Somebody Else’s Kids (33 page)

Claudia was sorting out some Ditto copies for me. She rustled one pile noisily. “I’m not sick. I never was.” There was a small interlude in the conversation before she looked over at me. “I was in the hospital over in Falls City. Because I tried to kill myself last Saturday night.”

“Oh.” Outside it was raining, a dark, misty rain that brought an almost primal longing in me that I could not identify. Turning away from Claudia, I rose to watch out the window. And wonder how all the big things in life can slip themselves into such small conversations.

“I just couldn’t stand it anymore,” Claudia said, her voice flat and unemotional.

The rain fell. Hard. Spring-cold.

“So I got put in the hospital. And now I go to see Dr. Friedman. He was the doctor who took care of me. He’s nice. He looks like Richard Dreyfuss and I like him. But he gave me some pills that make me feel tired all the time. Just until I get used to them, he said, but all I want to do is go to sleep.”

I kept my back to her and watched the rain. I did not want to turn around. I did not want to look at a twelve-year-old mother-to-be on antidepressants. Sometimes the job seemed just a little too heavy.

“It’s not so bad, really. Now I get to go to Falls City every week. And my mom’s taking me. She bought me a Kiss album last time we were there. Maybe she might even see Dr. Friedman; she said she might. And she said we could eat dinner out together on those nights. So, it’s not so bad.”

“No, I know it isn’t. I’m glad for you, Claudia.”

Stillness. Unexpectedly complete. I turned to check the other children, things were so quiet. All three of them were drawing together on one sheet of paper. They were unaware of us. Back to the window. I ran my finger along the caulking at the base and felt its rough edge.

“You know what I did?” Claudia asked.

I shook my head.

“I put a plastic bag over my head and tied a rope around it. Then I went and tied it in my closet to the bar. I closed the door and locked it so no one would find me.” She sighed. “But it didn’t work. Someone did.”

I
reckon I must have done something pretty awful in God’s book. To the Egyptians when they fouled up, He sent plagues. To me, He sent Ariadne Boom.

Ariadne Boom was not your ordinary person. We all knew about her. A short, wide, gray-haired grandmother with an undisclosed age and a Ph.D., Ariadne Boom had been in the employ of the state Office of Public Instruction for the last decade. She had made herself famous as the most bandwagon-jumpingest jumper the OPI had ever found. I have no doubt that somewhere there is a
Guinness Book of World Records
trophy for spending the most tax dollars with the least recoup and Ariadne Boom’s name is on it.

Some of her ideas would have been funny if they had not been so expensive. For instance, several years earlier she had become enamored of teaching machines, and one was purchased for every elementary classroom in the state. Not a single teacher I knew had ever used his or hers, partly because by the time they arrived, Ariadne Boom was believing in something else and none of us was ever instructed on how to use the things.

Her name was a company joke. Yet at the same time I think we all held her in awe because she had gotten so far and stayed so long in a position of power. Although I had never seen her, I suppose I should have known my days were numbered. Her new fancy was special education and child abuse, and she was making an informal tour of the state’s classes.

The first of May a little note slid across my desk. Ariadne Boom was coming to visit. No date. She liked to pop in unannounced and catch teachers acting “natural.” But Birk said she was headed my way. I was not sure why he chose to send her to my room when officially I did not even have a class. I suspected, however, that it was tongue-in-cheek disciplinary action for all the trouble I caused in March and April with Lori. It had to be. Nobody would willingly wish Ariadne Boom onto his friends.

What a lady. She was short; indeed, if she topped five feet I think that would have surprised me. Almost as wide as she was tall, she wore a bright maroon and red striped polyester top, black pants and, around her neck, half of Fort Knox pounded into jewelry. The odor of Emeraude preceded her. And followed her. Swinging open the door to the classroom one afternoon midweek in May, she rolled in with her entourage of two women and a man. About her was such an air of complete confidence that the room suddenly seemed like hers, not mine, and I felt to be the trespasser.

