Beautiful Child Read online

  “Get rid of that ugly black kid,” Billy said.

  “Get rid of you, girlie.”

  “Get rid of everybody,” Shane added. “Blow up the whole world.”

  “Yeah, kapow!” Zane shouted gleefully and threw his hands up in the air.

  “Keep your bottom glued to that seat, Zane,” I said.

  “Glue! Glue! Got to get the glue!” Billy cried and jumped up.

  “Billy!”

  About ten minutes into my not-very-successful efforts to have a class discussion, the door swung open and Wanda loomed in with Venus trailing behind.

  “Got to take her shoes off!” Billy shrieked. “Got to take your shoes off, psycho! Can’t have shoes in here. Teacher says.”

  Wanda looked bewildered. Venus looked blank.

  I went to the doorway. “Come on in, sweetheart. And thank you, Wanda, for bringing her up.”

  “Her don’t want to come to school,” Wanda replied.

  “No, me either!” Billy hollered. “It’s a jail in here. Just like being sent to jail.”

  “Oh, shut up, would you, butthead?” Jesse muttered.

  My feelings exactly.

  Billy was undeterred. “Take off her shoes, Teacher. You got to take off her shoes. That girl’s a psychopath.”

  “Billy, wherever did you learn a word like ‘psychopath’?” I asked as I closed the door after Wanda.

  He shrugged. “Just know it, that’s all. Just a brain, that’s me. But if I ever seen a real psychopath, that girl’s one. So make her take off her shoes.”

  The morning proved absolutely ghastly. There seemed to be no way to keep the boys from fighting. The minute I relaxed my guard, they were at it again. I’d wanted to have everyone help come up with some ideas on how to handle all this aggressive behavior, but the entire time before recess was spent “sitting on chairs.” I normally had a special “quiet chair” for disciplinary purposes, but in this room I very shortly had four. By 10 A.M. I had been forced to move the furniture so that there was one table in each corner of the room and two in the middle. The only way to maintain any kind of peace was by keeping everyone as physically separate as possible.

  Venus repeated her previous day’s performance. She sat, completely oblivious of the boys.

  When the recess bell rang, the four boys leaped up and dashed for the door before realizing that none of them had shoes on.

  “Hold it!” Billy cried. “What we gonna do?”

  I lifted down the box with the shoes in it and started taking them out. I handed Shane his sneakers.

  “Can’t tie,” he said.

  I looked at Billy. “Please tie Shane’s shoes for him.”

  “Huh?”

  “He’s not touching my shoes!” Shane cried.

  “And Jesse, you tie Zane’s for him.”

  “No way!”

  “Well, I guess nobody’s getting recess then,” I said and put the box back up on the cupboard.

  Loud shrieks of protest.

  “You can’t go out, if you haven’t got your shoes on.”

  “Not fair,” Billy cried. “I didn’t do nothing.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “Or me!”

  “Well, you four figure it out among you then. No one’s going until Zane and Shane have their shoes tied.”

  “You tie them. You’re the teacher,” Jesse said.

  “No, I’m going to help Venus put her shoes on. When you’ve come up with a solution, let me know.” I grabbed Venus’s shoes from the box.

  “Go outside without shoes,” Shane suggested.

  “Nope, sorry, that’s not an option.”

  “Oh fuck,” Billy said in a most world-weary way. “Give me the god-damned shoes then.”

  I put a finger to my lips.

  “I don’t care. Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  I didn’t say anything but I pointed to the clock to indicate the passing minutes of recess.

  “Okay. Give me the god-darned shoes then,” Billy said. “Come here, poop face. Let me tie your stupid shoes.”

  I lifted Shane’s shoes out and gave them to Billy. Then I took out Zane’s. “Jesse?”

  With a heavy sigh, Jesse accepted the shoes.

  Defeated, the boys finally left for six minutes of recess.

  But all was not over. As we hurried down the stairs for what remained of recess, Shane accidentally bumped against Venus. Big mistake.

