Beautiful Child Read online

  This elicited excitement. Though somewhat uncontrolled and chaotic, this group was also enthusiastic, which made them fun to work with when they weren’t killing one another.

  “Okay, I want you sitting, but get comfortable. Shane, keep your hands to yourself, please. Venus, sit down.” I had to rise up again and direct Venus into place. “Zane? Sit. No, sit.

  “Everybody ready? Now, we’re going to take a journey. Right here. Right now. And since we’re Chipmunks, I think we should visit the woods. Ready?”

  All the boys nodded.

  “Close your eyes then. Not tight. Just gently, so you’re comfortable. Keep them closed. Get yourself comfy.” I closed my eyes too at the beginning and leaned forward, forearms on my knees. “Now, we’re off. We’re walking toward the woods. Can you see? Look ahead.” I opened my eyes and checked on everyone. “No, Zane, keep your eyes shut. Look ahead inside your mind. There’s the woods. See the trees? Everybody look in their minds. See if you can see the woods ahead. Can you?”

  “Yeah!” Billy said enthusiastically.

  “See if you can tell what kind of trees they are. What kind of trees are in your woods? Does anybody know?”

  “Yeah,” said Billy immediately. “Pine trees!”

  “You’re seeing pine trees. Does everyone see pine trees? Or does someone see something different in their woods?”

  “I see the kind that’s got big flat leaves,” Shane said.

  “Okay. Good. Pine trees and the kind of trees that have flat leaves. The kind that lose their leaves. We call them ‘deciduous trees.’ So, look at your trees carefully. What kinds of trees are in your woods?”

  “I see trees with leaves and pine trees,” Jesse said. “My forest has got them both.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Billy said, not wanting his imaginary woods to be without something someone else saw.

  “Are they tall trees?” I asked. “Have they got thick trunks? Look around? Do you see any young trees there too?”

  “Mine are big!” Billy cried.

  “Can you put your arm around one of them, Billy? Everybody. Go up to one of your trees and try to reach around it. Feel the bark. Feel it with your fingers. But put your face against the tree too. You’re trying to stretch your arms all the way around. Feel what it feels like.”

  I opened my eyes again slightly to see the boys, all of them with their hands stretched out in the air, reaching to feel imaginary trees. I peeked over at Venus. She too had her eyes shut tight. She didn’t have her hands up in the air like the boys did, but her fingers were splayed out on her knees and twitching slightly, as if possibly she was feeling for an imaginary tree of her own.

  “Mine’s got knobbly bark!” Billy cried with unexpected loudness.

  “Quietly, Billy,” I said. “You’ll scare away the animals.”

  “Knobbly bark,” he whispered.

  “Yeah, mine too. I can feel it on my cheek,” Jesse said.

  “What about you, Zane? What does your tree feel like?”

  “It’s a pine tree. It’s rough.”

  “Can you smell it?”

  He nodded and smiled slightly, his eyes still closed. “Yeah.”

  “I can smell mine!” cried Billy, still a little loud.

  “Shut up, Billy, you’ll scare the animals away,” Jesse said.

  “Oh look,” I said. “Something’s moving through the trees over there. What is it? Look carefully. Over there in the distance. Going through the trees. Do you see it too?”

  “A deer!” Billy positively shouted.

  “You stupid pisser!” Jesse cried. “You keep hollering. You scared the deer away!” And before I knew what was coming, Jesse punched Billy in the mouth.

  This, of course, rather rudely pulled us all out of our imaginary visit to the woods. Not expecting to be hit, Billy burst into tears. Jesse got up and stomped off, twitching and yelping. Zane and Shane were on their feet, shouting, “That’s not fair! They wrecked our time. We weren’t done! They wrecked it! They ought to go in the quiet chair!”

  I felt sorry for Billy, innocent victim of his own enthusiasm, because I knew he hadn’t meant to wreck things. He had simply been enjoying himself and, as ever, had lost control. I gave him a cuddle and rubbed his chin. And while I could hardly condone what Jesse had done, I didn’t want to punish him. He too had simply been caught up in the imaginary journey. So I walked over and put an arm around him afterward, saying I was sorry Billy had disturbed things for him and I understood how it made him feel angry but reminding him for the millionth time that I couldn’t allow hitting and please would he try to remember that?

