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Chapter Two (#uf64aa853-cb30-58cf-aa1b-880700df8891)
“Boo? Boo?” I was in the hallway. “Boo?” I whispered loudly into the silence and felt like a misplaced ghost.
I had made it to the classroom door in time to see him career squawking around the far corner of the corridor, but by the time I had gotten down there Boo was gone. He had disappeared entirely and left me booing to myself.
I went into the primary wing of the building. Wherever he had gone, he had ceased to scream. The classrooms were empty, the children had gone out for recess. All was quiet. Eight rooms in all to check. I stuck my head first in one room and then in another. That miserable rushed feeling overcame me. I knew I had to capture Boo and get him back, check Tim’s and Brad’s work, calm them down a bit about this odd boy before they went back to their class, and finally prepare for Lori, my next resource student. And all that time I needed to be with Boo.
“Boo?” I looked in the third-grade rooms. In the second-grade rooms. “Boo, time to go back now. Are you here?” Through the first-grade rooms.
I opened the door to the kindergarten. There across the classroom under a table was Boo. He had a rug pulled over his head as he lay on the floor. Only his little green corduroy-covered rear stuck out. Had he known that this was a kindergarten room? Was he trying to get back to Marcy’s? Or was it no more than coincidence that put him here, head under a rug on the floor?
Talking all the while in low tones, I approached him cautiously. The kindergarten children were returning from recess. Curiosity was vivid on their faces. What was this strange teacher doing in their room under their table? What about this boy in the green corduroy pants?
“Boo?” I was saying softly, barely more than a whisper. “Time to go to our room now. The other children need this room.”
The kindergarteners watched us intently but would not come closer. I touched Boo gently, ran my hand along the outside of the rug, then inside along his body to accustom him to my touch. Carefully, carefully I pulled the rug from around his head and extracted him. Holding him in my arms, I slid from under the table. Boo was soundless now and rigid as a mannequin. His arms and legs were straight and stiff. I might as well have been carrying a cardboard figure of a boy. However, this time he did not avert his face. Rather, he stared through me as if I were not there, round eyed and unblinking, as a dead man stares.
A small freckle-faced boy ventured closer as I prepared to take Boo from the classroom. He gazed up with blue, searching eyes, his face puckered in that intense manner only young children seem to have. “What was he doing in our room?” he asked.
I smiled. “Looking at the things under your rug.”
Lori stood outside the door of my room when I returned carrying a stiff Boo in my arms. Tim and Brad had already gone and had closed the door and turned off the light when they left. Lori, workbook in hand, looked uncertain about entering the darkened room.
“I didn’t know where you were!” she said emphatically. Then she noticed Boo. “Is that the little kid you told me about? Is he going to be in with me?”
“Yes. This is Boo.” I opened the door clumsily and turned on the light. I set Boo down. Again he remained motionless, while Lori and I went to the worktable at the far side of the room. When it became apparent Boo was not going to budge, I went back to the doorway, picked him up and transported him over to us. He stood between the table and the wall, still rigid as death. No life glimmered in those cloudy eyes.
“Hello, little boy,” Lori said and sat down in a chair near him. She leaned forward, an elbow on the table, eyes bright with interest. “What’s your name? My name’s Lori. Lori Ann Sjokheim. I’m seven. How old are you?”
Boo took no notice of her.
“His name is Boo,” I said. “He’s also seven.”
“That’s a funny name. Boo. But you know what? I know a kid with a funnier name than that. Her name’s Maggie Smellie. I think that’s funny.”
When Boo still did not respond, Lori’s forehead wrinkled. “You’re not mad, are you, ’cause I said that? It’s okay if you got a funny name. I wouldn’t tease you or nothing. I don’t tease Maggie Smellie either.” Lori paused, studied him. “You’re kind of small for seven, huh? I think I’m taller than you. Maybe. But I’m kind of small too. That’s ’cause I’m a twin and sometimes twins are small. Are you a twin too?”
Lori. What a kid Lori was. I could sit and listen to her all day long. In all my years of teaching, Lori was unique. In appearance she was for me an archetypal child, looking the way children in my fantasies always looked. She had long, long hair, almost to her waist. Parted on one side and caught up in a metal clip, it was thick and straight and glossy brown, the exact color of my grandmother’s mahogany sideboard. Her mouth was wide and supple and always quick to smile.
Lori had come to me through evil circumstances. She and her twin sister had been adopted when they were five. The other twin had no school problems whatsoever. But from the very beginning Lori could not manage. She was hyperactive. She did not learn. She could not even copy things written for her. The shattering realization came during her second year in kindergarten, a grade-retention born out of frustration for this child who could not cope.
