One Child Part 4

"Be nice to me?"

I looked at her in disbelief. "Because I like you."

"Why? I be a crazy kid; I hurt your fishes. Why do you be nice to me?"

I smiled through my own perplexity. "I just wanted to, Sheila. That's all. I thought you might like something nice for your hair."

She continued to rub the clips through the wrapping, feeling the plastic shapes with her fingertips. "Ain't n.o.body give me nothing before. Ain't n.o.body be nice to me on purpose."

I stood watching her in bewilderment. There was nothing in my experience to relate to that. "Well, things are different in here, kiddo," was all I could reply.

I brushed the tangles out of her hair carefully. It took much longer than I had antic.i.p.ated it would because I did not want to hurt her in any way. I was fearful of this fragile relations.h.i.+p we were forming, of accidentally harming it because we were from such different worlds. She sat very patiently clutching the clips in her hands but never taking them out of the wrapping. Over and over again she fingered them, but she would not open the package. Her hair was that fine, soft, impossibly straight hair that fortunately never tangles too badly. When brushed out, it hung down below her shoulder blades in a thick curtain. In front I combed her bangs. They were too long, falling into her eyes. She was a pretty girl with bold, well-formed features. With soap and water she would be even lovelier.

"There you are. Here, give me the clips and I'll put them in your hair."

She squashed the clips to her breast.

"Here, let's put them in your hair."

She shook her head.

"Don't you want them there?"

"Pa, he take them away from me."

"He wouldn't do that, would he? Just tell him that I gave them to you."

"He say I steal them. n.o.body give me nothing before." She held on to the clips tightly, looking at the plastic bluebirds and ducks through the wrapping.

"Maybe for now, you can leave them at school until I get hold of your dad and tell him I gave them to you. How's that sound?"

"You fix my hair nice again?"

I nodded. "I'll fix it tomorrow morning when you come."

She looked at the clips a long moment and then hesitantly handed them to me. "Here. You keep them for me."

My heart thumped within my chest as I took the clips. It was so obvious how hard she was finding giving them back. At that moment Anton came into the room with an armload of dittos he had been running off. He reminded me that it was almost time for him to walk Sheila over to the high school to catch her bus. I was surprised that so much time had slipped by. We hadn't even gotten around to was.h.i.+ng up and she did smell so terrible.

"Sheila," I asked, "do you get a chance to wash yourself at home?"

She shook her head. "We ain't got no bathtub."

"Can you use the sink?"

"Ain't got no sink either. My Pa, he brings us down water in a bucket from the gas station." She paused staring at the floor. "It just be to drink out of. He'd be fierce awful mad at me if I get it dirty."

"Do you have any other clothes?"

She shook her head.

"Well, I'll tell you what. We'll see what we can do about that tomorrow, okay?"

Nodding she went to the coat hook to find her thin cotton jacket. I sighed as I watched her. So much to do, I thought. So much to change. "Good-bye, Sheila. Have a nice evening. I'll see you tomorrow."

Anton took her hand and opened the door into the blowy January darkness. Just as he was shutting the door behind him, Sheila paused, peering under his arm and toward me. She smiled slightly. "Bye, teacher."

CHAPTER 7.

THE NEXT MORNING I CAME READY FOR ACTION. Armed with three bath towels, a bar of soap, shampoo and a bottle of baby lotion, I arrived at school. First I went down to check the church box in the office. Although the school I was in was in one of the upper-income areas, enough children like those in my room were bussed in to warrant a box of spare clothes that could be given away. I kept my own box in my room, but primarily it contained underwear. What was in there was far too large for little Sheila. Having found a pair of corduroy pants and another T-s.h.i.+rt, I went back to my room.

Thus when Sheila arrived, I was running water into the sink in the back of the cla.s.sroom. The sink was a large, roomy, kitchen-sized sink and I figured I would get a good share of her into it, since we lacked shower facilities. The moment she saw me, Sheila yanked off her jacket and came trotting over. That was the fastest I had seen her move toward me since she had come. Her eyes were wide with interest as she leaned over to see what I was doing. "You gonna put clips in my hair now?"

"You bet. But first we're going to give you the full beauty-shop routine. We're going to wash you top to bottom. How does that sound?"

"It gonna hurt?"

I laughed. "No, silly. I don't think so."

She had pulled the bottle of baby lotion out of the bucket I had it in and she removed the top. "What do this be for? Do you eat it?"

