Beautiful Child (33 page)

She nodded.

Minutes passed. I could tell by the shrieks of glee beyond the door that Rosa had brought out the cake.

I ran my hand across Venus’s forehead, the kind of caress used to push back hair, except that hers was too short.

“You know what?” I said. “I think you are a
very
special little girl. I mean that. I don’t think I’ve said that to you.
I meant to, but sometimes we forget to say things to people. Especially good things. But I think you are so special. I always have. Right from the first day of school. Do you remember that? I do. You were up on your wall. I thought you looked beautiful.”

Rather than reassure her, this seemed to upset her more. Venus broke into renewed tears.

“I’m glad you’re in my class. I’m glad I got to be your teacher.”

She wept.

I pulled out a clean tissue. Gently, I dabbed her cheeks. “What’s wrong, lovey?”

“I wanna go home,” she cried.

“You want to go home?” I asked.

She nodded.

“What’s the matter? Aren’t you feeling well?”

“I want to go
home
.”

“Shall we call your foster mother?”

“No,” she said and sat upright on my lap. She looked at me full in the face. “No. I want to go home to
my
home.” And with that she really started to cry. She fell forward against me and sobbed.

“Ah,” I said and finally understood.

She cried. Cried and cried and cried. Wrapping my arms tight around her, holding her there in the wheelchair in the hallway, I kept her as close as I could.

Reduced at last to snuffles and heavy hiccups, Venus continued to lie against my breast. Damp and rather sticky, I
mopped the tears as best I could until we had a small soggy mountain of tissues with us there in the wheelchair.

“I want to go home,” Venus murmured tearfully yet again.

“Yes, of course, sweetheart.”

“I want Wanda.”

“Yes.”

“She calls me ‘beautiful child.’”

“Yes. And is that what happened? Rosa called you ‘beautiful child’ and it made you think of Wanda?”

Venus nodded. “I want her to be here.”

“Yes, I can understand that. It’s very hard for you, isn’t it?”

Venus nodded.

“You must feel very frightened by everything that’s happened. It must be very scary being by yourself in a new home with a new family.”

“I didn’t want this,” she said in a very tiny voice. “I just wanted it to stop, that’s all. I didn’t know they were going to take me away.”

And the enormity of what had happened to Venus suddenly became real to me too. Up until that moment I had seen it all only from my own perspective. It hadn’t even occurred to me that there was another. Here was a child living in the most appalling conditions. Even without the hideous abuse, her home situation had been awful with its poverty, motley assortment of half-siblings and “mother’s boyfriends,” poor supervision, and lack of care. The only solution to us on the outside – we, in the educated middle
class – had been to “rescue” this girl. “Save” her from her environment by taking her out, giving her a new home, new parents, new clothes, and in the process, a new identity. This not only seemed right, it seemed desirable. Of course, she would want it. Of course, she would grow and develop normally and everything would turn out fine.

Now, for the first time, I realized that in the process of rescuing Venus, we had also destroyed everything she loved.

“I’m really sorry, Venus,” I said softly. “I really, really am. You must miss your mom and your brothers and sisters very much.”

She nodded.

“Do you ever get a chance to see them?”

She shook her head.

There was a small pause.

“Well, maybe that can change,” I said.

Again the pause while I considered what could be done.

“I can’t say for sure. I don’t know what rules the police and the social workers have about visiting, so I’ll have to check. But shall I do that? Shall I see if you can visit with your brothers and sisters?”

“Wanda?” she asked and looked up at me.

“Yes, Wanda too. Shall I look into that for you?”

She nodded.

A moment or two passed quietly. Venus lay against my breasts. She wasn’t crying any longer.

“I wish I could make magic with my She-Ra sword and
magic everything back again, before everything happened,” she said softly. “I wish that could be real.”

“Yes, I can understand.”

“I wish everything was back like it was before and I could go home,” she said. “And my mom would be there and Wanda and everyone and it would be just like it was.”

“Yes. Sadly, what was happening, what Danny was doing to you was wrong. It’s against the law. And when parents or other adults show that they can’t take care of children, then other people have to come to take over that job.”

“I’d take my She-Ra sword and magic him to death.”

“Yes, I can understand your feelings.”

