Beautiful Child (6 page)

T
he next morning Venus did not come to school.

At recess time I went down to the main office to phone her house.

“Hullo?” answered a thick, sleepy sounding voice.

I said who I was and why I was phoning. Was Venus there?

“Huh? What? Dunno,” the voice at the other end replied. Then the line went dead.

I dialed again. Again, the same sluggish, sleepy voice. I couldn’t actually tell if it was male or female. Female, I guessed, but not Wanda.

Once more I explained I was Venus’s teacher and I was concerned because Venus was not at school. I said we’d had a disagreement the previous day and I was worried that Venus might still be upset. “Is this Venus’s mother?” I asked.

The person at the other end was incoherent. Drunk possibly. Whatever, I couldn’t make sense of the call.

As a consequence, I decided to visit Venus’s house after school. Normally I didn’t do this without giving the parents ample warning, but I was more than a little concerned about having allowed her to leave the school premises the day before in the state she was, and I wanted to see for myself that Venus was all right. Moreover, I wanted to make it perfectly plain to whomever was in charge at her house that unless she was ill, Venus had to attend school. This wasn’t a choice Venus or Wanda could make. It was the law.

Julie came with me. Venus and her family lived about five blocks from the school down one of the seedy side streets between the railroad and the meat-packing plant. Although it was now known as an area of crime and drugs, a century earlier when the town had been founded, it had been laid out with broad sidewalks and boulevards planted with elm and cottonwood trees. The elms had long since succumbed to disease and been cut down, but the cottonwoods had thrived, heaving up the decaying sidewalks and casting the whole area into dense shade. Most of the houses had been built between the two world wars. None of them were large houses, but most had porches and broad lawns. Now, however, the porches were broken-down and unpainted. Many houses had boarded-up windows, and the lawns, unwatered and too shaded by the big trees, were worn largely to dirt.

Venus’s home was not a house but a trailer set back on an empty lot. It was old and fitted permanently to a concrete foundation. The screen door was hanging open, and a man sat on the doorstep. I parked the car and got out.

He was a skinny, small-built man, probably two or three inches shorter than I was. His hair was that nondescript color somewhere between dark blond and light brown and it was rather wavy, rumpled almost, as if he hadn’t bothered to brush it when he got up. He had a thick growth of stubble and a very hairy chest showing through his unbuttoned shirt. He sat, smoking a cigarette and watching us come up the path to the front door.

“Hello, I’m Venus’s teacher from school.”

“Well, hi,” he said in a distinctly lascivious manner that made me very grateful for having Julie along.

“Is Venus here?”

He considered this a moment, as if it were a difficult question, then smiled. “Could be. You want a seat?”

“
Is
she?”

A slow, rather insolent shrug. “I reckon.”

“Venus didn’t come to school today. I’m concerned about her. It’s very important that Venus come every day, unless she’s ill. So, is she here?”

“Why? You want to see her?” he asked, but before I could respond, he leaned back and called over his shoulder, “Teri? Someone here about Venus. Teri?”

There was no response.

The man smiled at me in a casual way.

“Are you Venus’s father?”

“You think all these black bastards are mine?”

A woman, perhaps in her late thirties, appeared in the doorway behind him. She had shoulder-length hair, corn rowed neatly into small braids, and looked as if she just woke up, despite it’s being three-thirty in the afternoon. She blinked against the late summer sunlight. “Who are you?”

I explained again who I was and why I was there.

“Oh fuck,” the woman said wearily. “Wanda?” she shouted over her shoulder. “Wanda, what the fuck you done? Didn’t you take Venus to school again?”

Wanda stumbled to the doorway.

The woman turned. “What you done, you lamebrain. Why didn’t you take her to school today?”

“Beautiful child,” Wanda said and smiled gently.

“Yeah, I’ll ‘beautiful child’ you one of these days. Why didn’t you take her to school?”

“Her no go school,” Wanda replied plaintively.

“Yes, her do go school, you big fucking idiot. How many times you got to be told? You’re good for nothing.” The woman raised her arm as if to hit Wanda, but she didn’t. Wanda scurried off. The woman turned back to me. “Look, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“Are you Venus’s mother?”

“Yeah.” She ran her hands through her hair, pushing the braids back. She was a rather pretty woman in a tired sort of way.

“Could I talk with you a moment about Venus?”

“Why? What’s she done?”

“She hasn’t done anything. I was just wondering … could we chat a moment? I was hoping you could fill me in a little on her background.”

The woman rubbed her face in a weary fashion and backed aside. “Yeah, come on in, if you want.”

I stepped gingerly by the man, still sitting in the doorway. Julie, who was wearing a skirt, pressed it to her legs as she edged by. The man grinned up at us.

Inside there were two teenage girls and a boy sprawled over the furniture in front of the TV. Beyond, there was a built-in table with bench seats on either side. Wanda sat on one. She was doing nothing but staring at her hands.

“Get out of here, you guys,” the woman said. “Turn off that fucking box. I told you half an hour ago to turn that off.”

“Shut up, bitch,” the boy said. He must have been about twelve or thirteen.

The woman raised her foot and kicked his leg none too gently. “Get moving.”

He muttered crossly, got up, and went outside.

“Teri?” the man called from the doorway. “Get me another beer while you’re at it.”

“Get it yourself,” she replied.

“Frenchie? Hey, Frenchie, get me a beer.”

I didn’t know which one was Frenchie, as there was no response from any of the people in the room.

“Wanda?” he called. “Wanda, get me a beer.”

Lumbering out of her seat, Wanda plodded to the
refrigerator. She yanked the door open so hard that cans of beer tumbled out and went rolling across the floor. Teri swore at her. So did the man.