I looked at her in surprise. "No, it's lotion. You put it on your body."

A sudden look of pleasure rippled across her face. "It do smell good, teacher. Smell it. It smell good and you put it on to be pretty smelling." Her eyes were animated. "Now that kid, he ain't gonna say I stink no more, huh?"

I smiled at her. "No, I guess he won't. Look here, I found some clothes for you to wear. Then Whitney can take your overalls over to the Laundromat when she comes this afternoon."

Sheila surveyed the corduroy pants, picking them up gingerly. "My Pa, he ain't gonna let me keep them. We don't take no charity things."

"Yes, I understand that. You just wear them until the others get dry. Okay?"

I lifted Sheila up onto the counter beside the sink and took off her shoes and socks. She watched me carefully as I eased off her clothes but she made no attempt to help. I felt pressed for time because the other children would be arriving in less than a half hour, and although they were used to was.h.i.+ng and seeing others washed in the sink, I was afraid Sheila might feel too vulnerable at this point to have an audience. I asked her about it and she said she did not mind, but I still felt it would be better to finish before the others came.

She was a scrawny little whip of a child with all her ribs showing. I noticed the many scars on her body. "What happened here?" I asked as I washed one arm. A scar two inches long ran up the inside of it.

"That be where I brokeded my arm at, once."

"How'd you do that?"

"Falling down playing. The doctor putsa cast on it."

"You fell down playing?"

She nodded matter-of-factly, inspecting the scar. "I fall on the sidewalk. My Pa, he says I do be a G.o.dawful clumsy child. I hurt myself a lot."

In my mind was forming the question I had learned to ask of my kids; a question I dreaded. "Does your Pa ever do anything that leaves scars like these? Like spank you hard or something?" I asked.

She looked at me, her eyes clouding over. She regarded me so long in silence that I wished I had not asked. It was a personal question and perhaps I had not laid a firm enough foundation in our relations.h.i.+p to be so intimate. "My Pa, he wouldn't do that. He wouldn't hurt me bad. He loves me. He just hits me a little bit to make me good. You gotta do that to kids sometimes. But my Pa, he loves me. I just be a clumsy child to get so many scars." Her voice was tinged with defiance.

I nodded and lifted her out of the sink to dry her off. For several moments she did not speak to me. I had her on my lap and was drying her legs when she twisted around to look me in the eye. "You know what my Mama done though?"

"No."

"Here, I'll show you." She lifted the other leg up and pointed to a scar. "My Mama she take me out on the road and leave me there. She push me out of the car and I fall down so's a rock cutted up my leg right here. See." She fingered a white line. "My Pa, he loves me. He don't go leaving me on no roads. You ain't supposed to do that with little kids."

"No, you're not."

"My Mama, she don't love me so good."

In silence I began combing out her hair. I did not really want to hear any more because it hurt to listen to her; her voice was so calm and matter-of-fact that I felt that I shouldn't be listening to what she was saying. It was like reading someone's diary, the very calmness of the print making the words more pathetic.

"My Mama, she take Jimmie and go to California. That be where they live right now. Jimmie, he be my brother and he be four years old, 'cept that he only be two when my Mama, she leave. I ain't seen Jimmie in two whole years." She paused thoughtfully. "I miss Jimmie sort of. I wish I could see him again. He be a real nice boy." Again she turned around in my lap so she could see me. "You'd like Jimmie. He be a nice boy and don't yell or be bad or anything. He be a nice boy to have in this here crazy kidses cla.s.s. 'Cept I don't think he be crazy like me. You like Jimmie. My Mama do. She like Jimmie better'n me, that's why she tooked him and leaved me behind. You ought to have Jimmie in this here cla.s.s. He don't do bad things like I do."

I hugged her to me. "Kitten, you're the one I'd want. Not Jimmie. He'll have his own teacher some day. I don't care what kids do, I just like them. That's all."

She sat back and looked at me, a bemused look falling across her face. "You do be a funny lady for a teacher. I think you be as crazy as us kidses be."