“I’d magic my mom back. My mom never done nothing. I’d magic my mom back and Wanda and my brothers and magic it the way it was before Danny came. I’d magic a special spell so no bad men could come hurt my mom again. Or Wanda. Or me. Or beat up on my brothers. Or my sister Kali. ’Cept I wouldn’t magic her back ’cause she was always nasty to me. I’d magic all that stuff with my She-Ra sword.”

“That’d be good, wouldn’t it?”

Venus nodded.

There was a long moment’s silence.

She sighed heavily.

“I think they’re just about done in the classroom,” I said, listening to the noise beyond the door. “Shall we go back in?”

Venus didn’t respond.

“You could have your piece of cake. Did you see it? I made it in the shape of a train and there’s one whole car just for you. It has your name on it.”

“No. I don’t wanna.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t like chocolate,” she said.

“You
don’t
?”

“No.”

“You never said. Never in all this time!” I laughed. “Remember clear back in the beginning? Clear back in those first weeks and I was trying to get you to eat M&Ms?” I asked. “No wonder you wouldn’t eat them. And there was me, sticking them in your mouth!”

Venus giggled. It was an unexpected sound, small and tinkly.

“You think that’s funny?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I thought they tasted like throw-up.”

I laughed too.

“Well, shall we go in and have some punch then?” I finally said. “And some cookies? They’re sugar cookies with pink icing. You
do
like sugar, I hope.”

Another giggle. “Yeah.”

I rose and set her back down in the wheelchair. “Okay, then. Let’s go have goodies.”

S
ince Venus had returned, I’d endeavored to continue the special time we’d spent together during afternoon recess, even though she no longer required this kind of supervision to keep her out of trouble. I did it in part because I felt Venus needed this continued one-to-one, which she just could not receive in the hurly-burly of the classroom, but I did it also because I enjoyed it myself. My favorite part of teaching was this intricate process of connecting with a child, of looking for, finding, and bringing the phoenix from the ashes.

We never really went back to the She-Ra cartoons or the comics. No doubt this was partially due to her confinement in the wheelchair. Soon after her return to class, I realized how physical our interactions in regards to She-Ra had been. It had not simply been a matter of reading
the comics or watching the videos. Much of our relating had revolved around the games of chase with the sword or Venus’s twirling change into She-Ra. There was no way to duplicate this without watering it down in a way that did nothing but emphasize her current disability. Above and beyond this, I remained sensitive to the issues Julie had brought up about the quality and racial suitability of She-Ra. I had to admit, she wasn’t the best heroine I could find, and this rather ruined her for me.

As a consequence, what we usually ended up doing during that twenty minutes each afternoon was reading. I lifted Venus down onto the floor in front of the bookshelf and she went through the assortment of storybooks there to choose one. Then we cuddled up on the pillows and read. She liked this. And I think she liked the freedom and comfort of being out of the wheelchair for a while too. She wouldn’t crawl in front of the other children, but she did quite happily there alone with me. She also snuggled up with me on the pillows in a way she’d never done in earlier times.

We read quite widely from among the books – Greek myths, picture books, and the whole of A. A. Milne’s
Winnie-the-Pooh
– but Venus’s favorite was a thin book of verse called
Father Fox’s Pennyrhymes
. It was liberally illustrated with humorous little pen-and-ink drawings of foxes dressed in old-fashioned country clothes and getting up to some very silly antics. Venus loved to pore over the drawings, which were very detailed.

It was during these times that Venus began to speak with genuine spontaneity. “Look at the little bugs there,” she’d say and run her fingers over four teeny little bugs standing on a tree branch. “And lookit, there’s some more there. And there’s some worms.”

“How many bugs?” I asked.

“One, two, three, four,” she replied, counting them very precisely with her fingertip. “And then there’s one, two, three, four here.”

“How many all together?”

“One, two, three, four,” she said, counting over. A pause while she located the others. “Five, six, seven, eight. Eight.”

“How many worms?”

“Two.” She ran her finger along the picture. “There’s a lot of things on that branch. Those bugs. I think they’re ants. And then there’s a ladybug. And mouses. And worms. And birds. And the foxes. And…” She leaned closer to the page. “I don’t know what those are. What are those?”

“Squirrels, maybe?” I suggested.

Venus nodded. “Squirrels. And then more mouses. And birds. And bugs.”

“Can you count them all?”