Heaving a discouraged sigh, Teri flopped down on the couch. She gestured for Julie and me to sit. “Just don’t tell me you come about problems,” she said wearily, “’cause there’s nothing I can do. I got too many problems to deal with already. You can see that just looking around. So please don’t say you’re here about problems.”

I could sense she was telling the truth there, that she really didn’t have the resources to cope with much more. I felt sympathy for her then.

“Is Venus here?” I asked.

“Dunno,” Teri said. She was obviously tired. She rubbed her hand over her face again.

“Do you suppose we could find out?” I asked. “I’d like to see Venus.”

Teri lifted her head and scanned around the trailer, as if perhaps she’d overlooked the child. Then she turned her head and looked back at Wanda. “Wanda? Where’s Venus?”

Wanda ambled out of her seat. She wandered down the narrow corridor and into one of the rooms at the end of the trailer. Several moments passed in expectant silence. Julie and I had our necks craned to see where Wanda had gone. Teri leaned forward and removed a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table. She lit it and took a long, slow drag, giving a relieved-sounding sigh at the end.

Wanda meandered out of the back room carrying something. As she came up to us, I could see it was the plastic doll, wrapped in a receiving blanket. It had been dressed in old baby clothes. Wanda smiled shyly at me and cuddled the doll. “Beautiful child,” she said and smiled again.

“
Wanda
,” Teri cried in exasperation when she saw the doll.“
Venus
, you asshole. I said go get Venus, not your fucking doll.”

But Wanda never did get Venus. Indeed, we never managed to see Venus at all. Instead, Wanda wandered off with her doll into another part of the trailer and never returned, while I was distracted by the realization that Wanda needed intervention every bit as much as Venus.

Venus returned the next day as if nothing had ever happened, so I decided to pick up where I left off. During the time before school, I’d rearranged the classroom furniture to give me a small, cubiclelike space screened off from the rest of the room. This way I could work alone with Venus without constant interference from the boys.

That afternoon, after getting the boys settled with their folders and leaving Julie in charge, I took Venus around the corner of the file cabinet and into my little cubicle. I’d added a small table and two chairs. I sat her in one chair and positioned the other on the opposite side of the table. I sat down.

I got the feeling of a faint sense of alarm from Venus when I took her into this private area, but it was just a sense. Nothing about her facial expression changed much, and
she sat without a lot of encouragement, but there was a slight glance around the small area and a springy lightness to her shoulders that I was coming to recognize as the precursor to movement. She didn’t move, however. Within a minute or two, she’d settled down to stonelike stillness.

Opening the package of M&Ms, I took out a small handful and held them out. “Remember these? We had these day before yesterday. Remember?”

To look down at the candies in my hand, she only moved her eyes.

I let the M&Ms spill onto the table between us with a satisfying clatter. Bright and colorful, they lay scattered across the tabletop. I left them like that for several moments and did nothing, hoping Venus might be tempted enough to take one of her own volition or at least register an interest in them.

Not so.

“Candy,” I said. “Do you like candy? Most children do.”

She stared at me, her face immobile as wood.

“We eat them,” I said. I put one in my mouth. “Mmmm. Really sweet. Chocolate-y.”

She kept staring and I got the feeling that she thought I’d gone stark raving mad. This made me smile and eventually laugh.

“Here, you have one,” I said. I picked up a red M&M and put it between her lips. It hung there, so I took a finger and pushed it the rest of the way into her mouth.

Nothing.

“Can you taste it?”

Nothing.

“Try chewing it.”

Venus just sat.

“Chew.” I reached over and moved her chin with my hand while making exaggerated chewing movements myself. I was reminded, as I did this, of a scene from a
Star Trek
program where a member of the starship crew was trying to teach the fine art of eating to a woman who had spent most of her life as a sort of living machine. Not so unlike Venus.

This didn’t seem to have an effect, so we both just sat. The chocolate would melt in her mouth eventually and she would taste it whether she wanted to or not. I watched her, waiting to see her swallow.

Eventually she did.

“Nice?” I asked. “Do you want another?” I reached over and shoved a green M&M between her lips.

Venus and I spent forty minutes doing that. During this time I pushed a total of twenty-two M&Ms into her mouth. Nothing changed over the course of that whole time. She just stared at me as I pushed the candy into her mouth, waited for it to melt, waited for her to swallow, and pushed the next one in. She never looked down at the candies, never appeared to chew them, never tried to get them more quickly, never even acknowledged they were there at all.

All this time I kept up a quiet patter, largely about the
taste of the candy and the sensation of eating them, but Venus responded to my words no more than she did to the M&Ms.

When the bell rang to signal the end of the school day, I got up, put the candy away, and brought Venus around the corner of the cubicle to join the other children.

Wanda was at the door to take Venus home. Julie charged by, trying to keep up with the boys as they raced for their buses. I beckoned to Wanda.

“Will you come talk to me a minute, Wanda?”

“No talk to strangers.”

“Have you been told that?” I asked. “Yes, that’s a sensible rule, isn’t it? But I’m not a stranger. I’m Venus’s teacher. I’ve been to your house. Remember? I came and saw you the other day after school.”

Wanda was carrying the baby doll wrapped in the receiving blanket again. She held it close to her chest.

“I’d like to talk to you about Venus. Won’t you come in and sit down?”

“No go stranger house.”

“Here. Would you like some M&Ms?” I asked. It was dirty of me, because I was probably undoing all the efforts to keep Wanda safe from strangers, but it did the trick. Wanda ambled into the room happily as I poured the candies on the tabletop.