  She metamorphosed right then and there. Grabbing him by the shirt, she flung him down the remaining stairs, then, fists flying, she launched herself after him with the vicious grace of a leopard. Fortunately, it was only a few steps, so he was not hurt, and a passing sixth-grade teacher was able to help me subdue Venus and get her into the school office, where she spent the rest of the break sitting stonily in a chair.

  When class resumed after recess, I made everyone take off their shoes again, collected them in what became known as the “shoe box,” and put them back on top of the cupboard. I knew better than to try a group activity at this stage, so I endeavored to introduce the children to their work folders. Because I had always taught children who were at different levels academically, I was accustomed to putting each child’s work for the day in a file folder. At the start of class I handed out the folders and the child did the work in it. While they were working, I circulated among them and gave help as needed. The system worked well once everyone figured out what was expected, but often during the first few weeks of a new school year there were teething troubles, usually because some children were not used to working independently.

  I explained the system and let the children look through their folders, but I didn’t want to push the itty-bitty bit of order we’d managed to create in the ten minutes following recess. Consequently, I suggested that for today they might want to decorate the front of the folder with their name and things they liked so that I’d know whose folder was whose.

  The boys all tucked into this activity with relish, and because I had them so far apart, they managed to start it peacefully enough, if a little noisily. Venus, however, just sat. I came over to her table and knelt down beside the chair. “Did you understand what you were supposed to do?”

  Blank look. She wasn’t even looking at me this time. Just staring into space, the same way she did when sitting outside on the wall.

  “Venus?”

  No response.

  What was up with this kid? If she could hear, then why did she not respond? Not even to her name? Was she brain damaged? Did she hear but not process what was said to her? Or did she hear, process, and then not be able to turn it into action? Or, as I was beginning to suspect, was she so developmentally delayed that she wasn’t really capable of much response?

  “You and I are going to work on something else,” I said. I pulled out the chair next to hers. I picked up a red crayon. I put the crayon in her hand. Venus didn’t even pretend to take it. The crayon dropped through her fingers to the tabletop.

  “Come on, now, Venus.” I picked up the crayon again. “Here, put this in your hand.” I uncurled her fingers and placed the crayon into it. Holding my hand over hers, I drew a straight line down the paper in front of her.

  “Can you do that?” I asked.

  Venus let the crayon drop through her fingers to the tabletop.

  Taking the crayon myself, I made another line. “Now, you try.”

  Venus just sat.

  I leaned very close to Venus’s face. “Wake up in there.” I said it quite loudly.

  “Woo! What you doing back there?” Billy cried, whirling around in his seat.

  “I’m talking to Venus.”

  “Well, I don’t think you got to shout. She’s right in front of you.”

  “I’m trying to get Venus to take notice.”

  “I can do that!” Billy said cheerfully, and before I could respond, he’d bolted out of his chair and trotted over.

  “Ah-ah-ah!” he screamed in Venus’s face and bounced up and down like a chimpanzee.


  “Billy, get back in your seat this minute!”

  “Look at me, psycho girl! Look at me! Ah-ah-ah-ah!” He was shouting at the top of his lungs and pulling stupid faces.

  Venus responded to that all right. She went shooting right over the table after Billy, who hooted with fear and tore off. Stimulated by the excitement, the other boys leaped up. Shane and Zane ran, shrieking loudly, their movements wild and uncoordinated. Jesse, seeing a chance to get even, tripped Billy up as he ran by. In a split second, Jesse was on top of him pummeling him. A few seconds later, Venus was on top of both of them, ripping at Jesse’s shirt, biting his hair.

  Wearily, I pried everyone apart and forced them into chairs.

  Chapter

  5

  The rest of that week passed in relentless chaos, and I spent most of it in damage control rather than teaching.

  Every time the children came into the classroom, they had to remove their shoes. Of course this made getting ready for recess, lunch, and going home a pain, as only Billy and Jesse could tie their own shoes. However, it gave me the first small way to force bonding upon them because I made Billy and Jesse responsible for tying the twins’ shoes and nobody could leave until it was done. Fortunately Venus usually wore slip-on shoes. I wouldn’t have trusted her to let anyone help her.