That fifth day, Friday, she still did not talk to the other kids although when asked a direct question she would answer any of the adults. At the end of the day after everyone had had ice cream and we had finished closing exercises, we were standing in line waiting for the buses to arrive to take the other children home. We had finished up a bit early and everyone was standing around in their snowsuits getting hot, so I suggested a song. Max shouted out that he wanted "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands," one of the few songs he would sing with the rest of us. It was a simple action song that required the children to clap, then stomp, then nod their heads. I looked over to see Sheila standing on the edge of the group not singing but paying close attention. When we had finished all the actions, the buses still had not arrived so I asked for suggestions for new actions. Tyler said, "If you're happy and you know it, jump up and down." So we sang a verse using Tyler's action. Again I asked for new actions. From her corner Sheila shyly raised her hand. With all our other problems and with so few children I just never got around to requesting that they do that unless we were having a moment of ma.s.s confusion. To see this little kid - who thus far had never spoken to the other children, who came in with a history of uncooperativeness - standing there with her hand up was a heart stopper.

"Sheila, do you have an idea?"

"Turn around?" she said diffidently.

And so we sang our song turning around. The first week had ended in the heat of success.

Sheila came alive in our room during the next weeks. She began speaking, first with reserve, and then with none. Sheila had thoughts on everything and was most articulate when given the chance. I was delighted to have a verbal child in the room. The other children enjoyed her company and I was tickled that she could tell me about so many things.

Sheila never brought up the burning incident, not during the early stages of our relations.h.i.+p, not later, not ever. Most of the more coherent kids in my cla.s.s were aware of some of the reasons why they had been placed in there. We talked about those reasons regularly, during the times we set weekly and long-term goals for change, occasionally during morning topic and at other less formal times: out on the playground while we all stood s.h.i.+vering in the lee of the building too engrossed in conversation to go in, over lunch or art or cooking, alone together on the pillows in the secluded animal-cage corner. There seemed to be a pressing need in most of the kids to talk about these things.

The conversations were low-keyed and often casual, much experience having gone into my ability to discuss such topics as committing suicide or burning cats alive with the same casualness with which I made out my laundry list or asked about baseball scores. The kids did not need to knows the behaviors were wrong or that they frightened or repelled others - they already knew that. Otherwise they would not have been in my room in the first place. Instead they needed to explore the width and breadth and depth of those acts, how they felt when they did them, how they had expected they would feel and the seemingly meaningless myriad of details surrounding the episodes. Mostly I listened, asked a question or two if things were not clear, mmmm-hmmmed a lot to let them know I heard. And I kept us busy at dozens of mindless tasks like coloring or making papier mache projects so that we could talk without having to look at one another, without having to acknowledge we were talking.

Sheila knew why she was there. From the second day on she continued to refer to us affectionately as a "crazy cla.s.s." And she was a crazy kid who did bad things. Often she would join the conversations. Yet not once was the abuse incident brought up. Not with the kids. Not with me or the other adults. Never. I did not suggest the topic either. Although I seldom avoided issues, this one I felt instinctively I should leave alone, for no other reason than what my gut told me. So we never discussed it. I never found out what had been going through Sheila's mind that cold November evening.

I remained perplexed about her speech patterns. The more she talked, the more obvious the discrepancy was between the way Sheila spoke and the way the rest of us did. There were no reports of her father speaking any sort of dialect. He was a native of the area and should have spoken in the same manner as the rest of us. The major variations were word insertions, especially "do" and "be," and the absence of a past tense. The word "do" was used as an auxiliary verb, inserted at will throughout Sheila's conversations. "Be" took the place of "am," "is" and "are." For Sheila, the past tense simply did not exist with very few exceptions. Everything was spoken as if it were in the present or future. This mystified me because she had a good command of very difficult tenses such as conditionals like "should" and "would," and was capable of putting together complex sentences far beyond the grasp of most six-year-olds. Repeatedly, I taped samples of her speech and sent them off to experts to be a.n.a.lyzed. In the meantime, I let her speak as she chose.

Allan, the school psychologist, gave Sheila an IQ and reading test. The IQ test Sheila topped out, earning the highest possible score. Allan was astonished, coming out of his little room shaking his head. He had never had a child do that on the test he was using, and certainly had never expected it from a child they would place in a cla.s.s like mine. Sheila read and comprehended on a fifth grade level, despite the fact that no one had ever taught her to read. Allan left that day, vowing to find a test that could measure her IQ.

