg. Then calm would return.
Sometimes I could successfully interrupt the hoot-and-clap syndrome early enough to quell the frenzy and reorient Dirkie to the task at hand. More often, I couldn’t. And if he’d gone beyond a certain point, he needed to continue, because otherwise, he exploded, screaming and yelling, kicking and slapping, tearing papers from the bulletin boards, magazines from the shelves, overturning chairs, ripping his clothes and banging himself against walls and furniture. But even without such cataclysmic conclusions, Dirkie’s obsessions ruled us.
“Do you have a cat?” he asked me on the first day.
“Yes,” I answered, not realizing what I had started.
His eyes grew shiny with excitement. “What kind is it?”
“Just a cat. Tabby and white.”
But that wasn’t enough information. “How tall is it? How long is its tail?”
Thinking to put him off, I explained it wasn’t even my cat, but rather a cat on loan from my grandparents to keep me company. So I didn’t know the beast too intimately. But this didn’t put Dirkie off. Indeed, the novelty of the arrangement intrigued him, and he questioned me endlessly. “What color eyes does your cat have? When’s his birthday? How long did your grandparents have him before you got him? Here,” he demanded and gave me a piece of paper. “Draw a picture of your cat.” When I demurred, he panicked. “Draw it! Draw it! Draw your cat! Draw your cat in his basket. Draw your cat in the bathtub. Draw your cat eating food,” he screamed, his voice becoming louder with each demand. So I began to draw, and immediately, Dirkie quieted. “That’s your cat. You’re drawing your cat. You’re drawing your cat sitting up.” But when I finished, he thrust another sheet of paper under my nose. “Draw your cat lying down.” The room was soon a veritable gallery of my rather undistinguished cat drawings.
Our whole relationship began to revolve around my cat. Every time Dirkie saw me, he had to query me exhaustively about my cat. This conversation could be repeated twenty or thirty times over the course of the day. All I had to do was go out of Dirkie’s range of vision and return and he’d need to have a cat conversation with me. And if it wasn’t my cat, it was other cats. Did Mrs. Renton, the secretary, have a cat? Was it a big, yellow tomcat? D
id it weigh seven pounds? Did it eat from a green bowl? A white bowl? I felt ridiculous asking Mrs. Renton what color bowl she fed her cat from, but I did ask. It was either that or make it up.
Equally absorbing to Dirkie but with considerably less scope for conversation was the length of my hair. I had quite long hair, well past my shoulders, and this fascinated Dirkie. “You have long hair,” he would say. “I like your hair. Are you going to cut it?”
“No,” I’d reply.
“Don’t cut your hair. Leave your hair long. I like it long. I like long hair.”
This would be quickly followed by: “I need to touch your hair.”
He was, I quickly discovered, much better off not touching my hair. On the occasions he did, it only fueled his excitement, and he’d run off in a full hooting session. He also tended to grab and pull very hard instead of simply touching.
But the conversation over long hair was repeated, if anything, more often than our cat conversation. Or perhaps it just seemed like it, since there were not many dimensions of my hair to talk about. Again and again he asked me about it. One morning I counted him asking me about my long hair fourteen times during one hour. By the end of the first day, I was tying my hair back. By Friday, I was ready to shave it all off.
Leslie proved to be only slightly less of a challenge than Dirkie, and in some ways, she was more. Being untrained, she left me with the distasteful task of wrestling wet diapers off her several times a day, made less pleasant by the need to root around in them with a dipstick to check her sugar levels. Changing her presented other problems. Either I had to leave the other two alone in the classroom while I rushed Leslie down the hall to the girls’ rest room, or else I had to retire discreetly to the depths of the steel shelving and hope there weren’t going to be any nasty surprises. Taking Dirkie and Mariana to the rest room with me was out of the question. Seeing Leslie undressed and my cleaning her proved too much stimulation for Dirkie. He would masturbate frenetically against the sink or toilet-stall doors and use incredibly descriptive language. This, in turn, would get Mariana going. Sexuality and sexual matters were very much a part of both children’s disturbances, and I couldn’t allow Leslie to be exploited in this way. But it made the logistics of changing her difficult to cope with.
In the classroom, Leslie did nothing. If I told her to sit, she sat. But if I didn’t, she would remain stranded wherever I had left her. She did nothing without being physically oriented to it and told to do it, but once started, she would continue a task until physically stopped. For example, if I gave her crayons and paper and asked her to draw, she would begin making marks on the paper and continue until the entire page was covered and still continue coloring over this.
She was the most withdrawn child I had encountered. I had the impression some days of not only mental absence, but almost of physical absence as well, as if she weren’t really there at all, as if I were in the company of a hologram.
On the other hand, admittedly, Leslie was no trouble in other ways. If left to her own devices, she got up to no mischief. She got up to nothing whatsoever, other than a little self-stimulation. She didn’t speak. She gave no indication of being able to, although her file stated that she had spoken, when younger. She made no noises whatsoever except when she cried, which wasn’t often.
