The Tiger's Child Read online

  “It means someone whose ways are simple. They haven’t much experience with the world,” I replied.

  “Do I be naive?” she asked, looking up.

  “No, I wouldn’t say so. Not for your age.”

  She looked back down at the book. “The flower thinks she has experience.”

  I nodded.

  “But the prince knows she doesn’t.” She smiled. “I do love this part. I love the flower.”

  We read on:

  So, too, she began very quickly to torment him with her vanity—which was, if truth be known, a little difficult to deal with. One day, for instance, when she was speaking of her four thorns, she said to the little prince:

  “Let the tigers come with their claws!”

  “There are no tigers on my planet,” the little prince objected. “And anyway, tigers do not eat weeds.”

  “I am not a weed,” the flower replied sweetly.

  “Please excuse me …”

  “I am not at all afraid of tigers—”

  The door to the classroom opened and the secretary stuck her head around the door. “Sorry to interrupt, Torey, but there’s a telephone call for you in the office.”

  Handing Sheila the book, I rose and went down to take it.

  It was the call I was dreading. The director of special education was on the other end of the line: a vacancy had come up in the children’s unit at the state hospital. Sheila’s time in my classroom was over.

  To say I was devastated diminishes the enormity of the emotions I felt at that news. Whatever her difficulties, Sheila in no way belonged in a mental hospital. Intelligent, creative, sensitive, perceptive, she belonged here with us and, eventually, back in a normal class in a regular school.

  I moaned, I pleaded, eventually I raged. The director listened. We got on well, he and I. I had always counted him among my allies in the district, the sort of man I relied on as a mentor, and this, if anything, made his call harder to take.

  “It was settled long before any of us got into it, Torey,” he said. “You know that. There’s nothing we can do.”

  Pathetic little flower, I thought, so proud of her fierce thorns, and when the tigers really came, the thorns gave no protection at all.

  I simply couldn’t let it happen without a fight. When she had arrived in January, she had presented as bleak a case as I had ever encountered, and if they’d come for her then, I might have accepted it. But now …? The very thought of a child of Sheila’s caliber ending up institutionalized at six froze me to my soul.

  That evening when I was home, ostensibly watching television with my boyfriend, Chad, a plan formed in my mind. I had so much evidence of both Sheila’s intelligence and her progress that I wondered if there might be a chance of changing things. It would have to be approached in a formal, unequivocal manner to be taken seriously and it would have to be undertaken rapidly. I glanced over at Chad. He was a very new junior partner in a law firm downtown and was spending much of his time as a court-appointed lawyer to those who couldn’t afford their own legal advice. So he knew the ropes.

  “Is there a legal way to contest what they want to do with Sheila?” I asked cautiously.

  “You fight it?” he replied, sensing the meaning under my words.

  “Someone has to. I’m quite sure the school district would support me. The school psychologist has been in to administer IQ tests. He had evidence of her giftedness. And Ed knows.”

  A pause. A few mutterings. I was the sort of person inclined, as Chad described it, “to get the bit between my teeth and run,” so I think he could guess the obsessive nature of what was going to happen.

  “Would you take it on for me?” I asked.

  “Me?”

  Yeah, him.

  And so it was. With admirable solidarity, the school district did back me fully. They even paid for Chad’s services. I marshaled together the videotapes I’d made of Sheila in class, her schoolwork, the psychologist’s evaluations and whatever other examples I could find to support Sheila’s steady improvement. The weakest link in the chain was Sheila’s father, who had been in and out of so many institutions himself that he didn’t seem to believe there was any point to pursuing a different life for his daughter. He was deeply suspicious of us because we did. Beneath his boorish behavior, I felt he did genuinely love Sheila, but it took several rather beery evenings between us to convince him we were right.

  The hearing was held on the very last day of March, a dark, windy day that promised to bend the daffodils down yet again with snow. Sheila had had to come along, still dressed in her T-shirt and now badly outgrown overalls. They were clean and I had managed to get her father to accept socks and mittens for her from our church donation box, but that was the best I could do. She sat outside the courtroom with an attendant, in case we needed to call her in.

  Inside, I saw the parents of the little boy whom Sheila had abducted and set alight. It was the first time I’d encountered them. Up to that moment, the incident that had placed her in my class had seemed distant to me. In truth, I suppose I had kept it distant in my mind in an effort to make such an act of calculated cruelty unreal. Sheila certainly had done some outrageous things and she had done plenty of them in my presence, so I’d always felt I had a realistic picture of her, but for the first time I had to confront the veracity of another point of view. This upset me, if for no other reason than that I had so desperately wanted to feel a hundred percent right in what I was doing just then. In a way I still did. Revenge would not undo the harm done to their son and it would cripple Sheila for life. This was the only right route for this girl. Yet the hearing brought home to me the enormity of what she had done.

  The judge ruled in Sheila’s favor. She was to remain under Social Services supervision, but the order for detainment in the children’s unit was rescinded. Joy broke out in the halls of the courthouse, and afterward, Chad and I took Sheila out to celebrate.