  For the first time in my career I was maintaining not one “quiet chair” but five—one for each student—because they all had a knack for getting into one big fistfight together. Not a single day went by that week without my needing to use all five simultaneously at some stage. Indeed, most of the first three days were spent “sitting on chairs,” as Billy termed it.

  Bemused by having four feisty boys with cowboy names, I decided I’d capitalize on that in my efforts to bond us together as a group. I decided we’d become a cowboy “gang.” We’d think up a name and a code of behavior and some fun things to do together to denote our “belonging-ness” and that would be the beginning of group harmony.

  Unfortunately, no one told the kids that was the point of it.

  I realized my mistake immediately. While cowboy gangs meant belonging and being loyal to an agreed code of ethics and sticking up for one another, they also meant guns and shooting and lots of macho behavior. In a word, outlaws. Not something I needed to encourage! It was Jesse who first noticed this. We’d be an outlaw gang, he said brightly when I was talking about us being a “gang.” I said, no, that wasn’t the idea. We weren’t going to be outlaws. Billy, ever being Billy, then chirped up, “Oh? Does that mean we’re going to be in-laws?”

  I quickly quashed the opportunity to live out violent fantasies. The boys were thus left to come up with something different for our “gang.” In the end, they chose to become “The Chipmunk Gang,” which seemed ironically meek to me, but they were happy to make up rules about how to be a good Chipmunk. Billy really got into this. He wanted a pledge and a secret handshake to denote membership. Jesse then suggested that it ought to be a secret society and we could have other special signals too, to let one another know we were Chipmunks. By the end of the week, the Freemasons had nothing over on us.

  Throughout all of this, Venus remained a world apart. She did nothing. Almost catatonic in her lack of response, she had to be physically moved from place to place, activity to activity. However, an accidental bump would result in her coming alive with such unexpected fury that it was almost as if someone had pushed an “on” button. Once in “on” mode, Venus screamed like a wounded banshee and indiscriminately took after anyone within range. There seemed to be no coherence to her rage. It was unfocused, all-embracing, and dangerous.

  I tried to include her. Whenever we brought our chairs into a circle to talk about something, I always made sure Venus was there, although this involved moving her chair for her and then moving Venus. In the afternoons, when Julie was there to look after the boys, I endeavored to spend some time alone with her. To do what? I was never sure. Just get a reaction, I think. One day I tried coloring. She would do none of it herself. Another day I tried dancing. I put music on and pulled her through the motions. “Pull” was the operative word. On yet another day I piled building blocks up in front of her and stacked them one by one on top of one another to make what I felt was a very appealing tower. It just asked to be knocked over. Could she knock it over? I challenged. Nope. No response. I lifted her hand for her and knocked over the tower. It fell. Venus didn’t even blink. I built the tower partway up and put a block in her hand. Could she add it to the stack? Nope. Her hand just lay there, the block loose in her fingers. I finished building the tower. Then again. And again. Each time I lifted Venus’s hand and knocked the blocks down again. She didn’t even so much as give an impatient sigh of boredom.

  Perplexed and frustrated by Venus’s behavior, I took my troubles with me into the teachers’ lounge. I didn’t really expect anyone to give me answers when I moaned about what was going on in my classroom. Indeed, I wasn’t even upset, just frustrated. Being a rather noisy person by nature, this was my way of coping with the pressure. It was also a way of thinking for me. I’d go down to the lounge, complain about what was happening, and in the process of hearing myself articulate the problem, I’d often come up with alternatives.

  Julie, however, appeared unsettled. “You’re feeling really angry about Venus, aren’t you?” she said to me one afternoon after school when we were alone.

  Surprised, I lifted my eyebrows. “No. I’m not angry. Why?”

  “Well, you just seem angry. In the things you say. You’re always complaining.”

  “It’s not complaining. Just letting off steam, that’s all.” I smiled reassuringly at her. “That’s different from anger. I don’t feel anger at all.”

  Julie looked unconvinced.

