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Parent-teacher conferences occurred the last week in October just before Halloween. The children were excused from school for the last two days. Because of all the resource students, I had a huge number of conferences. I did not worry about squeezing Lori’s father into one of the fifteen-minute conference slots; he and I communicated regularly. But with Mrs. Franklin it was a different matter. If I could get her there at all, I did not want to scare her off by giving her only fifteen minutes to tell about seven and a half years. So I slotted her in the last place on the second day, about 3:00 p.m.
She did come.
A small, delicate-boned black woman, she had wide fear-stricken eyes. I wondered, as she took the chair opposite me at the worktable that afternoon, who else had talked to her about her dream child. And what they had said.
“How’s my boy been doing?” she asked, so quietly that I had to ask her to repeat herself. “I want him to learn to talk. Like other boys. Have you been able to teach him to talk right yet?”
“I think Boothe is doing nicely in here, Mrs. Franklin.” I tried to sound reassuring. “We have a lot to do. Boo and I, but I think we’re working hard on it. I’m glad he’s in my class.”
“You ain’t getting him to talk straight either, are you?”
“I think perhaps it’s a little premature for that just yet”
“You ain’t getting him to talk straight either, are you?”
“No,” I said. “Not yet.”
Her head dropped and she fidgeted in her chair. I feared she might leave.
“I –” I started.
“I don’t want them to take him away,” she interrupted, still looking down at her hands. “I don’t want them to put him in no insane asylum. I don’t want them to take my boy away.”
“I can’t imagine anyone will, Mrs. Franklin.”
“Charles, that’s my husband, he says so sometimes. He says if Boothe Birney don’t learn to talk straight like other boys, they’re going to lock him away in an insane asylum when he grows up and we can’t take care of him no more. Charles, he knows those things. He says Boothe Birney’s sick and they don’t let no sick boys stay with their folks.”
“Boo isn’t sick. He’s just different.”
“Charles says they’re gonna take him away. The doctors, they’ll do it. They told Charles. If Boothe don’t learn to talk straight.”
I found Mrs. Franklin difficult to reason with. She was so frightened.
“They ain’t good places, miss, them insane asylums. I seen one. My mother’s brother, they put him in one once in Arkansas. And I seen it.” She paused and the silence stabbed through me. “There was this big boy there,” she said softly. “A great big boy, ’most nearly a man. With yellow curls. Big curls, like my Boothie has. And he was standing naked in his own piss. Crying. A great big boy. ‘Most nearly a man.” She brought a hand up to stop a tear. “And that boy there, he was some mother’s son.”
Her fear was so intense and perhaps so warranted that I could not easily calm her. We talked a long time. She had come at three and now the October dusk was settling. Outside the partly open window behind me, the wind blew, startling up brown, fallen leaves and carrying them high as the roof. Autumn freshness pressed through the opening to dispel the heavy, humid weight of emotion. As twilight came, the brilliance of the fall foliage in the schoolyard muted to a rosy brown. And still we talked. Back and forth, quietly. I pushed us off into tangential conversation because it was still too scary to speak the truth. I learned of her favorite hobby, quilting, of how she had won a ribbon at an Arkansas state fair, of how her grandmother had left her a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old Lone Star quilt made in a slave cabin. In turn I told her of my haunted love for far-off Wales, my homesickness for a country not my own. At last the conversation turned back to her son.
Boo had been an unplanned and initially unwanted child. His parents were not married. That Mr. Franklin was white and she black had been a major issue with their families and in the small Southern community where they had lived. She and Charles eloped and finally fled north to our community in an attempt to build a better life together. Charles’s family had ceased all communication with their son. Mrs. Franklin had never seen her mother since the day she had left eight years before; her father had since died. However, her siblings had all resumed a positive relationship with her.