  Shane and Zane stood forlornly. “Can we do it again? It wasn’t fair. They wrecked it. Please, can we do it again?” Zane asked.

  “Yes, we will. But not just now,” I said. “We’ll do it tomorrow at the same time.”

  “Noooo,” Shane moaned. “I want to do it now. It’s not fair.”

  “I know. You feel disappointed. Tomorrow we’ll do it again.”

  “Pleeeeeeeese?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “This afternoon. Okay?” Zane begged. “Pleeeeeeeese?”

  “We can’t this afternoon. Julie comes then and we’re getting a new girl, so we need to do other things. Tomorrow after morning recess.”

  The twins stomped off, disgruntled, to their tables.

  I turned to look for Venus. And there she was, still sitting cross-legged on the floor, her eyes still tight shut. I regarded her. Why was she like that? Again, my first instinct was to believe she couldn’t hear us and thus had not realized we’d stopped the activity. But then, if she couldn’t hear, she wouldn’t have known we’d started the activity. Or what we were doing during the activity. So why was she still sitting with her eyes closed? Did some part of her brain not register that we’d stopped? Or not want to register we’d stopped? Or was it just plain resistance?

  Coming over, I squatted down directly in front of her. “Venus?”

  No response.

  I was a little reluctant to touch her, in case she wasn’t expecting it. “Open your eyes, Venus. We’re done with the imaginary journey. We’re doing something else now.”

  Slowly, she opened her eyes.

  I smiled. “You stayed a little longer in the woods than the rest of us, huh?”

  She looked at me.

  I looked back at her.

  Her expression was so enigmatic that she could have been an alien child sitting there.

  That day the part-time students were due to start coming. Up until that point we hadn’t been much of a cohesive group, as chaos had always been too close at hand. However, the arrival of “them other kids,” as the boys chose to call them, brought out the team spirit.

  “They ain’t gonna be Chipmunks, are they?” Shane asked during morning discussion as I prepared them for the arrival of our first new student.

  “No!” Billy cried. “No, Teacher, they can’t be Chipmunks. Okay? Please? ’Cause just us guys get to be Chipmunks.”

  “What do you think about that, Jess?”

  “Yeah, just us guys who live here.”

  “All right then,” I replied.

  “I think we ought to have a special signal,” Billy said. “You know, something that makes us know we’re Chipmunks.” It was said as if this were some elite society we were speaking of. “Something to help us keep our spirits up when we got all these other geezers in here to put up with.”

  “Let’s go ‘Chip, chip, chip, chip, chip,’” Zane suggested.

  “Don’t you think that might get a little noisy?” I asked.

  Of course, this meant all the boys had to do it.

  “And not too discreet.”

  “What’s discreet mean?” Billy asked.

  “Discreet means when you keep something kind of private and don’t make a big show of it,” I said. “Something like a hand signal might work better.”

  The conversation pursued this vein for several minutes with the boys trying ou
t various movements and gestures that they thought could serve as this special signal. I watched Venus as they talked. She was sitting at her table, as were the boys sitting each at their individual tables, as we’d not yet progressed to the point of being able to sit peaceably next to one another. Given my big, booming voice I had no trouble being heard when the kids were scattered all over the room, and the boys’ personalities were all so loud and expansive that the distance among them still helped more than it hindered. They could jump up, swing their arms around, and be their usual, lively selves without crashing into anyone else. In this respect, the distance was useful for Venus too, as she did not explode unpredictably simply because someone had inadvertently invaded her space. However, it also made it easier for her to isolate herself. I could tell she was completely tuned out of this conversation. Leaning slightly forward, arms crossed on the tabletop, eyes blank and unfocused, she was as motionless as the furniture itself. And, indeed, that’s how the boys responded to her. Venus, for all intents and purposes, was not there.