“What instructional model do you use here?” she asked me. The kids and I had just started opening exercises and we were all gathered in the reading corner on the floor. Boo stared wide eyed, his mouth hanging open. “I see your charts there. Are you a behaviorist?”

“Uh … uh,” I was saying intelligently. I honestly had expected Birk to at least tell me she was in town. As it was, she caught me a whole lot more natural than I would have wanted. Boo was in just training pants because he had had an accident right after arriving and I had his corduroys hanging over a chair to dry. We had begun to make a huge papier mâché dinosaur over by the worktable the week before but had not had time to get back to it. Thus, huge buckets of moldy, soaking newspapers were all over the room. And I was wearing dumb clothes. I had on a shirt with pink hippopotamuses on it that I had found at a secondhand clothing store. The kids loved it but it was hardly adult fare. Worse, I had worn suspenders instead of a belt. Superman suspenders, no less, a bright, almost fluorescent blue with small Superman emblems all over them, a gift from Tomaso at Christmas. When I saw Dr. Boom come in, I scrunched down and hoped my clothes would escape notice. I felt like a clown.

She marched over to us in the corner to question about my methods of teaching. I pointed to the logbook on my desk. She could look at that while I finished with the children, then I would talk to her.

Lori leaned against me when Dr. Boom had gone over to the teacher’s desk. “Boy, she sure smells, doesn’t she?”

I gave Lori a black stare. She opened her mouth to defend her position and I clamped my hand over it and shook my head. Tomaso giggled.

The afternoon was long, endlessly long. Dr. Boom and her attendants leaned over my desk and read the logbook for a while. Out of the side of my mouth I whispered wicked threats to the children about behaving. Then the visitors wandered back. They were as unobtrusive as a cyclone on a summer’s afternoon. I knew their interest in the class was genuine. Dr. Boom asked many valid, intelligent questions. But they were out of place. She took no notice of the children and spoke to me as if we were alone in the room. I could not tell if she was simply insensitive or if she believed that because these were special education children they did not hear.

What amazed me was her self-assurance. It oozed from her pores. Part of me was envious that anyone, regardless of how shmucky, could have that kind of confidence. The rest of me was intimidated by it.

The kids were nervous. Visitors were not that unusual in the room. Occasionally students from the community college or from the university in Falls City would come out for the afternoon. Nursing students, particularly those in psychiatric nursing, or medical students would often be with us two or three days at a time. The children never seemed to mind. But this day they did, I think because I was insecure. We were all feeling like bugs under a microscope.

Boo in particular was affected. Usually he completely ignored human beings. This time he did not. He seemed uncommonly alert to the environment, a condition I normally would have cherished. At the same time, he engaged in more bizarre behavior than usual. For instance, at one point he crawled the entire length of one wall underneath the rug to avoid having to pass the visitors. At another point he closed himself in my coat closet and I could not get him out. All the time in there he kept yelling, “And herrrre’s Johnny! And herrrrre’s Johnny!”

I took him aside and explained to him and to the others that these were merely people who had come to see how we did things and nothing to worry about. Did he remember how we had talked about having visitors at different times? No, he had forgotten. I patted him on the back and told him to go help Lori with her puzzle. Boo refused. Instead, he retreated to a spot near Benny’s driftwood and sat with Claudia’s sweater draped over his head. As I watched him, I thought I could exude a whole lot more confidence about the situation if he would help me a little.

Time raced by at the speed of a fly swimming in molasses. All I wanted was for recess to come, for dismissal to arrive and the whole thing to end. My own insecurity was beginning to diffuse into a kind of nervous nastiness.

At one point Ariadne Boom took a small chair to the far side of the room and sat down. Then she rose and strolled over to the animal cages not far away. The finches chirped merrily to her and she smiled. Benny was not in his cage but wrapped instead around the uppermost branches of the driftwood nearest the heat lamp. Being the friendly snake that he was, when Dr. Boom approached, he dropped his head and probably three feet of his body off the branch to be scratched. A silly snake smile of anticipation made him wiggle, swinging slightly back and forth on the branch.