In my opinion, Leslie needed very intensive work, the kind of one-to-one stimulation that was next to impossible within the constraints of my classroom. I had to leave her far too often quietly “disappeared.” I compensated by using every spare opportunity to make physical contact, to hold her, to touch her, to cuddle her and keep her close. Even then, Leslie seemed to be not much more than a body with no child in it, but holding her was the only way I could reassure myself that she really existed.
Poor Mariana was in lousy company. Regardless of her own problems, compared to Dirkie and Leslie, she was a world ahead. Glumly accepting that she was going to have no best friend in this class, she took her folder of work each morning and sat alone at the far end of the table. She was just as hopeless at academics as everyone had said and could have used a whole lot more of my time, but her difficulties were neither serious enough nor dramatic enough to compete with those of the other two. I was grateful for Mariana’s presence, however, from a purely selfish point of view. She was someone with whom I could have an occasional sane conversation. And I tried to reserve her some special, uninterrupted time, but with Leslie and Dirkie, that was a challenge. They couldn’t be ignored, and Mariana was capable of understanding that sometimes I did have to ignore her. So she soldiered on without complaint.
I knew what I needed—an aide. Desperately. During most of my years as a teacher in special education, I’d worked with children at the severe end of the emotional-disturbance spectrum and had had some kind of assistance in the classroom. Even with my smallest classes, there had been an extra pair of hands. It made all the difference in the world. Someone to change Leslie or watch the others while I did, someone to oversee while I gave a child individual instruction, someone to provide feedback, to laugh with, to chew over the day’s events, to compare bruises on the shins with—that was what I needed.
I discussed the matter with Carolyn. We had joined the local health club and started going down to the spa most evenings after work for a swim and a sauna, or a soak in the whirlpool. I quizzed her during those relaxed evenings. She had one full-time trained aide and two volunteers, who appeared regularly. Being so new to the community, I didn’t have the resources necessary to locate volunteers. Where had she found hers? Did she know of anyone else who might be interested? Did she have any alternate ideas?
I also went to talk to Frank Cotton, the Director of Special Education. I got to know Frank much better than I had any previous director, which was the one advantage of having a classroom in the administration building. I saw him daily. He was one of the gang, taking his coffee breaks in the teachers’ lounge with us, eating lunch with us at Enrico’s, and this quickly put us on a genuine first-name basis, the way it is with friends.
“I’m beginning to think it’s me,” I said. We were in his office, a long, narrow room converted from a storage closet, chosen because it abutted the main office, a former classroom. “I’ve got only three kids, for crying out loud, but it’s just not coming together as a class.” I explained my feelings of constantly shuttling between Dirkie and Leslie and getting nothing else accomplished.
Frank leaned back in his chair. He smiled gently. “You’re feeling out of practice.”
I nodded and grinned. “Yes, I guess it is a bit of that. But I keep thinking, we’re going to make a cohesive group out of this lot yet. I was always so good at that in the old days. I could make a group out of any sort of rabble. But it’s not happening this time.”
“It’s early yet,” Frank said.
“It still should be giving some sign of happening.”
Frank continued to lean back. He fingered his lip. “Not enough kids.”
“Quite enough kids, thank you.”
“No, I mean it. Not enough to make a group of. You’ve always had bigger classes before, haven’t you?”
I nodded. “But not much. I had only four when I was teaching at the state hospital, and we made a hell of a group there.” I smiled in what I hoped was a very disarming way. “What I need, Frank, is an aide.”
“Wish I could afford one for you.”
I knew I couldn’t have one, even before I’d said it, but it felt good to put it in words, to say it to someone in charge. “Any volunteers that you know of?”
He shook his head. “Not that I’m aware of. You should ask Carolyn. She seems to keep a secret supply.”
“I’ve tried Carolyn already. No luck.”
We continued to talk. Frank slowly diverted the conversation away from my aide business and on to other things. When a natural pause came into the conversation, he leaned forward. I sensed a change of topic. Clasping his hands together, Frank pressed them pensively against his l
ips a moment and stared at the orderly stacks of papers on his desk. His eyes rose to meet mine.
“That earlier conversation …” He paused, looked away, looked back. “It’s going to make what I have to say now a little harder.”
I wondered suddenly if I had done something wrong.
Frank smiled. “It’s nothing major. It’s just that … well, how can I say it? You’re getting two more children next week.”
“Two?”
“Yes. Sisters. Five and eight. They’re from Northern Ireland.”
“Oh.”
“Their family’s been embroiled in the trouble going on over there, and now the girls have come to live with relatives to get them out of all that, to give them a new start, that sort of thing. They’ve been up at Washington Elementary since school started, but it isn’t working out. They’re not integrating.”
“I see.”
“The younger one isn’t talking at all, so I thought of you immediately. With your experience in elective mutism, your room seemed the ideal place for them.”
I think I was too stunned to talk. Here I’d come in to complain about being unable to cope with the children I had, and I was ending up with two more.
If Frank sensed my benumbed state, he was ignoring it. “Like I said earlier, I think you need more kids to get organized. Three’s not a group. At least those three aren’t. Besides, it’ll be better for Mariana Gilchrist.” He smiled cheerfully. “This way, you can get the momentum going.”
I didn’t doubt that.
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