Ghost Girl (5 page)

The house was small and in the style of those built between the wars. Everything about it was ramshackle. Paint peeled from the window frames. The latticework around the front porch was broken. Large patches of grass in the front yard were worn away, leaving a battered tricycle mired in the mud. But when Mr. Ekdahl opened the door to greet me, I was led into a large room, warm and neat.

They were a wholly undistinguished-looking couple. Jadie’s mother was small and drab, with mousy hair and badly chapped hands. She’d made a clear effort to appear attractive, apparent in the eye makeup and styled hair, but they had an aging effect. I knew she was probably near my age, but she had the aura of an older generation. Jadie’s father had pale Scandinavian features. Thin almost to the point of gauntness, he looked worn out, like the winter-beaten buffalo grass slowly disintegrating in the prairie wind.

Jadie’s five-year-old sister, Amber, was there, too, and I was struck by the fact that this was one of those odd cases where the children were much more attractive than one would have been led to believe, seeing the parents. Amber was quite unlike Jadie in some ways. Her hair was fair and much less curly than Jadie’s, making her look more rumpled than ratty. Although her eyes were blue, they were a cloudy gray-blue, not the pure color Jadie’s were, but Amber, too, had the long, dark lashes, giving her the same look of infant sensuality. She remained in the room with us, a naked doll in her arms, and watched me guardedly. Jadie, however, made herself scarce. I heard the familiar sound of her shuffle in an adjacent room, and Mrs. Ekdahl said something about her minding the baby. Whatever, Jadie never even appeared to say hi.

Jadie’s parents were clearly ill at ease with me. They got me seated in a big chair, a cup of coffee in my hand, and then they just stared. I explained a bit about who I was and talked about my own background and my work with children like Jadie, in hopes this would break the ice some. I said how glad I was to have her in my class, how gentle and cooperative she was, and what good academic work she was doing. They sat together on a long brown vinyl couch, which had decorative stitching in the shape of a horse’s head on the back, and said nothing.

After ten minutes of this, it occurred to me that whatever else might be contributing to Jadie’s problems, a certain amount might simply be a familial trait. I endeavored to make conversation and ended up talking to myself, as no one else ever spoke. Mother, father, and daughter all sat motionless and mute, managing not even so much as a nod in my direction. Finally, I gave up and fell silent myself. Nothing happened. For three or four minutes, we all just sat.

“You can make that chair go back,” Mrs. Ekdahl finally said.

“Pardon?” I asked.

“That chair, that one you’re sitting in. It’s a recliner. If you want to get yourself more comfortable, you just lean back some more and it lays out real nice.”

“Oh. Thank you. I’m quite comfortable now, though.”

“Do you want some more coffee?”

“No, thank you. I’m fine.”

“You sure? No trouble. We got the pot on and it makes ten cups. We only just been drinking it, so there’s plenty more.”

There was pathos in all of this, and it left me feeling more uncomfortable and out of place than ever. “I’m fine,” I said, “but thanks. What I want to talk about … Jadie …”

They looked at me.

“What do you think about Jadie’s problems with speaking at school?”

“Nothing,” the mother replied, her voice soft.

“Nothing?”

“Don’t see it’s a problem. Leastways, it isn’t one for us. She talks fine at home. Sometimes she won’t shut up.”

“Oh? Can you tell me about such times?”

“She gets silly,” the father offered.

“In what way?”

He shrugged. “Just silly. Jumping around. Her and Amber.” He smiled at the younger girl, who ducked her head.

“Does Jadie talk then?”

“Yeah, all the time. Shouts. Says silly things.”

“What do you do then?” I asked.

“Tell her to stop. Tell her you don’t go jumping on the couch, ’cause she’s going to rip it. She’s already ripped it here, see?” He pointed to a place patched with what looked like duct tape.

“And tell her to stop talking dirty,” Mrs. Ekdahl added. “She does, sometimes. Shouts these filthy words and then Amber hears them.”

From my experience with Jadie in the classroom, I was finding all this very difficult to imagine.

“She picks them words up at school. From the big boys on the playground. And then, if she really wants to get you mad, she says ’em, ’cause she knows we don’t talk like that in this house,” Mrs. Ekdahl said.

“And does she usually stop when you tell her to?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” Mr. Ekdahl said. “Sometimes not.”

“What do you do then? Do you spank her?”

“
No
,” he replied indignantly. “I don’t think it’s right for a parent to hit their little children. We don’t spank our girls. We just take away privileges. Mostly, when she does those things, I send her outside. Tell her to go yell out there.”

“I see.”

Silence followed. I regarded the parents; they regarded their hands. “So, you feel Jadie’s problems with speech aren’t anything serious?”

Mrs. Ekdahl looked over. “It’s just shyness. Jadie don’t get on real good with outsiders, that’s all. She’s always been that way. Both girls have. Just like their family best, that’s all.”

“Well, the other thing … the way Jadie walks. What are your thoughts on her posture?”

“Oh, that, she can’t help that. She was born that way,” Mrs. Ekdahl said. “See, I had this real hard time getting her out when she was born. She was stuck in the wrong way, had her face like this.” She gestured along the front of her abdomen. “So she came wrong. I had to have forty-two stitches in me afterwards, and the doctor said things might not be just right, because she didn’t get enough air. That’s because she was stuck in such a long time.”

“Oh,” I said in surprise. “I hadn’t realized that. Nobody’s mentioned birth trauma to me.”

“We just got to be patient with Jadie,” Mrs. Ekdahl said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her. She’s little and she’s shy, but that don’t mean there’s anything really the matter with her. She’s good at her work. She always has good report cards, so I think we just got to be patient.”