During the early months of Boo’s life, he had seemed normal to the Franklins. He had been an inordinately placid baby but their pediatrician had told them not to worry. Boo was a little slow to learn to sit up and to walk but he still did so within normal limits. He never did crawl. During those first years he even learned to say a few words. Doggie. Bye-bye. Cracker. A few nursery rhymes. Yet never once did he say mama or daddy. Then at about eighteen months of age, the changes first began. He started to cry incessantly. No one could comfort him. He rocked in his crib at night and banged his head against the wall. Lights, reflections, his own fingers began to hold more fascination than the people around him. He ceased talking.
The Franklins never knew how wrong things really were until Boo was over three. Up until then they were still taking him to the same pediatrician, who continued to reassure them it was all “just a stage.” Boo was a slow developer. He would outgrow it. Then at three, prior to the birth of his sister, Boo was enrolled in nursery school. There someone recognized the earmarks of autism.
The years between the first diagnosis and Boo’s arrival in my class had been ones of heartache and financial devastation while the Franklins searched for a miracle cure. Selling their small house and possessions, they left with Boo and a newborn baby for California where they had heard of a special school for children like Boo. After nine long months of no improvement, the school gave up. Back home they came, this time armed with vitamins. Then off to Pennsylvania to a school for the brain-damaged that programmed children so that they might reexperience the womb, birth, growth. Back home again, broke. Three years had passed. Mr. Franklin had worked at twelve different jobs, often three at a time to meet family expenses and keep them together. The marriage, the emotions, the finances all were sapped. Boo still showed no improvement. Indeed, now more than ever he perplexed them. At every new school it had been a new label, a new method, a new diagnosis of why they failed. And the same old blame. For all that effort the Franklins did not know any more now about their dream child than they had known in the beginning. Exhausted and discouraged, they had come home for the last time and enrolled Boo in the public school system. That had been the year before.
Poked and prodded and racked, the marriage which had gotten started on such shaky ground still survived. Neither of the Franklins was well educated; neither knew how to cope with the problems this boy had given them. When things got bad, Mrs. Franklin said wearily, it was hard not to blame someone for this child. Especially when everyone else was willing to blame too. Yet … yet, they loved him. To be sure.
I think I hated these stories worst of all. Worse than the ones of brutal abuse, worse than the ones of neglect and suffering. I loathed these stories where there were no answers. Innocent people in innocent circumstances, where little more had happened than the day-to-day agonies of being human, and a child like Boo was produced. My sense of fair play was always badly bruised when I heard such tales, as I did all too frequently. What sense was there to it? Why such suffering given to those I could not see as deserving it? It always left me feeling angry and impotent against a world I did not understand.
“It’s so hard,” Mrs. Franklin said as she stared down at the shiny tabletop. “My sister has a little boy just four months younger than Boothie. She always writes me about what Merlin is doing. He’s in second grade. He got picked to sing in the children’s choir at church.” She looked at me. “And all I want is for Boothe to call me mama.”
Halloween came on a Friday. In the time left to us between the parent conferences and the holiday. Boo, Lori and I made dozens of construction-paper decorations, carved a pumpkin, mulled cider and hung honeycomb-bellied bats that I had purchased at the five-and-dime. Traditionally at our school, children attended regularly scheduled classes in the morning. In the afternoon they returned to school wearing their Halloween costumes and each room had a party. Lori and I had discussed the matter throughout October. She wanted to wear a costume too. I thought perhaps she would have more fun if she stayed in her other classroom for the party rather than with Boo and me. After talking it over with Edna, we agreed Lori would spend the afternoon there.
The other matter of great importance to Lori was her costume. In the two days before Halloween, she considered and discarded dozens of ideas.
“I could be Supergirl. My friend Tammy’s gonna be Supergirl. Do you think I could be Supergirl too?” Suddenly she blushed and a silly smile came over her face. “You know what?”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I could be Wonder Woman. You know why?” She cast a sidelong glance at Boo to see if he was listening, then leaned close to whisper. “’Cause I got on Wonder Woman underwear. Here, see.” She pulled up her dress to show me. “See, I got Wonder Woman underpants, and here, I got a Wonder Woman T-shirt. See, they’re made out of that slippery cloth. Feel it. My daddy says it’s sexy.” She giggled.
“I don’t think you can wear just your underwear to school for Halloween, Lor.”