“One, two,” and she kept counting right up to the correct number of twenty-four. And thus it was with
Father Fox’s Pennyrhymes
that I discovered Venus really did know her numbers and, indeed, could manage simple adding and subtraction.

The verses themselves had the strong rhythm of nursery
rhymes.
Mister Lister sassed his sister. Married his wife because he couldn’t resist her
. Venus quickly learned them and enjoyed saying them in a lilting singsong.

Her favorite of all the rhymes was one called “Dilly Dilly.”

Dilly, Dilly, Piccalilli. Tell me something very silly. Well, there was a chap, his name was Bert. He ate the buttons off his shirt.

Every time we came to that, Venus laughed. Every time she said it, she laughed. No matter how gloomy the day had been, no matter how sad she had seemed in class, “Dilly, Dilly” always cheered her up.

So,
Father Fox’s Pennyrhymes
was the book Venus pulled out most often.

Then, on the Monday following our birthday party, Venus was going through the books on the shelf when she came across a paperback. It was a follow-up to
Father Fox’s Pennyrhymes
called
Father Fox’s Feast of Songs
. It was a thin little paperback songbook. Several of the popular rhymes from the first book had been set to music, plus a few new songs. This book had never proved very popular with the children for the understandable reason that most of the pages were musical score, and in my classrooms I’d almost never had any instruments other than a tinny xylophone that could play that kind of music and even fewer students who knew how. I’d let it stay in the bookshelf because it contained more of the same marvelous pen-and-ink illustrations and kids always enjoyed those, but for the most part, this was a book
that ended up shunted to the bottom of the pile or the back of the shelf.

“I didn’t know you had this,” Venus said as she opened it. “What’s this?”

“Musical notation. That’s a songbook. They’ve written music to go along with some of the rhymes from the other books. That’s how you write music down.”

Venus crawled over to me with the book and sat down. “Sing the songs,” she said.

“I can’t.”

She looked up at me.

“I can’t read music,” I said.

Her brow furrowed. “You sing other songs.”

I nodded. “But that’s because I already know the tune. See, these notes, they tell me what the tune of the song is. But I don’t know this song, so I’d have to read these notes to find out.”

“So, sing it.”

“Except I can’t read them.”

Again she looked up. Again her brow furrowed.

“I don’t know how to read them,” I said. “I know what the names of the notes are. And I know what these lines are called. But I don’t know how to put it all together to make the song. It’s like reading words. Sometimes you will know what the letters are and you can see how they go together, but you still don’t know what the word is that they make because you can’t read it.”

“And you can’t read this?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Because I haven’t learned how.”

There was a pause. She was scrutinizing my face very carefully.

“Are you stupid?” she asked at last. It wasn’t sarcastic. The way she asked it, clearly it was a genuine question.

“On this, I suppose, yes, I am a bit. Because I was taught how when I was little, but I never understood it well enough to learn it.”

Venus looked back down at the book. A pause in the conversation lengthened into a thinking silence. She touched the page with one finger, tracing over a quarter note.

“I’m stupid too,” she said quietly.

“Everybody’s stupid about some things. Everybody has things they can’t do. There’s nobody in the whole world who can do everything,” I said.

“I thought you could,” she said softly, still not looking up.

“I
wish
I could,” I replied. “But I can’t. Even teachers don’t know everything.”

A pause.

“That’s all right,” she said, her voice still soft. “I like you anyway.”

“Yes, I like you too. A lot.”

She smiled up at me. “Yes. I know.”

Life seeped slowly back into Venus after her big cry at the birthday party. It wasn’t a dramatic change but more of a
shading, the way night fades into day. In class she became more responsive, especially to Alice.

Alice was a right little character, who was forever thinking up odd tricks. One of her favorites was to write Venus’s name on her papers and then make this out to be a big joke when they came back in Venus’s folder instead of hers. It struck me more as silly than funny, but Alice thought it was hilarious. And then Venus caught the joke.

“Look,” she said one afternoon. “I’m Alice.” She’d written Alice’s name on the top of a page in her own folder.

“Oh, I have two Alices today,” I cried in mock surprise.

“Call me Alice,” Venus said and smiled.

“Call
me
Alice,” said Alice. The two of them seemed to find this really funny. They both laughed uproariously. This, in turn, made Rosa and me laugh.

