Just Another Kid (2 page)

I moved forward to take the chairs away and then reached down for Dirkie. “Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!” he squealed with excitement.

“Come on, Dirkie. Come out from under there. Here, take my hand. Let’s sit up in a chair. I’ve got some interesting things in store for us today.”

Rising, I dragged Dirkie out.

“Mariana!” I cried in surprise. “What
are
you doing?”

She had her jumper hiked up around her waist and was removing her underpants.

“Put everything back on this instant and pull your dress down.
Now!
”

“Ooooooh!” Dirkie said. Excitement brightened his eyes, and he slid off the chair like butter melting into a pan. The chair beside me began to convulse as he masturbated against it.

Beyond the shelving, the door to the classroom unexpectedly opened and shut, and before I could extract Dirkie from under the table again, Mrs. Considyne appeared with her hand clenched around the back of her daughter’s neck.

“Good morning again,” I said and smiled. I was acutely aware of Mariana, just beyond me, her underpants not yet up. Dirkie hooted maniacally.

Mrs. Considyne pushed her daughter forward. Her fingertips were white from the pressure of her grip on the child’s neck.

“Hello, Leslie,” I said. “I’m so glad you could make it after all. We were just preparing to start.”

Leslie did not look at me but rather through me. Her expression was completely vacant.

“Here, come here. I’ll show you where your cubby is. You can put your lunch box in there.” I laid a hand on the girl’s shoulder and gently eased her away from her mother’s grasp.

Mariana materialized, fully dressed, at my side. “Hello, you,” she said to Leslie. “I’m the other girl in this here class. You want to be my best friend? You want to sit with me?”

Leslie screwed up her face and slapped her hands over her ears.

“Oh,
shit
,” Mariana muttered. “She’s crazy, just like him.”

I returned to Mrs. Considyne, who was looking fairly horrified. “I’m sure Leslie will be all right. Things are always a little hectic the first few days of a new year.”

She said nothing, but rather looked past me, over my shoulder toward the children.

“I do appreciate your having gone to the trouble to bring her in, Mrs. Considyne. I realize there were problems, but it is probably a good idea that she comes on this first day.”

She nodded. Looking down, she opened what I had assumed was her handbag. Instead, it was sort of a little medical kit full of bottles and cups. “Here are Leslie’s things. The testers and the insulin and all that. I’ve put extra candy in, in case of shock. You
do
know what you’re doing?” she asked, glancing up.

I hoped she meant regarding Leslie’s diabetes. I nodded. “I’ve been shown. But Mrs. Whicker, the school nurse, is coming in to give the injections for a few weeks.”

I put the bag on one of the upper shelves of the library to keep it out of the children’s reach and then moved around Mrs. Considyne in an effort to encourage her to leave. Turning, she came with me.

“Oh, by the way,” she said, as we reached the door, “I’m not Considyne. My husband’s Considyne. My name’s Taylor.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Ms. Taylor.”

She shook her head. “Not Mzzz. I’m Dr. Taylor.”

I felt myself blushing. “Oh. Okay. I’m sorry.”

Dirkie sidled up. Standing beside me, he gazed up at Dr. Taylor for a long moment. “My,” he said in a very solemn voice, “what big tits you got.”

L
eslie Considyne was a very curious piece of work. When I returned from seeing her mother out, I found her in precisely the spot I’d left her. Taking out a chair from the table, I indicated it to her. She sat. There was nothing mechanical about her movements. In fact, she moved with a surprisingly fluid grace, but she appeared to have no one at home inside her body. The entire morning she acted only when instructed. Otherwise, she remained wherever she was, staring vacantly ahead, and without a muscle ever twitching. She would not look at me or at the other children. Even when I sat directly in front of her and lined her face up with mine, she continued to look ahead, straight through me, as if I were not there. I could tell she wasn’t seeing me. What I couldn’t tell was if it was a conscious effort.

Although I had been led to believe that Dirkie would be my most disturbed child, Leslie presented a more disconcerting appearance that morning. She was the only one of the three who did not speak and was not toilet trained. She also had brittle diabetes, which necessitated a harrowing round of injections midday. Even this got no reaction from her. The nurse came in, took her aside, injected her, and Leslie never flicked an eyelash. She never even looked down at what the nurse was doing.

When the children had gone for lunch at 12:15, I sat down at the worktable with the files. Having now met all three children, I looked forward to understanding more what had been written about them.

There was a quick rap at the classroom door and then it opened. I looked up. Once again, my view was blocked by the shelving, and I could tell that not being able to see the door from the main part of the classroom was going to drive me mad. “Come on in,” I called and waited for someone to appear.

“Just me. How did it go? Okay?” It was Carolyn, the special education teacher from the class in the basement.

I nodded. “Pretty good.”

She grinned. “You want to come to Enrico’s with us? That’s where everybody here goes at noon.”

“Thanks, but I’ve brought my lunch. I need to catch up on all this stuff before the afternoon. Maybe I’ll join you tomorrow.”

“Who all have you got?” she asked, coming over and leaning down to look at the names on the files.

