Somebody Else’s Kids (16 page)

“But don’t you got no bears or stuffed things?”

“Aw, Lori, shut up, would you? Jesus, those are girls’ toys, don’t you know? What do I need anything like that for? He was right, my other foster dad was. I’m too old for things like that. Quit being dumb.”

“But what you got to love?”

“Jesus Christ, Lori, you’re bugging me. Tor, make her quit, would you? Jesus. But this, but that. But I don’t know, Lori Sjokheim. Does that satisfy you? I got plenty of junk to love. I got me my game of Sorry! Didn’t you hear me say that? Your ears full of wax? And I got my Lego toys. And I bet I can build a hundred million times more betterer with it than you can do. And I got me Barry’s baseball glove to love. What more does a guy need? So lay off me before I get mad.”

“But don’t you ever get lonesome in the dark?” she asked softly. Her voice was so quiet after Tomaso’s that it went in smoothly and deeply like a fine-edged blade.

“Shit!” Tomaso jumped up and knocked his chair across the floor. “You damned little bitch, all you do is ask questions. Jesus Christ and Mother Mary, you make me want to strangle your stupid neck sometimes.” Then to me: “Why the hell don’t you ever make her shut up? She’s got diarrhea of the mouth.” He darted to the far side of the room. Although he did not knock anything else over, his running was tight and tense. On the far side of the room he hoisted himself up on top of a desk and sat there. He swore at us from that safe distance.

Lori turned back to the table, lay down her doll on the floor beside her and reached for her folder. She said nothing more. From looking at her I was unable to discern her thoughts. I took up the remaining folders and handed Claudia hers, set Tom’s in front of his place at the table and opened Boo’s to start work with him.

We worked in silence. Tomaso remained apart from us. His swearing had quickly degenerated into little noises: huffs and puffs, snorts and pphumphs. I found the silence about us poignant, in part because no silence should have been there, in part because we all knew something had happened and it hurt, yet no one knew quite what.

At last Tomaso slid down from his perch and returned to the table. He stood behind me a while and watched me work with Boo. I did not turn to acknowledge his presence because something in me made me shy. Then he walked around behind Lori and leaned over her shoulder. “I know all those words,” he said softly about what she was copying. “You want me to read them to you?”

She nodded. He read the sentence. Finally he went over to his own chair and sat down. Pulling over his work folder, he opened it. He looked at us. First at Lori, then at me. I raised my eyes to him.

Tiredly he braced his forehead with one fist. “You know,” he said, “I do get kind of lonely sometimes. I do get real, real lonely.”

I nodded. “Yes, everybody does sometimes.”

“Yeah. Everybody does.”

Claudia remained a puzzle to me. Not so much, I suppose, for anything she did. More for what she did not do. She did not do much. From the time she arrived until the time she left, if I got three complete sentences out of her, it was unusual. She seldom looked me in the eyes. Her favorite way of looking was down. The girl must have memorized the pattern of our linoleum by the time she had been there a week.

She was an excellent student. The parochial school sent over all her books and the work she needed to do to complete her grade. Each afternoon after school I would sort through them and pick out assignments and place them in her folder for the following day. Claudia would come in the next afternoon, pick it up, take it to a desk away from us and for the remainder of the time completely absorb herself in finishing the assignments, without ever saying a word to us. Her shyness created an almost tangible wall around her. The puzzle to me remained how she ever managed to get pregnant.

The second week she was with us, the file arrived from her former school. By and large it was an unremarkable folder. Her grades had always been excellent. Her IQ, although not in the gifted range, was well above average. She read at the tenth-grade level; her other skills were not far behind. If anything, Claudia was an overachiever.

Little was said about her family. She was the oldest of five children, all girls. Three younger siblings also attended the parochial school. The youngest sister was not of school age yet. The family was characterized in one small paragraph as being cold, distant and competitive.

According to the notes, Claudia was three months pregnant with a predicted delivery date in early July. Apparently there had never been any consideration of abortion in this strict, Catholic family. In any case, from what was written, it was not clear if the family had discovered the pregnancy in time to consider abortion. The school had not been notified of the situation until Christmas vacation. No information about the father of the child was available.

All the reports in the folder mentioned Claudia’s unusually shy and reserved behavior. After each grade, the teacher had remarked on it. Claudia would participate in groups only if coerced. She became physically ill when made to speak in front of the class. Her skin would mottle with red blotches when interacting with adults. Although other children did not seem to avoid her, she was never observed to have any close friends. Her only noted interest was reading. She escaped into books.

I closed the file and pitched it over from the worktable to the top of my desk. It slid off the far side with a satisfying thud. This kind of child made me so damned frustrated. Why didn’t anyone ever see them? How could they sit and rot for years in classrooms without someone noticing them? They were invisible kids. Claudia was in as much trouble emotionally as Tomaso was. Yet, in the current state of the art, if one were bothersome, one usually gained attention and subsequently treatment. On the other hand, one could kill oneself quietly and as long as one did not disturb anybody else doing it, no one noticed. Or cared.

Then as I sat looking at the folder and its scattered contents, I had doubts about myself. Was it only I who saw her as having a problem? Was my being in these special classrooms so many years beginning to skew my judgment of normalcy? I felt that way sometimes. It seemed no matter how normal a child given to me was reputed to be elsewhere, the kid always ended up acting crazy in here. Maybe it was just all my perception. Maybe it was the air in my classroom. I laughed at myself and rose from the chair to go home. I felt like the Typhoid Mary of the disturbed.

Tomaso and Lori were quite willing to include Claudia in the class. I don’t think their curiosity had ever been fully satisfied regarding her pregnancy and they were trying to put her enough at ease to continue the interrogation I had interrupted the first day.

