Beautiful Child (7 page)

“Is that your dolly?” I asked as Wanda sat down.

“Beautiful child,” she said and caressed the molded plastic hair.

“Yes. You like to take care of your doll, don’t you?”

“Beautiful child. Her no go to school.”

“No, your dolly doesn’t go to school, does she? But what about Venus? Venus goes to school, doesn’t she?”

“Beautiful child.” Wanda caressed the doll again.

“Can you talk to me about Venus? What does Venus do when she isn’t at school?”

“Beautiful child.”

“Here, have some more M&Ms.”

Unlike her sister, Wanda had no inhibitions about eating. She stuffed the candy into her mouth by the handful and chomped messily.

“When I came to your place the other day, where was Venus then? I didn’t see her. Remember, you tried to find her. Where was Venus?”

“Her no go to school.”

“No, I know that. But what does she do at home? Can you tell me?”

“Eat.”

“Venus eats?”

“Eat!” Wanda said more insistently, and I realized she meant she wanted more candy. The package was almost empty. I poured what was left onto the table. Wanda scrabbled it up with both hands. I looked beyond her to Venus, who stood beside the doorway. She wasn’t watching us. She was just staring into space.

“Go home now,” Wanda said when the candy was gone.

“Wait,” I said.

“Go home now.” She got up. “Beautiful child. Go home, beautiful child,” she called to Venus. Before I could stop her, she was to the door and out with Venus in front of her.

It was only after she’d left that I discovered the doll in its receiving blanket, forgotten on the floor.

I
had one activity I’d always done with all my classes. Indeed, I’d used it occasionally in therapy with individual children as well. I’m sure it has some proper, formal name and probably proper, formal rules, but my version grew out of desperation one rained-in recess many years back when I was a student teacher. The children couldn’t go outside to play and were wild with pent-up energy, so I decided to take them on an imaginary journey. We all sat down in a circle on the floor and closed our eyes. Then I told them to look inward, to envisage a deep-sea diving bell, because I was going to take them on an adventure trip under the sea.

This worked fantastically. I had the children first imagine their diving bell – what it looked like, what was in it, how it felt and smelled – then they imagined the descent
down deep into the water. Then we started looking for things and I asked different ones to describe what they saw. If their descriptions were sparse, I queried gently to make a more complete picture. No one had to contribute but everyone did.

We stayed in the circle, our eyes closed, and wandered around under the sea for about fifteen minutes. When we finally emerged back into the classroom, the children were delighted. We made pictures of it to put on the wall in the hallway and talked about our trip for a long time afterward. Indeed, for many it became the single best memory they had of my student teaching.

From then on, I made imaginary journeys regularly. As I became more experienced, I knew more about what I could do on the journeys. If the children needed to relax and calm down, we visited quiet places and spent a lot of our time listening and feeling the atmosphere. If the children needed a change of scenery, as during that rainy recess, we went somewhere exotic. If the children needed cheering up, we visited a circus or a zoo or a carnival. Once we had an imaginary birthday party. At Christmastime we went to the North Pole. I found it a particularly useful activity with attention-deficit children, who often had a hard time calming themselves down. The act of sitting together on the floor with our eyes closed seemed to help them block out enough other stimuli so they could focus well.

Thus, this seemed like it would be a useful technique for my Chipmunks. I felt Jesse, in particular, would benefit.
Because he suffered from Tourette’s syndrome, he was often jerking and twitching involuntarily. It also caused him to make sudden noises. He didn’t shout out obscenities, the Tourette’s tic popularized in the media, which is actually rather rare; however, he did make a sharp yelping sound, rather like a startled bark, and he did this quite a lot. He also had a noisy, stylized sniff that went along with his facial tic, and this produced a piggy kind of noise. All considered, the others were tolerant about these tics, or at least they didn’t single out the tics as a reason to fight with him. Nonetheless, the tics were disruptive and occasionally alarming, if you didn’t expect them.

So I felt the guided journeys might be of benefit to Jesse, because his tics always became worse under stress. I was hoping that the journeys might provide a relaxing alternative in his day that would calm the noise and motion a little bit.

I also hoped they would help Billy. My goal for him was that he develop awareness of his thoughts
before
he did something, so that he had a better chance of intervening. At the moment, Billy just
did
and then coped with the aftermath. I was sure he wasn’t even conscious there were any “before” thoughts affecting his actions, so constructive use of imaginary journeys seemed like a good place to start helping him develop an understanding of thoughts as something you produced yourself and could control.