Lori had been a severely abused child in her natural home. One beating had fractured her skull and pushed a bone fragment into her brain. X-rays revealed lesions. Although the fragment had been removed, the lesions remained. How severe the lasting effects of the brain damage would be no one knew. One result had been epilepsy. Another had been apparent interference with the area of the brain that processes written symbols. She also had many of the problems commonly associated with more minimal types of damage, such as difficulty in concentration, an inability to sit still and distractibility. The bittersweet issue in my mind, however, was the fact that Lori came away from the injury as intact as she did. She lost very little, if any, of her intelligence or her perception or her understanding, and she was a bright child. Nor did she look damaged: For all intents and purposes, Lori was normal. Because of this, I noticed that people, myself included, tended to forget she was not. And sometimes we became angry with her for things over which she had no control.
The prognosis for her recovery was guarded. Brain cells, unlike other cells in the body, do not regenerate. The only hope the doctors had given was that in time her brain might learn other pathways around the injured area and tasks such as reading and writing would become more feasible things for her to accomplish. In the meantime Lori struggled on as best she could.
But there was no kid quite like Lori. Her brain did not always function well, yet there was nothing wrong with Lori’s heart. She was full of an innate belief in the goodness of people. Despite her own experiences, evil did not exist for Lori. She embraced all of us, good and bad alike, with a sort of droll acceptance. And she cared. The welfare of all the world mattered to her. I found it both her most endearing and annoying trait. Nothing was safe from her: she cared about how you felt, what you thought, what your dreams were. She involved herself so intimately in a world so hard on those who care that I often caught my breath with fear for her. Yet Lori remained undaunted. Her love was a little raw at seven, and not yet cloaked by social graces, but the point was, she cared.
Boo was of great concern to Lori.
“Doesn’t he talk?” she asked me in a stage whisper after all her attempts at conversation had been ignored.
I shook my head. “Not too well. That’s one of the things that Boo came here to learn.”
“Ohhh, poor Boo.” She stood up and reached out to pat his arm. “Don’t worry, you’ll learn. I don’t learn so good myself so I know how you feel. But don’t worry. You’re probably a nice boy anyways.”
Boo’s fingers fluttered and the vacant eyes showed just the smallest signs of life. A quick flicker to Lori’s face, then he turned and faced the wall.
I decided to work with Lori and leave Boo to stand. There was no need to hurry. “I’ll be right here, Boo,” I said. He stood motionless, staring at the wall. I turned my chair around to the table.
Lori flipped open her workbook. “It’s dumb old spelling again today. I don’t know.” She scratched her head thoughtfully. “Me and that teacher, we just aren’t doing so good on this. She thinks you oughta teach me better.”
I grinned and pulled the book over to view it. “Did she tell you that?”
“No. But I can tell she thinks it.”
Boo began to move. Hesitantly at first. A step. Two steps. Mincingly, like a geisha girl. Another step. I watched him out of the corner of one eye as I leaned over Lori’s spelling. Boo walked as if someone had starched his underwear. His head never turned; his arms remained tight against his sides. The muscles in his neck stood out. Every once in a while his hands would flap. Was all this tension just to keep control? What was he trying so desperately to hold in?
“Look at him,” Lori whispered. She smiled up at me. “He’s getting himself to home.”
I nodded.
“He’s a little weird, Torey, but that’s okay, isn’t it?” she said. “I act a little weird myself sometimes. People do, you know.”
“Yes, I know. Now concentrate on your spelling, please.”
Boo explored the environs of the classroom. It was a large room, square and sunny from a west wall of windows. The teacher’s desk was shoved into one corner, a repository for all kinds of things I did not know what to do with. The worktable stretched along below the windows where I could have the most light on my work. The few student desks in the room were back against one wall. Another wall housed my coat closet, the sink, the cupboards and two huge storage cabinets. Low bookshelves came out into the room to partition off a reading corner and the animals: Sam, the hermit crab; two green finches in a huge home-made cage; and Benny the boa constrictor, who had taught school as long as I had.
Boo inched his way around the room until he came upon the animals. He stopped before the birds. At first he did nothing. Then very slowly he raised one hand to the cage. Flutter, flutter, flutter went his fingers. He began to rock back and forth on his heels. “Hrooop!” he said in a small, high-pitched voice. He said it so quietly the first time that I thought it was the finches. “Hrooooop! Hrrrroo-ooop!” Both hands were now at ear level and flapping at the birds.
“Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah,” he began, still softly. “Ee-ee-ee-ee. Ah-ee. Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee.” He sounded like a resident of the ape house at the zoo.
Lori looked up from her work, first at Boo and then at me. She had a very expressive glance. Then with a shake of her head she went back to work.
Boo was smiling in an inward translucent sort of way. He turned around. The stiffness in his body melted away. “Heeheeheeheeheeheeheehee!” he said gaily. His eyes focused right on my face.
“Those are our birds, Boo.”
“Heeheeheeheeheeheehee! Haahaahaahaahaahaa! Ah-ah-ah-ah!” Great excitement. Boo was jumping up and down in front of the cage. His hands waved gleefully. Every few moments he would turn to look at Lori and me. I smiled back.
Abruptly Boo took off at a run around the classroom. High-pitched squeally laughter lanced the schoolroom quiet. His arms flopped widely like a small child playing at being an airplane, but there was a graceful consistency to the motion that made it unlike any game.
“Torey!” Lori leaped up from her chair. “Look at him! He’s taking off all his clothes!”
Sure enough Boo was. A shoe. A sock. A shirt. They all fell behind him as he ran. He was a clothes Houdini. His green corduroy pants came down and off with hardly a break in his rhythm. Boo darted back and forth, laughing deliriously, clothing dropping in his wake. Lori watched with horrified fascination. At one point she put her hands over her eyes but I saw her peeking through her fingers. A goofy grin was glued to her face. Boo made quite a sight.
I did not want to chase him. Whatever little bit of lunacy this was, I did not want to be a party to it. My greatest concern was the door. Within minutes Boo had completely stripped and now capered around in naked glee. I had not enjoyed chasing him the first time when he had been fully clothed. I could just imagine doing it now. This was a nice, middle-class, sedate and slightly boring elementary school without any classes of crazy kids in it. Dan Marshall, the principal, swell guy that he was, would have an apoplectic fit if some kid streaked down one of his corridors. I would hate to be the cause of that.
Boo laughed. He laughed and danced from one side of the room to the other while I guarded the door. I longed for a latch on that door. That had been one of the small things my classrooms had always had. Locks, like all other things, are neither good nor bad in themselves. There are times for them. And this was one. It would have been better if I could simply have latched the door and gone back to my work. As it was now. Boo had me playing warden, trapped into participating in his game. It gave him no end of pleasure.
For almost fifteen minutes the delirium went on. He would stop occasionally, usually not far from me, and face me, his little bare body defiant. I tried to assess what I could see in those sea-green eyes. I could see something but I did not know what it was.
Then during one of his pauses he lifted a hand up before his face and began to twiddle his fingers in front of his eyes. A shade went down; something closed. Like the transparent membrane over a reptile’s eye, something pulled across him and he went shut again. The small body stiffened, the arms came close to his sides, protectively. No life flickered in his eyes.
Boo stood a moment, once more a cardboard figure. Then a wild flap of his arms and he minced off across the room and dived under a piece of carpet in the reading center. Wiggling, he slipped nearly entirely under until all that was visible was a lumpy carpet and two bare feet.
Lori gave me a defeated look as I returned to the worktable. “It’s gonna take a lot of work to fix him. Tor. He’s pretty weird. Boy, and I mean not just a little weird either.”
“He has his problems.”
“Yeah. He don’t got no clothes on for one thing.”
“Well, that’s okay for now. We’ll take care of that later on.”
“It’s not okay, Torey. I don’t think you’re supposed to be naked in school. My daddy, I think he told me that once.”
“Some things are different from others. Lor.”
“It isn’t right. I know. You can see his thing. Girls aren’t supposed to look at those. It means you’re nasty. But I could hardly help it, could I? And my dad would spank me if he knew I was doing that.”
I smiled at her. “You mean his penis?”
Lori nodded. She had to suck her lips between her teeth to keep from smiling too.
“I have a feeling you didn’t mind it too much.”
“Well, it was pretty interesting.”
We made it through the first day. Boo and I. Boo spent the entire hour and a half we had alone under the carpet. I let him remain there. When 3:15 approached I pulled him out and dressed him. Boo lay perfectly inert, his limbs slightly stiff but still compliant, his head back so that he was looking above him. I talked to him as I put back all the clothing he had so skillfully removed. I told him about the room, about the birds and the snake and the crab, about what he and I would do together, about other children he would meet, about Tim and Brad and Lori. About anything that came to mind. I watched his eyes. Nothing. There was nothing there. A body without a soul in it.
He began talking while I was, but when I stopped, he stopped. He still stared above him, although there was no focus to the gaze.