“No, I guess not. Hmm.” She was thoughtful for a moment.
And so the discussion went on both days. Finally Lori decided to be a witch. Not as exciting as running around in your Wonder Woman underwear I suppose, but I was so thankful that this long, hard decision had been made that I patiently bore through the recital of all the costume parts Halloween morning.
“My daddy helped me make a dress,” she told me while stopping by on her way to recess. “It’s real long and black and I got this shawl thing to wear over it. And long black hair. My daddy dyed a mop last night for me. With Rit dye. That you buy at the supermarket. So I’m going to have long black hair and a big pointed hat. And guess what else?”
“What, pray tell?”
She exploded with giggles. “I’m gonna have warts!”
“You aren’t!”
“I am! I boughted this stuff at the store last night. It makes you fake warts. And I boughted it with my own money, even.” A hand slipped over her mouth as she laughed devilishly. “And guess what else besides that?”
“What?”
“I’m going to scare my sister. I got a better costume than her. She don’t got any warts ’cause she spends all her allowance on candy.”
“Oh Lor, she better watch out, huh?”
Boo and I had our own plans for the afternoon. He still was not toilet trained, but I hated keeping him in diapers all the time because it made training so much more difficult; and on those rare, rare occasions when he did attempt to use the toilet, he had missed a couple times because he could not break the tape on the disposable diapers. Recently, however, my guesses had been off and there had been a lot of puddles. I found intensive work in this area difficult with Lori around. So he and I were headed for some heart-to-heart moments in the rest room. Afterward I was considering taking a trip over to a nearby grocery store with him. Boo had never been to one and I wanted to buy new ingredients to try the ice-cream recipe again someday. That would fill our time together.
It was late afternoon, after recess. Boo and I were still in the girls’ rest room. With a copy of Toilet Training in Less Than a Day face down on a sink, a bottle of orange juice nearby to keep Boo supplied with liquids and the door propped open to warn any unsuspecting visitors we were hard at work, I had Boo on a toilet in one of the stalls while I searched the bottom of a potato chip bag for something to make him more thirsty.
“Torey!” someone wailed from the corridor. “Torey!”
I came to the door of the rest room and looked out. Lori in her witch’s costume was struggling down the hall. “Torey,” she cried when she saw me.
I could see tears coursing down through witch makeup, leaving big black smudges on her cheeks. “What’s wrong, honey?”
“I got scared when I couldn’t find you.” She pressed her face into my jeans.
“What happened? You were going to be in Mrs. Thorsen’s class all afternoon, remember? Even after recess. Did you forget?” I pulled her chin up. A fake wart was left sticking to the waistband of my jeans. Boo came hopping out, his pants around his ankles.
Lori would not look at me even as I held her face. She jerked her head from my hand and leaned back against my side. Finally I bent to pull up Boo’s pants and fasten them. “Do you want to come back with us, babe?” I asked her.
She nodded.
In the room Lori went over to the worktable and flopped into a chair. I was still unsure what had happened to upset her. The black witch’s hair was skewed to one side, the pointed hat was too large and came down almost to her eyebrows. I found the incongruity between her costume and mood pathetic. Coming over, I sat on the tabletop next to her. “What’s wrong? Did it just scare you not finding us here? Was that it?”
She paid me no attention. Another wart loosened by her tears dropped onto the table. Lori smooshed it with a fingernail.
“Did something go wrong in class?”
She nodded.
“Maybe if you told me about it, that would help.”
She shook her head.
“You don’t think so?”
Another shake.
Across the room I saw Boo begin to unbuckle his pants. I rose to see what he was planning to do.
“Stay here with me,” Lori said.
“Okay,” I sat back down and gave Boo the evil eye to leave his clothes on. He flapped his hands at me.
“Mikey Nelson says I’m retarded,” Lori muttered. “He says this is a retard class.”
Her head was still down; she twisted a strand of mop around one finger.
“He said I was the retardest kid in the whole school. He said I couldn’t even read baby books like the kindergarteners have. I’m that retarded.”