  It was a magical evening, one of those times when the experience is greater than the sum of its parts. Still high from our success, we went for pizza in a place Chad and I haunted frequently, full of smoke and jazz music and people speaking Italian. Sheila had never had pizza and took to the new experience with animated delight. Indeed, she took to Chad, and he, likewise, to her. He was soon as much under her spell as I was.

  They got into a silly contest, the two of them. What would you like best? To eat a worm sundae or brush your teeth with a spider toothbrush? That sort of thing. Until Chad went serious and asked what was the thing she would like best in all the world—for real. A dress, as it turned out. Something pretty to wear. Unable to resist this opportunity to play Santa Claus, Chad soon had us out to the shopping center. Despite all Sheila’s fears that her father wouldn’t let her accept a dress, Chad reassured her and helped her find the one she liked best.

  Sheila fell asleep on the way back to her house in the migrant camp.

  “Well, Cinderella,” Chad said, coming around to my side of the car and opening the door. He reached down and lifted her up. “The ball’s over.”

  She smiled sleepily at him.

  “Come on. I’ll carry you in and tell your daddy what we’ve been up to.”

  She buried her face in my hair. “I don’t wanna go,” she whispered.

  “It’s been a nice night, hasn’t it?” I said.

  She nodded and she pressed tighter against me. “Can I kiss you?”

  “Yes, I think so,” I said and enveloped her in a tight hug and kissed her first.

  Chapter 4

  My class would cease to exist at the end of that school year. The mainstreaming law with its edict that every handicapped child should be placed in the least restrictive alternative was the primary cause. Most of the special education classes were being closed and teachers like myself were being redeployed as “resource people” to provide support to the regular classroom teachers, who would now have special education children among their students.

  I wasn’t terri
bly comfortable with this change. While I would have liked to accept the law on the ideological grounds it was being put forth on—that it would promote greater equality and opportunity for handicapped children—I was too much of a natural cynic. The far more obvious factor to me was that it was a cheaper way to educate handicapped children.

  On a personal level, my style of teaching was best suited to the closed environment of a self-contained classroom. It was in this setting I was at my best. I could create the tight-knit, supportive milieu that became my trademark and it was under these circumstances I could encourage the most positive growth among my students. Consequently, I was loath to become a floating resource person with my children reduced to a catalog of educational problems I was given twenty minutes a week to sort out. Most difficult, however, was being boxed in theoretically. I was an eclectic, picking and choosing my methods of operation from a wide variety of sources, some of them entirely outside education. This seemed the only sensible approach when dealing with such varied difficulties as one comes across in human behavior. However, with the new law we were going to be restricted, generally to some form of behavior modification. I was competent enough with this approach but felt it vastly overrated as a method and rather dangerous as a theory. Thus, not feeling that I was ready to commit myself to all of this, I applied and was accepted at an out-of-state university to do further graduate work.

  It was May and school would end the first week in June. In the four and a half months Sheila had been with us, she had metamorphosed into a lively, sunny-natured girl. We had had no serious breaches of behavior since that week in February when I had gone to the conference, and while she was still capable of a hearty tantrum when provoked, normal methods of discipline brought her back into line. She could now express anger without destructiveness; she could be reasoned with; and she could even accept a small amount of gentle criticism without falling to pieces. In short, I didn’t feel Sheila would need a special class any longer. She was still fragile and the placement would need to be well thought out, but I was convinced she had the capacity to get on in a normal classroom.

  I had a good friend, Sandy McGuire, a third-grade teacher in another school who I felt would be an ideal next teacher for Sheila. She was young, innovative and had a reputation for sensitivity toward her students, many of whom came from minority backgrounds or extreme poverty. And while we had quite different styles of teaching, we shared similar philosophies. I felt confident that if Sheila went with her, she would receive the support and encouragement she would need to make the transition back into the mainstream.

  In the beginning, Ed, the director of special education, was not in favor of this, as it would mean not only releasing Sheila back into regular education, but also advancing her a grade, a practice he frowned upon; however, after much discussion we mutually concluded this was the best choice. Academically, Sheila was at least two grades above her chronological peers and she had no current peer friendships to disrupt anyway. Moreover, I feared that if Sheila did not receive a certain amount of academic challenge, she would get herself into trouble just to stay occupied. The most important factor, however, remained the teacher. Sheila had to have a flexible, supportive teacher to cope with the transition from me and my room to a new setting and I held tight to my belief that Sandy best fulfilled this capacity. In the end, Ed and the placement team agreed.

  Sheila didn’t.

  I approached the whole issue cautiously, although not tentatively, as Sheila would home in on anything done with uncertainty. Moreover, there was nothing to be tentative about. June was coming and that was the end.

  Tears, anger and great silences met my early efforts to broach the subject. We spent the better half of a week dancing nervously around the matter, once it had been raised.

  “This here be my class,” Sheila muttered to me after school. Her peculiar usage of the word “be” had almost disappeared over the months since she had been in our room, but now it came back. “I ain’t going in no other class. This here be mine.”

  “Yes, it is, but the school year will be over in a few weeks’ time. We need to think about next year.”