I liked Carolyn. I’d liked her instantly, which was fortunate, since we were the only two teachers in the building. She was about my age, still single and unabashedly concerned about it, easy-going, gregarious and inclined to speak before thinking, which gave her a refreshing naturalness.

Suddenly Carolyn whistled under her breath. “You got Considyne? Is this
the
Considyne?”

“I wouldn’t know. Have you had Leslie too?”

“Oh God, no.
Thank
God, no. The kid is absolutely wacko, which is all right, because it makes her fit in with the rest of the family. You live here for any time at all and you’ll know all you need to know about the Considynes. Or rather, Tom Considyne and
Dr
. Taylor.”

“Yes, believe it or not, I’ve already had that pointed out to me.”

Carolyn flipped open Leslie’s file. Pointing to the father’s name, she said, “He’s an artist. Supposed to be famous, although I’ve sure never heard of him anywhere.”

Then a wicked grin creased Carolyn’s features, and she pulled out a chair and sat down. “You want to hear the gossip about them? It’s pretty hot.” She reached over and helped herself to my potato chips. “She’s supposed to be this absolute genius; anyway that’s what people say. She’s a scientist of some sort. God knows how they met one another. But talk about a father fixation. She’s like twenty-five years younger than he is. Anyway, she was working back East at some university or other and commuting back and forth. They had their own private plane, jetting all over creation and part of Canada. She was even in Moscow once. Then all of a sudden it stopped. She got fired off what she was doing; that’s what I heard said. She has this fairly dramatic drinking problem, as you’ll no doubt discover, and I’m sure that’s what happened to her.

“So now
we’ve
got her, and she’s a pretty lively case, believe me. She has all these affairs. She isn’t even discreet about it. I know for a fact that she’s had an affair with Dr. Addison from up at the children’s clinic. It’s got to be humiliating for Mr. Considyne, because everybody knows she’s doing it. I suppose it must be because of the way she looks. I mean, if I looked like that, I’d probably have me a sugar daddy and keep a string on the side too.” Carolyn laughed.

I regarded my cheese sandwich glumly. This was the kind of thing you liked to hear about people you didn’t really know, not the parents of the children in your schoolroom.

“Trash with class, that’s what it boils down to,” Carolyn said. She leaned across the table and helped herself to my grapes. “She puts on all these airs. I mean, look at this silly business about
Dr
. Taylor. She thinks she’s too good to even talk to the rest of us. She’ll never even say hello. And who is she? What would she be if she weren’t Tom Considyne’s little bimbo? He’s the one who’s famous. He’s got all the money. But he’s nice. He’s real friendly, if you run into him down at the Co-op or something. If he’s been introduced to you, he’ll always remember your name. If he’s got any fault, it’s that he’s too casual about things. He tends not to follow through. He drove Rita wild last year. She was Leslie’s first-grade teacher. She was always arranging things with him to try and help Leslie, and he was always promising to do them, but he never did. That, and also he never answers his phone. If their help’s out, you’ll never be able to contact him, short of knocking the door down. He’s got a studio out in back of his house where he does his painting, and last year when Leslie went into a diabetic coma, Rita stood outside his studio knocking on the window, and he never even bothered to turn around and see who it was.”

“This sounds like a soap opera, Carolyn.”

“Ooooh, it’s better,” she said, with a gleam in her eye. “It’s real.”

I grimaced.

Carolyn smiled knowingly and pulled over the rest of the files to look at them. “You want me to fill you in on these too?”

“You know about them?” I asked incredulously.

She laughed. “No. But I’m sure I could think of something.”

We both dissolved into giggles.

After Carolyn left, I opened the Considyne file. There was nothing in there that hinted at the steamy stories Carolyn had been telling me. Dr. Taylor was a physicist. Mr. Considyne was listed simply as a painter. The first time I’d read it, I’d thought it meant house-painter. The only thing to have caught my eye initially was Dr. Taylor’s first name: Ladbrooke. The peculiarity of it had not struck me so much as idle curiosity over what, in intimate moments, one would call someone with such a formal name.

There was a fairly extensive sheaf of papers on Leslie and her disturbance. As in so many cases of severe handicaps of this nature, there was little certainty about exactly what her problem was and what had caused it. Apparently her birth and early infancy had been normal. She was a full-term baby and, while placid and not particularly responsive, she’d been easy to care for. Her progress past the usual milestones had been slow, but within normal limits. Then, somewhere around two and a half, she had begun to deteriorate. What little vocabulary she did have disappeared. What progress she’d made in terms of toilet training and self-care was lost. A futile round of doctors and psychiatrists started soon after Leslie was three. Autism, one report said. Mental retardation, said another. Childhood schizophrenia, said a third. No one seemed to know for sure, but everyone was willing to guess.

Amazingly, to my way of thinking, Leslie had had no special treatment program and, indeed, was kept in a regular classroom for two years. She had, in fact, spent more time in the classroom than had Mariana. There were a few acerbic jottings from Rita Ashworth, Leslie’s previous teacher, about the challenges this presented, and I got the impression that in the end, Leslie had been left pretty much to her own devices.