  “Well, what I think,” Zane said, “is that we should wiggle our feet. Like this. ’Cause we’re the ones who don’t got no shoes on. If you don’t got shoes on, you’re a Chipmunk, huh? And so you can wiggle your toes.

  “Hey, way cool!” Billy cried, whipping off a grubby sock and sticking his bare foot up on the table with a thud. He wiggled his toes.

  “Bill, remove it,” I said sharply.

  Billy didn’t take his foot down but instead burst into a spontaneous rendition of a children’s ditty, “Stuck my head in a little skunk’s hole! Little skunk said, ‘Well, bless my soul! Take it out! Take it out! Take it out!’” Zane and Shane chimed in with him, “REMOVE IT!”

  One of the children coming to me for extra support was a little girl named Gwen, although everyone called her Gwennie. Gwennie was eight, a very attractive little girl with shiny, straight, bobbed blonde hair and unexpectedly dark eyes. She had originally been diagnosed as having HFA, which stood for high-functioning autism. Like many autistic-type children, Gwennie was a bright child, doing well academically. Her reading skills were excellent and her math skills were good. However, social skills were another matter altogether, because Gwennie took everything literally and at face value. She could not interpret the nuances of speech, of other people’s facial expressions or their behavior, nor could she understand how to adjust her own behavior to that of those around her. As a consequence, she was unpopular with the children in her class because she often said blunt, hurtful things or barged in on games or activities.

  The social inadequacy was further hampered by her interests. Intensely pursued special interests are common in perfectly normal children of this age group and seem to be part of a healthy developmental process. Hence, the typical “collecting” stage, where acquiring trading cards or toys becomes a fascination for most school-age children, and for some, at least momentarily, a real fixation. As is typical for children with autistic tendencies, Gwennie raised these childish obsessions to a whole different level. For example, she collected pencils. While pencils themselves weren’t an unusual object of desire and a lot of the kids collected them, particularly the pretty, shiny ones or those with vivid designs or strangely shaped erasers, Gwennie was fascinated by plain old standard-issue yellow ones. She routinely carried about twenty of them around with her at any given time, and despite the fact that they all looked just alike to the rest of us, Gwennie knew each of these pencils individually. She liked to feel and examine them regularly and to lay them out on the tabletop and then line them up in ascending order from the longest to the shortest. Every time she went into a new classroom, she insisted on knowing if there were any other yellow pencils in there and couldn’t settle down until she found out if there were and if so, how many and how well used. Each time she saw one, her little eyes just lit up.

  This all paled, however, compared to Gwennie’s big obsession: foreign countries. Gwennie had acquired an encyclopedic knowledge on this subject and loved nothing better than telling you about the geography of Indonesia or the population statistics of Belgium. The problem was, this was all she really wanted to talk about. When I first found out she was due to spend time in our room, I was curious because her academic skills were so good. After half an hour of listening to her, however, I quickly came to suspect it was not so much a matter of giving Gwennie the benefits of my room as it was giving Gwennie’s teacher the benefits of a break from her. We all soon discovered just how tiring she could be.

  She came through the door Tuesday just after lunch.

  “Hello, Gwennie,” I said. “Here, I’ll show you where you’re going to sit.”

  “The total land area of Sweden is four-hundred-forty-nine-thousand, nine-hundred-sixty-four square kilometers. Its capital city is Stockholm and Stockholm is also the largest city. Sweden is bordered by Norway on the north and Finland on the east. It is one of the five Scandinavian countries. The others are Finland, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. The people are chiefly of Germanic ethnicity with a few ethnic Finns. The other major cities are Gothenburg, Uppsala, Sundsvall, Östersund.

  “Okay, Gwennie, thank you. Would you sit here, please?”

  “Have you been to Sweden?”

  “No. Here’s your folder.”

  “Have you been to France? France has five-hundred-forty-three-thousand, nine-hundred-sixty-five square kilometers and the capital city is Paris. About thirty-four percent of French land is cultivated.”

  “Hoooo,” Billy said softly under his breath, “this one’s cuckoo.”