“What did you say, Boo?”
No response.
“Did you want to talk about something?”
Still looking blankly into space. “The high today will be about 65, the low tonight in the middle forties. In the mountain valleys there is a chance of frost. The high at the airport yesterday was 56. In Falls City it was 61.”
“Boo? Boo?” I softly touched his face. Loose black curls flopped back onto the carpet where he lay. The picture-book beauty lay over his features like a separate entity. His fingers waggled against the rug. I was touching him, buttoning his shirt, moving slowly but certainly up his chest. I might as well have been dressing a doll. All the while he continued talking, parroting back the morning weather report exactly, word for word. Delayed echolalia, if one wanted the technical term for it. If that mattered.
“Chance of precipitation in the Greenwood area, 20 percent today, 10 percent tonight and then rising to 50 percent by morning. It looks like it is going to be a beautiful autumn day here in the Midland Empire. And now for Ron Neilsen with the sports. Stay tuned. Don’t go away.”
Don’t worry. I won’t.
Chapter Three (#uf64aa853-cb30-58cf-aa1b-880700df8891)
We were piloting a reading series program in the primary grades that year. For me it was not a new program. The school I had previously taught in had also piloted the program. I got to live through the disaster twice.
The program itself was aesthetically outstanding. The publishers had obviously engaged true artistic talent to do the layouts and illustrations. Many of the stories were of literary quality. They were fun stories to read.
Unless, of course, you could not read.
It was a reading series designed for adults, for the adults who bought it, for the adults who had to read it, for the adults who had forgotten what it was like to be six and not know how to read. This series was a response to the community agitators who as forty-year-olds were not fascinated by the controlled vocabulary of a basal reader. They had demanded something more and now they had gotten it. As children’s books for adults, those in the series were peerless. In fact, the first time I had encountered the books, I had covertly dragged home every single reader at one time or another because I wanted to read them. Of course, I was twenty-six. We bought the books, the children did not, and in this case we bought the books for ourselves.
For the kids it was all a different matter. Or at least for my kids. I had always taught beginners or failures. For these two groups the reading program was an unmitigated disaster.
The major difficulty was that, in order to appeal to adults from the first pre-primer on, the series had dispensed with the usual small words, short sentences and controlled vocabulary. Even the pictures accompanying the text, though artistic, were rarely illustrative of the story at hand. The first sentence in the very first book intended for nonreading six-year-olds had eight words including one with three syllables. For some of the children this was all right. They managed the first sentence and all the others after it. For the majority of children, including mine, well … in the three years I had used the series, I had memorized the three pre-primers because never in all that time did any of my children advance to another book. Normally, the first three pre-primers were mastered in the first grade, before Christmas.
I was not the only person having problems. In the first year of piloting, word soon got around in the teachers’ lounge: None of the first- or second-grade teachers was having much success. Traditionally, publishers of reading series send a chart outlining the approximate place a teacher and her class should be at any given time in the term. We all gauged our reading programs around that chart so that we could have our children properly prepared for the next grade by the end of school. This publisher’s chart hung in the lounge that first year, and the five of us, two first-grade teachers, two second-grade teachers, and I with my primary special education class, would moan to see ourselves slip further and further behind where the publisher predicted we should be. No one was going to get through the program on time.
After a few months of struggling we became so incensed over this impossible series that we demanded some sort of explanation from the school district for this insanity. The outcome of the protest had been the arrival from the publishing company of a sales representative to answer our questions. When I brought up the fact that less than half of all the children in the program were functioning where the chart said they should be, I expected I had set myself up to be told my colleagues and I just were not good teachers. But no. The salesman was delighted. He smiled and reassured us that we were doing very well indeed. The truth was, he said, only 15 percent of all first graders were expected to complete the entire first-grade program during the first grade. The other 85 percent were not.
I was horrified beyond reply. We were using a program that by its very construction set children up to fail. All except the very brightest were destined to be “slow readers.” Many, many teachers not hearing this man’s words were going to assume that the chart was correct and put their children through an entire year’s program under the mistaken belief that all the first-grade material was meant to be done in the first grade, none in second. That was not too extravagant an assumption, in my opinion. Worst of all, however, was that as the years went on, perfectly ordinary children who were learning and developing at normal rates would fall further and further behind, so that by fifth or sixth grade they could conceivably be considered remedial readers because they were two or more books behind their grade placement, when in fact they were right where the publisher expected them to be. And of course nothing could ever be said to these children who were reading fourth-grade books in sixth that would convince them that they were anything other than stupid. It was nothing more than statistics to the publishing company. For the kids it was life. That was such a bitterly high price to pay for an aesthetically pleasing book.