We were painting one afternoon. I had laid out newspapers and large sheets of art paper on the floor along with paint and an assortment of brushes. Tom, however, very quickly decided that he wanted to finger paint and before I could stop him, he had poured paint onto both his and Boo’s paper. Rolling up his sleeves, he plunged into it. Lori, of course, had to join them. Claudia did not. She just sat and watched, not even picking up a brush. Only after I had given in and joined the others, did she hesitantly pour a little paint on her paper and push it around with one finger.

The episode led to a lot of good-natured camaraderie. I had not planned to paint for the rest of the afternoon after recess but that was what happened. The kids really got into it, laughing and squealing over their work. So, continuing seemed more beneficial to me than the other activities I had planned.

Tomaso was the first to discover that removing one’s shoes and putting paint on the bottom of one’s foot resulted in footprints. Lori experimented with other parts of her body: elbow prints, knuckle prints – and before I caught her – nose prints. I could see Claudia loosening up. She began to laugh with them. She willingly painted their feet. Finally she volunteered to show Tomaso how to make prints by cutting designs into erasers. When next I turned from the art cabinet, she and Tom had painted themselves clear up to their elbows with red and purple paint. What a worthwhile mess.

When I finally called for cleanup, I found Tomaso and Claudia together at the sink, laughing and splashing each other with dirty water. They had a puddle going around their feet that stretched clear back to the newspapers. The moment of frivolity put Tom at ease.

“So how come they put you in this class anyway?” he asked. “Just because you’re going to have a baby?”

She nodded.

“Boy.” He shook his head. “That’s really something.” A pause while he stuck his entire arm up to the elbow under the running tap. “Tell me, did you do it?
It?
You know. With a boy?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow.” His voice was serious, not joking. A hint of respect. “Wow. Was he a big kid?”

She shrugged.

I was coming up behind them with the mop and I thought perhaps I had better step in before the conversation got out of control for Claudia. “Tom, I think that’s enough. No one has a right to pry.”

“I wasn’t prying. Was I, Claud? I was just asking.”

“I know it. But some things are pretty personal business and people often like to keep them private. We don’t want to put Claudia on the spot.”

“Oh,” Tomaso replied. “Don’t you want to talk about it, Claudia?”

Again she shrugged.

After the dismissal bell rang and the other children had gone, Claudia lingered and helped me clean up the mess of newspapers and paint that remained. She was on her hands and knees scraping at the linoleum with her fingernail.

“Here, that’s good enough,” I said to her. “We can leave the rest for the janitor. I don’t want you to miss your bus.”

She jerked one shoulder, a half shrug. “It doesn’t matter. I can walk. It isn’t that far.”

“Yes, but you don’t need to worry about the floor. It’ll have to be damp mopped anyhow. And we don’t want to worry your family, if you’re late.”

“No one will be worried,” she replied.

Finally I gave in and left her to her paint chipping. I went across to the worktable and started sorting through things to be corrected. Claudia rocked back on her heels and looked in my direction.

“You know,” she said, “I don’t really mind talking about it.”

I looked up. My mind had been on other things and I was confused. “About what?”

“The baby.” Red blotches came out along her neck.

“I’m glad,” I replied. “I know the other children are sort of curious. I don’t want them to make you uncomfortable with too many questions. That can be hard.”

She shrugged. “There isn’t even so much to tell. I was just seeing this guy. Randy. He’s fifteen. And I got pregnant. That’s all.” She made it sound like going to the movies.

I regarded her. In an odd way, Claudia made me uncomfortable. My experience with adolescents was limited, and what little I did have had been with kids so severely disturbed that they functioned as much younger children might. But the discomfort was more than simply lack of experience on my part. I felt sometimes as if my soul had been frozen somewhere in middle childhood, that the rest of me had grown, but that part of me which was I, myself, had never reached adulthood. I worked so well with the children not because I had any special gifts but simply because I was one of them; my only advantage was extra experience of life. Their thoughts were no mystery to me, nor were mine to them. Then would come the older children, Claudia’s age and up, and I could not understand them, I think simply because they were in fact older than I was. This lack made me uncomfortable.

Claudia rose from the floor and went over to the trash can to dump her handful of paint chips. Then she came to where I was sitting on the edge of the table and sat next to me. It was the closest she had ever been physically. Only a small space remained between us.

“I like your jeans,” she said and gingerly touched my leg. She gave me a very quick smile before dropping her head back down. I noticed the mottling was along her arms now.

“Thank you.”

“I asked my mom to get me some like that. They make you look nice.”

“Thanks.”

“I like the way you wear your hair.”

She was melting my heart. I wanted to open my mouth and tell her I understood, to let her know I cared and she wasn’t alone anymore. But I couldn’t do it. If she had been five or seven or nine, I would have had no hesitation, but here she was, by virtue of her body, a young woman like me. The instinct on which I normally functioned was pinioned beneath etiquette and I was too shy to risk the verbal freedom I was accustomed to with the little kids. Her eager, halting attempts to bridge the gap even I could not manage touched me.

“Do you like being a teacher?” she asked. She was looking at me. Warily, though, like an untamed animal.

I nodded.

“I might be a teacher someday.” She touched her stomach. “I don’t know though.” This was followed by a long breath, as if she were very tired. “I only did it once, you know.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Just once. And Randy said I couldn’t get pregnant. He said you had to have breasts before you could get pregnant and look at me: Even now I don’t hardly have any breasts. See? Even now.” She pressed her shirt to her chest.

I nodded.

“He said I couldn’t get pregnant. And we only did it once.” She lifted her head and looked beyond me. I could see the odd, indescribable color of her eyes; the bitterness was plain too. “A lot of truth that was.” She looked down again and traced around a red blotch on her arm. “I didn’t even like it. It hurt.”