  I was having to face the fact that I’d rather misguessed Julie. Her small size, her sweet face, her long hair with its thick bangs and girlish, beribboned styles gave the sense of someone young and, well … naive and impressionable. I’d rather arrogantly assumed I’d have a protégée, someone I could introduce to my special milieu and help her grow into a competent educator, much the way Bob had done with me. Only a week on, however, and the cracks in this fantasy were already beginning to show.

  For instance, on Wednesday, Shane picked up the fishbowl from the window ledge to bring it to the table. This was something he had attempted to do on two or three other occasions, and each time I’d intercepted him and explained very specifically that it was forbidden to carry the fishbowl around because it was heavy and awkward, which might lead to a nasty accident. Moreover, the fish didn’t like it very much. This time, however, he managed to pick it up without my noticing, and disaster struck. The water sloshed, surprising him, and he dropped it. Water, broken glass, and goldfish went everywhere. Shane immediately started to bawl.

  Julie was closest to him. She smiled, knelt down, and put her arms around him. “Poor you, did that frighten you?” she said in the most soothing of voices. “Don’t cry. It was just an accident.” She took a tissue and dabbed his cheeks. “That’s okay. You didn’t mean to drop it, did you? Accidents just happen.”

  Listening to her, I felt ashamed. My immediate reaction had been serious annoyance and I would have said to him, probably not too pleasantly, that here was the natural consequence of picking up the fishbowl and, thus, why we didn’t do it. I wouldn’t have comforted him at all. I would have made him help me mop up the water and catch the poor fish. Julie’s response was so much more humane.

  Thus it was with Julie. I found her almost pathologically compassionate. Nothing the boys did seemed to upset her. If someone was perfectly horrid, she’d say, “That isn’t thoughtful,” in a quiet, even voice. Or “I’m sure you didn’t mean to do that. It was an accident, wasn’t it?” when the little devil was looking her straight in the face. So too with Venus. No, Venus didn’t respond any more to Julie than to me, but that was okay. “I’m sure she just needs time to adjust,” Julie would say. “It’s a
loud, active environment. I think if we allow her to move at her own pace, she’ll become more comfortable and trust us enough to feel like joining in. Let’s not force anything. Let’s just wait and see.”

  Instinctively, I did not agree with Julie’s approach to Venus, but there still seemed to be logic in it. I could see that. The problem was that it just wasn’t my way of tackling things. I was not a wait-and-see kind of person. I was a do-it-now, a something’s-got-to-work kind of person whose success rested largely on a terrierlike refusal to stop harrying problems until I got what I wanted. Just leaving Venus to sit like a lump on a log was anathema to my whole personality. But I didn’t say this. In the face of Julie’s serene patience, I felt ashamed of my restless need to intervene.

  After so much failure with Venus, I decided I would go right back to basics; so, I arrived Monday morning with a bag of M&Ms.

  “Remember these?” I said to Bob as I came through the front office to collect my mail. I rattled the bag of candy.

  Bob smiled sardonically.

  Back in our very early days together, Bob had caused something of a scandal in the school district by using M&Ms to reward his students. This was the early 1970s when behaviorism was considered a radical approach and classrooms were still quite formal. In our quiet, semirural backwater no one had yet thought of equating something like candy with learning. Bob changed all that. Like many of us of that generation, he was out to build a better world. In his case, he wanted to show that his ragtag group of unruly, deprived youngsters could rise above their various labels and depressing environments, learn and progress. He started very concretely with the children, giving them M&Ms when they cooperated and worked. Sure enough, he soon had impressive results. He also soon had the whole school board down on him too, irate that he should be bribing children to learn. From then on, the term “using M&Ms” became a code among staff at our school for any kind of subversive behavior.

  Initially I’d been very impressed with Bob’s M&M system because it did work so effectively. It appealed to the kids on such a basic level that virtually all of them responded positively to some degree, and as most of them had already been labeled “unteachable” or “hopeless,” I felt the end justified the means. Moreover, I liked the obvious practicality of it all. Consequently, even though I didn’t know much about the theory behind behaviorism, I participated happily during the time I worked with Bob.