I went home from the meeting in a state of confusion. This new bit of information fogged over my previous conclusions. Jadie did speak now. She had responded classically to the intervention method I’d developed to treat elective mutism, which lent weight to the evidence that hers was psychological, and surely someone, somewhere, would have noted the likelihood of brain damage in her files if it was felt to be contributory. On the other hand, while she spoke in class now, she still did not speak much spontaneously but rather only when spoken to. Also, there was her bizarre posture to consider. And goodness knows, I’d been victim before of critical information being omitted from files. On thinking the matter through, it seemed reasonable to keep an open mind to the possibility that Jadie was aphasic, unable to speak because of brain damage.

At the beginning of March, we had a two-day break. I used the time to go up to the city and visit all my old colleagues at the clinic. Of course, I was curious about how everyone had gotten on since I’d left, and I wanted to know about the children I’d been working with, who were all now in therapy with one of my partners; however, there was an ulterior motive as well. I wanted to borrow a video recorder.

I had long been accustomed to using video machines in my classroom. Back in the early seventies when I’d first started teaching, I’d been fortunate enough to be in a school with its own video equipment—a rarity in those days—and even more fortunate in the fact that most of the staff hadn’t learned how to use it, so it sat idle much of the time. Subsequently, I appropriated it bit by bit and made it an integral part of my classroom routine. I found such a recording device invaluable. When I taught, I often became so absorbed in the process that I missed vital clues to a child’s behavior. Now, for the cost of a few reels of videotape, I could go back at the end of the day and observe and evaluate both the children and myself in a way never possible before.

We didn’t have a video camera or even a recorder in Pecking. Gracious and generous as Mr. Tinbergen was, he admitted that school finances did not stretch that far. He wished they did, he said, but it was rather too much of a luxury for a school that size. So back I went to the city over the two-day break to see if I could charm my old director, Dr. Rosenthal, into lending me one of the clinic’s for a couple of weeks. And so I did, returning to Pecking with an elderly reel-to-reel machine and its accompanying camera rattling around on the back seat of my car.

“I know what that is,” Jadie said, when she arrived in the classroom Monday morning.

“You do?” This surprised me, as cassette recorders were rapidly replacing these bulky older machines and even VCRs were still uncommon.

“Yeah. It makes TV pictures.” She hobbled up to the recording deck. “Are you going to put us on TV?”

“Just on this little one here. It’s called a monitor.”

“Will my mom and dad see it?”

“No. It’s just for us. When everybody is here, we’ll turn it on so that everyone can see themselves. And maybe at the end of the week, we can act out a little play and record it. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? Maybe one of those plays from your reading book.”

“Is that what you got it for? Us?”

“Well, mostly it’s for me. So I can see what I’m doing when I’m teaching.”

“What d’you mean?”

“See, what I do is turn it on and let it run and don’t pay any attention to it. Then, at the end of the day, I can sit down and look at it and see what we’re doing. I can look at each person carefully and decide if I’m doing the right things to help. This makes me a better teacher.”

“Just you? You look at it all by yourself? Nobody else sees it?”

“Just me, usually.”

Jadie peered into the camera lens and then went back to the deck. “This is how you turn it on, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And here’s how you stop it. You press this button, don’t you?” She bent nearer to the machine. “Rec-ord,” she read.

“
Re
-cord. That’s the button you press when you want the picture to go onto the tape.”

“Yeah, I know what it means.”

I looked at her. “Have you seen one of these before?”

She nodded. “Bobby Ewing’s got one.”

“Is that a friend of yours?” I asked.

“Yeah. Him and J.R., when they come, they put you on TV.”

“J.R.?” Confused, I searched her face for some explanation. “J.R.? Bobby? You mean like the Ewings on TV? On ‘Dallas’?”

“No, I don’t think he’s on TV. He puts you on TV. So you can be a movie star and make lots of money when you’re big.”

Totally baffled, I said nothing more, but I filed the conversation away. It was the first truly spontaneous conversation I’d thus far had with Jadie, and it made no sense whatsoever to me. This lack of coherence lent credence to the aphasia theory.

Setting the camera up on the wide window ledge, I ran the machine for almost two hours in the morning. This allowed me to catch a good cross section of both tightly organized activities, such as reading, and freer periods, such as art. I switched it off just before lunch and intended to record a bit more after lunch; however, when I returned later and stopped to check the reels, I saw there wasn’t actually enough tape left to make it worthwhile, so I decided to view what I had first and then record in the afternoon another day.

I didn’t get around to viewing the two hours of tape until after school the following day. The room was dark. We’d had a run of wet, heavily overcast days, and all I needed to do was turn off the overhead lights to plunge the schoolroom into gloom. Pulling up one of the small chairs, I flipped the monitor on and sat down, elbows on my knees, chin resting on my folded hands, and watched.

Much of the latter part of the tape was taken up with Jeremiah and me, just before lunch the previous day. We were at the table, and I was helping him with his reading, or at least trying to help. Jeremiah was fairly hopeless at most academic tasks and hid his troubles behind a constant barrage of defiant, distracting remarks.

Leaning forward, I studied the images. I listened carefully to my tone of voice. Did I sound as exasperated as I’d felt at the time? Was I inadvertently provoking him? Was I encouraging resistance? I looked at Jeremiah, slumped over the table, refusing to work. I heard myself saying that he seemed angry and unwilling to do his folder. Sometimes, I said, when people are afraid of being wrong, they get so worried about doing the work that they can’t do it at all. Sometimes what comes out is anger, because it’s frustrating, because something’s got to come out, and because feeling angry isn’t as scary as feeling afraid.

Studying the images of Jeremiah and myself, listening to myself as I posed these comments, I cringed. This was probably an appropriate place to make the connection between Jeremiah’s constant anger and the fear I suspected it was covering, but the way I said it … It made me sound as if I knew, when there was no way of
knowing
such things.