  Jesse raised one socked foot and wiggled his toes.

  As Gwennie was going to come three afternoons a week, I decided that here would be an ideal partner for Venus. She and Gwennie could work on social skills together, which even I realized was pretty much of a long shot, as both girls were virtually at nil in this department. But I felt that having two was better than my working individually with them, as they could model for each other in a way I never could.

  The first day I sat the two girls down together, which, of course, meant maneuvering Venus into position like a doll, and corralling Gwennie, who was trying to tell Jessie about South Korea. I chose just about as basic an activity as I could. I had cut out pictures from magazines and pasted them onto index cards. Each showed a person with a very definite facial expression—smiling, laughing, crying, frowning—and I’d collected about four examples of each.

  “Can you tell me how this girl feels?” I asked Gwennie and showed her a picture of a girl beaming at a little puppy.

  Gwennie looked at the picture.

  “How does she feel? Look at her face. See what her lips are doing? What does that tell you?”

  “Do you know the capital of Belize?”

  “Gwennie, we aren’t talking about countries just now. Look at the picture, please. What is this expression? It’s a smile, isn’t it? What does a smile tell us about this little girl? What does it tell us she is feeling?”

  “Most people in Belize are Roman Catholics. Are you a Roman Catholic?”

  “Gwennie, we aren’t talking about that just now. Look at the picture, please. What does this girl’s smile tell us about the way she is feeling?”

  Gwennie leaned forward and studied the picture intently.

  “What does this picture tell you?”

  Gwennie looked up, her eyes wide. “Maybe this girl’s Finnish?”

  Of course, doing this activity with Venus was even more fun. I showed her the same picture I had showed to Gwennie. “Look. See this girl?”

  Venus stared blankly at my face.

  “Down here, Venus.” I reached over and gently tipped her head down enough to see the card with the picture on it. “Look. She has a puppy in her arms. And look at her face. See. See how her lips go up. She’s smiling. She sees that puppy and she obviously likes holding him, because look how much she is smiling at him. Can you make a smile for me?”

  Venus stared blankly at me.

  �
�Here. Like this.” I made an obvious smile with my own lips. “Can you do that?”

  “I can do that,” Gwennie interjected.

  “Good girl. Look at Gwennie. She can smile. How are you feeling when you smile?”

  “Ill,” Gwennie replied.

  “You’re feeling ill?” I asked with surprise.

  “How are you feeling? Ill,” Gwennie said and smiled expectantly, and I realized she was simply parroting back a response she had heard somewhere before. This was conversation as far as she was concerned. Each question had a specific, invariable answer.

  “Can you make a smile like that, Venus?”

  No response.

  “Here. Like this,” Gwennie said and made an exaggerated smile. She leaned toward Venus.

  Whether Venus was about to go into attack mode or not, I couldn’t discern, but she shifted in her seat when Gwennie had suddenly moved toward her.

  “Not too close. Venus feels nervous when someone gets unexpectedly close,” I said and put an arm out to separate the two girls.

  “Is she an Eskimo?”

  “No.”

  “Eskimos live in the Arctic. Their proper name is Inuit. It means ‘real people.’ They speak more than six different languages.”

  “No, Venus is American, just like you. Only she doesn’t always feel like talking.”

  “Perhaps she is a Carmelite nun,” Gwennie responded earnestly.

  Chapter

  9

  The next afternoon started off badly. Billy got into a fight with a child from another class during the lunch break and was banished to the principal’s office. Bob gave Billy the expected lecture and then made him sit in one of the “principal’s chairs,” which were lined up in the hall outside Bob’s office. This was where the “bad kids” sat until Bob told them they could return to their classroom. Billy was incensed. As ever, he couldn’t see how anything that had happened was his fault, and when he came back to my room after the bell rang, his face was red with indignant anger, his voice on the edge of tears at the unfairness of it all. Everybody hated him. Everybody treated him unfairly. It was this stupid school and why did he have to come here anyway? He wanted to go home right then. He wanted his brother. He wanted to go to school where his brother was, because then people wouldn’t keep picking on him.