There was nothing written anywhere to suggest how Leslie’s parents had come to terms with their daughter’s handicap nor anything about what the home situation was like. There was a brief mention of two older stepchildren and how the younger of them, a teenaged girl, had a poor relationship with Leslie, but there was nothing else.

The first week passed. The three children were very different from one another, and I did nothing more than scuttle among them those first days, trying to keep order. Both Leslie and Dirkie could have done with a teacher apiece. Dirkie was fairly advanced in comparison to many other schizophrenic children I’d encountered. He was toilet trained, could express himself quite well, could follow simple instructions, and even had mastered a fair number of academic skills, although at a level way below what would have been expected for his chronological age. However, he still needed virtual one-to-one teaching to stay on task.

Dirkie’s worst problems came from an assortment of obsessions with things that were very commonly encountered, such as cats, hair, old men and women, fire engines and door hinges. Discharging the excitement generated by the obsessions took the better part of most days. First, an obsession would come to mind—perhaps he’d see a picture or hear a sound, and that would start him off. Then he’d become excited, then agitated, then frenzied, needing desperately to fulfill elaborate rituals before he could free his mind and think of something else. I became able to discern when one of the obsessions was overtaking Dirkie, because he would begin to talk in an odd voice. He spoke in a weird manner most of the time, with his voice deep and gravelly, like a child imitating its father, although Dirkie did have a normal speaking voice, rarely used. However, when one of his obsessions overtook him, Dirkie’s voice grew deeper and became urgent sounding, taking on a tone that made him sound permanently appalled. Then, as the excitement increased, he’d lose control and be unable to form words. He hooted instead. Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. No other sound, just that. And he’d begin to clap. Physical excitement took over from there, and he could no longer sit still. On his feet, he’d adopt a mincing, disjointed sort of locomotion, like a marionette with a very bad operator, and usually, he’d end up under the table, where he’d sit, clapping and hooting, and frequently, masturbating frantically on the table leg. Then calm would return.

Sometimes I could successfully interrupt the hoot-and-clap syndrome early enough to quell the frenzy and reorient Dirkie to the task at hand. More often, I couldn’t. And if he’d gone beyond a certain point, he needed to continue, because otherwise, he exploded, screaming and yelling, kicking and slapping, tearing papers from the bulletin boards, magazines from the shelves, overturning chairs, ripping his clothes and banging himself against walls and furniture. But even without such cataclysmic conclusions, Dirkie’s obsessions ruled us.

“Do you have a cat?” he asked me on the first day.

“Yes,” I answered, not realizing what I had started.

His eyes grew shiny with excitement. “What kind is it?”

“Just a cat. Tabby and white.”

But that wasn’t enough information. “How tall is it? How long is its tail?”

Thinking to put him off, I explained it wasn’t even my cat, but rather a cat on loan from my grandparents to keep me company. So I didn’t know the beast too intimately. But this didn’t put Dirkie off. Indeed, the novelty of the arrangement intrigued him, and he questioned me endlessly. “What color eyes does your cat have? When’s his birthday? How long did your grandparents have him before you got him? Here,” he demanded and gave me a piece of paper. “Draw a picture of your cat.” When I demurred, he panicked. “Draw it! Draw it! Draw your cat! Draw your cat in his basket. Draw your cat in the bathtub. Draw your cat eating food,” he screamed, his voice becoming louder with each demand. So I began to draw, and immediately, Dirkie quieted. “That’s your cat. You’re drawing your cat. You’re drawing your cat sitting up.” But when I finished, he thrust another sheet of paper under my nose. “Draw your cat lying down.” The room was soon a veritable gallery of my rather undistinguished cat drawings.

Our whole relationship began to revolve around my cat. Every time Dirkie saw me, he had to query me exhaustively about my cat. This conversation could be repeated twenty or thirty times over the course of the day. All I had to do was go out of Dirkie’s range of vision and return and he’d need to have a cat conversation with me. And if it wasn’t my cat, it was other cats. Did Mrs. Renton, the secretary, have a cat? Was it a big, yellow tomcat? Did it weigh seven pounds? Did it eat from a green bowl? A white bowl? I felt ridiculous asking Mrs. Renton what color bowl she fed her cat from, but I did ask. It was either that or make it up.

Equally absorbing to Dirkie but with considerably less scope for conversation was the length of my hair. I had quite long hair, well past my shoulders, and this fascinated Dirkie. “You have long hair,” he would say. “I like your hair. Are you going to cut it?”

“No,” I’d reply.

“Don’t cut your hair. Leave your hair long. I like it long. I like long hair.”

This would be quickly followed by: “I need to touch your hair.”

He was, I quickly discovered, much better off not touching my hair. On the occasions he did, it only fueled his excitement, and he’d run off in a full hooting session. He also tended to grab and pull
very
hard instead of simply touching.

But the conversation over long hair was repeated, if anything, more often than our cat conversation. Or perhaps it just seemed like it, since there were not many dimensions of my hair to talk about. Again and again he asked me about it. One morning I counted him asking me about my long hair fourteen times during one hour. By the end of the first day, I was tying my hair back. By Friday, I was ready to shave it all off.