“You guys are nuts,” Billy said.

“No, we’re Alice!” Alice cried, and again, she and Venus fell about laughing.

“You ought to tell them off,” Billy muttered to me. “You’d tell
me
off for laughing like that. You don’t treat boys the same as you treat girls in this class.”

“I don’t pay any attention to whether you are a girl or a boy, Billy. When I treat people differently, it’s because they have different needs,” I said.

“So they need to laugh?”

“They’re not hurting anything by laughing.”

“Humph,” he muttered. “I liked them better when they were quiet all the time.”

Then we were into the last week of school. I was trying to clear things up in the classroom as we went along, so that on the last day I did not have to stay too late closing the room down. I was going to be in the same room the following year and, indeed, Venus, Alice, and the twins were all due to come back. Nonetheless, because of school policy, everything had to be cleared from the rooms except school property, and those things would need to be stored in drawers and cupboards that were taped shut on the last day. Consequently, whenever there were a few spare minutes during that last week, I encouraged the children to help me sort things out and prepare them to be put away for the summer.

Jesse, in particular, enjoyed this activity. He had a real tidy streak in him and always found organizing and cleaning things an enjoyable pastime. Tuesday of that week dawned overcast and very wet, so the children stayed in for morning recess. When this normally happened, the recess aides organized indoor games in the classrooms with the children. On this morning, Jesse, who had been straightening out the bookshelf, asked if he could be excused from the games and keep working. This seemed reasonable to me, so I said he could and then went on down to the teachers’ lounge for my break.

About five minutes into my break, there was a loud knock on the door. It was one of the boys from the third-grade class next door to mine. “Miss Hayden, you got to come quick. That one boy of yours is in a fight with the girl in the wheelchair.”

I shot out of the teachers’ lounge. The third-grader ran with me.

“I would’ve got the aide but I couldn’t find her,” he said, “and I was scared he was gonna hurt that girl.”

“That’s all right. I’m glad you came.”

“She sounded like he was killing her.”

Cursing the silly idea that two aides could supervise eight classrooms of children, I sprinted up the stairs two at a time. I had been able to hear the yelling from the bottom of the stairwell.

By the time I got into the classroom, both of the aides were there too. Venus was out of her wheelchair and on the floor. Billy was crying. Jesse had a bloody nose. Alice was huddled over in the corner, being comforted by Mimi, who stroked her lovingly on the cheek. The twins were all but bouncing off the walls.

“What is going on?” I demanded.

“She went psycho!” Billy howled and pointed at Venus. “She tried to kill Jesse! I was just trying to settle her down!”

Whatever the third-grader had thought, Venus seemed to have come off the better in this, as she was clearly unhurt. Sitting on the floor, she gave Jesse and Billy a very evil glare.

“She
did
try to kill me,” Jesse said. “She got out of her chair and I didn’t even know she could stand up and she was gonna grab me.” He had his hand cupped over his nose. Blood dripped through his fingers.

“Come here. Get over the sink, Jesse.” Putting a hand
on Jesse’s shoulder, I encouraged him in the right direction.

Billy, weeping more with outrage than anything else, trailed after us. “And I wasn’t doing
anything
. She hit me and I wasn’t doing anything, ’cept trying to be a good Samaritan and help poor Jesse before he got his lights knocked out.”

“There’s times to be a good Samaritan and times when it’s not such a good idea,” I said.

“I wasn’t doing
anything
! That girl just went psycho. Again!”

“How did you get a nosebleed?” I asked Jesse. “Did Venus hit you?”

“No, I bumped it on Billy’s head when he jerked back. He was trying to keep her from hitting me and he hit me instead.”

“But not on purpose! I don’t deserve to get in trouble. I was just minding my own business,” Billy howled.

“Yes, okay. Let’s get things settled down first and then I’ll hear all sides of it. Can you help Jesse here? Can you stay with him while I sort the twins out?”

Snorting up his tears dramatically, Billy nodded.

I turned. And that’s when I saw her. Beside the bookcase, Venus had pulled herself up on her feet. She reached over and grabbed her She-Ra sword, which lay on the back of the bookcase. Pulling it against her, she cradled it a moment and then looked back at the wheelchair. Tentatively, she turned, still clutching the cardboard sword.