Each morning before school Sheila and I worked on hygiene. I bought a plastic bucket at the discount store and put a comb, brush, washcloth, towel, soap, lotion and toothbrush in it. Most days Sheila was willing to wash and brush her teeth, if I would fix her hair. She delighted in the hair clips. I bought another package like the kind that I wore and Sheila guarded them all like a king's treasure. Each morning she went through them, counting them and deciding which ones she would wear. Each evening she took them out of her hair, laying them carefully in the folds of the towel. Again she counted them to make sure no one had taken any. Her clothes were a bit more of a problem. I kept clean underpants at school and insisted she change every morning. We never discussed the problem because I deduced that after the first day, it was a sensitive area. I did, however, make sure she changed, regardless of what subjects we mentioned. On Mondays Whitney trotted Sheila's overalls and s.h.i.+rt down to the Laundromat around the corner from the school. It was hardly a foolproof solution but at least Sheila did not stink so much anymore. All in all, she was a handsome child cleaned up. She had thick, long blond hair and much to the pleasure of all of us she had sparkly eyes and a ready smile that showed three gaps on the bottom awaiting new teeth.

To my relief one problem which I had antic.i.p.ated but which never materialized was Sheila's bus ride to and from the migrant camp. With such a terrible history of uncontrollable behavior, Sheila, unsupervised on a bus, was something I could not imagine working out well. However, my fears proved to be unfounded. Perhaps putting her with forty high school students was enough to intimidate even Sheila.

Anton or I walked her to and from the bus, but once on it, she settled down in a seat toward the back. The only incident that ever occurred was in late January after she had been on the route for some time. We had walked her to the bus in the evening and put her on. However, by the time the bus had arrived at the migrant camp and the high school students had climbed off, Sheila was not there. The bus driver stood up from his seat and looked back, but the bus was empty. Alarmed because the bus only made two stops before the camp and he had not seen her disembark at either of them, the driver called me at home to make sure she had gotten on. I told him she had. There were more than a few panicky moments before the bus driver called back. Apparently, Sheila had gotten down on the floor by the rear tire where the heat came in and she fell asleep. After she discovered that warm, vibrating spot, she regularly curled up on the floor under the seat and slept during the hour ride both in and out. The driver always checked after that, to make sure she awakened and got off. The high school students, at first only tolerant of her presence, began to save that seat near the heater for her, began also to give her book bags or extra sweaters for a pillow and to see she was walked home on those nights she was too sleepy to be reliable.

A problem that was not solving itself was Sheila's father. I had tried relentlessly to get hold of him for a conference. He had no phone so I sent a note home with Sheila asking him to come to school. No response. I sent a second note. Again no response. I sent a third note saying I was coming to visit him at his home. When the evening came that Anton and I went out, the house was empty. I was getting the distinct impression he did not want to see me. Finally I contacted Sheila's social worker. Together we went out only to be greeted at the door by Sheila. Her father was gone.

I wanted to see him very badly. First I wanted to make some arrangements for Sheila to get proper clothing. I had mentioned this to the social worker. Although Sheila had only one outfit, my main concern was her outerwear. She owned only a boy's thin cotton jacket, something like a baseball Windbreaker. She had no gloves, no hat, no boots. And it was, after all, January. The temperature hovered around 20 degrees most days and had even been below zero on occasion. Sheila would arrive at school almost blue some mornings after her walk from the high school two blocks away. In desperation I had taken my car to get her on the worst days. I gave her more to wear at recess, but the one time I sent things home, they came back the next day in a paper bag. Sheila remarked with embarra.s.sment that she had gotten a Spanking for accepting "charity." The social worker explained that they had repeatedly gotten on the father for this and had even taken him downtown once to buy clothes for Sheila from his welfare check. But apparently he had returned the clothes later. You couldn't force the man, she said, shrugging. She did not want to endanger Sheila by forcing the issue because it was a known fact that he took his anger out on the child. Wasn't that child abuse? I had asked. Not technically. There were not any marks on her. I had slammed the door in frustration after the social worker left. Not any marks on her, huh? Then what the h.e.l.l was she doing in my cla.s.s? If that wasn't a mark, I didn't know what was.

During the hours that school was in session, I tried to provide her with all the experiences that her disturbance or circ.u.mstances had robbed her of. She came alive. Every moment of her day was filled with exploring and chattering. The first weeks she followed me around all day long. Everywhere I went, when I turned around there she would be, clutching a book to her chest or a box of math cubes, A silly smile would spill over her lips when she caught my eye, and she'd scuttle up ready to share. I had to divide my time equally with the other children, of course, but this did not deter her. She would stand patiently behind me waiting until I had finished. Sometimes I would feel a hand tentatively take hold of my belt as she got braver and longed for more physical contact. Anton would laugh and kid me in the teacher's lounge about looking like a subway, because as I walked around the room helping the other children, Sheila would go with me, one hand locked into my belt like a seasoned straphanger.