When she went over to the animal corner, I think Dr. Boom must not have been aware that Benny was there, or at least that he was quite the size that he was. And foolish me, I didn’t tell her. When she saw him flopping off his perch, she gave a strangled little squawk that caused all of us to turn. A deathly pallor on her face, she quickly returned to her chair, picked it up and moved it to the opposite side of the room from Benny’s driftwood. Filled with very mean glee, I smiled at Tomaso and we went back to work.

Boo came completely unglued. After a spell of sitting under Claudia’s sweater, he skittered across to me and plastered himself to my side in an atypical display of physical contact. Finding no belt to hang onto, he chose to grip the waistband of my jeans. Cautiously he would peer around me to look at the visitors. What did he think they would do to him? For a while he was content to hang on and move when I did. Then he pressed himself close and gripped my pants with both hands. This made walking difficult and I almost tripped.

“Boo, for crying out loud, cut that out. I can’t move when you hang onto me like that.” My voice sounded harsher than I had meant and I was instantly sorry. I fondled his head a moment.

Ariadne Boom watched the two of us intently. I could hear her whispering about the kids to her colleagues and I wished she would talk more quietly. I could also hear her whispering about me.

Moving to the table, I dragged Boo along. An irritated discomfort was growing inside me at not being able to present what I perceived she was looking for: the perfect class. I was acutely aware of all sorts of things – Lori’s overtalkativeness, Tomaso’s constant requests for teacher attention, Claudia’s failure to look anyone in the eye. And Boo’s incontinence. Still in only training pants, he released another stream of urine, all down the leg of my jeans.

“Oh, Boo!” I shrieked.

He clamped his hands around my leg and I nearly fell over. Shaking my leg, I tried to break loose. Lori and Tomaso looked up. Boo continued to cling, his hands clamped together in back of my leg where I could not reach them. When I tried to pull him off, he began to scream. Claudia came over and began the arduous task of unclenching his fingers. Prying him off, she held him long enough for me to reach down and lift him in my arms. As I carried him screaming to a less conspicuous corner of the room, I threw an apologetic glance to Dr. Boom. Already I could hear whispers about this severely disturbed youngster. Psst-psst-psst and the knowing shake of heads.

Boo continued to holler. When I set him down, he screeched and struck out at me although without hitting. Then a flurry of flapping and crying followed. I came down on my knees and took him in my arms. Boo clung so tightly that pain sprinted up my back where his fingers dug in.

When he quieted, he cautiously pulled himself up to look over my shoulder and check out the visitors. I could feel the tension in his small body, tension not meant for me but instead for whatever mysterious thing it was about these people that upset him. His small fingers still gripped my shirt; his breathing still rasped. I felt frustrated not understanding what frightened him and not being able to comfort him.

Recess at last. An aide came to take the children out, and I stayed in with Dr. Boom and her attendants. The only positive outcome of Boo’s upset was that it had involved me so much that I had forgotten my own nervousness. Now I met Dr. Boom on a more relaxed level than I would have if we had talked earlier.

And I had misjudged her.

She was not out for blood. Nor was she the caricature that she had seemed upon first entering the room. Beneath all the jewelry and Emeraude was an earnest lady. She saw through my foibles well enough to praise the class and the kids. I felt guilty for my misjudgment, but relieved.

Still, she wanted to know what I had avoided answering earlier: where I had come up with my teaching methods; what underlying theoretical model I ascribed to.

I had hoped I had eluded that question. The truth was, I did not know. My classroom methods were pretty eclectic. I used whatever seemed to me like it might work. But no matter how much I wanted to find the perfect method or the all-encompassing theory, I never had. God knows, I looked for it. Ever since I had walked into my first special education classroom almost eight years before, I had been searching for that secret way for me to open up every imprisoned child. So far I had never found it. Or anything else. Whose model and methods did I function under? Torey Hayden’s, I suppose. But not because I was any genius at what I did, and certainly not because I had any magic keys. Instead, only for the ignominious reason that I was the only person whose thoughts I routinely understood. And some days I wasn’t even sure about that.