Lori was one of the reading series’ unwilling victims. Already a handicapped student who undoubtedly would always have trouble with symbolic language, Lori was trapped with an impossible set of books and a teacher who despised both the books and special students.
Edna Thorsen, Lori’s teacher, was an older woman with many, many years of experience behind her. Due for retirement the next year, Edna had been in the field since before I was born. In many areas of teaching Edna was superb. Unfortunately, special children was not one of them. She firmly believed that no exceptional or handicapped child should be in a regular classroom, with perhaps the exception of the gifted, and even of that she was unsure. Not only did these children put an unfair burden on the teacher, she maintained, but they disallowed a good education for the rest of the class because of the teacher time they absorbed. Besides, Edna believed, six-year-olds were just too young to be exposed to the rawness of life that the exceptional children represented. There was plenty of time when they were older to learn about blindness and retardation and mental illness.
Edna kept to many of the more traditional methods of teaching. Her class sat in rows, always stood when addressing her, moved in lines and did not speak until spoken to. They also progressed through the reading program exactly according to the chart sent out by the publishing company. If in the second week of November the children were to be, according to the charts, up to Book #2, page 14, all three of Edna’s little reading groups were within a few pages one way or the other of Book #2, page 14, the second week in November. She had no concept of the notion that only 15 percent of the children were actually expected to be there and all the rest behind. Her sole responsibility, she said, was to see that all twenty-seven children in her room had gone through the three pre-primers, the primer and the first-grade reader by that last day of school in June and were ready for second grade. That all her children could not read those books had no bearing in Edna’s mind on anything. Her job was to present the material and she did. It was theirs to learn it. That some did not was their fault, not hers.
Lori was not doing well. The hoped-for maturation in her brain had not yet occurred. In addition to her inability to pick up written symbols, she continued to display other common behaviors of brain-damaged children such as hyperactivity and a shortened attention span. Although Lori had not been on my original roster of resource students when school convened, she appeared at my door during the first week with Edna close behind. We had here what Edna called a “slowie”; Lori was so dense, Edna told me, you couldn’t get letters through her head with a gun.
So for a half hour every afternoon, Lori and I tried to conquer the written alphabet. I had to admit we were not doing stunningly. In the three weeks since we had started, Lori could not even recognize the letters in her first name. She could write L-O-R-I without prompting now; we had accomplished that much. Sort of. It came out in slow, meticulously made letters. Sometimes the O and the R were reversed or something was upside down or occasionally she would start on the right and print the whole works completely backwards. For the most part, though, I could trust her to come close. I had scrapped the pre-reading workbook from the reading series because with two years of kindergarten she had been through it three times and still did not know it. Instead I started with the letters of her name and hoped their relevancy would help.
Her difficulty lay solely with symbolic language: letters, numbers, anything written that represented something, other than a concrete picture. She had long since memorized all the letters of the alphabet orally and she knew their sounds. But she just could not match that knowledge to print.
Teaching her was frustrating. Edna certainly was right on that account. Three weeks and I had already run through all my years of experience in teaching reading. I had tried everything I could think of to teach Lori those letters. I used things I believed in, things I was skeptical about, things I already knew were a lot of nonsense. At that point I wasn’t being picky about philosophies. I just wanted her to learn.
We began with just one letter, the L. I made flash cards to drill her, had her cut out sandpaper versions to give her the tactile sensation of the letter, made her trace it half a million times in a pan of salt to feel it, drew the letter on her palm, her arm, her back. Together we made a gigantic L on the floor, taped tiny construction paper L’s all over it and then hopped around it, walked over it, crawled on it, all the time yelling L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L! until the hallway outside the classroom rang with our voices. Then I introduced O and we went through the same gyrations. Three long weeks and still we were only on L and O.
Most of our days went like this:
“Okay, what letter is this?” I hold up a flash card with an O on it.
“M!” Lori shouts gleefully, as if she knows she is correct.
“See the shape? Around and around. Which letter goes around, Lor?” I demonstrate with my finger on the card.
“Oh, I remember now. Q.”
“Whoops. Remember we’re just working with L and O, Lor. No Q’s.”
“Oh, yeah.” She hits her head with one hand. “Dumb me, I forgot. Let’s see now. Hmmmm. Hmmmm. A six? No, no, don’t count that; that’s wrong. Lemme see now. Uh … uh … A?”
I lean across the table. “Look at it. See, it’s round. Which letter is round like your mouth when you say it? Like this?” I make my mouth O-shaped.
“Seven?”