  “I’m gonna be in here next year.”

  My heart sank. “No, sweetie.”

  “I am too!” she shouted. “I’ll be the baddest kid in the whole world. Then they won’t let you make me go away!”

  “Oh, Sheil. Oh, sweetheart, that’s not what’s happening. I’m not kicking you out. I’d love to have you with me.”

  She remained angry, her face flushed, her eyes hurt. She pressed her hands over her ears.

  “This class isn’t going to be here next year,” I said softly.

  She heard me, even through her hands. The color drained from her face. “What d’you mean? Where’s it going?”

  “It’s a grown-up decision. The school district decided they don’t need it and everyone can go into other classes.”

  Tears filled her eyes. Taking out the chair across the table from me, she slumped into it, folded her arms on the table and lay her head on it. The tears just fell. Her pain was palpable. I’m sure I could have touched it, had I reached out, and when I didn’t, it pressed in against me.

  All I could think of at just that moment was how much we expected from her in terms of tolerance, acceptance and understanding, and here she was, only six. Six, for God’s sake, not even seven until July.

  What had I gotten her into? There I was with all my ideologies on commitment and how it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. But did she think that? Had I ever given her a choice?

  On the other hand, what choice was there? To have done what I did, or to have left her as she was and simply counted off the days until they would come for her? There hadn’t been many alternatives. Watching her as she wept, I did not know if even with so few alternatives I had chosen the right one.

  Sheila rose from the table and went to bury herself among the pillows in the reading corner. I remained at the table, listening to her as she cried. At last, I rose and went over.

  “How come you ain’t staying to make me good?” she asked me, her voice confused.

  “Because it isn’t me who makes you good. It’s you. I’m here to let you know that someone cares if you’re good or not. And in that way, I’ll never leave you, because I’ll always care.”

  “You’re just like my mama,” she said.

  “No, I’m not, Sheil.”

  “You’re gonna leave me, just like her.”

  “No, Sheila, this is different.”

  “She never loved me really,” she said softly, matter-of-factly. “She loved my brother better than me. She left me on the highway like some dog, like I didn’t even belong to her.”

  “I’m not her. I don’t know what her reasons were for what she did, but this is different, Sheila. I’m a teacher. My ending comes in June. But I’ll still love you. I won’t be your teacher any longer, but I’ll still be your friend.”

  “I don’t wanna be friends. I wanna be in this class.”

  I reached over to her. “I know you do, sweetheart. I do too. I wish it could go on forever.”

  She pulled away. “You’re bad as my mama.”

  “This is different.”

  “It don’t feel any different to me.”

  They were an emotional few weeks, those last ones. Sheila was in tears as often as not. Not angry tears, though, just tears, popping up at the most unexpected moments: while we were baking cookies on Wednesday afternoon, while giving water to our cantankerous rabbit, while reading on her own in the book corner. I felt they were a natural part of the separation process, so I accepted them, giving her what comfort she sought and otherwise letting her come to terms at her own pace. And tears were by no means her only expression. There were plenty of boisterous, happy moments too.

  I took her over to visit Sandy and her classroom and then we arranged for Sheila to go spend a trial day there. As I suspected would happen, Sheila was seduced by Sa
ndy’s warm, cheerful personality and by the more stimulating environment of the third-grade classroom. These children were actively learning, busy with intriguing projects and undertakings, many of them self-generated. All in all, quite a different atmosphere from our classroom, where going to the toilet was considered an achievement. Sheila came back vibrant from her visit, her conversation full of “Next year, when I’m in Miss McGuire’s class …” I knew then I had been outgrown.

  Then the last day.

  We had a picnic in the park to celebrate our year together. All the parents were invited and we brought packed lunches and ice cream and all the trappings for a good day out. Ours was an extraordinarily beautiful municipal park with a long, winding lane lined with locust trees, a babbling brook that tumbled down through natural rock cascades to empty into a large duck pond ringed with weeping willows. In all directions there were large expanses of grass stretching out beneath ancient sycamores and oaks.

  Sheila loved the park. She had never been there before coming to our room, as it was a long way from the migrant camp; but it was only a few blocks from the school, so I had taken my class over on several occasions. Her father did not come that day, but it was obvious he was making more of an effort with Sheila. She came dressed in a bright-orange cotton sunsuit and excitedly told us how her father had taken her down to the discount store the night before and bought it, especially for her to wear to the picnic. She was so ebullient that day, skipping, dancing, pirouetting in the sunshine, that I still call to mind that bobbing form of sunlit orange every time I smell locust blossoms or see duck ponds.

  And then, finally, the end—the last good-bye at the door of the classroom to Anton, the last walk together over to the high school to meet her bus. I had given her the now dog-eared copy of The Little Prince to take with her, a tangible reminder of these last five months, and she clutched it to her as we walked.

  Running up the bus steps, she went straight to the back and clambered up on the bench seat to wave to me from the back window. The bus rumbled to life and diesel fumes overpowered the scent of locust blossoms. “Bye,” she was saying, although I couldn’t hear her because of the glass and the noise of the engine. The bus began to pull away and she waved frantically.