Thus, Monday after morning recess, I said, “Okay, gang,
we’re going to do something different. Once you have your shoes off and in the box, I want you to come over here and sit down in a circle on the floor.”

This elicited excitement. Though somewhat uncontrolled and chaotic, this group was also enthusiastic, which made them fun to work with when they weren’t killing one another.

“Okay, I want you sitting, but get comfortable. Shane, keep your hands to yourself, please. Venus, sit down.” I had to rise up again and direct Venus into place. “Zane? Sit. No,
sit
.

“Everybody ready? Now, we’re going to take a journey. Right here. Right now. And since we’re Chipmunks, I think we should visit the woods. Ready?”

All the boys nodded.

“Close your eyes then. Not tight. Just gently, so you’re comfortable. Keep them closed. Get yourself comfy.” I closed my eyes too at the beginning and leaned forward, forearms on my knees. “Now, we’re off. We’re walking toward the woods. Can you see? Look ahead.” I opened my eyes and checked on everyone. “No, Zane, keep your eyes shut. Look ahead inside your mind. There’s the woods. See the trees? Everybody look in their minds. See if you can see the woods ahead. Can you?”

“Yeah!” Billy said enthusiastically.

“See if you can tell what kind of trees they are. What kind of trees are in your woods? Does anybody know?”

“Yeah,” said Billy immediately. “Pine trees!”

“You’re seeing pine trees. Does everyone see pine trees? Or does someone see something different in their woods?”

“I see the kind that’s got big flat leaves,” Shane said.

“Okay. Good. Pine trees and the kind of trees that have flat leaves. The kind that lose their leaves. We call them ‘deciduous trees.’ So, look at your trees carefully. What kinds of trees are in your woods?”

“I see trees with leaves
and
pine trees,” Jesse said. “My forest has got them both.”

“Yeah, me too,” Billy said, not wanting his imaginary woods to be without something someone else saw.

“Are they tall trees?” I asked. “Have they got thick trunks? Look around? Do you see any young trees there too?”

“Mine are
big
!” Billy cried.

“Can you put your arm around one of them, Billy? Everybody. Go up to one of your trees and try to reach around it. Feel the bark. Feel it with your fingers. But put your face against the tree too. You’re trying to stretch your arms all the way around. Feel what it feels like.”

I opened my eyes again slightly to see the boys, all of them with their hands stretched out in the air, reaching to feel imaginary trees. I peeked over at Venus. She too had her eyes shut tight. She didn’t have her hands up in the air like the boys did, but her fingers were splayed out on her knees and twitching slightly, as if possibly she was feeling for an imaginary tree of her own.

“Mine’s got knobbly bark!” Billy cried with unexpected loudness.

“Quietly, Billy,” I said. “You’ll scare away the animals.”

“Knobbly bark,” he whispered.

“Yeah, mine too. I can feel it on my cheek,” Jesse said.

“What about you, Zane? What does your tree feel like?”

“It’s a pine tree. It’s rough.”

“Can you smell it?”

He nodded and smiled slightly, his eyes still closed. “Yeah.”

“I can smell mine!” cried Billy, still a little loud.

“Shut up, Billy, you’ll scare the animals away,” Jesse said.

“Oh look,” I said. “Something’s moving through the trees over there. What is it? Look carefully. Over there in the distance. Going through the trees. Do you see it too?”

“A deer!” Billy positively shouted.

“You stupid pisser!” Jesse cried. “You keep hollering. You scared the deer away!” And before I knew what was coming, Jesse punched Billy in the mouth.

This, of course, rather rudely pulled us all out of our imaginary visit to the woods. Not expecting to be hit, Billy burst into tears. Jesse got up and stomped off, twitching and yelping. Zane and Shane were on their feet, shouting, “That’s not fair! They wrecked our time. We weren’t done! They wrecked it! They ought to go in the quiet chair!”

I felt sorry for Billy, innocent victim of his own enthusiasm, because I knew he hadn’t meant to wreck things. He had simply been enjoying himself and, as ever, had lost control. I gave him a cuddle and rubbed his chin. And while I could hardly condone what Jesse had done, I didn’t want
to punish him. He too had simply been caught up in the imaginary journey. So I walked over and put an arm around him afterward, saying I was sorry Billy had disturbed things for him and I understood how it made him feel angry but reminding him for the millionth time that I couldn’t allow hitting and please would he try to remember that?