During those first weeks of intense devotion, I was both thankful and dismayed for the two hours we had alone after school. My planning time was shot. Much to Chad's displeasure I was having to haul my work home and do it in the evenings. Anton groused about never getting to talk over matters anymore unless we both came in at seven thirty in the morning. But for Sheila it was ideal. She needed undivided attention.

For all of her six years she had been unwanted, ignored, rejected. Pushed out of cars, pushed out of people's lives. Now there was someone to hold her and talk to her and cuddle her. Sheila soaked up every little bit of intimacy I could spare. Despite the inconvenience of losing those two hours of planning time, I felt less anxious about dragging her around all day hanging on my belt and ignoring her while I worked with the other children, because after school she had me all to herself.

The other children were as delighted as Anton and I were to see Sheila blossom. Notes filled the Kobold's Box scribbled in childish hand. Most of the children were relieved that she did not smell so often or so badly and were quick to comment on that. But they also perceived her budding attempts at kindness.

Sheila had evidently not had much of an opportunity to learn how to be considerate of others or how to be kind. She had been busy surviving and altruism had little place in survival. Consequently, she was used to having to fight for what she wanted. When someone got the place in line she had chosen, she socked that person hard enough to win it back. If another child had a toy she wanted, she grabbed it, wrestled it out of the child's hands and scuttled off to safety with it to hiss angrily at anyone who tried to take it away. In many ways she was much cruder and more obnoxious in her directness than even Peter, but hers was an animal-like aggressiveness, without malice.

I knew that, after six years, it was not going to be a simple matter to convince her that there was another way to do things. My reprimands and cautions and forced marches to the quiet corner did not noticeably dent her behavior. But the Kobold's Box did.

Each night Sheila listened carefully as I read the notes and complimented the children who earned them. Greedily she would count hers after each session and, if given the opportunity, she would count other children's also to see if they got more or less than she did. I tried to discourage that activity. The other kids were not compet.i.tive and did not feel the need to measure their worth by the number of notes they received. I did not want them to start. But Sheila could not resist. Her meager portion of self-confidence would not let her rest. Over and over again she wanted to prove that she was the best child in the cla.s.s, the smartest, the hardest-working, my favorite. When I steadfastly refused to confirm that, she set out to prove it to herself with notes in the Kobold's Box. But that eluded her. She could show me how well she read. That was simple; it only entailed getting out a book. She could show me how well she did math. That, too, was simple. But she could not figure out how to be kind or polite or considerate in order to earn herself more notes.

One afternoon after school she had stayed by the table where I was taking apart a science experiment. "How come Tyler gets so many notes?" she asked. "She gets more than anybody else does. Do you give them to her?"

"No, you know that. Everybody writes out notes."

"How come she gets more?" She c.o.c.ked her head. "What she do? How come everybody likes her so good?"

"Well," I considered the matter a moment. "For one thing, she's polite. When she wants something she asks, and almost always says please. And thank you too. That makes a person feel more like helping her or being with her, because she makes you feel good for it."

Sheila frowned, looking down at her hands. After a long pause she looked accusingly at me. "How come you never tell me you want me to say please and thank you? I don't know you want that. How come you tell Tyler and you don't tell me?"

I looked at her in disbelief. "I didn't tell Tyler, Sheila. It's just something people do. Everybody likes other people to be polite."

"I don't know that. n.o.body ever told me," she said reproachfully. "I never know you want me to do that."

In considering the matter, I knew she was right. I probably never had told her. It was one of those things I took for granted a child would know, especially a bright child like her. I had just a.s.sumed she knew. But the unfairness of the a.s.sumption was dawning on me. Sheila might never had heard those words in her environment. Or perhaps they had never been meaningful to her before.

"I'm sorry, Sh.e.l.l. I thought you knew."

"I don't. I can say them if I know you want me to."

I nodded. "I do. They're good words to use, because they make other people feel good. That's important. People like you better for it."

"Will they tell me I'm a nice girl?"

"It'll help them see that you are."

And so, little by little she began to attend to what others were doing to be kind and considerate. When she did not understand, she asked. At other times when it occurred to me that she did not know, I would tell her during one of our quiet moments.