“You know that old saying, Lor? That one about sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt me?”
“Yeah.”
“Isn’t very true, is it? Names do hurt. A lot.”
She nodded.
Another stillness.
“I guess it don’t matter so much,” she said softly. “I guess maybe he’s right. I flunked kindergarten. And I’m probably gonna flunk first grade too.”
Across the room near Benny’s driftwood Boo had sat down on the floor, his legs crossed Indian-style. He looked like an elf. A deep seriousness rested over his features as he watched us.
Lori looked up at me. “Is he right, Torey? Am I a retard kid?”
I put my fingers under her chin and lifted her face to see it more clearly in the gray afternoon light. Such a beautiful child. Why was it all these children looked so beautiful to me? I thought my heart would burst some days, I was so overwhelmed by their beauty. I could never look at them enough. I could never fill my eyes up fully with them the way I wanted. But why was it? Surely they were not all physically attractive. I knew something must happen with my eyes. Yet no matter how I tried to see them right, they seemed so unspeakably beautiful. This kid was. So very many of my kids were. I was troubled because I could not answer that question for myself. Were they that beautiful? Or was it only me?
“Torey?” She touched my knee to bring me back. The question she had asked had gone beyond words and now rested in her eyes.
No answers for my questions. No answers for hers. I looked at her. What could I say to her that would be honest? That would satisfy her? No, she was not retarded. Her brain did not work for a different reason. Mikey Nelson just had the wrong label. I could have told her that. Or perhaps I could have told her it was all a lie. To me it was. Mikey Nelson did not know what he was talking about. But what a laugh. In this world that prizes accomplishments so highly, I would have been the liar then. For Lori there might never be enough teachers, enough therapies; enough effort, even enough love to undo what had happened to her in one night’s anger. And then Mikey Nelson’s word would seem truer than mine.
Gently I pushed back her hair from her face, smoothed the mop strands, straightened the pointed hat. She was so beautiful.
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Lori.”
Her eyes were on my face.
“That’s the truth and you believe it. Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. No matter what. There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“But I can’t read.”
“Hitler could read.”
“Who’s Hitler?”
“A man who really was retarded.”
Chapter Seven (#ulink_b5826b7b-dc82-5ef7-badc-11342590d875)
“Good afternoon, Tomaso,” I said. “My name is Torey. I’ll be your teacher in the afternoons.”
“You leave me the fuck alone, you hear? I sure the hell ain’t staying here. What kind of a place is this anyway?”
We stared at each other. I was between him and the door. His scrawny shoulders were hunched up under a black vinyl jacket. He was tall for his age, but too thin. Lank, greasy, black hair hung over angry eyes. Angry, angry eyes. He was one of the migrant kids, no doubt. His hands were hard and calloused, he had already known the fields by ten.
I had not been prepared for Tomaso. A call in the morning from Birk and here he was. One look at him and his fearless, defiant body and I could guess why he had been brought to me. Not one to fit into the regimen of a school, not Tomaso.
“What kind of shitty place is this anyway?” he repeated a little more loudly.
Lori came around to stand between Tomaso and me. She gave him a long, appraising look. “This is our class.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Lori Ann Sjokheim. Who are you?”
“What have they stuck me in? Some babies’ class?” He looked at me. “Dios mio! I’ve been put in some fucking babies’ class.”
“I’m no baby,” Lori protested.
“Some goddamn, stinking baby class, that’s what this is. And with little girls in it. Go have a tea party, sweetie,” he said to Lori.
Her lower lip went out. “I’m no baby. I’m almost eight. So there!”
“Shit. I’m not staying in here.” Tomaso straightened his shoulders and raised one hand up in a fist. “You get out of my way; I’m going. And I’ll smack you right in the boobies if you try to stop me.”
My stomach cringed involuntarily at the very thought of him doing that. I said nothing. There was not much to say that would not be incendiary at this point. Anger had flared up in his dark eyes like sparks from a green-wood fire.
As we stood there sizing one another up, Mrs. Franklin opened the door behind me and shoved Boo through. Click, the door went shut again.