Shane and Zane stood forlornly. “Can we do it again? It wasn’t fair. They wrecked it. Please, can we do it again?” Zane asked.

“Yes, we will. But not just now,” I said. “We’ll do it tomorrow at the same time.”

“Noooo,” Shane moaned. “I want to do it now. It’s not fair.”

“I know. You feel disappointed. Tomorrow we’ll do it again.”

“Pleeeeeeeese?”

“Tomorrow.”

“This afternoon. Okay?” Zane begged. “Pleeeeeeeese?”

“We can’t this afternoon. Julie comes then and we’re getting a new girl, so we need to do other things. Tomorrow after morning recess.”

The twins stomped off, disgruntled, to their tables.

I turned to look for Venus. And there she was, still sitting cross-legged on the floor, her eyes still tight shut. I regarded her. Why was she like that? Again, my first instinct was to believe she couldn’t hear us and thus had not realized we’d stopped the activity. But then, if she couldn’t hear, she wouldn’t have known we’d
started
the activity. Or what
we were doing during the activity. So why was she still sitting with her eyes closed? Did some part of her brain not register that we’d stopped? Or not want to register we’d stopped? Or was it just plain resistance?

Coming over, I squatted down directly in front of her. “Venus?”

No response.

I was a little reluctant to touch her, in case she wasn’t expecting it. “Open your eyes, Venus. We’re done with the imaginary journey. We’re doing something else now.”

Slowly, she opened her eyes.

I smiled. “You stayed a little longer in the woods than the rest of us, huh?”

She looked at me.

I looked back at her.

Her expression was so enigmatic that she could have been an alien child sitting there.

That day the part-time students were due to start coming. Up until that point we hadn’t been much of a cohesive group, as chaos had always been too close at hand. However, the arrival of “them other kids,” as the boys chose to call them, brought out the team spirit.

“They ain’t gonna be Chipmunks, are they?” Shane asked during morning discussion as I prepared them for the arrival of our first new student.

“
No
!” Billy cried. “No, Teacher, they
can’t
be Chipmunks. Okay? Please? ’Cause just us guys get to be Chipmunks.”

“What do you think about that, Jesse?”

“Yeah, just us guys who live here.”

“All right then,” I replied.

“I think we ought to have a special signal,” Billy said. “You know, something that makes us
know
we’re Chipmunks.” It was said as if this were some elite society we were speaking of. “Something to help us keep our spirits up when we got all these other geezers in here to put up with.”

“Let’s go ‘Chip, chip, chip, chip, chip,’” Zane suggested.

“Don’t you think that might get a little noisy?” I asked.

Of course, this meant all the boys had to do it.

“And not too discreet.”

“What’s discreet mean?” Billy asked.

“Discreet means when you keep something kind of private and don’t make a big show of it,” I said. “Something like a hand signal might work better.”

The conversation pursued this vein for several minutes with the boys trying out various movements and gestures that they thought could serve as this special signal. I watched Venus as they talked. She was sitting at her table, as were the boys sitting each at their individual tables, as we’d not yet progressed to the point of being able to sit peaceably next to one another. Given my big, booming voice I had no trouble being heard when the kids were scattered all over the room, and the boys’ personalities were all so loud and expansive that the distance among them still helped more than it hindered. They could jump up, swing their arms around, and be their usual, lively selves without crashing
into anyone else. In this respect, the distance was useful for Venus too, as she did not explode unpredictably simply because someone had inadvertently invaded her space. However, it also made it easier for her to isolate herself. I could tell she was completely tuned out of this conversation. Leaning slightly forward, arms crossed on the tabletop, eyes blank and unfocused, she was as motionless as the furniture itself. And, indeed, that’s how the boys responded to her. Venus, for all intents and purposes, was not there.

“Well, what I think,” Zane said, “is that we should wiggle our feet. Like this.’ Cause we’re the ones who don’t got no shoes on. If you don’t got shoes on, you’re a Chipmunk, huh? And so you can wiggle your toes.”

“Hey, way cool!” Billy cried, whipping off a grubby sock and sticking his bare foot up on the table with a thud. He wiggled his toes.

“Billy, remove it,” I said sharply.

Billy didn’t take his foot down but instead burst into a spontaneous rendition of a children’s ditty, “Stuck my head in a little skunk’s hole! Little skunk said, ‘Well, bless my soul! Take it out! Take it out! Take it out!’” Zane and Shane chimed in with him, “REMOVE IT!”